Crash Diet: Stories Read online

  It’s on. Plugged in and on, that pot bottom dried into nothing but crisp brown sludge. “I did it,” I say to Eleanore, who is at that kitchen table with a Kleenex up to her face. “Thank God, there wasn’t a fire.”

  “He’s gone back to his wife,” Eleanore sobs. “Don’t you say ‘I told you so’ one time since I’m going ahead and saying it for you.”

  I’m a little confused since to my knowledge he never left his wife to begin with. “I didn’t know he had left her.”

  “He left her a year ago. He left her that first night we stayed in Apex and he told me that he loved me like he had never loved anybody.” Eleanore primps up and sobs again, wiping her mascara on my linen pineapple-print napkins. “I mean he still lived there, with her, but it was me he loved.” I listen to Eleanore telling the details of it all while the Mr. Coffee pot cools enough that I can rinse out that crud, but while Eleanore is going on my mind is thinking over that word love, and how it is used and misused and abused. Earl Taylor has said that word one time when it referred to me. Once, and I’m thinking that that isn’t good enough. I’m thinking of “Love my Squeaky” and Larry Cross might have meant it as much as if he’d said “Love my Carpet,” but still he said it.

  “He said if he could live his life over that he would be with me,” Eleanore says and looks up from my napkin, black smudges all over it. “He said it on the phone and then there came a sweetheart rose to the school office. No card. It’s right out there in my car if you want to see it.”

  “I don’t need to see it,” I tell her. “But what would you have done if I hadn’t come to lunch?”

  “You usually do come to lunch,” Eleanore says. “You’re usually here by eleven-thirty.”

  “Well,” I say because I’ve never thought that she would busy herself to pick up on my daily patterns.

  “Mr. Coffee, iron, oven, it’s always something.” Eleanore goes over and gets Larrette’s little frog and hugs it. It squeaks. I hear a squeak squeaky loud and clear, Larry Cross and bedsprings that Earl Taylor couldn’t squeak if he did a somersault with bricks tied around his neck. “I know you like a book, Maureen.”

  “I reckon you do,” I say and rinse that napkin out in cold water and a little Stanley spot remover. “Must be the Dummer in us.”

  “I know Tuesday is my wash night but I was wondering if I could come over tonight instead,” Eleanore says, and there’s no way I can tell her no. It’s my night to cook a little something for me and Earl and for us to watch “Cagney and Lacy” and I don’t even care. I don’t even care that I’m going to break that pattern starting tonight, and if Gail Mason-Anderson had some sense she’d break her habit and occasionally go to Harris Teeter, where they’ve got fresh seafood coming in by the barrel.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” I tell her and go over to touch that pot to see if it’s cooled down enough that it won’t crack.

  “What about Earl Taylor?”

  “Well, Earl Taylor can do something else. Earl Taylor can vacuum his Mazda, for example.” I run warm water first and take my Tuffy pad to the bottom of that pot. “Let’s go to Harris Teeter and buy some scallops,” I say when I’m so happy that pot doesn’t crack and splinter in my hands. “Let’s get some wine and some cheese, not dairy counter but deli cheese. And let’s go in Ivey’s and buy you some cologne and a blouse that’s in style.” Eleanore has taken that personally I can tell, but she is too upset to argue.

  “I can’t buy a new blouse,” she says, her eyes watering again. “I don’t get paid until the end of the month.”

  “We’ll just put it right on my card,” I tell her. “If it weren’t for you, Larrette probably wouldn’t be speaking at all. I’m expecting any day now that she’s going to get up and say frog and Kermit and everything else that goes with it.” That pot comes clean as a whistle and while it’s air drying, I go and call Trish to say I won’t be back.

  “I’ve taken ill,” I tell her. “I could barely get myself to the bathroom.”

