Crash Diet (4 page)

“Oh, ignore it,” I told them but Lynn and Grace quit. They said they just couldn’t have a connection like that, not when Lynn was pre-engaged to a boy at Vanderbilt and Grace was supposed to inherit her family’s pickle business in Mt. Olive, North Carolina. “Good Lord,” I said and flipped my hair. It was as long as Cher’s, and I was just as skinny, if not more so. “It’s a new generation.” But their response told me that men and pickles came first. Drugs came first for Margaret, and we tried singing a few times just the two of us, but she’d get really strung out and just go wild with a cowbell. Margaret referred to our singing engagements as
gigs
. All she talked about was gigs, gigs, gigs. She’d call me on the phone in the middle of the night to ask about a gig. Nobody wanted us and I knew that. The only real
gig
we’d ever had anyway was doing little spontaneous standups in a coffee shop downtown. Nobody wanted to hear “Blowing in the Wind” sung to a cowbell from India. Margaret liked to pass her time by doing LSD, and I passed mine by searching for the perfect male, dissecting specimen after specimen only to find his weaknesses and toss him
aside. I thought of myself as the female version of Dion’s “The Wanderer.” Or maybe I was “The Traveling Woman.” It was wanderlust and lustwander; it got even worse after my mother died and my dad took up with Mama, Too.

I was taking pictures of being naked in a bed long before John and Yoko,
imagine
ha ha. I met my husband at a Halloween party and married him the next week. He looked much better when his face was painted up like a Martian, and I guess I kept convincing myself that there would come a night when he would look that way again. My husband believed in unemployment and a working wife and all those other things I’ve mentioned. Lorraine said that I should’ve made my marriage work, should have gone into therapy instead of running off to D.C. I’ve told Lorraine that I could’ve kept that husband, could’ve made a go of that life-style. All I had to do was become a drug addict and hallucinate that everything was hunky-dory. I probably would’ve wound up like my friend Margaret, getting so high you’d have to scrape her off the ceiling. Finally she got scraped off a sidewalk. I was there when it happened. She said she was so high the only way down was to jump, and I was too busy talking to this matty-haired man to notice she meant business. He was wearing some of those suede German sandals that make people’s feet look so wide; you know the kind, they’re real expensive but they make you look like you don’t have a pot to pee in and couldn’t care less about your appearance. I had just asked him what
made him buy those shoes, what image was he trying to fit (even then I was researching), when all of a sudden there were screams and people running to the window, the fire escape. There were sirens, a woman thinking she could fly like Peter Pan. You’ve heard it before. That man with the matted hair expected me to go home with him afterwards. Not long after that happened I met my future husband and decided to get married. I was convinced that I had snapped to, but my snapping to was like a dream inside of a dream, a hallway of doors where with every slam I woke up all over again. I had barely begun to snap to.

That night while staring down to where Margaret was under a sheet with a little cowbell clutched in her hand, the matty-haired fellow breathing down my neck, I knew there was something powerful I needed to commit to memory but all I was coming up with was things like
lay off the stuff, don’t play on fire escapes, don’t let yourself become so lonely
. But like a lot of people (like Lorraine) I translated that last one as needing somebody, which leads me back to what I’ve already told, a marriage made in hell and me now in lover’s limbo. What I know now when I think of Margaret there, is that if you can’t make it in life all by yourself (and by that I mean without benefit of people and substances and gigs of whatever sort you might crave), then you simply can’t make it. That’s the whole ball of wax. If it happens that you meet a person who walks right
in and doesn’t change a hair on your head, then your pie is
à la mode
. I’ve found in my research that this type of male is most often the kind you can’t squeeze into a category. His lines are blurred and intertwined. He’s a little bit of a lot of things, and a lot of what counts. His feathers are like none you’ve ever seen.

I’ll hold out till I drop dead if I have to, and all the while I’m holding out I’ll pursue my projects, my crafts, my academic studies on why some women go the route they do. Why does someone like Lorraine, who could educate herself and do better, settle; and why can’t Mama, Too, who has already killed off two men (that I know of), give it up and take up cross-stitch? To think that a man can fill up whatever space you have is just stupid if you ask me. He can’t do it any better than a box of Twinkies or a gallon of liquor, and to ask it of him is unfair.

