Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  It was her idea to paint the building pink, to make it look tropical so people heading to Florida would be put in the mood sooner. By the time they reopened, she was three months pregnant with Rodney, and the business prospect was booming. If they had had a hundred rooms they could have filled them.

  Ruthie’s mother, now fully accepting and approving, helped out with the cleaning while Ruthie began the real decorating, the colors and textures and framed prints that would replace the drab tan walls and white chenille spreads and wall calendars that Jim’s uncle had received in bulk from the local Chevrolet dealer (each month showed off a different car model).

  Ruthie took great pride in the fact that no two rooms were the same; each had its own theme, its own mood, and she secretly named them as she sat at the sewing machine, her kitchen chair pushed back from the table as her abdomen grew round and hard. Jim said he saw no reason to go to all that trouble and expense when the rooms were renting just fine as they were. But she saw it as a challenge, the power to create a mood, colors changing in the same way the mood ring Jim had given her responded to her change in body temperature. She felt so hot during her pregnancy that she had called room number one “Tahitian Treat,” decorating it with cool shades of pink and green, a tropical spread on the bed, a seashell print on the wall. She had then done what she called “Sunshine Saffron” and “Forest Foliage” and “Lavender Lace.”

  She had just finished number six, “Blue Moon,” when Rodney was born, and sometimes around midday when there were vacancies, this is where she went with him. The air-conditioning unit rumbled there under the window, all heat and bright summer sun blocked out by the navy curtains, as she stretched her legs out on the shimmering chintz spread and stared up at the print she had hung of a big crescent moon over the sea. One day Jim eased open the door, a harsh blast of light and heat, and then came and stretched out beside her. Within minutes, his head was pressed against the crook of her arm and he, like Rodney, was sound asleep.

  This is another memory she thinks about these days as she watches the empty highway—the wonderful sensation of that cool dark room. Now Rodney is determined to hit the sign across the street; he has traded his pebbles for hard clumps of clay and is hurling them faster and faster. His jaw is clenched, his face red, as he exhales and lunges forward with each throw. He finally hits and the sign creaks back and forth on its chain.

  Rodney was four when Frieda was born. By then they had built the house back behind the motel, a white two-story house with a wraparound porch. The recreation facility had a huge stone fireplace, two Ping-Pong tables and a shuffleboard court. They added an efficiency on the far end of the building, a special honeymoon suite with a huge bathtub up on a platform. The room curved out towards the highway and had exposure on all four sides. From the window over the queen-size waterbed, you could see their house, hanging begonias swinging on the porch, and from the bathroom, you could see the office, new glass windows and fluorescent tubing that glowed all night.

  Some nights Ruthie’s mother came to baby-sit, and they drove off like they were going into town to the movies and then circled back and parked at the end of the lot where it was dark. They would sneak into number fifteen, where they turned on the radio and danced naked up the platform and into the huge tub. If they didn’t turn on any lights they could lift one shade and see the moon, the palmettos in the yard, headlights circling the ceiling as they lay there in the warm water. Some nights they lay there until the water got cool and then, the air-conditioning unit turned on high, they ran to the bed and climbed under the wine-colored satin comforter Ruthie had driven to Columbia to buy. Jim set his tiny travel alarm for eleven o’clock, and they bolted with the sound, shocked to find themselves removed from their normal place. They whispered and laughed while dressing to drive the fifty yards home as if they were still in high school and sneaking in from a date. Part of the fun was that it was a secret, that they could hold hands, squeezing to suppress laughter when her mother said things like, “Big crowd to see Sean Connery, I reckon.”

  Now, with the exception of an occasional clump of clay hitting the Budget’s NO TRESPASSING sign, there is silence, a wide flat silence, while over there on I-95 the traffic flows, heavy and steady. Now the VACANCY sign has rusted in place, the letters faded to a fleshy pink. Ruthie sits by the pool; behind her chair in rooms ten and eleven, “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Spring Meadow,” the Venetian-glass doors seal in darkness.

