Susan was born, but Duran insisted Marilyn continue with her studies, which ultimately raised her to paralegal status. «Marilyn, please stop talking and study the woman on TV.»
«I'm tired of watching her.»
«That is not an issue. Just keep watching.» Duran was convinced that the most useful accent a woman could use was the concise nasal telegraph of the network news goddesses, and made Marilyn watch and mimic their style.
«Durrie, why are you making me learn all of this stuff?»
«Because, Marilyn, you know I'm not going to be here forever, and please don't talk like such a heek.»
«What do you mean you're not going to be around? And by the way, it's hick, not heek, and please don't call me a hick.»
«I need to know you'll be able to make it on your own. The world is hard. You need skills.»
«And when am I going to be alone?»
«When you're twenty-one.»
«And then what, Durrie?»
What Duran did was leave, just as he said he would, and Marilyn accepted it without rancor and thought she had gotten good value for her time with him. As Marilyn had cultivated no friends, and had pretty well jettisoned her family, she didn't mention him again to anybody else.
But when the screen door slammed, Marilyn sensed an absence in her life as blunt and frightening as a freshly cut tree stump. And it was at this point that her enthusiasm for Susan's entry into the world of pageants was born.
Miss Eva Lorraine's primary cosmetological message was that the traits humans perceive as beautiful are those that bespeak of fertility. «Big titties mean milk, girls, no secret about that. Shiny hair means healthy follicles, and our eggs, girls, come from follicles just as surely as does our hair and fingernails. And so that's why we keep a buffin' and a primpin'.»
Marilyn found the message eminently scientific, and thereafter as a rule she let the pursuit of babies govern all of her future beauty decisions — push-up bras, rouge in the décolletage, cellophane rinses on her hair and, as time wore on, silicone injections to plump up some facial sagging. But the injections didn't come until long after Don Colgate entered her life, a hefty logger from Hood River. He was blown away by a looker who worked at a genuine legal office, with a daughter like a china figurine on his granny's mantelpiece.
After they got married, he insisted she quit working, and so she did. Marilyn saw this as decidedly old-fashioned thinking, but it also implied that Don wouldn't go leaving her like Duran.
It was with her conquest of Don Colgate that Marilyn obtained the final proof she needed that fertility and the proven ability to bear beautiful babies were integral to her allure and her sense of being. But then there was the issue of Don and his fertility. His sperm were dead or lazy or stupid or overheated, and he and Marilyn didn't conceive. As his sterility became more evident, so did his drinking and the number of pageants in which young Susan was entered increased. The bunny hutches behind the trailer increased, too, and it was a trailer,never a house, because Don just didn't seem to get promoted at the lumberyard.
Marilyn found that she could funnel her native intelligence into the world of pageants, an intelligence she was convinced she had passed on to Susan. Other pageant girls whined and screeched and pulled princess routines, but Susan sat like a hawk on one of the Interstate light posts, scanning for roadkill, watching and learning from the others. She tended to win, and after a point released Marilyn from the need to shuck bunnies.
Don said that some of the makeup and attire Marilyn made Susan wear was cheap and slutty. She told Don that she'd once read that girls in China have babies at the age of nine, «so if girls can have babies that early, there's nothing wrong with highlighting that capacity.»
«It's bad morals is what it is, Marilyn.»
«Don, cool your jets. Get off the pulpit.»
«Marilyn, nine-year-old girls do not wear tittie-bar stilettos.»
«Don't be so coarse. They're evening shoes.»
«I thought hill folk were supposed to be so wise, like the Waltons.»
The issue of morals usually quieted Marilyn, if only briefly. Knowing about morals was in no way the same thing as actually having them. She'd been raised in a hog pen and was lacking in ethics. Some nights she genuinely did worry about the sins of the parent being handed down to the child — her own feral upbringing overriding Susan's angelic manner. But she wouldn't speak these thoughts aloud. Instead, for example, she told Don that morals were whatever got the job done at the time. «Like those Polynesians who eat Spam.»
«The whats who eat what ?»
«Spam. That's what Mr. Jordan, my old boss, told me. He'd read that in supermarkets down in the South Pacific they have whole aisles that are devoted to nothing but Spam. The Americans tried to figure out why these island people liked Spam so much, and it turns out that nothing else approximates the taste of cooked human flesh like the salty porky taste of Spam.»
Don's mouth hung open.
«We think of those jolly little Island people down there in their jolly little hula skirts and being oh so moral. But to them, cannibalism is perfectly moral, so it seems to me, Don Colgate, that morals are a pretty flexible little concept, so don't go getting preachy on me. »
But it was Marilyn whose mouth was agape while walking through the sprays of cooked human flesh at Seneca. She was asked her name by a person inside one of the many biohazard protection suits swarming the site. She replied, «Susan Colgate is my daughter. I'm her mother. Have you seen her?» Marilyn's shoes' heels had broken. She was wearing a pair of pink women's running shoes she'd found intertwined with a stereo headset a few minutes back when she'd scraped her shin.
At sunset a Gannett reporter named Sheila drove Marilyn to the local Holiday Inn and gave Marilyn her bed. Sheila filed her stories and bounced between her laptop PC, her cell phone and the TV. Marilyn called Don. He arrived the next morning. Both spent the day at the local ice rink, temporarily converted into a morgue. Skating music serenaded family members of crash victims who appraised what remains were «readable.» There were rows upon rows of limbs and torsos and shards, all covered in black vinyl tarps, arranged like 4-H projects atop plywood sheets that straddled sawhorses. Five days went by and still they found no trace of Susan. Marilyn donated blood samples for DNA testing, to help analyze those bodies too far gone for visual or dental identification. They returned to Cheyenne, their spirits fogged like wet car windows, their emotions on hold. Sheila called each day to see if an ID had been made, but no. This in itself became a story, and the local coroner, in conjunction with the airline and the civil aviation authorities, were at a total loss as to where Susan's remains might have ended up. There hadn't been enough heat for vaporization to occur, and all eyelashes and fingernail clippings within a half-mile radius had been DNA-cataloged. It was at this point that Sheila hooked up Marilyn with a prominent claims litigator, Julie Poyntz, who spent the next year winning her claim, arguing about the profound stress for family members arising from the airline's losing the body of a passenger, a body that might very well be in the deep freeze of some psychotic fan.
«You just don't lose a body, Mrs. Colgate — Marilyn.» It was early on in their lawyer-client relationship. «And I don't want to dwell on the possibilities of what might have become of her remains,but … »
«What if she's alive?» asked Marilyn.
Julie tsk-tsked. «You were there, Marilyn. Everybody on that flight was dead and/or severely mutilated.»