Best Friends Forever (31 page)

28:13.” Her voice was hoarse. Outside the

windows, the sun was coming up, which

made it, by Dan’s fuzzy reckoning, Sunday

morning. They’d been at it for hours,

kneeling bare-kneed on the wooden floor,

with only a cup of chicken broth for

sustenance, a few hours’ sleep, and only

one bathroom break (when Dan had worked

up the courage to ask for another, she’d

merely looked at him narrowly and launched

into another prayer).

He pressed his hand against his head,

feeling faint. When Merry looked at him,

when she spoke to him about his sins, about

the harm he had done to Addie and to Val,

she didn’t look angry, she looked…He

shook his head. Never mind how she

looked. He had to get out of here. “Listen,”

he said in a voice as raspy as hers. “Merry. I

have a friend.”

She stared at him impassively.

“Chip Mason. Remember him?”

She shook her head. “Another idolator.

‘He that shal blaspheme against the Holy

Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in

danger of eternal damnation.’ Mark 3:29.”

“He’s changed,” said Dan, hearing the

edge of desperation creeping into his voice,

but unable to stop it. “If I did something

wrong—and I’m not saying I did…”

“ And it shal come to pass,’” Merry

continued, raising her voice, “ in that day,

that the Lord shal punish the host of the

high ones that are on high, and the kings of

the earth upon the earth.’”

“I want to talk to Chip,” Dan said, keeping

his head down, his voice low. “He’s a minister

now. I want to make amends.”

That shut her up. She stared at him, lips

clamped together, final y quiet, watching

him.

“I want to go to my church. Chip’s church,”

he said, and held his breath as time

stretched out until, final y, she gave one brief

nod. She handed him clothes he guessed

belonged to her father—baggy old khakis, a

mothbal y plaid shirt, a pair of cracked old

rubber boots that pinched his toes—and led

him out into the twilight, to a minivan

festooned with HONK IF YOU LOVE THE

LORD bumper stickers. She waited until

he’d fastened his seat belt, then drove into

the sunrise.

FORTY

By the time I turned thirty, my weight hovered somewhere south of three hundred and fifty pounds. That was just my best guess. I didn’t ever weigh myself, and I didn’t go to doctors—in fact, I rarely left my house. By 2004, you could get almost anything you wanted: your clothes, your groceries, new toothbrushes and dental floss, fancy chocolates, art supplies—over the Internet. Supplement that with the pizza and Chinese food and the dry cleaner’s that did pickup and delivery, and weeks could pass without my venturing beyond the end of my driveway unless I was on my way to visit Jon. Mostly, I was happy at home, fil ing my days with books and work, my online Scrabble games and the little black cat that sometimes came by my door, but every once in a while, I’d get an itch. I’d want to go to a department store and spray a new perfume on my wrists, to browse in a bookshop, holding the hard-covers in my hands, cracking their spines, smel ing the paper. I’d want to go to Pearl Art Supply and touch the bristles of the paintbrushes, or sit in a coffee shop or a restaurant, eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations, look at different faces; be part of the ebb and flow of a normal day.

One winter morning I’d found myself at the post office. I could order my stamps online and arrange for FedEx pickups for my art, but I liked one of the clerks—she remembered my name, and I’d ask her about her grandchildren or her vacations. Walking back to my car, picking my way along the slushy sidewalks of what passed for Pleasant Ridge’s downtown, I’d paused in front of a diner with a neon sign in the window reading HOT APPLE PIE. Trans-fixed, I stood there, watching the words light up, one at a time: HOT…APPLE…PIE. A piece of hot apple pie, maybe with ice cream on top and a cup of coffee, sounded like just the thing for this chil y, overcast day. The hostess looked at me dubiously before leading me to a booth. Booths, I saw, were al they had, unless you counted the spinning seats bolted in front of the long, curving counter, and I knew for sure that I wouldn’t fit on one of them.

I took a deep breath, sucked it in, and slid into the seat. The hostess dropped a menu in front of me and fled. This was a mistake, I thought, even before the little kid in the booth in front of mine turned around and stared at me. I tried a wave. Ignoring my overture, the kid turned to his mother and whispered loudly, “Why is that lady so fat?”

