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The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

St. Martin's Press

The story of Audrey Mapes begins with butter. Actually, Imperial margarine. The Mapeses couldn't afford real butter.

She rubbed sticks of Imperial on her elbows, forearms, shins, and knees. Not always, not every day. Not even every other day. But it felt like always, it felt like every day. Let's say that four times a week, Audrey the footless toddler slid in a blur across the kitchen floor. She barreled into the wheeled caddie, toppled tin canisters, ignited powdery explosions.

Nobody yelled at her. She was never told, "No." One of her parents — or, more often, one of her eight-year-old siblings — or, even more often, the meeker, kinder of the twins, McKenna, would dutifully take up broom and dustpan, careful not to mutter any profanity loudly enough that Audrey could hear while she swept away Audrey's mess and erased the Imperial glaze with a wad of paper towels.

On other days — the in-between ones when she wasn't lubricating the linoleum — Audrey gave herself a toothpaste mustache and lurched through the house on crutches while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the voice of Groucho Marx, who she'd never actually heard but who her daddy imitated in the basement when he was in the best of moods. This was a preschooler, mind you. She had the makings of a star, even then.

Another source of fun for Audrey was filling her right ear with cream cheese and letting Snoodles the basset hound puppy lick it clean. An hour later, still half-deaf, Audrey would slap her cheeks with handfuls of baking soda before climbing, confident as a shirpa, onto her daddy's lap.

"Gah!" he would say. "My bank statements. Get off!"

They weren't bank statements. Murray Mapes was seated on the couch, surrounded by papers — notes, drawings, schematics, the occasional hardware store shopping list — all hand-scrawled in blue ballpoint and legible only to his eyes. He had trained himself to call any important piece of paper a "bank statement" to kill any interest his children might have in what he was doing. He wanted, above all, to be left alone with his equations and crude sketches. Whereas the twins had learned, from nearly a decade of practice, to respect this dream of their father's, Audrey had only learned how to eat dirt, Play-Doh, crayons, and paper. That and how to walk on flattened soda pop cans.

Audrey would kiss her father's face, persisting through his weak objections until his light-blue work shirt was speckled with powder and his three-day scruff was white as the snow on the front lawn (more accurately, "front patch of grass" — five-minute mow time).

"Why do you hate me?" Audrey would ask, after he'd calmly gripped her shoulders, lifted her, and set her back onto the carpet.

"I don't hate you. I hate the idea of you." He pretended to return to his papers, but it was easy to see that his sideways glance was trained on Audrey's legs, on the careful rigging of straps, mounts, and clamps designed to stabilize the two Dr Pepper cans upon which his three-year-old precariously balanced.

Unflappable, Audrey mounted her dad again, stepping with her aluminum feet upon his thighs. The patches of baking soda made Audrey's cheeks resemble skin grafts, or the makeup attempts of an ill-trained clown. She gripped Murray's shoulders, mimicking what he'd done to her. She shook him, gently (in a silly way, no threats — even at such a young age, she recognized her provider).

She pouted. "Am I a bad idea?"

"You're a wonderful thought," he answered, licking the sweat from his lip. "An amazing gesture. A spectacular plan. A perfect theory."

(It's disingenuous to imply that this dialogue actually occurred when Audrey was three. It's true that Murray uttered these exact lines, but only once, many years later, moments before a furious, split-lipped, twenty-year-old Audrey, employing a dramatic high-step she'd learned by observing high school color guard practice from the sidelines, marched through the living room on her nationally recognized $30,000 prosthetic feet [designed by MIT graduate students], out the screen door, across the front patch of grass, and to the street, where she tossed her tortoise shell suitcase into the trunk of her Porsche and sped away to ingest the city of purple-capped lumber yards and railroad tracks.)

Normally, when Audrey asked, "Am I a bad idea?" her father answered:

"Your eyes are burnt matches. Your hair is a scented galaxy where time stands still. Your mouth can't be real, unless God, who doesn't exist, has performed a miracle and sent to Earth not a bearded savior but a pair of strawberry lips and teeth as crookedly perfect as wave-battered rocks under a maizy sun where no man could fear death. Now get the hell off my lap! I've got work to do."

The ugliest stain left by this disaster — beyond the loss of an irreproachable young woman barely out of her teens and millions of dollars in damage, both property and psychic — is the bilious stain that spread over time and still colors us. It's a stain of narrative, of story: the collected, steady drip of untruth from the lips of small-minded busybodies — women, if I may be frank, who found a vocation in slandering strangers over steaming cups. Through their dentures they whispered predictions and slurped their chamomile tea. All geezers are certain, but these particular geezers weren't certain that Audrey Mapes — at the time just a preschooler living in a rundown house and not yet experiencing functional, non-threatening feet — wouldn't grow up to perform some monumental act so insensitive and selfish and evil that she would be exposed as the devil she was. They predicted that Audrey — yes, that Antichrist who drifted off to dreamland clutching a stuffed rhinoceros — would alter the world forever, causing misery, horror, and perhaps even a dangerous chemical spill or two.

