Crash Diet (17 page)

I love the New York cards the best. They are so funny and happy. The pictures have all these bridges and lights and the Empire State building, places you only hear about. But there are still other hard-time cards. I had gone a week without hearing from her, and then I got this one that has people at Niagara Falls. The water is so beautiful, falling there; there’s a rainbow in the spray, and people are just standing there in yellow raincoats like the Safety Patrol people wear, standing so close to the little fence there before it drops off. I love the picture and I remember how glad I was to see it after having waited so long.

This is not a honeymoon so don’t even think it! Randy (he’s a good friend) came with me. I don’t know what I would have done that last week in New York without him! He saved me. That’s why I haven’t written. Hard Times, but thanks to Randy, I’m okay. He is such a card, looks real “sexy” in his yellow raincoat. How are you? Knocking the boys dead? I bet you are . . . more later. Love,
R

After Randy ran off without a word, after she had taken care of him,
practically supported him
for six months, there was another lapse. That’s why I was so worried at the sophomore dance. I don’t know if I would’ve had a good
time anyway; I went with Sandy Scott, who has teeth bigger than mine and a neck like a giraffe. I wasn’t going to go at all, but Rhonda always told me that I should go places “because you never know who you’ll meet. You can go on a date. It doesn’t mean you have to
marry
him! My God, I’d have been married a hundred times by now!” Sandy Scott asked me to dance one time, and the rest of the night we just sat at our table and watched other people. He folded his napkin in and out like an accordion and told me about his daddy’s heifer who had won a prize at the state fair. I guess he had heard what everybody else had heard, that I had liked Rudy that time. Everybody knew that Rudy’s daddy
always
has prize hogs and cows. Rudy was out on the floor slow-dancing, and it made me feel funny inside to watch him; I guess I felt funny because of all that Rhonda had told me about what men will try to do, and because I hadn’t heard from her. When I finally did hear, she was back down in South Carolina and had gotten a job in a Myrtle Beach bar.
It’s a long way from Ho Jo’s
, she had said and I was so relieved. When Sandy Scott called and asked me to go see
Return of the Jedi
, I went, but I didn’t meet anybody else and I didn’t have a very good time.

I think that Rhonda has probably moved again and not had time to write, or maybe she’s been suntanning, or going to that amusement park she’s told me about. I close my eyes and try to imagine all of the pictures in my mind before going to sleep. I see Rhonda and a handsome man
riding the Ferris wheel, while I stand on the ground and look up at them, a huge teddy bear in my arms that a boy like Rudy has won for me over at the shooting range. Rhonda waves her hand, her yellow hair flying in the wind every time they hit the top, and me and that boy wave back, all of us happy to be there together down in Myrtle Beach. I hear my door crack open and I know my mama’s standing there like she does every night. She’s checking to make sure I’m in my bed and have not run off like Rhonda. “She’s like a prison guard,” Rhonda told me years ago. “She will never get over the fact that she couldn’t hold on to Daddy.” I don’t remember my daddy at all; I only know what Rhonda has told me, that he was good-looking and full of life and it would have killed him to stay there. “She’s not going to keep me either,” Rhonda had said. “And don’t you worry, Bunny. I’ll come rescue you one day.” Now I hear Mama shuffling down the hall, and it makes me wish that things were different for all of us. Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand Mama at all.

“Did he touch you?” she had asked when I got home from the dance. I shook my head and then she was crying and holding onto me. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, but I’m not sure for what. Maybe because Rhonda was gone.

It’s been two weeks now since I’ve heard from Rhonda. I’m sitting out back on my orange crate and my boss doesn’t even care. He’s been asking about Rhonda lately, asking in
a way where he doesn’t laugh and his eyebrows don’t go that funny way. “Where do you guess she is?” he asked just before I came out here. I told him I bet she has a new job in a new city, or maybe she’s run off and gotten married. I hear the bell at the front of the store ring so I know I need to be getting back in so I can ring the person up. I’m just ready for the day to be over so I can get home and check the mail. I bet it’ll be there, some funny message about the Townsend girls or Mama smiling.

