I dropped the plastic plate and ran out the door, practically colliding with two young guys wearing matching Nine Inch Nails T-shirts. “Thar she blows!” one of them yelled after me, and the two of them cracked up.
I sat in my car, shaking, wanting to die. I put my head down on the steering wheel and sobbed.
“Excuse me, ma’am, are you pulling out of that space?”
I looked out my window. In the car next to me were two very cute college-age guys.
“This spot is handicapped parking,” the guy in the passenger seat explained to me. “So if you’re pulling out, we can take your spot.”
“Sure,” I managed, choking back my tears.
“Thanks, ma’am.”
And as I pulled out of the parking space, I realized he had called ma’am. He thought I was old! Because I was fat.
I had become a sexless, ageless, faceless blob.
I wasn’t a pretty girl anymore.
I was the same person inside, the same girl that those two guys would once have flirted with. Only now I was a different girl on the outside, a girl who lived in the land of the fat girls. Teased. Shunned. Pitied. Overlooked.
The only guy who still thought I was beautiful was Jett, whose love I wore like a shield against my exile into fat land.
But without Jett by my side, I was just this disgusting blob. I was nothing. Less than nothing.
I pulled out of Wendy’s parking lot and drove. I wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over my head. I wanted to hide forever, someplace where no one could call me names, laugh at me, pity me.
Lara Ardeche, a voice in my head said to me, you are not a quitter. You can change this. And you don’t need anyone’s help. All you have to do is stop eating. Totally. No matter how hungry you get, or how bad that is, it can’t be as bad as this is.
Yes. That was what I would do. I’d just stop eating.
One of two things would happen.
I would get thin again. Or I would die.
Either way, I would win.
“Lara, you can’t not eat at all,” my mother said, sucking on her cigarette nervously.
“Yes I can.”
It was that evening, and my mother and I were in the kitchen after dinner. Her dinner. I had consumed only water. Dad was out of town. Scott was at a friend’s house.
“You’ll get sick,” she said. “Don’t you think that therapist could help you?”
“I hate her,” I said, “and I don’t need her help. I’ve made a decision. I am not going to eat anything.”
“We’ll go to a different diet doctor—”
“No. I’ve made up my mind.”
She inhaled on her cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. “I can’t let you do that, honey.”
“It’s not up to you,” I snapped. “It’s up to me. You can’t force me to eat.”
“What if we don’t keep any fattening foods in the house anymore?” she asked brightly. “I’m sure Scott would be willing to—”
“Mom, when is the last time you saw me eat anything except diet food?” I interrupted.
“I know you try, Lara, but—”
“I mean it, Mom. When?”
“You don’t eat in front of me,” my mother said, her eyes full of pity. “But Tammie told me she found candy-bar wrappers behind your bed.”
“Our housekeeper’s reporting to you now? You’re spying on me?”
Mom got up and went to the drawer in the kitchen counter. She opened it and pulled out a small package. SKINNY STRIP was the return address. The package was addressed to me.
“This came in the mail last month,” Mom said. “I can’t believe you fell for such a—”
“It isn’t mine,” I protested. “It’s Molly’s! I only agreed to let her send it here because—”
“Lara, this lying has got to stop.”
“I’m not lying!”
My mother rested one palm on her forehead, her elbow on the table. Her eyes peered at me from beneath her shaggy blond bangs. “Honey, I’m just worried about you. You sneak food, you keep gaining. The other day when Jennie Smith stopped over I looked at her and I realized: ‘God, my daughter is twice as big as that girl.’ ”
“Listen to me,” I said, my voice low. “Sometimes I eat candy. Maybe once a week, after I’ve spent days starving—”
“And you lose your self-control, I know.”
I stood up. “You love me, right?”
She stood up, too. “Lara! What a thing to ask!”
