IT WAS LAST MAY when Miss Crystal gave up on her diet and exercise program. She had completely lost heart and stopped caring. She began wearing loose shirts and Mexican wedding dresses. Caved in to fat. I had never seen her that way. Miss Crystal is the kind that never believes the handwriting on the wall, that always says, No way, José.
Why? I was asking myself. Why would she give up after all these years of keeping herself in shape? Why give up now? Well, the answer wasn’t hard to find. After all, even Miss Crystal is not prepared to trade her teeth for a smaller waist.
Here is how the problem developed. First it became harder and harder to lose weight. No matter what Miss Crystal did or how many nights she went to bed hungry or how many breakfasts she skipped, still, the pounds would creep back on. One spice cake for Mr. Manny’s birthday. One roast beef on the first cold day. One loaf of Mrs. Diaz’s salt-rising bread and there would go all her work.
Finally, Miss Crystal was frantic. She went down and spent two weeks at a health spa in Texas and came home thin as a rail. Then her teeth started falling out. She had gone too far in the diet craze. First two of her molars became very loose. She went down to her dentist and the dentist said, You have been grinding your teeth to powder while you were starving yourself to death down at that crazy spa. This is terrible. We are going to have to send you to an expert and have him operate on your gums and no telling what all. It is going to cost eleven thousand dollars to undo the damage you have done.
She came home from the dentist and went to work flossing her teeth. I will make my teeth stay in my head, she said to me. The force of the human brain has never been measured. Anything the brain wishes, it can make come true. Only you must concentrate your powers on the thing you want. I am not ready for surgery on my gums. I am not ready to lie down and let my mouth be cut open. I will not take drugs and have surgery when my own brain can do anything it wants to do if I can only reach its ultimate power.
I was in agreement with her. You are right, I said. It only happened because you were determined to get your waist back. You just settle down and let a few pounds climb back on you and everything will be just fine. Look at all the problems we have solved this year. Crystal Anne learned to roller skate so she won’t be left out of birthday parties and King is off of coke and has been accepted in a college and is madly in love with that girl in North Carolina. You and Mr. Manny have settled your differences and made a happy home. You will also solve this problem of your teeth. I know you will. I am sure of it.
Oh, Traceleen, she said, and threw her arms around me. You are right. A few pounds won’t matter all that much. She pulled me over to a gilded mirror above the sideboard in the dining room. It is a very harsh mirror in a harsh light but we looked straight into it. “The body ages,” Miss Crystal said. “We must learn resignation or die worse fools than we were born.”
So we made a sour cream devil’s food cake with icing full of chocolate chips and sprinkled cut-up chocolate pieces on the top and cut a piece and ate it while we prepared fried chicken for the Saint James Auction and Picnic for the Benefit of the Home for the Incurables. Every year we fry ten chickens for them no matter how busy we are that day. By the time we finished the chickens and wrapped them in red and white checked cloths and put them into baskets and delivered them to the home Miss Crystal was in a better mood. She had decided to go on and let the dentist try to help her. One look at the old people sitting in their chairs with their jaws caved in was enough to make her decide to go with modern science. I have never seen it fail that charity always pays off. This is not the first time I have seen almost immediate results from a charitable act.
While we waited for November we decided to try yoga. Miss Crystal found this young woman named Ruthie Horowitz who agreed to come on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and teach us how to do it. It is the ancient art of India and the kind Miss Horowitz teaches is called Mahayana yoga. These postures, as they are called, are like very slow exercises. They stretch out parts of your body you didn’t know you had and call attention to the fact that you are made of flesh and blood. Most people walking around now never give that a thought. They have forgotten they are breathing and think the main thing they are here for is to drive cars and go to the mall. This yoga gets you back to thinking about what you are really made of.
