Getting Waisted (8 page)

Hal insisted I could clean up at his sister’s house nearby as she was in Florida. I waited downstairs while he went upstairs to fetch a towel and when he returned he very sweetly dried my hair, then pulled me toward him and kissed me. I pulled away but then felt stupid for being such a baby, so I kissed him back. But his kisses quickly became more insistent, hard, and brutal, and I felt blood bruising my lips. I was stunned that this was happening. I wrenched free but only for a moment, when he grabbed me and pushed me against the front door, his hands pulling at the zipper of my dress as he pushed into me. I tried to pull away but he had me pinned. “Please don’t. Please
. . . Stop.” He lifted my skirt and shoved his hands between my legs, I fought hard but he was so much stronger than I was. “Stop! . . . Please . . . I want to go home.” He ignored my pleas and grabbed my hair, pushing me down onto the floor. He got on top of me, pinning my arms to my sides, ripping my panties as he forced himself into me. I tried to crawl away, but he was not done.

I didn’t speak the entire way home. Harold twiddled with the radio to fill the awful silence. At one point he reached across the wide expanse of seat to stroke my hand. I yanked it away and huddled closer to the door. He had barely pulled up to the curb in front of our house, when I leapt from the car and went inside.

I tiptoed into the house where my overly excited mother was dozing in the dark, waiting. She couldn’t contain herself, wanting all the details of my fabulous night with the handsome doctor. “It was fine, nice. I’m tired.” I wasn’t ready to tell her that when I went to Hal’s house to dry off, he somehow interpreted that as an invitation to rape me.

I shut the door to my room. I wanted to be dead. It was when I undressed that I saw a spot of blood on my precious new shoes. I threw them into the back of the closet, never to be worn again. I sat on the edge of my bed, unmoving for what seemed like hours. I don’t remember having any thoughts. I was numb. When I was sure both my parents were sleeping, I showered in near scalding water until I was so exhausted I was either going to drown or have to get out. I climbed into bed and slept.

I woke up, startled by light flooding into my room as Queen Elizabeth flung open the curtains. I would have preferred she had bricked me in. She stood at the foot of my bed, a shit-eating grin stretched across her face, proffering a bouquet of roses. “He sent you roses; he likes you.” I wanted to tell her I hated him but I knew better, she was already planning our wedding.

I stayed in my room for three days, existing on emergency rations: chocolate bars, bread, cheese, and lots of chips—all kinds. None of it made me feel any better but I knew I didn’t want to be thin anymore. I needed food, lots and lots of food, and I didn’t care if it was good for me, in fact, I wanted it to be poisonous. I didn’t want to feel anything.

Hal called every day but I wouldn’t talk to him. Each time my mother would shake her head in confusion and disgust. Donna, Beverly, Vally, and all my other friends called wanting details. Did we kiss? Are we going out again? I pretended I had the flu and needed to sleep; I couldn’t tell any of them what happened. I threw the Benzedrine away; what did I need diet pills for? But coming off the little black and white pills only added to my misery and I began to shiver with a relentless feeling of coldness that wouldn’t go away. I finally crawled out of my cave and made my way to the kitchen, still in my ratty bathrobe, making sure to avoid any room that had windows overlooking Hal’s sister’s house, in case he might be visiting. I knew I would never set foot in our back garden ever again unless it was under the cover of darkness.

I made cookies and ate the batter, then made more and ate them as soon as I pulled them from the oven, burning myself but barely noticing. I had chocolate chip goo all over me, like some Betty Crocker version of Hester Prynne, only my scarlet letter was brown, my sin worn on my chest for all thin people to see and there was a chorus of them shrieking at me all the time, the loudest of them being my mother. She couldn’t understand my behavior. She was so sure I finally had it all, a boyfriend who was successful and liked me. “What is wrong with you?” I couldn’t tell her, so I just let her think I was moody and weird. She really believed it was me who put a bomb in the middle of it all. “BOOM! Now she has nothing except a lot of new clothes that don’t fit.”
The Trials at Nuremberg had less judgment.

With the fat or without it, I was not the same person. I knew my family loved me, but I couldn’t make a case for myself without telling them the truth and that was never going to happen. I was too ashamed, believing that somehow it was my fault. I shoved everything about that night deep into the vault with the hope that it would stay locked away. But the more I buried the pain and shame, the more I needed to feed.

Weeks passed before I finally emerged from my room, no longer dressed in my self-pity pink flannel, now ready to face the world. I knew it was time for me to move on and move out. I was starting to regret my self-loathing eating binge as the weight I had worked so hard to lose was beginning to circle as it hunted for a perfect place to land.

