Crash Diet: Stories

by Jill McCorkle

  “Yeah, right,” I said, feeling mad because she was right, mad because my bed was all rumpled up where they had been making out, while Sue’s bed looked like a picture out of some house-decorating book.

  “What you need to know, Norlina,” Sue said when the light was off and I was just about asleep, “is if you’ve got butter in your refrigerator, your man won’t have to go getting some margarine on the street.”

  “What refrigerator?” I asked her. “What man?”

  Occasionally Sue has been right and usually when I least expected it. I mean, who would have ever thought she was right when she suggested that I move into this neighborhood? It’s taking time, to be sure, but I am adjusting. My first month here, I bought a color TV, VCR, cable hook-up, and a microwave. Money was no problem since I had saved a bundle living with Byron for those long seven years. Down with Materialism and Up with Nature. That was Byron’s motto. He was a self-appointed forest ranger and we lived in a pup tent in the National Park. I had a job as the person who checks in campers and did get paid on a regular basis though Byron didn’t even know it. He’d be off all day communing with nature and smoking dope. He’d say, “What did you do today, Norlina?” We’d be sitting there by the campfire, his pupils the size of Frisbees, and I’d say that I had gone around and cleaned up after careless campers and had found some money and walked down to the Thriftway Grocery and bought the beans we were eating (I never told him they were originally pork and beans and I’d taken that scrap of meat and immediately eaten it). Now, I’m hooked on Lean Cuisines and Le Menus and I love every morsel. Now, I take a shower daily and I sell real estate and I only think of Byron when the crowd grills out at the Windhaven Estates Clubhouse.

  “Where have you been, Norlina, that you don’t even know how to work a microwave or a VCR?” Sue had asked me, laughing. For years, even though I stayed in touch with a postcard from time to time, somehow I had always avoided really telling Sue about my life with Byron, which I came to see later was in and of itself a sign that I was in the wrong place. I had missed Sue’s wedding on account of Byron taking it upon himself for us to be on bear patrol. “You’ve got to help me, Norlina,” he had said. “Ignorant visitors who feed them could get in big trouble.” On Sue’s wedding day, I was way up in a cedar tree waiting for somebody (like a real park ranger) to come and get us down and away from this particular spot where it seemed all the bears were hanging out.

  Sue had not changed a bit, and I gave in to her just as if we were still there in the dormitory bathroom. First thing, I let her streak my hair with Clairol, and I let her make up my face and pick out some new clothes. I told my story, bending the truth a slight bit here and there, to save her the discomfort of a shock (I had outright lied to my mother, who thought I’d married an Egyptian archaeologist and returned with him to study the Great Pyramids).

  I told Sue that I had married Byron (she met him in college) and that he’d become a forest ranger who did not believe in extravagant living. I did not let on, of course, that Byron was the one who married us because he believed there was no position that could not be self-appointed, or that we took vows to love and lust each other and never waste water or eat meat there near Buzzard’s Gap.

  “I really don’t know why I married him,” I told Sue, who was pulling my hair through little holes in a rubber cap with a crochet hook. (It hurts like hell to get your hair streaked, but I’m a true stoic, as hard and unbreakable as the piece of petrified wood that Byron gave me as a token of our union. “We will now exchange natural artifacts,” he had said during our vows and pressed that wood into my palm. I gave him what he thought was an arrowhead but was really a man-made piece of costume jewelry I found in front of the freezer in Thriftway. I think it had been an earring before it got stepped on a lot.)

