“Well, now that you mention it …”
Suzanne smiled at me. “People are so funny, you know?” she mused. “Did you ever hear this one? Groucho Marx said he would never join a club that allowed someone like him to be a member, something like that.”
“Meaning what, that because I’m conscious of my weight I hate myself or something?”
She took another bite of her roll. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Hate yourself.”
“No.”
“But you hate that you’re fat.”
“So? Don’t you?”
“No,” Suzanne said. “I used to. I just tell myself I missed my era. This thin obsession is a very modern American thing. I mean, I heard Mae West weighed like two hundred pounds.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Why?” Suzanne asked. “Just because they say it’s so doesn’t make it so.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“The billion-dollar diet industry,” she said. “Every year the standard of beauty gets more unattainable, and every year they make more money.”
“So that’s why you shouldn’t diet?” I asked dubiously. “Because someone might make money off of you?”
“Diets are self-abusive and they don’t work.”
“If you combine a low-calorie diet with exercise—”
“I do exercise,” Suzanne said. “I take a dance class three times a week.”
“Look, no offense, but it sounds to me like you’re just looking for an excuse so you can give up on your weight.”
Carolyn brought Suzanne’s tea and my water.
“When I was a kid,” Suzanne said, stirring sugar into her tea, “I was already chubby. What can I tell you? I come from a family with chubby genes, and we all love to eat. Not that I ate more than other kids, because I didn’t. But I got fat, and they stayed thin.”
Like Molly and me, I thought.
“I remember in sixth grade, we all got weighed and measured in the gym by the school nurse,” Suzanne continued. “The nurse would call out each kid’s weight to her assistant, who sat at a little table writing everything down. So she’s calling out each kid’s name and weight—‘eighty pounds, seventy pounds, ninety pounds’—and then she gets to me.” She made her hands into a megaphone. “ ‘Suzanne Silver! One hundred fifty-eight pounds!’ Everyone laughed. I thought I was going to die.”
“No, you wanted to die,” I corrected her.
She nodded. “I guess you know how it feels, then. After that, I went on a diet. I didn’t eat anything but lettuce for a week. My parents were crazed, begging me to eat, but I refused to give in. I remember I felt so virtuous, and it felt so good.”
She paused. “so then I went to this coffee shop with my older cousin, Lorraine. She went off with some guy and left me sitting alone, sipping this fat-free hot chocolate. So, this guy is sitting at the next table, and he’s having real hot chocolate—you know, with a pile of whipped cream on top—and he’s got these two huge chocolate chip cookies. So he eats one, and he gets up and leaves, and the other cookie is just sitting there.”
She sipped her tea, a slight smile on her lips.
“Anyway, I stared at that cookie for what felt like forever. I was so hungry. And he had just left it there. And my cousin had deserted me. So finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached over, picked up the cookie, and took a huge bite. And just at that moment the guy came back to the table with another cup of hot chocolate.”
“That’s horrible!” I clapped my hand over my mouth.
Suzanne laughed. “It’s funny to me now, kind of. But it felt like the end of the world at the time.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran out crying. And I gave up on my diet. I’ve been on a zillion of them since then. You name it, I’ve been on it. I always lose weight for a while. And then—same old story—I gain it all back, and more, as soon as I eat anything more than what you’re eating now, because I have totally trashed my metabolism! I used to be so ashamed. I just hated myself for being fat. I thought I deserved to die, I was so disgusting. But then, finally, one day after I’d binged and purged and cried until I thought I would die from dehydration, I just said: No more diets. That’s it.”
Carolyn set two green salads on the table, mine plain, Suzanne’s covered in creamy, fattening blue cheese dressing.
“That’s it? You just gave up?”
