Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  CRASH DIET

  Stories

  by Jill McCorkle

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  For Jan Gane and Cathy Caldwell,

  who have listened patiently to my stories for years.

  And for Shannon Ravenel,

  without whose encouragement they would

  never have been written.

  Contents

  Crash Diet

  Man Watcher

  Gold Mine

  First Union Blues

  Departures

  Comparison Shopping

  Migration of the Love Bugs

  Waiting for Hard Times to End

  Words Gone Bad

  Sleeping Beauty, Revised

  Carnival Lights

  Crash Diet

  Kenneth left me on a Monday morning before I’d even had the chance to mousse my hair, and I just stood there at the picture window with the drapes swung back and watched him get into that flashy red Mazda, which I didn’t want him to get anyway, and drive away down Marnier Street, and make a right onto Seagrams. That’s another thing I didn’t want, to live in a subdivision where all the streets are named after some kind of liquor. But Kenneth thought that was cute because he runs a bartending school, which is where he met Lydia to begin with.

  “I’ll come back for the rest of my things,” he said, and I wondered just what he meant by that. What was his and what was mine?

  “Where are you going to live, in a pup tent?” I asked and took the towel off of my head. I have the kind of hair that will dry right into big clumps of frosted-looking thread if I don’t comb it out fast. Once, well before I met Kenneth at the Holiday Inn lounge where he was giving drink-mixing lessons to the staff, I wrote a personal ad and described myself as having angel hair, knowing full well that whoever read it would picture flowing blond curls, when what I really meant was the stuff that you put on a Christmas tree or use to insulate your house. I also said I was average size, which at the time I was.

  “I’m moving in with Lydia,” he said in his snappy, matter-of-fact way, like I had just trespassed on his farmland. Lydia. It had been going on for a year and a half though I had only known of it for six weeks. LYDIA, a name so old-sounding even my grandmother wouldn’t have touched it.

  “Well, give her my best,” I said like you might say to a child who is threatening to run away from home. “Send me a postcard,” I said and laughed, though I already felt myself nearing a crack, like I might fall right into it, a big dark crack, me and five years of Kenneth and liquor streets and the microwave oven that I’d just bought to celebrate our five years of marriage and the fact that I had finally started losing some of the weight that I had put on during the first two years.

  “Why did you do this?” he asked when he came home that day smelling of coconut because he had been teaching piña coladas, and approached that microwave oven that I had tied up in red ribbon.

  “It’s our anniversary,” I said and told him that he was making me so hungry for macaroons or those Hostess Snoballs with all that pink coconut. I’d lost thirty pounds by that time and needed to lose only ten more and they were going to take my “after” picture and put me on the wall of the Diet Center along with all the other warriors (that’s what they called us) who had conquered fat.

  “But this is a big investment,” Kenneth said and picked up the warranty. Five years, and he stared at that like it had struck some chord in his brain that was high-pitched and off-key. Five years, that’s how long it had been since we honeymooned down at Sea Island, Georgia, and drank daiquiris that Kenneth said didn’t have enough rum and ate all kinds of wonderful food that Kenneth didn’t monitor going down my throat like he came to do later.

  “Well, sure it’s an investment,” I told him. “Like a marriage.”

  “Guaranteed for five years,” he said and then got all choked up, tried to talk but cried instead, and I knew something wasn’t right. I sat up half the night waiting for him to say something. Happy anniversary, You sure do look good these days, anything. It must have been about two A.M. when I got out of him the name Lydia, and I didn’t do a thing but get up and out of that bed and start working on the mold that wedges in between those tiles in the shower stall. That’s what I do when I get upset because it’s hard to eat while scrubbing and because there’s always mold to be found if you look for it.

  “You’ll have to cross that bridge when you come to it,” my mama always said, and when I saw Kenneth make that right turn onto Seagrams, I knew I was crossing it right then. I had two choices: I could go back to bed or I could do something. I have never been one to climb back into the bed after it’s been made, so I got busy. I moussed my hair and got dressed, and I went to my pocketbook and got out the title to that Mazda that had both our names on it. I poured a glass of wine, since it was summer vacation from teaching sixth grade, painted my toenails, and then, in the most careful way, I wrote in Kenneth’s handwriting that I (Kenneth I. Barkley) gave full ownership of the Mazda to Sandra White Barkley, and then I signed his name. Even Kenneth couldn’t have told that it wasn’t his signature; that’s just how well I forged. I finished my wine, got dressed, and went over to my friend Paula’s house to get it notarized.