  I told her I didn’t know why I married Byron but really I do. Byron is the only man who ever showed me any interest, plain and simple. He walked up to me one clear blue day and asked me to sign a petition that said I wanted to boycott all restaurants that served meat. He stood there looking at me, ready to engage me in conversation just as soon as he had my signature. How could I resist that? Sometimes back then I’d measure time by how long I’d gone without another human speaking to me (except Sue of course, who had no choice but to talk to me since we lived together). It was like I was invisible the way that I could go for days without a human voice speaking directly to me as an individual. The longest I ever went was five days. That record was broken by somebody who knocked on my dorm door and said, “Do you have any liquor I can buy from you?” Of course I didn’t, but I pretended I was looking while that tall thin guy stood there waiting. I wanted him to talk but all he said was, “Well, do you or don’t you?” and when I shook my head, he turned and walked down to the next door. I heard the girl there (a friend of Sue’s) say, Why no, I don’t care much for liquor myself unless of course I’m having a strawberry daiquiri. I really like the ones they make down at Barry’s Bar, you know the place with the cover charge? and he said, “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  You can imagine then how good it made me feel to look up and have Byron standing right there in front of me and looking me right square—through the glasses—in the eye. Sure, I thought he looked a little strange with a big brand drawn on his bare back (red and black so it looked hot), fake blood all around his neck (like a slaughtered chicken), and two bricks tied to a rope and swinging from his waist right in front of the groin area (castration is unnatural!), but it had been so long since I’d really communicated with anyone. The readership of my paper had gotten so small I had had to fold, and I had been replaced by a magazine that kept the paper’s name (adding the male genetic symbol). It was a billboard for personal ads, most of them with peculiar requests. “I can’t believe your magazine!” Sue had said. “I mean, you go along with that stuff? All these variations on the theme of love?” No matter how many times I told her that it was not my magazine, she kept talking like it was. And she read that rag more than she had ever read anything in her life. “I don’t get this at all,” she must have said a thousand times a day. It was a dark dark time for sure.

  And then, here was Byron, suited up for protest and holding out a ballpoint pen. I was the first person to sign, the first person he’d approached; he asked me to go sit with him in front of Burger King and ask customers how they would like to be hit in the head with a club, bled and carved, ground and charcoal broiled? One man said, “That’s disgusting!” Byron just stared at the man in what I later came to think of as his slack-jawed way. It seemed his mouth was always sort of hanging open in a stupid gape and I should’ve taken note of that, should’ve known that it would eventually get to me.

  I mean, all the signs were there; all the reasons why I shouldn’t go live a self-appointed life in the woods with Byron, but I was desperate just to have a life. But still, with every little perfumed card I ever got from Sue, (I kept a post office box I went to once a month), with every daily trip down to the Thriftway Grocery (four miles down and four miles up), I started imagining myself in Sue’s world, the thick rugs and carpet, the water beds and televisions and chlorinated pools. I imagined myself in a hot bubble bath and climbing between clean sheets and under a perfumed comforter and the air-conditioning churning out all that manufactured coolness. The thoughts were certainly better than my reality: Byron hosing me down like a forest fire and then zipping me into that double sleeping bag that had God only knows what living down in the foot of it.

  “What a cop-out,” Byron said the day I packed my backpack and headed down the trail. I can’t tell you how pitiful he looked there in his torn faded jeans, his ribs showing like xylophone keys through that grungy white skin, those thin strands of cotton-candy hair pulled back and tied with that stringy old bandanna. It makes me itch to think of him and then it makes me laugh. It makes me laugh all the way into my kitchen, where I pop in a Le Menu, sweet and sour chicken, and watch its eleven-minute spin.

  I laugh all the wa
y over to my sectional sofa, from which I flip on my widescreen TV by remote. Any minute now Tom and Sue will be on that screen right before my very eyes. Jack Crawford (who does look a little like Pat Sajak would if he had no hair and thirty extra pounds) is coming over to watch with me. He’s no dream man but it’s a lot better than being with Byron, and unlike Byron, who used to periodically take a vow of silence out of respect for the trees, Jack Crawford never shuts up. If I say the weather is nice, then Jack feels compelled to tell me why, (low humidity, the time of year, my house faces north, blah blah); if I say I don’t care for black olives, he tells me why.

  “You ought to be on Jeopardy,” I said the night I’d just met him for the first time. “You know more than God.” He smiled and thanked me while everybody got a good laugh, the intended sarcasm in my voice floating up and beyond all the strings of white minilights in the trees. So I thought why not relax and give these people a chance. Why not overlook the fact that these people aren’t the smartest on the planet (and Byron was?). They do have good taste in belongings. I made a decision to work on my life, to try and fit in with these people. I mean, they are certainly more normal than Byron, and most importantly, they accept me as one of them.

