Crash Diet: Stories

by Jill McCorkle

  The couple became a joke for them, their own Rear Window. Each day Anna and Walter would sit on the beach (she under a big striped umbrella) while Ben and Carol played in the sand and at the edge of the water. They would take turns glancing up at the big weathered house, each anxious to be the first to spy the couple, but the front shades remained drawn throughout the day. “Maybe they’re vampires,” Walter whispered and stretched out beside her, his skin sandy and sunburned. “Maybe they’re spying on us right now and they don’t want us to meet because then we’ll all just have ordinary boring vacations.”

  “It’s not so boring,” she said and yawned. “I love doing nothing.” It was a wonderful feeling to collect their things and head up over the huge white dunes in the early afternoon. The kids ran ahead, stopping to examine shells and the wild roses that grew close by, while she and Walter followed, drawn by the thought of a cool shower and a nap. Once when Wayne was nine he had asked them why they decided to have him. Anna looked over at Walter but he didn’t look like someone on the verge of speaking. “We wanted another baby,” she said. “That’s all we could talk about that summer at the beach, how we wanted another baby.” Walter grinned at her, eyebrows raised with the silent truth: they had been delirious with joy when the children finally closed their little eyes and mouths and slept like lambs. They had been careless, wild, and reckless, thinking that if something did happen they’d deal with it later. The nearest drugstore was a twenty-minute drive, and there just wasn’t always time enough to be prepared.

  It was in the late afternoons, when the beach was empty, that the couple strolled out, cocktail glasses in hand, and sat on their deck. When the sun set, they got in the car and left for their late-night dinner. Anna and Walter imagined them driving over to a friend’s house, maybe one of the large antebellum homes just inland, where they would sit at a long polished table and sip champagne. By now Walter had nicknamed them “the Vanderbilts.” With the children tucked in, Anna and Walter sat on their own tiny deck and waited for the Vanderbilts’ return. They took turns using an old telescope to zero in on the lights of the pier; one night they saw a man catch what looked like a shark before a circle of people blocked their view. Another night they spotted a young couple kissing below the bait shop, the woman’s back pressed against one of the creosote pilings. Walter said that at least one of them was married, an illicit affair; Anna said they were teenagers trying things out for the first time. They would have placed a bet except there was no way of learning the truth. They sat with their telescope, the transistor radio playing, until the headlights came around a curve. The Vanderbilts always returned just before midnight. Their lights went out half an hour later.

  The last day of vacation, Anna suggested they follow the couple on their nightly outing. As soon as they appeared on their deck, cocktails in hand, Anna started getting ready. Carol and Ben were in the back seat singing and screaming (they were going to get ice cream), and Anna and Walter took turns fiddling with something (he under the hood, she running back into the house) until the couple across the street prepared to leave. Finally, the Lincoln pulled out and they let them get a good block down the road before they pulled out and began following. Anna was excited, ready for a lengthy expedition that might take them who knew where, only to be disappointed five minutes later when the car turned into Brady’s Seafood, an old establishment adorned with plastic fish and nets and offering fried food galore. Walter turned off the headlights, the car still idling, as they watched the man walk around to open her door. Her floral evening skirt glistened under the streetlights as they walked to the big glass door. Inside they would be met by the glare of ceiling lights on Formica, the smell of fish and a reheated grease vat.

  “Disappointed?” Walter asked as he turned their station wagon around, flipped on the headlights, and drove to the Tastee Freeze next to a Putt-Putt Golf range. They sat on a bench and let the kids run around on the little green course. “They deserve better, don’t they?” he asked, and she suddenly felt very defensive of these complete strangers. “Maybe they’re happy,” she said. “What do we know?” It became a quote used often over the next twenty-five years. It’s what Walter always said to her (reminding her) if she commented on someone else’s life. It’s what she imagines people are saying about her life now that she is all alone in public places.

