“Yeah,” Phil says and glances around, his fingers clasped loosely on the grease-shined oilcloth. “I guess you’re right, but they are horrible stories, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know.” I take a sip of tea and stare at the menu. Other than today’s special broil, everything is fried; the question is how much fried can you take—small, medium, large, or deluxe? I can’t imagine that Phil will order anything fried; I can’t imagine that he’s ever even been here before. “There are bad things that happen all over; why should fairy tales be excluded?” Phil is studying me and with his cool glance, I hear Sarah, the final advice/reprimand/instructions for this date: Don’t get all serious or maudlin, you know? The guy has never had kids so don’t talk about Jeffrey the whole time and for God’s sake don’t talk about how the world is going to hell. Easy for her to say since her little hey ho world is not.
“What I mean is—” I force a laugh. “Well, it’s just easy for things to go too far in either direction.” And I begin telling him about taking Jeffrey to see a little production of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” where the story was not even recognizable. The giant, instead of falling to his death, climbs from the beanstalk and upon reaching the bottom is struck with amnesia and becomes a big-time land developer while poor Jack the hero fights the infiltration of shopping malls. I had taken Jeffrey straight home and read him the real version. Then we spent the rest of the evening with me falling to my earth-shattering death from the cedar chest.
Phil nods and it looks as if he might want to compliment this new version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” when up walks our waitress with Jeffrey right behind her. “I thought he must belong to you,” she says when Jeffrey crawls up beside me. “He’s having a time with those fish.” The waitress is probably right out of college, probably spending a carefree summer before graduate school or career planning. Her face is smooth as silk, her gestures animated as she stands there in her black stretch pants and nautical top. “Now what can I get you?” she asks, and I watch Phil take her in, from the wild dark tresses to the tiny white sneakers. He smiles at her and orders the broiled flounder. I ask if I can get boiled shrimp just like it would be in the shrimp cocktail only bigger, and she has to go to the kitchen and ask. Jeffrey realizes for the first time that the fish that swim around in aquariums or talk, like in The Little Mermaid, could just as easily be the fish that get eaten, so we finally settle on a hamburger.
“Haven’t read any cow stories, I guess,” Phil says and he and the waitress grin at each other. They have met before, it seems; it was at a big New Year’s party hosted by a friend of his who is a relative of hers.
“You were about to go to France, I believe,” he says, and she turns, her side to me as she talks to Phil.
“I went,” she says. “It was great. Better than what I’m doing now, which is applying to law schools. How about you, still pushing computers?” Phil laughs and leans back in his chair. He is relaxed and amused.
“Small world, isn’t it a small world?” they both keep saying and looking to me for confirmation. Yes, I say. Yes it is a small world.
“So,” Phil and I both say when our waitress leaves us in a wake of silence. We go back to the one topic of conversation that is safe and certain, Sarah and Dave, the friends who arranged this date. I barely know Dave and he barely knows Sarah, but it is enough to get by. I tell him that I’ve known Sarah ever since I moved here, that our classrooms at the junior high are next door to each other. I met her in the parking lot the day I went for my interview. He keeps waiting, face animated as he anticipates some cute anecdote of it all: Sarah and I collide and our purses spill and our papers blow away or maybe I slip on a banana peel and land on the hood of her car. But nothing. It was a simple meeting where I said that I had grown up just thirty miles away and now my husband had been transferred here to oversee the construction of a new subdivision. Phil, it turns out, set up the computer system for Dave’s podiatry clinic.
“I asked him,” Phil says, our waitress within earshot, “why you’d ever choose feet for a living.” Both of them burst out laughing, and I laugh out of beat, a little too late.
“So,” Phil says when Betsy (the waitress) disappears behind the big bubbling aquarium. “I kind of like that new ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’”
“But what’s next?” I ask. I look at him and keep thinking the words perfect and manicured. He is as clean and neat as a putting green, his fingernails rounded and filed to outline the balls of the fingers. I catch myself enjoying the clean brisk smell of his cologne, admiring the smoothness of his face. “How about,” I say and take a sip of my tea, “if the evil witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ joins a support group?”
He laughs. “Then there’s a spinoff group for daughters and sons of witches.”
“The queen in ‘Snow White’ becomes a nice grandmotherly type?”
