Crash Diet: Stories

by Jill McCorkle

  “Really, Mother,” Carol says and Anna wants to slap her, to shake her, to tell her for godssakes get a divorce. And Ben says, “Really, Mother,” and she wants to ask how they can be so sympathetic with an alcoholic who murdered his family and not with a woman who had a wonderful happy marriage (complete with wonderful sex and happy private jokes) to a wonderful man and who wants to talk about it? Wayne says, “Really, Mother,” and she wants to shake him, to ask how a son of hers and Walter’s went such a route, holes in his ears and men on his arm. She wants to say, Don’t tell me what loneliness means. Don’t you even try. Dear God. Some nights she can’t sleep because her mind flashes picture after picture, like slides. Walter. Wayne as an infant. Walter looking down at her, sheets twisted around their legs. Wayne running towards them with his suitcase, happy to leave summer camp, never to go again. Walter’s eyes closing as he exhales, his heart beating rapidly, her hands on his back, pulling him toward her. Wayne in a shiny blue graduation gown. Walter’s eyes closed as his heart beats rapidly, the telephone cord beyond his grasp, and Wayne with a male lover, sheets twisted around their legs. She shudders and cries out, unable to bear either picture.

  She is at the airport at a gate that is crowded. Sunlight is streaming through the big glass windows. There is a man with a bouquet of flowers. A young girl wearing fatigue pants and a tight black T-shirt is slouched in a chair with her tote bag on the seat beside her. She’s reading some kind of self-help book (Making a Place for Yourself) and will probably do so all the way to Dallas (it’s clear from the boarding pass she clutches that she is leaving). Somewhere in this world (somewhere in Dallas/Fort Worth maybe) this girl has a place and there is someone waiting for her, her name running through that person’s mind this very minute. The last time Anna was here she had witnessed a scene involving a lost child. The little girl’s description was given over the loudspeaker time after time as the airport employee hugged her close and tried to get her to stop crying.

  While the child sobbed, Anna had watched and wondered what Walter would have said when Wayne announced that he had a male lover? Alone, she had held her breath and counted long seconds, swallowed, focused. She said, “We,” and then faltered with the plural, “we want you to be happy, Wayne. Nothing more.” If Walter had been there, his large strong arm around her, she would not have been so understanding and sensitive. She would not have thought to remind herself how fragile it all is, fragile and precious. The lost child was red-faced. Her nose was running onto the stuffed toy she clutched. The airport employee looked at Anna and shook her head. “Can you believe this?” she asked. “Can you imagine a parent not keeping a better watch?”

  “Oh God, there you are!” A woman rushed into the area, her face white and frantic, mascara ringing her eyes. “Oh, baby, baby.” She grabbed the child and then turned to the airport employee. “My husband thought I had her,” she was explaining, out of breath and needing to redeem herself. “I thought she was with him.” The husband was there within seconds, a trail of suitcases strewn behind him as he wrapped his arms around the two. “Thank God,” the man said.

  Sometimes Anna imagines that she will turn in a crowded place and see him there, that they will reach each other with a babbling of how it was all a misunderstanding, that he didn’t really die. “Oh, thank God,” she sometimes wakes up saying, somehow confused that the dream where he was checking the air in her car tires is reality and the empty bed is not.

  “See you tonight, honey,” Walter says and hangs up the phone, turns to the simple moderately priced room. On the table by the window is his breakfast, orange juice and toast. He loves eggs and bacon but is watching his cholesterol. He quit smoking years ago. He walks at least a mile a day. He does everything just the way it’s supposed to be done. In the closet is his blue suit, white shirt, red paisley tie. He has been traveling for years. The insurance business has been good for him, good for them financially. Retirement is just around the corner.

  I left my heart in San Francisco. The third grade teacher thought it was an odd selection but couldn’t help but smile at the chorus. They drew pictures, hearts like valentines riding up to the stars. “You can’t leave your heart nowhere,” a boy, still pink-faced from recess, said and grinned. “You’d die.” He laughed, the whole class joining in. The teacher looked at Anna in a shocked worried way, which she brushed off with the wave of her hand. She thought of Mrs. Vanderbilt, her hands firm on the railing, her chin lifted as she stared out at the ocean.

