Douglas Coupland - Miss Wyoming

John got out and stood at the back of the car, absentmindedly eating a cheeseburger. «If we keep following her, we could be on the road for hours,» he said. «She could be driving anywhere.»

A black minivan drove by. Susan was at the wheel. She saw John and wrenched the van to a halt. Camper and Willy avalanched into the dashboard. She and John locked eyes, smiled. She recovered her wits.

«Shit, Susan,» Randy yelled, a drink spilled in his lap. «What the hell are you — ?»

Susan plunged the minivan into reverse gear and made a crazy donut, then looped around and pulled up beside John's car.

«Your mother is in there,» John said, pointing to the rest-room. «I found her for you. You were looking for her, weren't you?»

Susan climbed out of the van, lifted her arms up to her mouth, and started to rock back and forth slightly, like a stick in the wind. She said, «Oh, John … » but her voice vanished, and instinctively Randy and Dreama, now out of the van, stepped back in surprise, as though Susan were a highway smash-up during rush hour. She took geisha steps toward the rest room door.

Vanessa quickly pulled back from the door, allowing Susan to approach alone. The others in the group formed a semicircle around her. A truck zoomed by on the freeway. The sun was halfway behind a mountaintop and their shadows were black ribbons. The dogs romped and yelped in the grass scrub behind the station. Susan knocked on the door. Marilyn shouted out, «Jesus Christ, I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying. I'm changing a diaper in here, okay?»

«Mom?»

Everybody felt the silence from within the locked bathroom. The last glint of sun went behind a hill and their shadows vanished and the air became that much cooler.

The station's attendant rounded the corner to check out the crowd. Randy asked him, «Do you have an extra key to the ladies' room?»

«No sir, just the one.»

From inside the door came a child's crying. Instantly, Susan bolted toward the door and tried smashing it with her shoulder, unsuccessfully. She slammed into it again, then Marilyn opened the lock and Eugene Junior raced out. «He's okay,» said Marilyn, then Susan grabbed him and swept him over to a small wall beside the propane filling tanks where she held him close to her chest. Marilyn sat down on the toilet in haggard defeat.

«Mom,» said Susan, «it's okay.»

Marilyn didn't come out of the bathroom. Her body deflated and she took a breath. The group's eyes peered into the small, harshly lit room.

Susan slammed the door of the house in Cheyenne, and almost immediately Marilyn felt as if she were on fire. But the fire didn't go away. It burned within her, underground, flaring up hourly across the following months, and when she burned, she lost her head and said hateful, vengeful things, which finally drove Don away. She beetled about inside her clean, white petrified house with nobody to talk to and nobody to phone. She felt like her head was filled with larvae. Her doctor said it was «the change,» and Marilyn said, «Dammit, why can't you just call it menopause?» The doctor said, «We look at things differently these days. This isn't an end. It's a beginni — » Marilyn said, «Why don't you just shut the fuck up and prescribe me a suitcase full of pills and make this blasted fire go away.»

The fire didn't go away, and pills were useless in snuffing it out. She cried and then she felt elated, but mostly she was bewildered and burning. And then the bills came due and all of the money was gone. She'd been proud, and didn't want to give Susan the satisfaction of seeing her mother cash in on paid interviews, so she did no press after Susan had left for California. Yet at the same time she hoped that Susan would see her mother's refusal to pocket some money and then maybe, just maybe, Susan would forgive her. And if Susan forgave her, then maybe she'd one day allow Marilyn access to the brood of children she'd seemed suspiciously intent on mentioning.

In the end, Marilyn's pride and hope had left her vulnerably broke. She phoned the networks, but it was too late, the Susan Colgate story stale. Marilyn offered no new angle.

Marilyn pawned what she could, yard-saled some more, and then rented a cheap apartment. She developed a phobia about touching her lower stomach. She was afraid of her fallopian tubes and her uterus, sure they'd dried out like apricots or chanterelle mushrooms, and she didn't think she could cope at all were she to feel their lumpiness within her.

Fertility. Babies. Desirability. Love. These words were so fully joined together in her head, like pipes and wires and beams in a building. And now, suddenly she was barren. A houseplant.

As if on cue, parts of her face started to migrate and shift. Silicone injections from a decade ago became like rogue continents within her skin, and Marilyn ran out of supermarkets and convenience stores in the Cheyenne area because she had shrieked at the clerks in the stores for focusing even a blink too long on the inert sensationless bulges beneath her left eye, her right cheek or the bridge of her nose.

She lost her energy. She became unable to drag herself out of bed in the morning. And then the landlord's henchmen gave her a month to leave her apartment. So she threw what she could into the BMW (which she refused to surrender) and sold what remained to a guy from a local auction house. She went out onto the road, like so many people had done before her, discharged from a world that no longer gave a damn if she burned or mummified or vanished or was sucked up into the sky by a spaceship.

And then one day, somewhere in Colorado, it all stopped. Her head cleared, and it was as if the months of hell had been merely a fevered patch. Though she had lost her husband, her house, almost all of her possessions, she felt — free.

She took a room by the week over by the Cheyenne air force base, where weekly rentals were common. She changed her name to Fawn because she saw a fawn behind her rental unit one morning, and Heatherington because that was the fake I.D. name they gave her in the back room of Don's old sports bar haunt as she exchanged her Piaget wristwatch for a new identity.

Good old Duran had been spot on about Marilyn's needing a skill not tethered to beauty to help her through her life. She resumed including him in her prayers, when she prayed, which wasn't too often. He'd been dead for maybe fifteen years. In 1983 she'd read that he'd whacked his car into the side of a dairy van. She said, «Hey Durrie, at least I sound like a lady on TV announcing the news. Sleep tight, honey.»

Marilyn's clerical and organizational skills, acquired so many years back, landed her a job at a company called Calumet Systems, which, as far as she could tell, built UFOs for the government. Nobody there recognized «Fawn» as Marilyn, despite her recently televised reunion. She'd morphed into somebody utterly new. She was now a cropped brunette with pitted skin who bought her Dacron frocks off the rack that in a previous life she wouldn't have deigned to use to wipe crud off the snow tires in the garage. She was cool and serene and proud to help her government manufacture UFOs at Calumet.

This went on for a year. She assembled bits and pieces of daily necessities from thrift shops, and she went out once a month to see a movie with two of the girls from Calumet, who ribbed her about her BMW, which she said her brother gave to her. She watched TV. She was happy because she figured she could live this unassuming life until she died and she wouldn't ever again have to put so damnable much energy into being a complicated person with tangled relationships that only seemed to wear her out in the end.

She typed like a woodpecker, even with long fingernails. She was so good at it that a man from a company outside Calumet was brought in to witness her skills for himself, to identify her «metrics.» He praised Marilyn for her low error rate and he noted her biggest weakness, her frequent inability to capitalize sentences that began with the letter T. The man had smiled at her just before he left, and it was then that Marilyn intuited that he knew she might not be Fawn Heatherington. He'd asked her if she'd ever worked anywhere else before, and she'd said she hadn't. This had to seem like a bald-faced lie, but it actually wasn't. Her job with Mr. Jordan, the Spam Man, had been in another era altogether, and her only other typing-based work was time spent in a satellite office of the Trojan nuclear plant, raising money for Susan's gowns.