Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  “Well, I know it’s Norlina. Long before I met the woman, Sue had prepared me, you know. Like she’d make references to her weird roommate, Norlina, and so like finally one day, I said, ‘So, Sue Sue, tell me about Norlina. Why is she so weird?’”

  “Tom looks good on the tube, doesn’t he?” Jack is sitting forward, shirt pulled up and pants hanging low enough around the belt to paint a most undesirable picture. “I think it’s because he’s got a big head. All the people who photo well on the tube have the big heads. Nancy Reagan, for starters. Think of all the stars.”

  Believe it or not, it is my desire that Jack keep talking.

  “Yeah, Sue has always told me how at college she was afraid to sleep some nights.”

  “Afraid to sleep!?” I yell and push fat Jack off of me.

  “Sue has always thought that Norlina had repressed sexual tendencies.”

  Where did he learn to talk all of a sudden? What, he’s saved up a word a day his whole life to come on TV and douse me with public humiliation?

  “You know. She’s been fighting some kind of tendency ever since she was the editor of a small college newspaper that boasted many alternatives to sex, we’re not sure what this tendency is, though, if it’s lesbian or bi or, you know, nymphomania.”

  “We’ll have to ask Jack,” Sue shrieks and locks her arm through Tom’s. She turns to Bob Eubanks and gestures with her other hand, palm upward like she’s the little teapot. “You see, Norlina is dating a friend of ours.” Come on now, Sue, I’m thinking. Let Jack have it, too.

  “Great guy, Jack,” Tom says and nods. “He’s certainly one of the most intelligent of the kids we run with. Good old Jack, a man with a lot of valuable information.”

  “So maybe he’s got the info on your friend,” the woman in the next booth hoots, and they break for a commercial.

  “Tom speaks well, doesn’t he?” Jack is beaming now. His jaws are working in high gear. “But now I can’t go for this double business, honey. If you’ve got a problem—you know, the first two things Tom mentioned—then you gotta let me in on it. I’ve got myself to think of.” He crosses his leg toward the wall and locks his hands behind his neck. “I hate to think you’ve been using me.”

  “None of that is true,” I say. “You’ve got to believe me.” But Jack is acting as if I’m not even present and then I realize what I have been lowered to. I am begging a man to accept me; I am begging a man I can only tolerate by taking fantasy trips halfway around the world to accept me. I’ve done this before. With Byron I was the daughter of a real old and wise Chinaman whose young handsome apprentice communicated to me in poetic riddles. On his day off, he stopped with the poetry and we made passionate love in a sun-warmed marble pool, drank champagne, and made up dirty limericks while my father and the rest of the people supposed I was practicing my delivery of poetics. I wanted a dual life; I wanted to be accepted both outside and in. I wanted somebody who felt the same way.

  “Thought a real man could cure you, didn’t you?” Jack is saying, and I have to look at my world the way it really is; quickly, I have to comparison shop. My God, there is nothing worse!

  Tom and Sue are center stage now; they are mounting their little his and her mopeds and waving at the TV cameras. I know that within twenty-four hours she will be at my front door explaining how they said all of that to be funny, how they just knew I’d get a big kick out of it. “Come ride the moped,” she will say. “Come on, Norlina. It’s not the end of the world.” I want to pull her hair out by the roots and stuff it down the throat of her BIG MOUTH husband.

  “Look,” Jack finally says when Tom and Sue and their matching mopeds have been appropriately replaced by a commercial for Pepto-Bismol. “I mean, really.” He wants me to say that I lust for his body, that I’ve got to have a hunk of real man. I’d rather eat the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, and the Taj Mahal, stone by stone, with my mother there to comment on how I’m going to ruin my teeth.

