Vivica McDonalds: Enemy of the Wood Chipper

Vivica Shertogenbosch’s life was a struggle to escape the metaphysical bog she was plunged into at the age of five when her parents were devoured by a wood chipper at a landscaping expo in Tulsa. Her mother and father, Melanie and Cyrus, ran their own groundskeeping business. They were inspecting a diesel-powered whole-tree crane-fed shredder. Due to causes that were never established with forensic certainty, the wood chipper self-engaged. The belt of Melanie’s raincoat became tangled in the blades and pulled her into the mouth of the wood chipper. Cyrus latched onto her but couldn’t find a foothold on the slick yellow surface of the steel and aluminum behemoth, and he was dragged in with her.

Vivica watched as her parents were transformed into human confetti. She stood before the bloodied maw of the wood chipper, and she saw not just a defective landscaping device, but a portal to the abyss.

The Department of Social Services took custody of her. A therapist tried to help Vivica, but she wouldn’t answer his questions or point at dolls to show him where it hurt. He gave her a Rorschach test, but she wouldn’t tell him what she saw in the inkblots.

Cyrus had a younger sister, Nadine, who was nineteen years old. The last time Vivica saw her, Nadine was ruddy and glowing. She would give her niece piggyback rides, horseyback rides. But there was nothing playful about Nadine anymore. Her lips were gone. She was emaciated. Her face was pebbled with mauve scales. It took a long time for the state to find her because she was hospitalized due to a mystery illness.

Vivica moved into Nadine’s trailer in Catoosa. When it was time for her to start first grade, she still wasn’t speaking. A school psychologist, Dr. Aardvark, diagnosed her with posttraumatic stress disorder. The school placed her in a separate class for children with disabilities.

Nadine worked as a cashier at a Quik Trip store until the skin of her fingers became taut and red like uncooked sausage links. She couldn’t flip through dollar bills or pluck coins out of a cash register anymore, so she stopped working.

Nadine lay in bed day and night and kept a 5-gallon bucket next to her as a vomitorium. She dragged herself to the ER. Her throat wouldn’t stop burning. She told the doctors it felt like there was a jalapeño stuck halfway down her gullet. Vivica had X-ray vision and could see it, a little red pepper haloed by throbbing orange heatwaves.

Without anyone to care for her, Vivica became a marvel of self-sufficiency. She didn’t waste her time with Mr. Rogers or the Cookie Monster. She walked to school by herself, and she learned to cook and shop. She took out the trash and did the dishes and vacuumed the floor.

Their only income was a monthly welfare check. The check was so tiny it would fit on the tip of Vivica’s pinky, and if her pinky were wet, the check would dissolve into nothing. With Vivica’s help, Nadine applied for disability benefits. She received a hearing in front of a judge. His name was Judge Budge. He wore a navy suit and a bright yellow tie. He ruled Nadine wasn’t disabled.

The letter stated that all Nadine’s complaints were minor problems. She alleged fatigue and nausea, but she couldn’t prove those symptoms existed. The letter stated her daily activities were extensive. The judge wrote that Nadine lacked credibility because she treated her symptoms “on an ad hoc basis” in the emergency room, instead of seeing a regular doctor.

“What’s he mean I’m not credible?” Nadine asked herself.

Vivica thought there was something fishy about the denial letter. Tracing the print with her fingertips, she felt an irregularity in the texture of the paper. She daubed the letter with a wet rag and discovered a secret message written with invisible ink. The message said that Aunt Nadine was a liar, she’s not disabled, nobody’s really disabled unless they’re in a wheelchair, especially nobody as young as Nadine, she’s just a freeloader and she’s trying to drop out of the competitive economy, and if she won’t get off her ass and get a job then she deserves to starve to death, but even if she really is sick then she can go ahead and die, it’s just one less piece of trash polluting the gene pool. Vivica let the letter dry, and the secret message disappeared.

Finally, the ER doctors found a name for Nadine’s illness: Scleroderma. She asked if it was fatal. They said maybe. She applied for disability benefits again and had another hearing in front of Judge Budge.

When Nadine began to recite her complaints, Judge Budge cut her off and said, “Ms. Shertogenbosch, here’s what I don’t get. You say you can’t work, yet you can raise a small child single-handed. If you can take care of her, then you can be a babysitter or work for a daycare center, so why are you here?”

Nadine said, “I don’t take care of her. She takes care of me.”

“How old is she?”

“Six.”

The judge narrowed his eyes and asked, “Who does the cooking? And the shopping?”

“Vivica.”

“Who cleans your house? Who mows your yard? Who does your taxes? You’re not going to tell me Vivica does all that, too, are you?”