At first I didn’t want to do it with them but Miss Crystal insisted that I give it a try. She is always worrying about my blood pressure so the first thing I knew there I was pulling myself into postures and breathing into my chakras, which is what you call the different parts of the spiritual development. This is all from the Hindu religion. My pastor at my church said not to worry, it wouldn’t hurt me to see some heathen practices and might give me something to tell my Sunday school class about.
I have had to be at my church quite a bit lately, as I am a youth counselor in my spare time. We are fighting the dope as hard as we can down here but it looks like a losing battle. When I go down to the Saint Thomas Street project to visit people I know, these very small children come up to the car trying to sell us things.
This yoga teacher turned out to be more interesting than I thought she would be. I began to look forward to her visits. Began to worry that she might not come. We would take the telephone off the hook and go into the living room and light some incense and put on some very quiet slow music and then we would lie down on these sticky green mats Miss Horowitz brought with her and begin to do these postures, breathing all the time as deeply as we could to remind ourselves that we are not alone in the world but are breathing in the whole world every time we inhale. Out go the old things we don’t need anymore. In come the new things for us to think about. In and out, in and out, in and out. They might be able to use some of this in the project, I kept thinking. We could get Miss Horowitz to tell the young people some of her theories. Miss Horowitz thinks young girls should not have babies. She believes in the early works of a woman named Margaret Mead. Mrs. Mead said that people should have to take a test to have a baby. They would have to take a test and pass it and then take out a special license to become a parent. She said no babies should be born to young girls who don’t know how to take care of themselves, much less a baby. Miss Crystal was all ears since she had King when she was only nineteen and doesn’t think she has been a good enough mother for him because of that. Everything he does she blames it on herself for being so young when he was born.
So we are doing this yoga for the months of September, October, November, and December and it was wonderful for our bodies and our minds. Miss Crystal returned to a size ten and I got my blood pressure down to one hundred and twenty over ninety which is low for me. Also, we had many wonderful conversations with Miss Horowitz about her theories and where she thinks the world is going and how to do yoga even when you are in a crowd or walking around the house. I learned to do a headstand and Miss Crystal mastered the Heron pose, where you stand on one leg for fifteen minutes without moving. We also gave up sugar, since Miss Horowitz is so against it, and we found we did not need it with our minds at ease. The fall moved into winter. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Miss Crystal had her gum surgery and recovered without mishap using the yoga to help speed up her recovery. We were getting so good at the postures that Miss Horowitz said we might become samurai before too long. Samurai are people who have become warriors and know that you must struggle and suffer to live and don’t mind it or complain.
There was one other thing Miss Horowitz taught us that is interesting enough to mention. She had this idea that she could be a medium for passing along power from the universe into mine and Miss Crystal’s chakras. It was the only thing she did to us that I worried about. She said not everyone can do it and not everyone is able to take it in but that when the right two people get together the one that is the go-between can take this stuff out of the air and pass it through her chakras into the chakras of the one that is lying on the floor. I watched her do it to Miss Crystal and then to one of Miss Crystal’s friends that is a poet. The one that is getting the stuff lies down on the sticky mat (that is the name for the green mats we do the postures on) and Miss Horowitz goes into a trance to get the power to protect herself from being drained and then she passes her hands above the chakras of the person on the floor and very powerful information goes from her hands into the other person’s spiritual centers. If she does it exactly right it fills up the subject’s chakras without taking anything from Miss Horowitz but in the hands of the wrong person it could make the person doing it quite sick.
Miss Crystal and her friend, Miss Buchanan, swore they had never felt better in their life than after Miss Horowitz filled them up so finally I lay down on the floor and let her do mine too. I know it sounds crazy but I think something happened to me while I was lying there. I felt like I had grown an inch but my husband Mark says that only proves once again there is a fool born every minute.
Mark was leery of this yoga from the start but he was wrong to be. It turned out to be a good thing we took that yoga and learned about being samurai. Who would have thought we would need to know so soon? Who would have thought an armed robber would show up on Story Street with a kidnap victim in the trunk of his car? It was three minutes until two on a Tuesday afternoon in January. I had gone down to the Rug and Flooring Company that morning and rented a machine to clean the orientals. I was in the process of cleaning up the mess when he came in, which is why white cleaning powder was spread from one end of the house to the other by the time the police finally got there.