  Jim has been gone for the longest three weeks of her life, and 301 is without a doubt dead, no resurrection in sight. Frieda and her friend are doing what they call bump bottoms; they hold hands, press the soles of their feet together, and pull back such that they go under water and their bottoms collide. “Bump bottoms!” they scream when they rocket to the surface in laughter; they can do this for hours and Ruthie will probably let them until the sun sets and it’s time to go inside and go to bed.

  The sun is finally low in the sky (daylight saving time does not make life any easier), and soon she can call the kids inside to dinner and then gather in front of the television for yet another night of sitcoms. While they watch, she can slowly ease herself into her gown and then into her bed, where she can finally give into the growing desire to close her eyes and sleep through it all. It is like he robbed her energy supply and crammed it into the suitcase with all of his underwear.

  An occasional car passes on the highway, usually a local going to or from the shopping center. Sometimes it’s her mother, who says she just happened to be passing by, which is an overt lie; these happenings never occurred three weeks before, but Ruthie bites her tongue. Why should she blame her mother for asking all of the same questions she’s asking herself? It’s hard not to ask how she got here. How Rodney grew so fast from that warm little body she cuddled there in the Blue Moon Room. How Frieda went from being a plump little baby who refused to walk until she was fifteen months old to this long-legged colt. Jim had called Frieda “Buddha” when she sat round and placid in the center of the room and pointed to what she wanted, grunted a command. In the mornings when the teakettle whistled, Frieda shrieked after it, a high wailing Wooooooooooooo which sent Rodney into a fit of laughter; it sent all of them into a fit of laughter. So how had it happened?

  How can you be laughing one day and crying the next, and how had the years taken such a sudden turn? How had 301 died such a quick tragic death, and when had Jim ever had the time to meet someone else, and not just to meet her but to court her, to woo her, to sleep with her right there in number fifteen while just twenty yards away she had sat under the fluorescent light of the office and waited for the check-in that never came, waited for the phone call that would reserve the entire motel? These were the stories she was telling him, and he was telling her, these stories about how people would get tired of the sameness of the interstate, tired of those SOUTH OF THE BORDER and MYRTLE BEACH signs, how the people would come back. Why, any day now, old 301 would be buzzing. And in the midst of all of this futile optimism, she had been completely blind to what was happening. She had fallen for the very trick that she and Jim had used on her mother; he was in room fifteen, right there under her nose.

  “Watch this,” Frieda calls now and does a cannonball, arms hugging her knees as she slaps into the water and sprays her pale giggling friend who clings to the ladder. Ruthie wishes that Rodney and Frieda would ask her some questions. What happened? Will he come back? Is it your fault that he left? Instead, she has heard them whispering back and forth and she tries not to think of what Rodney, in the vocabulary of Malcolm, is telling Frieda. They will get a divorce. We will never see him again. He doesn’t love us anymore. He wanted to sell the motel and go to school years ago but she talked him into staying.

  Ruthie keeps thinking she needs some advice, an opinion, but is afraid to seek it because everyone in town will hear the news as fast as she opens her mouth and there will be desperately lonely people knocking on her door; nothing like a good bit of domestic dirt to shake u
p a ghost town or to lend hope to the other singles in need. Once she and Jim had spent a whole Friday evening sitting by the pool with a psychiatrist and his wife who were on their way to see the man’s family in Miami. Ruthie had been afraid to talk at first. Neither the man’s voice nor his wife’s carried a trace of an accent, but it was more that she was afraid he would read something in her every word. Finally, after everyone except her had had a couple of glasses of wine and an hour of idle conversation about the difference between a palmetto and a palm, she got used to the fact that he was as normal as Jim. She was six months pregnant with Frieda at the time and had Rodney clinging to her legs. She had asked the doctor lots of questions about bringing in a new baby, how to make it all easy on Rodney, while the doctor’s wife and Jim talked about astronomy, pointing out this or that constellation or planet. After another hour of chatting, Jim had gone in and gotten an old telescope that he hadn’t used in years, and the two of them sat there searching the sky. He had talked about college, what he planned to take when he finally got there. Maybe Jim had always been looking. That’s what Ruthie should have asked the psychiatrist. What are the signs of a husband about to leave?

