Crash Diet (7 page)

First Union Blues

I’m sitting here at work knowing full well that the Mr. Coffee that my cousin Eleanore gave me for Christmas is going full blast and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I knew as soon as I pulled into the parking lot that I forgot to turn it off. I knew when I looked up at our sign here in front of the bank that gives the time and temp; it said 80 F and I thought, hot, Jesus it is hot, blazing hot, and since I have a fear of fire and have my entire life since I saw the movie
Jane Eyre
, I happened to think of the Mr. Coffee and how I had thought I might want to drink that little bit there in the bottom after I put on my makeup and somehow in the midst of mascara and cover up, my mind wandered right on into wanting to wax my legs and see how it did. “It hurts like hell,” Eleanore has said and that’s what I was thinking right up until I parked and saw the time-and-temp sign.

I don’t tell anybody this but I’ve yet to learn the C temp and how to figure it out and so I always have to wait around for the F one. What bothers me is that some days waiting for the time to flash up is like waiting for Christmas and other good days—before you can make it out (all the dots don’t always work), it’s all changed on you. That’s how it was this morning. I don’t know who here is in charge of that sign; I’m not. I’m a teller, which they tell me is “a foot in the door,” “a base to grow upon,” and so on. A check to pay off Visa is more like it.

There’s nothing I can do about the Mr. Coffee right this second. I barely get a coffee break and I know they aren’t going to let me drive clear across town to check on something that I might or might not have done. It’s happened before that I have thought the oven was on and such, only to find that I had turned it off without even knowing. “I live by my instincts,” I’ve told Eleanore and that’s true. And so I could’ve cut it off, instinctively. All of us have done things instinctively only to find out we didn’t remember doing it. Some people spend years that way.

Eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit. I can read it loud and clear, not a dot out of place, and I know that any minute now that condo I rent is going to bust into flames. It starts there at the Mr. Coffee, wedged right between the microwave and the wok: a little piece of paper towel ignites, catches hold of my new Dinah Shore kitchen rags, which are just for show and stay dry as a bone since my condo has
a dishwasher and I let the dishes air dry. It spreads from there past the condo’s miniblinds to my little oil lamp that says “Light My Fire” and that I won at a fair once for hitting a woman’s big round butt with a beanbag. I never would’ve picked that lamp but free is free and so I took it and went ahead with Larrette over to the funny mirrors, which is all she wanted to do. “Fat,” she would say and hide between my legs. She is only two and doesn’t have many more words than what she saw in the mirrors—
big, little, funny
, and of course,
kitty
and
puppy
. There weren’t any animals at the fair but those are her favorite words. If she likes something she’ll call it kitty. If I could rig up some mirrors at home like that, she’d stay busy for hours but I’m not real sure how it’s all done, which I guess is why you only see them at a fair or someplace special. I bought a little compact at Woolworth’s that was on the sale table, and that mirror was so bad and wavy, I just knew Larrette would love it. She threw it to the floor and it cracked and sparkled all over the condo kitchen. “Seven years, puppy,” I said to her but I’m not worried. I figure I’ve had my seven already.

Larrette is my daughter by Larry Cross of Shallotte, North Carolina, and he is—cross I mean. So we never see him at all, mainly because he lives in California doing odd jobs. “The sea is in my blood,” he used to say just because he grew up in Shallotte, which is nothing but a spit from the ocean. And I told him that, yeah, if stretching out in the sun with little to no clothes on, sipping a Bud, and riding
the waves is what it takes to have the sea in your blood, well then, yeah boy, I’ve got it in mine, too. “Only that kind of blood calls for money,” I told him. “The average American cannot sunbathe straight from May to September.” I meant due to finances, of course, but I couldn’t even if I was Jackie O. because I’m fair-skinned; a strawberry blonde almost always is and my dermatologist tells me that skin cancer is bad in this area. That’s probably one reason right there why I instinctively took up with Larry Cross. He had the tan that I had never had; he could have passed for Spanish if he could have kept his mouth shut which he couldn’t. Open his mouth and Shallotte was written all over him.

I tell people that Larry Cross does odd jobs in California, when the truth is that I have no earthly idea what he does and I didn’t when I was staying there with him in Fuquay-Varina. I think he must’ve dealt in drugs or something underhanded from the looks of the people who would appear at my door at all hours of the night and day when decent people are either at work or at home watching TV.

