Crash Diet (21 page)

“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 have 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.

I’ve got a little brother, Bill, who is a royal pain. His way of getting on Mama’s nerves is to pick on Granddaddy and call him names even though Granddaddy doesn’t know the difference. Daddy says this is Bill’s way of dealing with the way Granddaddy has changed. At least that’s what Daddy said over the holidays in between learning how to pronounce the various kinds of yuppie lettuce he was suddenly responsible for buying and selling.

“People want more than just iceberg,” he said every hour or so. Mama said she didn’t know why people were suddenly so hepped up on maroon-colored wilted lettuce and she didn’t know how Granddaddy’s falling off could possibly explain why Bill had draped the old man’s head with a woman’s nylon hose and Christmas tinsel. She also wanted to know where Bill got that nylon hose. He’s just two years younger than I am but you’d never guess it. He looks like he ought to be in the seventh grade rather than just out of the tenth. I sure wouldn’t go out with him if I were a girl
other than his sister. We look a lot alike—thick curly hair and compact bodies, eyes too big and sad for the rest of us. It’s the kind of look that goes better on a girl.

People say that for somebody so short, I’ve got a large chest and that I should’ve made cheering squad and would’ve if I hadn’t had that fight with Bonita Inman when I was in the tenth grade and she called my daddy a fruit pusher (though hoping for a break in the business, he was still just manager at Food Lion at the time). You can imagine how everybody took it from there and got to saying fruit pimp, gigolo. They made awful jokes about bananas and cucumbers. It was nothing to take sitting down, and I got sent home with one-day suspension for fighting at the bus stop. A clump of Bonita’s hair was still in my fist when my father choked up in that old Chevette. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell him
why
I’d socked Bonita in the face and made her nose bleed down a blouse which she had broadcasted all day long was brand new from that new store in the mall where the mannequins are painted silver and don’t have faces. “Tell me what happened, Lori,” my mother said that night. “You can tell us the truth.” My dad was standing there with her, and I made up some silly story about Bonita calling me a name so ugly I couldn’t repeat it. You just don’t look your father (or the woman who loves him) in the face and say he’s been the butt of penis jokes for two days running.

I did
not
sleep with Donnie Wilkins even though I wanted to. He’s a nice guy and I’m a nice girl. I mean, I’ve only had one boyfriend other than Donnie. I went with Mike Tyler my junior year for one month, the highlight of our relationship being the Sunday nights I exercised my free will and we stood out behind the Methodist church during youth fellowship and kissed. I told him that if he could keep his mouth shut, I’d go with him, otherwise forget it. Ours was a brief relationship which ended with him telling people that he had given me seven hickeys and had undone my shirt to get a feel three times. Of course that wasn’t true, only further proof of his inability to keep his trap shut, but still there it was, the beginning of my reputation being sucked down the drain.

Donnie’s dad is the school guidance counselor, a tall skinny man who looks like he’s made out of Tinkertoys. It was in late November, around the time everybody was taking the SAT, when he told me that I had a lot of natural talent for putting things together and taking them apart. “If you were a boy,” he said and looked over at Donnie’s mama who assists him at his job, her little half glasses swinging from a chain around her neck, “I’d tell you to go to trade school, become a mechanic.” I keep hoping that women’s lib will be what follows the all-natural grocery in my hometown, but as of yet, people are still doing the HIS and HER types of things.

Everybody in school made jokes about the Wilkinses being the guidance counselors (her title is Assistant Guidance Counselor). People said that
really
there’s just
one
of them and that he/she has many personalities like in that movie,
Sybil
. I tried not to think about all that while I looked at them, their button-down shirts the exact same shade of blue.