  “Did you see me, Mom?” Frieda calls, thumbing the back of her bathing suit where it rode up with the impact of her landing. Ruthie nods and then waves to Mrs. Andler, who is sitting outside of the Blue Moon room in another of the worn-out lawn chairs. Mrs. Andler moved in when she decided at eighty that her house in town was much too large for her. Ruthie gave her a good deal when she moved in a month ago and has yet to have the nerve to approach her about whether she sees this as a temporary or permanent thing. “You can’t start this, Ruthie,” Jim said just two days before he left. “We are not running a rest home. Uncle Ross left here to go to a retirement area, remember?” We, he said we are not running a rest home.

  “We’re not running anything right now,” she had said. “We haven’t rented a room in over three weeks.” And she had reluctantly allowed Mrs. Andler to pick her own room, knowing that there was a good chance that she’d pick the coolest, the darkest, her own personal favorite. Still, it was steady rent and Ruthie didn’t see what would be so terrible about having a few senior citizens around the place. So put up a few toilet bars, widen a doorway. What’s in Florida anyway?

  “You’re not listening,” he said, the muscle in his jaw tight. “You’re not even trying to see.”

  Now she thinks he meant more than that. Maybe he wanted her to see. Just a week before, he had teased her about a boy who had been in their high-school class, a boy who always sent a Christmas card and stopped by to say hello if he was passing through. “There’s a catch, Walter the Weird,” Jim said. “Eight feet tall and a hundred and twenty pounds.”

  “Oh, well,” she said and laughed. “And I suppose you’ve got some real looker after you.” And she teased him about a girl in the class a year ahead of them. “What about you and Loose Linda?” she asked. “What about that purple sequin dress she wore to the prom? Clashed with her orange hair something awful.” Now Linda runs a local jewelry store and has fingernails long enough to rival those of Howard Hughes. She reminded him of that, too, all the while seeing a picture in her mind of the prom their junior year: Jim on the dance floor with Linda, her standing in front of the refreshments with smart Walter. Walter was talking about how he wanted to have a single room at the University so that he wouldn’t have to make compromises about his study time, and Ruthie was thinking about how she’d like to march out on the dance floor and grab Linda by the throat.

  “At least Walter is a CPA. I hear he buys his wife something extravagant every single April. For all I know he buys it from Linda.” There was a moment of silence and she read it as the same old sore spot, education, so she continued talking, something she had always done well. “Don’t you remember that prom?” she asked. “You came over and asked me to dance while Linda went to the bathroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You asked me out for the very next night, said it was dumb that we had broken up to begin with. You did all that right there under Linda’s long nose.” She thought they had both gotten a good laugh, a playful exchange that led to a kiss and a hug, a long hard hug, his day-old beard rubbing her cheek. Now she thinks he pulled her close so she couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t see the dishonesty. Now she thinks that he was trying to prepare her, trying to make her think about herself and what kind of man she would attract, make her stop and ask herself if she was still attractive.

  “I saw you.” That’s what she had said that night when Jim tried to offer an explanation. The ends of his hair were still wet from the tub; for all she knew the woman (he had called her Barbara) was still down there in number fifteen, a damp naked body stretched out on the sheets Ruthie had changed that very morning.

  Ruthie, drawn in some strange way—maybe by a thought of those wonderful nights they had spent in the Honeymoon Tub—had stepped from the office into the empty parking lot. It was unseasonably pleasant for a night in July and she had turned slowly into the breeze, the Budget Motel across the highway already dark and boarded up, the lights in her own house glowing where her mother sat reading to the kids. The window to their bedroom was open, and she could see the sheers blown to one side, showing a perfect rectangle of darkness. She imagined Jim sitting in a school desk, his long legs stretched on a linoleum floor while he listened to someone lecturing on hotel management, Options During the Slow Season, a two-week course offered at the community college an hour south on 301.

