Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  I’ve got a little brother, Bill, who is a royal pain. His way of getting on Mama’s nerves is to pick on Granddaddy and call him names even though Granddaddy doesn’t know the difference. Daddy says this is Bill’s way of dealing with the way Granddaddy has changed. At least that’s what Daddy said over the holidays in between learning how to pronounce the various kinds of yuppie lettuce he was suddenly responsible for buying and selling.

  “People want more than just iceberg,” he said every hour or so. Mama said she didn’t know why people were suddenly so hepped up on maroon-colored wilted lettuce and she didn’t know how Granddaddy’s falling off could possibly explain why Bill had draped the old man’s head with a woman’s nylon hose and Christmas tinsel. She also wanted to know where Bill got that nylon hose. He’s just two years younger than I am but you’d never guess it. He looks like he ought to be in the seventh grade rather than just out of the tenth. I sure wouldn’t go out with him if I were a girl other than his sister. We look a lot alike—thick curly hair and compact bodies, eyes too big and sad for the rest of us. It’s the kind of look that goes better on a girl.

  People say that for somebody so short, I’ve got a large chest and that I should’ve made cheering squad and would’ve if I hadn’t had that fight with Bonita Inman when I was in the tenth grade and she called my daddy a fruit pusher (though hoping for a break in the business, he was still just manager at Food Lion at the time). You can imagine how everybody took it from there and got to saying fruit pimp, gigolo. They made awful jokes about bananas and cucumbers. It was nothing to take sitting down, and I got sent home with one-day suspension for fighting at the bus stop. A clump of Bonita’s hair was still in my fist when my father choked up in that old Chevette. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell him why I’d socked Bonita in the face and made her nose bleed down a blouse which she had broadcasted all day long was brand new from that new store in the mall where the mannequins are painted silver and don’t have faces. “Tell me what happened, Lori,” my mother said that night. “You can tell us the truth.” My dad was standing there with her, and I made up some silly story about Bonita calling me a name so ugly I couldn’t repeat it. You just don’t look your father (or the woman who loves him) in the face and say he’s been the butt of penis jokes for two days running.

  I did not sleep with Donnie Wilkins even though I wanted to. He’s a nice guy and I’m a nice girl. I mean, I’ve only had one boyfriend other than Donnie. I went with Mike Tyler my junior year for one month, the highlight of our relationship being the Sunday nights I exercised my free will and we stood out behind the Methodist church during youth fellowship and kissed. I told him that if he could keep his mouth shut, I’d go with him, otherwise forget it. Ours was a brief relationship which ended with him telling people that he had given me seven hickeys and had undone my shirt to get a feel three times. Of course that wasn’t true, only further proof of his inability to keep his trap shut, but still there it was, the beginning of my reputation being sucked down the drain.

  Donnie’s dad is the school guidance counselor, a tall skinny man who looks like he’s made out of Tinkertoys. It was in late November, around the time everybody was taking the SAT, when he told me that I had a lot of natural talent for putting things together and taking them apart. “If you were a boy,” he said and looked over at Donnie’s mama who assists him at his job, her little half glasses swinging from a chain around her neck, “I’d tell you to go to trade school, become a mechanic.” I keep hoping that women’s lib will be what follows the all-natural grocery in my hometown, but as of yet, people are still doing the HIS and HER types of things.

  Everybody in school made jokes about the Wilkinses being the guidance counselors (her title is Assistant Guidance Counselor). People said that really there’s just one of them and that he/she has many personalities like in that movie, Sybil. I tried not to think about all that while I looked at them, their button-down shirts the exact same shade of blue.

  “I’d like to be an engineer,” I offered. “Or an architect.” When he talked of my natural talent it wasn’t like he was telling me some big news I didn’t already know. I knew the first time I ever sat down with a can of Lincoln Logs that I had this special aptitude, as they say. Lincoln Logs and Legos are why I stayed in the baby-sitting business as long as I did. I have a special aptitude all right. I could look at him and know how many cans of Tinkertoys it would take to duplicate his body. Mrs. Wilkins was harder to figure.

  “But you’re a girl.” Mrs. Wilkins inched her chair closer to her husband’s and peered down at my test scores. I know what she was really peering at was the front of my notebook where I’d written her son’s name in big block letters. I loved Donnie Wilkins and had for a long time. Even when I was kissing Mike behind the church, I was loving Donnie Wilkins. He had finally started loving me just two months before, when we found ourselves sitting together at a football game. The band wasn’t performing because the field was so muddy, but we wore our uniforms anyway. They finally called the game on account of rain, and we were about the only people left in the stands, our heads under his denim jacket and leaned in real close. It could have been a toothpaste or breath mint commercial on TV; it was that good.

  “You are a girl with a grade point total that falls just a little above class average, and so I suggest you take the clerical courses out at the Technical Institute and see how you fare in a setting of higher learning before committing yourself,” Mr. Wilkins said. His “just a little above class average” was a 93 so I knew he was not telling the whole truth. And everybody knew that I would have had an even higher average except I had received an ‘F’ for everything I missed on that day I was suspended two years before. I knew that what The Counselors were really thinking was that someone like me would need financial assistance to go to college and it was just too damn much trouble to fill out the forms.

