Crash Diet

by Jill McCorkle

  Now I’m in my checkout and Henry (my boss) is sitting over on the counter. He’s been real sweet to me lately, told me that he was sorry for things that he had said about Rhonda, said he used to really like her and that she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. “I would have done her right,” he said, and part of me believed that.

  “So, what’s new with you, Bunny?” he asks, leaning back against the wall.

  “Going steady with Rudy Thompson,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it outside the house. My sisters-in-law thought it was worth a Chinese dinner in Clemmonsville. My mama said she’d like for him to come by real soon.

  “Well, well,” Henry says and laughs. “I thought you’d looked different these days, all fixed up and smiling.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Having a man in your life will change a lot of things. I look away from Henry to the street where the mail truck is passing right now. I feel myself ready to run from the store. Sometimes I keep thinking that I will get home and reach in that box and it will be there. “Whew!” it will say, and there will be pictures of all the places she’s been. I still feel that way and sometimes I wonder if I always will. Sometimes I think I’d just rather stay right here and get the pictures of all those places, the lights and the bridges. And then all of a sudden I will see the other picture, the real picture that never did and never will be on a postcard, that motel room, that night. No man will ever change how I feel about you. I wish I could tell her she was wrong. I wait for the mail truck to move out of my sight, and then I tell Henry to call me Saralyn. “That’s my real name,” I say.

  Words Gone Bad

  I don’t believe in nonviolence. I never have. That’s what I tell my co-worker, Bennie, when we take our break and meet out on the wall that faces the University’s clock tower. Bennie and I have been arguing over the world for years. We see it all from opposite ends. He says black and I say white. He says hot and I say cold. The only thing we agree about is that we like each other just fine and would be hard pressed to name an older or better friend. Bennie says, “The future is there for our people, Mary.” He says, “Bend a little,” though I rarely do. He says that for such a skinny dried-up black woman, I sure have got a mouth. I tell him, yes, and for a black man he’s done all right. I tell him that if he wasn’t married and we were thirty years younger (and if I was interested in any such thing), I might go for him.

  Bennie went to all the meetings back during the marches. I can remember seeing the man, so much younger then, straight and tall as he led the way. He locked arms with others and swayed from side to side as he come down Richmond Avenue singing “We Shall Overcome,” and I hung onto a porch post and turned my face away from them so I could take in the voices and remember it by sound alone, sweet words in the air. I didn’t want to see any face of impatience made by somebody in a car having to stop and wait as the parade went forth. We could show him impatience. I didn’t want to see nothing sailing through the air towards a soul marching there. I didn’t want to hear some cheap crossness coming out from behind my own front door where I probably had a man (there were quite a few in my younger foolish days) that I wished I’d never seen laid up on the couch. I listened to the marchers’ voices long after they’d passed. I felt uplifted by the ideas and beliefs behind it all. I felt like a part of a whole—a small link in a long rusty chain—and whenever I caught myself feeling like a woman all alone in the world with the responsibility of six children to raise, I conjured the strength of those words back to my ear.

  Bennie said years after that he remembered seeing me there with my head turned to the wind and that his wife, Paulette, had prayed for me. He said all him and Paulette had heard of me then was that I ran wild, as wild as those black-eyed Susans that have taken over where my parents are laid down. They heard I’d been in this town since the day I was born and that I knew everything and everybody worth knowing and then some. He said Paulette had toyed with the notion of asking me to church; we got a laugh over that, all right. I told Bennie that the saints would have fell from the sky if I’d darkened a door, that’s how long it’s been. I hadn’t been to a church since my first baby was born dead. It seemed like all those other children were just me trying to bring that child back again one more time. In my mind I called him Lazarus; in real life I called the man I was with (not the daddy) Lazy Ass. The daddy was a fine man, somebody I always believed meant well, except for the fact that he was already married. All those men, all those babies, I was looking for what I’d lost. But I don’t go on about none of that with Bennie.