  “Why are you doing this?” Paula asked me. She was standing there in her bathrobe, and I could hear some movement in the back where her bedroom was. I didn’t know if she meant why was I stopping by her house unannounced or why I was changing the title on the car. I know it’s rude to stop by a person’s house unannounced and hated to admit I had done it, so I just focused on the title. Sometimes I can focus so well on things and other times I can’t at all.

  “Kenneth and I are separating and I get the Mazda,” I told her.

  “When did this happen?” Paula asked, and glanced over her shoulder to that cracked bedroom door.

  “About two hours ago,” I told her and sat down on the sofa. Paula just kept standing there like she didn’t know what to do, like she could have killed me for just coming in and having a seat in the middle of her activities, but I didn’t focus on that. “Just put your stamp on it and I’ll be going.” I held that title and piece of paper out to her, and she stared down at it and shook her head back and forth. “Did Kenneth write this?” she asked me, like my reputation might not be the best.

  “Haven’t I been through enough this morning?” I asked her and worked some tears into my eyes. “What kind of friend questions such a thing?”

  “I’m sorry, Sandra,” she said, her face as pink as her bathrobe. “I have to ask this sort of thing. I’ll be right back.” She went down the hall to her bedroom, and I got some candy corn out of her little dish shaped like a duck or something in that family. I wedged the large ends up and over my front teeth so I had fangs like little kids always do at Halloween.

  “Who was that?” I heard a man say, frustrated. I could hear frustration in every syllable that carried out there to the living room, and then Paula said, “Shhh.” When she came back with her little embosser, I had both front teeth covered in candy corn and grinned at her. She didn’t laugh so I took them off my teeth and laid them on her coffee table. I don’t eat sweets.

  “I’m sorry I can’t talk right now,” Paula said. “You see . . .”

  “What big eyes you have,” I said and took my notarized paper right out of her hand. “Honey, go for it,” I told her and pointed down the hall. “I’m doing just fine.”

  “I feel so guilty, though,” Paula said, her hair all flat on one side from sleeping that way. “I feel like maybe you need to talk to somebody.” That’s what people always say when they feel like they should do something but have no intention of doing it, I feel so bad, or If only. I just laughed and told Paula I had to go to
Motor Vehicles and take care of a piece of business and then I had to go to the police station and report a stolen car.

  “What?” Paula asked, and her mouth fell open and she didn’t even look over her shoulder when there were several frustrated and impatient knocks on her bedroom wall. “That’s illegal.”

  “And you’re my accomplice,” I told her and walked on down the sidewalk and got into that old Ford Galaxy, which still smelled like the apples that Kenneth’s granddaddy used to keep in it to combat his cigar smoke. If there’d been a twenty-year-old apple to be found rolling around there under the front seat, I would’ve eaten it.

  I didn’t report the car, though. By the time I had driven by Lydia’s house fourteen times—the first four of which the Mazda was out front and the other ten parked two blocks away behind the fish market (hidden, they thought)—I was too tired to talk to anybody so I just went home to bed. By ten o’clock, I’d had a full night’s sleep so I got up, thawed some hamburger in the microwave, and made three pans of lasagna, which I then froze because mozzarella is not on my diet.

