Her father checked in her luggage, while the two girls stood crying on the sidewalk, and Christine looked at her daughter unhappily.
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” she said softly. She would have liked to try again if she had the chance. She could feel Victoria slipping through her fingers forever. She had never really thought about what this day would feel like. The pain of it took her by surprise now.
“I’ll be home soon,” Victoria said, and hugged her, still crying, and then she hugged her little sister again. “I’ll call you tonight,” she promised her, “as soon as I get to my room.” Gracie nodded and couldn’t stop crying, and even her father’s eyes were damp when he said goodbye to her in a choked voice.
“Take care of yourself. Call if you need anything. And if you hate it, you can always transfer to a school out here.” He hoped she would. It was as though her leaving California for college were a rejection of him. They had wanted her to stay in L.A., or close to it, which wasn’t what Victoria wanted or needed.
After kissing them all again, Victoria went through security, and waved for as long as she could see them. They didn’t leave the airport until she had disappeared from sight. The last she saw of her family was Gracie leaving the airport, walking between her parents. They all looked the same, with their dark hair and slim bodies. Her mother was holding Gracie’s hand, and Victoria could see that her sister was still crying.
She boarded the flight to Chicago, thinking about all of them, and as the plane took off, she looked out the window at the city she was fleeing, to find the tools she needed for a new life somewhere else. She didn’t know where that would be, but the one thing she did know was that it couldn’t be here, or with them.
Victoria’s years in college were exactly what she hoped they would be. The school was even better than she had dreamed or expected. It was big and sprawling, and the classes she took and did well at were her ticket to freedom. She wanted to acquire the skills she needed to have a job and a life someplace other than L.A. She missed Gracie, and sometimes even her parents, but when she thought of living with her parents, every fiber of her being told her that she could never live with them again. And she loved her frequent visits to Chicago and discovering everything she could about the city. It was lively and sophisticated, and she thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the brutally cold weather.
She went home for Thanksgiving freshman year, and saw instantly that Grace had grown taller, and prettier, if that was even possible. Her mother had finally relented and let her do a commercial for Gap Kids. Grace’s photograph was suddenly everywhere, and she could have had a career as a model, but her father wanted a better life for her. And he swore that he’d never let a child of his go to college so far from home again. He told Grace that she’d have to go to UCLA, Pepperdine, Pomona, Scripps, Pitzer, or USC. He was not going to let her leave L.A. In his own way, he genuinely missed Victoria. He didn’t have much to say when she called, except that he hoped she’d come home soon, and then he passed the phone to her mother, who asked what she was doing and if she’d lost any weight. It was the question Victoria hated most because she hadn’t. And then she dieted frantically for two weeks before she went home.
And when she got back to L.A. for Christmas vacation, her mother noticed that she had lost a little weight. She had been working out at the gym at school, but she admitted that she hadn’t had any dates. She was working too hard at school to even care. She told them she had decided to get a teaching degree, and her father instantly disapproved. It gave them a new topic to disagree on, and distracted them from her weight and lack of dates.
“You’ll never make decent money as a teacher. You should major in communications, and work in advertising or PR. I can get you a job.” She knew he meant well, but it wasn’t what she wanted to do. She liked the idea of teaching, and working with kids. She changed the subject and they talked about how cold it was in the Midwest—she hadn’t even been able to imagine it until she was there. It had been well below zero for the whole week before she came home. And she was enjoying going to hockey games. She wasn’t crazy about her roommate, but she was determined to make the best of it. And she had met some people in her dorm. But mostly, she was trying to get accustomed to the school, and to being away from home. She said she missed decent food, and this time no one commented when she took three helpings of pot roast. And she was happy taking time off from going to the gym while she was home. She appreciated the weather in L.A. as she never had before.
Her father gave her a new computer for Christmas, and her mother gave her a down coat. Gracie had made her a montage of photographs of them, starting when she was born, on a bulletin board to hang up in her dorm room. And when she left after Christmas, Victoria wasn’t sure if she was coming home for spring break. She said she might travel somewhere with friends. In fact, she wanted to go to New York and try to line up a summer job, but she didn’t mention it to them. Her father said that if she didn’t come home in March, they would come to see her after that, and take her to Chicago for the weekend. And it was even harder leaving Gracie that time. The two sisters genuinely missed each other, and her parents said they missed her too.
Second semester of freshman year was hard for Victoria too. The midwestern winter was dreary and cold, she was lonely, she hadn’t met many people, she had no close friends yet, and she caught a bad case of flu in January. When she did, she lost the thread of going to the gym again and started living on fast food. By the end of second semester, she had gained the dreaded freshman fifteen, and none of the clothes she had brought with her fit anymore. She felt huge, and was twenty-five pounds overweight. She had no choice but to start working out again, and she swam every day. She managed to lose ten pounds of the extra weight fairly quickly, with a purging diet, and some pills one of her dorm mates had given her that made her desperately sick. But she could get into her clothes again, and she was thinking about going to Weight Watchers to lose the other fifteen, but she always had an excuse not to. She was busy, it was cold, she had a paper due. It was a constant battle with her weight. And even without her mother hounding her, and her father making fun of her, she was unhappy about her size, and she didn’t have a date all year.