“It could happen,” he says. I can’t tell if his jolly mood is simply a part of him or spurred by his contact with Betsy. He’s taking his time with his food, planning to stay awhile, it seems. Our booth looks out over the parking lot and the bypass. Jeffrey’s face is pressed against the glass as he looks through the reflection of the room (a group of loud-talking middle-aged women behind us) and into the night. Heat spreads from his plump fingers, fogging the window.
An unbearable silence falls again (we’ve run out of cute ways to rehabilitate the evil characters), and it’s difficult not to listen to the four women sitting across from us, their heads ringed in cigarette smoke as they pick through their mounds of batter and fries. They have already agreed at great length that anyone who burns the flag should receive the death penalty; they cannot imagine such a desecration happening, being allowed to happen in this country. “Let them just move in with the Communists,” one of them is saying. “Just get out of our country if you disagree.” I feel my chest tightening, my need to scream rising. Rewrite the fairy tales and the Constitution, I want to yell, go for the Gettysburg Address. Rewrite the Bible. I feel my grip tightening on my fork and I have that urge to drive it into the table, each tine sinking through the oilcloth with a pop. The Klan marches sixty miles from here. A five-year-old gets raped in a department store. There’s about to be a war. Marriages fall apart like worn-out seams, and children’s hearts get ripped along the edges where the threads won’t give, and all you can talk about is a piece of cloth, a star-spangled symbol. If you burn your marriage certificate are you still married? If you burn your birth certificate are you still alive? If you lose your divorce papers is the decree null and void? Are you sentenced to return to that failed life?
I realize I’ve diced my food to bits but Phil doesn’t notice; he smiles at Betsy as she fills the glasses of the women close by and then watches as she moves back towards the kitchen. Now the women are discussing with great fury the hideous atrocity which I soon figure out is Roseanne Barr and her rendition of the “National Anthem.”
“Baseball, baseball,” Jeffrey says and clicks his spoon against his milk glass, his voice an echo to one of the women who has told where it all took place. Phil raises his hand to Betsy and points to his empty water glass. She grins and steps out from the waitress station—a dark hall with a pay phone and a driftwood sculpture. Her stomach shows smooth and white as she reaches for the water pitcher. Phil is noticing, too. I hand Jeffrey a tissue and shake my head firmly, but he just laughs and goes back to what he was doing.
“Nose stuff,” Jeffrey says when I shake my head again and pull his hand away. Betsy wrinkles her nose in disgust and then gives me a sympathetic smile, fills Phil’s glass. “Ooh yuk,” Jeffrey adds, and I encourage him to finish his meal or sit quietly, to count the cars that pass on the bypass, to see if he can name all seven dwarfs, all seven Von Trapp children, the past fifteen presidents, all the states and their capitals.
“She grabbed herself you know where,” one of the women nearby says, while Phil and the waitress share a laugh. I feel the room closing in, the air getting thick. Phil is still lo
oking at Betsy. He looks like he’s in a trance, like the Prince when Cinderella enters the ballroom, the Prince when he finds Snow White in her glass coffin, the Prince when he makes his way to Sleeping Beauty’s bedside.
“Crotch,” I say and swing around to face the table of women. The volume of my voice surprises me and Phil sits back, knife raised. “She grabbed her crotch.” I shake my fork with each word. “It is a common gesture in baseball. Men have been doing it for years.”
“Well, it was disgusting,” the woman continues and turns from me as if I weren’t present. Her friends all nod, cheeks bulging with calabash goulash. “A man has to do that.” She receives another round of nods and turns back to me. I feel Jeffrey slipping down to the floor of the booth and crawling past my legs. I feel helpless to stop him. “A man has to adjust hisself and it’s not nice for the world to take notice.”
“That’s right,” another swallows and says. “He can’t go excusing himself each time he needs to adjust.” Jeffrey has gone back to his spot by the aquarium now. His mouth is moving in mimicry of the fish. “Men have different needs. They always have.”
“Well, what if I need to adjust myself?” I ask. “What if I have to keep adjusting my breasts all the time? Let’s just say that I can’t keep them properly housed inside my bra. What if my butt cheeks just will not stay in place?”
“Well, I never.”
