Life in the Fat Lane

by Cherie Bennett

I couldn’t possibly explain about the difference between love and being in love. About how it is when two people find each other, and everything fits—your minds, your dreams, your bodies. And you want each other so much there’s this fire, and it’s always there, always. Until, for one person, the flame dims, and one day it goes out completely—you don’t even know exactly when it happened—and then it’s gone, and you can’t pretend it isn’t, and you can’t ever get it back again.

  No, I couldn’t possibly explain that.

  I smiled at my little brother. “You’re going to be a lot cooler than Jett one day,” I told him.

  “I know one thing for sure,” Scott said, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

  “What?”

  “I’ll definitely be a lot cooler than Dad.”

  Zillions of girls binge and purge, or swallow hundreds of laxatives, or starve themselves so much that they turn into walking skeletons. Because everyone knows that anything is better than being fat. Anything.

  I vowed to become one of those girls.

  Because there was no way on God’s green earth that I was moving to Blooming Woods, Michigan, weighing 218 pounds. Axell-Crowne or no Axell-Crowne.

  Three weeks before the move date, the final edict came down from my parents. They had thought it over and they had decided that I had to go to Michigan with them. Dad came home so that he and Mom could present the little charade of bonding over “my problem.”

  They sat on the couch together and told me I couldn’t live with Molly’s family for senior year. We were a family, and family stayed together—that was the whole point of the move, they said. I would have to face the world eventually at my new “size,” they said. Besides, maybe the Axell-Crowne specialist at the University of Michigan’s hospital would be able to help me, they said. And anyway, they would be behind me a thousand percent, they said.

  What a joke. Almost as big a joke as their marriage.

  Well, that was their problem. Fat was mine.

  I went to the drugstore and bought a dozen packages of laxatives. That day I ate one small apple and a fat-free yogurt. At dinner I took two mouthfuls of broiled sole, and one of green beans. Both my parents looked at me approvingly. Then I told them I had a little stomachache, and went upstairs to bed.

  That was where I swallowed three packages of laxatives. I wasn’t sure it was enough. So I chewed another whole package, just to be sure, and lay down on my bed.

  It wasn’t long before the stomach cramps started. Good. I wanted to feel sick from food, to be empty. I ran into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. My insides were coiled in a knot. I was doubled over, but I didn’t care. Everything was coming out of me.

  I spent most of the night in there. Even when I finally fell asleep at around two, totally exhausted, the cramps woke me up again, and I stumbled back to the bathroom, again and again, until finally there was nothing left inside me. It wasn’t until sunrise that I finally fell asleep.

  I felt so sick the whole next day. The cramps wouldn’t stop. I didn’t care. Molly called and I told her I wasn’t feeling well. I spent the day in bed. Dad was supposedly out of town again—who knew where he really was? Between Mom selling her party business and packing up to move, she wasn’t paying much attention to me. So no one noticed that all I had that day was some tomato juice and a banana.

  That night I took more laxatives.

  And spent another night on the toilet. Only the cramps were worse this time, but it didn’t matter. It felt good to have the pain in my body be as bad as the pain in my heart.

  Then a third day of hardly eating, of ingesting practically nothing but water, a third night of laxatives. I sat doubled over on the toilet, moaning and crying from the pain. All that was left inside me was a fetid liquid that burned as I voided it into the toilet. Every time I tried to make it back to bed the cramps hit me again, so finally I fell asleep sitting on the toilet, my head leaning against the sink. When I woke up in the morning, I was lying on the cold bathroom tile floor, shivering in my own liquid feces. With my sick body weak and vibrating, I cleaned my bathroom and then got into the shower and cleaned myself.

  I could barely make it down to the gym to weigh in. Spots danced in front of my eyes. I was short of breath. But if it made me lose weight, I didn’t care.

  I got on the scale.

  It read 218 pounds.

  I hadn’t lost an ounce.

