Coffee with Meryl Streep
by Jean Copeland

Wanda admired herself in the cloudy full-length mirror, her gold lamé dress glittering as it reflected the light shining out from the bathroom. The rich creamy sweetness of the large Hazelnut coffee she’d ordered from a coffee house down the street lingered on her tongue. Ever since reading in her movie magazines that all of Hollywood drank only premium blends of expensive flavored coffees, the swill Aunt Gertrude perked in the old metal stove pot would no longer do. She savored each sip, noting that the robust flavor was more delicious than usual. Or perhaps it only seemed more delicious knowing that by the kiss of dawn, her life would be changed forever.

Aunt Gertrude had warned her that marrying Virgil would only lead to a dead end life in Muleshoe, but there she stood anyway, swaying back and forth in front of a mirror in a cheap motel primping for a Las Vegas wedding only a month after her aunt’s funeral. Gertrude had tried to teach her teenaged niece about life after the State left the girl in her charge, but “raising right a hellcat like Wanda wudn’t no piece of cake,” she would lament to anyone who’d listen.

“She’s with the Lord now,” Wanda rationalized. “She’s got better things to concern herself with.” Hearing it said out loud helped temper the pangs of guilt as she twirled again, marveling at how naturally glamorous she was in that lavish dress, holding her fancy coffee cup with its fancy lid.

In truth, not all of Aunt Gertrude’s wisdom fell on deaf ears. There was one lesson Wanda learned better than any other.

“Don’t dream small, girl,” she had insisted on Wanda’s sixteenth birthday. “I dreamed small, and small’s exactly what I got in life. You just go for the glitter no matter how you can get it. Maybe you can get your ol’ Aunt Gertrude out of here while you’re at it.”

“Hey there gorgeous,” Virgil drawled as he burst into their musty Boulder City motel room.
“Why you always drinkin’ that swanky coffee?” he asked, drawing Wanda up in his arms.

“Oh Virgil,” she scolded with a girlish giggle. “This is what all the celebrities drink. I’m going to have coffee with Meryl Streep once I’m a star.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he smirked. “You won’t be talking ‘bout being no star once you got our baby in your belly,” he predicted, replacing Wanda in front of the mirror.

She sighed, still studying her reflection. “It’s a shame Aunt Gertrude never got to know the real you, Virgil. Just ‘cause you had a couple of run-ins with the law don’t make you a bad man.”

Virgil crushed out his cigarette in a tin ashtray on the warped oak finish table. “Guess it makes me a lucky man to have a girl like you who understands that.” He gave her a loving whack on the backside that propelled her forward a few steps.

“I’d say I’m the lucky one,” she gushed, batting false eyelashes at her man.

“Well come on now, girl,” he commanded, hoisting up his crisp jeans by their belt loops. “We gotta get down to that chapel. It’s nearin’ midnight.”

“What’s your rush? It don’t never close.”

Virgil lit up another cigarette and cupped it in his hand. “I know,” he began romantically as smoke billowed out his nostrils. “I just can’t wait to make you Mrs. Virgil H. Clancy, Jr.”

Wanda’s face beamed with the vulgarity of the orange motel sign flickering in and out of their room. “Oh Virgil, all my dreams are coming true.” Her mood then turned somber.
“Virgil, can I take this picture of Aunt Gertrude? It’ll be like she’s there, and I can pretend she’s really happy for me.”

“Sure, baby.” He smiled then jerked Wanda by her arm out into the murky desert air.

“Careful, Virgil. You’ll spill coffee all over my new dress,” Wanda exclaimed as he whisked her toward his rusty Chevy pick up.

As they sputtered along the freeway headed to the Las Vegas strip, Wanda fussed with the stretchy trim of her dress itching her thighs. She was tempted to entertain the idea that Aunt Gertrude was the one making her itch. Her mind wandered back to that afternoon three months ago when her crotchety guardian called her into her bedroom. Wanda stomped down the hall, primed to go another few rounds over her dating Virgil, an event as ordinary in the Wheatley household as the dog chasing the paperboy. Much to Wanda’s surprise, though, the only thing Aunt Gertrude threw at her was a disarming smile.

“I got something for you, girl.”

“What?” asked Wanda, swatting a fly from her nose.

“First, you gotta promise you’ll stop seeing Virgil, Wanda. No good can ever come from hitching up with no thieving ex-con. You need to get better for yourself.”

“Aunt Gertie, I already told you I ain’t…” Aunt Gertrude took hold of Wanda’s shoulders.

“You want nice things, don’t ya, girl? Well, you ain’t gonna get ‘em from no outta work bum.” Perfectly timed, she then pulled out of her cluttered closet a box from Gentry’s Department Store. She handed Wanda the box, which the girl tore at like a toddler on Christmas morning.

“Oh Aunt Gertrude,” Wanda squealed. “It’s beautiful. Oh, I do want nice things.” She charged the mirror and draped the sparkling lamé dress down the front of herself.

“Then don’t go counting on that no-account, Virgil Clancy.” Aunt Gertrude shrewdly noted the starry expression in Wanda’s eyes, confident that reeling in her niece from the no-account would be easy now that she was using the right bait.
“Nice things come at a price, girl, remember that.”

“Yes, Aunt Gertrude.”

“Don’t be the fool I was,” she cautioned. “You gotta get out of Muleshoe any way you can, you hear? And don’t forget about your ol’ Aunt Gertrude when you do.”