I was vacuuming up the mess. Miss Crystal was in her office with a secretary dictating letters about the March of Dimes Celebrity Chef Dinner. She is the chairman of that this year. Dr. Phillips and his wife are going to participate and a famous physicist from here is returning to make Gumbo File and several others you would have heard of. The doors were unlocked, of course. Miss Crystal was born in the country and so was I. Neither of us are in the habit of thinking we are always about to be hit in the head.
Our doors will be locked from now on. You can be sure of that. We do not want to go through what we went through last Tuesday again. Although it was nice to have a photograph of ourselves on the front page of the Times-Picayune and the story was good publicity for the Celebrity Dinner.
Still, if I live to be a hundred I will not forget what it felt like to be running the vacuum sweeper and hear a footstep and turn around and there is an armed robber with his gun pointed at me. “Who else is here?” he asked, but I did not answer. I remembered the course in self-defense I took at the police department and I began to scream. I screamed as loud as I could scream. I was also looking around for something to throw out the window, hoping someone on the street would see a window breaking and call for help.
The robber listened to me scream for just a second, then he ran across the white powdered dry cleaner and grabbed me by the arm and put the gun to my head. About that time Miss Crystal and her secretary, who is really Miss Bitsy Schlesinger, a tennis player, came running into the room and when they saw us they began to scream. Miss Bitsy had taken a course similar to mine at Tulane and knew what to do. They screamed at the top of their lungs. Then the robber pushed the gun deeper into my head and told them to shut up or he would kill me. He made us sit down on the dining-room chairs and tied us onto them and then he went to the garage and opened it and drove his car in and got his kidnap victim out of his trunk and brought her upstairs.
It was horrible to behold. She was a lady almost seventy-five years old, as sweet as she could be. She had been kidnapped at one o’clock from a shopping mall and she was being held for one million dollars in ransom money. “But what do you want with us?” Miss Crystal said to the armed robber. “We have done nothing. We can’t help you. You can’t kill us all, can you? Who are you? What is wrong with you? Let us convince you to set this woman free and go away. Take my car. It’s yours. There are the keys in my pocketbook. Take the pocketbook. It’s got credit cards and money and a bank card. You can draw money from my account. You can take out two hundred dollars if you want to. The number is five five five five. That’s the secret number at any branch of the Hibernia Bank. There is one only two blocks from here.”
“Shut up, lady,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more out of you.” Then all was very quiet for what seemed like several minutes. You could hear the refrigerator hum and the air-conditioning unit next door in Mrs. Diaz’s yard. You could see the dust settling down through the light beams onto the table and I reminded myself how short a stay there is on the earth under the best of circumstances.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry,” I said. “Why don’t you let me make you a sandwich. You can’t think straight when you are starving to death.”
He waved the gun my way, then sank down into the easy chair where he was sitting.
“What’s this white shit all over the place?” he asked. “What’s this all about?”
“It’s cleaner for the dry cleaning system we rented to clean the orientals,” I said. “If you want to steal something you should take them. Miss Crystal’s brother sent them here from Turkey. They are original oriental rugs from Istanbul.”
“What time is it?” the armed robber asked. “Where’s a clock around this house?”
“Right there in the kitchen,” I answered. “You can see through the door.” We were sitting around the rosewood dining table. Myself and Miss Crystal and Miss Bitsy and Mrs. Allison Romaine, which was the name of the kidnapee, tied to the chairs with package wrapping twine. The armed robber was sitting in the door to the front hall on an easy chair he had dragged in from the living room after he tied us up. He was a big man, wearing a nice open-neck blue shirt and work pants. He was a little overweight so his face was not as handsome as it might have been but he was still a nice-looking man. I couldn’t tell how life had bent and shaped him into a criminal. It did not seem to fit with his appearance. I read quite a bit and at one time I made a specialty of murder mysteries so I know how to search the face of criminals to see if there is a clue to their motivations.
