Crash Diet (12 page)

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.”

“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?”