  “You think I should take a course like you took?” I asked Mrs. Wilkins and watched her bristle, her lips as thin as a paper cut. I turned and watched the principal on the other side of the glass partition. Mr. Sinclair was attractive in an odd way, sort of a prehistoric way. When he first moved here last year, the rumors raced that he’d once had a part on a detergent commercial that was filmed in New York, but he announced, in a joking sort of way, in the first assembly that this was not true. (He had only tried out for it.) He was married and had three small children. He had been a wrestler in college and it showed. He had a real thick neck and walked with his legs apart. A lot of the girls like Mr. Sinclair’s looks, but I much prefer Donnie Wilkins’s type, thin and graceful, smart-looking. Mr. Sinclair is what some people might call a jock. If I had to give an opinion I’d say he’s all right for his age, which my best friend, Jennifer Morgan, says must be forty or so. At the ball games his wife just sits there quiet as a mouse with children hanging all over her, while he stands and waves his broad hand at the people in the stand like he might’ve made that eighty-yard touchdown instead of Scooter Clark. My dad says that Mr. Sinclair is much too hard on the fruit in the grocery store and oftentimes eats as much as he buys while shopping. To his credit, though, or so my dad says, he’s a man’s man, an iceberg lettuce man. No flaccid leaves for him.

  “I was in a clerical position,” Mrs. Wilkins said, again with that strained look. “I’ve gone back to school for two summers now. It is hard work.” She smiled a fake smile.

  “She’s enrolled in a class right now.” Mr. Wilkins looked at her and grinned. “She has to go at night and that’s hard work. She’s a modern woman.”

  And you just got voted most desirable fat man on the planet, I was thinking and had to look away.

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Wilkins nodded her head modestly, returned his smile and then continued. “You could start out at Tech and whether or not you pursue school after that . . . well, time will tell.” She had one of those faces that is easily forgotten, a powdered white face that looks like a ray of sunshine has never shone her way, mousey, pla
in, all those words you put with little pointed-looking women, waist cinched in just so, cheeks sucked in just so. I sat there and imagined her to be somebody who washed her hands and couldn’t stop.

  While The Guidance Counselors sat there and talked about what I should do with my life, I sat there wondering how this pair had ever come to give birth to my Donnie. I was thinking that Mrs. Wilkins probably had tissue folded in tiny squares in some hidden compartment of her purse and she handwashed her underwear (she would say panties) but never touched the crotch when checking to see if they were dry. She was the kind of woman who complained about public toilets and hovered her butt over the John like a helicopter and sprayed without any thoughts about who would come in and want to use that commode next. I hate when women do that, too good just to wipe off the seat or even cover it over several times with toilet paper. I made myself laugh while picturing Mrs. Wilkins’s mousey little panties pulled down around those snow white ankles while she crouched and sprayed the floor of the girls’ bathroom, where the walls tell you to go and do things I’ve never done but have thought about, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke.

  “Is that my Donnie’s name you’ve got on your notebook?” Mrs. Wilkins asked. Her eyes matched her beige skirt, shoes, and hair. Mr. Wilkins shifted in his seat, and it hurt me to think of those knobby bones rolling beneath him.

  “Peggy,” Mr. Wilkins said. “Let’s keep this discussion on Miss Lawrence’s test performance.”

  “Very well,” she said. “But you ought to know that Donnie will be going off to school next fall.”

  “I know that,” I told her and pushed my chair back from the table. I could look through the glass partition and see everybody milling around in the hall, getting ready to dash through those big double doors with that three o’clock bell. I was supposed to meet Donnie out in front of the school so we could ride in Red Smith’s new Jeep Cherokee. “I’m going off to school, too.”

  “You are?” Mrs. Wilkins asked and scanned my aptitude test again as if she’d overlooked some major fact. “Where are you going and what in?”

  “In what, dear.” Mr. Wilkins patted her hand and shook his head. Her cheeks flushed for a second but then she came back around to her natural pasty color and was right back in there with Mr. Tinkertoy. Just as the two of them were closing in on me, the bell sounded and I bolted. I started to tell Donnie how weird I thought his folks were, but by the time we were all alone I decided I’d rather kiss him instead. We were in the back seat of the Jeep, his blue-jean jacket around my shoulders. “So what do your parents think about us going together?” I asked right when Red Smith leaned out the door of the Time Out and motioned for us to come inside—it was our turn for the pinball machine. I could tell by the look on Donnie’s face that I’d hit a rough spot. “We’ve been going together two months, one week, and two days, but they act like they’ve never heard of me.”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “They know we’re friends but my parents are kind of weird about those things.” There was a pause and then he had all his reasons together and started talking real fast. “You know, they’re afraid I’ll change my mind about going off next year or something so I just don’t tell them a whole lot. You can see that, can’t you?” I nodded because he had the purest, clearest emerald green eyes I’d ever seen and nice full lips. He had a mature-looking razor stubble, too, particularly up against somebody like Red, who had skin like a baby’s butt. I nodded and leaned in close enough to breathe in the scent of his Obsession, which all the boys in my class were wearing if they could scrape up the money to buy some. I was thinking that for excitement his parents probably sat in ramrod fashion and spanked each other’s palms with rulers or something. They probably conjugated verbs over the dinner table. She probably had to get his permission to sit her modern mousey self down. He probably had to floss his teeth before she’d kiss him. I was thinking, Your parents are queer as a three-dollar bill, but what I said was, “Of course, Donnie. Why, that makes lots of sense. I really like how you smell.”

