Life in the Fat Lane

by Cherie Bennett

  She looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to share some personal story about similar humiliations I had suffered. So we could bond over our fatness. The rage welled up in me again.

  “Thanks for the lesson,” I said stiffly. “I’ll see you next week.” I turned toward the door.

  “Wait a sec,” she called to me. “Do you like jazz?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Why don’t you come over to Captain Bizarro’s with me? I’m meeting Tristan and a bunch of our friends for lunch, and then we’ll all play something or other.”

  I had absolutely no reason to say yes. I didn’t really like her. On the other hand, I had nowhere to go but home, where Mom was so depressed and stressed out over Dad that all she did was chain-smoke, walk on the StairMaster, and obsess about her upcoming facelift, often simultaneously.

  “What’s Captain Bizarro’s?” I asked.

  Suzanne laughed. “It’s sort of indescribable,” she said. “So I guess you’ll just have to see for yourself.”

  Captain Bizarro’s was kind of rundown looking, on a side street near the campus of Wayne State University, in a neighborhood where you wouldn’t want to be alone at night.

  Inside, the empty room was filled with tables covered with white butcher paper, and the chairs were red vinyl, peeling at the corners. Billie Holiday blared from the jukebox, singing “Strange Fruit.” I recognized it from an album my grandmother played sometimes.

  “Hey, Mamacita!” a tall, skinny, brown-skinned man with a straggly beard called as we entered the restaurant. His skin was leathery; his voice was hoarse. He wore a white apron tied around his waist, faded jeans, and a green army camouflage jacket, and had a red bandanna tied hippie-style around his forehead. He hurried over to Suzanne and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug.

  “Captain, this is a new friend of mine, Lara Ardeche. And this is Captain Bizarro.”

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” the man said, bowing from the waist. “Your beauty does me honor.”

  Was that supposed to be some kind of a joke? I didn’t smile.

  “Lara plays keyboards,” Suzanne said.

  Keyboards. I had never heard it put that way before.

  “Everyone is downstairs already,” Captain Bizarro said. “You’re late!” He wagged a finger at her.

  “My teaching went overtime,” Suzanne explained.

  “You want the usual?”

  “Sure,” Suzanne said.

  “You like raw clams?” she asked me.

  “Raw?” I repeated, aghast.

  “Food of the gods,” Captain Bizarro said, kissing his fingertips. “I also do fried that’ll melt in your mouth.” He kissed Suzanne’s hand and took off toward the kitchen.

  “So, why is he called Captain Bizarro?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said as we walked down the stairs. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  Jazz grew louder as we descended, and we entered a room with a small stage at the rear. At the moment four guys were playing, with Suzanne’s gorgeous friend Tristan on electric guitar. A fat older woman with caramel-colored skin and almond-shaped eyes, her graying hair in a long braid, stood at a microphone, snapping her fingers and swaying to the music. She had a flower in her hair.

  Tristan took a guitar solo.

  “Yeah!” an Asian guy called from a long table near the stage. “Play, Tristan!”

  There wasn’t much of a crowd: four people, including a young girl and guy who looked about my age. She was petite and slender. He was very cute, with short brown hair. He wore sunglasses, even though the room was dark. In the words of Molly—très affected. He bopped his head to the music. I sat down next to him, but he was too cool to even acknowledge my existence.

  “Hey, gimme some sugar, sweet lady,” an old black man told Suzanne.

  She leaned over to kiss his cheek. “Hi, Asa.”

  She didn’t bother to introduce me to anyone, so I turned my attention to the stage. I didn’t listen to jazz much—only at my grandparents’ house, really.

  Tristan finished his solo, and everyone at the table applauded and whistled. The woman at the mike began to sing in a smoky voice. When the song was finished, everyone applauded again.

  “I’ll tell you what, that child can play the guitar,” the old black man said, slapping his knee.

  “Get your booty up here, girl!” the woman at the mike beckoned to Suzanne.

