Crash Diet: Stories

by Jill McCorkle

  If my daddy wasn’t already dead, I’d want to kill him for not changing our name legal to something else. “She’s Dummer!” That’s what children said to me at school, and I know they’ll do it to Larrette if I don’t get married and have whoever adopt her first. Some things never change—children teasing other children and people taking a little information and turning it all around and sticking it to you like a wad of Juicy Fruit. We can’t chew gum while on the window or smoke cigarettes. “It looks bad,” my boss, Mr. Crown, says, and I could bust his crown. I work right here and yet when I decided to get me a Visa card, I had one hell of a time. To get a card you have to show that you charge up a blue streak, that you owe money here and there. “I have always paid what I owe,” I told him, only to be told that I have no credit. I went and got me a microwave and a washer and dryer on time so I could owe some money and get a card so I’d be able to write a check in the grocery store. I probably couldn’t have done that if Earl Taylor hadn’t been working there in Sears and hadn’t been taken with me. He asked me to go for dinner and I asked him to let me charge and pay on time and we shook on it, ate Chinese food, and the next day my things were delivered. Larrette had a fit over those big pasteboard boxes. I’ve been going out with Earl ever since.

  I figure Larry Cross has himself one of those sticks that’ll beep if he’s walking there on the strand and happens upon some change. That’s what he does all day long, that and take pills and sell pills and do sex stuff. I’d be stupid to tell all of that and I am not stupid. “Why did you take a check that wasn’t endorsed?” Mr. Crown asked me first thing this morning, those other girls studying their papers like they were still in school, thankful to death, I know, that I had done it and not them. “You’re not stupid, Maureen,” he said and I said, “No, sir, I am not.” I can admit to a mistake; it’s easy if you’ve got the right perspective on it all; such as, Mr. Crown sits in a leather chair all day long and never once has to touch a nasty old piece of money that has been God only knows where and might have some disease on it. If Mr. Crown sat here at the window and saw what’s going in and out of this place, who’s bouncing and who’s scrimping, then he’d be likely to mess up occasionally, too. “You’ve got to concentrate, Maureen.”

  And I’m certainly not stupid. Stupid would be if I told all I know about Larry Cross. Sex stuff, that’s the only reason I got hooked up with Larry Cross to begin with and that ties right in with that Spanish tan and hairy chest because he was right good-looking in an apelike way. He looked like those little he-men dolls, except his hair was black and he had a real full beard like that man on “Little House on the Prairie” not Little Joe Cartwright but that other man that lived all alone most of the shows and dated that schoolteacher a time or two. Larry Cross was all right but I’m not stupid. I mean, why would I marry trash? Especially trash with a last name that isn’t much better than my own. Taylor—that’s Earl’s last name and one I’m thinking I could probably live with.

  Sometimes my mouth gets all worked up with saliva handling all this money. I am not good with money. That’s my biggest fault. It’s a fault I’ve always had; if it’s in my wallet then I just naturally think it’s for spending and that outlet mall can get me in a whip-snap. Larry Cross had the fault of spending worse than me. If I was still with him he’d probably be sitting in the living room of that condo with those long legs stretched out on the coffee table and he’d be wearing nothing but some bathing trunks, letting the kitchen burn down, while he drew up a plan of how I could slip a little money every now and then. Embezzle is the word and I’d put my body on the street before I ever did that. I’ve got Larrette to think of but would he have ever thought of Larrette as something other than a Frisbee fetcher? No, no way. “I am not a dog,” I told him when he’d say, “Honey, can you reach that Frisbee?” and that Frisbee about a hundred feet from where I was sitting. “If I had a rubber arm,” I’d say.

  I’d like for somebody to run my business. It isn’t that I’m not into liberation. God knows, you can just look at me and know that I am; you can know by my credit cards in my wallet, Visa, Ivey’s, and Texaco. But still, it would be so nice to have somebody run my business, somebody who would say, “Now, honey, look here. You just thought you threw out your W-2 and here it is right under this stack of Christmas cards that you forgot to open.” Take Earl Taylor, for example.

  “I’d rather not,” Eleanore always says when I say that. Eleanore is a teacher’s aide in the elementary school and that has slowed her thoughts down some, though she’s real good with Larrette. She was the first one to get Larrette to say kitty and to learn to meow.

