Novel Page 3

  Like I said, Bekah went from a hefty size fourteen to a 34-24-36 size six. From that point on, for the next couple years, she intook 2,500 to 3,500 calories a day three weeks out of the month, then spent a week snorting cayenne, baby powder, ragweed, and the contents of our vacuum cleaner bag in order to get back in shape.

  Me, I feigned interest for about a year, but mostly thought up new fun facts and lies to tell schoolchildren, county employees, and 4-H clubs about the menagerie I drove around in a retired and converted bookmobile. I put up with Ina’s biannual visits, her stories about how her husband could’ve stuffed my snakes so realistically that the state could save money raising mice. I humored Irby when he showed up at our small house off Trade Street—Irby always arrived between midnight and three in the morning—and drank my booze with him while he conducted monologues on such fascinating and diverse topics as massage therapy, spirit rocks, the police forces of south Georgia, his mother’s button collection, what rehab clinic workers need to understand most, Mayan counterculture, healing creeks, milk thistle, his father’s irrational expectations, how to shave properly, the secret government ingredients infused in every American cigarette, and—oddly—Bauhaus artists he admired. Irby also liked to tell me about the women he’d met in bars and jailhouse visits.

  Irby didn’t know that she’d been pierced down there, and five seconds into trying to pleasure her he wondered if he lost a filling: There’s a possible and appropriate novel opening.

  This ended simple enough: The Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone had a separate heat and air return for each room. I’m talking some crazy ductwork, an exorbitant cost for Trane or Carrier units, and so on. Bekah ran “The surgeon general and FDA won’t approve my weight-loss program—because it works!” in every woman’s magazine from Ms. to the AARP newsletter. She hired on a couple part-time old lady employees who once worked at Gruel Florists so I could spend my time over on Gruel Mountain searching out as-yet-undiscovered South Carolina anacondas.

  Our eleven guest rooms—which went for two hundred dollars a day—were furnished with televisions, a single bed, the requisite toilet/shower/sink. We didn’t arm the place with Gideons, but I talked Bekah into letting me place American history textbooks in every room, a book of poems by the Agrarians, The Half-Mammals of Dixie, and a photography book of Lisette Model’s obese swimsuit wearers.

  Our room—number 1—had a vibrating bed. We didn’t stay in Bekah’s childhood home for a variety of reasons—I thought at the time—which ranged from my wife’s superstitions all the way to my own superstitions.

  So basically a handful of overweight women, unable to undergo stomach stapling or gastrointestinal slipknots, flew to either Atlanta or Charlotte, then rented cars equipped with global positioning devices in order to find their way to Gruel, South Carolina. If a tone-needy woman happened to be less than thirty-five years old, we found that she sneezed ceaselessly when inundated with White Linen perfume fogged into the room. Older women, some of whom lost senses of taste and smell over the years due to a combination of smoking and/or electric shock treatment, could only summon sneezes when my special sweat sock/potpourri/pre-1950 library book/ammonia-filled cat litter box concoction got piped into their quarters.

  Bekah seemed delighted that I took such an interest in her clients. What the hell, I usually thought upon waking each morning. Bekah said, “I told you. I told you about this fantasy, Novel. I don’t want to get all overachievement like when I thought I could go from debt collector to North Carolina’s secretary of the treasury, but I’m thinking we might could start a franchise. The name ‘Gruel’ turns out perfect.”

  Looking back, I wish she would have said something about my walking off my job like a fool, and so on. I said, “There’s a place in south Georgia named Porridge. That might be a place. All those rich Miami women might come up to Porridge.”

  The women came, the women fled—taking off all the weight they wished to shed. I’m serious. Bekah only spent advertising money once, and then word of mouth took care of everything else. We made twenty-two hundred dollars a day, for three months. The patients got two hours off every afternoon—Bekah understood that no one could undergo the sneezing rigors she’d unintentionally set up for herself. I drove my old step van into Gruel’s square and let our customers out. They mostly walked around aimlessly. Some played pool at Roughhouse Billiards. All of them knew how to blow their noses farmer-style, which wouldn’t gain us any Business of the Year awards from the chamber of commerce, should a real chamber ever crop up.

