Big Fat Disaster

by Beth Fehlbaum

  An old lady on a motorized scooter gives me a judgy look as she putt-putts by us. I make a face at her.

  Mom’s waiting. She says loudly, “Well? At first I thought you weren’t eating enough, but I saw you from the side yesterday, and you’ve packed on the pounds. I don’t know when you’re eating, but it’s obvious that you’re not missing any meals.”

  I cringe. “Wow, Mom, I think there’s a guy at the back of the store who didn’t hear you.” I feel my face getting hot, and the lump in my throat is choking me. “Fine! I won’t get the damned cupcakes. Can we go now, please?”

  Mom gives me her moon-sized “teacher eyes” and her words feel like BBs stinging me all over. “Maybe you should try writing down everything you eat, along with the calorie count. Let’s go over to the book section and see if they have a calorie counter book. We don’t have extra money for such things, so that should tell you how important it is to me that you lose weight.” She abruptly turns, heads to the end of the aisle, and studies the department signs on the ceiling. “Ah! There it is.” She turns back to me, but looks right through me. “Come on.”

  As usual, Drew is Mommy’s Little Clone: “Yay! Can I write down everything I eat, too? I want my own calorie book!”

  Mom shakes her head, and her voice is gentle this time. “You don’t need to do that, Drew. You’re just fine the way you are.” Drew looks disappointed, but she shakes it off and joins Mom as they push the basket away from me.

  I watch them go until the tears in my eyes blur them into a blonde-haired blob. I take my oversized self to the front of the store and park my wide butt on a bench by the bathrooms.

  We’re on our way home when Mom’s phone rings. “Hi, Rachel!” Mom says brightly. She always puts on her sunshiny voice when Rachel calls.

  “He did? Oh, that’s good. Glad your dad finally called you…”

  Mom’s eyebrows lower and she veers into the right lane. A guy in a pickup truck swerves onto the shoulder to avoid being hit; he yells and shakes his fist at us. She doesn’t even notice. Other cars are zooming around us, and a couple more people shoot us dirty looks as Mom slows the car to fifteen miles per hour. The more she listens, the slower she drives. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I hoped that your dad would come through for you. I know you hate to ask; I know…oh, sweetie, no, I don’t have any money to send you. Have you called your grandparents?…I can’t call them, Rachel. I just can’t.”

  “Mom…” I try to get her attention, but she waves me off. “Mom, why don’t you pull off the road?” She frowns but nods and slides the car into the Piney Creek Family Pharmacy parking lot.

  She stops so abruptly that we jerk forward. Her voice cracks, “He does?…No, no, I don’t mind that you told him.” She closes her eyes, her hand on her chest. “Okay, okay, I know. I love you, too.” She slides the phone into her purse and leans back against the headrest.

  Drew pops up between Mom and me. “What’s going on? Is Daddy coming back to us?”

  Mom shakes her head slowly. “No. He’s pled guilty to all charges and will be sentenced in a few months. Could be anything from probation to ten years in prison. He’s agreed to pay back the money he stole from the campaign and the company’s clients.” She stares blankly and seems to be talking to herself. “I’m not sure how he’s going to do that, seeing as how he told Rachel that he can’t send her extra money to live on, but…”

  Drew says, “Huh?”

  Mom takes a breath and closes her eyes as she blows it out. “Daddy told the judge that he knows he made serious mistakes, and now he’s waiting to find out if he has to go to jail or not.”

  “Did he ask about us?” I dread the answer, but I ask anyway.

  “Rachel didn’t say if he asked, but she told him where we are.”

  Drew’s voice is squeaky-high. “Is he…still with that lady? The one he was holding hands with when we saw him on the news?”

  Mom nods, her voice barely above a whisper. “Marcy. Her name is Marcy…and Daddy told Rachel that he’s truly happy for the first time in his life.”

  The next week, the assistant superintendent asks Mom to come by to discuss the job opening. She stops in at Sugar’s when it’s over, and I can tell it’s not good news.

  “So? Did you get the job?” I ask hopefully.

  She shakes her head. “This district’s so small that there’s only one teacher for each elementary grade, and the secondary teachers usually teach more than one subject. Openings are rare, but they have one for fifth grade because a teacher’s husband got a job transfer. It was between me and one other person for the job, until the assistant superintendent did an Internet search for my name.”

