Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories (11 page)

My sister stared at him, and I said the three little words I should have said to him a long time ago: “Fuck off, Dad.”

It was a real Kodak moment for us, one of those that lives in the family memory book, and he didn’t speak to me for two months afterward. However, as we all know, when God closes a door, He opens a window, and my sister moved in with me that night. For the past eleven months, I have lived with a woman who experiences emotion the way other people have lunch, with regularity but without paying much attention. Her grief for Paul was real, but her memory is short, and above all else, Stephanie, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

Marshall was Paul’s insurance agent. Steph says Fate brought them together. My father says Paul’s half million in insurance helped. I don’t care. Steph is happy right now, not happy the way she was with Paul, but happy, and that’s all that matters. My mother was right, life really is just a bunch of moments, and it bothers me that she didn’t get more of her own, but right now the damn punch bothers me more.

It’s clear, some sort of white wine spritzer deal with lemons floating in it, and I look at it and then at my pink dress and then back at the punch, and I hate it. And I have to do something about it because after all, my sister is only going to get married for the fifth time once.

So I find the caterer, and I say, “I need a lot of red food coloring right now.” He says, “We don’t have any.” I see a quart can of strawberries and I say, “I’ll take the strawberry juice.” He says, “That’s for the cheesecakes.” I say, “I’m a member of the bridal party,” and he says, “No.” I say, “I’m the sister of the bride and I need it,” and he says, “No.” I look him in the eye and say, “Give me those strawberries, or I will hurt you.”

They didn’t make me the first female partner in my law firm because I’m nice.

The punch looks pretty bad when I pour the strawberry juice in, murky and not even close to the color of my dress. Steph looks over and her mouth drops open when she sees the punch. I point to my dress, and she laughs, and I feel good for the first time since those damn funerals.

Having defeated a caterer and given Steph her punch, I see my dad surveying the crowd, checking ties, storing up wisecracks. And I think, it’s time to change my game plan and find somebody to screw up my life. Steph has, and I can, too. So I’m looking around the wedding guests to make my next move and I see the usual sociopaths that I am attracted to, the married men, the brooding artists, the I-have-loved-and-lost losers, the baby-don’t-get-hooked-on-me fatheads—

And I think about how much that sounds like something my father might say. In fact, it’s probably something my father
did
say. And I know how Pavlov’s dogs must have felt about Pavlov.

I can see my father, looking at everybody with that you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look, only that look doesn’t make me anxious the way it used to. Now that look just makes me want to smack him, I’m so mad. Except that’s a place I don’t want to go, that’s something I’m going to have to work out because I can’t make my father pay for being himself all my life. It was my choice to be Daddy’s Girl, and now it’s my choice not to. That’s probably enough of a payback.

So I look around the party instead, and I see a fading blond guy with glasses and a receding hairline and a plain blue tie, a never-had-an-exciting-thought accountant type if there ever was one. It does occur to me that choosing guys my father will loathe is not a huge improvement over choosing guys my father will approve of, but I’ve got to take this one step at a time. And anyway, he looks nice. Like Paul. Lot of potential there.

I go find Scott and Jake, and I tug on Scott’s arm and say, “What about the guy in the blue tie, over there by the bar?”

Jake looks and nods. “Definitely a possible.”

Scott squints and says, “Looks a little dull for your dad.”

This I do not need. “I’m not dating for Dad any more. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a great idea and long overdue,” Scott says.

“No, about the
guy
.”

Scott gives me that I-love-you-but-you’re-an-idiot-look. “So now you’re going to start dating for me? Go talk to him, but don’t be yourself. Be sweet.”

Jake says, “Ignore him. You’ve always been sweet. It’s sort of a Stealth Bomber kind of sweet, but it’s there.”

I give up on both of them and go over to my sister. “What about the blond in the blue tie?”

She frowns over his way and then shakes her head. “Nope. Not your type. He’s Paul’s accountant. And he’s nice.”