  “I can’t call you anymore,” Fat Jack says. “Them’s the breaks, toots. You tried and you lost. We can’t all be a winner on Wheel of Fortune. We can’t all be Jack’s ‘spin.’” I close the door and try one more comparison shop: Children will stop in front of my house to stare. Cats with one eye and mange will make great pilgrimages to live in my part of the subdivision. I will feel humiliation and rage every time I hear Sue’s moped putter by. But also, I will never fly another flag for no reason or sit in an overcrowded, pee-warm pool or sleep in the woods with a stoned-out-of his-head man with poor hygiene and no words of wisdom. I will never mimic anyone else’s likes and dislikes. I will stretch out on my water bed and be grateful that some Mr. Hefty doesn’t make it rise and rock, be thankful that I don’t have to conjure up a dish of pork vindaloo to explain to myself why my eyes are watering. I’ll paint my Windhaven Estates house a lovely shade of pink, and I’ll put up an eight-foot chain-link fence, plant sprigs of bamboo and kudzu on the borders of my neighbors’ yards. I’ll start an alternative paper, a little neighborhood rag for inquiring minds. I’ll even invite my mother to come visit with her purse full of dental floss and Avon samples, and I’ll show her the photos a stray camper took of me on my wedding day at Buzzard’s Gap. I go into the bathroom and splash warm water on my face, study myself in the mirror. After so many wrong turns, after so many dead ends, it might seem I am right back where I started; but I know better. This time I’m starting out with a firm list of what I don’t want in my life so that what I do want will be easier to find. I’m also starting out with every modern convenience and appliance known to woman and man. I feel for the first time that there is a place for me in this world and I no longer need a passport to get there.

  Migration of the Love Bugs

  My husband and I live in a tin can. He calls it the streamline model, the top of the line, the cream of the crop when it comes to moveable homes. Ambulatory and proud of it. That’s Frank’s motto and I guess it makes sense in a way, since he is the only one of six siblings who’s still alive and walking, not to even mention that he spent his whole adult life setting things in concrete—house foundations and driveways, sidewalks that will remain until the New England winters crack them once too often and that new cement outfit that just opened comes in to redo the job.

  We’re in Florida now and the only concrete we own are the cinder blocks that keep our wheels from turning. “Can’t we at least put our tin can up on a foundation like everybody else’s?” I asked our first day here. “You know, pretend it’s a real building rather than a souped-up vehicle?” He was in what he called his retirement clothes, pastel golfwear, though he has never touched a club. He was surveying the flat, swampy, treeless land as if this was the Exodus. Even that day, our belongings not even unpacked, I was thinking that if this was the Promised Land, Moses for sure dealt me a bad hand.

  “I like knowing we can move at a moment’s notice.” He turned to me then, eyes wide. There was an exuberance about him that I found as foreign as the landscape. He didn’t even look like my husband to me. He looked so small in those lightweight Easter-egg clothes. Where was the concrete dried gray on his knees? The bandanna in his back pocket? The heavy brogans I had decreed must always stay outside of our apartment door? “After all these years, Alice,” he said and took my prize possession from my hands, my mother’s silver tea service that I had carried on my lap all the way from Somerville, Massachusetts, “we’re free to do anything we please.” He kissed me quickly and then ceremoniously carried the silver service inside the tin can. I stood and watched this frail pastel imitation of my husband walk away with my only piece of inheritance and willed myself to wake up. I had never seen such an expansively bright sky, never felt such intense heat. I felt lightheaded, as if my whole world were encapsulated in some kind of vaporous bubble that could pop any given second. I closed my eyes tightly and waited.

  “Alice!” Frank called. “Come see!” I opened my eyes, only to find the tin can in place, blinding me, and a swarm
of sticky flies clinging to my pale arms. The Promised Land, Armageddon—who knew they’d be one and the same? “We’ve got a view of the driving range,” Frank called in a voice so enthusiastic you might think he was Columbus and I was on board the Pinta. “I’ve for sure got to get some clubs, now.”

  There is no one in this neighborhood with naturally dark hair. The woman next door, her skin prunelike from what she refers to as her southern upbringing and what I (when alone with Frank) refer to as her melodramatic melanoma-begging life, has jet black hair that stains the fine teeth of the rattail comb that she uses to part and pincurl her hair. “I can’t imagine living up there where you were,” the woman says every time I see her. Her neck skin is like an accordion. I can’t imagine having hookworm, I think but bite the words quickly. Frank claims every day that he has never been happier, and it makes me feel helplessly sad. It makes me question everything I’ve ever believed in.

