«Christ, turn that thing off. The noise is like the theme song to a show I don't watch anymore.»

«She can't have been that bad.»

«You used to be married, too.»

«Still am, technically. We never divorced.»

«Rock star guy. Rough stuff, I imagine.»

«Chris? Rough, yes, but stuff, no. He's gay as a goose. I married him so he could get a green card and so I could remain close to his Catholic and very married manager Larry Mortimer.» She stopped playing with the clothing rack.

Eugene was dialing on the cordless, ordering groceries. «Oh God.»

«What?»

«You're real,» he said.

«As opposed to … ?»

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling fan. «I've got a good thing going here. My time is all my own. I don't have to deal with …»

«With what?»

«With people, » Eugene spat out.

Susan looked at him. «I agree. You do have a good deal going here.»

Now they were both looking at the ceiling and holding hands. Eugene asked her, «What did the focus groups say about you?»

«What do you mean?»

«You know. The focus groups. The ones they brought in to pick you apart so the network could figure out what makes you you. »

Susan was intrigued. «Why?»

«I'll tell you what they said about me. Then you tell me what they said about you.»

«Okay, deal.»

«Women said, “What's with his hair? Is it real? Is that his real color?” They said, “Ooh, me so horny, me want humpy astronaut.” They said, “I'd go metric for you, baby.” Guys weren't as descriptive. They just called me nothing, but once they saw my face, they knew the sports segment was over and could switch off the set.» He lit a cigarette then lay back and chuckled. «TV.Ugh. »

Susan spooned into him. The sheets felt like cool pastry marble.

She said, «Near the end they knew they had enough episodes to syndicate, so they stopped focus-grouping. But at the start I got stuff like “I can see the zits underneath her makeup. Can't you guys find her a putty knife? That's one helluva thick paper bag she's trying to act her way out of. Her tits are like fried eggs gone all runny.” That kind of stuff.» Their eyes caught and they both laughed.

«I've gotta phone in this grocery order.» Eugene punched a phone number into the cordless, and the touch-tone beeps reminded Susan of a song she used to like back in the eighties.

Susan had performed in shopping strips many times, and her afternoon stint at the Clackamas County Mall was by no means unusual. In fact, as opposed to pageant judges, she found the overwhelmingly geriatric mall crowds emotionally invisible, and performing before them neither chancy nor stressful, her only stings arising from the occasional heckling teen or a stray leering pensioner. Once in Olympia, Washington, mall security had removed an old lech who'd been wanking listlessly down by the left speaker bank, like a zoo gorilla resigned to a sterile caged fate. Susan thought it was funny, but hadn't quite understood what it was he'd actually been doing. She'd told both her mother and the mall cops she thought he'd been «shaking a donut,» which made the cops snort and Marilyn screech. When the cops briefly left the office, Susan had said, «Mom, please don't go filing another lawsuit. Not over this. Just let it go.»

«Young lady, who knows what harm that man did to you.»

«What harm?»

«It'll be years before you even know, sweetie.»

«Mom — no lawsuit. I'm sick of your suing people all the time. It's my birthday. Make it my present, okay?»

Marilyn's face froze but then immediately thawed. «I'll just keep on shucking bunnies to help pay the rent. I suppose some body has to work in this world.»

At the Clackamas Mall it had been arranged for Susan to perform a Grease medley, her routine that somehow dovetailed with the mall's Campaign for Drug-Free Kids. Susan's friend Trish had just turned sixteen, and drove Susan up to the mall from McMinnville. Marilyn was to follow shortly, after stopping to meet with a seamstress in Beaverton to go over Susan's autumn look.

Susan and Trish parked, hooked up with their mall contact, and then crammed themselves into the Orange Julius bathroom where Susan's poodle skirt remained untouched within its paper Nordstrom's bag. From a gym bag, she and Trish removed black jumpsuits and thin red leather ties. Both combed their hair into spikes and applied gel and heavy mascara, then headed backstage. Susan's name was called, and the two climbed up onto the carpeted plywood risers. They walked like robotic mimes, Trish to her Casio keyboard, Susan to center stage. To the bored and distracted mall audience they might just as well have been dressed as Valkyries or elm trees, but Susan felt for the first time a surge of power.

Trish hit the opening notes, at which point Susan lifted a riding crop she'd borrowed from one of Don's army buddies. She began to crack the whip in time with the rhythmic nonsense of «Whip It,» a by-then-stale new wave anthem. For the first time, Susan didn't feel like a circus seal onstage. Trish kept the synthesizer loud, and Susan could feel all other times she'd been onstage drop away — those years she'd been trussed and gussied up, barking for fish in front of Marilyn and every pageant judge on earth, joylessly enacting her moves like a stewardess demonstrating the use of an oxygen mask.

But now — the faces — Susan was seeing genuine reactions: mouths dropped wide open, mothers whisking away children — and at the back, the cool kids who normally mooned her and pelted her with Jelly Tots, watching without malice.

Suddenly the speaker squawked and moaned, and Susan turned around to see Marilyn ripping color-coded jacks from the backs of the Marshall amps while a mall technician lamely protested the ravaging. Heads in the audience shifted as if they were a field of wheat, in the direction where Susan now turned, glaring like a raven.

«What the hell are you doing, Mom?»

Marilyn plucked out more jacks, and her face muscles tensed like a dishrag in the process of being squeezed.

Susan cracked the riding crop at Marilyn, where it burned Marilyn's hands, a crimson plastic index fingernail jumping away like a cricket. «Mom, stop it! Stop!»

Marilyn grabbed the crop's end and yanked it away from Susan. She looked to be rabid and scrambled up over the 2-X-6 trusses and onto the stage. Susan turned to her audience. She was raging. «Ladies and gentlemen, let's have a big hand for» — she paused as Marilyn raised herself awkwardly, like a horse from thick mud — «my overenthusiastic mother.»

The audience smelled blood and clapped with gusto as Marilyn cuffed Susan on the neck. Three hooligans over by the Sock Shoppe shouted meows, at which point Susan went momentarily deaf from Marilyn's blow. Time stopped for her. She was lifted up and out of herself, and she felt aware for the first time that her mother didn't own her the way she owned the Corvair or the fridge. In fact, Susan realized Marilyn had no more ownership of her than she did of the Space Needle or Mount Hood. Marilyn's connection was sentimental if Susan chose it to be that way, or business, which made some sense, but no longer was Marilyn able to treat Susan like a slammed car door every time she lost control.

Marilyn looked in Susan's eyes, realized she'd blown it and would never regain her advantage. This sent her into a larger swivet, but its ferocity now didn't faze Susan. She now knew the deal.

Marilyn lunged at her daughter, enraged, but Susan looked back at her and with a gentle smile said, «Sorry, Mom, you're thirty seconds too late. You're not going to get me — not this time.»

Marilyn's arms went around Susan's chest, half as if to strangle her, half for support. The clapping stopped and Trish ran over. «Mrs. Colgate,please. »