Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories (3 page)

I
started falling asleep at the dinner table when I was twelve, after my stepfather married my mother and came to live with us. Nathan was a good breadwinner, even his boss Mr. Craven said he was a wonder at selling furniture, and once my mother married him, she didn’t look so worried all the time. He was good to her, and he never yelled at us or hit us or did any of the things some of my friends had to put up with from their real fathers. But he didn’t have any idea of how to be with kids so whenever he’d notice me, he’d put on this really jolly kind of voice and tease me about how dumb I was, how ugly I looked, and how big my feet were. He never gave me mean looks while he said it, and he always looked like he was waiting for me to laugh, but I hated it because at twelve you really do think you’re dumb and ugly and your feet are enormous.

“Oh, that’s just talk, Meggy,” my mother would say, fluttering her hands, but I could tell she didn’t like it, that she hurt for me, and I wished she’d stick up for me, but she couldn’t. She was just soft and pretty and silent. My grandma was the same way, and my mother said my great-grandma Metzger had been quiet, too. “We Metzgers just weren’t bred for backtalk,” my mother told me, and when Nathan came, I knew she wouldn’t change. So I sat there and took it like a Metzger, while my mother shot me worried looks and said, “Now, Nathan.”

Of course, Nathan didn’t stop. He’d say, “Time to get Meggy shoes for school. Let’s go down to the canoe rental,” and I’d want to say something, but my answer would get caught in my throat, and my breath would come all wrong, and I’d hurt in my chest. It was like putting the feelings into words would let out so much that I wouldn’t be able to stop, that the words would just sling out, one after another, and I’d say something so evil that I’d kill him, or Mama, or maybe all of us, just one big massacre, and when the police came there would be blood everywhere, and three dead bodies, and they’d be stymied as to what could have killed us. But it would have been the words.

It was when I didn’t think I could stand it any more that I started falling asleep.

The first time was at dinner one night about two months after he’d moved in. I’d been talking to our dog, Virginia, after school, and Nathan had come home early and heard me. I knew Virginia was just a dog, I wasn’t expecting any answers, but it was good to hold her on my lap and tell her the things I had to talk about that nobody else could hear. Except that Nathan did, and he had to tell Mama all about it. “Talking to that dog just like she was a person,” he said, and laughed. “Asking that dog questions like she could give the answers.” He made his voice really high and squeaky. “I like Denny Truwell, do you think he likes me? Huh, Virginia, do you?” Then he made his voice really low and growly. “I don’t know, Meggy. Is he sniffing your butt?” Mama said, “Now, Nathan,” and then I don’t remember because I put my head down next to my plate and passed out. Just like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life. Mama woke me and put her hand against my forehead and said, “Meggy?” and I felt bad for her because she looked so worried, but Nathan just thought it was the funniest thing ever. “Wear yourself out talking to the dog?” he said.

After that, I fell asleep every night at the table as soon as Nathan started talking to me, so Mama started feeding me early dinners when I got home from school to make sure I ate enough to keep alive. I still had to go in and eat with her and Nathan at six, but since I was asleep by six-fifteen, it didn’t matter much. Mama took to putting a folded up towel to the right of my plate because that was usually where my head fell, but one night Nathan said I’d been faking it, and I went out cold the other way and ended up with a big bruise on the side of my head. After that, even he had to admit I was really asleep. That’s when Mama took me to the doctor, and I had to take a lot of vitamins, which probably didn’t hurt me but didn’t keep me awake, either. When the vitamins didn’t work, Mama took me into Lima to see a different kind of doctor. “Tell him he should shrink her feet while he’s shrinking her head,” Nathan said at Sunday dinner the night before we went. “Feet that big—” and then I yawned and put my head down, and I missed the rest.

The doctor was nice enough. “Has anything been upsetting Meggy?” he asked my mother.

My mother and I looked at each other.

“No,” she said.

I went to sleep on the spot, falling out of the chair right there in the doctor’s office and smacking my head on the floor which woke me up pretty smartly, I can tell you.

The doctor helped me back in the chair and gave my mother one of those fishy looks. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong at home?” he asked, and my mother said, “I’m sure,” and stuck out her hand to catch me.

