Once There Was a Fat Girl

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Cut the cake, Martha!” her friends cried, and her mother magnanimously entrusted her with a sharp kitchen knife.

  “The birthday girl gets the first piece!” someone called, and Martha’s mother nodded in agreement.

  “That’s right, Martha,” her mother said. “Today is your day.”

  Martha greedily dug into the tall chocolate layer cake, covered with smooth swirls of sweet icing, cutting a huge slice for herself. The piece of cake was big enough to include two pink roses and the letters M-A-R-T. Her mouth watered as she carefully lifted the piece of cake with a silver cake server and placed it on a saucer.

  Martha’s father looked on from the doorway. As Martha glanced up at him, she saw that he was shaking his head slowly, his mouth twisted into a disapproving sneer, When he realized that his daughter was watching him, he quickly looked away, and disappeared.

  Martha experienced a sinking feeling then, along with a sudden wish that her friends would go away and leave her alone. The party was no longer fun, and she choked on every mouthful of the cake. It tasted dry, and every swallow was a great effort, but she was determined to finish every last crumb. She would show him, she resolved, blinking hard to keep her tears from spoiling everyone else’s fun.

  Now that same feeling had returned. “I’ll show him,” Martha told the remains of the brownie that clung to her fingers in big moist clumps. “I’ll get so thin...” and she sniffled loudly as she licked the last bit of brownie off her thumb.

  * * * *

  That Wednesday it rained, and Martha wore black to work in honor of both the day and her mood. She hadn’t been able to sleep, kept awake more by feeling surprised and hurt than by feeling angry. She didn’t know what had happened, but she knew that it would be a cold day in hell before another brownie passed through her lips.

  She was filled with resolutions and good intentions, yet when at the ten o’clock break one of the secretaries brought out a box of doughnuts to celebrate someone’s birthday, she succumbed. She placed two on a paper napkin, then sneaked back to her desk to devour her bounty in seclusion.

  “Get a load of Tubby,” she heard a mail boy whisper to a telephone repairman as they passed by her desk. “Not one doughnut, but two!”

  That was the last straw.

  After devouring the coconut and the honey dip without tasting them, she went into the ladies’ room to cry. She was sure no one would find her, and even if someone did, she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything.

  It was Shirley who discovered her there, red-eyed and red-nosed and sobbing into a clump of wet pink tissues.

  “Are you all right? What’s wrong?” Shirley had never seen Martha display any real emotion, just constant cheerfulness and jokes. She had always seemed oblivious to everything, untouched by depression and anger and even menstrual cramps.

  “It’s Eddie. He walked out on me last night. Just out of the blue!” The tears recommenced with renewed fervor.

  “That rat! Why? What happened?”

  Martha described the scene, leaving out no details. Even the candles and the cookbook got a mention.

  “What are you going to do? Make up or forget him?”

  Martha was incredulous. “Make up, of course! That is, if he’ll take me back.” She hesitated. “Shirl, I’m thinking of going on a diet. For real, this time. Otherwise, I’ll lose him. But I don’t know how. I think I’ve already tried every diet you can possibly imagine.”

  It was true. Martha had tried them all.

  It had all started ten years before with what began as an unexpected interlude with a stranger named Victor H. Lindlahr. Martha’s mother had casually suggested one day that she peruse the slim paperback expounding the man’s theories on carbohydrates. It seemed like an innocent enough idea, and Martha, who always complied with the requests of her elders and her betters, obediently read the book from cover to cover.

  Stretched out on a chaise lounge in the back yard, soaking up the rays of the June sun in her pink and white pleated-skirt bathing suit from Lane Bryant, Martha dutifully read Mr. Lindlahr’s cogitations on sugar (one of her favorite subjects) and fruit (a less inspired topic, as far as she was concerned). Mrs. Nowicki’s premeditations were not wasted. The very next morning, Martha began following the program, completely unaware that she had taken her very first step to becoming a semiprofessional dieter.

