Spin Cycle

by Susan Cameron

Hey, I finally found it! Sorry my post was late -- hope you think it was worth the wait.

* * * * *

"GO! GO! GO!" Brittany screamed into the wind roaring past her ears as she opened the throttle. The boat bounced into the air and splashed, bounced and splashed, leaping through Tomahawk Lake like a skittering, screaming cougar hot on the heels of a deer. The wind, the spray, the roar, the vibration of the wheel jittering through her hands, up her arms, the sting of her long hair whipping her back, thigh muscles trembling as she half-crouched, bracing herself, unwilling to throttle back and slow the beast -- "GO!" -- and Kenny waiting on the other side, Kenny and his slow grin and his slow kisses, long, deep, spearmint-flavored kisses, football-player muscles solid as bedrock under her hands, the very bones of her body melting like warm butter under his hands -- "GO!" -- and she was going, going away from Zombie Mom and Dad the Perv, him checking her out in her bathing suit, my God! -- and Kenny waiting on the other side, with his truck and dog and money from his summer job framing houses and a rented room at his cousin's house just waiting for them -- "GO!" -- and her duffel bag of clothes and her money in her backpack stuffed under the seats, ready for real life to begin! And there, up ahead, there was Kenny on the shore, just like he promised, waving, grinning at her! She throttled back, waved, screamed "I LOVE YOU!" Brittany felt as if her heart would burst open like a ripe, juicy plum. Nobody could have ever felt this way before, this excited, this happy, this much in love; nobody in the world had ever been this ready!

* * * * *

Brittany's father, the richest, most successful Chevy dealer in the state of Wisconsin, began his career in automotive sales by stealing a car from a dead woman in Detroit, Michigan.

Marvin Miller was eighteen, living in a dump on the lower east side. He heard that the nurse who lived down the street had just keeled over with a heart attack. After the ambulance hauled her away, Marvin heard opportunity knocking; he stole her car and sold it. With the profits, he bought a new suit from Sears, a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20, his first whore, and a Cadillac with a transmission that chattered. He packed the tranny with sawdust and banana peels to quiet it down, then sold the Caddy for triple what he'd paid for it to some illiterate ex-cotton picker working the graveyard shift at the Ford plant. Marvin counted the grubby cash, grinned in amazement and realized he had found his true calling.

Thirty years' worth of creative capitalism later, Marvelous Marvin Miller, king of the late-night car commercials, swayed gently at the wet bar in his study as he poured his fourth Glenfiddich on the rocks since lunch. He carefully wrapped the glass in paper napkins so he wouldn't drip scotch on the Aubusson rug and shuffled past the shelves of leather-bound books the interior decorator had installed. She had done a good job. The study looked classy. He had tried to install a little something in the curvy blonde interior decorator, too, but hadn't been able to close the deal.

He paused to look at the huge mahogany and glass display case full of plaques and trophies, sales awards he and his various dealerships had earned over the years. The case was lit up day and night, and it gave him as much pleasure as the wet bar. He checked his reflection in the glass, ran one hand over his thinning hair, sucked in his gut.

The French doors leading to the balcony stuck a bit in the humid summer air of Tomahawk Lake, Wisconsin, but Marvin forced one open without spilling a drop of scotch. He leaned over the railing and took in the view. His bloodshot eyes drifted around the rim of the steep hillside that plunged to the lake, and the nearby houses squatting on the edge -- past Harvey's huge English Tudor next door, and then Elmo's Venetian palazzo, and then the massive tile roof of some radiologist's hacienda -- house after house looming over Tomahawk Lake, sparkling below them like a shattered windshield in the sun.

Marvin grunted as he lowered himself onto a chaise longue and pulled a contraband Cuban cigar out of his pocket. He was focusing his attention on keeping the ash the proper length when the ferocious howl of a boat engine distracted him.

Marvin peered through the railing down toward the water, and he scowled. He watched his daughter Brittany blasting away from his dock in the Boston Whaler he'd bought her for her most recent birthday, her seventeenth. She was wearing that tiny bikini again, the one that matched her golden tan exactly, the one that made her look like a naked Victoria's Secret model. He'd forbidden her to wear it. He didn't want her running around looking like that. But she was headstrong and stubborn and boy-crazy and was probably going off to cock-tease her boyfriend, that big football-playing bastard who lived on the poor side of the lake. What the hell was his wife thinking, letting their daughter run around acting like a little whore?

Come to think of it, where was that fat bitch, anyhow? He checked his Rolex. Not dinnertime yet, so she was probably lumbering around the stores in town, taking his credit cards for a walk. Or down in the laundry room again. What the hell was this mania she had for doing the laundry herself? Why didn't she have the cleaning lady do it? He certainly paid the hired help enough. He shook his head, puffed his cigar. A man in his position, stuck with a wife who looked and acted like some slow-witted big-assed Polack washerwoman. Lucky for him the world was full of attractive cocktail waitresses to keep him distracted, and call girls at sales conventions, women who looked and felt as good as the wife used to when he married her. Divorce would cost him an arm and a leg. If it weren't for that, he'd divorce the wife in a heartbeat.

