Distortions (21 page)

“I don’t think right when I haven’t had eight hours’ sleep, and I haven’t even had close to that. And on this diet I’m always hungry.”

“Are you hungry? Would you like another hot dog?”

“That would be nice,” she says.

He orders another hot dog and talks more as she eats.

“Sometimes I think it’s best to forget all this dieting,” he says. “If so many people are fat, there must be something to it.”

“But I’ll get fatter and fatter.”

“And then what?” he says. “What if you did? Does your fiancé like thin women?”

“He doesn’t care if I lose weight or not. He probably wouldn’t care.”

“Then you’ve got the perfect man. Eat away.”

When she finishes that hot dog, he orders another for her.

“A world full of food, and she eats fourteen grapefruit a week.”

“Why don’t you tell her not to diet, Mr. Greer?”

“She won’t listen to me. She reads those magazines, and I can’t do anything.”

“Charlie hates those magazines, too. Why do men hate magazines?”

“I don’t hate all magazines. I don’t hate
Newsweek.”

She tells Charlie that her boss took her to lunch. At first he is impressed. Then he seems let down. Probably he is disappointed that his boss didn’t take him to lunch.

“What did you talk about?” Charlie asks.

“Me. He told me I could get fat—that it didn’t matter.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said his wife is on the grapefruit diet.”

“You aren’t very talkative. Is everything all right?”

“He said not to marry you.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“He said to go home and eat and eat and eat but not to get married.”

“One of the girls said that before she got married he told her the same thing.”

“What’s that guy up to? He’s got no right to say that.”

“She got divorced, too.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Charlie says.

“Nothing. I’m just telling you about the lunch. You asked about it.”

“Well, I don’t understand all this. I’d like to know what’s behind it.”

Cynthia does not feel that she has understood, either. She feels sleep coming on, and hopes that she will drop off before long. Her second husband, Lincoln, felt that she was incapable of understanding anything. He had a string of Indian beads that he wore under his shirt, and on their wedding night he removed the beads before they went to bed and held them in front of her face and shook them and said, “What’s this?” It was the inside of her head, Lincoln told her. She understood that she was being insulted. But why had he married her? She had not understood Lincoln, and, like Charlie, she didn’t understand what Mr. Greer was up to. “Memorize,” she heard her English teacher saying. “Anyone can memorize.” Cynthia began to go over past events. I married Pete and Lincoln and I will marry Charlie. Today I had lunch with Mr. Greer. Mrs. Greer eats grapefruit.

“Well, what are you laughing about?” Charlie asked. “Some private joke with you and Greer, or something?”

Cynthia saw an ad in the newspaper. “Call Crisis Center,” it said. “We Care.” She thinks that a crisis center is a good idea, but she isn’t having a crisis. She just can’t sleep. But the idea of it is very good. If I were having a crisis, what would I do? she wonders. She has to answer her mother’s note. Another note came today. Now her mother wants to meet Charlie: “As God is my witness, I tried to get through to you, but perhaps I did not say that you would really be welcome at home and do not have to do this foolish thing you are doing. Your dad feels you are never going to
find true happiness when you don’t spend any time thinking between one husband and the next. I know that love makes us do funny things, but your dad has said to tell you that he feels you do not really love this man, and there is nothing worse than just doing something funny with not even the reason of love driving you. You probably don’t want to listen to me, and so I keep these short, but if you should come home alone we would be most glad. If you bring this new man with you, we will also come to the station. Let us at least look him over before you do this thing. Your dad has said that if he had met Lincoln it never would have been.”

Cynthia takes out a piece of paper. Instead of writing her mother’s name at the top, though, she writes, “If you are still at that high school, I want you to know I am glad to be away from it and you and I have forgotten all those lousy poems you had me memorize for nothing. Sincerely, Cynthia Knight.” On another piece of paper she writes, “Are you still in love with me? Do you want to see me again?” She gets another piece of paper and draws two parallel vertical lines with a horizontal line joining them at the bottom—Pete’s trapeze. “APE MAN,” she prints. She puts the first into an envelope and addresses it to her teacher at the high school. The second is for Lincoln. The next goes to Pete, care of his parents. She doesn’t know Lincoln’s address, so she rips up that piece of paper and throws it away. This makes her cry. Why is she crying? One of the girls at work says it’s the times they are living in. The girl campaigned for George McGovern. Not only that, but she wrote letters against Nixon. Cynthia takes another piece of paper from the box and writes a message to President Nixon: “Some girls in my office won’t write you because they say that’s crank mail and their names will get put on a list. I don’t care if I’m on some list You’re the crank. You’ve got prices so high I can’t eat steak.” Cynthia doesn’t know what else to say to the President. “Tell your wife she’s a stone face,” she writes. She addresses the envelope and stamps it and takes the mail to the mailbox before she goes to bed. She begins to think that it’s Nixon’s fault—all of it. Whatever that means. She is still weeping. Damn you, Nixon, she thinks. Damn you.

Lately, throughout all of this, she hasn’t been sleeping with Charlie. When he comes to her apartment, she unbuttons his shirt, rubs her hands across his chest, up and down his chest, and undoes his belt.