“You love me, but you don’t believe me. Okay. I’ll prove it to you. I want you to spend every minute with me for the next five days. I won’t go to school and you won’t do any parties. I’m going to fast. If I lose weight, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do—go see that obnoxious therapist, join Jenny Craig, anything. But if I gain weight or stay the same, you have to believe me: something is wrong with me physically.”
She stubbed her cigarette out. “Lara, we’ve been back and forth to the doctors over and over. It isn’t healthy for you to—”
“Five days,” I said, my voice shaking.
“Your father would—”
“Daddy is out of town. He’ll never know.”
I could feel her wavering. “You’d do it if I was sick,” I said, my voice rising. “Really sick. Dying.… That’s how I feel, Mom. I feel like I’m dying.”
She was silent for a long moment. “Three days,” she finally said. “And you have to eat something.”
“Slim-Shake,” I countered, naming a popular over-the-counter milk shake used for weight loss.
“And vitamins,” Mom added. “You’ll take vitamins.”
“Deal,” I agreed.
We shook on it, her slender, lovely hand in my fat, bloated one.
Deal.
“Anton, you asked Marielle to come on the show with you today because you had something to tell her, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anton, who wore an oversized Dr. Dre sweatshirt and a red bandanna around his hair, turned to his overweight fiancée, a vision in leopard-print polyester. “Baby, you too fat.”
“Don’t even go there, uh-uh,” she warned him, waving her long, blood-red nails at him.
“I gots to, baby. I mean, I still love you an’ like that, but the fat be a real turn-off in the romance department, baby, you know what I’m sayin’? So if you don’t be takin’ the weight off by the wedding, you gonna be waitin’ on the wedding!”
“Oooooo!” the audience exclaimed.
The camera came in on Marielle’s pretty, round face, which burned with embarrassment. Her head shook back and forth on her neck, all bravado. “You the one with the problem, Anton. I can kick you to the curb, it won’t make no difference to me,” she lied, trying not to cry.
She pried her engagement ring off her finger. “If that’s how you feel, Anton, the wedding’s off.” She flung the ring at him. The crowd roared its approval.
Ricki Lake waded into the audience. “Yes, sir,” she said, putting the microphone in a young guy’s face.
“Well, I don’t get it, Marielle,” the guy said. “If you really love your man, lose the weight for him!”
Click. Next channel.
Sally Jessy Raphaël. “Our next guest says she knows what it’s like to be the brunt of every joke at her grade school. She says kids have stuck pictures of pigs in her desk and put dog feces in her lunchbox. Please welcome ten-year-old Emily to our show.”
Click. Next channel.
Richard Simmons, clad in tiny shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, tears in his eyes, rested his hand on the stirrup pants of a thin, middle-aged woman with a bad bleach job.
“Mom, I know you want what’s best for your child, but your daughter can’t lose the weight because you want her to. You can’t ridicule her into getting thin. Name-calling doesn’t work—”
“But I’m just trying to help!” thin Mom said. “I’ve tried everything else, and look at her!”
“B-But if you would just leave
me alone …,” her fat daughter blubbered, “then I could—”
Click. Next channel.
A commercial. A fat, sour-faced middle-aged woman sat with her husband in a restaurant. They had nothing to say to each other. They spread their muffins with a generic margarine spread. The husband’s gaze wandered to another table, where a gorgeous, thin young woman spread cream cheese on her muffin.
“I want … cream cheese,” the husband sighed wistfully.
“Half the calories, half the fat of margarine,” the voice-over said, and the camera panned back to the fat woman, the margarine eater.
“How lame is that commercial?” Jett asked me. “It insults your intelligence!”
I clicked the TV off and dropped the remote control onto the nightstand.
“Dr. Towne, line three, please. Dr. Towne, please pick up line three,” an amplified voice rang in the hospital corridor.
Jett turned to stare out the window. I lay heavily against the raised back of my hospital bed.
Why don’t you ever really kiss me anymore? I wanted to ask him. But I didn’t. I knew the answer.
The fat be a real turn-off in the romance department, baby.
“I can’t wait to get out of here,” I told him.