“Meggy?” the doctor said, and I wanted to say, “I hate my stepfather and I hope he dies,” but that wasn’t possible, so I said, “No. Everything is fine.”

He just nodded, and I felt hopeless and deserted because he wasn’t so smart after all. But my mother kept on taking me to him, and he kept on asking me questions and having me draw pictures, and I kept on telling him I was fine, and then one day, he said, “Do you ever dream, Meggy?”

I wanted to say, “Yes, I dream that Nathan goes away, I dream he gets hit by a car, I dream he swells up and explodes,” but I couldn’t say it. So I said, “Sometimes, but I forget.”

“The next time you fall asleep,” he told me, “you must tell your dream out loud when you wake up. Even if it sounds bad, you can tell it because it won’t be real, it’ll just be a dream. Will you promise to do that?”

I nodded, and he turned to my mother. “You must ask her to do that, Mrs. Ludlow. Have her tell you the dreams, and write down what she says, and then we can talk about them when you come back. Will you promise to do that?”

My mother, a Metzger to the bone, was speechless, but she nodded. When she got home and told Nathan, he groaned. “You paid him good money so Meggy could talk about her dreams?” I yawned but he started talking about the promotion his boss Mr. Craven had promised him, so I didn’t fall asleep until we sat down to dinner again.

Nathan had to talk about the promotion a lot at dinner, about how he’d invited the Cravens to eat with us on Friday as a thank you, about how they were coming (“Mercy, Nathan,” my mother said) even though they’d never been to any of the other salesmen’s houses for dinner, and about how Mr. Craven had said Nathan was the best salesman they had, but then toward dessert time he finally remembered me and said, “Maybe we can get Meggy’s feet shortened now that we’re going to have all this money. That way maybe old Danny Truwell—”

My head hit the table with a smack, and I was dreaming I was in the backyard with Virginia and she was telling me stuff. When my mother shook me awake, I yawned at her, and she said, “What did you dream?” and I said right away, still a little dizzy with sleep, “Virginia told me that Nathan is a mean, bad man and all the dogs on the block bark at him when he goes to work.”

Nathan’s jaw dropped, and I blinked at him, amazed I’d said that, although actually, I hadn’t, Virginia had. He said, “
Now wait a minute
,” and Mama said, “It’s just a dream.” Then she turned to me and said, “Dessert?” and I said, “Yes, please,” and she said to Nathan, “See, the doctor was right, it’s already working, she’s wide awake.” I had two helpings of chocolate pudding. It was delicious.

I had more dreams at dinner the next three nights, really good ones. In the last one, Nathan died, which wasn’t sad at all. He looked at me funny, but he knew I wasn’t faking because my head hit the table so hard each time, even with the towel there. “I think we’ve heard enough dreams,” he said after the death one, and my mother said, “But it’s curing her, she stays awake after she tells the dream.” And even Nathan had to admit they had to do something since the bruises were making the neighbors wonder. But he didn’t like it.

The night after the death dream was Friday. Nathan’s boss was there and his wife, and we were all behaving really well until Mrs. Craven said, “What a big bruise, Meggy. Did you fall off your bike?” and Nathan said, “Meggy’s so clumsy she—” and I yawned.

Nathan stopped. Right there in the middle of his sentence, like a cartoon character, he just froze with his mouth open.

“I bumped my head falling asleep,” I told Mrs. Craven. “It’s all right.”

“Goodness,” Mrs. Craven said.

Nathan closed his mouth and looked at me like I was something ticking.

“I’m much better now,” I said.

After two or three more dreams, Nathan shut up about me entirely, and I could mostly stand him after that. When I was eighteen, I started working in a realtor’s office, and I met a nice man who laughed a lot and didn’t say mean things ever, even after he’d had a few beers, and I married him and we had two little girls. Nathan died before they were old enough for him to talk to. At the funeral, the minister asked people if they’d like to say a few words, and a lot of people did, talking about what a good, honest businessman Nathan was, and that was true. My mother couldn’t speak, but the minister said he was sure she’d miss him, and that was probably true, too. Then he asked me if I wanted to say anything.

“No,” I said.

We Metzger women just aren’t talkers.

