Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer (10 page)

“Where on earth is Djibouti?”

“The Horn of Africa, not that far from Yemen. So I was thinking—”

“Oh, my God, Fletch. Fletch!”

“What?”

“Ask me where Djibouti is!”

“Pardon?” With an eye on the rearview mirror, he passes the slower drivers. Which, according to him, is every single person on the road.

“I said, ask me where Djibouti is!”

“I’m aware of where it is. I just
told
you; were you not listening again, or can you not find Africa on that big blue ball on a stick we keep in the den?”

“Please ask; I promise it will be worth it.”

“No.” Zoom, zoom; eat our dust, other motorists.

“Just play along for once in your life.”

He grips the wheel more tightly and squares his shoulders. “No.”

“Please! I won’t commandeer a bite of your dessert if you do, I swear.”

Through clenched teeth, Fletch asks, “OK, Jen; where’s Djibouti?”

“In my pants!”

I spend the next ten minutes braying like a jackass, rendering further conversation impossible until we get to the restaurant.

Having yet to learn a thing about moderation, I stuff myself with breadsticks dipped in Alfredo sauce, calamari squeezed with lemon and doused in chunky marinara, chicken Roma with a thick dusting of freshly grated Parmesan, cheesecake, and about fifteen Italian orange cream sodas. I take in enough calories to sustain an African village for a week. Oy.

Shortly after we get back in the car, I begin to whimper.

“Now why are you complaining?” Fletch asks. “With all this traffic, I’m not speeding. Look.” He gestures toward the speedometer. “I’m not even going forty.”

“Your driving is fine,” I moan.

“Then, what’s the matter?”

“I ate too much,” I wail, unbuttoning my pants and pulling down my zipper. “And now my Djibouti hurts.”

After the setback at the Olive Garden, I decide to give Atkins one last chance after reviewing the Weight Watchers cook-book. I’m guessing Dr. Awesome wouldn’t approve of this way of eating, but I’m desperate for some real progress. If I had a tiny bit of tangible success, I know I’d be motivated to eat better and exercise more. As it is now, I’m so sapped of energy that I haven’t even been to the gym in a few weeks.

Fletch has had a rough week in the office, so I decide to humor him by ordering dinner from his favorite rib joint. Ribs, especially those covered in sugary barbecue sauce, are an Atkins no-no, so I pick a green salad covered with grilled chicken. Yawn.

When the food arrives, I’m upstairs cleaning the bathroom, so Fletch assembles our plates. The house rule is, we eat at the kitchen table unless we have delivery, and then we get to have dinner
and
watch television. Woo! When I sit down next to Fletch, the smell of barbecue wafts up to greet me, and there’s no less than two pounds of food piled on his plate. “Mmm, something smells incredible. What did you get again?”

“I’m having the rib sampler—there’s baby backs, spareribs, and rib tips.” He gestures to each cut of meat with a giant half-eaten bone as he names it, and it kind of looks like he’s playing the drums in the Flintstones’ band. He also has a huge chunk of cornbread and a giant pile of French-fried sweet potatoes on a side plate because he has so many ribs, the sides wouldn’t all fit. “Want to try some?”

“Um, I probably shouldn’t . . . but it smells so good.” Here’s the thing—I’m a huge fan of barbecued ribs, but I’m also incredibly fussy about them. Seems like everywhere I order them they’re too spicy, too tough, or too fatty. Maybe there’s too much cartilage or they’re so stringy, I get tired while chewing them. It’s rare that I ever happen upon the correct juxtaposition of meaty, tender, and slightly sweet, but not for lack of trying. I’m always so excited to get them, yet I’m perpetually disappointed.

I prepare myself for another letdown as I sink my teeth into a spare rib. The meat falls off the bone the second it hits my mouth. The sweet sauce has the perfect amount of heat—not too spicy, but with enough of a red-chili-powder kick to wake my every taste bud. It’s delicately smoked and juicily perfect; I can tell exactly how low and slow it has been cooked. This easily ranks in the top ten. “This is transcendent,” I tell Fletch, placing the rest of the rib back on his plate.

“Go ahead and finish it. There’s plenty more.” he says.

But I can’t. If I have one more bite, then I will go in the kitchen and toss back the pound of meat that’s still sitting in the take-out container. I desperately want to roll around in that damned barbecue sauce, but if I do, then I’m going to go out of ketosis and I’ll have to start the induction phase
again
.