Jett turned back to me. “Yeah, I can imagine. But the whole thing will have been worth it if they figure out what’s wrong with you.”
It had been three weeks since my deal with Mom, where I had lived on Slim-Shake for three days. She’d kept her part of the bargain and stayed glued to me at all times. She’d even slept in the other twin bed, which we pulled in front of my door at night so I couldn’t leave the room.
At the end of the three days, I got on the scale in front of her.
I had gained two pounds.
She finally believed me.
She called Dr. Laverly and demanded that I be admitted to St. Thomas Hospital for a controlled study, just like the one we had done at home. Dr. Laverly had agreed. But since I wasn’t an urgent case, it would be two weeks before I could be admitted.
While I waited, I stayed home from school. I just stopped going. At first Mom tried to make me go, but I refused. She tried to get me to play the piano, too, but I wouldn’t do that either. I just did nothing. Molly brought me my homework. I only talked to Jett on the phone.
Dad came home between business trips for one night. He sat by my bedside and gave a speech about the positive attitude of a winner. I wouldn’t even look at him.
That night as I lay in bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake, I heard my parents, in their room.
“You’d better be goddamn glad my father will pay the hospital bills she’s about to rack up,” my mother seethed, “because your HMO isn’t going to cover a thing.”
“Daddy to the rescue again, huh?” my father jeered. “Did he make the house payment this month, by the way?”
“He better have,” my mother snapped. “You can’t afford to pay it.”
“You’re a real bitch, Carol.”
“You’re never here. You don’t care. At least my father—”
“Why would I want to be here?” My father cut her off.
My fault. I pulled the covers over my head. And I tried to imagine myself winning Miss America, with my parents in the audience, so proud …
It didn’t work.
He was gone before breakfast the next morning. My mom pretended their fight had never happened.
Now I had been in St. Thomas Hospital for five days, living on some kind of supercharged, very-low-calorie liquid a nutritionist prepared. I drank it every six hours while someone monitored me. They also monitored me while I downed ten glasses of water a day. Twice a day, I got wheeled downstairs to spend thirty monitored minutes on a treadmill. They even monitored me in the bathroom, by measuring everything that came out of my body. I had to tell them every time I wanted to use the bathroom so they could unlock it for me: someone would go in afterward and collect a plastic measuring contraption that hung inside the toilet bowl.
In between all this, they did tests. My blood had been taken so many times I didn’t think I could have very much left.
Today the nurses had weighed me for the first time since I’d been admitted.
I’d gained two more pounds.
They couldn’t believe it. They made me get on and off the scale three times. Then they put me on another scale.
It read the same: 190 pounds.
“Uh-uh!” one oversized black nurse named Shawanda exclaimed, writing the number on my chart. She was one of the nicest nurses in the hospital. “Well, honey, all I have to say is, if I lived on what you’re living on and I gained weight, I would just give up.”
The other nurse gave her a warning look.
“I’m just sayin’, is all,” Shawanda said, shaking her head.
“Dr. Laverly will be in to see you and your parents this afternoon,” the other nurse said.
So, at 190 pounds, I had finally proved that I wasn’t crazy and that I didn’t have an eating disorder. Something really was medically wrong with me.
I thought I would feel vindicated. But instead I felt nothing. Because no one looking at me cared why I was fat. I just was.
Jett came over to the bed and took my hand. “You’re nervous, huh?”
He meant about seeing Dr. Laverly. He knew she’d have my new test results. I nodded.
“You know I’m with you, no matter what, right?”
I nodded again.
He reached over and tipped my head back. I waited for him to kiss my lips. He kissed my cheek. “I gotta run. Call me as soon as you can and tell me what the doctor tells you?”
“Sure.”
He kissed my cheek again. “Hang in there.” And then he was gone.
I reached for the remote and clicked the TV on again.
