Also by Jennifer Crusie
Maybe This Time
Bet Me
Faking It
Fast Women
Welcome to Temptation
Crazy for You
Tell Me Lies
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this collection of short stories are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Crazy People: The Crazy for You Stories. Copyright © 2012 by Argh Ink LLC. All rights reserved. For more information, visit the author's website.
www.JennyCrusie.com
First Edition: May 2012
This collection is for
Lee K. Abbott
Who taught me how to write
and to never go for the cheap laugh.
The most unforgettable teacher
I've ever had and the best.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course
Sleep Cure
Meeting Harold's Father
Necessary Skills
Just Wanted You To Know
I Am At My Sister's Wedding
Appendix A: The ABC Story
Appendix B: Redbook/Condensed Version of "Just Wanted You To Know"
Appendix C: "Dog Days" - Chapter One
Appendix D: "Crazy for You" - Chapter One
Introduction
Once upon a time, I went to school to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. No, that’s not true, I went to get a PhD in feminist literature and got co-opted into the Creative Writing Program when the head of the program stopped me in the hall and said, “I hear you’ve published a novel.” You really have to know Lee K. Abbott to appreciate how startling that was: big guy, looks like the Marlboro Man, terrifying in his reputation for grilling students. And then there was me: frumpy middle-aged woman who’d written three novels for Harlequin, only one of which had been published so far. So I pushed my glasses back up my nose and said, “Uh, yeah, but it’s for Harlequin,” and he said, “I don’t care who it’s for, you should be in the program.” My brain shorted out about then, but Lee is not somebody who gives up, so I agreed to audit a creative writing seminar. Just dip my toe in, wait for somebody to make fun of me, and then leave. But as it turned out, the only biased person in the program was me. As far as I know nobody else gave a damn who I wrote for, they just wanted to write good fiction, although the lack of cheap shots might be in part attributed to the fact that Lee stood in front of the class the first day and said, “Anybody who makes fun of romance fiction is making fun of Jane Austen, and anybody who makes fun of Jane Austen answers to me.” Why yes, I would walk across broken glass for that man. Why do you ask?
I won’t say I don’t have scars from the experience, but every one of them was necessary. When he critiqued the first draft on one of the stories in this collection, “Just Wanted You To Know,” he said, “I already knew Jenny could make me laugh. But it matters the way she gets the laugh.” Then he went through the story page by page and said, “Here you went for the cheap laugh. And here you went for the cheap laugh. And here …” He was right. And every time since, whenever I write something that’s strictly for the laugh, I can hear Lee saying, “Here you went for the cheap laugh …” and I delete that sucker without hesitation. Lee K. Abbott taught me to write, and I am grateful to him every day for that.
The most difficult part of the program was that I had to write mostly short stories. I think writers are born to the length they’re best at. Some of us are born sprinters and some of us are born marathoners, and I was born for the long form. But people in MFA workshops get hostile when you ask them to read entire novels and critique them, so I learned to write short stories. In the process, I discovered that the short form is also the shortest path to discovering character, and as I worked my way through writing exercises and stories, I discovered a character I wanted to spend more time with: Quinn McKenzie of Tibbett, Ohio. It took some time, but eventually I started Quinn’s novel, full of characters I needed to know more about, so as the writing exercises assignments and workshop story assignments piled up, I pulled out characters from the assignments and put them in the novel, and then pulled characters from the first drafts of the novel and wrote short stories about them. In the process, I found out more about them than I ever would have within the confines of Quinn’s story. Turns out when you give a minor character her own voice, she has a lot to say.
Eventually, Lee pointed out that I had to graduate—I’d have stayed forever if I could have—so I put together my master’s thesis of the short stories I’d written during that time and the book proposal for Quinn’s story, then called Dog Days. I turned the thesis into Ohio State, graduated, and went on to write Dog Days, retitled Crazy For You and then other novels for St. Martin’s Press. These stories pretty much gathered dust on my hard drive (with the exception of “Just Wanted You To Know” about which more later) until the author-as-digital-publisher revolution hit, and it seemed like the time to resurrect Quinn and Zoë and Darla and Debbie and Meggy and Caroline again. So here they all are.
For those of you who’ve read Crazy For You, I hope this collection is fun, an inside look at the some of the characters you liked (or didn’t like). And if you haven’t read the book, I hope the stories stand on their own, pieces of a small town in Ohio that runs on gossip, friendship, and love. They’re stories I’d thought would be lost forever, so I’m grateful for the chance to publish them, and even more grateful you’re reading.