  My body sagged against the wall of the gym and I slid down until I hit the floor. I didn’t have the strength to hold myself up. I just sat there, heartsick. Dr. Laverly had warned me that purging by barfing or by laxatives would only make me ill. I hated her for being right.

  As I sat there, too worn out to move, I dimly heard the front doorbell. The next thing I knew, Jennie Smith was standing in the doorway of the gym.

  “Lara? Are you okay?” she asked, rushing over to me on her skinny legs, clad in faded jeans.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked bluntly.

  “I heard you were moving and I wanted to say good-bye. Your mom let me in,” Jennie said. She knelt down next to me. “Are you okay?”

  “I have the flu,” I said. “It’s very contagious.”

  She stood up quickly and took a step away from me. “Well, I hope you feel better soon.”

  I didn’t bother to reply. She could care less. And I could care less about her. I had no idea what the real reason was for her showing up at my house.

  “How soon are you moving?” she asked.

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “Well, you should come to Bongo Java with us some night before you leave and say good-bye.” Bongo Java was the coffeehouse in town where everyone hung out.

  “What for?” I asked her wearily.

  “Well, because we’re all going to miss you,” Jennie said as if she really meant it. “Just last night I saw Jett there and he said—”

  “You saw Jett?” popped out of my mouth. I hadn’t seen him since the night I had broken up with him. But I thought about him all the time. There was a hole in my heart where he used to be.

  “Uh-huh,” Jennie said, leaning against the handles of the treadmill. “He was there with that girl who sings lead for the Sex Puppets. Remember? From homecoming?”

  Now I knew why she had come over. She wanted me to know that Jett was with another girl. Even if she hadn’t gotten him, she wanted me to know that I didn’t have him anymore, either.

  Cramps hit me like a swift punch in the gut. I stumbled to my feet, toward the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry you’re so sick!” Jennie called. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  Somehow I found the strength to turn around and face her. “Yeah, there is,” I said. “You’re a bitch, Jennie. And you can go to hell.”

  Then I ran into the bathroom and got sick all over again, from both ends at once.

  Dear Jett,

  Last week Jennie Smith came over and told me she saw you at Bongo Java. And yesterday Molly told me she saw you at the Phish concert, and you told her you’re leaving for New York next week.

  I can’t believe you haven’t called me. I can’t believe you don’t even want to say good-bye. I can’t believe that I’ll never be in your arms again, or feel the beating of your heart against mine.

  Please, just tell me what love is. I mean, I really, really want to know. You said you would love me forever. I guess you meant you’d love me forever unless I got fat. I guess you forgot about that part. If only I could

  I stopped writing. Then I balled the letter up and threw it into the trash. What was the point? What was the point of anything? Of living?

  Two weeks later, we moved.

  My mother and father acted like they were some perky TV sitcom parents from the sixties. No one ever talked about why Dad had been gone for so long. Mom and Dad pretended they were madly in love and the whole family was starting out on a wonderful new adventure.

  The hardest thing had been saying good-bye to Molly. That last night, we stay
ed up talking till dawn. In the morning, when the taxi came to take us to the airport. Molly and I hugged one last time and swore we’d be best friends forever. She stood in our driveway, and I watched her face get smaller and smaller as I left the last remnants of my real life behind forever.

  We talked by phone every single night. It was the only thing that kept me going. But it wasn’t the same as being with her.

  At our new house in Blooming Woods we didn’t have a home gym, but my parents put the treadmill and scale up in my bedroom. I counted calories by day and ran by night. It wasn’t like I had anywhere to go or anything to do. It wasn’t like I wanted to make friends.

  I must have been the fittest 218-pound girl in Michigan. But my weight stayed the same.

  Dr. Goldner, the Axell-Crowne expert at the University of Michigan, thought it was great that I wasn’t gaining anymore. He gave me his own food and exercise plan, said I should come back and see him in two weeks, then patted me on the head like a good little girl.

