The Crasher (2 page)

“How old was Ginny when she stole the sheepskin car seat, Virginia?”

“Oh, Graham, don’t say that. She didn’t steal it; she…she borrowed it to make a lamb’s costume for the school’s nativity
play…”

Outside the living room door Ginny fumed. That old story! She couldn’t believe it. She’d been planning to give them a surprise
and add a little sparkle to their evening, but as so often happened she was getting a rude surprise herself. What exactly
was her father trying to prove this time?

“Borrowed, stole. What’s the difference? She cut it up so it was unusable afterwards. Hey! I’ve got gin!”

“Damn! Graham, you’re not fair. You take my mind off the game by talking so much and telling us all your stories, then you
always win.” Ginny heard Lucy Douglas giggle, but she bet she wasn’t really amused. Her mother had told her Lucy hated to
lose and so did her drab husband.

Since moving to Dallas in ‘88, her parents had drifted into these Sunday night gin games with the Douglases. Her mother wished
they hadn’t, although it had started because
Dad loved playing the game and so did Lucy, who worked at Neiman Marcus, where her mother also worked as a fitter.

A chair squeaked and Ginny heard her mother say in the cheery-trying-to-be-pleasant-at-all-costs tone she knew so well, “Let’s
have some coffee, shall we?” Ginny clenched her teeth. Please, Dad, don’t go on with the car seat story. She didn’t have much
hope.

“So what was I saying? Oh yes, well it was when we were still in San Diego, so I suppose Ginny was about ten, eleven.”

“Nine and a half,” Ginny murmured.

On the way to the kitchen Virginia shot Graham a warning sign to shut up. Everything he said would be all over the alterations
department in the morning. She’d warned him before, but as usual he took no notice.

“Seems Ginny didn’t get the part of Mary or even one of the angels in this nativity play, so what did she do? She didn’t sulk
or moan. She got the car seat—she’s like her mother, good with the needle—made it into this lamb’s costume, then, plucky kid,
went uninvited to a rehearsal wearing the damn thing and one, two, three, convinced the teacher that to add authenticity to
the stable scene she should bleat her way throughout the performance, right in front of blessed Mary, too.” Graham whacked
his leg with gusto. “How’s that for chutzpah? How’s that for showing initiative, something, I might add, Ginny knows I always
highlight in my courses as one of the crucial elements for success.”

Initiative! Virginia groaned. So that’s what he was calling it now.

Lucy screamed with laughter. “What a character. If she was like that at ten, what will she get up to at twenty?” Virginia
wanted to hit her. “Where is Ms. Sweet Sixteen, anyway? Out on a date, I s’pose?”

Ginny had had enough. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.

“Here I am, evening Mr. Douglas, Mrs. Douglas…”

She struck a pose in the doorway, hand on one hip, cane in the other, five feet seven inches and still growing. She tossed
her head back and winked, before giving the startled group the benefit of her most mischievous grin.

Her mother gasped, “What on earth…?”

With every strand of her generally tousled chestnut hair hidden out of sight under a curious black turban, her slanted cheekbones
made more so with powder blush, her dark eyes—inherited from her Italian grandmother—made still darker with kohl, Ginny Walker
was wearing—could it really be possible—the jacket of her father’s old-fashioned tuxedo. Belted tightly around her tiny waist,
the jacket ended well above her knees, her lanky legs in shiny black tights looking as if they reached up to her armpits.

Trouble, she looked like nothing but trouble. A line from her favorite Bette Davis movie,
All About Eve,
came into Virginia’s mind. “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night”

Sure enough, even as Graham was giving Ginny his usual mixed signal of aggravation and reluctant admiration, half smiling
a fatuous smile while shaking his head sorrowfully, Ginny plumped down on the sofa and said, ‘That’s right, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas.
I learned everything I know about initiative from Dad. Did you tell them, Dad, about that other time in San Diego, when the
Von Karajan concert was sold out and you, eh, pretended to the old Mother Hubbard at the box office you’d given the tickets
to me and I’d lost them?”