I think the difference between Meggy in this story and Meggy in
Crazy For You
is that the CFY Meggy is seen through Quinn’s eyes. The perception of a character changes depending on who’s looking at her, so Meggy is going to see herself as a Metzger (and miss the iron will she passes to Quinn and Zoë), and Quinn is going to see her as a lovable but exasperating parent. The real Meggy is much more than either of those, and I think the seeds of that are in this story.

And then there’s Quinn’s sister Zoë, the afore-mentioned hedonist. She was a fun character to write, but since she’d always been so sure of herself, there wasn’t a lot to say about her. Then in an early draft of the novel, I wrote a paragraph about how she’d met her second husband, Ben, the husband that lasted, after her first marriage to Nick had come unglued. The paragraph didn’t feel right, so I expanded it into a short story, and then used the short story to rewrite the paragraph. Hey, novel-writing is not for people in a hurry. The story is very short, and it’s also the only true romance short story I’ve ever written (generally you need the long form to convince readers it’s True Love Forever), but it did what it was supposed to do: it showed me Zoë and Ben so I could write the few brief lines they had in
Crazy For You
.

Z
oë was standing in the fountain when she met him.

She’d hiked her suit skirt to mid-thigh to splash in the green water, kicking waves of it onto the big statue in the center, a marble mess of some woman wearing lot of drapery. Probably Justice or Mercy or the Goddess of Fountains, stuck alone in Columbus, Ohio, just like Zoë. No, not stuck, that wasn’t right. She’d done the right thing by divorcing Nick five years before. If she hadn’t, she’d have ended up really stuck, trapped in Tibbett, Ohio, with a lot of dark-haired children who knew how jumpstart cars and tip cows. So she’d made the right decision and instead ended up with a great career in Columbus, Ohio, a career that was going so well that she had a meeting that afternoon with her boss and her opposite number from a sister company, a great meeting about a new project that was going to mean big things for her career. That was much better than being stuck in a nowhere marriage.

Zoë kicked the water.

The water kicked back, and Zoë looked down to see what had caused the splash. A tiny girl was plunking herself down in the foot-deep water.

“Hey,” Zoë said.

The little girl turned her head and smiled up at her, her moon face glowing in the sunlight as she sat in the pennies and patted the green water, and Zoë’s biological clock rolled over and betrayed her.

I want a baby.

Zoë straightened. No, she didn’t. That was the
last
thing she wanted.

The little girl smiled, her skin petal smooth and her mouth puckered like a rosebud.

I want a baby.

No, she did not.

Zoë frowned down at the kid. “You’re not supposed to be in here.” She held out her hand. “Come on, cutie, let’s go find your mom.”

“You’re not s’posed to be in here,” the little girl chanted back and stuck out her tongue.

Zoë looked around. “Where’s your mother?”

“Where’s your mother?” The kid pursed her mouth and splashed water on Zoë’s skirt.

“Look, kid,” Zoë said. “This suit is silk. Knock it off.”

“Look, kid,” the little girl said and splashed again.

“Significantly less cute after speaking,” somebody said, and Zoë and the little girl both looked around the statue in the middle of the fountain.

A guy sat there, with his feet in the water, his tie loosened, his suit jacket off, and his pants rolled up over his long muscled legs. His fair hair flopped over his forehead, and Zoë stopped and blinked at the warmth in his blue, blue eyes.

“Cute?” the little girl said.

“Not so much,” the guy said and stuck out his tongue.

The little girl giggled at him, sunny and beautiful again, and biology made a comeback. This was why Nature made kids darling, so women who were perfectly happy with their lives and their careers would suddenly throw everything over for weight gain and stretch marks and diapers and car pools and college tuition. The little girl transferred her smile to Zoë, and Zoë smiled back and looked over to see the guy starting to smile, too.
Like a family,
she thought. If I’d stayed married, this could be—

No, it couldn’t. For one thing, she wouldn’t have had blond children, not with Nick. For another thing, she’d still be stuck in Tibbett.

“Is she yours?” Zoë said to the guy, and he shook his head, just as a voice from behind them shrieked, “
Clarissa
!”

The little girl scowled as a woman in a watermelon print shift came running to the edge of the fountain.

“You get right out of there,” the woman scolded, her perfectly-plucked brows meeting in the middle of her slightly porcine face. She transferred her scold to Zoë: “What were you thinking, putting her in here?”