Crash Diet: Stories by Jill McCorkle

Author:Jill McCorkle
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780449912546
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1992-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Migration of the Love Bugs

My husband and I live in a tin can. He calls it the streamline model, the top of the line, the cream of the crop when it comes to moveable homes. Ambulatory and proud of it. That’s Frank’s motto and I guess it makes sense in a way, since he is the only one of six siblings who’s still alive and walking, not to even mention that he spent his whole adult life setting things in concrete—house foundations and driveways, sidewalks that will remain until the New England winters crack them once too often and that new cement outfit that just opened comes in to redo the job.

We’re in Florida now and the only concrete we own are the cinder blocks that keep our wheels from turning. “Can’t we at least put our tin can up on a foundation like everybody else’s?” I asked our first day here. “You know, pretend it’s a real building rather than a souped-up vehicle?” He was in what he called his retirement clothes, pastel golfwear, though he has never touched a club. He was surveying the flat, swampy, treeless land as if this was the Exodus. Even that day, our belongings not even unpacked, I was thinking that if this was the Promised Land, Moses for sure dealt me a bad hand.

“I like knowing we can move at a moment’s notice.” He turned to me then, eyes wide. There was an exuberance about him that I found as foreign as the landscape. He didn’t even look like my husband to me. He looked so small in those lightweight Easter-egg clothes. Where was the concrete dried gray on his knees? The bandanna in his back pocket? The heavy brogans I had decreed must always stay outside of our apartment door? “After all these years, Alice,” he said and took my prize possession from my hands, my mother’s silver tea service that I had carried on my lap all the way from Somerville, Massachusetts, “we’re free to do anything we please.” He kissed me quickly and then ceremoniously carried the silver service inside the tin can. I stood and watched this frail pastel imitation of my husband walk away with my only piece of inheritance and willed myself to wake up. I had never seen such an expansively bright sky, never felt such intense heat. I felt lightheaded, as if my whole world were encapsulated in some kind of vaporous bubble that could pop any given second. I closed my eyes tightly and waited.

“Alice!” Frank called. “Come see!” I opened my eyes, only to find the tin can in place, blinding me, and a swarm of sticky flies clinging to my pale arms. The Promised Land, Armageddon—who knew they’d be one and the same? “We’ve got a view of the driving range,” Frank called in a voice so enthusiastic you might think he was Columbus and I was on board the Pinta. “I’ve for sure got to get some clubs, now.”

There is no one in this neighborhood with naturally dark hair.

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