7

A Bitter Aftertaste

Diet #8
Sucking It Up

Cost
My compass

Weight lost
None

Weight gained
Yes

No one likes change;
that was certainly true in my world and being thin-ish was clearly too much change for me. Having experienced the price that came with thin, being fat was far safer and the pitfalls that came with it far more familiar. Both my parents freaked out when I said I was moving, as that was a change they were clearly not ready for. My mother practically barricaded the front door. “Nobody moves! This is your home but suddenly it’s not enough for you?” She was on a tirade about my room looking like Nagasaki and that I was just playing at being a grown-up. “Who will do your laundry?”

My father had gone pale at the very idea of my leaving, “You can’t, mustn’t. . . . No, it would be very, very bad. You can’t leave me alone with her, your mother. I won’t eat.”

She picked up the gauntlet, “If he does eat, I’ll poison him! You cannot leave me alone with him, it would be like living with a moldy zucchini.”

They were terrified to be alone together and it completely overrode what I needed. My choice was simple. Be the good girl and stay and then who’ll be the moldy zucchini? Me. Or be the bad daughter and have a shot at finding myself. My mother chose to help me pack by pulling everything off the hangers and throwing it all to the floor. “Take a look around, this is how it’ll be in your fancy grown-up apartment.” And my father belligerently practiced being alone as he slunk along the edges of the windows like a garden snake, silent and slithering, ever vigilant, desperate to catch any and all offenders who breached his domain.

But I did it. I left.

I had managed to save a chunk of money, given that my every need was taken care of as long as I was willing to live at home with my parents. Beverly had just taken a cool flat in an old house that I think she wished she could live in by herself but couldn’t afford on her teacher’s salary, so she was thrilled at my decision to join her and our new friend Katja. For me, it was the best medicine to avoid unraveling the ugly tangle that was occupying my mind.

We all have secrets we carry around; some of them are small, carrying no weight at all. Others are heavy, like tightly tied bags of stones, and those are the ones we don’t want anyone to know we have, so we shove them far down, trying to bury them. But like fragments of old wars found in farmers’ fields, the shrapnel couldn’t be contained. My heavy secret was a doozy, so I ploughed it under layers of comfort food.

I was in need of distraction and I had plenty of it, as we were always on the run leaving a trail of messy that none of us cared about. When we went out it was like being with a pair of beautiful bookends: Beverly was the dark, intriguing one; Katja, the sexy hot one; and I was the loud, funny one. I hated being the loud, funny one, but it did attract mindless attention, and attention was what I was after.

Katja’s real name was Kathleen and she had a glass eye from a tobogganing accident when she was five, which made her even more exotic. She was very beautiful but she never had any money. Somehow that never seemed to be a problem; whenever she needed some she’d bat her eye—the good one—and magically some guy would materialize with a full wallet. She seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of rich guys; I would have had to tap dance on someone’s head to summon that kind of attention. Katja told me she needed a new eye, something to do with the blink control not working. She had a date with someone pleasant and fairly unassuming and I watched fascinated as she moved into full operational mode, flirting, teasing, her voice becoming all husky. She was good and this poor fool whom she didn’t even like handed her a wad of money so “poor Kat” could get a new eye. She rewarded him with barely a peck on his cheek. On her way home from her eye fitting at the ophthalmology clinic, she stumbled across a pair of thigh-high purple suede boots in a fancy shoe shop that she just had to have. Knowing she’d find the replacement money for her eye when it came time to make the payment, but figuring the boots may be long gone, she bought them. I would have done the same thing if I had her legs.

I loved every moment shared with these girls. But at night when the parties ended and we all went to our beds, I was left alone to deal with my thoughts: sharp turbulent swings that ricocheted between fantasies of dismembering Hal’s body and dumping each piece in a bottomless pit, and feelings of deep shame that I piled on myself for having led him on. Had I led him on? Was my desperation to lose my virginity so transparent that I asked to be raped? After weeks spent in dead-of-night pathological investigation, going over every possibility from every angle, I became my own hung jury. My conclusion: what’s done is done. It was time to put it to rest, if only so I could get some desperately needed peace.

