Hope

by Tyler, Terry

  Mona loved cookies, pizza and ice cream. They made her feel warm and contented inside, so they couldn't be that bad, could they?

  Rosita didn't think so, but she was fat, too. Joey the gardener used to say they could 'tear down the Hoover Dam and use Rosita's ass instead'.

  In England, she learned the truth. Fat was gross, self-control was good. Bully Veronica said her sister binged on cream cakes then stuck her fingers down her throat and sicked them all up, so they wouldn't make her fat. Mona tried doing that, but it was so disgusting that she only did it once.

  'Disgusting' was one of Aunt Patricia's favourite words.

  When Cousin Catriona put too much oil in the salad dressing, it was disgusting. The supermarket trolleys of poor people, piled high with cheap pizzas, doughnuts and pasties, disgusted Aunt Patricia; the sight of them made her feel physically sick, she said. When Cousin Emily ate too many goodies at a party, she spent the night with a poorly tummy. Mona heard her thundering down the landing to the bathroom, followed by an unsympathetic Aunt Patricia declaring how disgusting she was. It was all her own fault for being a glutton. Greedy.

  She lectured Mona and her daughters, constantly. If you were fat, nobody would care how clever, kind or talented you might be. All they would see was your protruding stomach, flabby arms and chubby cheeks, and they would know that you were lazy, self-indulgent and greedy.

  Greedy. The very word conjured up a picture of a scruffy schoolgirl, tie askew, chin quivering with excess blubber, shovelling a huge cream pie into her mouth.

  "If you allow yourself to become overweight, you're telling the world that you have no respect for yourself," Aunt Patricia would tell them. "You're saying, 'I care more about eating this cake than looking smart, attractive, presentable. My ravenous stomach takes precedence over anything else'."

  Mona learned. By the time she was fourteen, she was as slim as a reed. When she visited her father, he was delighted with the change in her. His approval made everything right in her world.

  He invited her to come and live at home again.

  She only saw her mother twice before she died, a year later. Laura Bettencourt had been in and out of clinics for the past three years, but eventually her organs gave up the fight.

  "Nothing was more important to her than drinking," Mona's father told her. "She didn't care about me, or you, just her craving for alcohol. They tell me alcoholism is a disease, but that's just an excuse. She had no self-control, that's all."

  Paul Bettencourt found a new wife, who had (Rosita told her) been on the scene for a couple of years before Laura died. The new Mrs Bettencourt was a TV chef, slim and smiling with honey-coloured hair, called Sherry. Mona was sad for her poor mother, but she thought Sherry was wonderful. They went jogging together, then came home to make healthy salad lunches.

  Sherry had two young sons from her previous marriage: Mona's new stepbrothers. Her father spent more time at home, now, with this new family. Like the proper father Mona had always wanted. This made her feel resentful, but she learned to keep a lid on it. Every time it threatened to get out of control, she went for a run. Running made her feel good. Counting calories made her feel good. When she lost weight, her father and Sherry applauded her. Self-control made her feel in charge of her life, her body; more than that, though, it made people love her.

  If you were greedy or self-indulgent (fat or drunk), they despised you and hardly ever came home, so they wouldn't have to look at you.

  Mona worked hard, and made her father proud. He pulled strings to get her into Barnard, where she majored in psychology. The workload was heavy, and whenever it became overwhelming she would go back onto her strict one thousand calories a day diet―not because she needed to lose weight, but because the asceticism gave her the high she needed to take the world by storm.

  She fell in love with a scholar of English Literature, a writer who thrilled her with his romantic poetry, and wanted to marry her.

  "Don't do it," Paul Bettencourt said. "Give it a couple years; don't rush into anything. Get to know the man behind the fancy words. I married your mother in the first rush of romance, and that was the biggest mistake of my life."

  She waited for him to say something like 'or would have been, if not for you', and he did, in a roundabout, half-hearted way, but only after he saw the look on her face.

  She thought he would apologise for hurting her feelings, but he didn't.

  "That's something you need to curb, honey," he said. "Approval-seeking. You're a bright, attractive young woman with a great life ahead of you; you don't need me to keep applauding you. The most successful people don't give a hoot about validation from others. They say and do what they think is right, and stand by it."

  She laughed. "Says you, who just told me not to marry the man I love."

  His mouth turned up at one corner. "I was echoing what you already know. If you were sure about your feelings, you wouldn't have sought my opinion."

  "I didn't―"

  "Yes, you did. If you were sure, you'd have said, 'Howard and I are getting married'. What you actually said was, 'Howard's asked me to marry him', with an inquiring expression. You wanted to know what I thought, so I told you. Come on, sweetheart, you're a psych major, you should know this stuff! Be bold. Enjoy your handsome bard, but keep your eye on your future. Because it's happening, right now."

  Like the prod in the tummy, this conversation would remain with her forever.

  He was right, of course. Once the novelty wore off, she became irritated by Howard's insistence on a third bottle of wine when they both had early lectures next day; that he ignored her wishes meant that his declarations of love were little more than empty words.

  He was self-indulgent. Greedy.

  Alcohol was more important to him than her; that was all there was. She'd seen her own mother become a slovenly mess, a pitiful shell of a human being, and she wasn't about to go through it again.

  Her love for him was dead within six months

  Aunt Patricia was right, too; a lack of self-control showed lack of respect for yourself.

  After college, Mona became the shining new star in the Nutricorp PR department. By the age of twenty-six, she headed her own team of over a hundred employees.

  When she was twenty-seven she went on holiday to Italy, where she met a handsome young Englishman who was making waves in local political circles.

  His name was Guy Morrissey.

  Other books by Terry Tyler:

  The Project Renova Series (post apocalyptic/dystopian)

  Tipping Point

  Lindisfarne

  UK2

  Legacy

  Patient Zero

  The Lanchester Series (family drama/parallel history)

  Kings and Queens

  Last Child

  Stand alone, full-length novels

  The Devil You Know

  The House of York

  What It Takes

  Full Circle

  Dream On

  The Other Side

  Nobody's Fault

  You Wish

  Novellas

  Best Seller

  Round and Round

  Short Stories

  Nine Lives