I open up my salad and begin to eat it instead. Suddenly the crisp bed of romaine is far less appealing than I imagined it would be. I stab a bite with my fork and reply, “No, that’s OK. Thanks, though.”

I continue to stab, chew, and shoot angry glances at Fletch’s glistening pile of sweet, sweet meat.

Stab. Chew. Glower.

Stab. Chew. Glower.

“Um, Jen? You OK?” Fletch asks.

“I’m fine.” Stab. Chew. Glower.

“Are you sure?”

“
Yes
.” Stab. Chew. Glower.

“Jen, if you want ribs, have ribs. There’s a ton of them,” he reasons. He sounds exactly like I did in college when my best friend, Andy, was trying to quit smoking. I knew it was much healthier for him to be a nonsmoker, but he was such a bitch that I finally convinced him we’d both be happier if he just smoked already.
⁷⁰

“That’s the thing,” I reply. “I’ve had every single thing I’ve wanted for dinner for the past three years. Maybe if I’d had a salad once in a while, I’d have earned my own slab of ribs right now.” Stab. Chew. Glower.

“Want me to eat in the other room? Is this torturing you?”

“No. I’m fine. I’ll just enjoy my
salad.
Mmm, lettuce-y!” Stab. Chew. Glower. I watch as he takes a bite of his cornbread and a giant drop of golden butter plops onto the ottoman. “That bread is literally dripping with butter,” I accuse.

He’s quiet for a minute, and I see him surreptitiously trying to wipe the excess butter off the sides of his mouth. “Your, um, salad looks very nice. What kind of dressing did they give you?”

“Boring bleu cheese.”

Stab. Chew. Glower.

Stab. Chew. Glower.

Fletch hands me the television remote. “Here; you can drive,” he says.

“Wow, thanks!” I reply. “Is this you throwing me a proverbial bone because of my stupid salad?”

“No. I can’t work it because my hands are covered in gooey, delicious barbecue sauce.” To emphasize his point, he sucks the sauce off each finger and smacks his lips.

I shriek, “Evil! You’re evil! What an evil thing to say!”

He shrugs. “I figured if you’re going to be passive-aggressive and scowl at my food the whole time, I’ll one-up you by being aggressive-aggressive.”

Yikes. You see? This is what not having carbs does to people.

“Oh, Fletch, I’m sorry,” I backpedal. “My salad is fine. The chicken is grilled nicely, and there are whole chunks of bleu cheese. The cheese is nice and sharp, and the bacon bits are chewy and not crunchy. The dressing is thick so it doesn’t sluice through the leaves. Actually, it’s kind of a great salad. The thing is, even if this is the best salad in the world, it’s not a barbecued rib and it never will be and it makes me sad.”

He smiles. “It’s okay.”

“No, really, it’s not. You might not want to be so quick to forgive me, because somehow I’m still mad at you even though you didn’t do anything.”

He frowns at me and takes a purposefully enormous bite. We finish our meal in a thick silence (except for all the intentional and prolonged finger licking), and afterward I go upstairs to replace the towels in the bathroom.

While I fold the fluffy white cotton fabric and place the squares neatly on the bars, I realize that not only am I still hungry, but also I’ve made Fletch mad. The only reason I picked at him was because I wanted some damn carbohydrates. Dinnertime is usually one of our favorite opportunities to connect and really talk without distraction, but ever since I started this diet, our meals have been rife with tension because I’ve been unhappy with whatever’s been on my plate. Christ, he’s already under enough stress at work—the last thing he needs is to catch a bunch of shit from me just because I’m not having Tater Tots.

Is
this
what I have to look forward to as I try to live a healthier life? Complaining about my meals and thus ruining it for everyone around me while they try to eat their ribs?

Sure, I can be a stress eater and have been known to snack out of boredom, but the thing is, I truly love and appreciate good food. Dining is one of my greatest pleasures. But right now I feel like I’ve been denied every flavor that makes life worth living, and I’m cranky and unsatisfied, and I’m taking it out on the one person who could use a little extra compassion right now. I really have to wonder why I’m even bothering to try to lose weight.

So far it’s just not worth it.

from the desk of the logan square
-
bucktown neighborhood association

Dear Mayor Daley,

Can you please include better fast-food joints in your plans for urban redevelopment in the Logan Square- Bucktown area? As is, there are no decent hamburger places for miles and miles. There’s no Rally’s, no Checkers, no Jack in the Box, no Hardee’s, no Carl’s Jr., no Red Robin, no In-N-Out Burger, and no Culver ’s ButterBurgers. For God’s sake, we don’t even have an Arby’s.