So what’s my line? What’s my response? These days I’m not really playing. These days I’m constructing a little diorama of my apartment kitchen and in it I have a little clay figure who looks just like me and is working on a diorama of her apartment kitchen. I have always loved the concept of infinity; it makes me feel good. There is something about the large and small of the world, the connections and movement between the two that keeps me in balance. And if ever I need to feel even better about my life, I take
The Sound of Music
test, which assures me that my emotions
are in working order. I have never once heard the Mother Superior sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” or watched the Von Trapps fleeing through the mountains at the end without getting a lump in my throat. It is a testament to life, to survival. I could watch that movie again and again. When we all rented it not too long ago, Lorraine said that the nuns depressed her. I assured her that the feeling would be mutual if the nuns ever met her.

And speaking of religious orders, right now I’m having a nice big argument with Mama, Too over what the rules for priesthood ought to be. I say (just to see what
she
will say) that celibacy means
no
sexual interaction at all, which includes people of the same sex as well as with yourself and by yourself. “Well, how do you propose that?” she asked. “You gonna wire them up so if they touch themselves it’ll set off bells?”

“No,” I tell her. “A solemn vow to God is good enough for me.”

“What do you know of God?” she asks, and I’m about to tell her when her date walks in with a fifth of bourbon and a big slab of raw bloody beef.

“Why, Marty,” I say to this old saggy cowboy. “I never noticed how hairy you are.” He grins great big and hunkers down at the kitchen table. It’s sad how easily some birds are bagged. He has molted down to a patchy-skinned bone. Mama, Too will have him henpecked in no time.

I guess in a way I’m waiting for the rarest breed of all, my sights set so high I have to squint to keep the sky in focus. I concentrate on migration habits. I keep in mind that owls fly silently at night. Some people (like Lorraine) might say I’m on a snipe hunt. But, call me an optimist. I’m sitting here in a pile of ashes, waiting for the phoenix to take shape and rise.

Gold Mine

The day the interstate opened was the day Highway 301 and Petrie, South Carolina, died. It used to be a hot spot, buzzing with a steady stream of cars heading to Florida. Ruthie Kates remembers it well, the whoosh of traffic, a rise and fall like the ocean waves that beckoned the tourists southward. That’s how it was when she and Jim took over the Goodnight Inn and that’s how it stayed for years. Then with the opening of I-95 the traffic veered inland and the flow slowed to a dribble, leaving behind a ghost town of pastel-painted motor lodges.

Just three weeks ago Jim veered off as well and the empty silence of the blazing afternoon has left Ruthie with nothing to do but sit by the pool and conjure the way it used to be. Her daughter Frieda is in the shallow end with a
friend she met in Tiny Tots; already their eyes are red from the chlorine and their fingertips shriveled like raisins while they pretend to be mermaids with long flowing hair (both have the standard four-year-old pixie cut for summer). Rodney has twice ordered them out of the pool while he used the long net to fish out fallen leaves and then a tiny tree frog, which sent them screaming to the foot of Ruthie’s chair. Rodney, who is nine, has asked very few questions since Ruthie explained that his father needed some time away, though at least once a day he pulls the phone into the bathroom and then whispers for what seems an eternity. “Who was that?” she has asked, only to be answered by a shrug. She knows he calls Malcolm, a boy in his class who is on his third father. Ruthie feels his stare often and tries to read his eyes; sometimes there is a look of pity and sometimes there is a look of anger. He knows more than he should, thanks to Malcolm. Now he is sailing pebbles across Highway 301 and into the deserted parking lot of the Budget Motel; his goal is to hit the
NO TRESPASSING
sign blocking the drive.

There was a time when the Budget Motel was always filled by late afternoon and then the Goodnight Inn caught the overflow. Ruthie and Jim would stand in the office and look out the big glass window, watching as car after car circled the Budget Motel’s lot, crossed the road, and then turned into theirs; they would whisper ecstatic cheers, day
after day, as they nonchalantly leaned outside to greet their guests. In only a few hours they would walk out together to hang the
NO VACANCY
sign, and Jim, energized by each passing day, would tell her that they were sitting on a gold mine. It was like his uncle Ross had said when he turned it over to them, a gold mine. They had plans, too. They would add on; build a couple of rooms on each end of the building; build a little recreation hall out back in the empty lot where the guests could play Ping-Pong; build their own house, the very house she wanted, hidden from the motel by a grove of trees.