  4

  THERE’S A CONDITION in post-op circles called “adverse drug effect.” Sure, anesthesiologists, surgeons, nurses, and the occasional candy striper shorten it to ADE. No one knows why certain people undergo hallucinations that would make Timothy Leary and his set come off as teetotalers, but it happens. It happened to Ina Cathcart for about one day, but all of us knew that her condition probably had more to do with no one knowing how to read scales at Graywood Regional Memorial, thus causing nurses to shoot her up with enough oxycodone to make Secretariat woozy.

  But ADE can occur, evidently, without the D. You’ve seen these people before. The effect usually occurs after what some police officials and wives might call “seeing the light,” and Jesus always comes into play. It took place with our goofball president, who supposedly gave up drinking—and all notions of social or economic theories—and found Gawd.

  This has nothing to do with my story, really, but I have found that you should never befriend or hire anyone whose parents misspelled the kid’s name at birth. I’m talking don’t hire anyone named, say, Rusel, Howward, Andray, and so on. No woman named Juyne, Amee, or Fillis. Never, ever vote for a president whose parents named him Bubba, but spelled it George.

  Okay. Back at the Gruel Inn, I witnessed the adverse drug effect minus the “drug” part inside room 3. Bekah signed in one Ms. Maura-Lee Snipes, a heavyset woman in her late thirties who ran a catering business down near Columbia. Or so she said. Maura-Lee said to me, “I get this feeling that no one wants to buy cakes and bread from an unfit woman. They see my cakes, then look at my hips. They put two and two together.”

  More like two and two hundred, I thought. Like I said, the spa stayed at full capacity right off. I agreed to give up, at that point, my dreams of owning my own reptile farm or of writing my memoir or novel called Novel. My job leaned toward changing sweaty bed linens, serving a light lunch, driving clients into town, and aiding Bekah in the long, long phony check-in questionnaire. Oh, we asked our dieters about previous health problems, whether they had high blood pressure or diabetes, if there was a history of heart disease on their family tree, if they were allergic to any types of prescription drugs or over-the-counter medicines, what foods they normally ate for breakfast, and so on. We went through about a thousand “Have you ever sneezed in the presence of . . . ?” questions. You wouldn’t believe how many people say no to pollen, but yes to Irish Spring and Coast soap bars.

  Anyway, Maura-Lee Snipes said she had no previous histories, that she went to an all-female college up in Virginia, and that she put on a good ten to twenty pounds per year there. She sat in our office—I learned on day one to reinforce our couch with an extra set of four legs—and said, “I noticed one time that I had a sneezing fit from paprika. It was Cinco de Mayo last year. I had a big catering job for a party of Mexicans.”

  I wrote down “Irish Spring and paprika.”

  It needs to be said that, after only two months on the job, I had been anointed with the gift of envisioning these women at half their sizes and all shaped properly. If I were to actually write a memoir or novel, this would be what English teachers really stress in the eighth grade and call “foreshadowing.”

  I checked Maura-Lee in, sent her to room 3—which may have aided in her conversion seeing as all Christianity simmers on that father/son/holy ghost theme, or on that gold, myrrh, and frankincense theme—and set up the air-vent pipeline right away. I put my ear to the door, heard her firs
t sneeze thirty seconds later, and went back to the office.

  Some days, when the Gruel Sneeze ’n’ Tone lived up to its capacity and name, I crossed the road and walked into the primordial forest to see how far I could go before not hearing twelve women a-sneezing. My strides are exactly three feet. The record distance was 247 yards, though I admit that somehow these particular women all sneezed together. You get eleven women in close confines—though in different rooms—and it doesn’t take long for their clocks to readjust, you know.

  I didn’t get it. I thought about shelving my autobiography in order to research the idea.