I never married Larry Cross because I wasn’t about to saddle myself with trash. I say that now, but I guess there were some times when I thought we would get married; I guess I was thinking that when I was carrying Larrette and he was so proud of himself for getting me that way. And just as soon as Larrette had popped out Larry went and bought himself a surfboard with no surf whatsoever there
in Fuquay-Varina (my instincts told me it wouldn’t work). There were bills to pay which I had always paid and he was over there drinking a beer and listening to the Beach Boys singing, “Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”

“What’re you going to do come low tide?” I asked him. What we had wasn’t a home, so one day I just up and left, me and Larrette. We moved to Raleigh and stayed with Eleanore until I got my job here. Then before I knew it, I was going to the state fair and living in a condo with a wreath on every wall and a big hooked rug that I bought at the outlet mall over near the airport. That place has got everything you might want and then some. Everything.

If that oil lamp catches fire, it’s all over. Everything I own will bust right into flames and I’ll have to start all over putting my life into perspective. And I like that word—perspective—it can make something sound a lot more important than it is. Not that I don’t value my life, because I do, but sometimes I wish that I could spread it all out on a piece of paper and take some Wite-out to it. Larry Cross would be the first to go. I tell people (if they happen to ask) that he does odd jobs in California. I don’t tell them that I think he’s a drug pusher because that would stick and get turned right back around and follow me like gum on a shoe wherever I may go in this life. They’d say, “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works as a teller and used to live with a pusher down in Fuquay-Varina,” and I can’t
have that. Now people just say things like “That’s Maureen Dummer, who works down there at the First Union Bank; she’s the teller with the strawberry-blond hair that looks a tiny bit like Krystle Carrington off
Dynasty.
She has a cute little girl by the name of Larrette. No, she’s a single parent.”

If my daddy wasn’t already dead, I’d want to kill him for not changing our name legal to something else. “She’s Dummer!” That’s what children said to me at school, and I know they’ll do it to Larrette if I don’t get married and have whoever adopt her first. Some things never change—children teasing other children and people taking a little information and turning it all around and sticking it to you like a wad of Juicy Fruit. We can’t chew gum while on the window or smoke cigarettes. “It looks bad,” my boss, Mr. Crown, says, and I could bust his crown. I work right here and yet when I decided to get me a Visa card, I had one hell of a time. To get a card you have to show that you charge up a blue streak, that you owe money here and there. “I have always paid what I owe,” I told him, only to be told that I have no credit. I went and got me a microwave and a washer and dryer on time so I could owe some money and get a card so I’d be able to write a check in the grocery store. I probably couldn’t have done that if Earl Taylor hadn’t been working there in Sears and hadn’t been taken with me. He asked me to go for dinner and I asked him to let me charge and pay on time and we shook on
it, ate Chinese food, and the next day my things were delivered. Larrette had a fit over those big pasteboard boxes. I’ve been going out with Earl ever since.

I figure Larry Cross has himself one of those sticks that’ll beep if he’s walking there on the strand and happens upon some change. That’s what he does all day long, that and take pills and sell pills and do sex stuff. I’d be stupid to tell all of that and I am not stupid. “Why did you take a check that wasn’t endorsed?” Mr. Crown asked me first thing this morning, those other girls studying their papers like they were still in school, thankful to death, I know, that I had done it and not them. “You’re not stupid, Maureen,” he said and I said, “No, sir, I am not.” I can admit to a mistake; it’s easy if you’ve got the right perspective on it all; such as, Mr. Crown sits in a leather chair all day long and never once has to touch a nasty old piece of money that has been God only knows where and might have some disease on it. If Mr. Crown sat here at the window and saw what’s going in and out of this place, who’s bouncing and who’s scrimping, then he’d be likely to mess up occasionally, too. “You’ve got to concentrate, Maureen.”

And I’m certainly not stupid. Stupid would be if I told all I know about Larry Cross. Sex stuff, that’s the only reason I got hooked up with Larry Cross to begin with and that ties right in with that Spanish tan and hairy chest because he was right good-looking in an apelike way. He looked like
those little he-men dolls, except his hair was black and he had a real full beard like that man on “Little House on the Prairie” not Little Joe Cartwright but that other man that lived all alone most of the shows and dated that schoolteacher a time or two. Larry Cross was all right but I’m not stupid. I mean, why would I marry trash? Especially trash with a last name that isn’t much better than my own. Taylor—that’s Earl’s last name and one I’m thinking I could probably live with.