  The night before the first day at Blooming Woods High School, I called Molly. “It’s me,” I said into the phone. It was late, past midnight. My room was illuminated only by the moonlight coming through the window. There were no beauty queen trophies on the dresser—I had packed them all away when we moved. In my top drawer, where I wouldn’t have to look at it, was the photo of me and Jett at homecoming.

  “Tomorrow’s the big day, huh?” Molly asked.

  “Big is right. Day one as the fattest girl in the senior class of Blooming Woods High.”

  I hadn’t planned to go to public high school. My parents had felt guilty enough about forcing me to move that they had suggested I go to private school. I’d agreed. So I had started at Cranmoore, the best private school in the area, a week earlier.

  My senior class was very small and very rich, and I was the only girl who wore over a size ten. I had spent the entire week walking through the carpeted halls without one person saying so much as hello. The cool girls had looked at me as if I smelled bad. One had actually come up to me and said, “Don’t you have any self-respect?” I was too mortified to reply.

  I decided to transfer to the public high school—anything would be better than Cranmoore. Besides, Blooming Woods High was so big that maybe I could just lose myself in the crowd.

  “Hey, cheer up,” Molly said. “Maybe someone else will be even fatter than you are.”

  I had to laugh. “You are really demented.”

  “Thank you. We start back tomorrow, too.”

  Back to Forest Hills High, where everyone knew the real me. I felt a lump in my throat. “I wish I was there.”

  “I wish you were, too.”

  I wrapped the phone cord around my finger. “What if Blooming Woods is as bad as Cranmoore? What if it’s worse?”

  “Maybe if you tell everyone you have Axell-Crowne—”

  “No one has heard of it; they wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “And even if they did, no one would care.”

  “Look, you’re a terrific person, Lara. Once people get to know you, they’ll like you.”

  “It’s so funny,” I said bitterly. “It used to be that people liked me before they knew me, because of how I looked. And now people dislike me before they know me, because of how I look.”

  Molly didn’t disagree. I could hear the last crickets outside my open window. The night air was chilly. Outside, things were dying.

  “I bet it’s not that hard to kill yourself,” I said, “With pills.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “It would probably just feel like going to sleep.”

  “Lar, you’re scaring me. Lar?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t really do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Call me tomorrow and tell me everything, okay?”

  “Okay.” I hung up. Then I rolled off my bed and gazed at myself in the mirror on my dresser, searching for any remnants of the girl I had been. I supposed that if you looked closely enough at my face, you could still see that I was in there. Somewhere.

  Such a shame. She has such a pretty face.

  I didn’t have any pills. But it couldn’t be that hard to get them, could it?

  Maybe it really would just feel like going to sleep.

  “Lara, breakfast!” my mother called upstairs to me.

  I ignored her and tore off the black shift I had on. It landed on the pile of clothes on my bed. I had tried on every single outfit I had purchased in my new size, size twenty-four.

  I hated everything.

  I looked awful in everything.

  Desperate, I reached for the jeans, white T-shirt, and navy blue vest that had been the first outfit I’d tried. I studied my reflection. Did the vest help hide my huge stomach? I turned back and forth, nervously surveying all angels. Some outfits hid my fat better than others. I obsessed all the time about the magic combination that would make me look somewhat thinner.

  It was no use. I looked fat. Enormous. Grotesque.

  “Hey, breakfast,” Scott announced from the doorway of my new room.

  I turned to him. He had on his baggiest jeans and a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt.

  “That’s what you’re wearing?” I asked him.

  It would be Scott’s first day of ninth grade, which meant high school. For the first time since grade school, we’d be at the same school.

  “Yeah, why?” he asked, looking down at himself.

  “What if kids don’t dress like that here?”

  “Like I care,” Scott said. He went downstairs.

  I took one last look at myself, decided it was hopeless, and then went down to breakfast. Mom smiled at me. Our new breakfast room had cheery pink-and-white-striped wallpaper.

  “Well, Lara, don’t you look lovely,” Mom said as she put a glass of orange juice in front of me.

  “Please,” I said, taking a seat.

