Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

Susan walked up the bank and over to a commercial strip of fast food, car dealerships and complex traffic lights. It was now almost dark, and she was hungry, and tired of the chocolate energy bars. She strolled the sidewalk-free neighborhood as if seeing her country for the first time — the signs and cars and lights and shop fronts bigger and brighter and more powerful than they needed to be. She caught whiffs of fried chicken and diesel fumes, but having spent her only quarters, she couldn't buy food. She was starving. She walked for hours. She passed eighty Wendy's, a hundred Taco Bells, seven hundred Exxons, and then she came up on her nine hundredth McDonald's, where she decided to use the bathroom.

On the way into the restaurant she noticed a crew chief walking out a side utility door and over to a dumpster where he tossed away a large tray of fully wrapped, unsold, time-expired burgers. Susan saw her chance. She walked to the dumpster and with an agile climb reminiscent of the aerobics class she might well that moment be attending in a parallel universe, she hopped inside and crammed the sports bag with warm, wrapped cheeseburgers. Loot. She heard voices approaching. She quickly dropped the bag and contracted herself into a ball beneath the closed right-side door of the dumpster and listened to teenage banter:

«… gonna go over to Heather's after I lock up.»

«She still sore at you?»

«No way, man.» The second speaker threw two green waste bags into the bin, which rolled down onto Susan's feet. «I bought her a tattoo, and now she's real nice to me, like …»

Whamp!

The left lid crashed down. Susan heard a muffled conversation about women, plus the unmistakable sound of a key locking the door above her.

«Think of how gorgeous we're going to be when you wake up.»

«Mom, it's me doing this, not you. »

«Susan Colgate, I shucked a helluva lot of bunnies to correct that jaw of yours, and now is not the time to be ungrateful about it. Now hold on to my finger and count back from one hundred.»

Susan held on to Marilyn's finger and retro-counted: «A hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven …» and closed her eyes. When she opened them, it was to find herself inside a cool, dimly lit gray room. Marilyn was in the corner smoking exactly half a Salem, extinguishing the remains and then lighting another («Butts are coarse, dear»), all the while avoiding the more intimate questions contained in a magazine quiz about the reader's interior life. She looked up and caught Susan's now open eyes: «Oh sweetie! We look fabulous, » and then she rushed over to proudly beam at Susan's face, stained from within by lost and dying blood cells — blue, olive and yellow — her broken and reset jaw stitched and swaddled.

Susan touched her face, which felt disconnected to her, like a rubber Halloween mask. She found her nose was set in a splint. «My 'ose! Wha' 'appened?»

«Happy birthday! I had the doctor throw in a new nose at the same time. We're gonna look sen sa tional.»

«You let 'em mangle my 'ose ?» Her voice felt muffled, as though she were speaking from within a pile of carpets.

«Mangle? Hardly. You now have the nose of JenniLu Wheeler, Mrs. Arkansas America.»

«Id's … my 'ose.» She felt nauseous. Her jaws ached.

«Don't get so exercised, sweetie.»

Susan tried to move her body, which seemed to weigh as much as a house. She'd never felt gravity's pull so strongly. Marilyn said, «We have to stay here in the recuperation room for six more hours. How do you feel?»

«Woozy. 'Eavy.»

«It's the painkillers. I had them give you a double prescription with two refills. You know how Don the Swan's back can act up.» Don, Susan's stepfather had, over the years, evolved into a whisky-sunburnt, perpetually incapacitated repairman.

«Don seems to be able to lift his SeaDoo and his bowling balls from the bed of his pickup 'enever he needs to.»

«Susan! We're selling the SeaDoo to move to Wyoming, or are you conveniently choosing to forget this?»

«I don't want to go to Wyoming, Mom. It was your idea. I'm fifteen. Like I 'ave legal say in the matter.»

Marilyn smiled. «Oh! The treachery!»

«Mom, I'm too 'ired to fight. Go get me a mirror.» Marilyn paused upon hearing this. Susan said, «I look 'at bad, huh?»

«It's not a matter of good or bad, dear. I speak from experience. You're covered in bandages. You'll look like hell no matter what.»

«Mom, just show me the stupid mirror.»

Marilyn brought a yellow-handled mirror from the coffee table. Outside in the hallway bandaged figures were being trolleyed by on gurneys. Marilyn held the mirror up for Susan to see her face.

«Ee- yuuu. I 'ook like a used Pampers balled up and stuffed in a trash can.»

«Such an imagination, young woman,» said Marilyn, whisking away the mirror. «In three weeks it is going to be scientifically impossible for you to take a bad picture. Do you have any idea what that means? I've already lined up a photographer to come up from Mount Hood. An ex-hippie. Ex-hippies make the best photographers. I don't know why. But they do.» She lit up a Salem. «Speaking of JenniLu Wheeler, I heard that the night before the Miss Dixie contest, her eyes puffed up from too many cocktails with a handful of senators, and they put leeches under her eyes to suck out the puffiness. I never told you that one, did I?»

«No. You 'idn't.»

«She bled like a pig for two days, and she missed the title because of it. Or so the story goes.»

«Lovely, Mom.» Susan relaxed and sunk into the mattress. A nurse stepped into the room and asked Marilyn to extinguish her cigarette.

«Excuse me, young lady, but are we in Moscow right now?»

«It's rules, Mrs. Colgate.»

«Where's your manager?» Marilyn asked.

«This is a hospital, not a McDonald's, Mrs. Colgate. We don't have man agers.»

«Mom, this is a 'ospital, not the Black Angus. Stub it out.»

«No, Susan — no, I won't stub it out. Not until I get an apology from this insultress. »

«It's rules, Mrs. Colgate.» But the nurse lost her will to push the issue, and walked away.

Marilyn took a deep victorious inhale. «I always win, don't I, Susan?»

«Yes, Mom. You always do. You're the queen of drama.»

«And that's a compliment?»

Susan decided the smartest course of action was to shut her eyes and feign sleep. It worked. Marilyn returned to her magazine's personality quiz and smoked her victory cigarette. Susan mentally flipped through a catalog of Marilyn's seamless dramas, such as the time in the changing room she spritzed a tightly aimed spray bottle of canola oil at the swimsuit of Miss Orlando Pre-Teene after a close call in the talent contest. Susan played her Beethoven Für Elise, but Miss Orlando had played a Bach Goldberg variation, which could sway even the most musically naïve listener in her favor. As a result of the canola oil (to which Marilyn was never linked), Miss Orlando was forced to borrow Miss Chattanooga's one-piece and lost the pageant.

Susan won a mink coat and a Waikiki weekend, both of which were exchanged for cash, and used to cover travel expenses and the household bills. The money was nice, but it was by no means the sole reason for pageantry. «Susan, there is no price tag that can be placed on accomplishment and superiority. Even if you were the richest girl on earth, do you think you could simply buy yourself a crown? Winners have an inner glow that cannot even be dreamt of in the soul of a nonwinner.»

Marilyn called the pageant business «shucking bunnies,» even though the hutches in which she once bred rabbits to raise money for gowns were long a thing of the past — since Susan integrated Barbie into her essence and began winning solidly around age seven in the Young American Lady, West Coast Division.