  Her eyes fill with tears. “They’re afraid to hire me because of my ‘baggage.’ He said that if people around here find out who I am, it could cause a lot of upheaval. I’ve already been judged as guilty of theft by association.” Mom drops into a chair and stares at the floor. “Hard to believe that just three weeks ago I was in the dark about all my ‘baggage,’ and quite happy.”

  Ryan pauses in sweeping the floor. “Yeah, you were a mushroom.”

  Mom looks confused. “Excuse me?”

  “Reese kept you in the dark and fed you shit. Like a mushroom.”

  Mom studies the ceiling a moment, seeming to consider the idea. Finally, she nods. “That’s a pretty accurate description.” She shrugs and gives him a tiny smile. “See, Ryan? We’re not so different. We can agree on some things quite nicely.”

  For the first time since we moved to Piney Creek, Ryan looks at my mom and doesn’t scowl.

  Chapter Ten

  Since Mom can’t find a teaching job and Ryan and I will only be part-time after school starts in a week, Leah suggests that she start working at Sugar’s. I wonder if this is another one of her “compassionate” offers that she’ll end up regretting.

  Saturday morning, I try on my school clothes from last year and, sure enough, they’re way too tight. Mom screeches, “Those clothes are barely worn, Colby! It’s so irresponsible of you to eat like there’s no tomorrow, when you know that I don’t have money to buy new clothes!”

  I wonder if she knows how crazy she sounds. I’m standing in my bedroom doorway in jeans that I can’t get up over my thighs, and I feel myself blush from head to toe.

  I want to yell, “I don’t think about you when I pig out! I don’t think about anything!” Instead, I scream, “Well, Drew’s too tall for her clothes now. You going to yell at her for growing? If I had gotten taller, would you be so pissed off?” I curse myself silently for crying.

  I wait for her to answer, but all Mom does is sigh loudly and scroll through her bank statement on the computer for the millionth time. I guess she expects a money genie to have made a deposit. She lowers her head like she’s praying, then snatches up her phone and checks for a text. I want to smack her upside the head. Hasn’t she figured out yet that Dad doesn’t care about us anymore?

  I try to slam my door but of course it sticks, so I lean against it until it closes. I slide to the floor, then crawl to my dresser and pull out the bottom drawer. All that’s left in my snack stash is foil Ding Dong wrappers. I pull out the drawer, hoping some wayward Ding Dong might have fallen behind it. My frantic feelings are swallowing me whole.

  A while later, Mom taps on my door as she shoves it open. She doesn’t look mad anymore, and she’s using her bright voice. “I have an idea! When I was growing up in the girls’ home, I found a lot of my clothes at garage sales and secondhand stores. Get dressed, and we’ll make an afternoon of hunting for bargains. It’ll be fun!”

  She waits like I’m supposed to jump up and down and squeal, “Yay! We get to go dumpster diving for clothes!” I stay where I am on the floor with the upturned drawer on my lap.

  Mom gives me a strange look. “What are you doing?”

  I look down—there’s a foil Ding Dong wrapper in plain sight. I casually adjust my leg to cover it up. “I’m cleaning out my dresser to make room for the
new clothes I get today…new to me, I mean.”

  Mom starts to nod, but she looks confused. “Good. I’ll tell Drew to put her shoes on. Bet we find a lot of great bargains!” She starts to slump but catches herself and straightens, then shoots me a smile that looks a little like a dog baring its teeth.

  We head toward Cedar Points, keeping an eye out for garage sales along the way. Mom slows but doesn’t stop at the first few that we see.

  “They had clothes for sale,” Drew says as we pass each one.

  “Yeah, but that one just didn’t look…right. It didn’t look like any girls your age live there.”

  “But aren’t we looking for bargains for Colby, too?”

  “Yes, but the people were too…” Mom pops the top on a Diet Coke and takes a sip.

  It dawns on me: Mom’s looking for fat people garage sales. We pass several more sales and I’m trying to convince myself that I can’t be right, but, sure enough, Mom slows down when she sees a huge lady sitting under a canopy next to a table with a Pay Here sign on it. Mom says, “This looks like a nice one!” and whips the car into the driveway.

