Life in the Fat Lane

by Cherie Bennett

  “Me too. I can’t even believe it. Wait, I have to weigh myself again. Hold on.” I dropped the phone and ran back into my bathroom, and got on the scale. 213.

  “It’s true!” I cried into the phone. “It’s really true!”

  “So, this means it’s all over, right? You’re just going to lose it all now, right?” she asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Dr. Goldner says there are now seventeen documented Axell-Crowne cases, and four of them have lost all the weight they gained, so maybe.”

  “That’s what’s going to happen to you,” Molly insisted.

  “I’ll call him tomorrow,” I decided. “You don’t think this is some, just, I don’t know, natural fluctuation in my weight or something?”

  “No, no, the curse is broken; ding, dong, the wicked fat witch is dead!”

  “I’m afraid to get my hopes up,” I admitted, even though my hopes were already up, through the ceiling, the sky, the stratosphere.

  “So, listen, promise you’ll call me tomorrow after you talk to your doctor, okay?”

  “I will. Oh, Mol, I’m so happy!”

  “Me too,” she said, and then we both hung up.

  I had to tell someone else, but who? I pulled on some sweats, padded down to Scott’s room, and knocked on the door. No answer. Then I heard noises downstairs. Scott was foraging for more food. Food. Who cared about food? If I could only lose weight and get my old life back, I would never eat again!

  I stood outside Mom’s door and knocked again. Maybe she wasn’t that soundly asleep after all. I opened the door just a little and peeked in.

  She was lying half on and half off the bed, a spilled glass of something next to a full ashtray, her bottle of sleeping pills on the rug near her lifeless-looking hand.

  “Mom!” I ran over and shook her. Her eyes were closed. She was limp and cold. And so pale.

  “Mom!” I screamed again. I looked at the pill bottle. Empty.

  “Hey,” Scott said from the doorway, “someone named Suzanne is at the door and she says—”

  Then he saw Mom.

  “Call nine-one!-one!” I yelled, cradling my mother’s head in my arms.

  “What happened?” he asked in a tiny voice. “Is she—”

  “Just shut up and call nine-one-one!”

  Scott picked up the phone and dialed. I tried to get Mom to sit up.

  “It’s my mom, she took all these pills, I don’t know if she’s alive!” he cried into the phone. “Two-four-two-six Blooming Terrace Lane. Hurry! I don’t know what kind.” He turned to me. “What kind of pills?”

  “Look over there!” I ordered.

  Scott picked up the empty vial. “Valium,” he said into the phone. “No, I don’t know how many. No, I don’t know if she was drinking—why are you talking to me, why aren’t you doing something?”

  “Give me the damn phone,” I demanded, still holding my mother. Her head flopped against me; her mouth hung open.

  He handed me the phone. “Stop asking questions and get my mother an ambulance!” I screamed at the operator.

  “Calm down, miss, we’re doing everything we can. An ambulance is on the way. Does your mother have a pulse? Is she breathing?”

  I grabbed my mother’s wrist and tried to find a pulse. “No!” I shouted wildly. “There’s nothing! There’s—”

  And then I felt something. Faint, but there. And she was breathing. Barely, but breathing.

  “Wait, yes! I feel her pulse.”

  “Good. Do you know how many Valiums your mother took?”

  “No!”

  “Do you know if she was drinking alcohol when she took the pills?”

  “No, no, I don’t know anything! We just came in the room and found her—”

  “Is your mother conscious at this time?”

  “No!” I cried. “Please, please do something—”

  “Try to stay calm, okay?” the operator said. “Do you see any signs that she’s been drinking, or any other pill vials around?”

  I picked the glass up from the rug. I sniffed it. It smelled like wine. I told the operator.

  “Do you know how much wine your mother consumed?”

  “I just told you, I don’t know anything!” I was hysterical. “When will the ambulance get here?”

  “They’re on their way, miss. Your mother needs for you to stay calm now, okay? Help is on the way.”

  “What should I be doing?” I asked wildly.

  “Just wait calmly,” the operator said.

  I screamed in frustration, threw the phone across the room, and cradled my mother in my arms.

  “Mommy,” Scott whimpered, kneeling down next to me and taking Mom’s limp hand in his. “Mommy.”

  “You can’t die,” I said, sobbing hard. “Please, please, I’ll do anything, but you can’t die!”

  “Lara?”

  I looked up. Suzanne Silver was standing in the doorway. But that didn’t make any sense. Suzanne was my piano teacher. What was she doing in the doorway of my mother’s room while my mother lay in my arms dying?

  “An ambulance is coming,” I sobbed. “She took pills.”

  “What kind?” Suzanne asked, striding across the room toward us.

  “Valium,” I said.

  “Good news,” Suzanne said. “She won’t die unless she drank with it.”

  “You’re not a doctor.” I held my mother close.

  “There’s wine spilled on the carpet, from that glass,” Scott said through his tears.

  Suzanne looked at Mom, then at me. “Put her in my car. We’ll take her to the emergency room,” she ordered.

  “But they said—”

  “Do you want to wait for the ambulance or do you want to do something?” she asked pointedly.