“I think we’ll have the check,” Phil says. The tips of his shiny ears are crimson. I watch Jeffrey, whose face is pressed against the aquarium glass on the opposite side. From here he looks immersed and misshapen, his face long and wavy. “Yo, fish,” he says and licks the glass. Phil is watching me, his eyes pleading that I just let it all drop, while the table of women wait for me to make my move. Betsy has dashed off swiftly to Phil’s rescue, her fingers rapidly figuring the bill for a hamburger barely touched and a plate full of mutilated shrimp I have rolled over and over in a cocktail sauce bath. My heart races as I watch Jeffrey twirling in the drapes. Betsy has signed the tab, “Have a wonderful evening. Come again soon!” in large rambling script, the loops of her letters as open as her young face. Phil smiles and hands her two twenties. He’ll be back all right. There is electricity enough to light the building. She will give him excitement. He will give her stability. They will give each other warmth in a dark room.
I excuse myself to go untwist Jeffrey from the drapes. The women turn and watch, still expecting something from me. I want to swing around and grab my crotch but I keep walking, my hands reaching for my baby, his face and hands sticky with catsup. He says that the witch was behind the drapes and now he has got her locked in the oven and it’s just a matter of time. The witch must burn. I pull him over to the door of the restaurant and wait for Phil, who is writing on what looks like a business card. He carefully tucks the card in his coat pocket and, after nodding to the table of women, joins me. I avoid looking at him for the time being. I know that I will apologize, that I will say thank you for the meal, that I will offer to pay for Jeffrey’s, but for the moment I feel paralyzed. There is a sign in Uncle Buck’s window advertising a Thanksgiving special and I toy with the thought of calabash-style turkey.
As soon as I step outside I feel sick, a cool sweat breaking out on my face and neck. I’d rather stretch out full length on the sidewalk and slip into a coma than to get in this man’s car and try to carry on a conversation. Against my better judgment, I ease down and sit on the curb, head between my knees. Jeffrey spins around, a fake sword drawn and splitting the air. “I am Arthur! I am Arthur,” he says. “I pulled this sword from that stone!”
“Are you okay?” Phil asks and after a few awkward moments, his feet shuffling beside me, he sits. He reaches inside his coat as if checking his pocket and then, reassured, he clasps his cool hands on his knees. “Dave told me you haven’t had an easy year.” I turn, startled. He is showing genuine concern. He has a pot on his back burner, a slow simmer of a phone number and so it’s easier to be kind. I know that feeling; I remember it well. It seems I had more friends than I had ever had when I decided to get married just because I felt so confident that I had something. It wasn’t threatening for me to be kind to someone. I didn’t have to worry about what I’d do if that person took it the wrong way or wanted more from me. I’m engaged, or I’m married, that’s all I had to say. For years, that’s all I had to say, didn’t even need to say it, it was obvious. And now that I’m single, legally free, everything seems threatening. I feel myself losing control, about to cry at this totally inconvenient moment.
“See if you can spin around like that again, Sir Arthur, see if you can count to twenty,” Phil says, somehow knowing I need the extra time to get myself together.
“I’m sorry the night hasn’t been more fun,” he says.
“Well, it’s not your fault.” I force a laugh. “I’m certainly not the best company to keep.”
“We all have our turns,” he says and stands, offers me a hand. “Some of us abuse old women in seafood joints.” He pulls me up.
“And some of us pick up young waitresses.”
“You noticed,” he says. I nod, reach for Jeffrey’s hand, and pull him along. Phil apologizes over and over on the ride home but I tell him there’s no reason. I shake his cool hand and thank him for dinner. I imagine his picture ripped from a storybook—a two-dimensional prince—as he stands and waits for us to get inside. I turn the lock as Jeffrey bounds down the hall to his room. He names a dwarf each time he slaps his hand against the wall.
I’m sure Phil will drive back to the restaurant or to a phone booth, little card clutched in his hand. He will certainly call Betsy within the next twenty-four hours. She is just starting out, probably uses plastic milk crates to support her bed, a soft mattress draped with mismatched sheets and pillows. She doesn’t trip over Ninja Turtles and Weebles in the middle of the night if she can’t sleep and has to get up and walk around for a while. She doesn’t feel herself needing to stick her head in the freezer and count to fifty. She’s still waiting to begin, waiting to choose her patterns. There’s no slate to wipe clean, no fears about having done (or doing) irreparable damage to a young psyche, and not just a young psyche, but the young psyche, the person you love more than anyone else on earth, the person who turns your mistake into something you wouldn’t change.