  Eleanore goes with a man who already has a wife, so she can’t really talk much. She only gets to see him every now and then at the Ramada Inn in Apex. She thinks he’s going to leave that wife that drives a mini-van and heads up Easter Seals every year, and those two babies and that house that looks like a little fairy cottage out in a nice part of town for her. She likes for me to get in my car and drive her by that house late at night and she’ll say things like, “Yep, TV’s on. I knew he’d be watching TV. I know that man like the back of my hand. He’s sitting up late watching the TV so he doesn’t have to get in the bed with her.” Eleanore doesn’t know any better. She’s two years older than me, thirty-one, but she doesn’t know a bit better. She hasn’t had life’s lessons taught to her like I did staying in Fuquay with Larry Cross. I shouldn’t encourage that. I shouldn’t even drive her past that house for her to fill her head with stories, but sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes we say we’re going to disguise ourselves in case a cop should pull us over right there in front of that house, so I put on some sunglasses and tie a scarf to my head and I must admit that I like to do that because it makes me feel like I look a little like Susan Hayward and so I say things like “I Want to Live!” or “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain!” or “Let’s ride on ‘Back Street’!” and Eleanore will take it in her head that if she wears a gingham shirt and sunglasses that she looks like Doris Day and she will say, “Lover Come Back!” and “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” We have some fun times, me and Eleanore, and we always have, but then I have to get serious.

  “Eleanore, you might as well look elsewhere,” I say, and she rolls those big blue eyes that are common among us Dummers (her mama was a Dummer) like I might be a little breeze whistling past her ear. You can’t tell her.

  “I don’t know what you see in Earl Taylor,” she says. “Earl Taylor is a little nerd.” I can see where she gets that. I can. To somebody who doesn’t know Earl Taylor like I know him, he might look that way because of the way his hair is so thin and weak-looking and those glasses that he has to wear. But Earl is smart and that’s how he looks. He looks like somebody that can handle figures and money. Now, he doesn’t make a bed slope way off to one side or creak and groan like Larry Cross did, and he doesn’t make me creak and groan like Larry Cross did. As a matter of fact, Earl can get in and out of a bed and you don’t even know he’s been there. Now, I don’t want anybody getting me wrong because there is no such goings on in that condo with Larrette right there in the same dwelling. The only time that Earl and me have actually spent the night until dawn in a bed together was the weekend that Eleanore kept Larrette and we went down to Ocean Drive, which might as well be Myrtle Beach the way it’s grown. “Myrtle Beach, Ocean Drive, they run right together,” Earl said, and he was right. I couldn’t have drawn a line between the two if I had had to. Other than that, we just pop over to Earl’s place every now and then. He has a bed that’s just on a frame with a green glass-shaded floor lamp right there beside it so he can read in bed. Earl likes that green glass lamp shade because it’s related to his profession, but that green glass is the only adornment of any kind that he owns. Plain. It’s all real plain, but it’s clean.

  Earl is smarter than Larry Cross was even before he killed off so many brain cells. I looked it all up in the library while I was in Fuquay. I looked up drugs and one thing led to anothe
r till pretty soon I was reading on brain cells and come to find out that once they’re dead, they’re dead. As dead as that rubber tree that Eleanore has in her living room thinking it’s gonna bush back and be something. Larry Cross will never be something.

  Earl Taylor is already something; he’s in charge of finances at Sears. He banks here with us and so I’ve seen his savings account and it is a fat one. That doesn’t surprise me a bit because it’s obvious that he doesn’t throw money away; it’s obvious by the way that his place is so plain and the way that he wears clothes that mix and mingle to the degree that it seems like he has on the same outfit every single day. When I think of Earl, I think khaki and oxford cloth. When I think of Larry Cross, I think Levi’s and loud Hawaiian shirts, and loud-colored swim trunks and gym shorts. Flashy—Larry Cross is flashy with the money he doesn’t have and that little Spitfire convertible in bright orange that I was forever needing to jump with my VW Bug. Earl Taylor drives a Mazda, a nice, neat, plain, navy Mazda that he vacuums on a regular basis. Sometimes we’ll be on our way out to eat and Earl will whip right in the Drive-Thru Klean-a-Kar and pop a quarter into that vacuum and run over things. He took the shoes right off of my feet and cleaned up the bottom of them for me. Night and day. That’s what Larry Cross and Earl Taylor are.

