I started to read all the articles on losing weight that I used to skip before, and I took books out of the library. Over the next couple of weeks I tried one crazy diet after another: no-carbohydrate, no-fat, grapefruit and cornflakes, chipped beef and bananas and skimmed milk. Only I couldn’t stick with any of them. Things went wrong at night when I started thinking about how I’d written nine letters to Scott and hadn’t got one back. I’d lie in bed asking myself where the hell was he, what was he doing now? And pretty soon I’d feel hungry, starving.
Another thing I kept asking myself, especially when I chewed through some dried-out salad or shook Sweet-N-Low into my coffee, was what Scott, assuming he was still alive, was eating over there on the other side of the world. If he wasn’t on a diet, what was the point? I would think, watching my hand reach out for the blue-cheese dressing or the half-and-half. He hadn’t meant it seriously, I’d tell myself.
But suppose he had meant it? Suppose Scott was becoming slimmer and trimmer every day; what would he think if he knew I hadn’t lost a pound in nearly five weeks?
Trying to do it on my own wasn’t working. I needed support, and I thought I knew where to find it. There was a young woman in the Admissions Office called Dale. She was only a couple of years older than me, maybe twenty-six, but in two months she’d just about reorganised our files, and she obviously had her life under control. She was a brunette, with a narrow neat little figure and a narrow neat little poodle face; you got the feeling her hair wouldn’t dare get itself mussed up, and she’d never weigh one ounce more than she chose to.
I figured that Dale would have ideas about my problem, because she was always talking about interesting new diets. And whenever some really heavy person came in she’d make a yapping noise under her breath and remark later how awful it was for people to let themselves go physically. ‘Heaven knows how that hippopotamus is going to fulfil his athletic requirement,’ she would say, or ‘That girl’s mother ought to be in a circus, she hardly looked human.’ And I’d think, do I look human to Dale?
So one day when we were alone in the washroom I let on that I was trying to lose some weight. Dale lit up like a fluorescent tube. ‘Yes, I think that’s a good idea, Ellie,’ she said, looking from herself to me, poodle to hippo, in the mirror over the basins. ‘And I’d like to help you, okay?’
‘Okay, thanks,’ I said. I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into.
On our way back to the office. Dale explained to me that being overweight was a career handicap. It was a known fact that heavy people didn’t get ahead as fast in business. Besides, fat was low-class: the Duchess of Windsor had said you could never be too rich or too thin. When I told her there wasn’t much danger of my ever being either one, Dale didn’t laugh. She printed her Duchess of Windsor line out in computer-graphic caps, and fastened it on the side of my filing cabinet with two pineapple magnets.
The next thing Dale did was persuade me to see a doctor to make sure I was healthy, the way they tell you to do in the diet books. Then she started organising my life. She got me enrolled in an aerobics class, and set up a schedule for me to jog every day after work, regardless of the weather. Then she invited herself over to my apartment and cleaned out the cupboards and icebox. Bags of pretzels and fritos, butter and cream cheese and cold cuts, a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread, most of a pound of Jones bacon – Dale packed everything up, and we hauled it down to the local soup-kitchen. I kind of panicked when I saw all that lovely food disappearing, but I was hopeful too.
The next day Dale brought in a calorie-counter and planned my meals for a week in advance. She kept a chart, and every day she’d ask how much I’d weighed that morning and write it down.
Only the scale still stuck at the same number. If there was nothing in the apartment, there was always plenty in the grocery. I’d go in for celery and cottage cheese and Ry-Krisp, but when I was pushing the cart down the last aisle it was as if the packages of cookies on the shelves were crying out to me, especially the chocolate-covered grahams and the Mallomars. I could almost hear them squeaking inside their cellophane wrappers, in these little high sugary voices: ‘Ellie, Ellie! Here we are, Ellie!’
When I confessed to falling off my diet, Dale didn’t lose her cool. ‘Never mind, Ellie, that’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know what we’ll do. From now on, don’t you go near a supermarket alone. I’ll shop with you twice a week on the way home.’
So the next day she did. But as soon as she got a little ahead of me in the bakery section, I began drifting towards a tray of apricot croissants. Dale looked round and shook her poodle curls and said, ‘Naughty, naughty,’ – which kind of made me feel crazy, because I hadn’t done anything naughty yet – and then she grabbed my arm and pulled me along fast.