  Suzanne bounded up to the stage, as did the Asian man and the old black guy. That left me with the young girl and the cute guy in the sunglasses. She whispered something in the guy’s ear, gave me a cool look, and left the table.

  My eyes slid back to the cute guy next to me. I smiled at him. He continued to ignore me.

  “Hot food, make way, hot food,” Captain Bizarro called, and he placed two huge platters in the center of the table—one with fried clams, one with raw clams in their shells, both surrounded by lemon slices. “Go ahead,” he urged me. “Dig in.”

  “Try a raw one,” the cute guy sitting next to me said.

  “You can’t nibble at it, neither,” Captain Bizarro said. “You got to drop that whole sucker down your throat!”

  The idea of swallowing a raw clam was beyond vile. “Well, I …”

  “Go on,” Captain Bizarro said.

  Gingerly I lifted a raw clam to my mouth. I closed my eyes and slurped it down, trying hard not to gag.

  “There’s more where that came from,” Captain Bizarro assured me as he blew me a kiss and headed back upstairs.

  I picked up the nearest glass—someone else’s half-full glass of ginger ale—and downed it quickly, trying to wash away the hideous taste.

  “Hey, you just drank my soda!” the guy next to me said.

  “I’ll buy you another one,” I said, humiliated.

  “I have a feeling you’ve never eaten a raw clam before.” He smiled a superior little smile.

  “I’m just not hungry,” I said frostily.

  That terrible feeling of impotent rage came over me again. A year ago this guy would absolutely have flirted with me. He would have taken off his stupid sunglasses so that we could make eye contact, and then his eyes would have gotten that certain look in them, full of desire. But now I never, ever saw that look. And I missed it. I missed it so much.

  He nodded his head along to the music as Suzanne took a solo at the piano.

  “So, what do you play?” he asked.

  “How do you know I play anything?”

  “Suzanne brought you here, that’s why,” he said, still bopping to the music. “My name’s Devon, by the way.”

  “Lara.”

  “You meet everyone yet?” he asked.

  “I met Tristan at my piano lesson.”

  “Great guy,” Devon said. “My guitar teacher. I wish Suzanne would just give it up and marry him already.”

  “They’re a couple?” I asked incredulously.

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “But he’s so … and she’s so …”

  “So what?”

  I raised my eyebrows. What I meant was obvious. He was gorgeous. She was huge. I really didn’t need to say it out loud.

  When I didn’t answer him, Devon turned back to the music. The fat older woman in front of the microphone moaned lyrics about a guy who did her wrong. She swayed her large hips and sang with half-closed eyes. She looked ridiculous.

  The girl came back to the table. “I gotta book—my mother just had a hissy fit over the phone,” she told Devon, rolling her eyes. “You coming to the party next week?”

  “Yeah,” Devon said. “You?”

  “If my mother lets me live.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, eyeing me coolly again. “See ya.”

  “Nice meeting you, too,” I murmured after her sarcastically.

  Devon laughed. “Don’t mind Crystal. We used to be a couple. She still gets jealous if there’s another girl around me.”

  Yeah, like he’d really be intere
sted in me.

  “Why did you break up with her?”

  He shrugged. “She’s just not cute enough,” he replied.

  I stared at him. What an asshole.

  “That was a joke,” he finally said.

  “Well, it wasn’t funny,” I snapped.

  He threw his head back and laughed. Everyone on stage finished playing their song. The black man took over at the piano; everyone else came back to the table.

  “You two met, I take it?” Suzanne asked us as she reached for a raw clam and sucked it into her mouth.

  “Hey, Suze, I just told Lara here that I broke up with Crystal ’cuz she isn’t cute enough, so now she’s pissed off at me!” Devon said, his voice full of glee.

  Everyone at the table laughed, and I could feel my face flushing with anger and humiliation. “I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said, jutting out my chin.

  “It is funny, though,” Suzanne said, grinning.

  I pushed my chair back and stood up, pulling my T-shirt away from my stomach. If Devon thought Crystal wasn’t cute enough, I could only imagine what he thought of porky me.