Now when Ruthie remembers walking out to hang the sign with Jim, it’s always sunset and there’s always a breeze, a breeze that smells of citrus fruit and Coppertone lotion. It’s always one of those days when her hair falls smooth as silk, glistening with gold highlights that show off her tan; and her legs are long and lean, graceful with every step, her stomach flat as she stands with her hands on her hips, white gauzy dress swirling around her. And in this memory Jim is always beside her, both arms wrapped around her waist as he nuzzles into her, the collar of his workshirt smooth against her cheek, his eyes a brilliant blue as he stares at that sign. That’s the way she pictures it all, though she has never in her life owned a white gauzy dress and though, somewhere along the way, she was pregnant twice, and she knows that any good weather-record will show the intense humidity and breezeless days, the
rainy ones where they argued over who would suit up and dash out there with an umbrella to hang the sign. They had marveled at the Budget Motel; its
VACANCY/NO VACANCY
sign was electric, instant neon thrown with a switch from the warm dry attendant there in the lobby. “We’ll have a sign like that before long,” Jim always said.

Ruthie and Jim got married right out of high school. His uncle Ross was their only supporter, proof being his gift of the motel. He said he was ready to get out of the business, ready to buy a condo in a retirement community. The motel was in such a state of decay (Uncle Ross had said it
could
be a gold mine) that they spent the first year of marriage in a camper Ruthie’s dad had bought a week before he died. He had bought the camper with plans to travel around the country with Ruthie’s mother and see what they had missed. For over a year it had sat, flat and compact, in the back drive, while her mother periodically made mention of the money she
would
have had if not for the camper. Ruthie’s offer to buy it was the beginning of her mother’s acceptance of the marriage. Jim came and pulled the camper home and then it was as simple as flipping out the sides like wings (each formed a double bed). A canvas roof arched above. It had a tiny refrigerator and zippered windows.

“For godssakes,” Jim’s mother had said, “isn’t it bad enough without you two living in a tent?”

They were in the camper all those late nights when they huddled together and made plans for the future. They would turn the motel around and then sell it for a great profit. They would move to Columbia, where both of them would go to college. He would be an architect and she would be an interior designer. They might have their own business, a team to go in and refurbish old buildings and homes. But in the meantime they had gotten a loan and were slowly redoing the Goodnight Inn, painting and cleaning. Ruthie put every bit of time and energy into the motel. They spent one week in old bathing suits, scrubbing out the drained pool, and then repainting the plaster a deep cool aqua. Their bodies speckled with paint, they had stretched out on the concrete and talked about their accomplishments, when they would open, how soon they could begin filling the pool. “It’s a gold mine,” he said, his large tanned hand cupping hers as they lay there staring up at the sky and listening to the steady flow of cars in and out of the Budget Motel.

It was her idea to paint the building pink, to make it look tropical so people heading to Florida would be put in the mood sooner. By the time they reopened, she was three months pregnant with Rodney, and the business prospect was booming. If they had had a hundred rooms they could have filled them.

Ruthie’s mother, now fully accepting and approving, helped out with the cleaning while Ruthie began the
real
decorating, the colors and textures and framed prints that would replace the drab tan walls and white chenille spreads and wall calendars that Jim’s uncle had received in bulk from the local Chevrolet dealer (each month showed off a different car model).

Ruthie took great pride in the fact that no two rooms were the same; each had its own theme, its own mood, and she secretly named them as she sat at the sewing machine, her kitchen chair pushed back from the table as her abdomen grew round and hard. Jim said he saw no reason to go to all that trouble and expense when the rooms were renting just fine as they were. But she saw it as a challenge, the power to create a mood, colors changing in the same way the mood ring Jim had given her responded to her change in body temperature. She felt so hot during her pregnancy that she had called room number one “Tahitian Treat,” decorating it with cool shades of pink and green, a tropical spread on the bed, a seashell print on the wall. She had then done what she called “Sunshine Saffron” and “Forest Foliage” and “Lavender Lace.”