«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 — ever. Do you hear me?»
«Geez, Mom, I was only joking.»
«You'll never give that type of woman any of your time of day.»
Marilyn returned to her job of cross-indexing Eugene Lindsay's mail fraud scheme, but her body was obviously now awash in stress chemicals. Susan felt like the young wolf who's just discovered the tender, delicious underbelly of the porcupine.
The next afternoon they checked in to the hotel in St. Louis, whereupon Susan stayed up in the room to read comics while Marilyn confabbed with some other pageant moms, learning that Eugene was staying alone in the same hotel because Renata was stuck in Bloomington coping with demand for the following month's Big 'n' Proud convention in Tampa, Florida. With almost no effort, Marilyn determined Eugene's room number, and shortly after she knocked on his door. He answered, clothed only in argyle socks, striped boxers and an unbuttoned oxford cloth shirt. He was holding a scotch and Marilyn could see he had little hairs bleached gold by the sun on the tops of his fingers. Marilyn knew that Eugene was used to opening doors and letting in exactly whomever he wanted when he wanted. He saw Marilyn and said, «What is this — some kind of joke?»
«No joke, Eugene.» She barged into his room. She took it by storm.
«What the fuck? Lady — get the fuck out of my room. Now.»
«No, Eugene.»
«Did the guys at the station set this up? Is this a gag?»
«It's no gag, Eugene, and I don't know any guys from any station.» She coquetted her head and sat with her legs crossed on the bed.
Eugene gulped his scotch. «I'm not into mutton, lady. Out.»
«Oh, Eu gene — you've mistaken my intentions.»
«You're a show mom, aren't you? I can always tell you show moms. You're all nuts. You're all freaks.» He poured himself a new drink.
«Is drinking a smart thing to be doing?»
«I beg your — fuck it — I'm calling the hotel cops.» He moved to the bedside phone.
«I'm not the one on Stellazine, Eugene. I'm not the one who's insane here.»
His finger froze on the phone above the zero button. «You know, lady, I ought to — »
«Oh, shut up, you talking hairdo. My name's not Lady, it's Marilyn, which doesn't mean much. What does mean something is that my daughter wins tomorrow's title. She's going to play Für Elise and it doesn't matter if Miss Iowa cures cancer on stage, or if Miss Idaho gets stigmata, my daughter wins. Period. And you will make sure this happens.»
«This is a joke.» Eugene's face relaxed. «The guys at the station did set this up.»
«No joke.»
«You're good. »
«There's nothing for me to be good at, Eugene. This is for real.»
Eugene's face clenched and his voice assumed the cool metered speech of TV reason. «This is so totally Gothic, isn't it? You'd kill for your little proxy to win. I bet you and your little Miss …»
«Wyoming.» The family still had yet to move to that state, but Marilyn had already begun creating technical citizenship by renting a small storage locker on the outskirts of Cheyenne under Susan's name. At the present moment she wanted to unbalance Eugene's thinking. «You're wearing a beef bikini, Eugene.»
«Wha — ?» He reflexively reached for his privates, which had perhaps escaped containment.
«Read these.» From her handbag she removed a bundle of photocopies and slapped them onto the bedspread, and from where he stood, Eugene could tell what they were. «How do we spell “mail fraud,” Eugene? We spell it F-B-I.» Marilyn walked to the door and yanked it open. «You're a big fish in an itty-bitty pond, Hairdo. But it's my pond. Give me what I want and it doesn't go beyond these walls.» She stepped outside and looked in. «I could otherwise care less about you. Turning you in would be like spraying sewage onto a burning house. It'd get a job done, but — well, you think it over. Good-bye, Eugene.» She shut the door.