Sorority by Genevieve Sly Crane

Author:Genevieve Sly Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press

12

Endings, Bright and Ugly

-CHORUS-

April 2008

There are thousands of ways Margot could have ended.

Start with the easy.

It’s a four-hour drive to the Canadian border, dark and snowy and charming, where she landed a job at a titty bar in a scenario without malice: pink pasties, round-faced customers with cold noses, and she renamed herself something demure and kicky all at once. Candice, or Lorenna. And one night (of course it’s a late hour, and of course the roads are snow clotted and empty) she leaves work a little toasted and drives dreamily into a white ravine, tapped unconscious. Sleeping Beauty in a bikini and parka and yoga pants, hemorrhaging gently into an exhale. Her pristine blue face and ashy dye job are beautiful in the sunlight when the Mounties find her in the morning.

• • •

Or maybe, she dissolves far into another future that never happened, where she is reduced to an unflattering oil painting on the wall of her third great-grandniece, who removes it because it is an ugly portrait, anyway, and there’s something morose and clumsy in it. The mouth is too flat, and the nose is too squashy, and that just doesn’t jive with the upholstery.

• • •

And then there’s the easy option, the headstone cleaved in two after years of rain and sun, hauled off unceremoniously by a maintenance worker in a dirty polo shirt and a wheelbarrow, for even in the future, surely, there are wheelbarrows.

• • •

A novice hacker in search of something profitable accidentally wipes the courthouse holding the last existing scan of her birth certificate.

• • •

A daughter and son-in-law, standing on the dock of a beautiful fake lake in Arkansas that she’d always found detestable in life, dissolve her ashes in water.

—She would have liked that, her daughter will say. And her son-in-law, a nice man who never felt he could stare her old wilted face down at the breakfast table, will squeeze his wife’s hand three times, their secret grip.

• • •

All of the hairs on her head that have drifted out the window on long car trips or been left behind in airplane seats, on hotel pillows, in the water filter of a pool in Thailand, swept in the corner of a restaurant in Barcelona, wrapped around the squeegee handle in the bucket beside pump nine at the Sunoco in Tennessee: all of them will burst into dust—some of them well before their creator does—and some, frail and gray, not long after.

• • •

Or maybe she won’t disappear until a perfectly executed midlife crisis, complete with breast implants and the revelation that everything in her life that she resents falls on her spouse. A tidy solution that unravels two years later, living in a sublet in Des Moines, with the ugliness of her dissatisfaction waiting at her doorstep, disheveled and collared, loyal as a Saint Bernard that followed her stench through every forsaken hillside, trailing a noose behind him, whiskey sloshing in the tiny barrel on his collar.

• • •

It could be a tumor: pick a spot.

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