  “Didn’t you take ill last week?” Trish asks, and I figure she doesn’t even deserve an answer. “Are you expecting?” Trish asks, and I can’t help but laugh a little in between making my voice sound sick, low and slow and sick; I’ve always been able to make my voice that way instinctively. I’d do my voice that way and Larry Cross would make all kinds of promises that he never kept. I did it to Earl once and he didn’t even notice. I’d rather be told a lie than nothing at all, and Trish should feel that way, too.

  “I may be,” I tell her. “You might have hit the nail on the head, Trish.”

  “Don’t you date Earl Taylor down at Sears?”

  “Yes, yes I do.” I tell Trish that I think I’ll go to the doctor and that I’ll see her in the morning. But first I tell her that my cousin, Eleanore Tripper, works in the public schools and once saw a manatee down in Florida. This is the most me and Trish have ever even conversed. Now I call Earl to say I’m tied up for the evening.

  “But it’s Monday,” he says. “‘Cagney and Lacy’ comes on.” He states all that as a fact and I realize that all Earl has ever done to me is state facts. A fact is just a base, a foot in the door, to perspectives and instincts. Earl Taylor has got a lot to learn. “What am I going to do?” he asks, and I can tell he is in a hurry because he is not one to squander work time.

  “You could vacuum your car.”

  “I did that yesterday.”

  “You could go shopping.”

  “I don’t need anything,” he says, which is a lie, though he thinks it is the truth. He needs some pictures on his wall and to rip up that shag carpet, finish those floors, and buy himself some pretty braided rugs. He could use a grapevine wreath, a shower curtain other than a white cheapo liner, and some pretty towels that match. He needs a headboard and an Alexander Julian shirt and some contact lenses and some hair conditioner that’ll give body. He needs a body, a membership at a spa, barbells.

  “Oh now, Earl,” I say. “I bet if you went to the mall you could find some things you need.”

  “I don’t believe in just going out and spending money,” he says and sounds a little exasperated, and I know just how he’s looking with that exasperation, red-eared, bleary-eyed, and dull in an official way. “And I really can’t talk. I’m working. You should be working.”

  I start to tell him that he could gain some weight but I don’t. I just hang up, put on my sunglasses, and go get my scarf to tie on my head. “Let’s wear our outfits to the Harris Teeter,” I say. “No telling who might see me and run by First Union to tell it.” For the first time Eleanore smiles; it’s a weak smile and I know the whole night is going to be potato chips and Cokes and her tears working like a faucet. She puts on her glasses and says she’ll pretend she’s wearing a gingham shirt, and off we go once I check to make sure the hot rollers or Larrette’s vaporizer aren’t still going.

  We pass the North Carolina Bank and Trust and their sign says 88 F and I can believe it. It’s hot and clear and feels so good I could stretch out like a dog with little to no clothes on and imagine Larry Cross out walking some strand with his beeper stick and thinking of me, thinking that he was a fool not to know what he had when he had it. I know that’s probably a lie but right now I like to believe it. Right now I can believe in that lie and keep it all in perspective.

  “Lover Come Back,” Eleanore says, and though the tears come to her eyes, she sings a little of “Que Será, Será.” Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?

  “I Want to Live,” I tell her, and I toot that VW horn to do a “Que Será, Será,” and that’s no lie. We pass by First Union and I hold my head high since I’ve got on my costume, and I don’t even look to see what time of day it may be and I don’t even care that that fair-skinned arm of mine hanging out the window could get burned to a Jane Eyre crisp on a day like today. And I wouldn’t trade places with Trish sitting there under the green lights, or Gail Mason-Anderson with her cabinets overflowed with Kroger bags or her purse filled up with deposit sl
ips with my initials, or my cousin Eleanore, who is staring out the window through a steady stream of tears while she tries to get a better perspective on things.

  Departures

  Anna Craven has been going places all alone for three years now—airports, shopping malls, fairs, political rallies, any place where she can be surrounded by people without having to interact with any of them. She only works two days a week (could be retired if she desired), so it’s not like the outings rob anybody or anything. Her children are scattered off in every direction living their own lives, and her time is something that can’t easily be filled with cooking or talking on the phone.