  The Summer of the Fruits, Martha was later to dub that two-month period following her tenth birthday. She resolutely began each day seated at the kitchen table before a plate holding a single orange and a lone apple. It was no easy task, devouring a cold, crunchy apple, followed by a tangy orange, in the earliest light of morning, particularly when those around her were indulging in English muffins, Rice Chex, and oranges that had been reduced to their more acceptable state of juicehood. Her mother’s approving smiles alleviated some of the agony, but the fact remained that apples and oranges eaten at eight o’clock in the morning drop into the stomach with a force reminiscent of hailstones falling into a placid lake.

  After breakfast came another integral part of the program: air baths. This ritual consisted of Martha throwing open all the windows in her bedroom, stripping herself naked, and parading around the room for ten minutes, inhaling deeply. The goal, Lindlahr explained, was to let the body breathe. Martha was doubtful. Her body seemed happy enough swathed in clothing. After all, breathing was meant for noses, not shoulders and thighs. Nevertheless, Martha religiously took her air baths until the day she realized that Mr. Angelini, her next-door neighbor, had suddenly developed an uncharacteristic interest in weeding his garden at an hour when he should have been hurrying off to his Italian bakery.

  Mr. Lindlahr’s regimen wore thin as Martha faced the approaching school year. Wonder Bread sandwiches and waxy cartons of whole milk precluded the prescribed luncheon of still one more fruit, a bit of protein, and a bushel of salad. Mrs. Nowicki rescued her daughter once again, however, when a health food store sprang up in a nearby shopping mall a few months later. A tiny bald man who looked as if he had arrived in the twentieth century via a time machine set up shop, surrounding himself with shelves full of herbs and vitamins, half-gallon containers of brewer’s yeast, and such outrageous foodstuffs as Tiger’s Milk and bean sprouts. He cheerfully babbled unsolicited advice to any wayfarer who happened into his store. Mrs. Nowicki was one of the first customers to invade his store on the day of his Grand Opening. She had a reluctant Martha in tow.

  “Problems with your skin, eh?” the old man cried to the teenage boy who had innocently wandered in, in search of his buddies in purple satin Alpha Beta Pi jackets. “Vitamin A, that’s your answer! Take one thousand, even two thousand units a day! That’ll clear you up quicker than you can say ‘Jimmy Cricket!’ ”

  The boy, who looked as if he had no intention of ever saying “Jiminy Cricket,” retreated, his face as red as his few barely perceptible blemishes.

  After witnessing this scene, Martha, too, wanted to disappear back into the arcade of normal stores, which permitted their customers to shop without any interference. But Mrs. Nowicki saw in this oddity a new opportunity, a chance for the mysterious powers of vitamins and exotic roots and berries to cast their magical spells over her plump daughter. The old man was more than happy to offer his advice.

  “Lecithin,” he whispered hoarsely, as if he were muttering an ancient incantation. “Lecithin combined with vitamin B6. That’s the secret. Take these twice a day. It’ll melt the fat right off her!”

  Martha had not appreciated his terminology, but she was willing to try anything once. She halfheartedly began to take the pills, watching the mirror for a sudden, dramatic alteration.

  The change was neither sudden nor dramatic, but Martha began to notice that, after a while, skirts became a bit easier to button, belts could be stretched to just one more notch. As much as she hated to admit it, her mother’s faith in that wretched little warlock was well founded.

  That plan, too, fell by the waysi
de when the health food store was replaced by a record shop. The suburbs were not quite ready for the wonderful world of carrot juice. The Nowickis’ drug connection had dried up.

  There was no need to despair, though. It was only two short years before a new messiah appeared. Another tiny bald-headed man, this one characterized by extreme energy and a love for the media that defined him as a true twentieth-century figure, developed a diet trend that swept the nation like a highly contagious strain of Russian influenza. Martha discovered Dr. Stillman’s Quick Weight-Loss Diet while baby-sitting and sitting in front of a television talk show, armed with a box full of a delicious new snack called Pizza Spins. Martha watched Dr. Stillman jump up and down on the screen, trying to convince America that solid protein, washed down with almost three quarts of water a day, was the answer to everyone’s need to follow the anorexic trend that Twiggy had started. She enthusiastically switched her addiction from Pizza Spins to Dr. Stillman’s beliefs, and after finishing off the rest of the box, she resolved to begin his diet the very next day.