  I stared at the juice. My stomach was a mass of coiled fear. I knew I couldn’t possibly squeeze one drop of that juice down my throat.

  “Morning, all,” Dad called, coming into the kitchen. He dutifully kissed Mom first, then me, then Scott. I figured this was one of those things the therapist Mom and Dad had gone to far a few sessions had told him to do. They didn’t go anymore—they claimed everything was fine now and they didn’t need to pay someone to solve the problems they had already solved.

  “So, today’s the big day. Pretty exciting, huh?” Dad asked cheerfully, taking a sip of his coffee.

  Scott and I both gave him withering looks.

  “Hey, that’s not the winning attitude of the Ardeche team!” Dad said. “We never say die, right?”

  “You must be on drugs,” Scott mumbled, and got up from the table, carrying his English muffin with him.

  “I guess we’ll go,” I said. “I don’t want to be late the first day.”

  “Have a great time, you two,” Mom said, kissing us both.

  “And remember,” Dad added, “it’s all in your attitude.”

  “All right, class, settle down, settle down,” the teacher, Mrs. Benson, called. She had written her name on the chalkboard. She was middle-aged, frumpy, with graying dark hair. Her glasses hung from a chain around her neck.

  Frankly, I was relieved to have found her at all. The school was huge, and I had gotten lost trying to find my homeroom. In one corridor a boy had puffed his cheeks full of air and waddled behind me. I had pretended I didn’t see him.

  Once I had finally found my homeroom, I’d slid into one of the few remaining empty seats—actually, a combination chair and desk—and my stomach pushed into the desk part. I sat slightly sideways so that I could breathe.

  Everyone seemed to know everyone. They greeted each other with shrieks, laughter, hugs, kisses. Of course, I didn’t know anyone. I could feel people looking at me.

  “This is, as you know, your homeroom, and I am, as you can see, Mrs. Benson,” the teacher said, her tone no-n
onsense. She sat on the edge of her desk. “We have some paperwork to get out of the way. When I call your name, please respond.”

  She perched her glasses on her nose and referred to a long green form. “For some reason I’ve only got last names and first initials,” she said, shaking her head. “Must be some genius in data processing. Okay, people, obviously I know most of you, but please call out your full first name so I can write it into my records. Okay, here we go. M. Abbott?”

  “Here,” a girl in the back called. “It’s Melanie.”

  Mrs. Benson mumbled, “M. Abbott, Melanie,” and wrote it in. “D. Ackerly?”

  “Yeah, here,” a boy in the seat behind me said. I had noticed him—very cute, blond hair, intense blue eyes. In the past, when I was still my real self, a guy who looked like that would have flirted with me, would have given me that special look that I now knew was reserved for pretty, thin girls. Now he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist at all.

  “And we all know it’s Dave,” Mrs. Benson said dryly.

  I snuck a peek behind me. He grinned.

  “L. Ardeche?”

  “Here,” I said. My voice sounded small and quavery. I cleared it self-consciously. “It’s Lara. L-A-R-A.”

  “L. Ardeche,” Mrs. Benson mumbled, and before she could write in Lara on her form, it was clear that her pen had stopped working. She scribbled for a second. Nothing.

  “Okay, hold on,” she told us, and went behind her desk to rummage through her drawer for a new pen.

  “L. Ardeche? That’s you?” the cute guy behind me, Dave Ackerly, asked eagerly.

  So he had noticed me! I turned around, and he smiled at me again. Was it possible that I looked sort of cute in my new outfit? Maybe it really did flatter me. I nodded and smiled back.

  “L. Ardeche—Lardash—Lard-ass!” he crowed triumphantly, leaning his chair back on two legs. “Great name for you, babe: Lard-ass!” He put his hands together like a megaphone. “Lard-ass!” he boomed.

  “Mainstream,” someone sang out in a deep voice from the back of the room.

  “That’s enough, people,” Mrs. Benson called, still rummaging through her desk.

  A bunch of people laughed.