Once There Was a Fat Girl

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Look, I have to go now. Betsy wants to use the phone.”

  Betsy, who had been watching television and listening to Martha’s half of the conversation, looked up. Martha pointed to the phone and made a face.

  “Goodbye, Ma. I’ll call you soon.”

  By the time Martha hung up, she felt like joining forces with Attila and pursuing a career as a Hun. “Why are there mothers in the world? I feel like eating an entire lasagna after that.”

  “Don’t, Mart,” Betsy said. “You’ll only regret it in the morning.”

  “You’re right. Hey, you want to see what I bought?” Martha proudly displayed her little green boxes of magic, describing the wonders of each to her attentive roommate.

  “Ooh, this is neat!” Betsy exclaimed as she examined each item. “I should get some of this. I’ve been using that Revlon stuff, and it’s making me break out.”

  Betsy helped herself to Martha’s new purchases, streaking the aqua eye shadow across her lids dramatically and blending the blush into her already high cheekbones. Martha was taken aback, but she was reluctant to put a damper on her roommate’s enthusiasm.

  Betsy ran to the bathroom mirror and shrieked with delight. “I love this color! Could I borrow it sometime? Can I wear some tomorrow? A new author is coming to the office, and I hear he’s a cutie.” She skipped back into the living room, and stood proudly before Martha.

  “What do you think? How do I look?” she bubbled.

  Martha surveyed her roommate. Even in a faded green chenille bathrobe and graying Dearfoams, with her long black hair haphazardly pinned up with a silver barrette from Woolworth’s, Betsy was lovely. Her innocence, too, was engaging, her sparkle, delightful. On many occasions, Betsy had kept her two roommates laughing hysterically for hours as she told tales of the goings-on at the publishing house where she worked. Her quick sense of humor and her infectious giggle had become the target of relentless teasing at the office, Martha knew. Yet when it came to her responsibilities as an editorial assistant, she was serious to the point of being a true perfectionist.

  Martha smiled warmly and said, “You look great.”

  She knew that her approval was important to Betsy, who saw her as one of the stable influences in her life. She couldn’t begrudge Betsy the simple pleasure of a new eye shadow, and she agreed to share it with her. “Help yourself. It plays up your blue eyes.”

  “You’re a dear!” Betsy exclaimed, and she turned her attention back to the television show she had been watching, leaving the bottle of eye shadow on the bathroom sink and its silver cap on the coffee table.

  * * * *

  To some people, the view of Queens, Roosevelt Island, and the dramatic Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, viewed from the East River bank early on a misty May morning, is breathtaking. To Martha Nowicki, tramping over the awkward cobblestones of Carl Schurz Park, feeling ridiculous in terrycloth running shorts and a T-shirt that read “I’m a Pepper,” the panorama stretching before her made her think of a condemned man’s last glance at the world before ascending the stairs of the gallows.

  This, she thought glumly, is not fun.

  Shirley walked briskly, calling over her shoulder, “Start by walking as fast as you can. That’ll get your heart going.”

  My heart is already going, Martha thought, blaming Shirley for her difficulties with breathing, her runny nose, and the frizzing up of her split ends. If God had meant for us to run, He would have created us with rubber-soled feet.

  “Let’s start with some stretching exercises,” Shirley chirped, tossing a limber leg up on a stone wall and bending over to reach for her ankles. “That way, you won’t be sore tomorrow.”

  I won’t be alive tomorrow, Martha was tempted to threaten as she awkwardly copied her friend’s position. Shirley made it look so easy. It wasn’t, Martha was discovering.

  As the two women launched into some hearty deep knee bends, Martha had a sudden pang of bad feeling. Out of the blue, the dread and hatred of gym class and all things athletic that had been dormant inside her for years jumped out at her. From elementary school on, Martha had always been the slowest, the least coordinated, the weakest member of any gym class, coed or non.