  I said, I was wild, that’s right. I’d go out to Buzzy’s place on a Saturday night and drink white liquor like a man. If I sat down at a table with my sister Rosa and our aunt Libby, when we rose up to go there was a lot of liquor gone. We were women who could drink like mad, and when the sun rose on a Sunday morning and it was time to come on out of the club, we were among the standing. I’ve known a lot of men who needed to be carried. I’ve had several along the way that did. But I have never in my life had to be carried in no way. That’s what I told Bennie when we first met and that’s been years ago. I said, I’ll shoot myself through the head before I get scooped up and carried off. Bennie said he didn’t believe in such, couldn’t cotton to any kind of violence, or to that kind of drinking and taking up with bed partners. Bennie believes in God Almighty and the afterlife; he believes we’re all the same color when our train pulls in.

  I said, Smell the coffee, Bennie. If there’s a heaven it’ll probably be split up in all kind of crazy ways just like a piece of real estate. I was sitting out on my porch not a year ago and a woman come by all ready to talk, all ready to tell me about a life of peace and how it can be mine. I said, And how much does this cost, this peace, or is it a piece, a piece of candy or watermelon or strawberry pie? (To this day I will not stoop to have some man at the grocer’s grin when I buy a piece of melon, and I’ll drop dead before I have it). The woman took out her little pamphlets and handed them to me, and I gave her the eye (Bennie always laughs when I show my mean bad evil eye). She said they were free, all I had to do was be ready for her to come back in two days to tell me some more about this peace I’m missing.

  “Price is too high.” I handed her back her papers and watched her mouth go tight while she clamped them back in her bag. She was as black as me and I didn’t care. I knew when I saw her standing there in the middle of the road with a little suitcase like the big folks carry that she was up to no good. No sir, makes no difference to me if you’re white, black, or green come poaching me. “Go read your Bible,” I told her, and she backed a step like I’d slapped her. “The Bible will tell you that you’re gonna be crying for some peace—yes, screeching your heart out for some peace—but it ain’t here. No.” I shook my head and stood up from my chair. To be so skinny, I’m a tall woman, and I pulled myself up straight and looked down on her smooth-combed hair. I started to ask her why she was working so hard to straighten and plaster down her God-given hair, but I had other fish to fry. “It ain’t on this earth,” I said. “The peace just ain’t here.” She turned and walked down my sidewalk and then collected there in the street with her other club members, each with a handful of those little books. They stared over at me and I gave the eye, then I started laughing; I laughed till I had to sit back down and put my head on my knees. Bennie got a good laugh about it all, but it was no time before he got to feeling like he needed to work on my soul a little bit, soften me up or something.

  I told him then, and I’m still telling him, that I don’t believe in nonviolence but I’m all for those who do; I’m proud of what results have been good. I’m all for their peaceful marches and protests if they are for a fact peaceful, peaceful like lilies on a Easter Sunday, like a white rosebud on a child’s chest to boast love for a mama gone by the by. I’m for peaceful lilies and still waters, brotherhood and firm handshakes, prayers whispered in the head, but I’ve seen something described as peaceful only to then see it was as peaceful as a hog bu
tchering, as peaceful as a fire hose turned loose like a big wild snake down a city street. I’ve seen dark peaceful nights, a baby on my lap in a peaceful sleep only to have it woke by a nasty voice telling me what I’ve been doing wrong, woke by the sound of a dark heavy fist busting up a warped washstand mirror and leaving it there for my broom to come around tomorrow; I saw the men come and go, every time with the going me hoping I’d never see that face coming my way again, though I did keep hoping there would be another face. Somehow I kept hoping there was love and happiness in my forecast; it took hurricanes and tornadoes and tidal waves and a little of everything else to convince me otherwise. Bennie said I was watching the wrong weather report, and I said I can’t believe there was ever good weather for a woman like me. I’ve seen spray-painted bricks red as blood, scrawled-out letters like a child might make, only a child don’t spell those words so easy and a child can’t get hisself up there to do it. Anger, words of hate, lopsided and crazy. Words of peace, about peace to peace. Give peace a chance, they might write, and somebody puts fuck you beneath it.