  She has spent three years without Walter and she has adjusted to the shock. She has gotten used to the largeness of the bed, the quiet ticking of the clocks that his snores and breathing had always hidden. Still, she comes to loud public places to absorb the emotions. People in airports cry and hug, Look at you!; they lean and wave. I thought you’d never get here! People at political rallies or marches smile and cheer one another on as if there is a relationship there. All you have to do is clap at the right time, raise your hand in affirmation or rejection at the right time. People in the mall are absorbed into the fluorescent lights and water fountains.

  Now, Carol has had another boy (Brandon) to follow that first one (William the Fourth) and stays at home with them while Trey sits and records people’s problems out in his black-and-white office, which used to be the garage. Carol wears children like most people wear arms and legs. She is already talking about having another. Anna can’t imagine that Carol and Trey have ever done anything reckless. All of these children are planned, one right after another. Carol never talks about anything else these days. Carol never says, “What do you miss most about Dad? What would be your pick of a day if you could have one?” Instead, Carol says, “Trey and I have got to get a new diaper service, we’re dissatisfied with the way this service folds—there’s always a wrinkle in the front. We fear they use really strong detergents, too, else how do they get the diapers so white? Trey says I can just keep searching until I find the perfect service, no matter the cost, isn’t he wonderful?” And Anna says, “Well, Carol, if I could have any day with your father, I’d pick a day in July that very summer that we surprised ourselves and I got pregnant with Wayne. Your dad would tiptoe to look in on you and Ben to make sure you were completely out, and then he’d come flying back and lock our door, jump in the bed and there we’d be, laughing and whispering and doing anything we pleased. If I could’ve bought Huggies, I would’ve.”

  “Mom, I can’t let Kim and William and Brandon eat canned spaghetti. When you said you had spaghetti, I thought you meant real spaghetti.” Carol stands there, her eyes as blue as Walter’s, her nose with the same slope. She used to eat canned spaghetti all the time. Anna looks at the open can and puts it on the counter. She wants to say, Your father and I would go after each other like crazed rabbits and we wouldn’t stop until we fell out with exhaustion or until one of you started calling from the other room, whichever came first, but instead she tells her that if she wants real spaghetti, that if Chef Boyardee, who has been around longer than Trey, is not good enough, then she’ll have to do her own shopping and cooking.

  Ben, after a series of live-in girlfriends, met and married somebody who looked and sounded just like all the others. They moved to Alaska, where he teaches history. His wife teaches arts and crafts in the prison there and for Christmas sent Anna a pendant carved from ivory. It’s an awkward elephant, so large it would knock her out if she forgot and bent over too fast, that is if she ever wore it. Terri (the wife whom she has met only once) sent a history of this elephant: This was carved by a reformed alcoholic named Ike who is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, mother, and child. Ike has found religion and sees his art as a manifestation of his cleansed soul. He is a new man. Though the children at school would probably love this atrocity the same way they love when she wears her loud parrot pin, Anna will not touch it with a ten-foot pole. Imagine, writing to tell her such a thing. Didn’t they know that she would only stare at the misshapen piece of junk and ask why such a man is living and breathing and whittling his animal tusks while Walter, who was the epitome of sanity and goodness, is gone? Were it not for completely alienating her son an
d his free-spirited wife, she would throw it out in the trash. Instead, she has it boxed up and placed in the drawer where she keeps a photo from Ben’s first marriage, the other wife, a cute quiet conventional woman who wanted to settle and spend her life somewhere. “That’s not so much for her to ask,” Walter had told Ben when he announced with anger that they were separated, that she was asking too much of him. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  Wayne, after only a few months practicing law, decided that it was not for him and went back to get an MBA. Now he’s considering a CPA. What happened to the normal child? She keeps asking the question and wishing Walter could answer. Anna recently asked Wayne why he didn’t drive his BMW while eating a BLT to the YMCA for a little R&R or better yet, why didn’t he find a nice young woman who could give him some TLC? What she has found out most recently is that Wayne is more interested in finding a nice young man and she thinks she can live with all that. She is convinced she can live with just about anything. It’s what she can’t live without that poses a problem.

