Fight Club

I'm reading Reader's Digest in the kitchen. I am totally nonplussed.

Marla yells, "Tyler. Can I come in? Are you home?"

I yell, Tyler's not home.

Marla yells, "Don't be mean."

By now, I'm at the front door. Marla's standing in the foyer with a Federal Express overnight package, and says, "I needed to put something in your freezer."

I dog her heels on the way to the kitchen, saying, no.

No.

No.

No.

She is not going to start keeping her junk in this house.

"But Pumpkin," Marla says, "I don't have a freezer at the hotel, and you said I could."

No, I did not. The last thing I want is Marla moving in, one piece of crap at a time.

Marla has her Federal Express package ripped open on the kitchen table, and she lifts something white out of the Styrofoam packing peanuts and shakes this white thing in my face. "This is not crap," she says. "This is my mother you're talking about so just fuck off."

What Marla lifts out of the package, it's one of those sandwich bags of white stuff that Tyler rendered for tallow to make soap.

"Things would've been worse," Tyler says, "if you'd accidentally eaten what was in one of those sandwich bags. If you'd got up in the middle of the night sometime, and squeezed out the white goo and added California onion soup mix and eaten it as a dip with potato chips. Or broccoli."

More than anything in the world right then, while Marla and I were standing in the kitchen, I didn't want Marla to open the freezer.

I asked, what was she going to do with the white stuff?

"Paris lips," Marla said. "As you get older, your lips pull inside your mouth. I'm saving for a collagen lip injection. I have almost thirty pounds of collagen in your freezer."

I asked, how big of lips did she want?

Marla said it was the operation itself that scared her.

The stuff in the Federal Express package, I tell Tyler in the Impala, that was the same stuff we made soap out of. Ever since silicone turned out to be dangerous, collagen has become the hot item to I gave injected to smooth out wrinkles or to puff up thin lips or weak chins. The way Marla had explained it, most collagen you get cheap from cow fat that's been sterilized and processed, but that kind of cheap collagen doesn't last very long in your body. Wherever you get injected, say in your lips, your body rejects it and starts to poop it out. Six months later, you have thin lips, again.

The best kind of collagen, Marla said, is your own fat, sucked out of your thighs, processed and cleaned and injected back into your lips, or wherever. This kind of collagen will last.

This stuff in the fridge at home, it was Marla's collagen trust fund. Whenever her mom grew any extra fat, she had it sucked out and packaged. Marla says the process is called gleaning. If Marla's mom doesn't need the collagen herself, she sends the packets to Marla. Marla never has any fat of her own, and her mom figures that familial collagen would be better than Marla ever having to use the cheap cow kind.

Streetlight along the boulevard comes through the sales agreement m the window and prints "AS IS" on Tyler's cheek.

"Spiders," Tyler says, "could lay their eggs and larva could tu

Right now, my Almond Chicken in its warm, creamy sauce tastes like something sucked out of Marla's mother's thighs.

It was right then, standing in the kitchen with Marla, that I knew what Tyler had done.

HIDEOUSLY WRINKLED.

And I knew why he sent candy to Marla's mother.

PLEASE HELP.

I say, Marla, you don't want to look in the freezer.

Marla says, "Do what?"

"We never eat red meat," Tyler tells me in the Impala, and he can't use chicken fat or the soap won't harden into a bar. "The stuff," Tyler says, "is making us a fortune. We paid the rent with that collagen."

I say, you should've told Marla. Now she thinks I did it.

"Saponification," Tyler says, "is the chemical reaction you need to make good soap. Chicken fat won't work or any fat with too much salt.

"Listen," Tyler says. "We have a big order to fill. What we'll do is send Marla's mom some chocolates and probably some fruitcakes."

I don't think that will work, anymore.

Long story short, Marla looked in the freezer. Okay, there was a little scuffle, first. I try to stop her, and the bag she's holding gets dropped and breaks open on the linoleum and we both slip in the greasy white mess and come up gagging. I have Marla around the waist from behind, her black hair whipping my face, her arms pi

I didn't do it.

"My mother! You're spilling her all over!"

We needed to make soap, I say with my face pressed up behind her car. We needed to wash my pants, to pay the rent, to fix the leak in the gas line. It wasn't me.

It was Tyler.

Marla screams, "What are you talking about?" and twists out of her skirt. I'm scrambling to get up off the greased floor with an armful of Marla's India cotton print skirt, and Marla in her panties and wedgie Feels and peasant blouse throws open the freezer part of the fridge, and inside there's no collagen trust fund.

There's two old flashlight batteries, but that's all.

"Where is she?"

I'm already crawling backwards, my hands slipping, my shoes slipping on the linoleum, and my ass wiping a clean path across the dirty Moor away from Marla and the fridge. I hold up the skirt so I don't Dave to see Marla's face when I tell her.

The truth.

We made soap out of it. Her. Marla's mother.

"Soap?"

Soap. You boil fat. You mix it with lye. You get soap.

When Marla screams, I throw the skirt in her face and run. I slip. I run.

Around and around the first floor, Marla runs after me, skidding m the corners, pushing off against the window casings for momentum. Slipping.

Leaving filthy handprints of grease and floor dirt among the wallpaper flowers. Falling and sliding into the wainscoting, getting back up, ru

Marla screaming, "You boiled my mother!"

Tyler boiled her mother.

Marla screaming, always one swipe of her fingernails behind me.

Tyler boiled her mother.

"You boiled my mother!"

The front door was still open.

And then I was out the front door with Marla screaming in the doorway behind me. My feet didn't slip against the concrete sidewalk, and I just kept ru

With one beer each, Tyler and I spread out on the front and back seats with me in the front seat. Even now, Marla's probably still in the house, throwing magazines against the walls and screaming how I'm a prick and a monster twofaced capitalist suck-ass bastard. The miles of night between Marla and me offer insects and melanomas and flesh-eating viruses. Where I'm at isn't so bad.

"When a man is hit by lightning," Tyler says, "his head burns down to a smoldering baseball and his zipper welds itself shut."

I say, did we hit bottom, tonight?

Tyler lies back and asks, "If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?"

I say, goodnight.

The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling, and Tyler says, "Clawing at the lid of her coffin."