  My office at the university is in the basement, a long windowless hall lit up at each end by the humming red Coke machines. My door is at the end there by the stairs, where the feet echo loud and clear all through the morning, a rustle of bookbags and the jingle of pocket change, the cold slap of that canned Coke rolling down, the whoosh and fizz as the can is opened. Feet scurry back up to class where there are big wood-framed windows that stay open near about the whole year, in summer when the heat of day and those clustered young bodies is too much to bear and in winter when the old radiators hiss and whine uncontrollably as they breathe the heat. They sit there, some professor slouched on a wooden desk, leg carelessly swung over the desk top, lectern set crooked on the floor. Some want a lectern and some don’t. Some leave notes that might say Please do not move the lectern, like they are all that remain on earth.

  They ball up papers in nervous palms and pick those little confetti pieces from rough-edged paper ripped out of a notebook to snow down onto the floor; brush it away, brush it away, and there’s always words on the board, words and words and more words in their dusty slanted lines of white and yellow, erasers filled with words gone old or bad or both, used up day before yesterday and some not even in English. Their words carry over my head, their accents so foreign to this part of the world. They speak French and German and who knows what else, and these professors come and go, some in little old caps cocked off to one side like it might be good for something. What? Ain’t no warmth in such a hat, no different from placing a crocheted poodle over a roll of toilet paper, no purpose but adornment, putting on an appearance. I know a woman who has spent her life crocheting toilet-roll poodles and for what? I once asked her for what. I know she isn’t earning her keep, isn’t setting any table with those fit for the bathroom dogs. She sells them for less than the cost of the yarn to people with bad taste who lean out of their car windows and toss her some coins. “But maybe she’s happy, Mary,” Bennie said to me one day and put me in my place for a while. SPEAK ENGLISH, I’m always wanting to say when those students pass me by, sidestepping a neat little pile of sweepings, those long black spooky overcoats they like to wear breezing my pile of work away.

  Their words sound peaceful sometimes, these nothing sounds that come to my ears, but then you look those sounds up in a dictionary or a textbook that might be left there on a windowsill or kicked down the hallway and you find there’s nothing peaceful about afflige; nothing peaceful about mal de mer or pomme de terre. All that for a potato. I want to stick my head in the doorway and say, Mange your pomme de terre then and pick up your droppings when you leave the room.

  Peaceful is something you imagine when you close your eyes at night. It’s those times that you remember so good as being the very best times you know: being a child with a sack of penny candy that you count out on an old quilt, or thinking you’ve fallen for a good good man. I think of my babies, all of them forty years old or better and living in places like D.C., where they got good jobs and drive good cars. No Greyhound waiting for my children. From the time they could follow my words at all I was saying don’t let your life go for waste, nobody’s going to pick up your mess but you. I took my youngest son to get hisself a used car so he could drive back and forth to school, and that white man standing there asked us, well, who would be paying for this car, and I pulled a roll of bills from my purse and I stepped up close to him, oh yes, so close he could see I meant business, so close I smelled his old cheap cologne, and I said I mean to give you a down payment today and then make payments from then on until my son here gets his job. These hands didn’t get this way from watching the TV, I said, and held my palms up to him. I did not blink until it was all done and signed. I didn’t take my eyes off of his slick fingers. Peaceful is what you feel after you’ve acted. They say calm before a storm but no, I can’t believe in that. You may not see that turbulence, you may not hear the thunder but it’s there all the same. Peaceful is reserved for after the action, after you’ve done what you had to do. Peaceful is something you tell yourself you will feel one day when it is all over and you’ve found a better home.

