Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  “I’ll call Sandra tomorrow,” Kenneth said, and put his arm around Lydia, but she wasn’t having any part of that. She twisted away and slapped his drink to the dirt.

  “Call her?” Lydia screamed, and I wished I had my camera to catch her expression right when she was beginning to say “her”; that new camera of mine could catch anything. “What good is that going to do?”

  “Maybe I can settle it all,” he said. “I’m the one who left her. If it goes to court, she’ll get everything.”

  “She already has,” Lydia said, sat down in the yard, and blew her nose on some of that decorator toilet paper. “The house, the money. She has taken everything except the Mazda.”

  “I got the dishes,” he said. “I got the TV and the stereo.”

  “I don’t know why you didn’t take your share when you had the chance,” Lydia said. “I mean, you could’ve taken the microwave and the silver or something.”

  “It’s going to be fine, honey,” Kenneth said, and pulled her up from the dirt. “We’ve got each other.”

  “Yes,” Lydia nodded, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, being about ten pounds too heavy for her own good. I waited until they were back inside before I finished the yard, and then walked over behind the fish market where I had parked the car. There wasn’t much room in the car because I had six loads of laundry that I’d been meaning to take to the subdivision Laundromat to dry. Kenneth had bought me a washer but not a dryer, and I should have bought one myself but I hadn’t; the clothes had mildewed something awful.

  Not long after that all my friends at the Diet Center took my picture to use as an example of what not to let happen to yourself. They said I had gone overboard and needed to gain a little weight for my own health. I was too tired to argue with Martha, aside from the fact that she was five times bigger than me, and I just let her drive me to the hospital. I checked in as Lydia Barkley, and since I didn’t know how Lydia’s handwriting looked, I used my best Kenneth imitation. “Her name is Sandra,” Martha told the woman, but nobody yelled at me. They just put me in a bed and gave me some dinner in my vein and knocked me out. As overweight as I had been, I had never eaten in my sleep. It was a first, and when I woke up, the shrink was there asking me what I was, on a scale of one to ten. “Oh, four,” I told him. It seemed like I was there a long time. Paula came and did my nails and hair, and Martha came and confessed that she had eaten three boxes of chocolate-covered cherries over the last week. She brought me a fourth. She said that if she had a husband, she’d get a divorce, that’s how desperate she was to lose some weight, but that she’d stop before she got as thin as me. I told her I’d rather eat a case of chocolate-covered cherries than go through it again.

  My mama came, and she said, “I always knew this would happen.” She shook her head like she couldn’t stand to look at me. “A man whose business in life depends on others taking to the bottle is no kind of man to choose for a mate.” I told her to mind her own damn business, and when she left, she took my box of chocolate-covered cherries and told me that sweets were not good for a person.

  By the time I got out of the hospital, I was feeling much better. Kenneth stopped by for me to sign the divorce papers right before it was time for my dinner party. His timing had never been good. There I was in my black silk dress with the table set for twelve, the lasagna getting ready to be thawed and cooked in the microwave.

  “Looks like you’re having a party,” he said, and stared at me with that same look he always had before he got choked up. I just nodded and filled my candy dish with almonds. “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you,” he said. “I didn’t know how sick you were.” And I noticed he was taking me in from head to toe. “You sure look great now.”

  “Well, I’m feeling good, Kenneth,” I told him and took the papers from his hand.

  “I’m not with Lydia anymore,” he said, but I focused instead on signing my name, my real name, in my own handwriting, which if it was analyzed would be the script of a fat person. Some things you just can’t shake; part of me will always be a fat person and part of Kenneth will always be gutter slime. He had forgotten that when he had me he hadn’t wanted me, and I had just about forgotten how much fun we’d had eating that half-gallon of ice cream in bed on our honeymoon.