As her father’s face reddened, Ginny rocked backward and forward, a determined look on her face. There was no stopping her
now. “Of course, I didn’t know then Dad was pretending, that there never had been any tickets, otherwise I wouldn’t have bawled
my eyes out as he made me empty my pockets to find nothing there… and the kind old Mother Hubbard wouldn’t have taken pity
on us, would she, Dad? She gave us some standing room tickets meant for others in the line just to shut me up.”

The smile was gone from Graham’s face. “Ginny, watch that loose tongue of yours.” He suddenly realized what she was wearing.
“And who gave you permission to wear my
jacket? What do you think you’re doing? What d’you think you look like anyway?”

“Practicing for my audition in
Ginger and Fred,
Dad… I’m the tallest in the class, so I’m trying out for Fred.” She gave him a coquettish look. “I wanted your opinion about
the look before I asked permission to borrow it for the big night…”

As Graham growled something about putting the cart before the horse and the Douglases made polite titters, Ginny got up and
tap-danced around the room, the taps on her shoes and the tap of the cane on the wooden floor reverberating through Virginia’s
head. When she reached the door she bowed low to the ground. “Good night, ladies and gentlemen.”

Jim Douglas made a halfhearted attempt to applaud, but when nobody else joined in, he stopped. There was an awkward silence
as they heard Ginny run upstairs. “I’ll get the coffee,” said Virginia, and “Where’s that coffee?” said Graham, simultaneously.

“Ginger and Fred?” Virginia didn’t need to look at Lucy Douglas to know she thought her daughter belonged in a straitjacket.

“Ginny’s in a modern dance class at Dallas High,” Virginia snapped over her shoulder.

“Oh, does she want to be in show biz now? I thought she wanted to be a dress designer?”

Graham’s face was still red. “Certainly not.” He struggled to regain his composure. “She’s top of her class in math. When
she graduates, she’s going to business school, to get a degree in business administration.” He straightened his shoulders.
“She’ll eventually join me.”

“Over my dead body,” Virginia murmured. She was so upset, reaching up for the precious coffee cups she only used when they
had company, she dropped one, the handle breaking off as it hit the countertop.

Upstairs, at the small sink in her bedroom, a lifesaver in the rented house with only one bathroom, Ginny slowly,
painstakingly, began to remove the kohl with Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Before she was halfway finished, her tears were
helping the job along.

What a fool she’d made of herself… and in front of prissy, gossipy Lucy Douglas, of all people. How could she have let her
mother down like that, giving away the family secret that her father had always conned his way through life?

Ginny stared at the black streaks on her face. Not half an hour ago she’d felt so excited, applying the newly acquired kohl,
managing to stuff her unruly hair into a skintight, olympic-style bathing cap that gripped her skull so tightly, it made her
cheekbones look more prominent, tying her pièce de résistance on top, the black turban she’d made out of the control tops
of her mother’s old panty hose.

She’d set out to make everyone laugh with her Fred Astaire act, to help her mother, who wasn’t that keen on playing gin—or
for that matter having the Douglases over. As usual, because of her father, it had turned into a nightmare.

Why did he constantly humiliate her with his well-worn stories? Why was he always illustrating his own cleverness with stories
about escapades her mother believed showed up her worst trait, an overpowering determination to get her own way, no matter
what, rather than flashes of brilliant initiative learned at her father’s knee?

She was spent, worn out, the way she always felt after any confrontation with her father. There were more and more of them
these days as the subject of Her Future loomed nearer.

She knew when it was coming. Usually at breakfast. Often on a Monday, her father’s favorite day for making pronouncements,
the day the fathers of most kids she knew were in a rush to get to work, dashing to their cars or the subway, or a seven-thirty
or eight o’clock bus to get to an office, a plant, a business.

Her father was different, and how she’d grown up hating that fact.

It was her mother who went to work. Her father worked from home—wherever home happened to be—and most
Mondays he acted the way she supposed most wage earners did, sighing about the onset of another week of toil ahead, sitting
at the breakfast table as if he was the chairman of the board.