She picked up her fork. “It’s more like I changed my attitude. I decided I don’t have to believe the world when it tells me I’m not okay.” She dug her fork into her salad. I fiddled with the earring in my left ear. “Look, I know you assume we have a lot in common, but we really don’t. A year ago I weighed one hundred eighteen pounds. I never had a weight problem in my life. Then I got this disease. It’s called Axell-Crowne Syndrome. It’s very rare, and it makes you gain a lot of weight no matter what you do or what you eat. And there’s no cure.”
“I had heard something,” Suzanne said.
I was surprised. “From who?”
“Your piano teacher in Nashville told Dr. Paxton that you’d gained a lot of weight in a really short period of time, and you were talking about giving up piano. But I didn’t know you had a disease …”
“Well, now you do. So if you want to rationalize why you’re fat, go ahead. But it doesn’t apply to me.”
Suzanne tapped her chin with a finger. “Not that it’s the same, mind you, but you know who you remind me of? A doctor who gets AIDS from a needle stick, who feels superior to a person who gets AIDS from sex.” She took another sip of her tea. “But, hey, they, both still have AIDS, right?”
She was so irritating.
“No matter what you say, it doesn’t change the reality of being fat,” I said. “People laugh at you, you can’t wear cute clothes, guys don’t ask you out—”
“Guys ask me out.”
Carolyn set Suzanne’s huge, steaming plate of lasagna in front of her, and Suzanne picked up her fork and dug in.
“Tristan, you mean,” I said. “You are so lucky that he’s attracted to … well, you know what I mean.”
“I do,” she agreed. “It’s insulting, but I do.”
“Devon says Tristan asked you to marry him.”
“He did.” She looked down at her plate a moment, and then her voice changed. “I love Tristan. And Tristan loves me. But I don’t know if I can ever marry him. The thing is, he hates that I’m fat.”
She smiled, but the smile never reached her eyes.
“If I married him, I’d always feel judged and found wanting, insecure, diminished, constantly scared of losing him …”
“Which is worse than not having him at all,” I finished.
“So you know,” she said, her eyes meeting mine.
I nodded and forked a dry lettuce leaf, then put my fork down. “If you ask a thin girl with no talent or brains if she’d rather be her or you, she’ll pick her. Skinny girls who chain-smoke four packs of cigarettes a day would rather get lung cancer than get fat. Being fat is the worst thing in the world. Everyone knows it. So no matter what you say, the world wins. And we lose.”
She didn’t bother to contradict me. She just picked up her fork and ate her lasagna. Which meant I had won the argument, in a certain way. But all it made me feel was really, really sad.
“You’re the best pianist in the quartet, you know. That Mozart really rocks,” Perry said, brushing his hair out of his eyes.
I laughed. “I never heard Mozart described quite that way before.”
“Hey, he was a major rebel. Beethoven too—totally out there. If they lived today, they’d be dating supermodels and trashing hotel rooms.”
It was the next evening, and I was giving Perry a ride home after orchestra rehearsal. For once he wasn’t eating anything.
“It’s the third house on the right,” he told me, and I turned the car into his driveway. It was a two-story colonial with a wide front porch in need of paint, v
ery homey looking, lights shining from every window. A colorful flag that read WELCOME hung over the porch.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said.
“Sure.”
I waited for him to get out of the car. Instead he turned to me. “Hey, um, so, some friends of mine are having a party Saturday night. I … uh … thought you might like to go.”
“Oh, gee, I’d love to, but I already have plans,” I said quickly. It made it somewhat easier to say this, since it was true. I was going to Captain Bizarro’s birthday party with Devon and his friends.
“Oh, yeah, okay. I guess I didn’t give you very much notice. Maybe another time.”
“Sure,” I lied.
“See ya.” He heaved his huge body out of my car.
My house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. The grounds were immaculate, the lawn perfectly trimmed.
“Hello?” I called out. I wandered into our black-and-white family room and set my schoolbooks down on the black marble coffee table. “Anyone home?”
It was so quiet. I went upstairs, past my room and Scott’s and poked my head into my parents’—now basically my mom’s—room. She was sitting on the bed, smoking. The only light in the room was a small Tensor lamp trained on the family photo album she had open in her lap.