  “That’s true,” she said. “You would die without your heart.”

  “Oh, no.” A girl at the front shook her head, her hand up to her chest as if to check her own beating heart, while Anna attempted to explain figurative.

  “What’s a cable car?” Another child asked.

  Now, people are filing through the jetway door, spilling into the hall with waves and shrieks. The man who has stood so quietly with the bouquet is moving forward, arms reaching for a young woman in blue jeans, her hair cropped in a thick blunt cut. “I thought I’d never get here,” she says and kisses him full on the mouth, the flowers pressed between them. The girl in fatigues looks around as if annoyed by all the chatter and goes back to her book. Her flight can’t board until all of these people have gotten off and the plane is tidied.

  Anna thinks of the couple reunited with their lost child as if she knows them, as if they are distant relatives or old acquaintances. She imagines them at home, their house recently painted, a yard recently mowed, a bed with sheets just washed, their dinner thawing in the kitchen. They have gotten over what happened at the airport last week and have stopped studying each other with the unspoken, unintended accusation; but they still wake with a sudden rush of horror with all the things that could have happened that day. “You have such a morbid mind, sweetheart,” Walter once said. The kids were at camp and she kept expecting a phone call: a broken arm, salmonella, stitches in the chin.

  But that morning as she collected her construction paper and went to school, she had no such thoughts, no expectations of what was to come. She tries so hard to see it all. “See you tonight, honey,” he says, and he hangs up the receiver. She imagines a hotel bedspread with matching striped draperies, art deco prints in chrome frames. He would have the draperies opened with the sunlight coming through. He would stand in front of the window and watch people coming and going on the street below. Maybe someone was watching him across the way. Maybe someone from another window in another building saw him turn suddenly. He felt sick and he turned to put down his coffee, but he didn’t get there and he reached for the phone, their familiar number going through his mind like a secret message or song. Everywhere Anna looks, there is the message: life is fragile, so very very fragile. She watches the people exit, the crowd thinning temporarily before those departing make their way to the gate. Already the couple with the bouquet is at the end of the hallway, arms entwined as the flowers swing back and forth. Now the girl in the fatigues sits up straight, clutching her boarding pass.

  “You going to Dallas?” the girl asks, and Anna is startled, turns quickly from the big glass window and shakes her head.

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah.” The girl’s voice is much higher than Anna would have expected, much younger. “Unfortunately.”

  “Oh.” Anna waits for an explanation but the girl doesn’t give it.

  “I guess your person missed the flight,” the girl says and points to the closed door.

  “Yes.” Anna feels the need to move now. To push herself down the hall and outside into the fresh autumn air. “I hope you have a good trip.”

  The girl smirks, runs a hand through her short stiff hair. “I won’t. It’s my dad. You know I have to go spend that weekend once every three months.” She waits for Anna to nod and then goes back to her book.

  Anna begins walking. By her next visit here, she will have constructed a setting for this girl where she will be happily reunited with her father. The father and girl will ask in amazement
why they didn’t see years ago how silly their problems were. They are parent and child—family. They will drive into Dallas and eat at a fine restaurant. Now Anna feels like a ghost, like someone haunting someone else’s life, and so she concentrates on turkey and stuffing and her own children and grandchildren and schoolchildren, and how she needs to construct or reconstruct her own scene. It’s been exactly three years; now the fourth begins. There are details she will forget and need to reinvent in a simpler, gentler way. It will be a smoother progression, the nerves worn down. She passes gate after gate, each one identical.