  I remember staring up at those little minilights (they would have sent Byron into a seizure) and thinking about it all. I remember thinking I could overlook the fact that Jack Crawford wore platform shoes and had bad breath. (I mean, look at what I’d already lived through.) I could overlook that Sue’s perfect man, Tom, had a vocabulary of about six words, most of them used twice and strung together to make statements like, “Oh, Sue Sue, you little cute cute.” He was just as good-looking as she had always said and he did have an absolutely perfect body; so okay, give the man that. I decided right then and there to give it the benefit. After all, hadn’t Sue gone out of her own little way to be there for me?

  “Speaking of game shows,” I had said and leaned forward. “The other night I was watching The Newlywed Game.”

  “The New Newlywed Game,” Sue said and nodded to Tom, who was pinching up her little little cheek to kiss her cute cute self.

  “Anyway, they asked this woman which vowel her husband most resembled while he slept. …” I continued my story, Jack Crawford staring a hole through my breasts. I was about to move quickly to startle him, to say something like fill your eyes and then fill your pockets but I just let it go. It had been a long time since anybody had looked at me. Next thing I knew, Jack sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and leapt into the pool fully clothed. Before too long we all followed.

  “Let me explain to you why you want me,” Jack said later, when the two of us were stretched out on my waterbed, his weight causing my side to buoy a good six inches higher.

  “Do you have to?” I asked, and he said it was just what he was hoping, a woman who was all action and no talk; he’d read about such and whenever I was ready he could expound on the subject. He had heard that women like me, homely in the youthful years, sometimes suddenly blossomed like one of Georgia O’Keefe’s sensuously sexy flowers, and would I like to hear what he knew about her or would I rather just go right ahead and do my thing?

  Talk about a rock and a hard place. And still it was better than what I’d had there in the pup tent with Byron. It’s sad sometimes how life is distorted by comparisons: good-better-best, when really you were never up to good at all. I just lay there and indulged my best fantasy to date, while Jack Crawford began going into what he called his sexual trance and which resembled some kind of dance like you might expect to see from a tribe of pygmies. My fantasy of the moment was this: I have married a handsome Indian doctor and live with him in Bombay, where he is a highly specialized surgeon revered by all. I wear saris and sandals and a veil over my face in public, but just let us get home and we go wild for each other, a trail of clothes strewn over my gleaming tile floors and expensive carpets. My liberal-minded sensitive surgeon sings and laughs the whole time he prepares dinner, while I put on The Rolling Stones and dance around in my underwear. We are incognito; we fit into society but we do not live by it. We eat lots of puff bread and curried rice and pork vindaloo; we eat crepe suzettes and pasta primavera and Hostess Twinkies. This was the fantasy; and I closed my eyes tightly and brought to my mind sitar music, high twings and twangs, while Jack Crawford explained his rapid heartbeat and profuse sweating. It was quite a feat, but I could still maintain that life could be worse.

  I have just finished my dinner when the doorbell rings and in strolls Jack with a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter and an explanation about how he has found these foods to be aphrodisiacs for all the men in his family. “Oh,” I say and tell him to sit down. The show is coming on right this second. Same music, same Bob Eubanks and there they are, Sue and Tom, all the way from Windhaven Estates.

  “Everybody’s watching,” Jack whispers and reaches for my hand. Cracker crumbs are sticking to his damp palm. “I noticed while driving over. A television in every home. You know how there’s a bluish-grayish glow in the window when a set is on. You know how it’s like you’re sitting in a room and turn a set off … ?” I have to blank my brain and comparison shop: Byron (scratching his head to see if anything has set up housekeeping there). Okay. Back to Jack. I can face him better now. Now I can also face Tom and Sue, who are doing real well. Sue has answered all of her questions correctly: his favorite fast-food restaurant is Snoopy’s Sushi; his former girlfriend’s name is Trix; and he was most embarrassed the time Sue walked in and saw him trying on her underwear. “Yeah, I remember when that happened!” Jack says and kisses a mouthful of crumbs onto my cheek. “Yeah, that was when I was still with my ex, and we all got such a kick out of Sue’s story that we all started wearing the spouse’s undies, funny, huh?” I stare at Jack Crawford, fully expecting to see the slackest jaw of them all, a jaw so slack that it just swings back and forth like it’s held by rubber bands, but, no sir, not Jack’s jaw; it is moving up and down in tight mechanical bites, crackers spewing. All I can think about is Jaws and that multimillion-dollar machine they made to jump up and eat the boat and most of its inhabitants at the end.