  “This is the life,” he says after a round of golf lessons and a couple of martinis with the accordion’s malnourished spouse. “You’ve got to give it a chance, Alice,” he pleads. “The change is good for us.” I want to tell him that I don’t like change and never have and that he, the person who has bought me White Shoulders cologne every Christmas for years, should know that better than anyone. But instead, I tell him that I am giving it all a chance, that I am enjoying all this reading time that I never had before. Just this week I read an article about these very bugs that are driving me out of my mind, the ones that cling and stick to your skin whenever you walk outside. The article said that these bugs have created a boom in the market for car-headlight nets.

  I’m not sure where the bugs started out, maybe in Canada, maybe on some cool lake in Maine, the White Mountains or the Green Mountains, or around the Cape. The article didn’t discuss their origin, only that they are slowly migrating through Florida; their destination is always south of wherever they are. It’s a very slow migration because their life story is so brief: hatch, have intercourse, produce, and die. It sounds like a normal enough life, except that these bugs only get one turn each at steps two and three. And since they’re chronically on the move, no two steps happen in the same place; there’s no time in their short, migrant lives for settling down.

  When Carl was born, Frank stood outside the hospital nursery window for hours on end. Mothers were treated differently in those days; having a baby was like being sick, like having something removed surgically. We took a taxi, Frank’s face turning stark white each time I gripped the front seat and bit my lip. “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” he kept saying, his hands and hair damp as we bumped along the icy streets. I passed out while staring into the pale gray eyes of a nurse and woke with a terrible headache, my whole world disoriented until I remembered where I was and what must have happened. Within minutes Frank was there just like in a scene from a movie, flowers and candy and a fuzzy stuffed bear. Suddenly there was a new picture, a new life, new plans of some day.

  Imagine if Frank and I, like the bugs, had dropped dead at that moment. We would have missed everything that we have come to know as our life. Or maybe there wouldn’t have even been a Carl because it took years for us to have him. The article didn’t say what happened to the unsuccessful, the infertile bugs, if there is such an error of nature. You wonder. Do they get to try again or do they just go ahead and die under the false assumption that they were successful?

  “Mom, are you okay?” Carl asked when I called to say we were where we were going, only bound by cinder blocks and a doormat that said welcome to the tin can. I could hear his wife, Anne, in the background. “Say hi to Nana and Pop,” she was saying, and each time she spoke, we’d hear the small echo of Joseph, eighteen months old and miles and miles away. They live where Frank and I used to talk about living some day, in Brookline. It was something I never expected to really come about, just as I never really thought we’d end up here. There’s a park across the street from their building with a rose garden and swings for the children. Just a little over a month ago we were sitting there, Frank going on and on about here, this place and how the weather would be so much better, so much healthier for both of us. I was already homesick just listening to him.

  “Have you been home?” I asked Carl. “You know, by our building?” I felt like I needed to yell into the receiver. “I’m wondering if they ever fixed that broken windowpane in the front door?”

  “Well, I haven’t gotten out . . .”

  “What do you mean, our building?” Frank asked. “Give me that phone.” He laughed and took the receiver, Carl’s voice trailing on about how it wasn’t always convenient to just hop in the car or on the train and go. “Your mother is fine,” he said and patted my arm. “Sure. Sure. She’s going to love it once she gives it a chance.” I caught a glimpse of us in the storm door, only to be alarmed by what I saw—a couple of dried-up sardines stuffed in a tin can.

  I have to take a broom and sweep those sticky bugs off of our screens at least once a day. I read in the paper that they have been nicknamed the “love bugs” because that’s all they get to do. It’s a real mess since they’re all just looking for a place to either procreate or die or possibly both. I can’t help but think if the bugs knew what was going to happen, they’d choose a celibate life and potential longevity. Don’t they have enough sense to look around and see what’s happening, to witness the great fate? I sweep them to our cinder-block stoop and then into the hibiscus, a lush bush with flowers so fiery red I keep expecting it to speak to me. I feel disgust and I feel pity as I sweep the carnage, some of the carcasses still joined at the thorax. The article theorized that they are heading for Cuba. I can’t imagine why they’d choose Cuba. I’m sure that when they arrive it’ll be nothing like what they expected. Millions and zillions of bugs to have died in vain. If I were a love bug I’d have to stop midflight and ask just whose idea was this anyway?