  If she could pick a time, they would load the station wagon and drive to the coast, the kids crowded in the back seat. It would be a long bright day—the children’s squeals muffled by the roar of the surf—followed by a cool shower and a nap. And in the late afternoon as the children sat in a circle playing cards, as Walter still napped, she would cross the street and go stand by Mrs. Vanderbilt on the deck. She would take notes on loneliness (is it really possible to live with it?) and then rush back to her own bed to find Walter there, her love reaffirmed with his every breath.

  Anna decides while walking the long hallway that she will not stuff her turkey. She will have a turkey breast; there will be a pan of dressing on the side. She will not have to put the heart, liver, and gizzard (those working parts) into her gravy because she won’t have them in the first place. People are boarding at gate C-10. She will bake a chocolate cake so big and so rich that everyone will need to lie down right after dinner. They will nap and she will sit quietly on the patio, content to rest after a busy day, relieved to have some silence after all the talk, all the questions she has asked her children about their lives. There is a young woman in the hallway, her beige pumps a perfect match with her suit, diamond ring flashing on her smooth young hand. “See you tomorrow night,” she calls and blows a kiss to the tall dark-haired man stepping into the boarding tunnel. He lifts a hand and is gone.

  Comparison Shopping

  The big news in my neighborhood is that Tom and Sue are going to be on The Newlywed Game or rather, The New Newlywed Game, as Sue has corrected me over the past four months. It all started as a joke, a joke which, I might add, stems from my own little anecdote about what I had heard a woman answer one night while I was scanning my cable for something to watch. Bob Eubanks asked, “What vowel does your husband most resemble while asleep?” and the woman said, “S.” Bob Eubanks said, “Oh, the vowel S,” and the woman nodded. The next woman said a I, not a little t but a capital T, because her husband scrunched his shoulders up such that his arms were even with his head. Bob said, “Oh yes, the vowel T,” and once again got an emphatic nod.

  We were all sitting beside the subdivision pool when I told that. Jack Crawford, who has too often been told that he bears a striking resemblance to Pat Sajak, and who had had too many drinks, laughed so hard that he fell into the pool, which prompted other people to follow. That’s how it is here in Windhaven Estates; we all do the same things. Like if one person hangs out a flag just for the hell of it on some nondescript day, then by noon, all the flags are flying. I’m starting to get the hang of it all now, though it hasn’t been easy.

  Sue and I have been friends for years, one of those odd friendships where you have absolutely nothing in common and yet, for whatever reason, genuinely care about each other. We could not be more different, which is why I never would have imagined that I would one day begin imitating her life.

  When we were in college, roommates by lottery, Sue was Halloween Queen and I was the editor of a small campus newspaper called ♀. Being Halloween Queen was a lot better than it sounds. It was a big deal if you were into the fraternity/sorority organizations; Sue’s picture was plastered all over campus on a ballot with lots of other beauty queens, and every guy in every fraternity voted. She sat on the back of a convertible and rode down Main Street, smiling and waving and yelling, “Go Greek!,” while guys whistled and made what I have always called catcalls. She wanted me to write an article about her and put her picture on the front of ♀, but I saw this story as a conflict of interests. Sue was the perfect example of what my newspaper was trying to destroy: she was coy and superficial and wore makeup every day of the week.

  “Did you see me in the parade?” Sue asked as soon as she got back to our dorm room. She was standing there with an open bottle of champagne in one hand and a long-stemmed red rose in the other. It never occurred to her that I might be concentrating on something just because I was typing full blast. “Norlina? Yoo-hoo! Are you there?” She was using that little singsong voice of hers that seemed to charm every man on the face of the earth and just made me want to get sick. She hiked up her sequined evening dress and sat Indian style on her bed.

  “No,” I said and cut off my typewriter to emphasize that she had interrupted me. “I had too much work to do to go and stand on a corner and watch a parade.”

