by Theresa Alan
“I was just practicing my moves. I was thinking of trying out. I think there is no better way that one can serve her school than to put on low-cut sequined uniforms and do high kicks.”
“Really, when you think about it, you’re not just doing a service to the school, but the whole community really.”
And off we went. Before the end of the night, he asked me if I wanted to go to the school’s battle of the bands contest with him the next weekend, and I said yes and gave him my number. He called the next day and from that moment on we were inseparable—either attached through sound waves via telephone cords or together—for most of the next year. I said to my mom and Jen on every possible occasion, “my boyfriend” or some version of “I have to get ready for a date. Oh, did you hear, I have a date. Me.”
When we got to the part of the relationship when we were ready to have sex (he was ready eleven seconds after meeting me; it took me about a month), I spent the first several months wearing as many clothes during sex as humanly possible and insisting that the room was bump-into-walls dark. No matter how much he insisted I was beautiful, I just couldn’t buy it. What’s funny is that I wasn’t even that heavy then. Maybe ten pounds over my ideal weight. Eventually, however, hating myself so acutely simply became too exhausting, and I eased up on myself until it was more of a low-grade self-disgust that I had toward my appearance.
By the time I got to college, I’d at least gotten over the fear that a guy would run screaming from the sight of my naked body, thanks in part (inadvertently) to Alex (not because he made me feel good about my looks, but because he helped remind me that I was a smart, funny woman who had a lot more going for her than just having a body made for Baywatch). Plus, I finally figured out that it would take a lot more than a few extra pounds and a little jiggle to stop a guy from getting laid.
Enter Ryan. It was the middle of my junior year in college, and I was at a bar with Jen and some of my friends and some of her friends. We’d all gotten in thanks to the fake IDs created by a friend of a friend of Jen’s.
When the waitress came to our table and told me that the guy at the end of the bar wanted to buy me a drink, I promptly said, “Wait, are you sure he wants to buy me a drink?”
“Yep, he said the pretty red-haired girl in the green shirt.” (Jen, the only other redhead at the table, had been wearing black.)
I accepted another beer and turned to look at him, fully expecting someone who looked like he’d be cast in the part of Über Nerd in the teen movie of the week, and instead saw Ryan, who was actually really cute. He had a little bit of a potbelly, but he didn’t carry himself like someone who was sorry for being imperfect. He looked like someone who ate, drank, and had sex with gusto, and couldn’t always be bothered with something as confining as self-control, something I found strangely sexy.
We waved to each other, and later, he pulled up a chair to our table to talk to me, me—amidst a table of gorgeous women.
Like the night I’d met Alex, I was unusually outgoing and feeling atypically good about myself on the night Ryan came into my life—thanks to the thrill of being bought my first drink by a man I didn’t know plus the drinks themselves, which had bolstered me with a liquid confidence. We laughed a lot that night and had a great time.
Ryan had never finished college and was in a rock band, although he made most of his money by teaching guitar. Though our interests were about as different as could be—mine were academic and future-thinking, his were street-smart and about living life in the moment—we ended up dating for two years, and sleeping together on and off for another year after that. Our relationship had many faults, but we always laughed and the sex was always good. It helped that he was a little overweight himself. I realized that I loved him despite his imperfections, and it helped me grasp that maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to believe someone could love me even if I wasn’t perfect.
People, that is, other than my mother.
Mom had never been more proud of me than when I’d gotten engaged. She’d beamed for weeks after we announced the engagement. She’d taken an interest in the wedding that she’d never shown in anything else I’d ever done.
Before the engagement, Mom and I talked to each other on the phone every other week. Now that I had a wedding to plan, Mom sometimes called a few times a day. She would mail ads for dresses she thought would look good on me, all of which I found virulently repugnant, and she constantly offered advice, little of which I wanted. Mom and Dad had eloped because they’d been young and too poor to afford a wedding, so this was Mom’s first wedding. She’d been storing up visions of an elaborate reception since she’d eloped twenty-eight years earlier, and she was spewing all of her ideas my way.
Since Greg had proposed, Mom’s crusade to get me to lose weight had spiraled out of control, though she feigned subtlety. If she saw me eating something, anything, with too much enjoyment, sometimes she’d say, “ Think of the wedding pictures” or “Think of the bridal gown.” More often, she would watch me eat and give me a look like I was a drug-addled prostitute who murdered small animals for sport. She did not hide her disappointment in my appearance well.
I was determined to find a wedding dress before she came out for Christmas—I did not want to go shopping for a dress with my mother. It was bad enough going shopping with Jen. Jen thought shopping for a wedding dress was a blast. If there were an award for the capitalist of the year, Jen would have been a serious contender. She’d at least get an honorable mention. She loved shopping as much as I hated it. It was simply not a good way for a fat, poor person to spend her day. You’d think as the bride I could get excited, but frankly I found planning all the petty details that went into hosting the most expensive party of my life rather dull.