Thank you,
Jenny Crusie
The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course
One of the perks of being in an MFA program is the Visiting Writer Program, which is exactly what it sounds like: a famous writer comes in for a week and teaches a seminar for advanced grad students. In 1996, Ron Carlson came to OSU and it was one of the best weeks of education in my life. One of the things he did that I thought was insane at the time was assign the Alphabet Exercise: Write a short story of twenty-six sentences, the first beginning with A, the second with B, and so on. It sounds nuts, but what I realized after I tried it is that it provides an arbitrary structure that solves a lot of problems. The story is only going to be twenty-six lines, so you get to the point fast. And wrangling those words around to fit the alphabet makes you think about what goes into the sentences. I called my protagonist “Quinn” and her sister “Zoë” to get rid of the Q and Z, and then within the freedom of that structure, I just wrote, and the story emerged on its own. I liked it so much I rewrote it into a real story, the story below. (The original twenty-six line exercise is in Appendix A of this collection.) The big takeaway from this exercise? It doesn’t matter what structure you use, as long as you have a structure.
So this is Quinn’s story at fifteen, seventeen years before the start of Crazy For You.
After my big sister, Zoë, shot Baker Turnbull, our mailman, Mama grounded her for twenty-four hours, which didn’t seem like much of a punishment to me since it was assault with a semi-deadly weapon, but Zoë was put out because it made her miss the big dance at the Grange Hall in Celina. She said she didn’t care except that she was eighteen and shouldn’t be getting grounded at all, even if she did still live at home. Zoë says the key to life is not caring about much and not being ashamed of anything, but you have to be Zoë to pull that off.
I was really surprised Zoë got grounded at all because she always gets away with pure blue murder around here which Lord knows I never do, even though I am
just three years younger than she is which is practically twins. My dad just laughed when he heard about it and went back to watching the game, but Mama said Zoë crossed the line when she picked up that gun. (That’s when I said, “Guns don’t hurt mailmen, people hurt mailmen,” which would have gotten a big laugh if Zoë had said it, but all Mama said was, “Quinn McKenzie, do you want grounded, too?” And I ask you, is it fair that Zoë shoots somebody, and I mouth off, and we get the same punishment? No, it is not.) Mama said that Baker was a truly terrible mail carrier, but shooting him was not the kind of behavior she wanted her daughters associated with, which is another thing that makes me mad because she’d never said anything about not shooting people before, probably because she figured Zoë and I would have the brains not to, and now we’re absolutely not allowed to, and of course Zoë got to, and now I can’t. Not that I’d want to. It’s the principle of the thing.
I do not want you to get the idea that I’m jealous of Zoë because I’m not. My mama says some people are oil paintings and some people are watercolors, and they’re both perfectly fine, and I could handle being a watercolor, but Zoë’s decided she’s neon, and it’s damn hard to see me next to her. I don’t mean for other people, I mean for me. It’s like that mailman thing I said and got yelled at for, which is exactly what Zoë would have said, and the only thing I can figure out that’s different in the way we say it is that I’m trying to be something when I say stuff like that and Zoë just is when she says it, and there’s nothing you can do about that. But I figured it wouldn’t be so noticeable if she wasn’t standing next to me all the time, so I was hoping things would get better when she married Nick and moved out.
That’s the reason I decided to help Baker, because of Nick going to boot camp. He was Zoë’s boyfriend, and they were really going places, mostly our back porch after dark, and I was pretty sure they’d get married and that would have given me some room because Zoë would have been staying home nights someplace else besides where I am. But then Nick decided he wanted to be a Marine and joined up, and Zoë told him that she wasn’t waiting six weeks for anybody, let alone somebody who was dumb enough to enlist in the Marines without asking her first and then come around afterwards expecting to be congratulated for being a moron. Nick tried to tell her he was doing it for her so they could get married faster, and she threw one hellacious fit and said, “Do I look like somebody who wants to get married, Nick Ziegler, do I? Do I?” And of course, that’s exactly what she looked like to Nick, but that’s not what she looked like to Zoë, and it’s what Zoë thinks that counts, so Nick left for boot camp a real mess because he thought he’d lost her.
I thought so, too. That’s how I ended up talking to Baker, which was a big mistake although I do not regret it because Zoë says that regrets are for people who don’t understand life. The thing was, I still had some years left being only fifteen, but if Zoë was going to hang on and be one of those late marriers, I could see those years going fast. So I thought all I had to do was get somebody else to love Zoë, which wouldn’t be hard, and marry her, which would be harder, and she’d move out and then I’d be able to figure out who I was without Zoë getting in my eyes all the time. Which is how I noticed Baker, carrying our mail one afternoon.
Baker was not a bad catch, being a civil servant, and not bad looking at all, being an ex-fullback for Tibbett High. He had no neck to speak of, but his face was pretty good and his nose hadn’t even been broken once, which Zoë says tells you something about how much use he was on the field, but I still thought he had potential. He was old, of course, close to thirty, but I thought Zoë’d like that, dating an older man and making people say, “That Zoë” and shake their heads and smile. I didn’t know much about Baker, but I figured as a government employee he must have something going for him because the civil service exam doesn’t mean scoot in Tibbett without somebody pulling for you, so somebody had liked Baker enough to give him those blue shorts, and that’s more of a recommendation than most of Zoë’s dates come with. I mean, Nick was pumping gas for his dad when he left for the Marines and half the time all he wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch TV and the other half he wanted to sit on the back porch with Zoé and do God knows what, and neither one was enough to hold Zoë, even if he was a sweetie and really cute, and even if she was fairly enthusiastic about the back porch part. “I need somebody with flair,” she told him once, “and you do not have it.” He must have had something because she dated him for six months without going out on him more than once or twice, but once he was gone, he was history, and he knew it, and I knew it, so I had to do something.