These arthritic Nostrodami also added assurances that the only folks who would come out looking good after the ordeal (Aside from the victims. Of course.) would be the ones who'd had the prescience to see it coming, those who'd warned the world even while this monster was still a sweet lily cup in a pink dress sticking out her tongue for Polaroids. Nightly, their clawed hands patted each other's hunches before they crawled alone between tightened bed sheets to pray rosaries for one more day of lung power, one more meatloaf sandwich, one more chance to trash a child they barely knew.

The stain, of course, is that they were right. The geezers called it. That's the sticker.

However, I hereby assert that none of these psychic busybodies, and in fact, no one on Earth — not Audrey's half-paralyzed prophet of a mother; not her half-deaf, wannabe-inventor father; not her bulging brother or misunderstood sister — ever envisioned Audrey growing up to devour an entire city. Not even a crumb like Kal-amazoo.

McKenna and Toby, five-year-old fraternal twins, stood with aching arms held above their heads. Each was battling bravely to keep Misty's assigned leg aloft. Misty lay undrugged and pale on the queen-sized bed, bearing down. Thick vines of sweat-heavy hair gave her head the appearance of an unpruned plant. Murray slid ice chips between her lips, toweled her brow, looked bored and distracted even during her contractions.

The midwife Sheenie, a freckle-ridden redhead with a stout body and manhands, gave encouragement. "That's a good girl," she said. "You're doing it, honey. We're gonna get that baby out of there." She repeated her mantra every ten minutes, every two minutes, every ten seconds. The contractions rose again and again. Misty bucked on the mattress. Sheenie monitored the baby's heart rate when she could, but mostly she bustled — never rushed, never harried — from one end of the bedroom to the other, her hips and buttocks bumping McKenna and Toby's shoulders as she brought warm compresses and Styrofoam cups of ice. She rubbed lavender oil onto Misty's naked belly. Every half-hour, Sheenie reached three fingers inside to "move things around." Misty screamed like a raw brake.

McKenna, gripping her mother's calf, couldn't stifle her own yelp. Her weakness embarrassed her. She looked down at her socked feet.

Blood vessels branched over Misty's cheeks. Then branches formed atop the original branches. Eventually, she was the color of an eggplant.

When McKenna and Toby could take no more, as their arms began to burn, tremble, and collapse, as they began to fear that their mother's face was literally going to explode ... just then, a swirl of matted yellow hair appeared between Misty's legs. Then a whole head. A squished face. A gush of blood and water that rusted the twins' tube socks.

Like magic, Audrey was a reality — the baby sister the twins had envisioned for so long.

There she was, a slick, glistening body, a crying mouth, tiny legs bicycling.

Legs with no feet attached.

The midwife hurried the footless infant onto Misty's bare chest. Murray cooed, smooched the bloody cheek. He allowed his index finger, which to the newborn was the size of a baseball bat, to be grabbed. McKenna and Toby stepped around Sheenie as she scissored the cord. They leaned, straining to see inside. Perhaps the feet were still on the way.

No such luck.

"You'll need to help out around here," Murray told the twins, days later. "You're old enough to pitch in. No more free lunch."

This news caused McKenna so much anxiety that she messed her pants. Toby smelled it. He glared.

Their father didn't seem to notice. He kept talking, flapping like a bird as he tried halfheartedly to take flight from the front cement steps and over the Bader's dilapidated two-story across the street. Murray had strapped on the latest prototype of his Man Wings — this particular untested pair built from wax paper, tin foil, and eight hundred melted-together plastic Sporks.

"McKenna, you're in charge of baths. Three a week. Don't get soap in her eyes, and pay special mind to the stumps. Be gentle but firm, dig into those crevices like you mean it, and don't let her drown." He paused long enough to ignite a Kool 100 and kick his flip-flops onto the lawn, for less ballast. He resumed flapping, the white cigarette hanging from his lips. He was doing a dry run, a "flap check," trying to get a feel for the wings and how they responded to his body before the Actual Launch Date. (The Actual Launch Date never came. FYI.)

McKenna and Toby stood on the grass near the steps. Toby, like a Wimbledon ball-boy, sprinted to retrieve the discarded flip-flops. McKenna watched her father, anticipating with each swoosh of the wings that he might actually rise off the stoop, take to the sky, and never return.