  Aside from brief periods of square dancing, which she had actually enjoyed, Martha had considered gym days very close in concept to dentist days. There had been the sadistic gym teacher who had had them doing sit-ups and leg lifts for entire half-hour gym classes. Later on, during the Olga Korbit years, there had been one who had forced each girl to gamble on suicide with the help of uneven parallel bars, a gymnastic horse, and a balance beam that, to Martha, seemed more like a tightrope. There had been races never completed, cartwheels never mastered, an endless array of notes from Mom. It had been torture, all of it, and one of her happiest days had been the week before high school graduation, when she had ceremoniously burned her gym suit in the back yard.

  Now, here she was again, about to embark upon the physical pain, not to mention the humiliation, of exercise and sport. Even though Shirley was a relatively sympathetic, undemanding soul, even though her only witnesses would be occasional self-absorbed joggers, even though she would receive no grade for her efforts, the very thought of physical activity was making Martha break out into a cold sweat.

  “Shirley,” she confessed weakly, “I can’t do it.”

  “Oh, Martha,” Shirley sighed. “At least try. It’s not as hard as you might think. Just try. And be easy on yourself. The first time out, you can’t expect to run very far or very fast. Look, try jogging along with me. If my pace isn’t the same as yours, then drop back until you find your own pace. It’s really exhilarating, once you get going.”

  Looking forward to feeling “exhilarated,” Martha started running slowly next to Shirley. She noticed that her friend ran aggressively: chest out, head up, arms grabbing at the air in front of her. Martha ran as if she were crossing the street in front of an approaching Mack truck.

  Oh dear, oh dear, she thought as she started to wheeze, I’m not going to make it. Her heart was pounding, her lungs hurt, the muscles in her side screamed at her. She tried, she wanted to show Shirley that she was as good as she was, she pushed as hard as she could...

  “Shirl, I can’t do it. I have to stop.” She dizzily leaned against the metal railing that prevented park strollers from strolling into the river. Shirl waved and kept on. Martha’s nausea and pain began to subside, but she still felt terrible as she glanced around the park and realized that she had run a little farther than a block. She had failed, again. She was still not as good, she was still different. Why, oh why couldn’t people live without bodies? she thought mournfully. Why couldn’t they exist as ghosts, conglomerations of feelings and voices and eyes that floated through space? Then everyone would look the same, and there would be no fat and thin, no such thing as food, no need to run or swim or even walk.

  It was unfortunate that she had not been consulted when humans were being designed.

  After a few minutes, when Martha’s face had faded from red back to its normal color, Shirley came romping back.

  “Don’t you feel terrific?” she cried, prancing before Martha. “I did almost two miles this morning!”

  “That’s great,” Martha said dully.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Martha. It’ll get easier. You’ll see. Tomorrow, you’ll be able to go that much farther.”

  ‘Tomorrow,” Martha replied grumpily, “I’ll be able to sleep that much later.”

  “You’re just tired because your body hasn’t adapted to your new eating habits yet.”

  Martha wished they could stop talking about her limitations, of which, it seemed to her, there was an infinite number. “I believe you have just witnessed the demise of a great athletic career,” she told Shirley firmly. “I’ve got to go home now and take a shower. We’re going to be late for work.”

  The two women trudged out of Carl Schurz Park, just as they had trudged in a half hour earlier. The only difference was that Shirl
ey now felt like a million dollars, and Martha felt like two cents.

  * * * *

  Despite her cynicism, despite her trauma of the morning before, Martha found herself awakening an hour earlier than usual the next morning. All signs of sleepiness were gone, and instead of relishing the extra time to lie in her warm comfortable bed and revel in relaxation, she was haunted by some nagging feeling.

  Go outside and jog, a little voice told her. Go ahead. You have time. It’s a beautiful morning. All you have to do is put on your running shorts and walk a few blocks to the park...

  What was this? Guilt? Masochism? A strange brand of dedication to self-improvement? She lay in bed, one leg thrown outside the sheet, a tie-over from the air bath days, pondering the issues that were coming into play. Did yesterday’s failure really bother her? After years and years of thinking of herself as a physical wreck, how could she be expected to compete with someone as thin and energetic as Shirley? Surely it was impossible for her ever to perform such a feat as running three miles, even if she wanted to.