  “Well, send me a postcard,” I told him when I opened the front door to see Martha coming down the walk in one of my old dresses that she was finally able to wear. And then came Paula and the man she kept in her bedroom, and my mama, who I had sternly instructed not to open her mouth if she couldn’t be pleasant, my beautician, the manager of Revco, my shrink, who, after I had stopped seeing him on a professional basis, had called and asked me out to lunch. They were all in the living room, mingling and mixing drinks; I stood there with the curtains pulled back and watched Kenneth get in that Mazda that was in my name and drive down Marnier and take a left onto Seagrams. Summer was almost over, and I couldn’t wait for the weather to turn cool so that I could stop working in the yard.

  “I want to see you do ‘eat spaghetti,’” my shrink, who by then had told me to call him Alan, said and pulled a butterfly yo-yo like I hadn’t seen in years from his pocket. I did it; I did it just as well as if I were still in the seventh grade, and my mama hid her face in embarrassment while everybody else got a good laugh. Of course, I’m not one to overreact or to carry a situation on and on, and so when they begged for more tricks, I declined. I had plenty of salad on hand for my friends who were dieting so they wouldn’t have seconds on lasagna, and while I was fixing the coffee, Alan came up behind me, grabbed my love handles, and said, “On a scale of one to ten, you’re a two thousand and one.” I laughed and patted his hand because I guess I was still focused on Kenneth and where was he going to stay, in a pup tent? Some things never change, and while everybody was getting ready to go and still chatting, I went to my bedroom and turned my alarm clock upside down, which would remind me when it went off the next day to return the title to Kenneth’s name and to maybe write him a little check to help with that MasterCard bill.

  I could tell that Alan wanted to linger, but so did my mama and so I had to make a choice. I told Alan it was getting a little late and that I hoped to see him real soon, socially, I stressed. He kissed me on the cheek and squeezed my hip in a way that made me get gooseflesh and also made me feel sorry for both Kenneth and Lydia all at the same time. “A divorce can do strange things to a person,” Alan had told me on my last visit; the man knew his business. He was cute, too.

  “It was a nice party, Sandra,” my mama said after everybody left. “Maybe a little too much oregano in the lasagna. You’re a tad too thin still, and I just wonder what that man who calls himself a psychiatrist has on his mind.”

  “Look before you leap,” I told her, and gave her seventy-nine skeins of yarn in the most hideous colors that I no longer had room for in my closet. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

  “That’s no way to talk to your mother,” she said. “It’s not my fault that you were overweight your whole life. It’s not my fault your husband left you for a redheaded bar tramp.”

  “Well, send me a postcard,” I said and closed the door, letting out every bit of breath that I’d held inside my whole life. I washed those dishes in a flash, and when I got in my bed, I was feeling so sorry for Kenneth, who had no birds in his hand, and sorry for Mama, who would never use up all that yarn. I hurried through those thoughts because my eyelids were getting so heavy and I wanted my last thought of the night to be of Alan, first with the yo-yo and then grabbing my hipbone. When you think about it, if your hipbones have been hidden for years and years, it’s a real pleasure to have someone find them, grab hold, and hang on. You can do okay in this world if you can just find something worth holding on to.

  Man Watcher

  What’s my sign? Slippery when wet. Do I want to see your etchings? No. Have you seen me somewhere before? Maybe, since I’ve been somewhere before. What’s my line? Well,
I’ve got quite a few, all depends on what I’m trying (or not trying) to catch.

  It’s not so hard to pick up a man, matter of fact it’s one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. A good man? Well, that’s something entirely different. Believe you me, I know. My step-sister, Lorraine, is always saying like I don’t know where you’re coming from. Like if I say I’ve got a migraine headache, she says, “Like I don’t know where you’re coming from. I have the kind of migraine that blinds you. The doctor says I might have the very worst kind of migraine known to man. My migraines are so horrendous I’ve been invited to go to Duke University for them to study me.” You get the picture. Like I don’t know. Lorraine knows a lot about everything and she has experienced the world in a way nobody can come close to touching. Still, when it comes to sizing up men, I’ve got her beat. I sit back and size them up while she jumps in and winds up making a mess of her life. When she opens her mouth in that long horsey way of hers, I just say like I don’t know where you’re coming from.