What the hell? Did we lose a war or something?

Also, I called 911 last week because one of my stupid neighbors was working on his forty-year-old hoodless purple Plymouth and kept driving it around the block at seventy miles per hour. When I called the police, they were very rude. They kept asking me what the license plate number was, and I kept telling them I couldn’t see it because they were driving by too fast. I gave them the car owner’s address, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. They asked, “How are we supposed to identify the vehicle without a plate number?” And I replied, “It’s the only forty-year-old purple Plymouth with no hood making seventy-mile-an-hour laps around the block.” They never came, and now I’m pissed. Please fix.

BTW, a really good hamburger would probably go a long way toward unruffling my feathers. Think about it.

Best,

Jen Cognito, Association President

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gentlemen, Start Your Cheesecakes

"Wrong. No. No way. Uh-uh. Over my, and by extension, your, dead body.”

"I’m presenting this as an option.”

Fletch has just gotten home from work and has joined me in the guest room, where I’m working on my first piece of fiction. He sits down on the bed across from where I’m positioned at my computer.

“Well, stop thinking about it, because it’s out of the question. You probably just had a bad day and your judgment is off,” I reply. I cross my arms to emphasize my point.

“We have the cash reserves,” Fletch counters.

“Yes, and they’re in case the unthinkable happens, and not because people at work are
mean
and you want to
quit
.”

“You’re oversimplifying the situation, and you know it.”

He’s right. He was hired to be a high-level business strategist, inking long-lead-time deals with CEOs. However, the company is in such a panic for instant sales and cash, they’re having all their sales executives do entry-level stuff like make cold calls to IT directors, exactly the kind of work Fletch did ten years ago when starting his career. They also eliminated bonuses.

“I know; those asshats lured you away from your very secure, albeit boring, telecom job with promises of fat bonuses and complete autonomy, and now you’re reporting to a high school grad about how many ‘dials’ you made today.”

“Exactly. That’s why I want to give notice.”

“Don’t you see?” I ask. “They’re trying to drive you out, not because of your poor performance, but because they made bad business decisions. If there was ever a shadow of a doubt they weren’t going to be economically viable for the long run, they should have never rallied so hard to get you to join the organization.” I take a quick breath and try to return my voice to a less shout-y level. “The thing is, if you quit, they don’t have to give you a severance package and they don’t have to pay unemployment.”

“I’ll get another job in a heartbeat.”

“Ha! Where have I heard
that
before?”
⁷¹

Fletch counters, “Things are very different now. We have resources . . . my 401(k), an IRA, stocks, et cetera. And I’m getting ten recruiter calls a week.” He adds, smiling, “Plus we have our ‘savings account.’ ” (Which is actually a big beer pitcher full of quarters.)

I pull up our online bank account and examine the balances. “There’s no reason to burn these resources unnecessarily, and I guarantee none of this”—I point at the screen—“will last as long as you think. We pledged we’d never cash in our ‘savings’ at the Coinstar again.”

Fletch says nothing, scanning the figures over my shoulder. I continue, “Make them fire you or lay you off, because you can’t walk out of there on principle alone without what’s due to you. Otherwise, you’ll have left your phone company job in vain, and if I have to worry about income, I’m going to inevitably eat so much, we’ll need the jaws of life to break me out of this house. Am I making sense here?”

Fletch nods slowly. “Yeah, you’re right. Walking out is a bad idea, but after the day I had, it seemed like a reasonable alternative.”

“Whatever’s bothering you now is going to get worse because they want you to check out voluntarily.”

Fletch looks thoughtful. “Honestly, it’s probably just a matter of a couple of weeks anyway. I’m guessing they’ll do a big purge before they get stuck paying out commissions at the end of the month. I’ve already packed up almost everything, so I’m ready to be cut loose as soon as they give the word.”

I give him a quick pat on the head. “You always do the right thing.” I close the window for my banking information and return to what I’d been doing.

Fletch lies back down on the bed and closes his eyes for a couple of minutes, deep in thought. “Hey, wait a minute.” He sits back up. “If money’s such a concern, shouldn’t this be a team effort?”

“Of course.” I nod. “That’s why I’m working on my novel.”