  We get out of the car and Mom calls, “Hi, there! Sure is hot today, isn’t it?”

  The lady holds a battery-operated fan that sprays a cooling mist. She nods.

  A girl about my age—but half my size—steps out onto their front porch. “Mom, do you want a Coke or sweet tea?”

  “Sweet tea. Thanks, Tina.”

  Mom wanders over to a pile of clothes on a card table and starts sifting through them, looking at size labels. “What do you think you are now, Colby? A 20 or 22?” She pauses and looks horrified. “You don’t think you’re a 24 yet, do you?”

  I shrug, grab a random book from a pile, and pretend that I’m too interested in it to answer.

  Mom’s voice is sharp. “Colby, I asked you a question.”

  I turn the page, not even seeing what’s on it.

  Drew comes up beside me and giggles. “Colby, why are you reading Everyone Poops?”

  I toss the book away. “What?”

  Mom latches onto the back of my upper arm and gives it a sharp pinch. “We do not have time for silliness, young lady, now get over there and help me find something that will fit you!”

  The lady with the fan eyeballs me up and down. “I’d say she’s at least a 20. Most of those jeans are 22s. They ought to fit her just fine.”

  Tina emerges from the house carrying a tall glass of iced tea. She glances at us. “Oh, good. Looks like I might make some money today after all! The jeans are four dollars each.” She hands her mom the tea and gestures to some shirts hanging from a clothesline. “Shirts are two apiece.” She removes a shirt from the line, pushes her sweaty hair back from her forehead, wipes her hand on the shirt, and holds it up to herself. It looks like it could wrap around her twice. “Yeah, I only wore this one a few times before I lost weight.”

  Mom pounces on that. “How much weight did you lose?”

  “Eighty pounds.”

  Mom gasps, “See, Colby? Here’s someone your own age who’s an inspiration!” She takes the shirt from Tina and holds it up to me, and all I can think about is Tina’s sweat on it. I close my eyes and will myself not to make a disgusted face.

  “This shirt is perfect!” Mom’s nearly giddy. “I prayed we’d find clothes for you, Colby, and here we are! God is good!”

  Tina’s mom raises her sweet tea in a toast. “Amen!”

  You want to answer a prayer, God? Here’s one: Kill me now.

  The Goodwill store in Cedar Points doesn’t have much in the Big Girl department, unless you count polyester floral-print tents and old lady pants with elastic waists, but I’ve got four big bags of Tina’s fat clothes in the trunk of our car anyway. Drew lucks out and finds school clothes as well as a winter coat. She tries to get Mom to buy a ragged rabbit fur vest for her, but Mom refuses.

  Drew slips on the vest and crosses her arms, tosses her hair, and prances up and down the aisles like she’s in a beauty pageant. “Look, Mommy! I’m Miss Texas!”

  I warn, “That thing’s got the same skin disease as those dogs up the road from Aunt Leah’s house. You’re going to get bald patches and melty skin, too.”

  “Ohmygosh! Ohmygosh! Ohmygosh!” Drew freaks out, throws the vest off, and slams into a wispy caramel-skinned girl who’s carrying an armload of clothes toward the fitting room. The girl drops the clothes and nearly falls.

  I grab her arms and steady her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to happen!” Drew recovers enough to gather the girl’s pile of plaid western shirts and worn blue jeans.

  She doesn’t make eye contact; just accepts the clothes from Drew and hurries into the fitting room.

  Drew gives me a wounded look, and I laugh. Mom’s not paying attention; she’s adding up the price tags on Drew’s clothes and looking worried.

  Mom washes all the clothes, irons them, and proudly presents them to us. “Now you have clothes to start the year! Nobody has to know where we shopped. They won’t know if you don’t tell.”

  Drew is in heaven, combining her tops and jeans and admiring herself in the mirror as if her school wardrobe came from the most expensive store in the mall.

  I try on my clothes and know right off that Tina’s mom was right: I am “at least a 20.” I’m also way more than a 22. I don’t have the nerve to tell Mom that Tina’s fat jeans are too tight.