Murray continued with his instructions: "And space them out, okay? Or else it won't count. Like for example Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That's not a rigid schedule, understand? Just a 'for instance.' Nobody's trying to lock you into anything. No contract except the one you draw up in your own head. I trust you. Pick different days! Have fun with it! You're a smart girl. You'll figure it out."

McKenna hated her sister's stumps, the little knobs of skin where the feet were supposed to be. Like drawstring purses cinched tight. The mere mention of them upset McKenna's stomach.

Later that night, she tried to get Toby to switch jobs.

McKenna's eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she could see in the adjoining bed that Toby was also awake, studying the ceiling, perhaps imagining, as McKenna was, two-week-old Audrey walking acrobatically on her hands, ascending a flight of stairs, entering Heaven for all eternity.

McKenna tried to make her whisper sound casual, conversational — any way but desperate: "Baths are so easy. And you love the water."

"I love swimming," Toby answered. "Not water. No way I'm washing Stumpy."

"You want to change her diapers? That's nasty!"

"They can't smell as bad as you."

It was a low blow. McKenna had no response. She felt her face blushing. Despite being triple-wrapped in Bounty and sprayed with Misty's patchouli oil, the soiled underwear McKenna had stashed behind her dresser (until smuggling it to the toilet before bedtime) had filled the room with rank. Her neck itched with perspiration. She tried to sleep. Toby snored for hours.

Murray Mapes wanted to give his new daughter the feet she'd forgotten to carry out of the womb. By his own estimation, he'd been an inventor for twenty years at the time she was born. He liked to tell the story of how, at age five, he'd transformed three plywood boards, a handful of nails, and four industrial-sized rubber bands into a gun and turret mounted on a Radio Flyer wagon. The weapon could launch screws and nails up to twenty-seven feet.

In the following decades, Murray filed dozens of patents (the first at age twelve), including, but not limited to, the Clock Hat, the Squeezable Survival Kit, the Hood Wiperz, the Detachable Shirt Collar, the Hot Dog Pouch, the Pencil Pachyderm, the Collapsible Ukulele with Hairbrush, and the Moldproof Towel Organizer.

Murray's habit was to pursue each new idea with an intensity approaching madness. Once a brainstorm hit him, he spent every free moment in the basement, from which issued clanks and buzzes, scrapings and explosions, celebrity impersonations, paroxysms of laughter, and, now and then, weeping. He pretty much drained his emotional well down there. If Misty and the twins saw Murray ten minutes each day during an invention jag, they felt blessed.

Then, three months after the idea first took shape in his mind, Murray would ascend from his dungeon. He would kick open the basement door, his clothes and hair covered in sawdust and metal shavings, bearing his new baby. He would promptly demonstrate the gadget to his wife, children, mother-in-law, and a few select neighbors, to varying degrees of applause.

That's as far as Murray took any one idea. The fury of his initial passion left him exhausted and listless, and he was unable, or unwilling, or a combination of both, to actually thrust his inventions into the public sphere. Try as he might ("might" being the operative word) he could never find an investor to fund the production of his goods. And of course, there wasn't enough money in the Mapes's bank account to make the inventions anything more than conversation pieces in a future attic museum.

Daily bread found its way to the table because Murray worked the line at Hanson Mold, a factory that made plastic injection molds for automobiles. It was a thankless, noisy existence. Murray hunched hour after hour in the shadow of the 300T Castmaster press, far from natural light and fresh air. By age forty, half of his hearing would be gone, causing him to shout for his salt and pepper. Red trenches from the safety goggles would become permanent circles around his eyes. His palms would thicken with calluses from repeated burns. His fingers would chap and split.

But that was years later. And on the plus side, Hanson Mold was the type of repetitive, mindless, union-protected work that allowed a man to daydream. While the radio rocked "Running on Empty" and "Point of Know Return" for the hundredth time in a month, and while his coworkers bickered about the pros and cons of low-cal shortening substitutes as a way of diverting their attentions from their indignation over the latest infringement on personal rights (Article 4.9.4 of the Standard Operating Procedures now stipulated that all mustaches had to be "well-groomed"), Murray lived somewhere else, sketching in his mind (and during lunch breaks, on McDonald's bags), the perfect pair of prosthetic feet for his breathtaking new daughter.

Audrey was a comely baby; this much is indisputable, no matter how twisted and grotesque people try to make her in legend.

Henri Rousseau said, "Beauty is the promise of happiness."

Notice that the "promise of happiness" is all it takes. No actual happiness is necessary.

Audrey was beautiful like the fever that kills a virus. Like a vivid dream of an ex-lover. Like a perfect beach moment just before the carnation horizon is swallowed by a night so complete you forget pink is a color. Like a fat, barn-red apple straddling the line between ripeness and rot.

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Excerpted from The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo by Darrin Doyle. Copyright © 2009 Darrin Doyle. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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