“Probably because she eats large portions of foods that aren’t healthy,” the mother responded without bothering to lower her voice. I felt my face heat up. What ever happened to a simple Shh! or I’l

explain it to you later?

By the time my waitress arrived, I’d given up on the pie—I was too ashamed to order or eat it in front of judge-y Mommy, and the edge of the table was digging painful y into my bel y.

I asked for a cup of soup, slurped it down as fast as I could, scalding my mouth in the process, slapped a ten-dol ar bil on the table, and was poised to make my getaway…except I couldn’t. I was stuck. I pushed my hands on top of the table, inhaled hugely, and pushed as hard as I could, wriggling my ass as I shoved. Nothing was happening. I tried again, a little squeak escaping me. Stil nothing. “Mommy,” said the kid through a mouthful of half-chewed French fries (the little brat had turned around and propped himself up on his knees, so as not to miss a minute of the show), “is the fat lady stuck?”

My waitress wandered over. “Everything al right?”

“I’m fine,” I managed. I was sweating—I could feel it trickling down my back and my sides in hot rivulets—and I was sure my face was red as a stop sign. “I’m fine,” I repeated, and sucked, and pushed, and as I final y, thank

you

God,

felt

myself

move

incremental y to the left, toward freedom, a single word rose up in my mind, and that word, which might as wel have been written in ten-foot-high neon letters that had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire, was ENOUGH. I had had ENOUGH.

Head down, I hurried out of the restaurant and back to my car. I drove home. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, pul ed a trash bag out of a kitchen cupboard, and then, before I could lose my nerve or change my mind, I swept every piece of junk food in the house into that bag, the chips and cakes and candies, the cups of pudding and frozen pies, the boxes of muffin and brownie mix, the Valentine’s Day chocolates, the canisters of heat-andeat biscuits and cinnamon rol s. I fil ed the first bag, then another, then loaded them both into the trunk of my car, drove them to the dump, and tossed them. Then I drove to Dr. Shoup, the oncologist who’d treated my mother twelve years before, the only doctor I knew.

I gave my name to her secretary, explaining that I didn’t have an appointment but that I needed to see the doctor as soon as she could manage. Then I sat in her waiting room, holding Good Housekeeping open in front of my face, trying not to let any of the other patients, the ladies in wigs and scarves, see that I was crying, because if they saw, they’d probably think that I was sick, like they were, that there was something wrong with me besides too much dessert.

Dr. Shoup was wonderful y calm. Her eyes did not widen as she saw me for the first time in over a decade, and her hands, when she took my blood pressure and listened to my heart, were steady and gentle.

“There’s no big secret to weight loss,” she told me. “Burn more calories than you’re taking in, and you can expect to lose a pound or two a week.”

Dr. Shoup handed me a sheet with a twelve-hundred-calorie-a-day diet,

a

prescription for a diet pil that, she said, might take the edge off my appetite, and, after I’d told her that I was having trouble sleeping, a prescription for pil s that would help with that.

“Good luck,” she said, and sent me home.

My diet, which was a mash-up of every weight-loss plan I’d read in any women’s magazine, started the next morning. For breakfast, I’d have two poached eggs, a slice of mul-tigrain toast, and water. For lunch, I’d have a big salad with sprouts and beans, a drizzle of olive oil, and four ounces of salmon or chicken. For a snack, I’d have blueberries and almonds and a stick of string cheese. For dinner, I’d have another four ounces of chicken or fish and a bowlful of broccoli or spinach, plus half a cup of brown rice or half of a potato. For dessert, I’d have sleeping pil s, enough to knock me out until the next morning. I had twelve hours’ worth of wil power. I couldn’t let my days go any longer than that.

It was brutal. There were nights when I’d lie awake practical y crying until the sleeping pil s took hold, thinking about warm corn muffins with melted butter and honey, crispskinned fried chicken and biscuits soaked in sausage gravy, chili with a dol op of sour cream and chopped onions on top. Pound cake, shortcake, blackout chocolate mousse cake, gelato, biscotti, biscuits and popovers, caramel popcorn and warm apple pie, which I knew I’d probably never be able to eat again.