  “Why don’t you watch TV?” they asked over the holidays and pointed to that great big set they had given her the year before. “I do,” she told them and did not try to explain how there was more drama to be seen in public places.

  “It’s not healthy, all this time alone,” her son-in-law, the therapist, had said, “There are plenty of other women who are . . .” He faltered for the right words, widows? all alone? “Why are you punishing yourself?”

  Punishment. The punishment was that Walter was no longer with her—period, the end. Divorcees go out for drinks and dancing—even the ones her age—but the widows, the all alone, are supposed to drink coffee and play mah-jongg, sing in the church choir, never think about or wish for intercourse other than of a verbal or spiritual nature. Nobody even uses that word in front of a widow—intercourse. Sometimes she wants to tell her son-in-law the therapist that that is punishment; perfectly good solid words reduced to nothing. Punishment was that day three years ago when she got the call that Walter had died. He was on business, the West Coast, his last looks fastened on some awful hotel furniture, the telephone cord beyond his reach.

  She had just gotten home from the elementary school when the call came. The kids at school called her “the traveling musician” because she made her rounds to each class once a week. Her music lessons were usually related to the closest season or holiday at hand, but she also had her favorites to be sung in between these times, songs such as “Born Free” or “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” That one was wonderful to hear, a chorus of little high-pitched voices singing words they did not fully understand, much like “Mares Eat Oats.”

  That particular day she had spent the classtime singing “Gobble Gobble Turkey” while the students drew their own versions of the first Thanksgiving, turkeys whose tail feathers were the outline of a hand, each finger colored a different hue. Her mind had been on the upcoming holiday and what kind of sleeping arrangements they would make for the growing family. Her daughter, Carol (wife of the therapist), was pregnant with their second child. Carol had said that Kim, the fifteen-month-old, only ate pizza crust and that Trey (the therapist, whose name was William Bradford the third) said that it was important they let Kim eat her way through this, that if they used any force of any kind she might never eat vegetables. Anna and Walter had sat up many late nights talking about how absurd their ideas were, how it seemed such a shame that all of Kim’s toys as an infant had been in basic black and white because this is what stimulates newborns. Anna kept wanting to remove the odd dull toys and replace them with fluffy pastel bears and cats.

  Trey had videotaped every minute detail of childbirth. He carried the placenta home in a lawn-and-garden bag; (though curious, Anna never asked what they did with it). He studied the child’s every movement, quick to tell anyone who would listen what Kim could and could not see, could and could not know. Walter’s greatest fear had been that they would have a son and name him something something the fourth.

  “And then what?” Walter had asked off and on for a month. “Will they call him Quar?” He tossed his travel kit into his suitcase, then stretched out on the bed and laughed. “Or queer?” He shook his head, hands clasped behind his neck as he watched her put on her nightgown. They had always done that, locked looks in the mirror as she undressed for bed.

  Their older son, Ben, had just gotten his divorce and was going to bring the new girlfriend and her four-year-old. The girlfriend had told Anna in their one and only conversation on the telephone that she had had a child on her own because she had not yet met the right man. “Little did I know the right man was still married at the time,” she had said and laughed, Ben chuckling with her in the background. “Divorce is so prevalent I knew I’d find somebody eventually; you know, somebody who could be a father figure, not of course that I think a father figure is important. They aren’t. Men are not always necessary.” Can you imagine? Anna had asked after hanging up the phone. The gall. The poor taste. Walter said he would like to put this woman and Trey in a room and lock the door, take bets on which one would survive the night. Anna said she’d just like to tell them not to come, but Walter talked her out of it; he said it would be one of those occasions they would enjoy after the fact.