I was late for my appointment because of little Ms. Capitalist who was hungover from partying the night before. I might’ve been jealous—it had been forever since I’d gone out and had fun—except she didn’t look as though she’d had a particularly good time. Her hangover made me feel both righteous and dull.
Three other women had appointments at the boutique at the same time I did. Five “bridal consultants” flitted around giving advice and agreeing with everything we brides-to-be said. The women trying on dresses were positively emaciated. One of the brides-to-be was a size two. She looked damn good in everything she tried on. Wedding dresses are made for the clinically anorexic. Even the other women, who were size eightish, looked bloated in the white silk sample gowns, which, though they were allegedly all size ten, nobody could zip up. I didn’t even try. White’s a horribly unflattering color. Why hadn’t someone had the forethought to make the traditional bridal gown a slimming shade of black or some color that wouldn’t make women’s skin look so sallow?
I stood in front of a mirror on a platform the size of a car tire because the dress was way too long for a shrimpo like me. I sensed that all the skinny bitches were saying, What loser would marry that lard-ass blubber butt? Perhaps they weren’t using those exact words, but that was the gist of it.
“Ooh, this one looks great on you,” Jen said, the lying bitch. “I’m so jealous. I wish I was getting married. I want to have at least one kid before I’m thirty.”
“Yeah,” I said, grimacing at my reflection.
Why wasn’t I more excited about this? Maybe because marriage and bridal registries were supposed to come after I had broken the hearts of a string of exotic lovers around the world. The plan had been that I would spend my twenties in a high-paying, fulfilling career. After spending years accumulating adventures, I would settle down maybe in my late thirties, to having just one live-in lover.
The reality was that I was too terrified of getting herpes to sleep around, and as for travel and excitement, I hadn’t even made it out of the States. One spring break spent in Florida and a couple of weekend trips to Chicago were as far as I’d gotten.
My plans for an exciting life dwindled quickly after college, when suddenly my friends began getting married o
ne after the other. Some of my friends had bought houses; some were already having babies. Things were getting out of control, and despite myself I’d been knocked over by the nuptial domino.
The average age American women got married was twenty-five. I was twenty-seven. I had seen the men women over thirty had the opportunity to date, and it wasn’t pretty. If I didn’t get married soon, I would probably never get married. It’s better to be a divorcée than a spinster. Divorcées might be failures, but at least people knew somebody had loved them at one time. Eventually I’d meet somebody who would give me herpes and cheat on me and beat me up and then stalk me when I broke up with him.
I hadn’t been looking for a husband, but when Greg came along, I knew we’d get married. I just had this quiet feeling; our relationship felt so right. Is that the feeling that people who marry their high school sweethearts have? It must be. But I don’t think I could have appreciated how right things felt with Greg if I hadn’t had the close-but-not-quite experiences with Alex and Ryan. Alex was fun and sexy. As I realized later, well after we’d broken up and I’d gained some perspective, he wasn’t a particularly nice person. And Ryan had never really been my intellectual equal, not like Greg.
I don’t believe that we each have only one soul mate, but I do think finding someone who is as attracted to you as you are to him, who you can laugh with and still have something to talk about years down the road, is as rare as a four-leaf clover, and if you manage to find him, you should count yourself very lucky. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments when I’d like to push Greg down a long flight of cement stairs. Happily, these moments are infrequent, and most of the time I consider myself fortunate indeed.
Plus, after seeing Jen and my girlfriends date one self-absorbed loser after another, I really appreciated how good Greg was to me. He was so sweet. He wasn’t into football or porn or getting wasted with his buddies. He didn’t spend all his money on beer and electronic equipment. I wasn’t about to let such a good guy get away.
Why hadn’t we had the forethought to elope?
Why were wedding dresses made to make our asses look like the hindquarters of a wildebeest?
AVERY
Romance and Other Marketing Ploys
I did not want to get out of bed Saturday morning. Something about going to the bar made my mood sour. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that nursing two margaritas throughout the evening had left me sober enough to notice the desperation that filled the air like humidity, heavy and thick. I’d been sober enough to watch Les watch Jen, sober enough to calculate the chasm of difference between thirty (my age) and twenty-five (Jen’s age).
Eventually, however, my rumbling stomach managed to motivate me to get out of bed.
I sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of yogurt and fruit and flipped through the newspaper. As usual, I started with the horoscopes, then the comics, then the celebrity gossip. Eventually I’d glimpse at the serious news, doing my best to avoid reading anything depressing. If a headline talked about rape, murder, war, or robbery, I didn’t read it. I used to read everything, and I’d end up crying in my cereal bowl and be sad all day. I flipped the page and froze when I saw Gideon smiling up at me from an ad for men’s cologne. He looked gorgeous as always. His long dark hair, his dark eyes courtesy of a Cherokee grandmother. He was thin, but his muscles were well defined. It was easy to see why I’d been so proud to be seen with him, why I’d wanted to brag to everyone, “Look! This gorgeous guy actually wants me to be his wife!”