It is very late when I hear Jeffrey get up. The night light glows behind him, and he looks so small as he scampers down the dark hallway to my room. Twice I have awakened to find him standing there staring at me, his hands on the edge of the mattress.
“Mom?” He is beside my bed now, his hand full of leftover candy from Halloween. “Who was that man?”
“Just a friend of Sarah’s,” I say, and he is totally satisfied with that answer. His trust in me is complete. If it weren’t, he’d never give me the bad parts to act out. And what’s wrong with acting out the bad parts? What’s wrong with Jack getting rid of the giant? And why shouldn’t Hansel and Gretel kill the witch in self-defense? Hooray for Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead. Then you just turn the page and start all over.
“You want to hear a story?” he whispers.
“Sure,” I say. He crawls up, his breath like candy corn.
“It’s a scary one.”
“Scarier than ‘Hansel and Gretel’?” I ask and he nods, moves in closer.
“This is about ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’” he says and begins, his voice a rapid whisper, his heart beating quickly each time he says trip trap trip trap trip trap and describes the old troll who threatens to eat the goats.
“Are you scared?” he asks, his sticky hand groping to find my face.
“A little,” I say. “Are you?”
“Oh, no.” He wiggles in closer. “I’m the biggest billy goat of all.” His breath quickens as he repeats the verse, hand clutching my arm. I close my eyes and hug him tighter. Who goes there? Trip trap trip trap trip trap. I imagine a postcard scene, cartoon-green grass and a brilliant blue sky. Now all we ha
ve to do is cross the bridge.
Carnival Lights
I never slept with Donnie Wilkins like everybody says I did. I could go and straighten it all out, I guess. I could sit down with the phone book and pick through the names of everybody I know, call and give my speech, my explanation about how they’ve got the wrong idea about me. I would say, “Hey, this is Lori Lawrence, you know Mr. Lawrence who is co-owner of that new grocery store where everything’s all natural? I’m his daughter. I just graduated from the high school. I carried a flag in the marching band. I’ve helped flip the sausage patties at the Kiwanis pancake supper since I was eleven.” And then I’d pause because of course they’d know who I was. It isn’t like this is some metropolis we live in. There are no more than eight thousand people here, and so once you figure in marriage and friends of friends, it gets real small. People don’t even expect the new grocery store to make it, that’s how small it is. Then my dad will be out beating the pavements and I’ll have to hear that old this is why we are so proud you’re going to college speech. There were only seventy-five people in my graduating class, and if I hadn’t been one of them (like I honestly feared for a while), my parents would’ve died fourteen hundred times.
Nobody needs to be told who I am. Everybody knows my mama is Sandy Lawrence. She used to be Sandy Leech and, yes, we have heard all of those parasite jokes. We made a bunch of them up ourselves. My mother is the little plump woman who always wears clogs and who will fill in and drive a schoolbus if somebody’s sick. Otherwise she is a secretary at the courthouse, vital information at her fingertips. We hear things over the dinner table that don’t even get in the paper until the next day. Everybody knows she married my dad the same night she graduated from high school because she was afraid he’d be drafted. Everybody also knows that I was born exactly—give or take a day or two—nine months later. She says that though this course of action would not be good for a girl like me, it was the best thing she could have done in 1972 and she has never regretted her decision. She says I might think the world was so very different eighteen years ago but within these city limits, except for the fashions and music, it was pretty much the same. The Lions Club was selling light bulbs and brooms and the Civitans were selling fruitcakes. Her parents made her go to Methodist Youth Fellowship, which is why she had left me to my own free will. She grew up with old parents and once said that she had decided to break that mold and several others; she didn’t want us to be afraid to ask her questions and she didn’t want us to have to bury her before we got out of high school. Speaking of her old parents, Granddaddy Leech lives with us; you know him, old Herman Leech, who used to grow tobacco and now doesn’t know what day it is or who he is.
Crash Diet: Stories Page 16