  Each time Tom has said, “Goody goody, Sue Sue,” and now there’s a commercial break, and now Sue is left to say what Tom will answer. Bob Eubanks is chuckling when they come back on. Sue obviously has said something real cute cute.

  “Who will your husband say is your strangest friend?” Bob asks and goes down the line. I think Sue should say Kandi (she renamed herself), who heads up Welcome Wagon and has recently had both a breast enlargement and a fanny tuck. Jack thinks she should say him. “I mean, I am a little strange, you must admit,” he keeps saying while all the other women tell their little stories. “I mean, how many men like me are still available? How many men who look like me are also interested in sexuality as is portrayed in both art and National Geographic?”

  “I’ll have to say my friend Norlina.” Sue pronounces my name slowly.

  “Hey, it’s you.” Jack leans forward and claps. “She said your name nice and slow so they can be sure and spell it right on the card.”

  I just sit back and wait, wondering what reasons she has. Is she going to say something about my past life? My life with Byron? I can’t help but wonder if my mother is watching this. Maybe Tom and Sue had a deal. Maybe on the way to California, they figured up all these little patterns with set answers, like if Bob said his typical “My friend so-and-so is a real bow-wow,” or “My friend so-and-so has the biggest bazookas,” (something tacky and trashy like the way they always talk about “whoopee”), then Tom and Sue had decided to name me. If it had been a male friend, maybe it would have been Jack. After all, I’ve always thought that any couple with any sense could devise a system and easily win. That is, of course, if you want to win that year’s supply of tomato soup and a recliner. I sit and will Bob Eubanks to move on to the next one, but he likes to linger with Sue. For the first time in this century Jack is quiet, and it is noticeable that he has bron
chial problems.

  “Why do you say she’s strange?”

  “Why not?” Sue asks and turns to the woman in the little cubicle beside her. What!? Has she forgotten that I’m here on the other side of the country and the other side of the tube? Does she think that a flight to California entitles her to talk about me behind my back and to my face so that Jack can hear about my pitiful wallflower type of youth, which he will soon begin to explain? Even if they do mean to win, enough is enough.

  “I mean, well, there’s just no way to explain Norlina. She’s been really weird since the first day I met her. I mean, she looks weird, you know?” Sue lifts her hands as if to explain, her mouth all screwed up and off to one side as if in imitation of how I look.

  “Hey, that’s pretty good,” Jack says. “I’ve seen you do that face before. It really requires quite a few of those facial muscles, may be related to the set of your teeth. I know every single dentist in town real well. I play golf with two dentists often.”

  “I mean Norlina has no taste,” Sue is saying. “Not even in her mouth!” Bob Eubanks is holding his stomach. Sue is really on a roll. “She used to live with a forest ranger and before that she edited this magazine that got into all kinds of weird sex. In college all she did was sit in the bathroom.”

  “Wait, wait,” Bob says. “Let’s hear about the weird sex.”

  “Like really weird,” she whispers. “Like so weird I can’t even say.”

  “Hey hey hey,” Jack says and gets a handful of Ritz. “I want to know. I want to know.” He puts his other arm around me and jiggles. “You’ve been holding out on me, firecracker.”

  “None of it is true,” I say and move away from Jack, go and put a cup of hot water in my microwave for a cup of coffee. I don’t even want coffee, just to get away.

  “They’re back!” Jack screams, and I go in in time to hear Tom, who has never said more than six words, spout an encyclopedia’s worth about me.