“Your honor, we live in a trailer. It’s small.”

“Maybe your niece can get a job as a housekeeper and you can live off her.”

Nadine whimpered, “How dare you talk to me like that.”

Something was ablaze inside Vivica’s brain now, something hotter than the jalapeño in Nadine’s throat. She spoke for the first time since her parents died. Her voice was lively, authoritative, stentorian. She recited verbatim the diagnostic criteria for scleroderma from the code of federal regulations. Pulling out pages from her aunt’s medical records, she waved them in the judge’s face and pointed to the clinical findings. Inside those pages was a map showing Nadine’s path to disability. Fingers that turned blue in cold weather, a thirty-pound weight loss, an irregular heartbeat, kidney damage. Vivica knew every twist and turn leading to the big red X in the center of the map.

Judge Budge recoiled as if she’d hit him in the face with a rock. 

Weeks later, Nadine received a massive letter, a letter so big it barely fit inside the trailer. Vivica had to stand on a stepladder to read the whole thing. The letter said Nadine was disabled and would receive a monthly check and free health care.

Nadine called the school. She insisted her niece was a prodigy. Dr. Aardvark reexamined Vivica and assessed her with a full-scale IQ over 200. The school moved her into a gifted and talented program.

Vivica gained confidence from her victory over Judge Budge. She started speaking to her teachers. But when she was with other kids, she clung to her silence like a plush alligator. While they were going on about how much they loved Michael Jackson and Cabbage Patch Kids and Ronald Reagan or how much they hated the Russians and the Arabs and the Japanese, Vivica became bored, and when she was bored, she remembered the wood chipper. It inspired a feeling of nothingness inside her. She couldn’t stand that feeling. Instead of making friends, she completed her homework with excruciating thoroughness, and she did all the chores so Aunt Nadine could rest.

Vivica also engineered a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the wood chipper that killed her parents. It took months for her to find an attorney who’d take her case. Most of them were uncomfortable working with a hands-on six-year-old. Eventually, she found a small firm in the Yellow Pages who wanted to represent her. They filed a complaint just before the statute of limitations tolled.

The suit dragged on for ten years. The manufacturer’s legal department deluged Vivica’s attorneys with pre-trial motions and low-ball settlement offers. Her attorneys appreciated Vivica’s help. She reviewed their motions and edited them for accurate citation to the evidence of record. She begged them to let her depose a witness, anyone, it didn’t have to be a key witness, maybe a secretary who might know something, but her attorneys wouldn’t let her.

When she was sixteen, Vivica won a six-figure judgment. The money went into a trust fund.

After the trial ended, Aunt Nadine’s kidneys failed, and she died. Vivica blamed the wood chipper. The manufacturer’s litigious behavior had weakened her aunt’s body, and the manufacturer was just a proxy for the wood chipper. It became her life’s mission to combat the scourge of the wood chipper.

Vivica went to Georgetown and majored in political science. She wanted to get a policy job on Capitol Hill and formulate a regulatory strategy against wood chippers. Her end game was to regulate them out of existence.

Vivica interned at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The longer she worked there, the more she realized the agency’s strategy for combating wood chipper violence was wishy-washy. They were interested in making wood chippers “safer.” Vivica knew there was no safe way to turn human beings into mulch. She lost interest in taking a regulatory strategy.

She didn’t make any friends at Georgetown. Vivica thought about wood chippers all the time but didn’t feel comfortable sharing these thoughts with anyone else. When people tried to get to know her, she had nothing to talk about. The lack of friendship didn’t bother her consciously. But sometimes she felt a pain deep inside like a canker sore, and she didn’t know where it was coming from, so she couldn’t put Anbesol on it to make the pain go away.

Vivica channeled all her loneliness into schoolwork. She wrote a senior thesis entitled, “On the Demonic Engine of the Commercial Grade Wood Chipper.”  She made quantitative arguments to support her assertion that the wood chipper was an incorrigible evil and should be eradicated.  Her academic adviser was skeptical. She thought the topic was outré, but she was impressed by the rigor of Vivica’s empirical research.

Before graduating, Vivica became anxious about the implications of the last name Shertogenbosch. A Dutch teaching assistant told her it meant “The Duke’s Forest.” Being the last of the Shertogenbosches, Vivica imagined herself as the last tree in the forest, a naked mulberry trunk pressed under the hands of the wind.

After careful deliberation, she changed her last name to McDonalds. It reminded her of the weekends her parents took her to eat Happy Meals and frolic on a playground with a plexiglass cheeseburger tower. It was the most vivid memory she had of her parents—other than their death. The name McDonalds was a reminder somebody once loved her.