Sometimes my mouth gets all worked up with saliva handling all this money. I am not good with money. That’s my biggest fault. It’s a fault I’ve always had; if it’s in my wallet then I just naturally think it’s for spending and that outlet mall can get me in a whip-snap. Larry Cross had the fault of spending worse than me. If I was still with him he’d probably be sitting in the living room of that condo with those long legs stretched out on the coffee table and he’d be wearing nothing but some bathing trunks, letting the kitchen burn down, while he drew up a plan of how I could slip a little money every now and then. Embezzle is the word and I’d put my body on the street before I ever did that. I’ve got Larrette to think of but would he have ever thought of Larrette as something other than a Frisbee fetcher? No, no way. “I am not a dog,” I told him when he’d say, “Honey, can you reach that Frisbee?” and that Frisbee about a hundred feet from where I was sitting. “If I had a rubber arm,” I’d say.

I’d like for somebody to run my business. It isn’t that I’m not into liberation. God knows, you can just look at me and know that I am; you can know by my credit cards in my wallet, Visa, Ivey’s, and Texaco. But still, it would be so nice to have somebody run my business, somebody who would say, “Now, honey, look here. You just thought you threw out your W-2 and here it is right under this stack of Christmas cards that you forgot to open.” Take Earl Taylor, for example.

“I’d rather not,” Eleanore always says when I say that. Eleanore is a teacher’s aide in the elementary school and that has slowed her thoughts down some, though she’s real good with Larrette. She was the first one to get Larrette to say kitty and to learn to meow.

Eleanore goes with a man who already has a wife, so she can’t really talk much. She only gets to see him every now and then at the Ramada Inn in Apex. She thinks he’s going to leave that wife that drives a mini-van and heads up Easter Seals every year, and those two babies and that house that looks like a little fairy cottage out in a nice part of town for her. She likes for me to get in my car and drive her by that house late at night and she’ll say things like, “Yep, TV’s on. I knew he’d be watching TV. I know that man like the back of my hand. He’s sitting up late watching the TV so he doesn’t have to get in the bed with
her
.” Eleanore doesn’t know any better. She’s two years older than me, thirty-one, but she doesn’t know a bit better.
She hasn’t had life’s lessons taught to her like I did staying in Fuquay with Larry Cross. I shouldn’t encourage that. I shouldn’t even drive her past that house for her to fill her head with stories, but sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes we say we’re going to disguise ourselves in case a cop should pull us over right there in front of that house, so I put on some sunglasses and tie a scarf to my head and I must admit that I like to do that because it makes me feel like I look a little like Susan Hayward and so I say things like “I Want to Live!” or “I’d Climb the Highest Mountain!” or “Let’s ride on ‘Back Street’!” and Eleanore will take it in her head that if she wears a gingham shirt and sunglasses that she looks like Doris Day and she will say, “Lover Come Back!” and “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” We have some fun times, me and Eleanore, and we always have, but then I have to get serious.

“Eleanore, you might as well look elsewhere,” I say, and she rolls those big blue eyes that are common among us Dummers (her mama was a Dummer) like I might be a little breeze whistling past her ear. You can’t tell her.

“I don’t know what you see in Earl Taylor,” she says. “Earl Taylor is a little nerd.” I can see where she gets that. I can. To somebody who doesn’t know Earl Taylor like I know him, he might look that way because of the way his hair is so thin and weak-looking and those glasses that he has to wear. But Earl is smart and that’s how he looks. He looks like somebody that can handle figures and money. Now, he doesn’t make a bed slope way off to one side or
creak and groan like Larry Cross did, and he doesn’t make
me
creak and groan like Larry Cross did. As a matter of fact, Earl can get in and out of a bed and you don’t even know he’s been there. Now, I don’t want anybody getting me wrong because there is no such goings on in that condo with Larrette right there in the same dwelling. The only time that Earl and me have actually spent the night until dawn in a bed together was the weekend that Eleanore kept Larrette and we went down to Ocean Drive, which might as well be Myrtle Beach the way it’s grown. “Myrtle Beach, Ocean Drive, they run right together,” Earl said, and he was right. I couldn’t have drawn a line between the two if I had had to. Other than that, we just pop over to Earl’s place every now and then. He has a bed that’s just on a frame with a green glass-shaded floor lamp right there beside it so he can read in bed. Earl likes that green glass lamp shade because it’s related to his profession, but that green glass is the only adornment of any kind that he owns. Plain. It’s all real plain, but it’s clean.