I take this in the spirit in which it is meant, which is a kind attempt to save me some time because she doesn’t realize I’ve had an epiphany, and I move away to gather my courage. Jess comes over.

“Now what?” she says. “You’ve got that look in your eye.” She turned twenty-four a couple of weeks ago, and she thinks she knows it all. Actually, she probably does know most of it. I should have been so smart at her age.

I should be so smart now.

“The blond in the blue tie,” I tell her.

She squints over. This guy has got to be getting a little paranoid by now with all of us watching him, but he’s not breaking a sweat. “Boring. And look at that tie.”

“I told you not to listen to Grandpa,” I tell her. “You stop that right now.”

She gives me one of those beneath-contempt looks, the kind I used to give Steph. “Chill out, Aunt Caro. I was kidding. I’m my own woman.”

“Yeah, well, me, too.” I take a deep breath so I can go prove it.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to pick my way through this crowd to start a new life at forty-four, wearing pink chiffon, by making my move on an accountant.

“Hello,” I say loudly when I’m next to him, and the champagne slops out of his glass when he jumps. “I’m the sister of the bride, and I’m planning on making a pass at you, but I need to know first if you have a diagnosible psychological disorder, a reliance on controlled substances, or a predilection for whips, chains, German shepherds, or sheep.”

“Uh, no,” he says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “But I’m willing to learn.”

Listen, I want you to know that I know that this isn’t going to work. Even if this guy turns out to be a man I could spend the rest of my life with, even if he turns out to be faithful and true, even if he doesn’t contract a fatal disease or collapse from a stroke, even then, a truck will hit him. I know this in the very depths of my soul. I am looking at a mild-mannered accountant, and I am seeing a future of pain, degradation, loss, and despair.

But I don’t care. I’m finally going to have my own goddamned moment.

Even if it is at my sister’s wedding.

This is how it all got started. In 1996, Ron Carlson gave my graduate class a writing exercise based on a Joyce Carol Oates story that was structured by using 26 sentences, the first one beginning with A, the second with B, and so on. When I sat down to write the story, I thought Carlson was giving us busy work. When I finished it, I knew he was a genius teacher because writing that exercise showed me that any structure will work as long as it is a structure. So here it is from the Carlson Workshop, my Alphabet Exercise:

A
fter my sister, Zoë, shot the mailman, Mama grounded her for twenty-four hours and made her miss the big dance over at the Grange Hall in Xenia, but Zoë said it was worth it just to hear old Buster scream, and she didn’t care anyway because her boyfriend, Nick, is away at boot camp so there’s not much fun in Zoë’s life except for taking out the occasional public servant with a beebee gun.

B
uster Turnbull was a truly terrible mail carrier, Mama told Zoë when she grounded her, but shooting him was just un-neighborly and not the kind of activity she wanted her daughters to be associated with.
C
ertainly Buster needed to be taken in hand and reminded that neither snow nor rain was supposed to keep him from handing over the stuff people sent us, and his unfortunate habit of reading postcards out loud as he went on his rounds had annoyed all of us, and not one of us was amused when he got tired of postcards and started flat-out opening our mail and shouting it to the world, but Zoë was amused the least because he liked reading her stuff the best.

“Dear
Z
oë,” he’d read at the top of his lungs when my sister would get a letter from Nick. “
E
very night I sit here and think about all the things we did to each other naked on your back porch and I get hot all over again.”

“
F
ine
goings on,” Buster would call out before he’d read on, sounding like some hell-fire Baptist preacher looking to stir up trouble and stop pleasure. “
G
ood
girls wouldn’t get letters like this, and Miss Zoë McKenzie shouldn’t be either and I am just shocked that she is even though she goes around looking so sweet and pretty and all.”
H
e didn’t get around women much since he looked like a peeled egg and had a personality to match, so he had no clue what kind of letters good girls got or didn’t get, but that didn’t stop Buster from making Zoë’s life particular hell.

