Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

The vehicle approached an expensive-enough-looking Spanishstyle house with a maroon BMW and a Mercedes in the driveway. So this was the House on the Hill up to which Marilyn had leveraged herself. Trailers with satellite feeds circled the yard. Neck-craning neighbors stood behind yellow police tapes and the cameras rolled as Susan slowly walked up the front pathway to the house, toward the double doors inlayed with a sandblasted glass kingfisher holding a minnow in its beak. The doors opened and Marilyn emerged, eyes flooded with tears, and she stumbled toward Susan, who hugged her mother the way she used to hug first runners-up during the pageant days. If the pageants had trained her for nothing else, it was for this moment: Susan! Mom!

It was mechanical. A pushover. The cameras needed this. The world wanted it. But what neither the cameras nor the world got to hear was Susan whispering into Marilyn's ear, jeweled with a gold nautilus shell earring, «Guess what, Mom? You really are going to have to give back every single penny you were set to receive from the airline. So that makes us even now, okay?»

«Susan!»

Don came out the doors and approached Susan, giving her a hug, with Marilyn barnacled between them. «Good to see you, Sue. We haven't had a single quiet moment since we got the news yesterday.» Susan laughed at this, then smiled at Marilyn, who was crying out of what Susan was now convinced was a real sense of loss.

The press camera lenses whirred and zoomed and the apertures clicked and chattered among themselves. Susan, Don and the tearful Marilyn stood on the front steps of Marilyn's house. Susan said to the cameras, «Sorry guys. We need to go inside for a spot of privacy. See you in a short while.»

Good old Sue! Always kind to the press.

Marilyn, Susan and Don stepped in the house, and almost immediately Don fled to the cupboard above the telephone and pulled out a magnum of molasses-colored Navy rum. «It's woo-woo time,» he said, pouring four fingers worth of the liquor into a highball glass, which he topped off with cartoned chocolate milk. « ‘I call it a Shitsicle in honor of that wad of crap that got us here to Wyoming. I live on 'em. You want one, Sue?»

«No thanks, Don.»

«You sure? Aw, c'mon. We need to celebrate.»

«No. It's too early,» said Susan.

«Have it your way then,» said Don, a nasty new spark to his voice. He glugged down a sizable portion of his drink.

Marilyn was mute. She stood by the kitchen table, her arms folded over her chest. Susan looked around the kitchen, bright and clean and dense with appliances, and by the telephone she saw an array of envelopes and letterheads from CBS, CNN, KTLA and assorted cable and network outlets. «It's been a busy year here, I can see,» Susan said.

Marilyn opened her mouth, about to speak, and stopped. The three were as far away from each other as it was possible to be inside the kitchen.

«You're wondering where I've been,» said Susan, «aren't you?»

«It's a reasonable question.»

Susan picked up a Fox TV letterhead with a note on it:

DearMrs. Colgate Marilyn,

Please find enclosed a check for $5,000.00, and thanks again for providing yet another compelling and inspiring story segment for our viewers.

Yours, Don Feschuk

VP Story Development

«Maybe you ought to be talking to Don Feschuk instead of me, Mom. »

«Don't be willfully cruel. It's not becoming.»

«Today's festivities must have caused a bidding war. Who won, Mom ?»

«CBS,» said Don.

«Let me hazard a guess,» Susan said, not releasing her eyes from Marilyn's face. «An exclusive interview, scheduled for pretty soon, I'd imagine, so as to be ripe for tonight's East Coast prime-time slot.»

«I didn't want pandemonium here,» Marilyn said. «It was a way of simplifying things.»

«Heck, no — we wouldn't want pandemonium here, would we. Mom. »

«Stop saying Mom like that.»

Susan tried to remember the last time she'd seen Marilyn in the flesh. It was at Erik Osmond's accounting office in Culver City. Marilyn had called Susan a «bitsy little slut,» and Susan had called her a thief, and then Marilyn threw an ashtray as Susan was leaving the room. The ashtray had shattered and Erik shouted, «That was a gift from Gregory Peck!» Susan had shut the door and that had been it.

Marilyn lit a cigarette. «You could have called.»

«Are you dense, Mom ? I don't even know where the hell I was.»

«I don't believe it.»

«Then don't.» Susan found the Fendi glasses. «But aren't you the one faking it.»

Marilyn came over and snatched them away from Susan. «Not these days, daughter .»

«This is the most ornery homecoming I've ever seen,» Don said.

«Don,» said Susan, «Look at it from my point of view, okay? As far as my brain is concerned, there was no last year. Suddenly I'm standing on a street in the middle of Pennsylvania, and then I'm whisked home to see Mummy here who, as far as I'm concerned, is the same thief who swiped not only the sum of my TV earnings, but who also made me shake my moneymaker onstage in front of an unending parade of Chevy dealers and small-time hairstylists for all of my childhood. I had no desire to speak to her a year ago, and I have no desire to speak with her now.»

Don was somehow cast in the role of debating coach and nodded fuzzily.

«Do you honestly think,» said Marilyn, «that I walked around that crash site — and don't try telling me you don't remember it, because I know you do — amnesia my ass — and saw those body parts and shoes and wristwatches and dinner trays piled up and charbroiled like so much pepper steak on the grill at Benihana's — that I could walk through all of that and wish my own girl dead? That I would say to myself, Hey Marilyn, your ship's finally come in but hey, too bad about the kid? » Marilyn walked over to the sink where Don put the rum and the chocolate milk, and she poured herself a drink and took a slug. The rest of the drink soon vanished. «I wouldn't wish that crash on anybody, not even my worst enemy. But I don't even have a worst enemy because I don't even have any friends . What do I have? Really? I have Don and I have you, and I don't really even have you. Yes, I almost made a shitload of money from your disappearance, wher ever you went to, but let me say here for the record, you disappeared. You vanished. It was torture, never having a true ending. All the money I made over the past year is mine. I didn't earn it, and maybe I didn't even deserve it, but I'm not ashamed of it.»

Outside on the street, through the kitchen window's sheers, Susan saw a network van, and some guy beside it switching on a rumbling generator. «I wonder what those people out on the street think we're doing in here right now,» she said.

«Oh, hugging, or some sort of crap like that,» said Marilyn.

Susan thought of Eugene and Eugene Junior. A small wave of possible forgiveness lapped over her. «Mom, have you ever once, even for a fleeting moment, felt sorry for stealing my life the way you did?»

«Stealing your life?» Marilyn plunked her glass down on the counter. «Give me a break. I made you what you are .»

«What I am?» A small pin of hope pricked Susan's skin. Maybe she'd right now find out what it was she'd become. «You've got my full attention, Mom. Please, go ahead and tell me what I am.»

«You're my daughter and you're tough as nails.»

This useless reply dashed Susan's brief hope. «What a sack of crap.»

«If it weren't for me you'd be driving a minivan full of brats to a soccer game in small-town Oregon.»