Free Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland Page A

Relatives brought him presents and slipped him envelopes of money. John appeared grateful for these gifts in their presence, and, once they left, promptly gave the cash to Doris. She stashed it away in her mad-money Vuitton valise, up above her collection of Op and Pop outfits that began to infiltrate her sensibility across the decades.
    Doris liked arty men. She liked men who lived inside paintings. And these men tended to like Doris at first, when they thought she could buy their way
out
of paintings, but it usually took about one season before they discerned she wasn't in the Maria Agnelli league and elegantly dumped her. Doris was aware of this cycle, but it failed to harden her in the same way that the serial tribulations of soap opera characters left them similarly undented.
    With John, Doris was quite talkative about her family, its source of wealth and its role in the overall scheme of the world. John would squint and try to envision the Lodge Corporation, and he would briefly gather the impression of a massive diseased creature — a sperm whale in which all cells were infected and doomed.
    «Darling,
all
aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant. Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Lodge electronics fizzle, pop and quickly expire like thrushes hitting the front picture window. Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariably render their wearers unstylish, lame and beset by fungus infections. Lodge service divisions give sloppy parodies of service at hyperinflated prices needed to pay for Lodge's vast overhead of union bribes, drugs, lynx fur coats and Bahamian holidays for executive wives. Lodge is a goiter on society, draining and taking, pustulant and mute.»
    John would egg her on: «What kinds of things does Lodge
make,
Ma?»
    «What
doesn't
Lodge make is the better question, darling. Lodge will make
anything.
Nothing is sacred: children's cigarettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born timeexpired, Vatican City parking spots — just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved penny from somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling,
that's Lodge.
»
    When he was fourteen, John developed breathing problems, and spent, with minor exceptions, a year in bed while his lungs and bronchial tubes healed. He watched TV, read, chatted with Doris — he had no friends and his numerous cousins were conspicuously kept away from him. Tutors came in and kept him primed with the basics. He wasn't dumb and he wasn't a genius. He liked his world, and he didn't mind its limitations.
    John did wonder, though, how he could make up for the lost time in his life. Assuming he recovered, how might he catch up with all the other children who had been out in the everyday world — chasing balls? throwing sticks? shoplifting? John's notions of normal childhood behavior were sketchy. And he worried about Doris, who came close, but didn't «snag herself a
may-un.
» Would she ever be happy? What could he do to bring love into her life? TV had taught him that love was pretty much a cure for all ills.
    Doris put a good face on it all. John was the constant in her life, the one thing family could neither take away nor reduce. From her perspective, the more time John spent watching TV in the apartment away from hooligans, third rails and strange men in raincoats, the better.
    The year he spent in bed was certainly the longest of his life. When he was older and met other people who had accomplished great things during their stints on earth, he found that invariably, somewhere in their early youth, they had felt the experience of death or incapacity burned into them so deeply that ever afterward they gambled with all their chips, said fuck it, went for broke in the sound knowledge that wasting life is