  For Christmas I gave Donnie Obsession body shampoo (which my mother thought was a little personal until I explained how it was no different from what she had once known as soap on a rope) and a key chain with his initials (my father’s suggestion, something about how a man should always have something jingling in his pocket). That, like everything on the planet, reminded Bill of a dirty joke, and he got sent out of the room even though everybody (including Granddaddy) had laughed. Donnie gave me a pen and pencil set (gift choice of The Counselors, I’m sure). But secretly, what we gave each other was a solemn vow that very soon, as soon as we felt comfortable with the idea, we’d go somewhere where we could be all alone and take our clothes off. We didn’t make any promises beyond that.

  Over the holidays, Bill and I sat up one whole night watching the “Madonna Marathon” on MTV. I was studying the way she moved and took her clothes off. Bill sat there trying to act like he wasn’t about to start drooling. Then we both got distracted by circling headlights in the parking lot across the street from our house. For years that lot had been the meeting spot for people fooling around, or so my parents always joked. They never named names but it was obvious they knew some things. “What do you think we did before we could afford a big television and cable?” my dad often asked, and she grinned at him. It was possible she was grinning about something else they did which I couldn’t bear to think about. It gave me the creeps to imagine my parents in a hot naked embrace, especially now that I was planning my own unvirgining.

  Bill and I had sat and waited for cars to come before, but this was the first time we’d actually witnessed a meeting. We didn’t have any lights turned on other than the TV, so it was easy enough to kneel by the window and watch the two cars pull into spaces side by side. The dark station wagon’s engine cut off, lights out, door opened. Bill was breathing too close to me, his breath like nacho Doritos, and he fogged the glass. By the time we stopped shoving each other, the other car had driven off and we had missed seeing who had moved from one car to another. Bill had the bright idea that we’d sneak out to watch the return, but an hour later we both got caught up in Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video, and while we were trying to figure out why those weird-looking guys were wearing and stroking these really gross-out fake boobs while Madonna writhed on the bed, both cars disappeared. “That was a quickie,” Bill said knowingly as he stared out into the empty lot. “Poor guy just couldn’t keep going.”

  “What do you know?” I asked, and he turned to face me just as seriously as if I’d asked him to explain condensation. He turned his head to one side and sighed.

  “I know more than you know,” he finally said and flipped open his wallet to show me a condom packet.

  “Yeah, right,” I said and examined the packet. “This must have come with the wallet.” It said it was a size large, but I didn’t say anything about that. Everybody I heard talking about condoms (people like Mike Tyler and Rowland Jones) talked about how they needed a size large. Yeah, right; like how have people gone all these years without the jumbo size? What boy is going to walk in and say give me a size small? I closed the Doritos and put the bag on the table. Madonna was writhing again to “Express Yourself,” and I decided not to challenge Bill on his knowledge or his size; it was not a good time for me to be swapping stories, not to mention the fact that if he had done something, I didn’t want to think about it. My head was already getting filled up with enough thoughts without one of Bill dancing the dance.

  Vacation ended and Donnie and I still hadn’t taken anything off. The Counselors had given him a long speech over the holidays (probably after they saw his body shampoo) about how he was too young for something serious and shouldn’t be dating just one person. Everybody at school knew we were going steady, but neither of us ever came right out and said it. The only person who knew all about our plan was Jennifer Morgan, and she was sworn to secrecy. I knew what was going on with her, too, and that’s what being best fri
ends is all about. You’ve got the dirt on each other and it holds you tight like glue. Jennifer took the pill and Rowland Jones had put his hand up her bra right there in Chemistry while they were supposed to be washing some beakers they’d burned up real bad. If that’s not insurance, there’s no such thing.

  It was February when Bill started calling Granddaddy “Paw Paw,” all the while rapping and dancing around like M. C. Hammer, which drove my mother up the wall. It was right after the doctor said that Granddaddy would never ever be the same. It didn’t matter what Bill called him, Granddaddy grinned great big. Paw Paw, Monterey Jack, Homer Simpson, it didn’t make a dab bit of difference, except anything other than Granddaddy Leech made Mama bite her lip and turn away. The worse Granddaddy got, the more my parents talked about me going to college, and before I knew it they had me filling out all kinds of applications and financial aid forms they had ordered themselves. Nothing like a good sharp contrast between life and death to make people start planning out their futures. I knew then more than ever that Bill (yes, Bill) and I were a big hunk of my parents’ future. It shocked me to think that when my mother was my very age, she and my dad were talking about their future together. It was hard to believe that such planning went into me and Bill and all those grocery store jobs.