  “You are making a big mistake if you get hooked up with him,” Eleanore tells me. Eleanore comes over every Tuesday night and fills my washer full of slinky nightwear she only wears in Apex. “What you like about Earl is how he isn’t like Larry. Now tell the truth.” Eleanore always says that, “Now tell the truth,” but she only wants your truth; she turns a deaf ear if you discuss her truth.

  “That’s not the reason,” I tell her. “Earl is a good businessman.”

  “And Larry Cross was not,” she’ll snap, though I know he must’ve done all right to have had that stream of weirdos coming by all the time. Of course, I never say that.

  “Earl is as neat as a pin.”

  “And Larry Cross was a slob,” she says and doesn’t even pause to breathe. “And I’ll give you the last one. Larry Cross, as worthless as he is, is good-looking and Earl Taylor is not.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I tell her, though I know better. “Beauty is only skin deep and Earl goes through and through.”

  “How? Name one way.” Eleanore is so persistent with perspectives other than her own.

  “He fixed it so I could get myself established with credit.”

  “That’s his job. Name another.”

  “He’s sweet to Larrette,” I say, and Eleanore can’t deny that one because she’s never seen Earl around Larrette that much.

  “What does he think about the way you spend money? What does he think about the way you order just about everything that Yield House has to offer?”

  “Earl doesn’t care,” I tell her and that’s true. Half the time Earl doesn’t even notice, which is, I guess, another difference between him and Larry Cross. If Larry Cross was to slap those long legs up on a brand new butler’s table, he’d at least notice. He’d say, “Where’d you get this?” and I’d say what I always said, “At the getting place.” Larry Cross didn’t know a thing about the business because I made the money and I paid the bills and I just about lost my mind doing it.

  There’s a woman leaning out of her car window right now with a check and a deposit slip in her hand and a diamond that would make anybody proud sparkling on her finger. “Hi, Gail, how are you today?” I say before I even open the drawer and pull it back in. I know her without even looking at the name on her deposit slip because she comes in every Monday with her husband’s check that he got on Friday. William Anderson, MD, and her name is right there under his, Gail Mason-Anderson. That check is something, too; I bet the United States of this country makes more off of one of William Anderson’s checks than I make in four months gross. They live on Winona in a two-story house that’s got a pool in the back. I know because I looked for that house when I rode Eleanore by to see whether or not her boyfriend was really out of town on the weekend when they were supposed to meet in Apex. He wasn’t. He was right there in his backyard, wearing an apron and carrying barbecue tongs, with cars lined up on either side of the street. “He’s out of town all right,” I told Eleanore.

  “It’s her,” she said. “She makes him do all these social things with people he can’t stand. He does it to keep her off his back just a little bit.”

  “He lied,” I told her.

  “He didn’t want me to be hurt by it.” She had taken off her Doris Day glasses and wiped her eyes. “He’s protective of my feelings.”

  I sang “Que Será, Será” but it didn’t perk her up. It made her mad, to be perfectly honest, and so she lit into Earl Taylor like a fly on you know what, because that’s what she always does when her own life is going bad and she has no choice but to admit it.

  “I hope you had a nice weekend, Gail,” I say when I slip back that deposit slip minus the 150 dollars that I put in one of our little envelopes. Now she’s going over to Kroger’s and put that 150 dollars to use, does it every Monday. I know Gail Mason-Anderson like the back of my hand.

  “I did,” Gail says, but she doesn’t look at me because she’s checking to make sure that I gave her the 150 she requested. Seven twenties and one ten, can’t get any closer than that, though I’m not offended when people do that. I’m glad people sit right there and check it because if she got to Kroger’s and then came back it would be her word against mine and Mr. Crown would chew me out whether I was in the right or wrong. “Think of the ways people could trick us out of money,” I told him one day and it’s the truth. There are numerous ways that you might trick a teller out of money and it is my job to keep that from happening. Not that I think Gail Mason-Anderson would do any such thing. She doesn’t have to. I bet she and William Anderson have a man who looks a lot like Earl Taylor to just figure it all up for them.