My mother called every hour on the hour to complain about how crazy my father was making her, standing at his post in the window like some old dried up rubber tree, or he’d be at his drafting table making meticulous calculations on his “sure thing” inventions that others had patented fifty years earlier. She didn’t get how crazy she was making me, but when she realized she wasn’t making a dent in my protective wall, she decided to make her case in person. She stood at the threshold of our front door holding a cardboard box of pastel stuffed animals, which she clutched even tighter once taking in the chaos. After a deep breath she stepped inside with a face that registered something akin to revulsion. She trailed one finger over everything looking for dust and then she sat on the edge of our worn but comfy couch, refusing to take her coat off in case something unspeakable had occurred there. Like a ticking time bomb, she held out the box of bunnies for me to take. It was only a matter of seconds before she pulled a couple of them from the box and dangled them menacingly in front of my face. “You begged me for these.”

“I was ten! You are looking for a fight but I won’t be goaded.”

She couldn’t comprehend the change in me that had come with my new address, and none of it made any sense to her—me passing on the potential doctor boyfriend and leaving our very safe and clean house with home cooking included. Mostly she needed to vent, “I’m going to take an axe and kill him.” I quietly told her I was sorry she was so miserable but he was her husband, not mine, and she had invited him back into her home because she had to have a better address and needed his bankbook to help pay for it. “That’s right and I did it for you and I want you to come home to live, where there are no cockroaches and perverts.” I had an involuntary reminder of how wrong she was before I made the mistake of laughing. She stood up, impaled me with a look, and left in a huff without saying a word. None of it fazed me. After all, Queen Elizabeth was just being true to herself.

Beverly had gone off with a new boyfriend to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and Katja was just gone but called one morning to ask me to sell her bed as she had met the love of her life. She had called and asked me to do the same thing last month. I didn’t. I was standing in front of the fridge debating between making a healthy but unsatisfying salad or just succumbing to the pull of the mac and cheese I really wanted. Just as I was reaching for the macaroni, one of Kat’s throwaways called looking for her. I broke the bad news that she was engaged or something but told him to hang in there, knowing she’d be back on the auction block in a week or two. He laughed and introduced himself as Nick, wanting to know who I was. I was about to say no one but then realized . . . I was just a voice on the phone . . . he couldn’t see me.
Ta da
. I emerged from my black hole ready to play. I was funny, sexy, and sassy. He was so captivated that we talked for several hours, and the next night he called back to talk to
me
. Before long, those nights morphed into a few weeks. I couldn’t wait to get home from work and become
that
girl, the one he was so desperate to meet, the one I was so desperate he didn’t.

I remained convincingly Mata Hari-like until one night he asked me if I had a physical impairment. “Are you part lizard, part woman? Is that why you won’t meet me?”

I swallowed my panic and laughed as I tossed my head back and went for it, “I am blonde, green-eyed, and fully equipped.” He was on his way.

I knew this day would come as I jumped into the shower, washed my hair and blew it out into all its blonde glory, wondering if I took a full bottle of diet pills, did a colonic, stuck my fingers down my throat and threw up everything I had ever eaten, wrapped myself in saran and steamed for . . . forget it, it was hopeless. I was like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon: large and colorful, and in danger of exploding. I was so screwed!

I squeezed my body into a full body condom, yanking that bitch up over my hips until I could no longer bend. I could barely breathe, but I hauled that thing up as if it were a Polish kielbasa sausage casing, and then I stood very carefully hoping nothing would fly out. My boobs were pushed up so high they looked like floatation devices. Maybe he was into that; maybe he was different and maybe he wouldn’t care. I slid on a black dress knowing full well black magic was what I really needed. The lumps and bumps were definitely smoother but my organs were crushed. I opened a bottle of wine just as the doorbell rang. I sucked in my tummy, but in a nano second of instinctual self-preservation, I answered the door with just my hair showing. “Hi!” Oh God, oh shit . . . he was gorgeous. I tried to get behind a chair but I felt him staring at me . . . His silence was loaded as he looked at me and shook his head. It was subtle but I caught it. I was hurt and angry. “Yup, that’s me—part lizard, part female hippo. . . . Oopsie.” I actually felt sorry for Nick. He was busted and he was unsure of what to do next. The silence between us just kept widening until I stepped forward, patted his hand, and held open the door. We both shared a polite smile. The wine didn’t even have a chance to breathe and
poof
he was gone.

He wasn’t different.

In spite of things not working out between Beverly and her boyfriend, she still arrived home euphoric from climbing the mountain to its summit. Katja wasn’t far behind her, cavalierly carving another notch on her belt. “Another one bites the dust.” I, however, was devastated but in typical fashion I told no one, swallowing my pain with the same fervor as a drunk on a bender, only my poison of choice required chewing—lots of chewing.