  It was easier said than done, Martha quickly discovered. She had often wondered, years before, if there could possibly be anything more distasteful than apples and oranges for breakfast. She discovered that two huge glasses of water, gulped down immediately before and after three hard-boiled eggs, qualified as the quickest way possible to simulate morning sickness.

  Dr. Stillman was right: eating nothing but meat and eggs and gallons of water for ten straight days did indeed result in a ten-pound weight loss. But Martha found that life even for the slender was not fun if one could only explore the world that existed within a twenty-five-foot radius of a bathroom. Another downfall of the diet was that after eating two cookies, Martha immediately gained back four pounds. A small bag of pretzels and a dish of French fries, appropriately seasoned, just about canceled out her achievement. She continued to think of Dr. Stillman’s diet fondly, but somehow she never again got around to indulging in such an aquatic experience.

  Martha’s teen years were rocky ones for the whole nation, as well as for slightly chunky, obsessively self-conscious teenage girls. Everyone was yelling, “Revolution!”—the students, the Black Panthers, the Gray Panthers, the Weathermen. This cry of the late sixties and early seventies managed to work its way into Martha’s secluded, apolitical world. She, too, found a revolution. One Saturday afternoon Martha Nowicki happened into a bookstore and immediately became an activist in Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution.

  What Dr. Stillman had failed to provide in variety, Dr. Atkins supplied in the form of melted butter, whipped cream, and unlimited quantities of cheese. Martha couldn’t help noting that she had taken a trip back in time, to Victor Lindlahr’s world where carbohydrate was a dirty word. Nevertheless, Dr. Atkins’ promises of lobster in butter sauce, bacon and fried eggs, and cheese omelets galore hypnotized Martha. It was a wonderful diet—in theory, anyway. Butter was one of Martha’s favorite foods, but with nothing to smear it on except the palm of her hand, it was of little use. Cheese without a cracker was like Christmas without Santa Claus. And lobster was hardly the kind of thing that Mrs. Nowicki kept piled up in the refrigerator. At any rate, it was not long before Martha returned to the Establishment.

  During her first year of college, Martha met a pleasant young woman who, although as trim and muscular as a fifteen-year-old boy, indulged in a curious obsession with food and dieting. This friend, given the necessity of working within the system of dormitory meals, created a rather unique diet: the pancake diet. Martha’s dorm served pancakes only twice a week, on Saturday and Wednesday mornings. The philosophy behind this plan was that the dieter would eat nothing except all the pancakes she wanted. But she could only eat them when they were served in the dorm.

  Martha embarked upon the pancake diet with relish. On the first morning, a Saturday, conveniently enough, she ate four platefuls of pancakes, topped with hot maple syrup and enough butter to make even Dr. Atkins cringe. Now this, Martha thought, is a diet that makes sense.

  When lunchtime rolled around, Martha politely accompanied her roommate into the dining room to discuss the English composition assignment, an essay on the meaning of the gold doorknob in The Horse’s Mouth. Her intentions were the best, but when she was actually confronted with her roommate’s plate of steaming macaroni and cheese, Martha decided that the pancake diet could best wait until the following Wednesday. Needless to say, that idea died a rapid death.

  There were other diets, as well. The anti-cellulite diet, the grapefruit diet, the traditional steak and salad diet. Every one of them seemed to work, at first. But something always got in the way: the beginning of a school year, the end of a school year; pre-exam tension, post-exam relief; too little free time to plan healthy meals, too much free time that could easily be whiled away in the kitchen.

  So it was that Martha Nowicki never came to find her little niche in the world of diets.

  Martha leaned against the wall of the ladies’ room and looked pleadingly at Shirley. There was no way that she could convey her history to this emaciated nymphet, no possible means to communicate the frustration, the hope, the disillusionment. “I don’t think there are any diets left for me to try,” she said, blinking away tears of self-pity.

  “Why don’t you try one of those diet clubs?” Shirley suggested, her face lighting up as if she had just had a vision. “My aunt went to Weight Watchers and lost sixty pounds. She kept most of it off, too. It wasn’t even that hard, except she was always carrying around Baggies full of celery. She looks terrific now.”