She went to New York as she hoped to over spring break, and managed to get a job as a receptionist at a law firm for the summer. The pay was decent, and she could hardly wait. She didn’t tell her family about it till May, and Gracie called her sobbing on the phone. She had just turned twelve, and Victoria nineteen.
“I want you to come home! I don’t want you to go to New York.”
“I’m coming home in August before I go back to school,” she promised, but Gracie was sad that she wasn’t coming home till then. She had just done another ad, for a national campaign. Her parents were putting the money away in trust for her, and she liked the modeling and thought it was fun. But she missed her sister. Life at home wasn’t nearly as much fun without her.
They had also met Victoria in Chicago, as they’d promised, for a long weekend in April, and it had snowed. It had been a seemingly endless winter, and when Victoria finally finished her exams, she was excited to fly out of Chicago on Memorial Day weekend. She was starting work in New York the day after Memorial Day.
She had bought some skirts and blouses and summer dresses that were appropriate for her job at the law firm. And she had gotten her weight back in control again by not eating any desserts or bread or pasta. It was a low-carb diet that seemed to be working. It was heading in the right direction at least, and she hadn’t eaten ice cream in a month. Her mother would have been proud of her. It had also occurred to her that while her mother complained about what she ate, she had always kept a hefty supply of ice cream in the freezer. And she had served all the fattening things Victoria liked to eat. She had always put temptation in Victoria’s way. At least now she could only blame herself for what she ate, Victoria told herself. And she was trying to be diligent and sensible about it, without going on any crazy diets, or bo
rrowing someone else’s pills. She hadn’t had time to go to Weight Watchers yet, but she had promised herself that she would walk to work every day in New York. She was going to be working on Park Avenue and East 53rd Street, and staying at a small residential hotel in Gramercy Park, which was a thirty-block hike to work, a mile and a half. Three miles if she walked both ways.
Victoria liked her summer job. The people at the law firm were nice to her. She was competent, responsible, and efficient. Mostly, she answered the phones, handed envelopes to messengers, or accepted them for the lawyers in the firm. She directed clients to attorneys’ offices, took messages, and greeted people at the front desk. It was an easy but busy job, and most days she wound up staying late. And by the time she left, in the torrid summer heat, she was too tired to walk home, so she took the subway back to Gramercy Park. But she managed to walk to work on the days she wasn’t late, at least some of the time. When it took longer than she’d planned to get dressed or do her hair, she’d have to take the subway to work, so she wouldn’t be late.
Victoria was considerably younger than most of the secretaries at the law firm, so she didn’t make any friends. People were busy and didn’t have time to socialize and chat. She spoke to a few people in the employee dining room at lunchtime, but they were always in a hurry and had things to do. And she didn’t know a soul in New York. She didn’t mind. On weekends she went for long walks in Central Park, or listened to concerts, lying on a blanket on the grass. She went to all the museums, walked around the Cloisters, explored SoHo, Chelsea, and the Village, and wandered around the campus of NYU. She still would have liked to transfer there, but she thought she would lose credits and didn’t know if she had the grades. She was planning to stick it out at Northwestern for the next three years, or finish sooner if she could by going to summer school, and then move to New York and find a job. She knew after living in the city for a month that this was where she wanted to work, without any doubt. Sometimes during her lunch hours she looked up lists of New York schools. She was determined to teach at one of the private schools. And nothing was going to sway her from her plan.
When she finished her job at the law firm, she flew to L.A. for the last three weeks of her summer vacation, and Gracie threw herself into her sister’s arms the minute she walked through the door. Victoria was surprised to see that the house looked smaller, her parents older, and Gracie suddenly looked more grown up than she had four months before. But she looked nothing like Victoria had looked at the same age, with her rapidly maturing body, full figure, and big breasts. Gracie was tiny like their mother, with the same lithe figure and narrow heart-shaped face. But despite her skinny body, she still looked more mature. And on Victoria’s first night back, Grace admitted that she had a crush on a boy. She had met him at the swim and tennis club that their mother took her to every day. He was fourteen. And Victoria was too embarrassed to admit to her or her parents that she hadn’t had a date in over a year. When they pressed her about it repeatedly, thinking she was being coy, she finally invented a mythical boy she had gone out with at Northwestern. She said he was a hockey player and was studying to be an engineer. Her father informed her immediately that all engineers were bores. But at least they thought she had a date. She said he had spent the summer with his family in Maine. They seemed relieved to hear that she had gone out with someone, and she said she hadn’t gone out with anyone in New York. But dating someone at school made her sound more normal than the reality of the nights she had spent studying alone in the dorm.
Her mother pulled her aside and told her she might have gained a little weight in New York, and when they went to the club so Gracie could see her “boyfriend,” Victoria stayed in her shirt and shorts, instead of putting on a swimsuit, which was what she always did when she gained weight. And she and Grace had an ice cream nearly every day on the way home. But she never touched the Häagen-Dazs her mother had stocked in the fridge. She didn’t want them to see her eat it.
