The New Yorker Stories

Cynthia saw an ad in the newspaper. “Call Crisis Center,” it said. “We Care.” She thinks that a crisis center is a good idea, but she isn’t having a crisis. She just can’t sleep. But the idea of it is very good. If I were having a crisis, what would I do? she wonders. She has to answer her mother’s note. Another note came today. Now her mother wants to meet Charlie: “As God is my witness, I tried to get through to you, but perhaps I did not say that you would really be welcome at home and do not have to do this foolish thing you are doing. Your dad feels you are never going to find true happiness when you don’t spend any time thinking between one husband and the next. I know that love makes us do funny things, but your dad has said to tell you that he feels you do not really love this man, and there is nothing worse than just doing something funny with not even the reason of love driving you. You probably don’t want to listen to me, and so I keep these short, but if you should come home alone we would be most glad. If you bring this new man with you, we will also come to the station. Let us at least look him over before you do this thing. Your dad has said that if he had met Lincoln it never would have been.”

Cynthia takes out a piece of paper. Instead of writing her mother’s name at the top, though, she writes, “If you are still at that high school, I want you to know I am glad to be away from it and you and I have forgotten all those lousy poems you had me memorize for nothing. Sincerely, Cynthia Knight.” On another piece of paper she writes, “Are you still in love with me? Do you want to see me again?” She gets another piece of paper and draws two parallel vertical lines with a horizontal line joining them at the bottom—Pete’s trapeze. “APE MAN,” she prints. She puts the first into an envelope and addresses it to her teacher at the high school. The second is for Lincoln. The next goes to Pete, care of his parents. She doesn’t know Lincoln’s address, so she rips up that piece of paper and throws it away. This makes her cry. Why is she crying? One of the girls at work says it’s the times they are living in. The girl campaigned for George McGovern. Not only that, but she wrote letters against Nixon. Cynthia takes another piece of paper from the box and writes a message to President Nixon: “Some girls in my office won’t write you because they say that’s crank mail and their names will get put on a list. I don’t care if I’m on some list. You’re the crank. You’ve got prices so high I can’t eat steak.” Cynthia doesn’t know what else to say to the President. “Tell your wife she’s a stone face,” she writes. She addresses the envelope and stamps it and takes the mail to the mailbox before she goes to bed. She begins to think that it’s Nixon’s fault—all of it. Whatever that means. She is still weeping. Damn you, Nixon, she thinks. Damn you.

Lately, throughout all of this, she hasn’t been sleeping with Charlie. When he comes to her apartment, she unbuttons his shirt, rubs her hands across his chest, up and down his chest, and undoes his belt.

She writes more letters. One is to Jean Nidetch, of Weight Watchers. “What if you got fat again, if you couldn’t stop eating?” she writes. “Then you’d lose all your money! You couldn’t go out in public or they’d see you! I hope you get fatter and fatter and die.” The second letter (a picture, really) is to Charlie—a heart with “Cynthia” in it. That’s wrong. She draws another heart and writes “Charlie” in it. The last letter is to a woman she knew when she was married to Pete. “Dear Sandy,” she writes. “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I am going to get married the tenth of February. I think I told you that Lincoln and I got divorced. I really wish I had you around to encourage me to lose weight before the wedding! I hope everything is well with your family. The baby must be walking now. Everything is fine with me. Well, got to go. Love, Cynthia.”

They are on the train, on the way to visit her parents before the wedding. It is late January. Charlie has spilled some beer on his jacket and has gone to the men’s room twice to wash it off, even though she told him he got it all out the first time. He has a tie folded in his jacket pocket. It is a red tie with white dogs on it that she bought for him. She has been buying him presents, to make up for the way she acts toward him sometimes. She has been taking sleeping pills, and now that she’s more rested she isn’t nervous all the time. That’s all it was—no sleep. She even takes half a sleeping pill with her lunch, and that keeps her calm during the day.

“Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

Cynthia didn’t want Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

“I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.