“The
Veronica Mars
meets
The Net
thing? How’s it coming? Did you send the synopsis to your agent?”

“Yeah, and Kate said she dug the premise. And I could so easily convert it to a screenplay.”

“Nice. How much progress have you made?”

I squirm a bit. “Enough.” Fletch totally supports my writing career, although he normally doesn’t read my stuff. I bounce almost all my ideas off of him, but he says he’s already lived everything I describe, so there’s no need for the blow by blow. He’s right, except he may not realize I, um,
adopt
some
⁷²
of his funniest lines and attribute them to myself.

“Can I hear what you have?” he asks.

Uh-oh.

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “It’s, um, really rough. And since when do you want to know about the details? You always say you’re a big-picture guy.”

“Maybe I’ll bring a different perspective.”

“Sure, OK, but it’s so, so rough. You should wait until it’s more polished.”

“Jen, I’m familiar with your writing process. It’s a rough draft, which means your draft? Will be rough. I’m curious to see how you work in the network security aspect of the story.”

"I’m ... not really there yet.”

“Then how did you explain about the protagonist being a hacker? Everything hinges on that plot point, right?”

I am so freaking
pwn3d
right now.

“Err . . . still fleshing that bit out.”

He begins to look suspicious. “And the mystery surrounding her family?”

I pluck my T-shirt out of my armpits because I’ve started to sweat. Hard. “Oh, yeah . . . that bit of exposition isn’t appropriate to address yet.”

“Then read me the part where she gets busted by the NSA.”

Straws. Me. Grasping.

I bolt out of my desk chair. “Dogs! Maisy! Loki! Who wants to go outside? Huh? Who needs to make a potty? Oops, no; I can’t read it now; the dogs haven’t been out in hours. OK, guys; let’s go!” Both of them gaze languidly at me from their side-by-side position on the guest bed, barely thumping their tails.

Fucking traitors.

Fletch narrows his eyes. “Have you even finished a chapter yet?”

“Ha! Of course!” I squawk. “Of course I have! Not completed a chapter? That’s crazy talk! You know what we should do? We should go buy you a new belt. You love belts, and you’ve been bitching that your oxblood-colored one is getting ratty. Let’s go to Coach! Right now! Belts! Yes! You had a terrible day and deserve something extraspecial.” I dash over to my closet to put on shoes. “Ready!” I grab his arm and try to pull him off the bed.

“Jen.” His voice becomes very serious. “How much have you done?”

“Plenty!” I giggle nervously. “Good and plenty! Like the candy!”

His patience has worn thin, and he looks me directly in the eye. “Is this book going to be ready to send to editors in the next month? Otherwise, if tapping into our reserves is going to give you palpitations, and you don’t have any writing to sell, the most logical solution is that you start temping again, at least for a short while.”

I gasp so hard, I suck all the air out of the room. Noooooo!

“Now, are you gonna show me what you’ve got?”

Very, very slowly I pull up the Word document, temporarily titled
Jen Rocks Fiction
. With a heavy heart, I click it open. “Keep in mind, the opening line can make or break a book, so it’s got to kick serious ass.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really, would
A Tale of Two Cities
be the same without ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?”

He leans back against the dogs and they respond by licking his cheeks with much enthusiasm. Suck-ups. If you little bastards think we’re going on walkies later, think again. “Yes.”

“But you don’t disagree it’s important. If I were to say, ‘Call me Ishmael,’ you’d know in a heartbeat I meant
Moby-Dick
, right?”

“Is this a quiz? ’Cause if you say, ‘Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die,’ the answer is
Fight Club
. Quit stalling. We’ve established the importance of an opening line. Move on to the part where you read me what you’ve got.”

I clear my throat. “This is the scene where the heroine is getting ready for a big job interview at the college placement office. So here goes: ‘I look like Donald Rumsfeld in this out fit.’ ” I stop to gauge his approval.

He chuckles. “I like it; it’s very
you.
Continue.”

I was hoping he wouldn’t say that.

“Um . . . that’s . . . that’s kind of all I have right now. But it’s superintriguing, right? People will want to know what’s next.”

“You’ve been writing for three months, and all you have is one line? In three months? One line?” He’s not mad so much as incredulous.

“It’s a really good line,” I insist. “And fiction is a lot different than nonfiction. With nonfiction I just have to describe the scenes as they happen around me, and the pages sort of write themselves. With fiction I have to make everything up.”

He glances down at his fingers. “So far you’ve made up eight words.”