“Yes, Aunt Gertrude,” she again agreed but her mind had already jetted off to the Hollywood Hills, to a star-studded film premiere or a sprawling mansion overlooking a swimming pool full of blue water glimmering in the Pacific sun.

“A spiffy set of earrings and a fancy bangle bracelet might finish that dress off right,” Aunt Gertrude added.

“I look just like one of them Hollywood starlets in this dress.”

“Just like ‘em. And don’t you worry about Virgil Clancy. You’re only eighteen years old. You got plenty of time ‘fore you got to settle down.”

Wanda stood in front of the mirror, imagining her reflection accented with shimmering hoop earrings and the bracelet Aunt Gertrude suggested. She then tilted her head to the exact angle the movie stars always tilt theirs on magazine covers.

“Twenty-six years old, and he can’t find himself a job,” Aunt Gertrude grumbled on, picking through a pile of clean laundry dumped on her floral bedspread. Wanda tuned out the old woman’s protests as she cascaded deeper into her fantasy. Outside a chapel, with her bejeweled arm looped through the arm of her handsome groom, the paparazzi clamored to snap just one more photo.

“So when’s the life insurance check coming?” Virgil asked, jolting her back to the noisy reality of the creaking truck ride.

“Oh, the agent said any day now.”

“Fifty thousand whole dollars. Yippee,” Virgil rejoiced through smoky breath.

Wanda frowned. “Virgil, my Aunt Gertrude had to die for us to get that money. It ain’t proper to say ‘yippee’ when a woman dies in a terrible car wreck.”

“You’re right, honey, I didn’t mean no disrespect. I’m just excited about being able to get a clean start. Now I can buy the parts to fix up this truck, and we can call that real estate guy and put a hefty down payment on that double-wide in Amarillo.”

“I’m glad we can do all that stuff too, Virgil, but just don’t be so excited about it.” Wanda slumped down in her seat and gazed out at the empty night surging past her.

At just about forty minutes past midnight, Wanda Jo Wheatley became the bride of Virgil H. Clancy, Jr. for the bargain price of seventy-five dollars. That modest fee also included a bottle of flat champagne, a spray of wilted pansies, and a few handfuls of rice pitched at them as they dashed through the chapel doors hand in hand. Outside they were greeted by a pair of stern-faced men in ties and short-sleeve shirts leaning against Virgil’s truck.

Virgil stopped suddenly and looked at Wanda. “Wanda, please tell me you ain’t thirteen,” he pleaded, his face pale with terror.

“I ain’t thirteen, you damn fool. You sure you ain’t got no warrants you forgot to mention?” she then accused.

“I told you I was clean, baby. We’re making a fresh start.”

As the newlyweds bickered, the detectives slowly approached. “Virgil H. Clancy, Jr.?” inquired the gaunt, older man.

“Ya, ya, yes, sir,” he stammered, his hand turning clammy in Wanda’s.

“We have a warrant for your arrest,” the younger, burly detective added.

“For what?” Wanda demanded.

“Does your husband fix cars, Mrs. Clancy?” The older detective asked.

“He does when he has a job.”

“Then he knows how to fix brakes,” said the younger man, stroking his goatee.

“’Course he does,” she snapped.

“Then he’d also know how to cut a brake line.”

“What?” Virgil’s knees buckled under him.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Mrs. Gertrude Wheatley of Muleshoe, Texas.”

“Murder?” Wanda shrieked.

The detectives then slammed Virgil against the chipped hood of his truck, cuffed his skinny wrists and shoved him in the back of their unmarked Grand Marquis.

“You can follow us down to the station, Mrs. Clancy,” the older detective said as he fished Virgil’s keys out of his front pocket and flattened his combed-over hair blown up by a sudden wind gust.

“I gotta go back to our motel room and get some money first,” she replied, tears lining her pink cheeks.

“No rush, ma’am. He’ll still be there when you get back,” the older detective chuckled.

“Hurry, baby, hurry,” Virgil bellowed from the back seat. Wanda returned to their room only to pack their belongings into tattered suitcases and peel out of the motel’s gravel parking lot, leaving her predestined life of poverty wafting in a wake of dust. Heading south on Interstate Fifteen, she leaned out the window to catch a cool burst of wind on her face and settled in for the half-night’s journey to Los Angeles.

Once in Barstow, she pulled into a highway rest stop where she wrestled with the constricting lamé material wrapped around her chest before nodding off for an hour or so. She then woke and inspected her weary reflection in the rearview mirror as the amber glow of sunrise provided studio-quality backlighting.

Inside the convenience store, while a long-hauler restocking his Marlboro supply distracted the pimply-faced store clerk, Wanda made a furtive maneuver toward the array of self-serve gourmet coffee dispensers.

“Why this is just highway robbery,” she quietly griped, lowering the Styrofoam cup to her waste as she slid past the checkout counter. Swigging from the largest cup of sweet creamy Hazelnut her hand could grasp, she reveled in the vision of sipping coffee with Miss Meryl Streep at an outdoor Hollywood café as the paparazzi staked them out from a wall of shrubbery.

“You were right, Aunt Gertrude,” she said, speeding down the Interstate and flinging into the desert abyss the wire cutter and rag she’d used to wipe off her fingerprints.
“Nice things do come at a price.”

© 2007 prickofthespindle.com

Jean Copeland is an English teacher and writer from Connecticut whose fiction
has appeared in Folio, The First Line and Hotmetalpress.net.