What bullshit as Toby, her best friend at Dallas High, would say. Monday was no different from any other day of the week for
her father. He would go into whatever room of the house he’d designated as his “office” and dictate his daily output of words
of wisdom into his “Memory Minder.” Later he would take hours, starting and stopping the machine, to listen, before finally
typing out, almost word for word, what he had already dictated.

It was a terrible waste of time, but Ginny had long ago given up hope of trying to persuade him to type his thoughts directly
onto the typewriter.

“Think of the correspondence course as a classroom,” he would pontificate. She could repeat it word for word. “When the material
arrives through the mail, it is essential the pupil can ‘hear’ as well as read what the teacher is teaching. So I must first
hear what I am going to teach—the tone is almost as important as the information.”

Quentin Peet, the nationally acclaimed columnist, her father’s idol, would then be brought into it. “I am sure Peet must dictate
his pieces,” her father would say. “Every word resonates like no other writer’s in the world. I am sure that’s his secret.”

Well, bully for Mr. P. As far as Ginny was concerned dictation was for secretaries, but there had never been enough money
around in their lives for that kind of luxury.

California, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas. During her short life they’d lived in four different states and seven different cities.
Toby thought it sounded terribly glamorous and she’d let her think it, but it wasn’t, no sirree. It wasn’t glamorous at all.
It was hell on earth.

Just before moving to this dreary house near the Marsalis Park Zoo, they’d been living in Denver, and that was where
the horrible, lurking suspicion that had been building inside her turned into reality.

Her mother, trying to hide the fact, had been crying over the electricity bill, and like a thunderbolt, as if God himself
had spoken, Ginny had suddenly known, absolutely known for certain that the Walker School of Advanced Learning was a failure,
if not a sham, that despite growing up hearing over and over again that it was their passport to prosperity, it never had
been, nor would it ever be.

Heavy rain began to beat against the window. At least that would drown out the smell of the monkey house for a few hours.
Ginny threw off the tuxedo jacket, undressed and jumped into bed to finish her math homework. At ten o’clock at night, still
only in October, she was shivering, dreading another Dallas winter, with only a gas fire in her room.

“It rarely rains and is never cold in Texas,” her father had said two years before as he outlined the reasons for their move
to the area of his “new opportunity.”

As she turned out the light Ginny’s resentment and anger returned. Just like the Walker School of Advanced Learning, that
had been a lot of bullshit, too.

When the Douglases left, Virginia could just imagine what they were saying as they drove home. “Is that what he teaches in
his How to Succeed in Business or whatever he calls his courses, to lie and steal and crash? No wonder his daughter’s such
a kook. He probably cheated at gin, too. He probably always cheats, then calls it chutzpah or initiative.”

The car seat story was all too true. Virginia hadn’t been amused or impressed when it had come out. On the contrary, she’d
wanted to punish Ginny, to make her realize that taking someone else’s property was stealing, that to go anywhere where she
wasn’t wanted was undignified. To her fury, before she could do anything, Graham had not only told Ginny he was proud of her,
he’d rewarded her with a wonderful present, her first sewing machine, using some of the money they’d put away for medical
emergencies.

Ancient history though it was, Virginia thought about it as she washed up the supper plates, and it made her boil all over
again. As if the sewing machine hadn’t been enough. As usual, she’d been the one paying for the lease on the car and so, of
course, for the car seat, too.

It was all uphill and tonight it was all too much. How could she ever give Ginny a normal life, growing up with a peripatetic
father who had itchy feet as soon as responses to his local ads ran dry, whose “School of Advanced Learning” would have led
them into an advanced stage of poverty without her paychecks?

On the wall was the set of kitchen knives Graham’s sister Lil had sent them last Christmas. How horrified Lil would be if
she knew what she, Virginia, wanted to do with them right now.

After “Dear Friend,” Graham Walker’s opening letter to new subscribers began with the homily, “We don’t wake up on the wrong
side of the bed. We wake up on the wrong side of the brain.” Ever since she could remember Ginny had always tried to sleep
flat on her back.

Now it was one of the few left of her father’s many dictates she thought might contain an element of truth. Certainly on this
day of days, when she’d woken up on her stomach, with her head buried in the pillow and the wrong side of her brain definitely
in control, not cooperating in any way with what she had to do.