  When procrastination finally made it impossible to fit in jogging and showering before work, Martha concluded that athletic prowess was simply not in her future.

  She resolutely turned over and tucked her leg back under the sheet. Martha dozed off for the remaining half hour before her day would officially begin with the radio’s helicopter traffic report on roads she had no intention of ever traveling.

  * * * *

  It was Wednesday when the rumors about Aimee Ludlow started flying around the fifteenth floor like a band of wild parakeets. It seemed that her new career as the voice of the noodle magnates had suffered a dangerously inauspicious beginning.

  Shirley came by Martha’s desk at ten o’clock with a huge smirk on her face. “Mart, why don’t you come on down to the Xerox room with me?” she suggested offhandedly.

  Martha’s first inclination was to protest, for she was having fun leafing through the carton of potato casserole recipes sent to her by an unusually creative Methodist cooking club in Short River, Alabama. She knew from her friend’s expression, however, that whatever gossip Shirley was about to transmit was much juicier than Lucille Wainwright’s recipe for potato goulash,

  Kate from Personnel joined them on the stairway.

  “Goodness, Shirley. Did you send out smoke signals? What happened?” Martha could sense that Shirley’s news was something much bigger than the usual promotion or demotion or casual affair between office-mates.

  Once the three of them were secluded in the tiny Xerox room, with no one to overhear except the dull, oversized copying machine, Shirley launched into her exposé.

  “It’s Aimee,” she began hoarsely. She was having difficulty containing her excitement. “I was about to make a phone call just now, and I picked up the phone without noticing that Mr. Shaw was on. He was talking so loudly that he didn’t hear the click when I picked up my extension, and I got to listen to his whole conversation.”

  “With who?” Martha squealed.

  “Whom,” Kate corrected her matter-of-factly.

  “With Aimee. She was calling Mr. Shaw to report on her new job. She spent yesterday at a food show in Minneapolis.”

  “Gee, I’d love to go to Minneapolis,” Martha said wistfully. “I’ve heard it’s a beautiful city.”

  “So what did she say?” Kate liked her gossip fast and clean. She had no time for dramatic delivery or wordy embellishments, especially today, when there was a six-page expense report sitting on her desk, waiting to be typed.

  “Well, Mr. Shaw thought that it would be a pretty simple first assignment for her, that she’d just have to stand there, behind some booth, and look pretty.”

  “She’s fairly good at that,” Kate commented wryly, languidly wrapping her long dark hair around her hand and on top of her head to form an experimental chignon.

  “Anyway,” Shirley went on, “some reporter from the big Minneapolis newspaper who’s really into consumer activism and muckraking picked her out of the crowd and sort of descended upon her. He spent two hours drilling her with questions.”

  “Oh dear,” Martha breathed.

  “He attacked the company’s consumer policies, then asked her to defend them. Then he asked her all kinds of questions about the ingredients in our products ...”

  “Heavens,” Kate remarked. “All those preservatives. And dyes. And God knows what else.”

  “Of course, it goes without saying that Aimee made a complete fool of herself and, more importantly, of Amalgamated Foods. There was a huge article in the Minneapolis paper this morning, condemning the company and its products. And,” she added gleefully, “guess whose photograph was on the front page?”

  “Oh my God,” Kate groaned. “I bet Shaw is having a fit!”

  “What about Aimee?” Martha asked hopefully. “Does this fiasco bring her celebrity career to an unexpected halt?”

  Shirley shook her head. “I don’t know. Mr. Shaw’s final words were, ‘Ludlow, I want to see you in my office as soon as your plane gets in. I’m not leaving here until I see you, so even if you circle La Guardia for eight hours, I’ll still be sitting here, waiting for you!’“

  “I love it,” Kate chortled.

  “That’s something, huh?” Shirley glanced at her watch. “I’d better get back. I’m hoping there’ll be a few more phone calls about this. Being a secretary for a bigwig does have its advantages.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open, too,” Kate offered. “It’ll be interesting to see if Shaw gets Personnel involved in this.”