  The next day, I was thinking about going to the grocery store because I didn’t have a carrot in the house, but it was as if my blood was so slow I couldn’t even put on a pair of socks. I felt like I had taken a handful of Valium but I hadn’t. I checked the bottle there at the back of the medicine cabinet that was prescribed for Kenneth when he pulled his back lifting a case of Kahlua about a year ago. The bottle was there with not a pill touched, so I didn’t have an excuse to be found for this heaviness. “When you feel heavy, exercise!” we warriors say, so before my head could be turned toward something like cinnamon toast, I got dressed and did my Jane Fonda routine twice, scrubbed the gasoline spots from the driveway, and then drove to the Piggly Wiggly for some carrots. It felt good being in the car with the radio going, so I didn’t get out at the Piggly Wiggly but kept driving. I had never seen that rotating bar that is in a motel over in Clemmonsville, so I went there. It was not nearly as nice as Kenneth had made it sound; I couldn’t even tell that I was moving at all, so I rode the glass elevator twice, and then checked into the motel across the street. It was a motel like I’d never seen, electric finger massages for a quarter and piped-in reggae. I liked it so much I stayed a week and ate coleslaw from Kentucky Fried Chicken. When I got home, I bought some carrots at the Piggly Wiggly.

  “I was so worried about you!” my buddy Martha from the Diet Center said, and ran into my house. Martha is having a long hard time getting rid of her excess. “I was afraid you were binging.”

  “No, just took a little trip for my nerves,” I told her, and she stood with her mouth wide open like she had seen Frankenstein. “Kenneth and I have split.” Martha’s mouth was still hanging open, which is part of her problem: oral, she’s an oral person.

  “Look at you,” Martha said, and put her hands on my hips, squeezed on my bones there, love handles they’re sometimes called if you’ve got somebody who loves them. “You’ve lost, Sandra.”

  “Well, Kenneth and I weren’t right for each other, I guess.”

  “The hell with Kenneth,” Martha said, her eyes filling with tears. “You’ve lost more weight.” Martha shook my hips until my teeth rattled. She is one of those people who her whole life has been told she has a pretty face. And she does, but it makes her mad for people to say it because she knows what they mean is that she’s fat, and to ignore that fact they say what a pretty face she has. Anybody who’s ever been overweight has had this happen. “I’m going to miss you at the meetings,” Martha said, and looked like she was going to cry again. Martha is only thirty, just five years younger than me, but she looks older; the word is matronly, and it has a lot to do with the kind of clothes you have to wear if you’re overweight. The mall here doesn’t have an oversize shop.

  I went to the beauty parlor and told them I wanted the works—treatments, facials, haircut, new shampoo, mousse, spray, curling wand. I spent a hundred and fifty dollars there, and then I went to Revco and bought every color of nail polish that they had, four different new colognes because they each represented a different mood, five boxes of Calgon in case I didn’t get back to Revco for a while, all the Hawaiian Tropic products, including a sun visor and beach towel. I bought a hibachi and three bags of charcoal, a hammock, some barbecue tongs, an apron that says KISS THE COOK, and one of those inflatable pools so I could stretch out in the backyard in some water. I bought one of those rafts that will hold a canned drink in a little pocket, in case I should decide to walk down to the pool in our subdivision over on Tequila Circle. Summer was well under way, and I had to catch up on things. I bought a garden hose and a hoe and a rake, thinking I might relandscape my yard even though the subdivision doesn’t really like you to take nature into your own hands. I had my mind on weeping willows and crepe myrtle. I went ahead and bought fifteen azaleas while I was there, some gardening gloves, and some rubber shoes for working in the yard. Comet was on sale so I went ahead and got twenty cans. I bought a set of dishes (four place settings) because Kenneth had come and taken mine while I was in Clemmonsville; I guess Lydia didn’t have any dishes. Then I thought that wouldn’t be enough if I should have company, so I got two more sets so that I’d have twelve place settings. I figured if I was to have more than twelve people for dinner then I’d need not only a new dining-room set but also a new dining room. I didn’t have any place mats that matched those dishes so I picked up some and some glasses that matched the blue border on my new plates and some stainless because I had always loved that pattern with the pistol handle on the knife.

