Crash Diet (8 page)

Earl is smarter than Larry Cross was even before he killed off so many brain cells. I looked it all up in the library while I was in Fuquay. I looked up drugs and one thing led to another till pretty soon I was reading on brain cells and come to find out that once they’re dead, they’re dead. As dead as that rubber tree that Eleanore has in her living room thinking it’s gonna bush back and be something. Larry Cross will never be something.

Earl Taylor is already something; he’s in charge of
finances at Sears. He banks here with us and so I’ve seen his savings account and it is a fat one. That doesn’t surprise me a bit because it’s obvious that he doesn’t throw money away; it’s obvious by the way that his place is so plain and the way that he wears clothes that mix and mingle to the degree that it seems like he has on the same outfit every single day. When I think of Earl, I think khaki and oxford cloth. When I think of Larry Cross, I think Levi’s and loud Hawaiian shirts, and loud-colored swim trunks and gym shorts. Flashy—Larry Cross is flashy with the money he doesn’t have and that little Spitfire convertible in bright orange that I was forever needing to jump with my VW Bug. Earl Taylor drives a Mazda, a nice, neat, plain, navy Mazda that he vacuums on a regular basis. Sometimes we’ll be on our way out to eat and Earl will whip right in the Drive-Thru Klean-a-Kar and pop a quarter into that vacuum and run over things. He took the shoes right off of my feet and cleaned up the bottom of them for me. Night and day. That’s what Larry Cross and Earl Taylor are.

“You are making a big mistake if you get hooked up with him,” Eleanore tells me. Eleanore comes over every Tuesday night and fills my washer full of slinky nightwear she only wears in Apex. “What you like about Earl is how he isn’t like Larry. Now tell the truth.” Eleanore always says that, “Now tell the truth,” but she only wants your truth; she turns a deaf ear if you discuss her truth.

“That’s not the reason,” I tell her. “Earl is a good businessman.”

“And Larry Cross was not,” she’ll snap, though I know he must’ve done all right to have had that stream of weirdos coming by all the time. Of course, I never say that.

“Earl is as neat as a pin.”

“And Larry Cross was a slob,” she says and doesn’t even pause to breathe. “And I’ll give you the last one. Larry Cross, as worthless as he is, is good-looking and Earl Taylor is not.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I tell her, though I know better. “Beauty is only skin deep and Earl goes through and through.”

“How? Name one way.” Eleanore is so persistent with perspectives other than her own.

“He fixed it so I could get myself established with credit.”

“That’s his job. Name another.”

“He’s sweet to Larrette,” I say, and Eleanore can’t deny that one because she’s never seen Earl around Larrette that much.

“What does he think about the way you spend money? What does he think about the way you order just about everything that Yield House has to offer?”

“Earl doesn’t care,” I tell her and that’s true. Half the time Earl doesn’t even notice, which is, I guess, another difference between him and Larry Cross. If Larry Cross was to slap those long legs up on a brand new butler’s table, he’d at least notice. He’d say, “Where’d you get this?” and I’d say what I always said, “At the getting place.” Larry Cross didn’t know a thing about the business because I
made the money and I paid the bills and I just about lost my mind doing it.

There’s a woman leaning out of her car window right now with a check and a deposit slip in her hand and a diamond that would make anybody proud sparkling on her finger. “Hi, Gail, how are you today?” I say before I even open the drawer and pull it back in. I know her without even looking at the name on her deposit slip because she comes in every Monday with her husband’s check that he got on Friday. William Anderson, MD, and her name is right there under his, Gail Mason-Anderson. That check is something, too; I bet the United States of this country makes more off of one of William Anderson’s checks than I make in four months gross. They live on Winona in a two-story house that’s got a pool in the back. I know because I looked for that house when I rode Eleanore by to see whether or not her boyfriend was really out of town on the weekend when they were supposed to meet in Apex. He wasn’t. He was right there in his backyard, wearing an apron and carrying barbecue tongs, with cars lined up on either side of the street. “He’s out of town all right,” I told Eleanore.

“It’s
her
,” she said. “
She
makes him do all these social things with people he can’t stand. He does it to keep her off his back just a little bit.”

“He lied,” I told her.

“He didn’t want me to be hurt by it.” She had taken off
her Doris Day glasses and wiped her eyes. “He’s protective of my feelings.”