Vivica graduated summa cum laude, and she had many post-graduate options. She decided to go to law school. Her long-term plan was to become the attorney general of the United States, which would give her an extraordinary arsenal of weapons she could use to combat the wood chipper: Political connections, well-qualified legal assistants, senators in her back pocket, the President’s ear. She intended to ensnare all the wood chipper manufacturers in litigation so costly it would bankrupt them.

As a 3L, Vivica enrolled in the personal injury law clinic and litigated her first wood chipper case. She wrote a dazzling pre-trial motion that allowed her client’s claim to proceed to a jury trial. By the end of the semester, she had argued her first case before the state court concerning an unresolved question on whether maritime wood chipper injuries were compensable under standard homeowners’ insurance contracts. The court ruled in her client’s favor. Their decision was a salve on Vivica’s heart. But relief was short-lived, for this would mark the last victory in Vivica’s war against the wood chipper and the beginning of a precipitous decline in her fortunes.

After passing the bar, Vivica applied for a job in the state attorney general’s office. She planned to get a few substantial wood chipper cases under her belt before jumping over to the US attorney general’s office. To her surprise, the state AG, Donna Charmin, didn’t even offer her an interview, so she settled for a job at a big firm, taking cases completely unrelated to wood chippers.

For several years, she applied to every opening at Donna Charmin’s office, but she never received an interview. Bored and frustrated by the grind of her billable hours, she left the big firm. She opened her own law office, but clients were scarce. Every time she interviewed a potential client, she would give them a speech about her hatred of the wood chipper, to show them she had the passion it took to win their case. Invariably, at some point during her spiel, the client would look at her like she had something disgusting stuck between her teeth.

Thankfully, the AG finally granted her an interview, which went well. The interviewer seemed impressed rather than put-off by Vivica’s enthusiasm for wood chipper cases and offered her an entry-level position.

She was doing work on wood chipper cases far below her level of expertise, and the pay was negligible, but the psychic rewards were palpable. Donna Charmin had achieved quantifiable success in wood chipper litigation. Thus, Vivica found it vexing that, after several months working there, she wasn’t invited to meet the AG. The other new hires had been called into Charmin’s office one by one, but not Vivica.

She might not have taken this sleight so hard, but she didn’t have any allies in the office. Everyone in her division seemed to have a “work spouse” or a subordinate they could bully into going to lunch with them—everyone except Vivica.

When Vivica arrived at work on her thirtieth birthday, she discovered that the AG was holding a party for a vast number of children in the banquet room next to her office. Round tables were adorned with party novelties, but what struck her heart like poisoned arrows was the sight of sugar cookies, bowlfuls of them on each table, frosted and animal-shaped.

Vivica adored sugar cookies and asked the AG’s assistant if she could have one. He told her no. She said she felt like she was valued less than a child. He said the cookies were for pediatric burn victims. She said it was her birthday. He told her to take it up with Donna Charmin.

Enraged, she walked directly into the AG’s office and said, “I’m Vivica McDonalds and I’m a trauma victim, too, and my birthday shouldn’t be ignored, and a happy birthday and a sugar cookie aren’t too much to ask!”

The AG said, “I know who you are, Vivica. Sit down.” Reaching into a desk drawer and pulling out an elephant-shaped sugar cookie, she said, “Is this what you’re making such a fuss about?”

“It’s the thought behind it,” Vivica replied, uncowed.

Dangling the sugar cookie by the proboscis, the AG rolled her eyes and said, “Do you have any idea why I’m on this side of the desk and you’re on that side?”

Vivica said, “We’re at different stages of our careers.”

“Bullshit,” she said, pointing the elephant at her for emphasis. “My career beats the hell out of yours. And I didn’t go to Georgetown or Harvard. That must tear you up inside.”

Vivica started to protest, but the AG steamrolled her. “There’s only one reason someone with your credentials applies to my office. You want to be on this side of the desk,” she said, pointing at herself with her thumbs. “I can assure you that’ll never happen.”

“Then why did you hire me?”

“I didn’t. I was out campaigning. My assistant hired you. When I do the hiring, fancy resumes go straight into the shredder.”

Something shiny underneath the desk caught Vivica’s attention, and she ducked her head to take a closer look. Donna Charmin had a pair of sleek metal appendages stuffed into her flats.

“Is this supposed to be . . . some kind of motivational speech?” Vivica asked.

“The only thing I want to motivate you to do is get the hell out of my office. You’re fired. Here’s your severance,” the AG said, tossing the elephant into Vivica’s lap.