  “Room 3’s good to go,” I said to Bekah. She looked up from an ad we’d placed in Woman’s World magazine. Bekah still insisted that we sell her family home, that we live at the old Gruel Inn. But her eyes told a different story, one that may be labeled “sleep deprivation.”

  She said, “I can’t take much more of this. The noise! Even when I accidentally nod off I can only dream of a giant Laundromat, all the washers turned to heavy duty. The sneezing’s driving me insane. Most of the day I spend my time trying to stifle sneezes in time with the clients’.”

  I will now admit that, perhaps, my marriage to Bekah was doomed by this point, though I didn’t know that an elaborate scheme lie or lay hidden beneath it all. I could have easily said, “Yeah, I felt that way, too, for the first week. But then I went down to Gruel Drugs and bought a pair of tiny, hardly noticeable rubber earplugs.”

  But I didn’t. I said, “To dream the impossible dream,” meaning Bekah’s fear of turning sixty-five and kicking herself for not following goals, et cetera, and knowing she’d now have either Jim Nabors’s or Robert Goulet’s voice in her head for a good ten hours, competing with the wash cycle. I said, “This new woman Maura-Lee seems like a real sneezer. I’m thinking if she works out, we might could get her to do some testimonials.”

  Of course we took before and after photographs. Of course Bekah got out a seamstress’s cloth measure and tallied figures.

  Bekah said, “Listen, I spoke with Paula Purgason earlier today. She’s not a real real estate agent, but she’s the best Gruel has to offer. She told me that the old Wiggins place has been on the market for nearly fifteen years. It’s right at three thousand square feet.”

  “Same size as your dad and mom’s.”

  “I’m glad you’re paying attention. Well the Wiggins’s grandkids have gone from asking a quarter-million dollars down to only seventy-five thousand. There’s still been no one interested.”

  Bekah stuck her pinkies in her ears. I said, “There’s nothing to do in Gruel, and little to do in Forty-Five outside of break a finger, go to Graywood Regional Memorial, and die under odd and sudden circumstances. Nothing against your hometown, honey, but I don’t know why anyone would move here unless the government started witness protection.”

  My wife, I’m positive now, didn’t mean for “Oh, there are reasons to live in Gruel” to come out audibly. Then she said, “Maybe I’ll get in touch with the FBI. Well no, it’s probably best not bringing the government down here checking out my people.” Behind me all of the women responded to whatever irritant I had blowing into their vents. My wife, nearly psychotic from lack of sleep, spoke toward the window in our office.

  I thought, Possible chapter 2 opening of Novel—Essays: It’s a well-known fact that the Republican Party wants the poor poorer; indeed, with citizens unable to pay electric bills or purchase newspapers, then it’s impossible for them to know what’s going on, or even when to vote next. Seeing as a high percentage of Republican politicians—male and female—could never carry on a meaningful sexual relationship postadolescence, they want more poor people, which means more streetwalkers, which means it won’t be so difficult to get laid.

  I said to Bekah, “You need to go over to your folks’ house and take a little nap. Go over there, get some rest, and think about selling it off for fifty grand. Or we could move in. I don’t want to come off as highly logical and rational, but if your clients drive you crazy, then we could take out all the stuffed trophy heads and move in, goddamnit.”

  You might have noticed by this point that not much has been said about our house in Charlotte. Had we sold it yet? No. Had we signed some kind of lease with a nice family originally from Pennsylvania? No. Did all of this hang over my head? Fucking A yes.

  My wife began to cry. She welled up and fanned her face. “We wouldn’t be going through all this if I hadn’t lost weight. Why couldn’t I have only started sneezing near a piano and found out I could play ‘Smoke on the Water’ by the way my hands flopped on the keyboard? Then I’d’ve had that dream.”

  I’m not lying. “Smoke on the Water”—which, I’m sure, a chimpanzee could learn to play during flea season. I said, “Believe me, you don’t want to end up like my parents, Bekah.”

  I don’t know if it was the crying jag or her first attempt to go by Kah, Kah, Kah, but my wife let out some noises I’m certain only B. F. Skinner ever came across.