  “Well, pardon my ass.” Sue traced her finger around the edge of her Love Story poster where Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neil sat staring into our dorm room. “No, no. Let me take that back.” She giggled and pulled her thick blond hair up on her head, then pointed to the little quote at the bottom of the poster. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

  “Sue,” I said and gave her my most serious look, which wasn’t difficult in those days given those thick ugly glasses I used to wear. “I am writing an article about how women need to be appreciated for more than their physical appearance.” As soon as I heard myself say this I wished I hadn’t. Sue had been trying to get me into contact lenses for over a year, and even with her head reeling from too much champagne, she took in my appearance from head to toe and burst out laughing.

  “I’m not laughing at you, Norlina,” she said, but then she didn’t say anything else either, just told me to make sure she was up in an hour to get ready for her date, and then drifted off into a snoreless beautiful oblivion that I supposed came with having nothing else on your mind. It did, every now and then, enter my mind that I might be a touch bitter, seeing as how I had had one date my entire life, a blind date, which ended abruptly when the guy excused himself to a pay phone and came back to say that his grandfather just died and he had to go to Kansas.

  “Kansas?” Sue asked when I returned early and interrupted the candlelight dinner she was serving on top of my desk to one of her many admirers, a little jar of red caviar opened and spilling on my only copy of my latest editorial. “He’s not from Kansas.”

  “No,” her date said. “And his only grandfather died last year.”

  “Oh,” I said. As liberated and open-minded and realistic as you may be, there are those times when the sting of humiliation is unavoidable. And I felt it right then. I said something like, Oh screw him, what a doofus he was anyway, and I gathered up my work that had little red eggs clinging to it, and went off to a place where I often worked at night, the hall bathroom. It was not a bad place to work: the tile floor was cool on hot nights, the overhead lights were really bright; if you got thirsty or wanted to wash your face, there were fifteen sinks and fifteen mirrors. Whenever I was upset, I liked to write letters to Marabel Morgan and tell her how she was about as far from being a Total Woman as Clint Eastwood. How can you be total without a brain, just tell me that? How can you stand to look at yourself in the mirror? I was having trouble concentrating and so I went to look in the mirror at myself. I was about to splash my face (an easy thing to do if you don’t wear makeup) and, just as I was leaning down, I caught a glimpse of Sue there in the doorway. She had a caviar cracker in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

  “Norlina, Norlina, Norlina,” she said and came and draped her arm around my neck, caviar cracker swinging near my eye. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Did I say it was?” I stood up straight and stared at her. I was still in date attire, denim skirt and this prissy monogrammed T-shirt that Sue had given me for my birthday and insisted that I wear. I was wearing her lime green espadrilles,
which matched the T-shirt. If I had let Sue, I would have had a big grosgrain bow in my hair; if I had listened to Sue, my hair would have been streaked (“It’s such a drab color, Norlina”) and permed (“It’s lifeless and limp and too long and you have split ends”).

  “You don’t have to say anything, Norlina,” Sue said and pressed her perfect little pink face next to mine. We looked like the before and after of a Glamour magazine makeover. “When you start writing to Marabel, I know what’s up.” She pointed to my legal pad in the corner where I had written Marabel Morgan sucks eggs, and shook her head. “C’mon.” She pulled me by the arm, thrust that wine bottle in my hand and insisted that I turn it up. She didn’t insist I drain it, but I did; I figured what the hell. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I squinted to get her in focus while I cleaned my glasses. “And where’s the date?”

  “I sent him on his way.” Sue giggled and stuffed that cracker in her mouth. “I told him that you needed me more than he did.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said. “That was real smart.” I imagined the guy now, back in some fraternity basement where the walls and windows were painted black. He’d be wondering so why was his date cut short? And answering himself, Well because Sue’s poor pitiful ugly roommate got trashed by a guy who couldn’t get dates either.

  To be dumped is one thing, dumped by someone who is usually a dumpee, too, the very worst.

  “I am smart, Norlina,” Sue said as we moved down the long hall of the dormitory. “I am very very smart in many many ways.” Whenever Sue drank, she started repeating herself. “You are prejudiced.”

  “Me?” I asked her. “I’m prejudiced?”

  “About people like me and Marabelle,” she said. “You are prejudiced against women who have a lot of sex.”