MTV. A drop-dead-gorgeous girl in a leather bikini was swishing her hair over a long-haired guitar player, who lay on his back and played a long, wailing riff. Now the girl and the musician were standing in front of a window, and the girl was wearing white lingerie and the guy was kissing her beautiful, slender neck—
“Can I come in?”
Patty Asher, of all people, was standing in the doorway of my room.
I turned off the TV. “What are you doing here?”
She didn’t answer me, just came into the room and plopped her massive butt into the chair next to my bed.
“It’s nice of you to visit, Patty,” I said politely, the old Lara kicking in, “but I really didn’t want any—”
“Do you believe in witchcraft?” she interrupted me.
I just looked at her.
“Yeah, sounds loony, right? I always put it right up there with, like, the Psychic Friends Network—so stupid, you know?”
She looked me over. “You’re really fat now,” she noted objectively. “Not just chubby or anything.”
“Look, Patty—”
“Everyone at school is talking about you,” she continued. “Everyone knows you’re here at St. Thomas. Someone said you have cancer. Someone else said you have AIDS.” She rested her intertwined fingers on top of her head.
“I don’t have AIDS,” I said, my voice low.
“Oh, yeah, I knew that was ridiculous,” Patty said. “I mean, look at you. You don’t get fat if you have AIDS. They’re trying to figure out why you got so fat so fast, right?”
“Look, I don’t want to be rude, but would you just please get out of here? I don’t want any visitors. And as you pointed out to me at homecoming, we aren’t friends.”
She got up and looked out the window. “Yeah, homecoming. I’ll bet you had a lot of fun that night, huh? Winning and everything?”
I didn’t answer her.
“I have a confession to make, Lara,” she continued, still looking out the window. “When I went home the night of homecoming, I lay in bed and had these really awful thoughts about you. First, I wished that you’d die. But then I thought of something even better. I thought: No,
I don’t want Lara Ardeche to die. I want her to get really, really fat, so she’ll know just what it’s like.”
She turned back to me. “And now, you are. You’re as fat as I am. Why, you might even be fatter—isn’t that a hoot? So that’s why I was wondering about the witchcraft thing. I mean, maybe I wished so hard that I put a spell on you, and it worked.”
Tears stung my eyes. “I never did anything to you.”
She walked back over to my bed and looked down at me. “Well, see, that’s just the whole point. That’s how you see it. It’s funny, really. I mean, you never said mean things to me, like Blake or Jennie. You thought you were being nice, with your I-feel-sooo-sorry-for-a-fat-blob-like-Fatty-Patty. I guess I’ll take pity on her and try and help her lose weight. You were sooo superior, weren’t you? And I was supposed to be sooo grateful. And for that, I hated you most of all.”
“Get out! Just get the hell out of here!”
“Okay,” Patty said cheerfully. “I want you to know that I don’t think I’m a very nice person or anything for coming over here to enjoy your misery. But you know what? I don’t give a shit.” And then she walked out the door.
I picked up the TV clicker and threw it at her, but I missed. It hit the wall and broke apart, the pieces clattering to the floor.
Sobs tore from my throat. “It isn’t fair,” I hiccuped to myself as tears ran down my face. “It isn’t fair.”
I heard my parents’ voices before I saw them. They were arguing, their voices harsh, escalating as they got closer to my room. Quickly I rubbed the tears off my cheeks and pushed my hair off my face. I couldn’t let them see me like that. It was bad enough that Dad hardly ever made a special effort anymore to come home between his business trips to see me. I didn’t want to make everything even worse.
They came silently into my room. Dad looked tired, Mom looked stressed out. Dad gave me a cold kiss on my cheek. A terrible thought hit me—they knew something I didn’t. That I had some rare horrible kind of tumors that were going to kill me, and that’s why I kept gaining weight.
“If I’m dying, I want you to tell me,” I blurted out.
“What?” Mom asked, taken aback.
“I mean it,” I insisted. “If it’s cancer or something, don’t pretend it’s not.”
Life in the Fat Lane Page 9