  “Maybe they’ll start looking for a replacement,” Martha suggested, but her comment was lost in the flurry of bodies evacuating the Xerox room.

  As she wandered back upstairs, still pondering Aimee Ludlow’s colossal failure, Martha found herself in front of Alex Turner’s door.

  “Is Mr. Turner in?” she asked Diane, his secretary.

  “He sure is. But he’s on his way out. He’s leaving on the noon flight to Chicago. If you want to see him you’d better just stick your head in his office.”

  “Mr. Turner?” Martha asked timidly, hovering outside the door of his office.

  “Well, hello, Martha. What a pleasant surprise. I’m sorry I don’t have much time to talk right now. As soon as I manage to fit all these reports inside my briefcase, I’m dashing off to La Guardia. What’s up?”

  “Nothing, really. I just wanted to ask you a question about corporations.”

  “Anything I can answer within five minutes?”

  “I wanted to know how people get promoted. I mean, what determines whether one person is chosen over another?”

  “Hmmm. That’s a complicated question, I’m afraid.” Alex Turner frowned as he reached for his raincoat. “There are a lot of factors that go into a decision like that. Work history, attitude, level of experience, potential ... all the usual measurements that are used to evaluate an employee.”

  “I guess it’s impossible to be right all the time, or to be fair,” Martha mused.

  “Actually, it is tough. And sometimes, decisions get made for the wrong reasons. The results can be disastrous, but somehow, no matter what happens, corporations always manage to keep trudging along. Is there a specific reason why you’re asking about this, Martha?”

  “Oh, no,” she answered quickly. “I was just curious. I’m trying to learn about how big companies operate.”

  “Well, the bottom line for any corporate operation is sales! Right now, I’m heading for Chicago because sales are down in the Midwest, and some of the larger supermarket chains are threatening to drop some of our products if we don’t come up with a program to get sales back up. Doodle Noodles are killing us in Michigan and Illinois. If we’re not on the supermarket shelves, no one can buy us, no matter how much advertising we do. We can talk more when I get back...”

  With that, he hurried off, leaving Martha behind to contemplate the vastness of human imperfection. If people often made decisions for the wrong
reasons, she supposed that it was only fair to expect that corporations would do the same thing too. Still, she found little consolation in that thought as she shuffled back to her desk.

  * * * *

  Saturday night, Martha had her usual date with Eddie. Lisa was gone for the weekend, and Betsy had already left for her Saturday night date, giggling that she probably wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. He came over after dinner.

  “Hiya, Mart. What do you want to do tonight? Hey, what’s that stuff on your face?” He leaned toward her and squinted.

  “It’s just make-up. Don’t you like it?” Martha looked at the floor.

  Eddie studied her face. “It looks stupid. It looks like you’re playing dress-up.”

  “I’ll take it off then.”

  “No, no, don’t bother.” Eddie plopped down on the couch and picked up the television program schedule.

  “Where have you been lately?” Martha asked casually. “You haven’t called for days, and you never seem to answer your phone.”

  “Hey, come on. You know I’ve been busy. I’ve been working a lot, making lots of money. Why? What do you think I’ve been doing?” His face was buried in the program guide.

  “Nothing. I was just wondering. Hey, do you think I look thinner?” A dangerous question, she knew.

  “You always look gorgeous. I like a girl with a little meat on her. You know that.” He put the program guide on the coffee table and looked at her. “So, you want to get a pizza and watch TV?”

  “No. I can’t. I’m on a diet.”

  “Oh, Martha,” Eddie whined. “Will you stop worrying? You look terrific.”

  Martha thought, You sure didn’t think so three weeks ago. But she said nothing. She just made sure they went out to a movie.

  When they shared popcorn, she discreetly tossed her handfuls onto the floor. When they shared a Coke, she put the paper cup to her lips and pretended to swallow, but drank nothing. The sugar tasted wonderful on her lips, though, and she was glad it was only forty-eight hours to the Monday night meeting.