  “Thanks for inviting me,” I told Suzanne. “I’ll see you—”

  “Wait, wait, hold on,” Suzanne said, biting her lip to keep from laughing. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand just fine.”

  “No you don’t,” Devon said. He grinned in my direction and waved his hand in front of his face. “See, I have no idea what Crystal looks like. I’m blind.”

  I stood there with my mouth hanging open while everyone laughed.

  “Well, how was I supposed to know?” I protested. “And how did you know I drank your ginger ale?”

  “I’m blind, not stupid,” Devon said. “I heard you.”

  “Oh.” I sat back down.

  “Want another raw clam?” he asked devilishly.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Still laughing, Suzanne and everyone but Devon went up onstage again and began playing a Cole Porter song.

  I studied his face. He was so handsome.

  “Were you born blind?” I asked him.

  He leaned forward. “It happened when I was fifteen.”

  Fifteen! That’s awful, I thought.

  “Do you mind if I ask—how it happened?”

  “It’s not a pretty tale,” he began solemnly. “My mom told me that if I masturbated too much I’d go blind, but I said I’d just do it until I needed glasses, and—”

  “You, you … God!” I sputtered.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, trying to speak through his own gales of laughter. “So, here’s the answer to all your burning questions. Yeah, I was born blind. Yeah, my other senses really are more acute. And no, I have no idea what you look like. So why don’t you tell me? Better yet, let me see.”

  He reached over with one hand and touched my face. Very gently, he began to trace it with his fingertips—I closed my eyes as they lingered over my cheeks, neck, chin, lips.

  “Nice,” he said. “Soft skin.”

  I opened my eyes. “Thanks.”

  His gorgeous face was very close to mine, his voice low. “You smell like lemons.”

  “That might be the clams,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Good one.”

  Low, sexy music came from the stage. The air felt charged with something electric. Devon couldn’t see that I was fat. So he was flirting with me.

  “Where do you go to school?” I asked Devon.

  “Wayne State,” he said. “Freshman music major. You?”

  “Still in high school,” I admitted. “A senior.”

  “Comin’ through, comin’ through, hot stuff,” Captain Bizarro said, flying across the room with two new trays of food. He set them down on the table and pointed at Devon.

  “Hey! You coming to my birthday party next week?”

  “But of course,” Devon said.

  “You gotta date?” Captain Bizarro asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Nah, man,” Devon said.

  “Me neither,” Captain Bizarro said. “Ain’t life a bitch?” He cocked his head slightly. “What?” he asked, though no one had said anything. “Don’t bother me now, for crying out loud!” Then he hurried toward the stairs.

  “He’s a very strange man,” I commented. “Why is he called Captain Bizarro?”

  “It’s like this,” Devon said. “He’s this brilliant guy—a chef, musician, just incredible. Only he got shot up in Vietnam and they put this plate in his head, and sometimes it makes him weird. Like, he’ll hear voices talking to him, and he talks back. Last summer some bikers thought he was being a smartass, so they just about beat him to death.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “I know,” Devon said. “So now one of us always tries to be here, to keep him safe. Next Saturday is his forty-ninth birthday. We’re closing early to give him a party. There’ll be a lot of jazz. I think you’d have a blast.”

  He’s going to invite me, I realized.

  My God, life was so ironic. In the last forty-eight hours, I’d been asked out by a fat guy and was about to be asked out by a blind guy. If I’d even wanted to go out with the fat guy, everyone would say he had only asked me out because he knew a fat girl wouldn’t turn him down. And if I went out with the blind guy, everyone would snicker that he didn’t know he was out with a fat chick.

  I didn’t need that kind of humiliation in my life.

  “Listen, Devon—”

  “Listen, Lara—” he began at the same moment.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I just wanted to say that you’re a really nice guy,” I said earnestly. “And while I’d really like to go to the party with—”

  “Oh! You’re gonna come?”

  “Well, I mean, if I’m invited, but—”

  “Cool,” he said, nodding. “You can come with me and my friends, if you want.”

  So he wasn’t asking me out, he was being nice.