#

With nothing to occupy her time, Vivica began to feel dissatisfied by the lack of personal connections in her life. She remembered how good it felt to be useful to Aunt Nadine. She wanted to be useful to another person, even if they weren’t an attorney general.

She started dating, and she fell in love with the first person she met on Match.com. His name was Anaxemander, and he was a lawyer, too. He said her eyes were like black currants and she could be a hand model. He didn’t hold her alma maters against her.

Anaxemander seemed like a capable person, but there were hints that he needed to be taken care of. His socks didn’t match. He weighed 104 pounds. His liver enzymes were borderline. He was great, but he had a lot of cats.

“How many?” Vivica asked on their first date.

“Enough to fill three washing machines,” he said. They came from a Mexican cat circus, and they were abandoned in a laundromat in Boulder. The laundromat adapted them into a marketing gimmick, changing its name to The Circus-Cat Laundromat. The patrons would be entertained while waiting for their laundry to finish. Instead of playing video games in the lobby, they could watch circus cats jump through hoops and traverse a high wire and throw knives at each other. But the gimmick backfired because there was cat hair everywhere and nobody wanted to wash their clothes there anymore, so the laundromat went bankrupt. Anaxemander obtained the cats in a lawsuit, but he couldn’t bear to liquidate them.

With Anaxemander’s cooperation, Vivica had sex for the first time. His body splashed gently against hers, instead of slamming into her like the hand of fate, or a sugar cookie. The sensations weren’t earth-shaking but they were memorable, like a dream she was in Oslo being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She wished she could feel that way every day.

Anaxemander asked Vivica to marry him. She insisted on a courthouse wedding. She told him she was trying to be frugal and thought big ceremonies were a waste, which was true, but mainly she was embarrassed that her side of the aisle would be completely empty.

Anaxemander and his cats moved into the cozy Cape Cod-style home Vivica bought when she moved to town. He was easy to live with, but the cats were acrobatic and domineering. They insinuated themselves into everything: Lampshades, designer clutches, unopened cereal boxes. Once she saw a cat pop out of the mouth of another cat—they were that adaptable to tiny spaces.

At first, she was merely allergic to the massive amounts of dander the cats generated. But after a few months, the cats became an onus on her soul. They had a rapport with Anaxemander she couldn’t match. The cats slept on his side of the bed. Sometimes they dangled lovingly from the ceiling fan above him. They were passive aggressive towards Vivica. When she went to sit down in a chair, they would jump in it and then act blasé, as though that’s where they’d intended to sit all along and they weren’t just trying to frustrate her.

Worst of all, the cats inspired a persistent subliminal feeling of guilt. They were orphans just like Vivica, and she should feel happy they found someone to care for them. But she wasn’t happy. She wanted them to be orphans again.

She had a recurring dream she was confronted by an assembly line of cats, and it was her job to wring their necks one by one. They made her feel like it was opposite day—up was down, day was night, and Vivica was the wood chipper.

Disturbed by the psychotic thoughts they inspired in her, Vivica gave Anaxemander an ultimatum: Rehome the circus cats, or else. Anaxemander was flabbergasted by such heavy-handed manipulation.

“Is it because I snore?” he asked. “Or you don’t like my deodorant? What am I doing wrong?”

Over and over Vivica said, “It’s not you, it’s the cats.”

But he didn’t believe her, or understand her, and he left. He took the cats with him, but the dander remained in the house like an appliance that was too heavy for her to lift.

One day, still grieving the implosion of her marriage, Vivica was playing I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor on her E-Machines desktop. As the speakers throbbed to Gloria’s high-energy anthem, the cat dander became visible, vibrated and convulsed as if in pain, and retreated from her nostrils. In that moment, she learned that music was the antithesis of dander, and that she could combat the dander with musical vibrations. She was hopeful, imagining a life filled not with cats and dander and ex-husbands and attorneys general, but with melody and harmony and inspiring lyrics and a disco beat. But it was only a temporary victory because the dander returned within hours, seeping into her lungs like a toxic gas.

She played I Will Survive three hundred times. With each repetition, the song became less potent and the dander grew thicker, taunting her with its playful insouciance. She tried other songs, but her control over the dander was fleeting. She speculated that just playing a recording gave her little control over the frequency of the vibrations. Frequencies were the key to everything. If only she were a knowledgeable performer or composer, she could corral the dander and dispose of it by composing the right chords and performing them herself.

Vivica decided to study music in order to learn how to master the frequencies, so she took up the French horn and enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music extension in Aurora, Colorado. However, she turned out to be a mediocre music student. She was tone deaf, and her embouchure was hideous. Further, she made enemies within her department because she was polemical during orchestra rehearsals, yet in one-on-one lessons she was needy and defensive.