  At the time, their younger son, Wayne, seemed to be the only sane one. He was just out of law school and studying for the bar. Except for an earring in one ear, he was classically clean-cut with a wardrobe of 100 percent cotton and name brands. The earring—a tiny diamond chip like a star—prompted Walter to say he had a hole in his head, but it was a joke. They talked a lot about how Wayne had the most sense. How he was the caring child. “A little depressed, maybe,” Walter said often. “But he’ll pull out of it. Got a lot of pressure on him.”

  She had been thinking about the children coming home when the phone rang. She was standing in the kitchen, one crayoned turkey folded neatly in her purse. She was thinking about stuffing—in the bird or out of the bird? Carol (who said that pregnancy had brought with it a great distaste for poultry) liked the stuffing (or had liked it) crumbling out from the bird; Walter preferred it fixed in a pan (dressing it is called) because he said he hated the thought of scooping around inside the bird. He said he couldn’t stand to think of either end of the creature and refused to eat giblet gravy because he did not eat any of the working parts, no organs. Trey did not like any two items touching on his plate and often had to have lots of separate little bowls like in a cafeteria. He also talked a great deal about roughage. She was envisioning both—emptying the turkey out of Walter’s vision—but also having a nice pan of dressing cut into squares. She would prepare a huge salad and some bran muffins and, if that wasn’t enough roughage, would offer a Metamucil cocktail. The phone ringing was an interruption, and she was slow to grasp the purpose of the call.

  Oh dear God, she remembers saying and, with the phone cradled under her chin, had slowly and systematically shredded that paper turkey. She had stood, not knowing what to do with her hands or with the turkey that was thawing on the counter. That very morning she had changed the sheets on the bed. The pillows were fluffed to his liking, TV Guide was placed there on the nightstand, clean pajamas were folded in his drawer. The thought of their bedroom, the minute details of their world, made her feel unbearably alive. Walter’s raincoat was hanging there in the hall. She ran past it to the stairs. Their bedroom was just as she had left it that morning when the sun streamed through the window, and she was so sorry that she had not waited to wash, so terribly sorry that she did not have his pajamas and the sheets left on the bed from day before yesterday.

  She was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang and then it seemed that within minutes they were all there, these people, these children she had birthed while unconscious, with Walter in the waiting room chain-smoking with the other men—these children they had conceived in the darkness of their bed: Carol in that tiny studio apartment overlooking the A&P parking lot; Ben, in their first house, the small two-bedroom Cape Cod where she left be hind a rosebush she had brought from her grandmother’s house (when she went back and requested it, the new owners refused); and finally Wayne, in a rented cottage one row back from the ocean, salt wind whipping the sticky draperies.

  Ben came home without the girlfriend, and the only thing Anna said to him that night was “How dare you ask to bring such a trollop to my
house when we still haven’t gotten over your divorce?” She told Trey and Carol that if they didn’t stop talking about gastrointestinal and psychiatric things that they would have to get out, they were making her sick. She told Wayne that she wished he’d pierce his other ear so that she didn’t have the inclination when looking at him to tilt her head in attempt to make up for his lack of symmetry. She asked him please to guard her bedroom door so that no one would come in to talk to her or to try and get her to talk or eat or turn on a light. She didn’t cook a turkey; she didn’t leave her room. It was the lousiest Thanksgiving known to man.

  Walter’s favorite movie was Rear Window. He said the movie reminded him of them and the way they sat on the balcony of that rented beach house and watched the lights in the row of houses across the way. They had gone to the same house every summer when the kids were growing up. It was not a big cottage, just a small white wooden house up on tall spindly-looking pilings; it was one row back from the ocean, a short walk to the pier.

  “Well, I’m no Grace Kelly,” Anna had said and laughed. The first year they had watched an older couple across the way; they had laughed at the way it seemed they dressed for dinner, the woman in a floor-length floral skirt and the man in a white jacket and white shoes. “Like Pat Boone,” Walter had howled. He was only thirty-six then and his skin was a dark tan. “Imagine getting dressed up like that at the beach.”