Crash Diet (20 page)

Lenora is someone who got more education (one course here, another course there) than she could find room for in her head and has spent her whole adult life deleting whatever doesn’t match her own opinion. “Give me a weekend and I could straighten him out,” Lenora once told my mother, to which my mother simply replied, Oh
dear
. Lenora’s own son has chosen a sort of evangelical route (having driven away a perfectly normal wife) and now spends his weekends in front of the Family Dollar store, handing out the religious poetry that he spent the rest of
the week composing. I have always wanted to tell Lenora to go to hell. I can tell that, more than anything, my dear peace-loving mother wants to say, “Lenora, go to hell.” But out of kinship or some distant childhood love, she just says things like, “Oh really, Lenora, he’s just a little boy.”

Still, in spite of my mother’s loyalty, Lenora has planted the seed, and doubts are beginning to flourish. Just the other day my mother turned, her eyes narrowed in Lenora fashion, and said, “Doesn’t it bother you that you always get the
negative
parts? You know, do you ever wonder if Jeffrey blames you, if he sees you as the
antagonist
?” That was Lenora’s word for sure. Lenora had once made it perfectly clear that though Nick had left me, she thought I was the one to blame.
A man who is not well cared for will up and leave
.

I am being devoured by the crocodile when the doorbell rings. Jeffrey gets there first, his Ninja Turtle headgear in place. Phil is tall and fresh-looking, crisp as a stalk of celery. He extends his hand in a firm and cool shake and steps inside, navy wool socks and loafers, khakis and an oxford cloth shirt, narrow knit tie, circular brown frame glasses; he’s the kind of man I always wanted to date in college, the kind of man Nick would size up quickly as a snob, a prep, a wimp. His eyes fix on me only a second and then he is looking around the room at the trophies and pictures and videotapes strewn about on the floor. I turn and catch a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror and quickly reach to pull the hot rollers from my hair.

“Sorry,” I say and he looks at the rollers, nods and smiles; he thinks I’m apologizing for my hair. “But I don’t have a sitter. She had an accident at school. There was just no way to get anyone else.”

“Oh.” He looks at Jeffrey, then looks back at me and shrugs. “So, we’ll all go.” He is wearing some kind of cologne which I don’t recognize; Nick always said cologne was for somebody with something to hide. I’m not sure what else he is hiding but any disappointment is covered well.

“Yeah! Let’s go. Let’s go.” Jeffrey runs and pulls his jacket from the low hook by the stairs.

“Are you sure?” I ask and he nods again. He is freshly shaven and not a scratch on his face. He looks like someone (a good guy or prince) out of one of Jeffrey’s books; I keep expecting him to turn to the side and become the flat straight edge of a picture page or maybe just blow away and join the ankle-deep leaves as we walk through the yard. “Fe, fi, fo, fum,” Jeffrey is saying as he crawls into the back seat. Phil holds open my door and I get in. When I look at my house, porch light and living room light on, I have an odd sense of guilt, like I’m breaking a rule or a law. It feels like
I’m
the one running away from home, only it’s not so easy with a thirty-four-pound walking, talking superhero.

I imagine Phil had planned to take me somewhere else, maybe the tiny dark Greek restaurant on the other side of town, a place for couples and whispers. I imagine that
with Jeffrey in the back, bumping against the seat in beat with his rendition of “Fe, fi, fo, fum,” that Phil has thought better of disrupting that quiet dark meeting place for lovers and has made a quick turn into Captain Buck’s Family Seahouse. And so here we are, nets on the ceiling and all furniture vinylized. I stir my iced tea round and round, the red plastic tumbler wet against my hand.

“Rather violent, isn’t it?” Phil asks, and I jerk to attention, certain that he has seen my thoughts, my recounting of the final legal session that granted me divorce and child custody. For a single dollar (truly a rare bargain) I could have bought back my maiden name but declined since Jeffrey was stuck with the married one. Phil is talking about Hansel and Gretel and the way Jeffrey has delivered it, the mean ugly witch pushed into the oven and gassed, charred to a crisp. I don’t tell how many times in the past week I’ve sat in the pantry, cackling and then screaming at the victorious Hansel.

“It’s the same old story,” I say and nod when Jeffrey asks to go and look at the aquarium on the far wall, a huge tank with glowing tropical fish. I watch him dash through the restaurant, barely missing a waitress with a tray piled high with fried food, oysters, shrimp, or clams, they all look the same with the thick golden batter,
calabash style
it is called. “I mean, when I was a kid, the witch landed in the oven.”

“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 looking 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.”