“Hi,” I said. “I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“These photos are so wonderful,” she said, not looking up at me.
“Where’s Scott?”
She took a puff on her cigarette. “Come look at these, Lara.”
I sat down next to her on the bed. The album was open to the photo of her and Dad at her homecoming dance, when she had been crowned queen. He looked impossibly handsome, impossibly young, and his arm was snaked proprietarily around her tiny waist. She wore a pink satin dress and a tiara. Her arms were full of roses.
“You were so beautiful, Mom,” I said. “I was, wasn’t I,” she agreed. “And you know what’s funny? I thought I was fat.”
“No!” I exclaimed. “How could you? You were so thin. You’ve always been thin!”
“But I never felt thin,” she said. “Or pretty. Not really. So I never got to appreciate it.” She turned to another page in the book. “Oh, look: Scott’s tenth birthday party. Remember how we took a family trip to Hawaii? Look, here we are on the beach. We were all so happy. Everything was so perfect!”
It was Mom, Dad, Scott, and me on the beach in Hawaii. We looked like an advertisement for America.
God, I was so thin then, I thought, staring longingly at the photo.
“God, I was so young then,” my mom said. She put her hand to her cheek.
I looked at her gaunt face in the harsh light of the gooseneck lamp, and for the first time I saw lines, shadows, the stark signs of aging. For the tiniest moment, mean gladness filled my heart. But then it was gone, and I realized how much weight she had lost, how sick she looked.
“Want me to make you some dinner, Mom?” I offered.
Puff, puff on the cigarette, her eyes still on the photo. “I’m not hungry.”
“You really need to eat something, Mom.”
“I’ll get something later,” she said vaguely.
“Where’s Scott?”
“At a friend’s, I think.”
Fine, I thought. Sit here and obsess about what used to be, when you were pretty and young and life was perfect. Abdicate all maternal responsibility. Scott and I don’t really need parents anymore, anyway.
I left her there and went back downstairs, where I pulled some cheese and an apple from the refrigerator and went into the family room to do my homework. My bio teacher had given us twenty pages to read on arachnids—also known as spiders—and we had to do a cute little spider diagram.
I had read all the pages and was halfway through my spider diagram when I heard the front door slam. Scott walked noisily into the kitchen, which I could see from where I sat, opened the refrigerator, and took a long drink out of the milk carton.
“Did you eat?”
“At Gordon’s, but it sucked.” This was his new friend, Gordon Pinzer, who lived down the street. Gordon claimed to know someone who knew someone who was actually related to Kurt Cobain, which was how Gordon had acquired the signed photo of Kurt that hung over his bed. The week before, Scott had asked why Gordon’s handwriting matched Kurt Cobain’s handwriting on the poster, and they’d had a big fight. Evidently they had made up.
“Do you have to drink from the carton?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just drank some more, then left the empty milk carton on the counter. Then he rummaged in the fridge for food, found some cold chicken our housekeeper had broiled the day before, and stuck a drumstick in his mouth.
“You could wash your hands, at least.” I said as he came into the family room gobbling the chicken. Watching him eat made me hungry. I went to the fridge and got out a piece of chicken, too.
“You don’t need that,” Scott said, his mouth full of chicken. “Who are you, the food police?”
“I’m just saying—”
“Well, just don’t,” I snapped, wounded. “I didn’t even eat dinner.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he muttered under his breath.
“Okay, class, let’s review,” I said in a singsong voice. “Someone gained weight because she has a disease, not because of how much she eats, and that someone would be …? Anyone? Scott?”
“Well, you could fight it or something,” Scott said. He threw his chicken bone at the wastebaket, missed, and left the chicken bone lying there on the rug.
“What’s your problem tonight?” I asked. He threw himself on the couch. “I’m sick of kids saying stuff about you.”
