Fight Club

ninety-nine. Two hundred.
    Tyler’s wearing a sort of gummy flannel bathrobe and sweatpants. "Get Marla out of the house,” Tyler says. "Send Marla to the store for a can of lye. The flake kind of lye. Not the crystal kind. Just get rid of her.”
    Me, I’m six years old, again, and taking messages back and forth between my estranged parents. I hated this when I was six. I hate it now.
    Tyler starts doing leg lifts, and I go downstairs to tell Marla: the flake kind of lye, and I give her a ten-dollar bill and my bus pass. While Marla is still sitting at the kitchen table, I take the clove cigarette from between her fingers. Nice and easy. With a dishcloth, I wipe the rusty spots on Marla’s arm, where the burn scabs cracked and started to bleed. Then I wedge each of her feet into a high-heel shoe.
    Marla looks down at me doing my Prince Charming routine with her shoes and she says, "I let myself in. I didn’t think anyone was home. Your front door doesn’t lock.”
    I don’t say anything.
    "You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger.”
    I’m not talking to Marla. She can horn in on the support groups and Tyler, but there’s no way she can be my friend.
    "I’ve been waiting here all morning for you.”
    Flowers bloom and die
    Wind brings butterflies or snow
    A stone won’t notice
    Marla gets up from the kitchen table, and she’s wearing a sleeveless blue-colored dress made of some shiny material. Marla pinches the edge of the skirt and turns it up for me to see little dots of stitching on the inside. She’s not wearing any underwear. And she winks.
    "I wanted to show you my new dress,” Marla says. "It’s a bridesmaid dress and it’s all hand sewn. Do you like it? The Goodwill thrift sold it for one dollar. Somebody did all these tiny stitches just to make this ugly, ugly dress,” Marla says. "Can you believe it?”
    The skirt is longer on one side than on the other, and the waist of the dress orbits low around Marla’s hips.
    Before she leaves for the store, Marla lifts her skirt with her fingertips and sort of dances around me and the kitchen table, her ass flying around inside her skirt. What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway. You see those trees and think of roadkill animals or sex crime victims wearing their underwear inside out and bound with black electrical tape.
    I just want her out of here.
    "The Animal Control place is the best place to go,” Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital and then into the big pet oven.
    "The big sleep, ‘Valley of the Dogs’ style.
    "Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you.” Marla looks at me as if I’m the one humping her and says, "I can’t win with you, can I?”
    Marla goes out the back door singing that creepy "Valley of the Dolls” song.
    I just stare at her going.
    There’s one, two, three moments of silence until all of Marla is gone from the room.
    I turn around, and Tyler’s appeared.
    Tyler says, "Did you get rid of her?”
    Not a sound, not a smell, Tyler’s just appeared.
    "First,” Tyler says and jumps from the kitchen doorway to digging in the freezer. "First, we need to render some fat.”
    About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I’m really angry I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.
    Tyler starts pulling out sandwich bags of frozen white stuff and dropping them in the sink. Me, I’m supposed to put a big pan on the stove and fill it most of the way with water. Too little water, and the fat will darken as it separates into tallow.
    "This fat,” Tyler says, "it has a lot of salt so the more water, the better.”
    Put the fat in the water, and get the water boiling.
    Tyler squeezes the white mess from each sandwich bag into the water, and then Tyler buries the empty bags all the way at the bottom of the trash.
    Tyler says, "Use a little