  Together the three of us carried my mother down the stairs and out to Suzanne’s car. Mom felt very heavy.

  “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die,” I kept chanting to her as Suzanne zoomed through every light, her head-lights on bright, one hand constantly on her horn.

  Scott sat in front, his body twisted around in the seat so that he could see us, tears streaming down his face. His eyes met mine. I knew that the terror I saw there was mirrored in my own.

  And I prayed.

  Scott, Suzanne, and I sat silently in the hospital waiting room. Every part of my body hurt. Nothing seemed real. Scott kept crying. It was Suzanne who’d suggested that we call my father—it hadn’t even occurred to me. I told her he mostly lived in Nashville and gave her Tamara Pines’s phone number, which I had memorized in spite of myself.

  After an hour that felt like forever, a harried-looking African American doctor came out to talk with us. Scott and I held hands.

  “I’m Dr. Kellogg,” he said. “Your mother is going to be fine.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” I cried.

  Scott just nodded, too overcome to speak.

  “As it turned out, she didn’t take all that much Valium or drink all that much wine,” Dr. Kellogg said, “just enough to make her pass out. We didn’t know that until we pumped her stomach. There wasn’t much in there—it doesn’t look as if your mother has been eating lately.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” I said.

  “Can we see her?” Scott asked.

  “Only for a little while,” Dr. Kellogg cautioned. “She’s feeling pretty punky right about now. Just be gentle with her, okay?”

  He led us down the hall to a room and opened the door. “Five minutes.”

  She looked so tiny, lying there in that bed. Tiny. And old. Her eyes were closed.

  “Mommy?” Scott whispered.

  Her eyes opened. She smiled, sort of.

  Scott ran to the bed and put his head down on her shoulder, sobbing.

  “Shhh,” she whispered, stroking his hair. “It’s okay.”

  “You almost died,” he managed between his muffled sobs. “Is that what you wanted? Did you want to die?”

  “I just want
ed to sleep,” she said, her voice raspy.

  “You mean you weren’t trying to kill yourself?” I asked her. My voice sounded sharper and more accusing than I had intended.

  “I just wanted to sleep,” she repeated. “I wanted to wake up and find out it was all a bad dream and your father loved me again.” She turned her head away from us.

  It was everything I could do not to run to the bed and beat my angry fists into her. But you’re our mother, I wanted to scream. You’re supposed to take care of us, we’re not supposed to have to take care of you! How could you? How could you?

  But I didn’t say any of that.

  I just left her there with Scott and walked out of the room.

  When I got back to the waiting area, Dr. Kellogg told me he wanted to keep Mom overnight for observation, but she could probably be released the next day. She had convinced him that it was an accident, that she had not tried to kill herself. If it had been a suicide attempt, he’d have admitted her to the psychiatric ward, he explained.

  Funny, I thought. Since it wasn’t a suicide attempt, she could be terminally depressed on an outpatient basis.

  I thanked him and numbly lowered my oversized body into one of the ugly orange plastic chairs. I overflowed at the sides.

  “Hi.”

  I looked up. It was Suzanne. She sat next to me. She overflowed, too.

  “How’s your mom?”

  “She takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” I muttered bitterly. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I felt a zillion years old. “She didn’t take that much. She says she wasn’t trying to kill herself, she just wanted to sleep. She can probably come home tomorrow.”

  “That’s good,” Suzanne said.

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. “How did you know that you can’t die from an overdose of Valium?”

  “Practice,” she admitted.

  “You mean you—”

  She nodded.

  I reached for her hand. “Thank you. For helping me. I mean it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What were you doing at my house, anyway?”

  She gave a short, sharp laugh. “My parents live practically around the corner from you. I was at their house and I found the sheet music for this great old jazz tune I used to play, and I thought, Lara would love this. So I decided to drop it off. After your brother let me in, I heard all the screaming from upstairs, and, well, I’m just nosy enough to want to see what was wrong.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I said. I gulped hard. “I don’t know why you’re so nice to me. I haven’t been very nice to you.”

  “I guess because, regardless of what you told me the other day, you still remind me of me.”

  It was so strange. For some reason I wasn’t insulted. I didn’t feel like I should protest yet again that we were nothing alike, that she was this out-of-control fat person, whereas I was a thin person stuck in a fat person’s body through no fault of my own.

  No, I didn’t feel that way at all. I put my head on her shoulder.

  Just then Scott came trudging down the hallway toward us, his sneakers untied, his eyes red. He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweatshirt, like a little boy. I got up and wrapped my arms around him.

  Suzanne took us home, and though I told her she didn’t have to stay, she refused to leave us alone and said she’d stay until my father arrived.

  When he finally did, near dawn, Suzanne left. Dad tried to hug me but I moved away. He had already been to the hospital, he told me, and had spoken with Dr. Kellogg. Mom had refused to see him.

  As the sun came up, I sat in the family room, numb. Dad came and sat next to me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Look, princess—”

  “I told you never to call me that,” I snapped.

  “Lara,” he corrected himself. “You’re blaming me for this, aren’t you?”