“You certainly don’t look like a criminal,” I said at last. “Also, I can see no point in us sitting here all day. What is the point of this?”
“I’m waiting to make a phone call,” he said. “I have to wait for her husband to get back to his office so I can sell her back.” He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. No one said a word but in a minute Miss Crystal gave a little cough. I had never seen her that quiet for that long. I supposed she was terrified he’d still be here when King and Crystal Anne came home. This gun he had in his hand was a very terrible-looking weapon but somehow it seemed to me he would never really shoot it. Even when he had it pointed at my head I did not think he would pull the trigger. I guess I was having a denial. That’s what Miss Horowitz said later when she heard the story. She said Miss Crystal was being samurai and I was having a denial. But later I also became a samurai when I had the brainstorm to fake a heart attack. She said the reason we were saved is that Miss Crystal and I are so used to working together and have honed the skills of cooperation so well that we knew how to read each other’s minds when we had to. She said it is very interesting to understand the diametrics of a situation like that. She said what it looks like on the surface is very often not what is really going on. What it looked like that Tuesday was that everyone was scared to death. Miss Bitsy was breathing in little gulps, in, in, in, out, out, out. (She had not been doing any yoga.) Mrs. Romaine, the kidnapee, had begun to cry.
“Why me?” she kept asking. “Why did you pick out me?”
“Because your husband stole my racehorse,” he said. “Because your husband owns the track and he owes me for ten years of my life if he wants to see you again. A hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“I didn’t do it,” she said. “I didn’t take anything from you.” At that she began to cry louder than ever. Sobbing until I thought she might choke. She was tied up hand and foot onto a chair with a handmade petit-point seat cover of the coat of arms of the Manning family. She was too old to be tied up like that. I decided no matter how nice looking he was this robber must be the meanest man alive, perhaps a psychopath.
“Let me get her something to eat,” I suggested. “She might get sick and have a heart attack. You might have a murder on your hands.”
“Okay,” he said. “Get some food ready. Make some sandwiches.” He untied my feet and hands and I went into the kitchen and made five lovely little sliced turkey sandwiches with lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise and added some potato chips and brought it back on a tray. I set a place at the table for Mrs. Romaine and turned her around and untied her hands. So she could eat. I was thinking of things to poison him with. I thought of ways to grab the phone and dial nine for emergencies. I thought of how long until King would be coming home and how Crystal Anne would be waiting at her school with no one to pick her up. I thought of the time the bookcases in the den fell on me and Miss Crystal held them off with superhuman strength while I escaped. It might be possible to make them fall on him if we could get him in there. I thought of every weapon within my reach as I made another round of sandwiches. I thought of the dogs in the back yard. Three English sheepdogs that weighed more than a hundred pounds apiece. They were right out there in the back yard. How to get them in?
“Come on back in here,” he said. “Stop fooling around.” So I brought in the second tray of sandwiches and the iced tea and passed them around and then got back into my chair.
It was a quarter to three. The robber got up and made a phone call from the kitchen phone. Then he came back in. “I think I’ll take that pocketbook you offered,” he said. “Where did you say it was?” I looked at Miss Crystal. She was so quiet. She was breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.
“It’s in my bedroom on the dresser,” she answered. “Look, could I go to the bathroom? I need to urinate. Also, my children will be coming home. If you let me make a call I can keep them from coming here. I don’t know how long you plan to stay, but surely you don’t want my children coming over with their friends. You can’t hold a dozen people at gunpoint, can you? What is wrong with you anyway? Why don’t you let us help you? You don’t look like you’re insane.”
“All right,” he said. “You can go to the bathroom. I’ll go with you and we’ll get that purse. I’ll need your car.” He tied me back to a chair and undid Miss Crystal.