  I make up my mind that the jeans will fit if I starve myself the entire week, but I can’t stay out of the sample box of broken cookies on the counter at Sugar’s. There’s a sign on the box that says Free, so I figure I’m not eating up Sugar’s profits. Every time Leah or Ryan turns away, I’m sneaking handfuls of cookie pieces. The more I worry about what I’ll wear to school, the harder it is to stop eating.

  Mom starts working in the bakery, too. She’s mixing up muffins and quick breads and picks up easily on cake decorating. She’s so busy, she doesn’t notice when I take a spoon and a measuring cup full of icing to the bathroom with me and wolf it down. It tastes just like my dad’s recipe and I find myself thinking about him, but instead of the punched-in-the gut feeling I usually get since he left, I don’t feel anything.

  It’s like I’m a robot and my hand is programmed for shoveling. Before I know it, the container’s empty. I check my face for icing before I open the door and hide the measuring cup behind my apron as I walk to the sink and drop it into the sudsy water. No one notices. About twenty minutes later, the sugar and fat have my head spinning and my stomach churning.

  I promise myself that I’ll never do it again.

  At night, I run my hands over the rolls on my stomach and pull my bed sheet up to the top of my neck so that my double chin doesn’t touch against it. I think about the first day of school, and I wonder what I’ll wear. I can’t tell Mom that the jeans don’t fit; it’s not like she can return them to a garage sale.

  I click on my lamp and stare at the plastic star on my ceiling. I wonder why my dad doesn’t send Rachel or us any money. Don’t other kids get money from their dad when their parents split up? I think about the address label across my face…I hate myself for being ugly. I hate myself for eating like I do. My stomach kicks back the icing and cookies, and stomach acid burns my throat. I close my eyes tight and pray that when I wake up in the morning, I’ll be normal-size like Rachel and Drew.

  The next day, I do it all over again.

  Early on the first day of school, I pull Tina’s jeans up just past my thighs, then shimmy and dance around until the material reaches my hips. The floor shakes and thunders with each stomp, and I worry that I’ll plunge right through to the dirt under the trailer. Mom yells, “What are you doing in there?”

  I grab a wire coat hanger off my dresser and fall back onto my bed. I thread the hanger hook through my zipper and pull on the hanger as the zipper strains upward. I hold my breath as I work the top button through the button hole until my fingers feel like they’re bleeding, but I finally get it f
astened. I can’t sit up, so I roll side to side until I gain enough momentum to hurl myself toward my headboard, which I use to pull myself up. When I manage to stand, I release my breath. My lower back is screaming and my middle hangs over the top of the jeans, but, by God, they’re on.

  I yank a purple shirt off a hanger—this one says Hallister on it—and it looks like it’ll be loose enough to cover the overhang of fat. But it’s not. So I pull it over my arms just enough to stretch it with my elbows side to side. I twist the shirt around and stretch it front to back. When I’ve got it as loose as I can get it, I pull it over my head and push my arms through the sleeves. I walk stiffly to the full-length mirror on the back of my door and gasp when I realize that I forgot to put on my socks before I wrestled myself into the jeans. I slide my bare feet into my shoes, step back from the mirror, and try on a smile. My smile’s not convincing, so I imitate Mom’s fake smile.

  It really does look like a dog baring its teeth.

  Mom offers me a Slim-Fast bar for breakfast, but I’m in too much pain to think about eating. I can barely breathe.

  She hugs Drew. “I filled out the paperwork for the free lunch program when I enrolled you in school. The teacher will give you a student ID number, and you’ll use that instead of money to pay for food.”

  Drew’s voice is high. “You’re not going to make my lunch? You always used to make my lunch.”

  “Honey, if the school will feed you for free, we need to save money and let them do it.”

  Mom turns to me and pushes my hair out of my eyes. “Try to make healthy food choices, Colby. Don’t choose all junk.”

  I pull away from her. “Speaking of choices, you kept putting me off when I asked about my classes. Am I supposed to see the counselor to fill out my course selection sheet? I don’t even know which electives this school has.”

  Mom abruptly steps away, pulls her phone out of her purse, and checks it for messages. She does that constantly, and she never says so, but I know she’s hoping she’s missed a call from Dad, or that he at least texted her: some sign that we still matter to him. She frowns and places the phone face-down on the kitchen table. “You were busy at Sugar’s, so I stopped in at the high school and filled out the papers for you.”