One day her eurythmics instructor told her she lacked musicality and she should drop out and take up macramé or something, anything but music. The next week Vivica caused a kerfuffle by throwing fox urine in his face, calling him an elitist possum. Criminal charges ensued. The state suspended her law license. The police confiscated her French horn. Worst of all, the Juilliard extension expelled her before she learned how to deploy the frequencies. She bought a kazoo, but it was worthless against the dander.

The court placed Vivica on probation and ordered her to undergo intense outpatient psychotherapy. She developed a rapport with her therapist, Dr. Zhivago.

On her third session, Vivica finally trusted the doctor enough to open up to her. Her thoughts and feelings about wood chippers consumed the next nineteen office visits.

Finally, Dr. Zhivago said, “I want to suggest something to you. You have constructed an agonistic dynamic between yourself and others, a fight. The wood chipper is an expression of that conflict, a metaphor if you will, and one that dominates your life. Your career was a wood chipper. Your marriage was a wood chipper. Your childhood was a wood chipper. And you see yourself as the enemy of the wood chipper. But you are a victim of the wood chipper, a hostage. You think you’re fighting it from the outside, but you are trapped inside the wood chipper. Are you going to escape, or are you going to be chewed up and spat out?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s your choice.”

Vivica contemplated the doctor’s advice for days. She had to admit there was a strange dynamic in her life that seemed to ruin everything. Nobody in the world wanted to be near her, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how that happened, or how to change it.

Vivica went back to see Dr. Zhivago. She admitted something she had never admitted to anyone, not even herself. When her parents disappeared inside the wood chipper, she crawled inside to look for them, but she got trapped inside, and now she couldn’t get out. Vivica wanted to climb out of the wood chipper but she didn’t know how. She needed help but nobody could help her.

“Why not?” the doctor asked.

“Because you can’t reach inside a wood chipper without getting your hand torn off!”

Dr. Zhivago told her not to worry, she had anticipated this conversation and had already devised a method to extract Vivica from the wood chipper: Hypnotic temporal reversal. The doctor placed a pulsing red pendulum on the coffee table. Vivica counted backwards and imagined herself at the landscaping expo.

Her parents entered the mouth of the wood chipper. Vivica was about to crawl in after them, but Dr. Zhivago directed her attention to something she never noticed before: A reverse button on the side of the machine.

Trembling, Vivica pushed the button. Her parents flew out of the wood chipper alive and intact, like acrobats. They took her by her hands, and the three of them walked backwards to their pickup truck. Cyrus drove to McDonald’s in reverse, where they headed directly to the playground. Melanie tossed her onto the end of the french fry slide and Vivica slid upwards. She was sucked out of Cyrus’ arms and into the window of the cheeseburger tower. When she was done playing, Vivica regurgitated a Happy Meal, and they went home.

Dr. Zhivago ended the session by prescribing an anti-anxiety drug and dismissing Vivica from her care because Vivica’s insurance had lapsed.

Vivica’s thoughts of the wood chipper diminished in frequency. But the feeling of nothingness lingered like a phantom limb.

Her meds couldn’t keep her from despairing over her finances. She’d spent most of her money on college, law school, her home, her failed law practice, the tuition at the Juilliard extension, the fees from her criminal defense, and a fine following her conviction.

Reduced to dire circumstances, Vivica thought she might be okay as long as she could manage to pay her property taxes every year. After lying in bed for several weeks, no plan came to mind for how to do that. She continued to lie in bed, inert and hopeless. Eventually, she wanted to die, but she felt too tired to kill herself.

Suddenly—and this was more than a year after Anaxemander left her—a kitten leapt onto the bed. Vivica wondered if a colony of circus cats lingered in the crawlspace of her home. To her surprise, she didn’t feel any hatred or resentment towards the kitten. He nuzzled her hand, and she scratched him behind the ears.

Vivica remembered the circus cats’ uncanny ability to compact themselves. She had an urge to try it. She contorted herself into a little ball and crawled through the kitten’s needle-like teeth. The kitten purred; he was game; he coughed her up like a hairball. They took turns popping in and out of each other’s mouths. She wished the wood chipper’s victims could have passed through its gnashing maw so easily.

When they were done playing, Vivica felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time, a spark of ambition. She needed to get some cat food. Could she even afford cat food anymore? Maybe she could afford a can of tuna and they could share it. As she walked to the 7-11 to see if they had any tuna she could afford, she decided to name him Kite because he seemed to be drifting, kind of like she had drifted through life, but she didn’t want him to drift away. She wanted to be the hand that held his string.