Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories Read online

  Anyway, that’s what you missed while you were on vacation. Just wanted you to know.

  Sincerely,

  Debbie

  My agent, Meg, loved this story and sent it to an editor at Redbook who said, “We love it but it’s too long.” But they said they’d buy it if I cut about two thirds of it, so I did. Meg said, “If I ever need anybody to do Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, I’m calling you.” If you want to see the short version, go to Appendix B in the back of this collection; the Redbook version and another note about the story are there.

  I Am At My Sister’s Wedding

  In the early drafts of Crazy For You, Quinn had two close friends, Darla and Stephanie. Both had married young, but while Darla had settled into permanency with Max, Stephanie had divorced and remarried, and at the time the book took place, was coming unstuck from her second husband. Stephanie was such a bright, simple character that I couldn’t get a grip on her, so I wrote this story about the arc of her life and marriages, seen through the eyes of her practical and disapproving younger sister. In the process, the story turned out to really be about Caroline, the sister, a much more interesting character to write, but it also did what it was supposed to do: it gave me closure on what was going to happen to Steph, a woman who was thoughtless in the best sense of the word, living in the now with such fervor that sometimes she forgot there could ever be a tomorrow. I wonder now if I should have made Caroline Quinn’s other BFF instead of Stephanie; I think the simplicity of Stephanie’s outlook on life made her much easier to cut from the novel than Caroline’s whacked-out view of men and relationships would have. And as a side note, if you’ve read Crazy For You and don’t remember Caroline and Stephanie, it’s because they were cut from the novel.

  1967

  I am at my sister’s wedding, looking stupid in a pink lace dress with a lot of ruffles and a butt bow, and I’m feeling putrid since I barfed up half a bottle of pink champagne an hour ago, and of course, my father saw me, but that’s my life for you.

  My sister, being my mother’s daughter, would never do anything like that. Stephanie is no rocket scientist, she just married Andy the Slime and the ink on her high school diploma is still wet, but she always does the right thing about people and clothes, two things I am never going to understand but that my mom and Steph just know.

  Like she picked a wedding gown and matching bridesmaids dresses with ruffles across the boobs, and I know she did it so I wouldn’t look so flat because she has plenty up there, more than the other bridesmaids, and the ruffles on her look sort of too much. I saw her during the fittings trying to smooth them down, so I know she noticed. I mean, she did that for me, got a wedding gown that wasn’t exactly what she wanted so I’d look good and everything would match. I get fed up with her because she’s eighteen and I’m fifteen, and she’s supposed to be the mature one, and I have to tell you, she’s totally dumb, but nobody ever said she wasn’t a really good person.

  I’m not a good person but I’m interesting, like my dad, who’s really smart, so whenever I say anything good, my mother sighs and says, “Caroline, you’re just like your father,” like that’s not a compliment, which I guess it isn’t to her and Steph. But it’s not like I have a choice. I tried to be like them last night and look where it got me. Andy is the scum of the earth and I hate him and I hope he dies.

  But, as my father says, at least he’s a primate.

  The reason I hope he dies is that the rehearsal dinner was last night, and that’s when I decided to see if I could do the Stephanie thing, you know, be charming and good, since I was going to be dressed for it, Steph having picked out my dress again. It was blue this time with more ruffles, but I didn’t look so tall and skinny in it, and I thought I might have a shot at the girl thing. Steph made sure I was paired with the tallest usher (as my father says, beanpoles should have my reach), and he looked nice even though he was one of Andy’s cousins, so I thought I might have a chance.

  But then instead of letting Steph introduce me, Andy grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over and said, “Scott, this is Steph’s titless little sister, the giraffe. You’re stuck with her and her zits for the night.” Then he laughed like he was hilarious and staggered off to evolve or something.

  I don’t care what you say, not even Steph could come back from that one.

  Scott tried to help me. He said, “The family doesn’t claim Andy much,” but I couldn’t say anything for the rest of the night, and if I can’t talk, there’s not much to me. Steph says Andy gets defensive because he thinks Dad and I don’t like him, and we don’t, but I never did anything to deserve that. I mean, I wanted to say, “Oh, yeah, well, Andy, I may be titless, but you’re stupid, and I might grow tits someday but you’re screwed for life,” but I didn’t think of it until I was sitting up in bed at one this morning, still thinking about how dumb I must have looked when he said that.

  Thank God my father didn’t see me just stand there like a dumbass.

  Since I couldn’t sleep, I went down to the kitchen and there was my mother, the big detail freak, with about a quart of red food color and my dress, dying the punch until it matched so that the wedding theme—“Pink of Perfection”—would be carried out in the refreshments.

  I said, “Ma, it’s punch, not the Sistine Chapel,” and without looking up she said, “Caroline, your sister will only get married for the first time once. It has to be perfect.”

  That threw me for a minute, but it never does much good to think about what my mom says since she doesn’t, so I said, “Where does that leave Andy?” and she put the food coloring down and looked at me, and I knew we were going to have a Moment.

  My mom’s big on moments. Like Steph stopping and shooting us that winner smile of hers from the stage when she graduated from high school two weeks ago. Or me picking up the debate cup, except that I got embarrassed because everybody was looking and I didn’t stay at the podium, so Mom didn’t get her fix. “You have to pause, Caroline,” she told me later. “You have to cherish the moment.” Other people’s moms just take pictures. My mom pauses, cherishes, and then she takes a picture.

  Of course, maybe I feel that way about it because other people have moments like Steph has moments and I have moments like the one with Andy the Slime last night. I don’t think I’m going to have the kind of life where you want to pause and cherish a lot.

  The biggest moments in my mom’s life, she has told us over and over and over, are going to be when Steph and I get married, which was why she was dyeing the punch, so that when Steph paused behind the punch bowl with Quinn and Darla and me an hour ago, our dresses matched the punch that matched the roses on the cake that matched the roses in Steph’s bouquet, and my mom got her moment.

  Like I told my father, it could be worse, she could be hooked on religion or uppers, so pausing isn’t much to ask. He laughed, so it must have been an okay line.

  Anyway, when my mom paused last night, I knew that’s what we were having, one of those mother and daughter things that she was going to look back on, so I pretended I was Steph and paused, too.

  And then she said, “Caroline, no man is perfect. Choose for potential.”

  If you ask me, Andy’s only potential is as an organ donor, but my mom had a lot of punch to dye, and the last thing I wanted to talk about was the Slime, so I let it drop.

  But it did make me think about Scott again, because he had loads of potential even though I couldn’t talk to him, so I decided to give the Stephanie thing another shot at the wedding reception. It’s not that I’m desperate for somebody, but it would be nice to be with somebody who can talk about things the way my father does. But I hear my father talk about the guys he teaches at the Lima Branch, and I figure college guys must be pretty much the best there is when it comes to brains, but he doesn’t seem to think much of them, and he’s the smartest person I ever met. That was another thing about Scott; when I got to the reception, I saw my father talking to him, so I figured he must be pretty smart be