  I’ve thought of publishing a book about it all, all the different types of the species. You know it would sort of be like Audubon’s bird book. I’d call it Male Homo Sapiens: What You Need to Know to Identify Different Breeds. Natural habitats, diet, mating rituals. I’d show everything from chic condos to jail cells; from raw bloody beef to couscous and sprouts; from a missionary position (showers following) to an oily tarp spread out behind a Dempsey Dumpster. I’d break it all down so even the inexperienced could gain something. Of course there are a few questions that I haven’t quite worked out yet. Like, why is it considered tough for a man (usually a big-city macho type) to grab himself and utter nasty things (such as an invitation to be fellated) to another man? Is there something hidden there, like in those seek and find pictures? And why don’t men have partitions between urinals? Is there a history of liking to watch or something? Does it all go back to the Greeks and Romans where a little homosexual activity was perfectly in order, like a good solid burp at the end of a meal? I’m still working on a lot of topics, as you can see, but quite a bit of my research is already mapped out.

  You know, you got your real fun guys that you love to date but you wouldn’t want to marry—they’d be addicted to something and out of work about the time you hatch the first kid. Then you got the kind who might do all right in a job and lead a relatively clean life, but they bore you to tears. (I’m talking the kind that gets into little closet organizers and everything zipped up in plastic.) And you’ve got the kind you ought to leave alone—period. (I’m talking worthless pigs and middle-aged crazed sleazos.) That’s where Lorraine screwed up (on both accounts) and I’ve told her so on many occasions. Her husband, Tim, likes to drink beer and scrunch the cans on the side of his head. He likes to chew tobacco while drinking beer and talk about what him and the boys done and seen while hunting up some good fat quail and some Bambi. He wears army fatigues and drinks some more beer and talks about needing to get some sex (actually, he uses all the slang terms for a woman’s anatomy). He drinks still more beer and talks about needing to take a leak.

  “Well, just be sure you put it back,” I said not long ago, and Lorraine and her mother (my evil step-mother) gave me a long dirty look. My name is Lucinda, after my real mother’s mother (I go by Luci), but every now and then I refer to myself as Cinda and bare my size six-and-a-half foot just so they have to take a good look at themselves: mean ugly step-mother and self-centered step-sister, both with big snowshoe-type feet.

  “Take a leak. Put it back. That’s a good one now,” Tim said and shuffled through his magazines until he found one of his choosing for a little bathroom time, Soldier of Fortune or American Killer, something like that. Lorraine and Mama, Too—as she used to beg me to call her when Daddy was still alive—were still staring. They have accused me of turning my back on my family and our natural ways because I lived in Washington, D.C., for a year, where I worked as a secretary in some very dull and very official office where there were a lot of very dull and very official men. I was there when there were rumors that this senator who wanted to be president (there are LOADS of men who fit into this particular Homo sapiens profile) had a mistress. This fellow always wins the election with the help of people like my step-brother-in-law who believe that there should be a gun in every home and that school cafeterias should be eternally stocked with that delicious vegetable, the catsup. What I still don’t understand is who in the hell would go with that type? I’m an expert on these things and oftentimes am led by curiosity, but I have my standards. I mean, if you were the wife at least you’d live in a nice house in Georgetown or Alexandria, the fella wouldn’t utter a peep if you dropped a few thou. But just to go with him, good God. Lorraine’s friend, Ruth Sawyer, has dated a man for fifteen years with nothing to show for it. Stupid, I say. I left D.C. (which was fine with me) when Daddy got so sick. I was allergic to those cherry trees the whole country raves about in the spring. Still though, if I ever even refer to the Smithsonian, Lorraine and Mama, Too roll their eyes and smirk at each other.

  “You’d be lucky to get a man like Tim,” my step-mother had said.