  The thought of him there, a tired knowing look on his face, had made her homesick for when they had just started, homesick for all those days they had walked out to the road to hang the NO VACANCY sign or even before, those late afternoons in the camper, his how-to books thrown on one bed while the two of them curled up on the other. She had liked the way his shirts looked hanging over the other bed, his guitar up where the pillow should be. We’ll show them, they had said too many times to count; that’s the kind of promise she missed and needed. She had wanted to stretch out on the bed in Blue Moon, only Mrs. Andler had beaten her to it, and already she could hear the opening music to “Falcon Crest” coming through the Venetian- glass door; Mrs. Andler had probably fallen asleep as she did every night, the sounds of the stories keeping her from having thoughts that would keep her awake.

  So Ruthie tiptoed past Blue Moon and then ran past all the other dark doors until she got to the end, the familiar key on the ring already pressed in her palm, an involuntary act. It slipped into the lock and she crept in, soothed by the darkness for that half of a second before she heard a splash. She froze, first expecting a thief, a stranger. “Barbara,” he said, and she could not move, her legs paralyzed. It was after a series of sounds, slips and slides and groans, that her voice came back to her, only it didn’t sound like her voice at all. “Jim!” she screamed. “Jim, is that you?” And then within minutes, he stumbled out in front of her, a towel around his waist, and there in the dark bathroom before the door slammed shut, she saw the profile of a woman sitting straight up, arms crossed, hands covering her breasts.

  Jim looked as handsome at that moment as he had ever looked, and it made her sick that she even thought it. He kept opening his mouth as if he had something to say (It’s not what you think. I have no idea how this happened.) but realized that there was nothing he could say, absolutely nothing, at least at that moment, and before he had time to think of something, she turned and ran, leaving the door to number fifteen standing open.

  Her mother would have known with one glance that something had happened, and she was not up to facing her. She searched her pockets for the car keys but they were on top of her dresser, dropped as they were every night into the pink silk box that she had received when Frieda was born. At a loss, she went into the office and turned her stool towards the wall where hung the last of the auto calendars, a turquoise Chevette front and center. Below it in bold letters, MAY DAY.

  Jim came in and stood behind
her for a long time without saying a word. She could see in the reflection of the plastic-coated bulletin board that he kept reaching a hand out and then drawing it back. The reflection of his hand kept reaching right into a notice about AKC poodles, and then into one about a Jane Fonda aerobics course that took place each weeknight in the Petrie Junior High School Cafeteria. Jim said it had never happened before, a first, and though she didn’t believe that, though she sensed habit and pattern in the whole fiasco, she said so what if it was the first, did that make it right?

  When it was finally late enough that she knew her mother was asleep in the guest room, she went up to the house, Jim right behind her. She kept looking around for Barbara, kept wanting to ask how and when he met Barbara, but the night was silent. He brushed his teeth and got in their bed as if they would sleep on it, talk it over in the morning over a strong pot of coffee and frozen waffles. She stayed up the entire night, checking on Rodney and Frieda every thirty minutes, needing to put her hand out and feel their warm breath. She could not shake the picture of the two bodies, there in her bathtub, in her number fifteen. It wasn’t necessary to have a face for Barbara. Barbara had any and every face that he had ever stopped and noticed. Barbara had a perfect young lineless body, and she was brilliant and funny and talented in every way. Barbara told him that of course he should be in school, no woman in her right mind would deprive such a man. Ruthie finally slept on Frieda’s bed, her face pressed into the hard plastic face of a baby doll, a hideous baldheaded baby whose name oddly enough was Barbara Jean.

  Jim left the very next day. Ruthie woke with a stiff neck to see Frieda still asleep, mouth open and drooling onto Barbara Jean’s nightgown. She woke with the slamming of a car door and looked out in time to see him leaving, Rodney standing in the middle of the parking lot, waving. “What is going on?” her mother asked and stepped into the room, a sealed envelope in her hand, Ruthie’s name printed in his handwriting, a script as unruly as his and Rodney’s hair. “Jim barely even spoke to me this morning. Didn’t even eat his waffles and I thought he loved them.”