So when Nick left, and Baker handed me the mail one day and said, “How’s that pretty Zoë?”, I looked him over and saw potential and said, “Pretty lonely now that her ex-boyfriend’s in the Marines,” and I watched his little brown eyes light up and thought, Good job, Quinn. I swear on my mother’s grave when she eventually has one, I did not know he was crazier than a bed bug when I said that. His delivery of the mail had been one hundred per cent without incident up until then, so I had no idea.
Baker came around that night and asked Zoë out on the porch and then he asked her out on a date, and Zoë wanted to see the new James Bond movie so she said, “Yes.” When she got home that night, I was hoping that she’d say, “This is the one,” but she said, “I can’t believe what a jackass that man is, he didn’t shut up all night long, and all he did the whole time was tell me what a catch he was.” And I thought, Well, Baker, we have some work to do.
So the next day when he came by with the mail, I said, “Baker, next time you go out with my sister, talk about her not you.” I know that wasn’t polite, but I didn’t think Baker would get it if I didn’t lay it out for him. He came back that night and asked Zoë out on the front porch, and she came but she said she could only stay until nine because Moonlighting came on then. He said, “I’ll come in and watch it with you, Zoë, honey,” and she said, “No, you will not.” They sat on the swing and I listened, and that fool told her all the reasons they should go out and they were all about him again. I guess Baker thought that if the word “Zoë” was in the sentence that counted as being about her.
It wouldn’t have been nearly so bad, but Baker had delivered his own death sentence that day when he’d handed Zoë a letter from Nick.
Zoë damn near fell on the floor when she saw it because, before boot camp, Nick couldn’t even make a phone call without getting bored, and this was a long letter, and it was all about her, what she looked like and smelled like and how much he missed her. I think there were some parts where he talked about what she felt like, too, but she didn’t show me those. “Some of this is private, Quinn,” she said, but she showed me the other stuff, and I have to say, it made me think twice about Nick. Any guy who’ll write a twelve page letter deserves another look, especially a guy who was as nice as Nick, and I started to feel bad that I’d egged Baker on.
So when he came to the door the next day and said, “What did I do wrong?” I said, “Give it up, Baker, she’s in love with a cute marine who writes really good letters.”
“Are you telling me,” Baker said, “that she’d rather have some damn letters than me sitting next to her?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” I said.
“You know what Zoë’s problem is?” he said, which made me a little mad.
“I believe that would be you, Baker,” I said, but he didn’t listen, being all caught up in his own mind again.
“Zoë thinks she’s special,” Baker said. “And she’s not. She’s awful sweet and pretty but she’s not special.”
That’s when I knew Baker was dumber than snot because he had it completely backwards. Zoë is the last thing next to sweet, but any fool could see she’s special, and there’s old Baker trying to make her something he could understand, which he never could.
I said, “Give it up, Baker, you’re history,” and took the mail and closed the door, but of course, he didn’t give
it up.
It was shortly after that when Baker started opening the letters from Nick, probably trying to figure out what Nick was putting on paper that was better than what Baker was doing in real life. And he must have thought Nick’s letters were pretty stupid because about a week after Zoë kicked him off the porch and refused to ever go out with him again, he started reading the letters out loud. Real loud.
He stood on our steps, grinning like a fool, and yelled, “Dear Zoë,” and I stopped in the doorway where I’d gone to get the mail, and I must have looked like a fool, too, because I just stood there with my mouth open, not believing what I was hearing. He started off with Nick’s usual stuff about how much he missed the way the back of her neck smelled, and it sounded sweet when you read it on paper but it sounded pretty stupid when Baker bellowed it which was probably his plan, and then Zoë came downstairs and said, “What is that godawful racket?” and I knew there was going to be bloodshed, and it was at least partly my fault.
Baker stopped reading when he saw Zoë through the open doorway, and began to shout his own stuff instead. “Fine goings on,” he bellowed. “Good girls wouldn’t get letters like this, and Miss Zoë McKenzie shouldn’t either, and I am just shocked that she is, even though she goes around looking so sweet and pretty and all.”
Zoë said, “Jesus wept, that fool has gone completely round the bend.”
Baker went back to the letter and started to read louder since he had his prime audience now. He yelled, “I miss you like hell and can’t wait until we’re together again. All I do is think about you in that white underwear with the red hearts that you know drives me crazy. Wear it next Saturday so I can think about you in it all day long and then think about you out of it all night long.”
He would have read more, but Zoë stomped out on the front porch and down the steps, and grabbed the letter out of his hand, and said, “Baker Turnbull, I am calling the Postmaster General because you have just broken the goddamned law.”