  Was it because he’d felt my puffy face when he’d touched me? No, because he’d said “nice” when he’d touched me, and he’d meant it. I knew he’d meant it.

  Which meant that he wouldn’t have asked the old me out, either.

  Huh. But then I had this thought: The old me would never have been sitting with a blind guy in some dump in downtown Detroit, listening to a fat lady sing.

  Never.

  “And here’s what’s so weird,” I told Molly through the portable phone as I padded over to my door and closed it, trying to shut out the Grateful Dead blasting from Scott’s room. “Suzanne is really fat and Tristan is about the best-looking guy I ever saw.”

  It was that evening. Dinner had been a silent, sordid little affair. While Scott and I ate, Mom chain-smoked and stared into space. No one mentioned Dad, who basically had been a no-show for days.

  As soon as I could, I’d escaped to my room.

  “Tristan’s a chubby chaser,” Molly said.

  “What’s that?” I lay down on my bed, my feet propped up on the wall.

  “Guys who get turned on by fat girls. It’s like a fetish.”

  “But Tristan doesn’t seem weird.”

  “Neither do half the people in my mom’s practice,” Molly said. “They look as normal as you or me. But one guy—he’s an accountant—he can only have sex if he’s wearing his dead mother’s panties.”

  “You made that up,” I insisted, laughing.

  “True,” Molly admitted, “but the chubby-chaser thing is for real. I saw it on Sally Jessy Raphaël. There’s this guy who wrote a book about how much he loves fat girls. Talk about living in a parallel universe!”

  “So, wait, you mean that if Suzanne lost a lot of weight, Tristan wouldn’t want her anymore?”

  “It’s a big, bizarre world out there,” Molly said.

  I thought a moment. “It would be kind of cool, though, wouldn’t it? If fine guys thought you were gorgeous and perfect just like you are, instead of in spite of ho
w you are?”

  “Yeah,” Molly agreed. “Except the only guys who think that way are like, these deviants.”

  There was a knock on my door. “Hold on a sec, Mol,” I said, and pulled my mouth from the phone. “I’m on the phone!”

  The door opened. It was Dad. I hadn’t seen him in at least a week.

  “Mol? My dad’s here, I’ll call you back.” I hung up.

  “Hi,” Dad said, coming into my room.

  “Hi.”

  He sat on the chair at my dresser, looking perfect, as usual. “How’s school?”

  “You haven’t been home for a week, so you thought you’d pop in for a few minutes to ask me how school is?”

  “School is important.”

  “Thanks for the insight.”

  He smiled a wan smile. “I know I haven’t been here for you lately. I’m sorry, princess.”

  Princess. It had been such a long time.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  Dad looked down at his hands dangling between his legs; then he looked back at me. “Life can get pretty problematic when you’re a grown-up, Lara—”

  Ping, as he hit a nerve.

  “As opposed to my life,” I said, “which has been so problem free.”

  He ignored my remark. A weird thought flitted through my brain: Had he really ever seen me at all?

  “I’ve always believed in doing the right thing,” he said, looking at the wall above me. “But sometimes a person’s heart doesn’t listen to what’s right.”

  “You’re seeing her again, you mean.” And then the truth dawned on me. “You never stopped seeing her! That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “I meant to. I wasn’t lying when I said I’d stop—you have to believe that. But I love her.”

  “And you don’t love Mom.”

  “I do love Mom,” Dad said earnestly. “I’m just—I’m not in love with her anymore.”

  Ping, as he hit another nerve. Just like Jett and me: If a woman gets fat or old, there’s no happily-ever-after.

  “How could you do this to us?” I said bitterly.

  “What about me?” he asked, finally looking at me. “Don’t I deserve happiness? God, I’ve played by the book my whole life. What about me?”

  I looked at him, and something strange happened. My whole life, I had seen him as a knight in shining armor, my perfect daddy. But now the knight was gone. In his place was this spoiled brat who really only cared about himself. Mom, Scott, me—we were just a reflection of how wonderful he was.