“Like what? No—don’t tell me, I know what.”
“It’s just … I hate it here,” Scott said. “I don’t even like Gordon—he’s an idiot. And when people say stuff about you …” He shrugged. “It was just a lot easier when you were thin.”
“Well. I’m so sorry if my disease has made you suffer in any way,” I said sarcastically.
“Forget it,” Scott said, getting up. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Where’s Mom?”
“Up in her room reliving her glory days.”
“I should just run away,” he said.
“Don’t say that!”
“I should just hitch back to Nashville. Mom wouldn’t even notice I’m gone, I’ll bet.”
“She would too. And I would.”
“Yeah, sure.” He picked up his skateboard and headed for the stairs.
Gee, didn’t I have a happy home. Lah-dee-da. I picked up my pencil to finish the spider diagram and decided to click on the TV for company while I worked. “There’s word this week of a health breakthrough that might change the lives of millions of people,” came Barbara Walters’s voice. “It’s a hormone that researchers claim drastically and rapidly eliminates fat. Just imagine if this hormone proves successful in humans!”
My head rotated toward the TV. It was a special Tuesday-night edition of 20/20.
“As you saw in very revealing story that John Stossel brought you awhile back, coming of age is hard enough, but for overweight kids, it is particularly painful.”
“No kidding,” I muttered.
The screen filled with a chubby young girl and her mother at the mall, clothes shopping. “I wish I could shrink,” said the little girl. “I’d rather be Thumbelina.”
“Kids call her names,” John Stossel’s voice-over said, “such as Shamu the Whale.”
“It gets my heart broken,” the little girl on the screen said.
“Now, in this age of enlightenment where kids are taught not to make fun of disabilities or differences, are kids still mean about someone being a little overweight? Well, listen to what happened when I offered these five year-olds some choices. Who would they pick as a friend?”
Now the screen filled with a group of little kids. John Stossel sat with them. “Would you rather have as a friend a stupid kid or a fat kid?�
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“A stupid kid,” piped up one little boy.
“I hate fat kids,” said another.
“Well, which would you rather be,” Stossel asked them, “ugly or fat?”
“Ugly!” the kids all yelled.
“Okay,” John Stossel said, “if you had to live your life without one arm or be fat, which would you pick?”
“One arm!” the kids yelled again.
I clicked off the TV. Five-year-olds would rather have one arm than be me. Even Scott, Mr. Looks-Are-So-Superficial, hated me for being fat.
And I hated me for being fat.
A solitary tear tracked down one of my cheeks. I felt as if I were starring in someone else’s life, and her life sucked.
I closed my books and trudged up to my room, dropped my clothes in a heap, and went into my bathroom to take a shower. I don’t know what possessed me to get on the scale. It wasn’t my workout week. After my first visit to Dr. Goldner I’d set my home scale to match the one in his office. But it never changed. So I only weighed myself every other week so that I could report to my mother and Dr. Goldner. Who wanted to look at 218 pounds on the scale any more often than was absolutely necessary?
213 pounds, the scale read.
My heart thudded in my chest. It couldn’t be true.
I got off the scale and got back on.
213.
I repeated this three times, but the scale showed the same thing.
213 pounds.
I had lost five pounds.
With trembling hands I threw a T-shirt over my head and ran down the hall to my mom’s room. The door was closed. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing.
Fine. Some mother. She had probably taken her little pills and nodded off to dreamland, where she could pretend she was still young and life was still a ducky little bed of roses.
I ran back into my room and quickly punched a familiar long-distance number into my telephone.
“Hello?”
“Molly? Oh, my God!”
“Lara? Are you okay?”
“Mol, I … I lost five pounds!”
“No!”
“Yes! I just weighed myself! I lost five pounds! It’s true!”
She screamed into the phone, and I screamed back. “I’m so happy for you, I am sitting here totally dying of happiness,” Molly said.
Life in the Fat Lane Page 18