She writes more letters. One is to Jean Nidetch, of Weight Watchers. “What if you got fat again, if you couldn’t stop eating?” she writes. “Then you’d lose all your money! You couldn’t go out in public or they’d see you! I hope you get fatter and fatter and die.” The second letter (a picture, really) is to Charlie—a heart with “Cynthia” in it. That’s wrong. She draws another heart and writes “Charlie” in it. The last letter is to a woman she knew when she was married to Pete. “Dear Sandy,” she writes. “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I am going to get married the tenth of February. I think I told you that Lincoln and I got divorced. I really wish I had you around to encourage me to lose weight before the wedding! I hope everything is well with your family. The baby must be walking now. Everything is fine with me. Well, got to go. Love, Cynthia.”

They are on the train, on the way to visit her parents before the wedding. It is late January. Charlie has spilled some beer on his jacket and has gone to the men’s room twice to wash it off, even though she told him he got it all out the first time. He has a tie folded in his jacket pocket. It is a red tie with white dogs on it that she bought for him. She has been buying him presents, to make up for the way she acts toward him sometimes. She has been taking sleeping pills, and now that she’s more rested she isn’t nervous all the time. That’s all it was—no sleep. She even takes half a sleeping pill with her lunch, and that keeps her calm during the day.

“Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

Cynthia didn’t want Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

“I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.

As he walks down the aisle, she looks at his back. He could be anybody. Just some man on a train. The door closes behind him.

A young man sitting across the aisle from her catches her eye. He has long hair. “Paper?” he says.

He is offering her his paper. She feels her cheeks color, and she takes it, not wanting to offend him. Some people wouldn’t mind offending somebody who looks like him, she thinks self-righteously, but you are always polite.

“How far you two headed?” he asks.

“Pavo, Georgia,” she says.

“Gonna eat peaches in Georgia?” he asks.

She stares at him.

“I’m just kidding,” he says. “My grandparents live in Georgia.”

“Do they eat peaches all day?” she asks.

He laughs. She doesn’t know what she’s done right.

“Why, lordy lands, they do,” he says with a thick drawl.

She flips through the paper. There is a comic strip of President Nixon. The President is leaning against a wall, being frisked by a policeman. He is confessing to various sins.

“Great, huh?” the man says, smiling, and leans across the aisle.

“I wrote Nixon a letter,” Cynthia says quietly. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I said all kinds of things.”

“You did? Wow. You wrote Nixon?”

“Did you ever write him?”

“Yeah, sure, I write him all the time. Send telegrams. It’ll be a while before he’s really up against that wall, though.”

Cynthia continues to look through the paper. There are full-page ads for records by people she has never heard of, singers she will never hear. The singers look like the young man.

“Are you a musician?” she asks.

“Me? Well, sometimes. I play electric piano. I can play classical piano. I don’t do much of it.”

“No time?” she says.

“Right. Too many distractions.”

He takes a flask out from under his sweater. “If you don’t feel like the long walk to join your friend, have a drink with me.”

Cynthia accepts the flask, quickly, so no one will see. Once it is in her hands, she doesn’t know what else to do but drink from it.

“Where you coming from?” he asks.

“Buffalo.”

“Seen the comet?” he asks.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he says. “Some days I don’t think there is any comet. Propaganda, maybe.”

“If Nixon said there was a comet, then we could be sure there wasn’t,” she says.

The sound of her own voice is strange to her. The man is smiling. He seems to like talk about Nixon.

“Right,” he says. “Beautiful. President issues bulletin comet
will
appear. Then we can all relax and know we’re not missing anything.”

She doesn’t understand what he has said, so she takes another drink. That way, she has no expression.

“I’ll drink to that, too,” he says, and the flask is back with him.

Because Charlie is apparently going to be in the drinking car for a while, the man, whose name is Peter, comes and sits next to her.

“My first husband was named Pete,” she says. “He was in the Army. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

The man nods, affirming some connection.

He nods. She must have been right.

Peter tells her that he is on his way to see his grandfather, who is recovering from a stroke. “He can’t talk. They think he will, but not yet.”

“I’m scared to death of getting old,” Cynthia says.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “But you’ve got a way to go.”

“And then other times I don’t care what happens, I just don’t care what happens at all.”

He nods slowly. “There’s plenty happening we’re not going to be able to do anything about,” he says.

He holds up a little book he has been looking through. It is called
Know What Your Dreams Mean
.

“Ever read these things?” he asks.

“No. Is it good?”

“You know what it is—right? A book that interprets dreams.”

“I have a dream,” she says, “about being at an altar in a wedding dress, only instead of standing on the floor I’m on a scale.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “There’s no weird stuff in here. It’s all the usual Freudian stuff.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Oh—you dream about your teeth crumbling; it means castration. That sort of stuff.”

“But what do you think my dream means?” she asks.

“I don’t even know if I half believe what I read in the book,” he says, tapping it on his knee. He knows he hasn’t answered her question. “Maybe the scale means you’re weighing the possibilities.”

“Of what?”

“Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”

“What will I do?” she says.

He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”

“Virgo.”

“Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”

Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”

He shrugs. He passes her the flask.

It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time—it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.

“That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”

He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.

“Do you have any more books?”

“No,” he says. “All out.”

They ride in silence.

“You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”

“A palmist? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say …”

“You don’t believe them?”

“Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention
to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”

“Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.

“Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”

“Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”

Peter laughs. “O.K.,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.

“Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.