“Hey,” I hear, but I can’t see through the wire mesh of the screen door to know who it is. Before I can ask, Rudy Thompson steps out here and leans against the building where somebody has spray-painted
GO TO HELL
in lopsided letters. “Haven’t seen you at 4-H lately,” he says. “Or school.” That’s true, because I haven’t been in three days—been going down to Sikes Pond and sitting instead. “You been sick?”

“What’s it to you?” I ask, remembering that that’s what Rhonda had said to a man one time. Rhonda said, “That silenced the jerk!” I must have done it wrong because Rudy just shrugs and his face turns pink. Now I don’t know what to say, so I just wave a stick in the dirt and wait for him to leave.
They will always leave you. One minute he’s there and the next minute he’s gone
. How did he know I wasn’t at school?

“I was just hoping you weren’t sick.” He steps forward and puts his shoe up on the orange crate; his foot is so
close, I could retie his shoe if I wanted.
Oh yeah, they love you when they can get something. In your pants and in your wallet
. I shake my head and, for the first time in a year, I look Rudy Thompson in the face.
You got to learn to stare them down. Get the upper hand
. His eyes are just as green as before, as green as that Atlantic Ocean; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; The Grand Strand. Where is she? “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he says and looks away. “You remember that time—” I know what he’s going to say and I don’t even want to hear it.

“No, I don’t remember,” I tell him before he can finish.
Sometimes I play dumb for Elwood because he thinks it’s cute. HA!

“Well, I wanted to tell you I was sorry that I didn’t stick up for you,” he says. “I just didn’t know what to say. I mean, you looked so grown-up that day and all, and I had never seen you look like that.”
Wear my blue-jean jacket and make up your eyes like I told you. That’ll get him! I bet one of these days you look just like me, Little Bunny! (Hope you don’t mind. HA!
)

I see the mailman’s truck go by and I know his routine so well; he’ll be at my house in fifteen minutes. “I gotta go,” I say, and standing, I take off my Thriftway apron.

“I wanted to ask you to go to the movies,” he says, and I don’t have time to think. I have fourteen minutes to check out with my boss and run home. “I’ve been wanting to ask you but—”

“I gotta go,” I say. “Really, I have to go.” I open the screen door, my mind on Rhonda and the card. If my mama gets it, it’ll be gone.

“Will you think about it?” he asks, his forehead wrinkling, and I nod, once again looking at those clear green eyes.
Keep ’em guessing
. I have twelve minutes. “Can I call you?”

“Yes,” I say and run through the store, the buzz of the freezer so loud, my steps so loud.

“Hey, what’s the hurry?” my boss asks. He looks to the back of the store where Rudy is standing and still looking confused. Shaking his head, my boss laughs like he knows everything, but I don’t take the time to hear what he’s gotta say. I throw down my apron and I am gone, running so fast down the street, the sun low and gold behind the big tree branches. Rudy Thompson’s face keeps popping in my mind, but I don’t have time to think about it right now.
Sometimes people will ask you out just to use you
. I turn the corner just in time to see the mail truck stop in front of my house. I run faster and pretend I don’t see Mama out there on the front porch. She is walking down the sidewalk, but I get there first and reach my hand in.

“I need to talk to you, Saralyn,” Mama says, and I wait for her to turn around so I can see if there’s a card for me. “Why are you so eager for the mail?” she has asked before, and I always come up with one reason or another. I haven’t shown or told her about a card in months now, but
I know she knows. I know because every time Rhonda’s name comes up, which isn’t real often, they all look at me like I know something. They have tricked me a few times by saying things like, “I bet Rhonda is in Canada,” only to have me slip and give the real answer. I have quit talking.

“There’s no card from her,” Mama says, and I turn slowly, so angry. “Rhonda has gotten herself killed.”

I wait a long time before I go inside; I wait until it’s dark and the light there in the living room comes on. When I get inside the doorway, I hear the policeman saying they got no traces, that Rhonda was there in the Sleepy Pelican Motel somewhere near Georgia. I listen while he tells all about it: it looked like there had been a struggle, looked like they had been drinking. Shot there in the heart. I don’t want to even get a picture in my mind.

