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Last Last Chance
By Fiona Maazel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright © 2008 Fiona Maazel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-18385-1



Chapter One People I love know how to get on with their lives. In evidence: A girlfriend from elementary school was getting married. Day after tomorrow, Plaza Hotel. The invitation was piped in copper and rice, maybe because the bride was Indian. It promised a groom on horseback. This I'd like to see. I knew the groom, which made it tough to imagine horseback nothin'. A horse could make him cry. A horse could make me cry. How fortuitous. When the crying starts, blame horse.

I was on break outside the crèche. The view was coops and farmland. Tractor here, reaper there, and, per usual, Wanda Deckman headed my way. She is the chief union steward. She likes to meddle. And, in my case, to paw for information apropos a strain of lethal plague vanished from my father's lab a few months ago. I understood. Miasmic events storming the country were on everybody's mind. There was reason to believe the strain had fallen into enemy hands. Enemies of freedom, the press was saying. I tried to look buoyant.

"Lucy," she said, and grabbed at the card. "Hand it over." Never mind that I'd been fondling the invitation for weeks, it looked like news to her.

I did as told. She studied it and blushed. Not word of the Miasma, just some girl's wedding.

I said it was my oldest friend, though we don't talk.

"Uh-huh."

I said I had regrets, more regrets than not.

"Uh-huh."

"But I do like a good biryani," I said. "Some of the curries, too."

She agreed. Could I have the day off? Sure, have fun.

There was nothing left to say. Stanley Gensch, making for the john, came as a relief. He'd been the bellman and pluckhouse supervisor for twenty-three years, though his job was in peril. It always was. He drank. And, in drink, tended to forget the closing bell, which got Wanda cross and him grousing that double duty prefigured a screwup. No matter. Wanda could nail him with guilt. I'd even heard it myself, them squared off while she declaimed his past, social outcast inmate whose priors she chose to overlook when giving him what's called a second chance, even though this was more like his third or fourth and certainly did not feel like a chance since this place, this abattoir, was hours away from life in any direction, a kosher chicken plant that had the remove and dyspepsia of rehab. I had been here two months, four days, nine minutes.

First thing I noticed about the plant: hygiene was king. We wore latex gloves and surgical caps to repel disease. We sterilized our clothes. In canisters bolted to every wall: antibacterial mousse. Broadsides would come down from the office, stuff like, The chicken line cannot be exposed to unhealthful agents. That's the phrase we used: unhealthful agents. Listeria monocytogenes was a threat. I would read this, and my heart would sink. Because I knew what was on deck. I knew about disease-my dad had worked for the CDC-so yeah, I knew, which made for an uneasy time on the line. I'd developed a clucking of the tongue that kept time with the action of my hands. Some of the other girls got annoyed. They said I was disruptive. And when the brass called me up, they had this to add: The serenity proffered by the line can be had so long as you try.

It wasn't so much the job. My colleagues were fine. The vistas were great. But the feeling was claustral. I'd been exiled, and though I could leave anytime, I felt I deserved this. And that's the thing about exile, you tend to feel extra trapped if you know the comeuppance is just.

In the city, I'd been in sales for high-end retail. Next, I'd dabbled in real estate and estate planning, which have less in common than you'd think. Then I had my fun and slept with Mother's acupuncturist, whose practice foundered on the scandal. We were discovered by a client arrived too soon. Mother, who'd been footing my bills under aegis of Bridge Loan, decided to foot no more. And so, the chicken house. The house as holding tank until a bed opened up for me at a rehabilitation facility down South.

Wanda had hair to the small of her back, sieved through a low ponytail. Mostly white and gray, fried at the ends. She wore glasses. Red plastic. I often found her lost to the occupation of wiping the lenses, which had the boon of redress for awkward moments such as this.

She sat next to me on the step. I tried to stand and was successful at it.

"Did you just swoon?" she said. "Because that is not right. Especially at a wedding. Heels and a bad inner ear, I'm going to call it a bad inner ear, can make for a spill on the dance floor, not to mention the disco ball and strobe lights."

Wanda, apparently, had not been to a wedding since 1977.

She gloved herself and, once gloved, snapped the rubber cuffs like maybe she was about to engage in some ob-gyn activity. "Going to the pluckhouse," she said. "Sleep it off. Drive safe-"

I rolled up the invitation and brought it to my eye like maybe I could see something new in the prospect before me. Inner ear. Wanda's will to believe was disheartening. But she was just doing her best. I'm sure Mother had begged her to take me in. And who knew, maybe the chicken house really could subtend the path I was on. Maybe it would get me out of rehab. Rehab cost a fortune, and Mother had a habit of her own to finance. Plus, I really, really didn't want to go.

I scoped the terrain and found Stanley across the yard, shouting and throwing up his arms. I thought he might be trying to pep my spirits coach style, so I gave him a thumbs-up, like play ball!, which seemed to satisfy him enough to continue walking to the salting plant. I liked Stanley. We both had death in our families, and the idea of sharing our grief seemed to improve on acquaintance.

It was August. The wedding was on the thirtieth, which seemed odd because who gets married on a Friday? Less odd was that I had no date. I'd had weeks to prepare and yet: no date. Possibly it was because I knew the nuptials would be my last outing for a while, which meant having to find just the right escort, which meant being paralyzed by the onus of having to find Just the Right Escort. Possibly it was because I had no male friends. Most likely, though, it was because the pressure of having to front my well-being for at least five hours was so unsustainable, I'd been hoping the world would end before Friday. Showing up would certainly evidence progress of my own-is there anything more well adjusted than going to your oldest friend's wedding?-but also, come on, what a nightmare.

It was time to frisk the chickens. Alternately, there was my bed, which called out to me with godlike authority. I was under the covers in seconds. Unlike the other staff, I slept on the premises, in more of a barn than house, whose open windows and cracks in the joists let in a breeze I enjoyed, except by morning spindrift was always up in my hair, which made me look more acclimated than I would have liked.

I didn't have many personal items, since I'd left the city in a rush, essentially shoved on a bus by Mother, who blew kisses as the driver pulled out of Port Authority. There was Farfle, my stuffed sweet potato, and tweezers because I cannot live without tweezers, and a cardholder that looked like a recipe box, in which I kept a log of the men I've dated. My last entry was before I came here, when I was participating in a study-pheromones, I think-that paid enough to get me the blast, which became the tryst with the acupuncturist.

The good thing about the log is that it bedecks my heart with the lives I could have had if only. One of the entries was for a guy named Ben, Dirty Ben, who told me he had married a Venezuelan to help get her a Green Card, but that this was not in any way prohibitive of relations between us because she was gay. He could make for a good date at a Hindu wedding, being a free spirit and such. Plus he knew the bride from a Sierra Club summer when they had teamed up and gone door to door, guilting for money. As for me, we'd met last winter in Charleston, at a VA homeless shelter for narcotics recovery. It was absurd, my being there, because five seconds before I was at a department store, looking for sneakers-Chuck T's-until the saleslady was like: Oh, I recognize you from the news, your pop done fouled it up, at which point I got mad, and suddenly there's cops, rehab, and what? The worst I had on me was grass and a locket of smack around my neck. Ben was in for something retarded like Robitussin OD, though I found out later he was just there to get some crystal meth from one of the VA guys. His wife was not Venezuelan or gay, but I slept with him anyway. And since antibiotics are not cheap, and since Ben knew he was giving me more than his love, I figured he owed me. Plus he lived in New York.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel Copyright © 2008 by Fiona Maazel . Excerpted by permission.
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