Or would he? He sipped his scotch and thought about it. Having the wife around kept the golddiggers in their place. Probably saved him trouble in the long run.

* * * * *

Juliana was in the laundry room. She didn't mind doing laundry. She didn't mind much of anything since she'd discovered Prozac. It was a nice addition to her fruit salad, the colorful collection of pills she took before each meal. Lots of doctors, lots of prescriptions, lots of pills, pretty pills, red and green like Christmas, pink and purple like Easter, a holiday in every handful.

Her big hands drifted slowly from laundry basket to folding table, basket to table, floating back and forth like seaweed in the surge. She loved the smell of detergent, fabric softener, soft and clean. She smoothed the wrinkles out of Brittany's size five underpants, tiny as doll clothes. She herself had never been a size five. She stood the same five-foot-seven as her husband, but was wide-shouldered, big-hipped, built for field work and birthing babies. The long, powerful legs she'd once wrapped around the happy, scrawny young man who would become her husband had gained ten pounds each and sprouted ropy varicose veins that spread under her flesh like roots looking for water.

She folded and smoothed, folded and smoothed, hands drifting, watching the big diamond in her wedding ring sparkling even in the dim light of the laundry room, a huge diamond, catching and reflecting the light, winking at her. And she listed to the jingle of her charm bracelet, the present Marvin gave her the first time he won the Salesman of the Year award. She shouldn't wear it while doing laundry, but it was so pretty. A thick golden chain, empty at first, now heavy on her wrist, loaded with golden charms, souvenirs of their life together. The Eiffel Tower; that was from their tenth anniversary celebration in Paris. A tiny Cadillac with diamond headlights. After Brittany was born, Marvin gave her the baby carriage with little gold wire wheels that really turned. He gave her crabs, too, and gonorrhea twice, and it turned out he'd started cheating on her before they were even married -- but no no no, she mustn't think about things like that anymore. One or another of her doctors said it was important she not get upset, and really, she hardly ever got upset these days.

She stacked Brittany's fresh clean folded clothes into the basket and drifted like a rudderless ship toward her daughter's bedroom. She opened the door and floated into a foreign country.

Brittany had annihilated all the interior decorator's good work as soon as the woman left. The tasteful country French furniture was buried somewhere under an explosion of stuff Brittany brought home from the thrift store where she insisted on working. Clothing, junk jewelry, brass incense burners, candles, Navajo fetishes, Chinese good-luck charms, collections of rocks and stones and shells and beads. Not a speck of flowered wallpaper was visible behind the layers of rough cotton Indian and Pakistani bedspreads tacked to the walls, and so many more were layered on the floor that you couldn't see the cornflower blue wall-to-wall carpet at all. The light was blocked by the burgundy velvet drapes Brittany had rescued from their neighbor Harvey's trash, and Marvin would have killed her if he knew where she got them. A blacklight shrine on one wall was filled with images of rebellious rock and roll heroes who died before Brittany was born, and live ones who looked dead. Brittanyland smelled like patchouli and sandalwood, Coppertone and mildew.

Damp bathing suits were festering somewhere -- under the bed? in the closet? The last time she looked for the source of the smell she found two baggies of marijuana. Kids and drugs, oh my God, and she had cried and cried, not knowing what to do. She couldn't tell Marvin, not with his temper. She eventually flushed the marijuana down the toilet, took a couple of pills and went to bed. If Brittany noticed the baggies were missing, she never said a word.

Her daughter didn't say much about anything these days. She was rarely home, always out with her friends somewhere, showing up for meals sometimes but eating in silence, bolting from the dinner table as soon as she was done. Marvin would try to talk to Brittany and ended up yelling at her, saying things he didn't really mean. When she tried to intervene, her words just wouldn't come out right. Her brain and her voice seemed slow and disconnected somehow.

But that was sad, and she didn't want to think of sad things. She sat the yellow plastic laundry basket on top of a pile of magazines with tattooed musicians on the covers, and opened Brittany's underwear drawer. It was completely empty.

This was confusing. She looked at the little pile of clean underwear, looked at the drawer. There should be more in here, she thought.

She opened the next drawer, where Brittany kept her cute little T-shirts. Empty.

And the next. No socks. Empty.

A sunbeam of panic sliced through her brain's gray fog. Check the closet. Half empty. The clothes all over the bed and chair and floor hadn't been dropped there after being worn -- they'd been discarded. The backpack on the closet shelf -- gone. The duffel bag -- gone. Another thought hit her with such force that her knees buckled and she staggered backward, stumbling to the bed. Brittany had turned seventeen.

Emancipated minor. She hadn't thought of the phrase in years.

She herself had once been one, a seventeen-year-old runaway with a minimum-wage job, living in a converted garage, desperately in love with a boy named Marvin who wanted to marry her. The police told her parents they couldn't touch her. She hadn't been afraid of being poor them; she'd been afraid of being trapped.

Juliana sat for a long while, staring vacantly at her right hand twisting the wedding ring on her left, eyes open but not seeing, hearing one word whispering itself in her mind, a soft small wave gently breaking on beached driftwood: Go. Go. Go.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999