“Yet the story has taken shape nicely in my head.”

“Then it’s a shame the oral storytelling tradition is dead or you’d be all set. What have you been doing up here? I thought you were working all this time. You spend hours, no,
days
on this computer. Tell me you haven’t pissed away three months playing Big Kahuna Reef.”
⁷³

“Don’t be silly. I’ve done all sorts of stuff. I’ve been very busy dieting. And, um, researching what I need to know about her character,” I bristle.

Fletch leans over me to pull up my cache of Web sites, and I watch him scan the list, his eyebrows going higher and higher with each line he reads. By the time he gets to the end, they’ve practically disappeared into his hairline. “Really? Because it seems like you’ve mostly been cruising YouTube. How can you sit there and lecture me on what I should be doing to support this household when you’re doing nothing but watching
a goddamn panda sneeze
?”

I’m silent for a minute because he’s completely right, so I have to level with him. “The truth is, I really tried to do something with this novel, but I’ve been so hungry that every time I began to type I ended up with a fourteen-page ‘Ode to the Oreo.’ I’d talk about how my character opened the bag and how the smell of chocolate cookie practically smacked her in the face. And then I’d describe grabbing a pitcher of milk—ooh,
whole
milk—and how it would pour out all cool and smooth and rich, and then she’d twist open two Double Stufs, toss away the clean sides, and stack the other two together to make her signature ‘Quad Stuff.’ Then she’d dunk this heady concoction, this Mother of All Oreos, into the cold milk, and she’d pop the delectable bite into her mouth and—”

“You’re doing it again.”

“No, I’m explaining where my time went. I’d write all this ridiculous stuff about cookies, and then I wanted to actually
see
someone eat Oreos—”

“Sort of like watching food porn?”

“Exactly! So I Googled Oreo commercials, and a bunch of them were on YouTube, and I’d never really been to YouTube before, and you would not believe the shit they’ve got there! Dogs on skateboards! Cats falling off televisions! And, of course, sneezing pandas. I, um, kind of got distracted, but the good news is, it got me to stop thinking about cookies, which is why I was able to write such a great opening line. If you think about it, finding the sneezing panda was a good thing.”

He kisses me briefly on the forehead. “The reality is, if we want to keep our safety net, we don’t have time for you to be a temperamental artist, scanning the ‘interwebs’ to be inspired by pandas with sinusitis. I know the deal was, you’d stay home, write, and run the household, but our situation has changed.”

I know when I’ve been defeated. “I’m not going to argue because I can’t. You’re right, and . . . the possibility exists I’ve been taking advantage of the situation.”

“Maybe there’s a compromise here?” He looks thoughtful for a moment. “I’d say you haven’t been properly motivated. You do much better with a deadline. How many times have your manuscripts been late?”

"Never.”
⁷⁴

“Could be a hard-and-fast end date is what you need. How about we agree that if you don’t have something to show Kate by the time my company lays me off, you return to temping until I start working again?”

My natural charm is not going to get me out of this. “I have no grounds to say no deal, do I?”

“Not a one.”

“But it took me months to come up with the opening line. How am I supposed to finish a whole novel in the next few weeks?”

“Perhaps”—he smirks—“
Jen Rocks Fiction
isn’t the book you work on next. What about nonfiction? Don’t you have any more neighborhood stories to tell?”

“Not unless someone new moves in.” Because it’s winter, things have been kind of quiet around the ’hood. Maybe a little
too
quiet.

“Well, what else do you have? Didn’t your friend suggest you do a book about dieting?”

“Yeah . . . great idea, but that seems like a whole lot of work. If I wrote it, I’d actually
have
to lose the weight, and it would be a struggle not to lapse into the Oreo Zone again. Don’t get me wrong. I want to be thinner and healthier—I’m just not sure I should stake my whole writing career on my ability to avoid Ding Dongs. After all, Atkins has been a holy disaster, and so far all I’ve done is messed up my metabolism and discovered I have a penchant for cookie-snuff films.”

“Let me ask you this—would you rather arrange travel and fetch coffee for some random executive or write a book about losing weight?”

“Can’t it be neither?”

“No.”

“Then it’s a tough call.”

“Well, at least mull the book thing over.” He stands up and brushes the dog fur off his wool pants. “Listen, I’m going to go change so I can hit the gym and work out some of this tension. Are you coming? Here’s a perfect opportunity for you to test your mettle.”