  I like to think of having a hyphenated name myself. Maureen Dummer hyphen something. Maureen Dummer-Taylor with right above it Earl Sinco Taylor. “Your name sounds like a plumbing product,” I told him, only to find that I had hurt his feelings. Sinco is a name from somewhere in his mama’s family, and since his mama is dead, it made him real defensive that I should laugh at that name.

  “Thank you,” Gail says. I read her lips because I’ve already cut off my speaker. She drives a diesel-powered Audi, and it wrecks my ears to hear it going on and on and ricocheting off the little drive-through area. I just nod and watch Gail Mason-Anderson go straight to Kroger’s.

  Eighty-five degrees F and 11:37. I decide I’ll go and take my lunch hour a little early. I do that every now and again when it’s important like today when I am not going to Eckerd’s and order a grilled cheese but am going home and make sure there’s no fire started. It will take the whole hour but it’s the only way that I can stay in my seat the rest of the afternoon, not to mention that I have got a little nic craving that I can’t hold off anymore. I don’t even bring my cigarettes into this building because it would be such a temptation, not to mention that Trish, who sits at the other little opening, wears one of those badges that has a picture with a slash through it. A picture paints a thousand words and I don’t need to be hit over the head. Trish has a husband and that’s how she can afford to be so outspoken. She hates cigarettes and loves manatees, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, Statue of Liberty, 96LITE, and Jesus. You can read it all right there on the bumper of her car. I personally would not open my life like a book to the world. I have a sticker that says GET OFF MY REAR! and that’s all. Trish brakes for animals but won’t answer a person when they say they’re going to lunch. She just looks at the clock machine and rolls her eyes like I’m going to abuse the system and stay out until one instead of returning at 12:53, which will be exactly an hour from when my car exits the lot, give or take a few minutes. Trish supports the system, the public schools, the Little Theater, the President, and whales. All I know about Trish I’ve lear
ned right off of that car. Her savings account shared with Edward Hunter cannot touch the savings account of Gail Mason-Anderson and William or that of Earl Sinco Taylor.

  Now I feel like I can’t get this Bug to go fast enough. It’s like all of a sudden I’m in a panic to see my condo still standing with my potted geranium on the front stoop and my straw hat with lacy ribbons on my door. Welcome and welcome relief it is when I turn this corner a little and see it. What I don’t welcome is Eleanore standing on the sidewalk with what looks like catsup or poster paints there on the front of her blouse that I gave her for her birthday two years ago. That blouse not only is out of style but if it was in style it is far too frilly for a Monday morning in the elementary school. “It’s a church blouse,” I told her and she gave me the Dummer eye.

  Eleanore has always taken things personally. The time I told her that there is a difference in the country look that is authentic and the country look that is a hodge-podge of too much of a good thing, she took it personally and I certainly didn’t mean it for her personally, even though she does not need one more rooster looking like it’s about to crow tacked up on her kitchen wall. I think it’s symbolic that she’s so into roosters, all that strutting and taking hold of every hen and that’s not even touching the biblical symbol, three crows and you’re out.

  “Where have you been?” she asks just as soon as I step out of the Bug and this heat hits my head like a ton of bricks. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” I tell her. I do more than tell her. I state it like the fact that it is. This isn’t the first time Eleanore has pulled such a visit only to turn it around and make it my fault that she’s been waiting. And where else would I have been but at the bank, here in this navy linen suit with matching pumps, and little canvas clutch? Every fiber of my Monday-through-Friday wardrobe says “teller.”

  I get up close and I can see that Eleanore has been crying, and it takes me a second to remember why I trucked clean across town home—the Mr. Coffee. “Come on in,” I tell her. “I’m afraid I left the Mr. Coffee on.” Eleanore follows me in and just about falls down on a Fisher-Price bathtub frog which Larrette meows to. We both have tried to teach her to say “frog” but she is as stubborn in that way as Larry Cross. “Gotta love that Squeaky,” he used to say to me and throw those gorilla arms around my hips. He called me Squeaky because he thought I looked like that woman that tried to shoot Gerald Ford that time, and I don’t. “I love my Squeaky,” he would say because he didn’t have much sense, but God, just the thought of that bed breaking down and not even fazing that man makes my heart skip a beat or two.