  The summer after Wayne was born they went back to the small cottage. Anna spent most of the vacation up on the screened-in porch with Wayne in her arms, his tiny body shielded from the salty breeze by a cotton blanket. It was midweek before they saw any lights on in the house across the way. There were several cars in the drive (the Lincoln was in the garage but they never saw it move), and the beach in front of the house was peppered with children of all ages. Anna had a lot of time to watch while Walter was out swimming with the kids and she was left behind to the shade of the porch. All day long people came and went, but no sign of the couple from the year before other than their car.

  Finally, late one afternoon, the woman came out on the deck. She stood and held onto the rail as if the wind might whip her out to sea. She stood that way for what seemed an eternity and then a younger woman—someone who was probably Anna’s age—came out and took her by the arm. Anna’s involvement in the scene was interrupted by Wayne’s cries. There was a diaper to change, a baby to nurse, two children to bathe and dress and entertain.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt left her,” Anna said over a dinner of steamed shrimp, which the children would not eat, and french fries, which they would. “She’s all alone. He ran off with his very young secretary and where does that leave her?” Anna was trying hard to make a joke of what she had seen but the humor was impossible to find.

  “I think he died,” Walter said, and she turned, her expression matching his. They both sat quietly, fries and catsup all over the plastic tablecloth that came with the house. “Yeah, he died all right,” Walter said. “She’s too peaceful for him not to be. If he’d just left her she’d be furious, breaking things, screaming for the lawyers. He died all right.” It was a feeble joke, and though Anna laughed, she felt the tears spring to her eyes without warning. Summer after summer, they came to the same house, catching glimpses of the lady who came outside less and less; the Lincoln was no longer in the garage. With each passing summer, the children across the street got bigger and then they were doing things with Carol and Ben and Wayne. Carol reported that the house belonged to the kids’ grandmother; there were twelve cousins in all. The children were still so young then: Ben down at the Putt-Putt range or pavilion playing pinball; Carol reading magazines with a girlfriend and talking about how no man was going to keep her from being an astronaut if that was what she decided to be; Wayne out riding the waves on a Styrofoam board. In her worst scenarios, tragedy came to them from beyond the boundaries and frames of their everyday lives: a car running a red light, an airplane engine dying, Ben drafted and dropped in a jungle, a stray bomb planted in a building where they happened to be visiting, a lunatic with a submachine gun in a fast-food chain. But instead it came from within, a heart that had never threatened anything except too much love, a fragile, easily broken organ.

  “See you tonight, honey.” That’s the last thing Walter said, and she has spent countless times playing back through the phone conversation, imagining that unwitnessed day. Why didn’t she feel something? Why didn’t she, while singing songs of praises and drawing turkeys and pilgrim hats, get a sudden rush of goose flesh, a tightening in her own chest?

  Now she steps up where a crowd has gathered in the center of the mall and is watching the closed curtains of a stage. People are pushing, up on tiptoe, to get a better look. Welcome! a big banner says and another says, Eat to Win! All of a sudden this little man in a white jumpsuit jumps from behind the curtain and bounces around, waving and circling his arms at his fans. It’s the Exercise Man; she’s seen him on TV before. People are lined up to catch a glimpse. She pulls her purse around in front of her and eases out of the crowd, goes down to the other end of the mall where there is a petting zoo. Young mothers are there with little ones who reach out and then shrink back from the hungry tongue of a billy goat.

  “I worry about Wayne,” he had said on the phone. It was early morning. She sat on the bed in her gown and robe, a cup of coffee on the nightstand. Out the window she could see the dogwood tree, leaves bright red, and down below, the school bus stopping for a crowd of children who filed up the step and in through the narrow door, their arms filled with lunchboxes and notebooks. She had a stack of construction paper on her dresser; the children would spend the time during that day’s lesson tracing their hands to make turkey feathers. “I just don’t think he seems satisfied.”

