Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories Read online

  Necessary Skills

  This story came out of a writing exercise in Michelle Herman’s class. As I remember (foggy memory many years later), Michelle had us do character sketches of a minor character from a story we were working on. Then she had us swap with somebody else in the class and the exercise was to write a scene between the two characters, merging two story worlds. I’d written about Barbara, the Bank Slut (the first drafts of this story were called “The Bank Slut’s Story”), and my partner, whose name I have shamefully forgotten, had written about Randy, who drove a Peachstate Cable truck down south. That meant I had to get Ohio Barbara down south somehow since it didn’t seem right to drag Randy up north, and while I was trying to figure out how Barbara had gotten herself to Georgia, a much better understanding of a character I hadn’t liked much emerged. I don’t think you have to like all your characters, but I do think you have to have some sympathy for them and a lot of understanding of why they do the things they do. And this story, which is so interior that it runs close to reverting to character sketch again, told me everything I needed to connect to Barbara.

  Barbara knew she’d made a mistake when Matthew couldn’t change the tire.

  She stood on the edge of the hot Georgia highway and watched Matthew fumble with the jack, flipping metal parts back and forth, clearly having no idea of how the thing worked. The tension made her lips thin and her neck tight. He’d deceived her. This was not her fault, she’d been careful this time. They’d been together for five months, and he’d done everything beautifully up till now. Even on the trip from Ohio to Florida, she’d admired the way he’d driven with such careless skill, one wrist draped over the wheel, the elbow of his other arm propped on the window edge. He’d looked as if he owned the road, and now he couldn’t work his own jack. Barbara sat down on the rear bumper of the Pontiac and thought about the duplicity of people and the slipperiness of life.

  Living in Tibbett had been hard enough even before Matthew’s wife Lois had started calling her the Bank Slut. Tibbett wasn’t the kind of place that let mistakes go unnoticed, something Barbara had known early from hearing her mother and father talk about everyone in town. “Cheat,” her father would say. “Whore,” her mother would add. “Liar.” “Fool.” “Bum.” Barbara knew that everybody in Tibbett judged everybody else because her mother told her so. “People watch,” she’d told Barbara. “They watch and they talk behind their curtains. You be careful how you act.” Barbara had felt sorry for them, scared for all the people who were out there—the troublemakers, the sluts, the drunks—although she’d always felt safe herself, tucked behind her father’s good name.

  Then her father had gone bankrupt when she was a senior in high school, and she’d been left out in the open. “I just got some bad breaks,” her father had told her then. “Made a few mistakes. Don’t worry, people forget.” But Barbara had known those were just excuses. People didn’t forget. Her father had told her that her life would be all right because she was a Niedemeyer, and then he screwed up and it wasn’t, and she hadn’t been safe since.

  Matthew exhaled loudly and said, “You could help some here,” and Barbara ignored him. How could she help? He was just like her father, turning to her mother and saying, “You’ll have to go to work now.” She could remember her mother’s face, the shock and the shame and the anger. Her mother hadn’t known how to work. Barbara did, she’d made sure of that, she was never going to depend on a man for money, she was never going to look like her mother had that day. But money didn’t protect you from life, you needed a man for that, somebody who had a good name and basic skills. Somebody not like her father. And now, not like Matthew.

  Matthew swore and Barbara seethed. It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to split an atom, for heaven’s sake. He should have known how to work his own jack; this was his fault.

  It was all their faults really. They’d come to the house to fix her roof (that was Gil) or her electricity (Louis) or her plumbing (Matthew), and she’d been truly grateful that they knew so much. It wasn’t that Barbara wasn’t competent; she was head teller at the First National Bank at only twenty-eight after all, and that hadn’t been easy, walking in there straight out of high school, saying she was Barbara Niedemeyer, watching people act like they didn’t know the name, like they thought she was just anybody’s daughter. No, it was that life held so many pitfalls for a woman, so many uncertainties, and these were men who were certain. “I can patch that right up for you,” Gil had said. “But the next time you have that roof done, you tell them to tear it off, not roof over it.” “You need a bigger box,” Louis had said. “Running this kind of load off that old box, you’ll have trouble in no time.” And Matthew had been the same—“Copper pipe, definitely,” he’d said. “Wouldn’t want somebody as pretty as you to get lead poisoning”—they’d all been the same, all happily married, solid family men with good reputations, the kind of men that Barbara wanted to depend on someday, the kind that would never leave her stranded. She admired them for that and told them so and then it turned out that they weren’t that happy after all, that their wives had changed after they’d gotten married, that they were lonely, wistful, unappreciated.

  Barbara had appreciated them. She couldn’t help it. She’d been so grateful they were protecting her from roof leaks and power failures, and they’d been so grateful she’d noticed that they were good at things, and then they’d moved in and one day she noticed that they didn’t know that much after all, that they made mistakes on ordinary things, and that scared her, and she had to let them go. Look at what had happened to her mother; one mistake in marriage and she still couldn’t hold her head up in public, still spent all her time hiding in the house, taking care of the man who’d let her down.

  Matthew was standing now, staring at the jack as if he were trying to learn it by looking at it. He’d been so competent back in Ohio, telling her not to worry about a thing, he’d take care of it all. He’d looked so solid there in his blue work shirt with Ferguson Plumbing embroidered right on the shirt, not on a patch. Barbara had relaxed a little just because there wasn’t a patch, because his name was a permanent part of the shirt, not just ironed on, not something that might peel off with wear.

  First he put in her new copper pipes and her leaks stopped, and she was grateful. Then he came back and put in her new shower head and her shower pressure went up, and she told him he was wonderful. But then he came back again and didn’t charge her for putting a new stopper in the bathtub, and he fixed the plug on her lamp and cleared out her clogged gutter and told her that her dogwood needed potassium to bloom. And Barbara surrendered, helpless under the full force of his competence.

  Matthew caught his finger in the jack handle and swore again, and Barbara remembered everything she’d risked for him, remembered the day she’d gone by Lois’s beauty parlor and seen Lois come to the door with a customer, heard her say “Bank Slut” loudly, sounding the way Barbara’s mother used to, her voice fat with contempt. Barbara felt annoyed now with Lois. Lois should have been relieved when Barbara had taken Matthew off her hands. “Let the Bank Slut have him,” Lois should have said. “He’s worthless at changing tires.” Really, Barbara couldn’t see why Lois was upset at all. All she’d lost was Matthew.

  A Peachstate Cable truck came toward them and pulled off the road. The man who got out—medium height, nothing special, nothing awful, just a man—said, “Need some help?” like he didn’t care, and Matthew did one of those macho things where he said, “No, just this damn jack,” which really meant “God, yes, but I’m going to hate your guts if you can do this when I can’t.”

  Of course, the cable man could. Barbara moved to the edge of the road and watched as he flipped the pieces of the jack together and pumped the back of the car off the ground as if it were nothing. He had good shoulders, steady hands, thick dark hair. She grew calmer just watching him, and when he looked up and met her eyes—he had nice dark eyes—she smiled, grateful to be relieved.