  We had rented our apartment in Somerville for forty years, and the rent was frozen for us, safe and stable. For years I watched others move in and then out; with each tenant exchange and new coat of paint the rent increased. I knew all the neighbors, smooth-faced college students or young families replacing people like ourselves who had either died or one day just packed up and left. I had strolled Carl up and down that street, waved to all the neighbors on porches and at windows. “You don’t even know that many people anymore,” Frank said just six months ago, and I explained that, no, I didn’t know them like I had known various relatives and people who had been friends for forty years. But I recognized people; there were young people who looked up at my window and waved, a young woman next door who was always asking me what smelled so good in my kitchen. I knew that if we left, we could never afford to come back; the rent would skyrocket and what I had called home for forty years would be as unattainable as the moon.

  The landlord already had the painters there in the hallway when I went in to look around one last time. There were clean white patches where Carl’s picture had hung over the television set in our bedroom; there were bits of dried concrete in the corner of our closet where Frank threw his work clothes. There was an old ball of yarn that had belonged to our cat years before and had somehow fallen into a small space at the back of Carl’s closet. Fitting, since it was in his closet that he had hidden the cat after sneaking it into the apartment. That was when he was only seven years old, and the cat slept in that same closet until Carl was a senior in high school. Finally the old cat went into the closet one Sunday afternoon and refused to come out. Carl was out at the movies with a girl in his class. Frank asked me to go down to the market and get him some bicarbonate, and while I was gone, he took the cat away so none of us would have to see it die.

  I felt panic rise in my throat as I surveyed the apartment, pacing room to room and back. There was a mark on the living room ceiling made by a rocketing champagne cork on the day Carl and Anne got married. There were smudges on the kitchen doorframe where all of us held on while leaning into the liv
ing room to hear the conversation, or to announce dinner was almost ready. There was masking tape around one window pane in the bedroom, Frank’s solution to the winter wind he had likened to a dog whistle. The painters were waiting. They would lay on a fresh coat of paint that would hide all traces of us. I excused myself a moment and then opened the window over the bathtub and leaned out onto the small flat section of roof where I had deserted a dying geranium. In the distance I could see the train, hear the familiar rumble as it made its way into the city, where it would spill all the people and scoop up some more. I thought of all those times I’d complained, my arms filled with shopping bags, while I stood and waited for the rush of wind that announced an approaching train. I wanted another chance; just one more trip into the city and I would return stoically, no complaint uttered.

  My young neighbor, pregnant and cheerful, was watering her patio tomatoes. “We will miss you,” she said, I assume speaking for her husband and unborn child, maybe for the whole building. I mouthed a thank-you and turned quickly, sat on the edge of the empty bathtub, my hand gripping the faucet. I grieved that I had never counted the baths taken there, never made little marks on the inside of the door with each passing day. I was sorry that I had not taken longer baths, that I had not simply lain back in my world and stared at the full green weeping willow which hid the building next door.

  “Alice.” Frank was there in the bathroom door, a young wild-haired painter behind him. “I was getting worried.” He turned then to the young man and said something about women things.

  “You know that we can never come back,” I told him, and he shook his head, hugged me close. “If we leave, we can’t ever afford to come back.”

  “Sure we can, honey,” he whispered. “But we won’t want to. Wait and see.”

  Frank and I were both born right near where we lived all those years; we figure we walked the same streets, shopped in the same stores, saw all the same movies at the same time, but we never met until we were in our twenties. He had just come back from World War II and I was taking some business courses in night school. I went to a party at my cousin’s house and there he was. He was already in the same concrete business where his father worked for years before him, and he was spending his day off setting my cousin’s children’s swingset in concrete. He was kneeling there, his big hands pouring cement, face flushed with the brisk March wind, his thick hair a deep auburn in the late afternoon light. “Once it dries, that swing is set for eternity,” he told my cousin when he was all finished. “Won’t budge an inch.”