I sang “Que Será, Será” but it didn’t perk her up. It made her mad, to be perfectly honest, and so she lit into Earl Taylor like a fly on you know what, because that’s what she always does when her own life is going bad and she has no choice but to admit it.

“I hope you had a nice weekend, Gail,” I say when I slip back that deposit slip minus the 150 dollars that I put in one of our little envelopes. Now she’s going over to Kroger’s and put that 150 dollars to use, does it every Monday. I know Gail Mason-Anderson like the back of my hand.

“I did,” Gail says, but she doesn’t look at me because she’s checking to make sure that I gave her the 150 she requested. Seven twenties and one ten, can’t get any closer than that, though I’m not offended when people do that. I’m glad people sit right there and check it because if she got to Kroger’s and then came back it would be her word against mine and Mr. Crown would chew me out whether I was in the right or wrong. “Think of the ways people could trick us out of money,” I told him one day and it’s the truth. There are numerous ways that you might trick a teller out of money and it is my job to keep that from happening. Not that I think Gail Mason-Anderson would do any such thing. She doesn’t have to. I bet she and William Anderson have a man who looks a lot like Earl Taylor to just figure it all up for them.

I like to think of having a hyphenated name myself. Maureen Dummer hyphen something. Maureen Dummer-Taylor with right above it Earl Sinco Taylor. “Your name sounds like a plumbing product,” I told him, only to find that I had hurt his feelings. Sinco is a name from somewhere in his mama’s family, and since his mama is dead, it made him real defensive that I should laugh at that name.

“Thank you,” Gail says. I read her lips because I’ve already cut off my speaker. She drives a diesel-powered Audi, and it wrecks my ears to hear it going on and on and ricocheting off the little drive-through area. I just nod and watch Gail Mason-Anderson go straight to Kroger’s.

Eighty-five degrees F and 11:37. I decide I’ll go and take my lunch hour a little early. I do that every now and again when it’s important like today when I am not going to Eckerd’s and order a grilled cheese but am going home and make sure there’s no fire started. It will take the whole hour but it’s the only way that I can stay in my seat the rest of the afternoon, not to mention that I have got a little nic craving that I can’t hold off anymore. I don’t even bring my cigarettes into this building because it would be such a temptation, not to mention that Trish, who sits at the other little opening, wears one of those badges that has a picture with a slash through it. A picture paints a thousand words and I don’t need to be hit over the head. Trish has a husband and that’s how she can afford to be so outspoken. She hates cigarettes and loves manatees, the Cape
Hatteras lighthouse, Statue of Liberty, 96LITE, and Jesus. You can read it all right there on the bumper of her car. I personally would not open my life like a book to the world. I have a sticker that says
GET OFF MY REAR
! and that’s all. Trish brakes for animals but won’t answer a person when they say they’re going to lunch. She just looks at the clock machine and rolls her eyes like I’m going to abuse the system and stay out until one instead of returning at 12:53, which will be exactly an hour from when my car exits the lot, give or take a few minutes. Trish supports the system, the public schools, the Little Theater, the President, and whales. All I know about Trish I’ve learned right off of that car. Her savings account shared with Edward Hunter cannot touch the savings account of Gail Mason-Anderson and William or that of Earl Sinco Taylor.

Now I feel like I can’t get this Bug to go fast enough. It’s like all of a sudden I’m in a panic to see my condo still standing with my potted geranium on the front stoop and my straw hat with lacy ribbons on my door. Welcome and welcome relief it is when I turn this corner a little and see it. What I don’t welcome is Eleanore standing on the sidewalk with what looks like catsup or poster paints there on the front of her blouse that I gave her for her birthday two years ago. That blouse not only is out of style but if it was in style it is far too frilly for a Monday morning in the elementary school. “It’s a church blouse,” I told her and she gave me the Dummer eye.

Eleanore has always taken things personally. The time I told her that there is a difference in the country look that is authentic and the country look that is a hodge-podge of too much of a good thing, she took it personally and I certainly didn’t mean it for her personally, even though she does not need one more rooster looking like it’s about to crow tacked up on her kitchen wall. I think it’s symbolic that she’s so into roosters, all that strutting and taking hold of every hen and that’s not even touching the biblical symbol, three crows and you’re out.

“Where have you been?” she asks just as soon as I step out of the Bug and this heat hits my head like a ton of bricks. “I’ve been waiting forever.”