  They had everything in this Revco. I thought if I couldn’t sleep at night I’d make an afghan, so I picked out some pretty yarn, and then I thought, well, if I was going to start making afghans at night, I could get ahead on my Christmas shopping, and so I’d make an afghan for my mama and one for Paula, who had been calling me on the phone nonstop to make sure I hadn’t reported the stolen car, and one for Martha that I’d make a little bigger than normal, which made me think that I hadn’t been to the Diet Center in so long I didn’t even know my weight, so I went and found the digital scales and put one right on top of my seventy-nine skeins of yarn. I bought ten each of Candy Pink, Watermelon, Cocoa, Almond, Wine, Cinnamon, Lime, and only nine of the Cherry because the dye lot ran out. It made me hungry, so I got some dietetic bonbons. By the time I got to the checkout I had five carts full and when that young girl looked at me and handed me the tape that was over a yard long, I handed her Kenneth I. Barkley’s MasterCard and said, “Charge it.”

  It was too hot to work in the yard, and I was too tired to crochet or unpack the car and felt kind of sick to my stomach. Thinking it was from the bonbon I ate on the way home, I went to the bathroom to get an Alka-Seltzer, but Kenneth had taken those too, so I just took two Valiums and went to bed.

  “I feel like a yo-yo,” I told the shrink when Paula suggested that I go. All of my clothes were way too big, so I had given them to Martha as an incentive for her to lose some weight and had ordered myself a whole new wardrobe from Neiman-Marcus on Kenneth I. Barkley’s MasterCard number. That’s why I had to wear my KISS THE COOK apron and my leotard and tights to the shrink’s. “My clothes should be here any day now,” I told him, and he smiled.

  “No, I feel like a yo-yo, not a regular yo-yo either,” I said. “I feel like one of those advanced yo-yos, the butterfly model, you know where the halves are turned facing outward and you can do all those tricks like ‘walk the dog,’ ‘around the world,’ and ‘eat spaghetti.’” He laughed, just threw back his head and laughed, so tickled over “eat spaghetti”; laughing at the expense of another human being, laughing when he was going to charge me close to a hundred dollars for that visit that I was going to pay for with a check from my dual checkbook, which was what was left of Kenneth I. Barkley’s account over at Carolina Trust. I had already taken most of the money out of that account and moved it over to State Employee’s Credit Union. That man tried to be serious, but ev
ery time I opened my mouth, it seemed he laughed.

  But I didn’t care because I hadn’t had so much fun since Kenneth and I ate a half-gallon of rocky-road ice cream in our room there in Sea Island, Georgia.

  “Have you done anything unusual lately?” he asked. “You know, like going for long rides, spending lots of money?”

  “No,” I said and noticed that I had a run in my tights. After that, I couldn’t think of a thing but runs and running. I wanted to train for the Boston Marathon. I knew I’d win if I entered.

  Lydia was ten years younger than Kenneth, I had found that out during the six weeks when he fluctuated between snappy and choked up. That’s what I knew of her, ten years younger than Kenneth and studying to be a barmaid, and that’s why I rolled the trees in the yard of that pitiful-looking house she rented with eleven rolls of decorator toilet paper. My new clothes had come by then so I wore my black silk dress with the ruffled off-the-shoulder look. Lydia is thirteen years younger than me and, from what I could tell of her shadow in the window, about twenty pounds heavier. I was a twig by then. “I’d rather be an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave,” my mama told me just before I got married, and I said, “You mind your own damn business.” Lydia’s mama had probably told her the same thing, and you can’t trust a person who listens to her mama.

  I stood there under a tree and hoisted roll after roll of the decorator toilet paper into the air and let it drape over branches. I wrapped it in and out of that wrought-iron rail along her steps and tied a great big bow. I was behind the shrubs, there where it was dark, when the front door opened and I heard her say, “I could have sworn I heard something,” and then she said, “Just look at this mess!” She was turning to get Kenneth so I got on my stomach and slid along the edge of the house and hid by the corner. I got my dress covered with mud and pine straw, but I didn’t really care because I liked the dress so much when I saw it there in the book that I ordered two. The porch light came on, and then she was out in that front yard with her hands on her hips and the ugliest head of hair I’d ever seen, red algae hair that looked like it hadn’t been brushed in four years. “When is she going to leave us alone?” Lydia asked, and looked at Kenneth, who was standing there with what looked like a tequila sunrise in his hand. He looked terrible. “You’ve got to do something!” Lydia said, and started crying. “You better call your lawyer right now. She’s already spent all your money.”