Nobody at school has said a thing about Rhonda to me. My boss just said he was sorry, real sorry. “Let it be a lesson, Saralyn,” my mama said, and I wanted to be called Bunny so bad I thought I’d die. I went to the movies with Rudy Thompson and afterwards we went and sat down near the pond. He didn’t ask me about Rhonda but I knew he wanted to know.
They will use you to get what they want. I can’t wait for you to get out of that hole
. I kept hearing Rhonda talking to me the whole time that Rudy and I sat there. He held my hand and it made me feel so
funny all over, like maybe I was doing something wrong. He asked me why I never went on the school trips or club trips out of town, and I said because I didn’t want to go anywhere, didn’t need to go anywhere. “I know what it all looks like,” I told him, and then I saw the real pictures, the motel room where they said she had lived, the way they found her without any clothes at all. It made me feel cold all over and I told Rudy I had to go home. I told Rudy if he was after me to use me up that he better forget it. “I like you, Bunny,” he said, and I wanted so bad to believe him.

Rudy still calls me; he called just this morning to ask me if I wanted to ride down to South Carolina with him and his mama and daddy. “We’re going to the beach for the weekend,” he said. “You can tell your mama that my whole family’s going.” I imagined me and Rudy on that Ferris wheel, the stuffed bear, putt-putt ranges. But it was all too close.

“I’ve got to work,” I told him. “But how about we go to the show when you get back?” Rudy paused like he was disappointed, but then he said he thought he knew why I didn’t want to go down there. He said he wanted to go with me, steady, just me, and I said all right.

Now I’m in my checkout and Henry (my boss) is sitting over on the counter. He’s been real sweet to me lately, told me that he was sorry for things that he had said about Rhonda, said he used to really like her and that she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. “I would have
done her right,” he said, and part of me believed that.

“So, what’s new with you, Bunny?” he asks, leaning back against the wall.

“Going steady with Rudy Thompson,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it outside the house. My sisters-in-law thought it was worth a Chinese dinner in Clemmonsville. My mama said she’d like for him to come by real soon.

“Well, well,” Henry says and laughs. “I thought you’d looked different these days, all fixed up and smiling.”

“Yeah,” I say.
Having a man in your life will change a lot of things
. I look away from Henry to the street where the mail truck is passing right now. I feel myself ready to run from the store. Sometimes I keep thinking that I will get home and reach in that box and it will be there. “Whew!” it will say, and there will be pictures of all the places she’s been. I still feel that way and sometimes I wonder if I always will. Sometimes I think I’d just rather stay right here and get the pictures of all those places, the lights and the bridges. And then all of a sudden I will see the other picture, the real picture that never did and never will be on a postcard, that motel room, that night.
No man will ever change how I feel about you
. I wish I could tell her she was wrong. I wait for the mail truck to move out of my sight, and then I tell Henry to call me Saralyn. “That’s my real name,” I say.

Words Gone Bad

I don’t believe in nonviolence. I never have. That’s what I tell my co-worker, Bennie, when we take our break and meet out on the wall that faces the University’s clock tower. Bennie and I have been arguing over the world for years. We see it all from opposite ends. He says black and I say white. He says hot and I say cold. The only thing we agree about is that we like each other just fine and would be hard pressed to name an older or better friend. Bennie says, “The future is there for our people, Mary.” He says, “Bend a little,” though I rarely do. He says that for such a skinny dried-up black woman, I sure have got a mouth. I tell him, yes, and for a black man he’s done all right. I tell him that if he wasn’t married and we were thirty years younger (and if I was interested in any such thing), I might go for him.

Bennie went to all the meetings back during the marches. I can remember seeing the man, so much younger then, straight and tall as he led the way. He locked arms with others and swayed from side to side as he come down Richmond Avenue singing “We Shall Overcome,” and I hung onto a porch post and turned my face away from them so I could take in the voices and remember it by sound alone, sweet words in the air. I didn’t want to see any face of impatience made by somebody in a car having to stop and wait as the parade went forth. We could show him impatience. I didn’t want to see nothing sailing through the air towards a soul marching there. I didn’t want to hear some cheap crossness coming out from behind my own front door where I probably had a man (there were quite a few in my younger foolish days) that I wished I’d never seen laid up on the couch. I listened to the marchers’ voices long after they’d passed. I felt uplifted by the
ideas
and
beliefs
behind it all. I felt like a part of a whole—a small link in a long rusty chain—and whenever I caught myself feeling like a woman all alone in the world with the responsibility of six children to raise, I conjured the strength of those words back to my ear.