  So Maura-Lee sneezed until she got orgasmic some six hours later—go look on the Internet and you’ll see how it’s not pure urban myth—and then eleven other fit-obsessed women moaned in unison, each from her room. It broke all records, believe me. I took out my earplugs and stepped off almost three hundred yards into the woods. Because I’m not one to hide anything I’ll admit that some “ideas” crossed my mind that involved hidden cameras, tape recorders, and peepholes for the clientele of Roughhouse Billiards on the square.

  Later on, long after her forty-pounds-lighter-in-just-two-weeks! stint, Maura-Lee Snipes told me it got to the point where she could no longer stand in her room, that she remained in the fetal position, sneezing and climaxing, and losing inches by the half day. Way later, she confessed to me that she often crawled around room 3 looking for a Gideon Bible in order to pray better for God to stop the constant electricity that ran down there. She said she didn’t want to be ruined for life, knowing that no other person (notice how I say “person” here, and not “man”—this’ll come back later) could satisfy her near what a sneeze could offer.

  I never said anything about how I might start off my novel one day with the labial piercing mistaken for a fallen-out piece of mercury filling.

  “I have found a reason to live,” Maura-Lee said upon completion of her stay with us. “I have to tell you—and I didn’t mention it when I got here because I feared an intervention for my suicidal tendencies—but I planned to come here and flat-out die. I planned on never returning to Raleigh. And I still won’t go back, except to pack my bags and move to Gruel.”

  Raleigh?

  Bekah said, “Well I guess you got your wish. You want me to go ahead and charge your bill on the American Express?”

  Maura-Lee nodded. She raised her palms upward, and sure enough it was apparent that she’d shaped up. I said, “I know of a house for sale.” I said, “What would you plan to do here in Gruel?”

  Now, I might not be the most perceptive man in regards to women, but because I worked with snakes for so long I could detect little subtle, secret movements that meant a strike neared. And I knew that I saw Bekah’s head move to the left just enough so I couldn’t see her either cut her eyes or widen them scarify toward Maura-Lee as one of those “don’t say anything” international signals.

  Maura-Lee said, “Never mind.” See?

  My wife said, “American Express has to be paid on time in full,” for some reason. I couldn’t figure out that particular international signal.

  “It’s as if God came down and whispered in my ear,” Maura-Lee said. “God said, ‘You know how to bake bread. Go ye to a place where people need your talent.’ As far as I can tell, there’s no real bakery in this area. People need to know something better than Sunbeam King Thin. Or Pepperidge Farm pastries.”

  I didn’t say anything about how we couldn’t even get Won-derfuckingbread in Gruel, much less Pepperidge Farm, and how there had never been Sunbeam Bread since the dented-can st
ore closed, some time back when Bekah grew up in Gruel. I said, “How about that. How about that, Bekah?”

  But my wife didn’t listen. She worked to keep her eyes open, to concentrate on the conversation. She’d not slept well since opening the “spa.” And she’d foregone any sneeze therapy to eradicate those twenty extra pounds she’d put on since her mother’s and brother’s deaths, though she tried daily. Whatever it was that caused the original seizures just wasn’t present in Gruel, though we experimented with Bekah’s nose almost every time she returned from her utter devastation of Gruel Drugs’ candy aisle.

  5

  IT WASN’T ONLY shrimp and moonshine growing up. Oh, I’m prone to exaggeration and habitual lying, I know—what smarter men and women call “hyperbole”—so let me confess that glimpses of my childhood reveal themselves at times much the same as that little polka-dotted man carrying a valise shows up when one ingests a gram-too-much psilocybin mushroom the night before his wedding.

  Like I said, my parents were ex-concert pianists. They had long, long nimble fingers. What do nimble-fingered ex-musicians trying to raise a family of adopted and biological children in the North Carolina mountains take up in order to pay bills, put food on the table, and create college funds should said adopted children not run back to Ireland? I hate to bring up such obvious and rhetorical questions. It’s almost embarrassing. You’re probably way ahead of me.