  “Like I don’t know,” I told her. “There are very few men in his category.”

  “That’s right.” Lorraine nodded her head as she flipped through her husband’s pile of arsenal magazines to find one of her beauty ones. Tim’s breed happen to travel in camouflage clothes, but they like their women to sport loud and gaudy feathers and makeup. Of course she had enough sense to know that I was not being serious, so she turned quickly, eyes narrowing. “What do you mean, his category?”

  “Not many men who read about the defense of the great white race while taking a leak,” I said.

  “Har de har har,” Lorraine said. She has not changed a bit since they came into our lives not long after my mother died of liver disease. Mama, Too worked in the office of the funeral parlor, which was convenient. I called her a “widower watcher” then, and I still do. My daddy was not such a great man, but even he was too good for Mama, Too.

  Before Lorraine met Tim, she dated the man who I file in the middle-aged crazed sleazo slot. You know the type, someone who is into hair (especially chest) any way he can get it: rugs, Minoxidil, transplants. That poor grotesquerie would’ve had some grafted on his chest if he could’ve afforded the procedure. He’d have loved enough hair on his head to perm and chest hair long enough to preen. You know the type of man I mean, the type that hangs out in the Holiday Inn lounge like a vulture, sucking on some alcoholic drink, his old wrinkled eyes getting red and slitty as he watches young meat file through the doorway. He likes chains and medallions and doesn’t believe in shirt buttons.

  “You’re some kind of bad off, aren’t you, Lorraine?” I asked one night after her MAN left, his body clad in enough polyester to start a fire that would rival that of a rubber tire company. “I bet he couldn’t get it up with a crane.” My daddy was dying of lung cancer even as I was speaking, though we hadn’t gotten him diagnosed yet, and he let out with a laugh that set off a series of coughs that could have brought the house down.

  “Don’t you have any respect?” Mama, Too asked, and I turned on her. I said, “Look, I am over thirty years old and my step-sister there is pushing forty. It isn’t like he can send me to my room and keep me from going to the prom. Besides,” I added and pointed to him, “he wasn’t respecting me when he and Mama were out cutting up all over town, pickling their livers and getting emphysema while I was babysitting every night of the week to pay for my own week at Girl Scout camp, which I ended up hating with a passion anyway because it was run just like a military unit.”

  What I didn’t tell her, though, (what I’ve never told anyone) is that going to Girl Scout camp gave me my first taste of self-sufficiency. It had nothing to do with the actual camp, but was in my getting ready for it. I found stability in my little toiletries case: my own little personal bottles of shampoo and lotion. My toothbrush and my toothpaste. These smallest personal items represent
independence, a sensation you need forever. Otherwise, you’re sunk. I liked having everything in miniature, rationed and hidden in my bag. For that week (the only way I made it through their bells and schedules) I was able to pull myself inward, to turn and flip until I was as compact as one of those little plastic rain bonnets. It was the key to survival, and it had nothing to do with the woods (though I’ll admit the birds were nice) or building a fire (I had a lighter). It had nothing to do with what leaves you could eat (I had enough Slim Jims along to eat three a day). It was my spirit that I had found. Of course I lost it the very next week once I was back home and doing as I pleased when I pleased, but I couldn’t forget the freedom, the power my little sack of essentials had brought me.

  “You could have benefitted from the military,” Mama, Too said after I’d run down my career in the Girl Scouts. She was ready to spout on about her late great husband Hoover Mills and his shining military career. I told her his name sounded like an underwear or vacuum cleaner company.

  “I have said it before,” I told her, “and I’ll say it again. I would never have a man of the church, and I would never have a man of the military. I don’t want anybody telling me what to do or inspecting me.” I emphasized this and looked at Mama, Too.

  “Who’s to say they’d have you?” Lorraine said.

  “I could have that old piece of crap who just left here if I wanted him,” I told her, and my daddy erupted in another phlegm fair, coughing and spewing and laughing.