The weeks in California flew by, and they were sad again to see her leave. Gracie was more composed this time, but it was hard knowing they wouldn’t see Victoria again for three months until Thanksgiving. But she would be busy with a heavy workload at school, and Gracie was going into seventh grade. It was difficult for Victoria to believe that Gracie would be in high school in two years.
Victoria’s roommate sophomore year was a nervous-looking girl from New York. She had an obvious eating disorder and was frighteningly thin. She admitted after a few days that she had been in a hospital all summer, and Victoria watched her get thinner every day. Her parents called her constantly to check on her, and she said she had a boyfriend in New York. She looked miserable at school, and Victoria tried to ignore the atmosphere of stress she created. She was a crisis in full bloom. Just looking at her made Victoria want to eat more. And by the time Victoria went back to L.A. for Thanksgiving, her roommate had decided to leave school and go back to New York. It was a relief to know that she wouldn’t be there when Victoria got back. It was hard to live with the tension she exuded in the room.
It was between Thanksgiving and Christmas that Victoria met the first boy who had interested her since she’d been there. He was in prelaw, in his junior year, and he was in an English lit class with her. He was a tall, good-looking boy with freckles and red hair, from Louisville, Kentucky, and she loved to listen to his drawl when he talked. They were in a study group together, and he invited her out to coffee afterward. His father owned several race horses, and his mother lived in Paris. He was planning to spend Christmas with her there. He was fluent in French, and had lived in London and Hong Kong. Everything about him seemed exotic to Victoria, and he was a kind, gentle person.
They talked about their families, and he said his life had been pretty upside down since his parents’ divorce, and his mother constantly moved from one place to another around the world. She had married someone after his father and was divorced again. He thought Victoria’s life sounded a lot more stable than his own, and it was, but she didn’t consider her childhood a happy one either. She had been an outsider in her own home all her life. And he had been a newcomer wherever he was. He had gone to five schools after eighth grade. And his father had just married a twenty-three-year-old girl. He was twenty-one. He admitted to Victoria that his stepmother had come on to him, and he had almost slept with her. They had both been drunk, and by some miracle of good judgment, he had managed not to give in to temptation, but he was nervous about seeing her again. He had decided to spend Christmas with his mother in Paris instead, although she had a new French boyfriend he wasn’t crazy about either.
He was very funny about his stories, but there was something almost tragic about the tales he told about a lost boy caught between crazy, irresponsible parents. He said he was living proof that people with too much money screwed up their kids. He had been seeing a shrink since he was twelve. His name was Beau, and despite some romantic moments and a little heavy petting on the night before she left, they hadn’t slept with each other when she went to L.A. for Christmas. He promised to call her from Paris. And he seemed wonderfully romantic and exotic to her. She was fascinated by him. And this time when her parents asked who she was dating, she could say a junior in pre-law. It would sound respectable to them, although she couldn’t imagine her father or mother liking him. He was much too offbeat for them.
Beau called her over the holidays and had gone to Gstaad with his mother and her friend. He sounded bored and a little lost. And he texted her constantly with things that made her laugh. Gracie wanted to know if he was handsome but said she didn’t like red hair. And this time Victoria watched her diet. She passed on desserts even though her father expressed surprise when his “big girl” said no. It was impossible to shake his view of her as someone who ate all the wrong things and was always overweight.
Victoria lost five pounds during her ten days in L.A. And she and Beau got back to Northwestern within hours of each other on the same day. She had thought of not
hing but him over the holiday, and she wondered how long it would take for them to wind up in bed. She was glad that she had saved herself for him. Beau would be her first, and she could easily imagine him being gentle and sensual in bed. They were kissing and laughing and cuddling when he came to her dorm room, and he said he was so jet-lagged that nothing happened that night. Nor for the next many weeks. They were with each other constantly, they studied in the library together, and since she no longer had a roommate, sometimes he fell asleep on the other bed. They spent a lot of time kissing and fondling, and he loved her breasts, but it never went past that point. He told her she should wear miniskirts because she had the best legs he had ever seen. He appeared to be totally enthralled with her, and for the first time in her life, Victoria was seriously losing weight. She wanted to look great for him. And she was feeling good about herself.
They had snowball fights and went ice skating, they went to hockey games, restaurants, and bars. He introduced her to his friends. They went everywhere together and always had a terrific time. But no matter how close they got to it, they never made love. She wasn’t sure why, and she was afraid to ask. She wondered if he thought she was too fat, or if he respected her too much, or if maybe he was afraid, or if his near miss with his twenty-three-year-old stepmother had traumatized him, or his parents’ divorce. Something was holding him back, and Victoria had no idea what it was. He obviously wanted her, and their makeout sessions grew more and more passionate, but their hunger for each other was never consummated, and it was driving Victoria insane. They were down to their underwear one night in her dorm room, and then he held her in his arms and lay there silently without moving for a long time, and then he got out of bed.
Big Girl: A Novel Page 5