He and Miss Crystal went back toward the bedroom. Miss Bitsy and Mrs. Romaine and I were still tied to dining room chairs. Miss Bitsy was where he had put her to begin with, beside the sideboard. Mrs. Romaine was facing the dining table. Her feet were tied but her hands were free. He had forgotten to tie her hands back together. I was beside the rubber plant near the French doors that open onto Story Street. Behind the doors is a small balcony with a row of red geranium plants. It was almost three o’clock. Children would be coming home from school. If I could break through the French doors I could get the attention of schoolchildren and call for help. Of course the sidewalk is quite a way from the house. I didn’t know what to do. I was thinking as hard as I could. Here is how a samurai decides what to do. One, he sees the situation as a whole. Two, he gauges his own strength. Three, he figures out the strength of his enemy. Then he fits it all together in his mind like a puzzle and finds the part that no one else can see. He must find the place where his strength fits into a hole in his enemy. Cutting my arms to pieces on the French doors did not seem to be a good enough plan. I thought harder. Who was this armed robber? What was he afraid of?
Miss Crystal came back in, carrying her pocketbook. She looked at me. I looked right back. I sent stuff to her chakras and she sent stuff to mine. “My heart,” I screamed. “Oh, no, not my heart again.” I pulled my chair forward with the weight of my body. I fell upon the floor taking my chair with me. “My pills,” I gasped. “Miss Crystal, get my pills.”
Mrs. Allison Romaine thought it was for real. She let out a scream. Then she picked up her sandwich plate and threw it at the robber. Miss Bitsy screamed too. “Heart attack,” she screamed. “Call an ambulance. Get the pills for her. Untie me. I know CPR.”
“Pills,” I gasped. “Got to have my pills.”
“I’ll get them, Traceleen,” Miss Crystal yelled. She ran from the room. The armed robber fell on his knees beside my chair to look at me. Just then the front door opened and King came in with his friend, Matthew Levine, beside him.
The dogs came bounding up the stairs. Tiger and Stoner and Boots. They ran into the room and started licking everyone in sight. Old English sheepdogs are the worst-smelling dogs you can ever imagine having. They are the last dogs in the world you want to let into your house and so kind they would never hurt a flea but the robber did not know that. I guess his guilt was so bad over kidnapping a woman old enough to be his grandmother that he thought the dogs had been sent from hell. He was screaming now. The harder he screamed the more the dogs licked and jumped on him. They sensed his fear and stopped being gentle.
Meanwhile, as soon as she opened the basement door for the dogs, Miss Crystal had climbed the fence and run into Mrs. Diaz’s house to use the phone and call the police. They were not the first law enforcement to reach the scene, however. Our neighborhood guard came tearing in and disarmed the robber before the police drove up in three cars with their sirens running.
Mrs. Romaine was returned to her husband, who is a nice man who has never cheated anyone and ended up giving fifteen thousand dollars to the Celebrity Chef March of Dimes Fund. It put Celebrity Chef over the top and made them the most profitable charity event of the year. Miss Bitsy has been interviewed by three different publications concerning her role in the affair, including the Tulane Alumni Newsletter. They used a full-length photo of her wearing a white and green knit tennis outfit with a matching sweater. We are hoping it will help her catch a husband. She is so good at tennis it scares men off.
Miss Crystal and I have gone back to yoga. We are doing it for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday morning. No matter how busy we get we are in the living room with the phone off the hook two mornings a week doing our yoga postures. Both of us have many people depending on us. We must be strong enough to face the challenges. The strength to live your life and help other people begins in your own body. You must strive to make your body a strong thing that never forgets its place in the universe. Breathe in, breathe out. This is what Miss Horowitz is teaching us as we do the plough and the headstand. We must be ready, she keeps saying. It is every person’s duty to be prepared. Breathe in, breathe out. Just because we have faced one challenge doesn’t mean there won’t be another.