I
could remember when Buster had been sort of fun, announcing what we were getting as he came up our steps, like previews of coming attractions at the movies. “
J
ust in time for your birthday, Quinn,” he’d holler to me. “
K
indly old Aunt Betsy has sent you a letter and I bet there’s a check in it.”
L
ater on, he started holding the envelopes up to the sun so he could see how much the check was for, but of course that didn’t work because people always send checks in cards so it doesn’t look so cold and heartless sending money instead of a present, and I’m sure that must have been frustrating for him, trying to see into people’s lives and getting shut out by Hallmark.
M
aybe that’s why he started opening the mail; it just got too frustrating trying to see through the envelopes.
N
ever getting any mail of his own, Buster probably just figured that he had the right to see ours since he was delivering it.

O
pening other people’s mail is a federal crime, of course, but it probably didn’t seem like one to Buster.
P
eople never think what they’re doing is a crime because crime is always what other people are doing, but Zoë knew right off that Buster was breaking the law. “
Q
uinn, we have to turn him in,” she told me after Buster had read the hot-sex-on-the-porch letter out loud while Mrs. Armbruster down the street stood on her steps with her mouth open, soaking up every word, ready to repeat it to Mrs. Mueller and Mrs. Papacjik and Mrs. Jerome, and we both knew that from there the news would percolate to Mama and there would go Zoë’s chances of ever finding heaven on the back porch with Nick again, assuming Mama would ever let her out of the house at all as long as she lived.
R
eally, I’d have been seriously pissed off at him, too, so I was behind her all the way when she reported him.
S
omebody down at the post office promised to look into it, but my big sister knew a run-around when she heard one.
T
he only thing left for her to do was to take matters into her own hands.

U
nfortunately for Buster, he chose the next day to open a package from Nick which was full of old movies that Nick wanted Zoë to watch instead of going out with other guys and doing god knows what. “
V
ideos for adult viewing,” Buster bellowed without reading the titles so he could make the worst possible call; “porn through the postal service.”
W
hereupon Zoë picked up the beebee gun she’d loaded with salt pellets, and went out on the front porch, and aimed just below the mail bag, and said, “Buster, you have just violated your last piece of U.S. mail,” and opened fire, yelling, “Dance, gringo,” just like she’d seen in the Western Nick had sent her.
X
enia heard Buster’s screams, they were that loud, but then you can imagine what that salt felt like going through Buster’s pants.
Y
ou can’t imagine the sound he made, though; it was like a pig being pulled through a meat grinder backwards.

Zoë
says she’s not sorry, and Mama grounded her because of it, but Buster’s not reading our mail anymore, so things are a lot better here.

This shorter version of “Just Wanted You To Know” was published in the August 2000 issue of
Redbook
, and my favorite thing about it is that a woman wrote in to the magazine:

“Recently, my husband left me for our infant son’s baby-sitter. Your fiction selection, Jennifer Crusie’s “Just Wanted You to Know” (August), kept me laughing while I made the transition from a tear-stained wreck to a woman who finally realized that she’d been given a second chance at a better life. I’m even going to send a copy to my soon-to-be ex-husband for his reading enjoyment!”

That’s the stuff that makes you glad you’re a writer.

D
ear Ronnie,

I am trying to be calm and understanding here, but Darla told me yesterday after church that the reason you didn’t come home Saturday night—and I was so worried, Ronnie, I even drove out to the hardware store to see if you were out there maybe having a heart attack in the parking lot—was because you went off with Barbara Niedemeyer from the First National. She told me that, and all the breath went right out from my body, and the whole world swung around. And then I remembered that all I needed to do was faint in Saint Mark’s vestibule and everybody in Tibbett would know, not to mention Mama, and Darla was holding my hand so tight that my wedding rings cut right into my skin, and the pain brought me back. But Ronnie, it almost broke my heart to hear news like that, and then Barbara called this morning to say you’d be back in two weeks to pick up your things and the Mustang once the two of you got back from the vacation you’re taking. Twenty-six years of marriage, and you go to Michigan with a bank teller and don’t even call to tell me yourself. I couldn’t believe it, it hurt so much.