  “He will once he’s taken that test,” she told him. They had visited Wayne once during law school at Columbia, and he had spent the whole visit locked in his room “studying,” though they’d heard him make many phone calls. They had just gone ahead and ventured out as tourists, seeing everything you can possibly see in Manhattan in twenty-four hours. That night, after an early dinner, Wayne went back to his studying, and they sat nursing their sore feet and vowing how the next trip would last longer. They had made the same promise just the year before when she went with him to San Francisco. Walter had an early meeting but then they rented a car and headed out. They were determined to see everything from Alcatraz to Chinatown, Walter singing like Tony Bennett every time they saw a cable car. They had raced through downtown Seattle the year before that. They loved the West Coast and had always talked about taking another trip—a long relaxing childless trip—as soon as Wayne passed the bar. Son, I’ve got to tell you, Walter said the day they were leaving New York, I’ve never been able to pass a bar.

  “I hope that test is all that’s bugging him,” Water said that morning on the phone. “He’ll be home soon.” That’s when she looked at the clock and told him that she had to hurry, she was going to be late; somebody had to work.

  “See you tonight, honey.”

  She thinks now that Walter was onto Wayne. He always seemed to know things. On Ben’s first wedding day he said that he felt the marriage would never work; he just couldn’t put his finger on it but something was wrong. Carol will never go back to school if she marries this Trey fellow, he had said. This Trey fellow wants a woman in the house. I can tell. It may take a dozen children and shackles but he’ll find a way. Sometimes it makes her mad that he knew so damn much, was so perceptive about their children, could tell from her physical stance what mood she was in (uh-oh, the limp-wristed hand on the hip means depressed; straight wrist is mad as hell), but when it came time for him to know the most important moment, the danger that would rob him, her, all of them, he hadn’t had a clue.

  The first year was the hardest. Each day was an anniversary. Each day was a countdown of events. Nothing could pull her away from the timetable leading up to or away from his death. Her children tried. They took turns dumping the events of their lives at her feet, but she wouldn’t be deflected. She got tired of listening to what was going on in their lives. She wanted her own life. Real or not, she wanted to be a part of something that was of her own design. She had to get out, go places, watch people. In her mind, she wrote long letters to the woman at the beach. How could you just stand there? she asked. How could
you be at peace?

  Now the third year is closing. Thanksgiving is around the corner. It’s time to decide what kind of stuffing or dressing to prepare. But nothing equals a mall or an airport during the holidays. Both are bustling with people, and emotions are soaring. On the days she doesn’t work, she alternates between the two. Carol says, “But why were you at the airport?” and Anna tells her that there are wonderful stores at the airport, that people shouldn’t ask so many questions so close to the holidays. That was Walter’s line. He had used it on the children from October 1st to December 25th, diverting their curiosities with hopes for a present. Her children want her to be the perfect widow, being led in and out of the house like the woman at the beach house. Anna imagines Mrs. Vanderbilt living out the rest of her life in silent composure as she yearns for those late afternoons with her husband (their dinners at Brady’s Seafood) so long and so hard that she is stripped of all that was ever a part of her.

  Children are so selfish the way they want to lead you around and keep your mind occupied with latch hooks or Phil Donahue. Carol says, Why don’t you get interested in a continuing program? (Meaning a soap opera.) Trey disagrees with Carol’s suggestion of regular programs. (He says he hopes she isn’t watching such trash when he’s out in the garage working!) He suggests Anna watch the Public Broadcasting System (British soap operas). Ben and Terri suggest she choose a craft (ivory-carving has done wonders for some people). Wayne says she’d be great at the soup kitchen, a breath of life for the down and out. And who will give me a breath? she asks.

  Her children don’t want her to talk about Walter anymore. They don’t want her to talk about how he looked in the casket. She keeps saying, “He looked okay, but his mouth was wrong. Walter never held his mouth that way a day of his life.”