In eight months’ time, I’d made my way from scary-fat into the neighborhood of regular-fat, where I could fit into the clothes at the plus-size shop at the mal , instead of having to order everything on the Internet, where I could walk down a street and not feel like everyone was staring at me and I was going to col apse from the effort. I could tie my shoes without sweating, I could wear pants with snaps and zippers. “You look fantastic,” said people I’d never spoken to before, people I’d never noticed noticing me.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing special,” I would say. “Just cutting back.” Meanwhile, I would think, suffer. What I did was suffer.

“Nice work,” said Dr. Shoup when I came for a checkup. “We can do a tummy tuck when you’ve hit your goal weight and stayed there for a while.” She looked me over dispassionately.

“You should get some exercise. Tone up a bit. Find something you like.”

I looked at her. If there’d been an exercise I’d liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

She noticed my expression. “Find something you can tolerate,” she amended.

“And do it for at least thirty minutes, five times a week.”

“Does sex count?” I asked. Ha—like I was having any of that.

“Anything that gets your heart working at its aerobic threshold,” she said. Trust Dr. Shoup not to get a joke. “Maybe start with something low-impact. Walking or swimming.

”

I drove home thinking about my mother, the way I’d always pictured her as a teenager, swimming through the lake at summer camp with my father’s arrow in her summer camp with my father’s arrow in her hand. I got online and ordered a swimsuit, a one-piece in dark purple from a company that specialized in “the active lives of larger women.” The morning it arrived, I bundled the swimsuit and a beach towel into a tote bag and drove myself to a fancy health club I’d passed on my way to see my brother. There I al owed myself to be bul ied into a one-year membership by a woman who was maybe

twenty-two

years

old

and

approximately the size of my right thigh. My gold-level membership, she recited, while keeping her eyes careful y trained on the wal above my shoulder, came complete with one session with a personal trainer, free towel service, and a half-off coupon for the juice bar.

“We also offer complimentary body analysis,” she said. In addition to being tiny, she was deeply, alarmingly tanned. She looked like a tangerine with a ponytail.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Height, weight, body-fat percentage…”

“I’l skip it,” I said hastily.

“…Then you run on the treadmil for twelve minutes…” She looked at me. “Or walk.

Whatever. Then there’s a sit-up test, and a flexibility test, and we enter al the data into the computer…”

“Skip! Skip! Skip!” I was positive that I couldn’t do a sit-up to save my life, and what would the computer tel me after they’d sent it my data? Probably that I owed the treadmil an apology. I glanced through the wal of windows, toward the Olympic-sized pool. There were three swimmers, a man and two women, al of them in swim caps and goggles. I didn’t have a swim cap or goggles. “Do you sel swim stuff?” I asked the tiny tangerine.

“Oh. Um. No.” She giggled. I guessed that she’d never seen anyone as big as I was.

People my size were, most likely, infrequent and unwelcome visitors to the land of free weights and stairclimbers and Yogalates stretch classes. I felt like tel ing her that she didn’t have to worry, that I wouldn’t break anything or eat anyone, but I decided that cal ing attention to her discomfort would only increase it.

I struggled out of the little foam-and-wire armchair across from her desk. “When is the pool the busiest?”

“Mornings,” she said. “It’s real crowded right when we open, which is at six, and it stays busy until eight. Then it’s busy at lunchtime, and then it kind of empties out, and it gets real busy after four or five.”

“So how are things at ten in the morning?”

“Ten’s pretty empty.”

I thanked her and made my way to the locker room. In my purple skirted suit, in the unforgiving three-way mirrors at the end of the locker room, with wobbly white flesh fore and aft, even with the weight I’d lost I bore a disconcerting resemblance to Barney. Ah wel , I thought, and dunked underneath the shower and made my way into the steamy, chemical-scented air of the pool.

The two women swimmers were gone by then. There was just one man with silvery hair and black goggles doing the crawl, plowing up and down the lap lane closest to the windows.

I stuck a toe into the water, which was as warm as a bath, then eased myself, inch by inch, down the steps and into the shal ow end, al the while maintaining a death grip on the metal handrail, terrified that I would slip and fal and hit my head and drown, and that my death would be written up in News of the