  Martha paced back and forth, then settled against a sink, oblivious to the wet spots creeping down the back of her black skirt with the elastic waistband.

  “I don’t know, Shirley,” she said hesitantly. “I’m not very good at structured things. I don’t think something like that would work for me.”

  “Well,” Shirley sighed, patting Martha’s shoulder in a sisterly fashion, “let me know if you change your mind. It’s at least worth thinking about.”

  * * * *

  Martha sat down carefully in her chair, determined to proceed as if her only concern in life was the pile of letters from irate consumers that sat in her in-box, demanding courteous and immediate replies. She glanced around the Consumer Complaints corner of the floor. Shirley sat at her desk, licking envelopes, and Aimee was draped across a file cabinet, rearranging piles of manila folders and smiling provocatively at every junior executive who strolled by.

  “Think AmFoods,” Martha told herself, and she turned to the first letter.

  “Dear Sir,” she read, wondering how many times her eyes had skimmed over that salutation during the past eighteen months. “I have been a loyal customer of yours for the past twenty years. However, I was extremely disturbed when I opened a box of Grandma Goodcook’s Enriched Egg Noodles (boxtop enclosed) and discovered that the box was only half full...”

  Martha glanced at the piece of cardboard that Mrs. Olivia Kavanagh of Coburn, Iowa, had so conscientiously stapled to the pink flowered stationery in order to voice her complaint against the corporate machine.

  “Mrs. Kavanagh, Mrs. Kavanagh,” she scolded, weighed down by the tedium of other people’s discontent.

  “Dear Mrs. Kavanagh,” Martha typed on her loyal IBM. “Thank you for your letter of April 12. We at AmFoods are always happy to hear from our customers.

  “We are sympathetic to your recent unfortunate experience with Enriched Egg Noodles. However, the boxtop you sent is from Doodle Noodles, one of Grandma Goodcook’s competitors. It is very possible that you purchased our competitor’s product instead of ours, and we suggest tha.t you contact them concerning your complaint...”

  Martha paused for ten seconds to picture Mrs. Kavanagh in her kitchen in Coburn, Iowa, busily preparing a tuna casserole for her bridge club. She genuinely hoped that the technology which placed hundreds of tiny noodles into cardboard cartons had not caused her any great inconvenience or embarrassment.

  �
�To Whom It May Concern,” Mrs. Dora Gerard of Riverdale, New York, had typed on Holiday Inn stationery. “I am very much offended by your current advertising campaign for Grandma Goodcook’s Dried Potato Mix with Onions. Your stereotyping of grandmothers as old ladies with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses...”

  “Hey, Martha,” interrupted a human voice. Martha glanced up, her mind still immersed in a vision of Grandma Goodcook, telling millions of television viewers about potatoes and onions. She was surprised to see Aimee’s youthful face, when she had half expected to confront Grandma Goodcook herself.

  “Martha, Donald—I mean, Mr. Shaw—wants us to go down to the supply room and get a whole bunch of stuff.”

  “Isn’t that Shirley’s job?” Martha muttered. She was interested in finding out what Dora Gerard had to say about the media’s portrayal of grandmothers, and didn’t want to be interrupted. She had just gotten to the part about Mrs. Gerard’s seven grandchildren.

  “Shirley’s busy. Come on. We have to go now!” Martha hated it when Aimee whined, so she reluctantly abandoned Mrs. Gerard in order to stop the unpleasant sounds that flowed from Aimee’s carefully painted red lips.

  “So, how are things going?” Martha asked politely in the elevator.

  Aimee wrinkled her tiny nose and said, “Boring. But,” she added loftily, “I don’t expect to be in this job much longer.”

  “Oh?” Martha asked, trying to contain her glee. “Are you leaving the company?”

  “Oh, no,” Aimee replied, pressing the button for their desired floor for the eighteenth time. “There’s a new job opening up, and I plan to move into it.”

  “Really? Which job is that?” Martha asked casually, trying to sound as well informed as Aimee.

  “Public Relations Assistant.”

  “Of course. That job.” It was news to Martha. She was always the last to hear about anything, and her spirits drooped even further.