  The students write their words on pieces of paper and the fronts of their notebooks. They write them on the walls above the urinals, and then I scrub them off letter by letter, and though they might add some little bit of spouting from a textbook, some fancy long-winded words holding it all together, their words is no different from those in the bus station or in a rat-ridden alley. I put cleanser on a rag and I wipe their fucks and damns and shits, their educated words.

  Not too many weeks ago I saw a young girl, her tam cocked to the side of her head as she listened to a young man speaking of his goings ons, his little summer vacation ABROAD; and she nodded her pretty little head, with a smile frozen there because she’d been no such place. She listened while he tossed down some paper scraps, and her eyes cut over at me, her eyes as dark as mine, her face and hands, and there was a second when she recognized me, somebody she knows, and a part of her wanted to slap his abroad-gone hand and tell him you know better than to toss trash to a clean floor, but she couldn’t do it and when she felt me looking, she turned away ashamed and ignorant of what to do or what to feel. Don’t you see my office, this closet, don’t you see this sign taped here for anybody who’s buying himself a Coca-Cola to read and know what I do? Clean the bathrooms. Clean what’s on the wall. Get up all the paper scraps and dust those erasers. I have a thought that the walls into heaven are littered with ignorant bits of orders. I have to believe that or else I couldn’t do a thing. I’m working towards peace but there’s no peaceful way to do it. I wanted to grab that young lady by her thin shoulders and shake till her teeth rattled; I wanted to say if you was my child, girl, you would have some serious explaining about how you can stand here and talk to this French-speaking white dishrag-looking boy while I am watching and waiting to stoop down and clean his droppings.

  “I roomed with an African-American guy,” that boy said, shifted his books so some more bits of litter snowed on my floor. “You may know him.” But when the name was called, my little weak putting-on-airs love shook her head no, instead of saying what I was wanting to hear, which was: And so I suspect you must know the president of the University, you must know Dr. Robert Conway Taylor, who is a white man like yourself. “Momma, you do overreact,” my girl, Denise, has said in the past, usually when I’ve got one of the grandbabies on my lap and I’m telling him how he’s always gotta be ready to jump in the ring; and I say yes, maybe I do, but there’s reason, there’s good solid reason why I do. I’m angry. I don’t deny that I’m a mad woman sometimes, and I can give you a list as long as my skinny leg to tell you why. And yes I like that sound; I like to hear African-American the same way my great-grandmother liked hearing emancipation, but there is more to it than the words. In all of life there is more to it than the word; words can get washed off and thrown out, but just show me what does those words
mean to you, what kind of act is coming with those words. Those words might sound so pretty but are they? When I was carrying my oldest baby that lived (I was just sixteen), I heard somebody say something of the fontanel, and I thought what a beautiful word that was, soft like a feather on the wind, and then come to find out that word was my darkest fear, that word was that tender pulsing soft spot that let me know she was living, that place you had to worry over and care for so gently, her little mind so vulnerable until the bones had grown and cemented there. Over my head I hear fromage, fromage, and we have had some laughs over all that, me and Bennie, nothing but cheese. He might hand me out a slice of American cheese his old lady packed with some light bread and he say, Oh Mary, shall we eat this here fromage? A kick. Yes Lord, I like the sound of African-American, but I’ve been called so much you better be ready to give me more than two words.

  Bennie spends most of his time in the administrative building, where he’s got a bright fluorescent-lit office. We find books left on the windowsills and in the trash cans, have for years, and we share them out like a library. I told my children years ago that they better never go destroying property that way, if they were going to destroy something then find something that needs destroying. You find it and then I’ll be there to help you; yes sir, you get me riled up and any riot you’ve every heard of will look like a little dog fight.

  “Oh now, don’t you worry over that paper you dropped,” I said to that dishrag boy, all the while looking at that pretty young girl, those eyes all aglow with high hopes of African-American equality brought directly to her on the wings of this washed-out big-talking boy. “No, honey, just as soon as you go on to class, I’ll be able to catch my breath and stoop there to retrieve it.”