Miss Wyoming

«Is this something nasty again, Mom?»

«Susan!»

«Then it is, because you haven't said “sweetie” once yet, and whenever you fib, you drop the nice stuff.»

«Oh sweetie.»

«Too late.»

Marilyn pursed her lips and looked at her daughter, swaddled in track pants and a gray kangaroo sweater. «Well then. Come along.» Marilyn brought two pairs of gardening gloves, a box of trash bags and two flashlights. They drove out into winding residential streets of a repetitive stockbroker Tudor design, the type that, when she was younger, Susan associated with the walrus-mustached plutocrat from the Monopoly board. Now she more realistically associated this sort of neighborhood with car dealers, cute amoral boys, sweater sets, regularly scheduled meals containing the four food groups, Christmas tree lights that didn't blink, the occasional hand on the knee, cheerful pets, driveways without oil stains, women named Barbara and, apparently, weathermen for regional NBC affiliates.

«That Lindsay guy lives here?» Susan asked, looking out at a colonial with a three-car garage, as colorfully lit as an aquarium castle, surrounded by dense evergreens that absorbed noise like sonic tampons.

«Shhh!» Marilyn had killed the car's lights the block before. «Just help me out here, sweetie.» They sidled over to the cans and Marilyn removed the lid from one. «Beautifully bagged. Like a Christmas gift. Susan — quietly now — help me lift the bag out.» The bag made a fruity, resonant fart sound against the can's inner edge as Susan hauled it out, and she laughed.

Five beautifully wrapped bags of trash made their way into the car's trunk and back seat. Marilyn squealed away from the house, with her lights out for the first, almost painful, nervous puffs of breath. «Where now?» Susan asked.

«A Wal-Mart parking lot.»

«A Wal-Mart lot? Isn't that kind of public?»

Marilyn turned on the lights. That's pre cise ly why we're going there. We'll look like two lady lunchbucket losers sifting through their own crap, most likely in pursuit of an eleven-cents-off coupon for house-brand bowling balls.»

And Marilyn was correct. She parked within ten stalls of the store's main entrance, and not a soul gave a second glance to the mother-daughter team purposefully ripping through deep green plastic umbilical cords and placentas like industrial midwives.

«What are we supposed to be looking for?» Susan asked.

«I'll know when I see it. One bag at a time. Spread the contents evenly on the trunk floor. Good. Now hold open your bag and I'll put things into it, piece by piece.» Marilyn hawkeyed the items, which afforded a glass- bottom boat tour of the home and lives of la famille Lindsay. «Bathroom,» she said, «bloody Kleenexes, three; Q-tips, two; bunion pads, four, five,six; prescription bottle, contents: Lindsay, Eugene, Stellazine, a hundred milligrams twice daily, no refill.»

«What's Stellazine?»

«An antipsychotic. Powerful. Diggety-dawg, this is a keeper. » Marilyn's elder sister, a fellow escapee from their yokel origins, was a schizophrenic who, before jumping off the I-5 bridge in downtown Portland, had been a pharmaceutical bellwether for Marilyn. «Let's go on. Disposable razor, one.»

Marilyn then found three 8-X-10s of Eugene's face, sandwiched together with a layer of Noxzema. «Dammit, why does he have to be so goddam handsome?»

Susan grabbed one of the photos and her eyes sucked him in. She felt the way she had when she won a side of beef in her high school's Christmas raffle. «He is good-looking, isn't he?»

«They always are, honey, they always are.»

Susan snuck the photo into her pocket, then shivered.

«You're cold, sweetie.»

«No. Yes. Sort of.»

«You sound like Miss Montana did in last month's pageant.» Marilyn laughed, and even Susan had to smile. «Only give declarative answers, sweetie.»

The next bag must have been from Renata's bathroom, a perfect bin of high-quality cosmetics, items which earned grudging admiration from Marilyn.

Next came several bags of kitchen waste: junk mail, coffee grounds, mostly unopened upscale deli containers and several cans of unpopular vegetables — beets and lima beans.

One bag remained: «Come on, Eugene! Give me what I need. » It was evidently office waste: dried-out pens, a typewriter's correction ribbon, opened bill envelopes from Ameritech, Chevron, PSI Energy, Indiana Gas and — «What's this ?» Marilyn reached for an askew clump of similar-looking photocopies. She chose one at random, and began reading it aloud: « “Ignore this letter at your peril. One women in Columbus chose to ignore this and was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning a week later …” A chain letter.» Marilyn skimmed the copy. «Well and good, but why so many of them, Eugene? What the — ?» At this point her eyes saucered and her brain flipped inside her head like a circus Chihuahua. «Susan! Look! This weasel's been sending out hundreds of chain letters to dupes around the country — Canada and Mexico, too, and look — he always puts himself at the top of the chain on all the lists.»

Susan was young and unfamiliar with chain letters. «Yeah?»

«So even if a fraction of these suckers mail fifty bucks, he still scores big-time.»

«Let me see.» Susan read the threatening letter more carefully.

Marilyn, meanwhile, yanked out a folder cover: «KLRT-AM Radio, San Jose, California, All Talk, All the Time.» Inside the folder were printout lists of names and addresses, each crossed off. There were also folders from other cities — Toronto, Ontario; Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Schenectady, New York. «I get it — these are names and addresses of station listeners who filled out marketing cards.»

«Why them?» Susan asked.

«Think about it: if you've nailed down a file of people who enthusiastically identify with whacko call-in radio shows, it's not too much extra work to squeak a fifty out of them. Kid's play. Here, help me put these papers in neat piles. Eugene, I love you for helping dig your own grave.»

They stacked and collated their booty. Back in the car Marilyn drove to a dumpster behind a Taco Bell and said, «Chuck the leftover trash in there.» Susan took Eugene Lindsay's rebagged garbage and daintily lobbed it over the bin's rusty green rim.

At the hotel, Susan got fed up with Marilyn and her cache of papers. The TV was broken. She lay on the bed and tried to find animal shapes inside the ceiling's cottage cheese stippling. «Mom, are we with a host family or at a hotel tomorrow night?»

«A hotel, sweetie.»

«Oh.»

«You'd rather we stay with a host family?»

«Yes and no.» Yes because she got to peek into other people's lives and houses, invariably more normal than her own, and no because she'd also have to smell the host family, eat their food and have yet another host dad or host brother try to cop a feel or mistakenly enter the bathroom while she was having her shower,and she'd have to put a sunshine smile on everything to boot. Her mind wandered to a group of women who'd picketed the California Young Miss pageant earlier on that year in San Francisco. They'd called the pageant entrants cattle. They accused the mothers of being butchers leading sheep to slaughter. They'd worn meat bikinis. Susan smiled. She tried to imagine beef's feel on her skin, moist and pink, like the skin beneath a scab. «Mom — what did you think of those meat women in San Francisco? The ones with the flank steak bikinis.»

Marilyn drooped the papers she was holding. «Angry, empty women, Susan.» Marilyn's temples popped veins. «Did you hear me? Lost. Absolutely lost. No men in their lives. Hungry. Mean. I feel sorry for them. I pity them.»

«They looked like they were having fun, kinda.»

Marilyn turned on her with a ferocity that let Susan actually see that human beings have skulls beneath their faces. Marilyn mistook Susan's horror for fear of what she was saying: «No! Don't ever think that —