I quickly shut the paper and pulled a stack of e-mails from Art I’d printed off at work from my bag.
As soon as I began reading them, my mood lightened. I’d been a lot happier since I’d begun writing Art. It gave me hope that someone decent was out there. All weekend, I actually looked forward to going into work Monday so I could hear from him again.
It was hard for me not to look around my apartment and envision smiling pictures of me and my future boyfriend, Art or whoever he was, taken from a variety of interesting vacation spots. If things worked out between Art and me, we’d go camping in the mountains, vacation in Hawaii, go to museums in Italy and France. He’d tell me little-known facts about the artists and their work. As an artist, he’d be able to point out things that I might not see on my own. We’d make a cute couple. I had no proof, but I felt fairly certain he was quietly good-looking, with a friendly smile and beautiful eyes.
By noon I officially began feeling guilty for squandering my day and I put on a T-shirt and shorts, threw my exercise mat on the floor, and started with some stretches. I used to do yoga every day, but now I was down to two or three times a week.
After warming up I went into the downward dog position, feeling my muscles lengthen. I breathed slowly, letting my tension drain away. I stretched further, as far as I could go. I loved that moment when my mind stopped fretting over quotidian details and all I could think about was how good my body felt.
When I used to perform, there was always that moment before the music started and the spotlights went on that I was sure I wouldn’t remember what the first step was and I’d be standing there, motionless, like an idiot. I would stand/sit/lie there in whatever strange pose, straining to remember the first step, and until the music started, I couldn’t have told you if you held a gun to my head what the first move was. My mind was that blank. But then the music would start, and the lights would come on, and my body always knew the right step, and I would get to this place where my body and mind were working together in a way they never did in any other area of my life. Throughout the performance, it seemed as if my body were acting on its own accord, as if the steps were programmed into my limbs. It wasn’t until the music stopped that I would realize just how intensely I’d been concentrating. Even though I worked hard and long at the office, nothing I did there challenged me like performing once had.
After an hour or so of yoga, I went for a jog. I came home and showered and changed, then I called Rette. “What’cha up to?” I asked.
“I just spent several hours inducing clinical depression by trying on wedding dresses. Now I’m not cleaning, not working out, not going to the library to search for jobs on the Internet, and I’m certainly not doing a damn thing about the wedding. I was thinking about how I should be doing these things, however. Does that count as being productive?”
“You are strategizing, really.”
“Oooh, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing, strategizing. How about you?”
“I went jogging and decided that was accomplishment enough for the day. I was just about to read a romance novel. I have to read about someone else’s love life since mine is a desolate wasteland.”
“Oh, please. You have the mysterious Art. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the excitement of first falling in love.”
“Excitement? Torture is more like it. I want to skip right to the part where you are comfortable walking around naked in front of him because you know he’ll love you even though gravity is doing horrible things to your body.”
“When do I get to that part of the relationship? I don’t walk around naked even when I’m all alone. My thighs would chafe and the skin on the back of my arm would flap like a bird preparing for liftoff.”
“Very funny. You’re beautiful, Rette. I know it and Greg knows it. You’re the only holdout.”
“It’s true I was lucky to score a guy who doesn’t mind fat women.”
“You’re not fat.”
“Whatever. This stupid wedding is going to kill me. Why didn’t we elope? All the saleswomen at the bridal shop were fawning over us, telling us all these lies about how we looked like fairy princesses. I look more like Cinderella’s fairy godmother.”
We talked for several more minutes. Rette kept cracking me up with tales of her bridal woes.
I ordered Chinese takeout for dinner and ran a bubble bath. I read my novel for a while, laid it on the edge of the tub, and called my mother on my cordless phone to ask about her blind dat
e. She’d signed up with a dating agency a month or so earlier, and this week she was supposed to have gone on her third arranged date.
I hadn’t told her about Art. Even though I thought it was great that she’d gone to a dating agency, I was embarrassed I couldn’t find a guy the traditional way. She was older; it made sense for her to go through a dating service. But I was young enough that I should have been able to find a guy in a more romantic milieu. The women on Sex and the City were in their mid-thirties to early forties, and they scored dozens of dates every week.
“So how was the date?”
“Oh honey, it was . . . not good. He didn’t seem like a healthy man. His aura was a very murky green.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. If this doesn’t work out, I have three more dates left. And I’ve been thinking about teaching a gardening class at the free university. It might help the business, and who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone.”
“How are things going at the shop?”
“It’s a little slow; it always is this time of year. We’re just getting our poinsettias stocked up.” Mom owned a flower shop. She’d started the business using some of the insurance money she got after Dad died. Gardening had always been her biggest passion. Her yard could rival any small botanic garden.