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I tell her. I do more than tell her. I state it like the fact that it is. This isn’t the first time Eleanore has pulled such a visit only to turn it around and make it my fault that she’s been waiting. And where else would I have been but at the bank, here in this navy linen suit with matching pumps, and little canvas clutch? Every fiber of my Monday-through-Friday wardrobe says “teller.”

I get up close and I can see that Eleanore has been crying, and it takes me a second to remember why I trucked clean across town home—the Mr. Coffee. “Come on in,” I tell her. “I’m afraid I left the Mr. Coffee on.” Eleanore follows me in and just about falls down on a Fisher-Price bathtub frog which Larrette meows to. We both have tried to teach her to say “frog” but she is as stubborn in that way
as Larry Cross. “Gotta love that Squeaky,” he used to say to me and throw those gorilla arms around my hips. He called me Squeaky because he thought I looked like that woman that tried to shoot Gerald Ford that time, and I don’t. “I love my Squeaky,” he would say because he didn’t have much sense, but God, just the thought of that bed breaking down and not even fazing that man makes my heart skip a beat or two.

It’s on. Plugged in and on, that pot bottom dried into nothing but crisp brown sludge. “I did it,” I say to Eleanore, who is at that kitchen table with a Kleenex up to her face. “Thank God, there wasn’t a fire.”

“He’s gone back to his wife,” Eleanore sobs. “Don’t you say ‘I told you so’ one time since I’m going ahead and saying it for you.”

I’m a little confused since to my knowledge he never left his wife to begin with. “I didn’t know he had left her.”

“He left her a year ago. He left her that first night we stayed in Apex and he told me that he loved me like he had never loved anybody.” Eleanore primps up and sobs again, wiping her mascara on my linen pineapple-print napkins. “I mean he still lived there, with
her
, but it was me he loved.” I listen to Eleanore telling the details of it all while the Mr. Coffee pot cools enough that I can rinse out that crud, but while Eleanore is going on my mind is thinking over that word
love
, and how it is used and misused and abused. Earl Taylor has said that word one time when it referred to me. Once, and I’m thinking that that isn’t
good enough. I’m thinking of “Love my Squeaky” and Larry Cross might have meant it as much as if he’d said “Love my Carpet,” but still he said it.

“He said if he could live his life over that he would be with me,” Eleanore says and looks up from my napkin, black smudges all over it. “He said it on the phone and then there came a sweetheart rose to the school office. No card. It’s right out there in my car if you want to see it.”

“I don’t need to see it,” I tell her. “But what would you have done if I hadn’t come to lunch?”

“You usually do come to lunch,” Eleanore says. “You’re usually here by eleven-thirty.”

“Well,” I say because I’ve never thought that she would busy herself to pick up on my daily patterns.

“Mr. Coffee, iron, oven, it’s always something.” Eleanore goes over and gets Larrette’s little frog and hugs it. It squeaks. I hear a
squeak squeaky
loud and clear, Larry Cross and bedsprings that Earl Taylor couldn’t squeak if he did a somersault with bricks tied around his neck. “I know you like a book, Maureen.”

“I reckon you do,” I say and rinse that napkin out in cold water and a little Stanley spot remover. “Must be the Dummer in us.”

“I know Tuesday is my wash night but I was wondering if I could come over tonight instead,” Eleanore says, and there’s no way I can tell her no. It’s my night to cook a little something for me and Earl and for us to watch “Cagney and Lacy” and I don’t even care. I don’t even care that
I’m going to break that pattern starting tonight, and if Gail Mason-Anderson had some sense she’d break
her
habit and occasionally go to Harris Teeter, where they’ve got fresh seafood coming in by the barrel.

“I think that’s a good idea,” I tell her and go over to touch that pot to see if it’s cooled down enough that it won’t crack.

“What about Earl Taylor?”

“Well, Earl Taylor can do something else. Earl Taylor can vacuum his Mazda, for example.” I run warm water first and take my Tuffy pad to the bottom of that pot. “Let’s go to Harris Teeter and buy some scallops,” I say when I’m so happy that pot doesn’t crack and splinter in my hands. “Let’s get some wine and some cheese, not dairy counter but deli cheese. And let’s go in Ivey’s and buy you some cologne and a blouse that’s in style.” Eleanore has taken that personally I can tell, but she is too upset to argue.