  A reply hardly seemed necessary.

  “No matter what you think,” Dad said, “this is not my fault.”

  “No? Then whose fault is it?”

  He sighed. “Your mother has to be responsible for her own life.”

  “Even if you’re the one who ruined it.”

  He sighed again. “I’m not perfect, prin—Lara.”

  “Funny, you always tried to tell us you were.”

  He smiled a sad little smile. “People are complicated, honey. It hasn’t been easy for me—”

  “This isn’t about you,” I said with disgust.

  He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I just thought you were mature enough to understand—”

  “You know what, Dad?” I said, getting up from the couch. “I don’t feel like trying to understand. I’m your daughter, not your shrink.”

  “This isn’t like you, honey …”

  “Here’s a real news flash for you, Daddy,” I said. “You don’t have any idea what I’m like. I’m only beginning to figure it out myself.”

  “Mom?”

  She was sitting on the hospital bed, facing the window, dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt I had brought over for her. Her face was pale, and so thin. She wore no makeup, and for once she wasn’t smoking. She smiled at me.

  “Well, that was an adventure none of us needed, huh?” she whispered.

  “Does your throat hurt from the stomach pump tube?”

  “Like crazy.”

  “So, you can go home?”

  She nodded. “Is your father there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I told him to leave, that Scott and I could take care of you. But he gave the housekeeper the day off.”

  “Can’t have the hired help know that the Ardeche family is less than perfect,” she croaked.

  “Do you want me to call and tell him to leave before we get back?” I asked her.

  “No. I need to talk to him.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him at all. Ever. Neither does Scott.”

  “He’s still your father,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She smiled sadly. “My life wasn’t supposed to end up like this. I was supposed to marry your father and stay thin and beautiful, he was supposed to stay madly in love with me forever, and we were supposed to live happily ever after. I wish I knew where I went wrong.”

  I went over to the bed and sat down next to her. “You and Dad always made me think that if we just tried hard enough, if we were just perfect enough, we could control everything. But it isn’t true, is it, Mom? I mean, sometimes stuff just happens. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  I struggled to find the right words. It was so hard.

  “Last night when I got home, I couldn’t sleep,” I went on. “All these tapes just kept playing in my head. It was like watching a movie of my whole life, right up until now. I could even stop this tape in my mind, you know? If I wanted to take a really good look at something?”

  I reached for my mother’s hand. There were tears in her eyes.

  “And I did look, Mom. I looked at the time when I was little and I heard you and Daddy fighting, the time I heard him hit you.”

  “Lara—”

  “I looked at all the other fights, too,” I went on, “when you and Daddy yelled at each other and called each other horrible names, and then at all the mornings afterward when I thought I was crazy because you both pretended it had never happened.”

  “I didn’t mean for—”

  “Even though you were young and thin and perfect looking, you weren’t happy. You and Dad always fought, and you always lied to us about it. You were always afraid that you weren’t good enough for him, or that he’d leave you.”

  “And he left anyway,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, he did,” I agreed. I gulped hard. “I used to think that if I was just perfect enough, everything would be great. But it wasn’t. And I used to think that everything in my life was so perfect when I was thin. Only it wasn’t. I mean—don’t get me wro
ng—I’d give almost anything to be thin again, but being thin didn’t fix my life.”

  “It didn’t fix mine, either,” she rasped.

  Tears were streaming down my face. “The happy, perfect Ardeche family has always been one happy, perfect lie, Mom. And I’m not going to lie anymore.”

  Two big tears slid down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry I’ve let you and Scott down, Lara.”

  I put my arms around her. “It’s okay, Mom,” I said.

  But even that was one last lie, because nothing was really okay at all, and she really had let me and Scott down.

  But at the moment, it was the best I could do.

  I stepped onto the scale. It read 211. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too good to be true. I got on and off the scale again. And again. Same weight.

  It was Saturday evening, a few days after my mom had come home from the hospital, and with everything that had happened, I hadn’t called Dr. Goldner until that morning. So I had called him at home—he was excited, I could tell. He told me it was possible that I was going to lose all the weight I had gained, but it was also possible that it was just a fluctuation, which everyone had. Then he moved my next appointment up to the following week so that he could check me out himself.

  I had resisted the urge to get on the scale again all day, but now, straight out of the shower, as my wet hair dripped on the scale, there it was, staring at me.

  I hopped on, not daring to hope for anything.

  I had lost two more pounds.

  I went to look at myself in the mirror on my dresser. Was it my imagination, or did my stomach stick out a tiny bit less? I rolled my shoulders forward. Couldn’t I almost see my collarbones again?

  I reached into my drawer, got out some underwear, and put it on. My bra was a little looser. I felt full of hope and scared to hope, both at the same time.

  Please, God, I prayed, please let it all be over. Please let me be thin again. I’ll do anything if only—

  And then I stopped, midprayer. The last time I had prayed this way was when I was afraid that my mother would die. And I’d prayed to God that I’d do anything that time, too, if only my mother would live.

  How could being thin be as important to me as my mother’s life? How could it?