There’d been several fat people in the A & P that day, the way there always were lately. When we were in line at the checkout with a load of groceries only a rabbit could love, I noticed one of them, a really heavy blonde girl about my own age, leaving the next register. Her cart was full and a couple of plump bakery boxes, a carton of potato chips and a giant bottle of Coke were bulging out of the brown-paper bags. As she came past the fat girl picked up a package of Hershey bars and tore it open, and half-smiled in my direction as if she were saying, ‘Come on, Ellie, have one.’
I looked round at Dale, figuring she would make some negative comment, but she didn’t. Maybe she hadn’t seen the fat girl yet. The funny thing was, when I looked back I didn’t see her either; she must have been in a big rush to get home. And she was going to have a really good time when she got there, too, I thought.
Another week dragged by full of carrots and diet soda and frozen Weight Watchers dinners, and no news from Scott. My diet wasn’t making much progress either. I’d take a couple of pounds off, but then I’d go out to dinner or a party and put some back on. Instead of losing I was gaining.
I was still seeing fat people too, more and more of them. I tried to convince myself it was just because they weren’t disguised inside winter clothes any longer. The only problem was, the people I was seeing weren’t just heavy, they were gross.
The first time I knew for sure that something strange was going on was one day when I was in the shopping plaza downtown, sitting on the edge of a planter full of sticky purple petunias and listening to a band concert instead of eating lunch, which had been Dale’s idea, naturally. I was feeling kind of dizzy and sick, and when I touched my head it seemed to vibrate, as if it wasn’t attached to my body too well.
Then I happened to glance across the plaza, and through the window of the Home Bakery I saw two middle-aged women, both of them bulging out of flowered blouses and slacks as if they’d been blown up too full. I couldn’t make out their faces well because of the way the light shimmered and slid on the shop window; but I could see that one of them was looking straight at me and pointing to a tray of strawberry tarts: big ones with thick ruby glaze and scallops of whipped cream. It was as if she was saying, ‘Come and get it, Ellie.’
Without even intending to I stood up and started to push through the crowd. But when I reached the bakery there weren’t any fat women, and I hadn’t seen them leave either. There’d been a moment when I was blocked by a twin stroller; but it still didn’t make sense, unless maybe the fat women hadn’t really been there. Suddenly I started feeling sick to my stomach. I didn’t want a strawberry tart any more; I just wanted to go somewhere and lie down, only I was due back in the Admissions Office.
When I got there I said to Dale, making my voice casual, ‘You know something funny, I keep seeing all these really fat people around lately.’
‘There are a lot of them around, Ellie,’ Dale said. ‘Americans are terribly overweight.’
‘But I’m seeing more. I mean, lots more than I ever did before. I mean, do you think that’s weird?’
‘You’re just noticing them more,’ Dale said stapling forms together, bang-bang. ‘Most people block out unpleasant sights of that sort. T
hey don’t see the disgusting rubbish in the streets, or the way the walls are peeling right in this office.’ She pointed with her head to a corner above the swing doors, where the cream-coloured paint was swollen into bubbles and flaking away; I hadn’t noticed it before. Somehow that made me feel better.
‘I guess you could be right,’ I said. I knew that Dale was getting impatient with me. She’d stopped keeping my weight chart, and when we went shopping now she read the labels on things aloud in a cross way, as if she suspected I was cheating on my diet and had a package of shortbread or a box of raisins hidden away at home, which was sometimes true.
It was around that time that eating and sex started to get mixed up in my mind. Sometimes at night I still woke up hot and tense and longing for Scott; but more often I got excited about food. I read articles on cooking and restaurants in a greedy lingering way, and had fantasies about veal paprika with sour cream and baby onions, or lemon meringue pie. Once after I’d suddenly gone up to a pushcart and bought a giant hotdog with ketchup and relish I heard myself saying half aloud, ‘I just had to have it.’ And that reminded me of the way men talked in tough-guy thrillers. ‘I had to have her,’ they always said, and they would speak of some woman as if she was a rich dessert and call her a dish or a cupcake and describe parts of her as melons or buns. Scott isn’t really a macho type, but he’s always liked thrillers; he says they relax him on trips. And when he got on the plane that awful day he’d had one with him.
He’d been gone over six weeks by then, and no news since the telegram from Delhi. Either something really terrible had happened to him or he deliberately wasn’t writing. Maybe while I was cheating on my diet, Scott was cheating on me, I thought. Maybe he’d found some Indian cupcake to relax him. As soon as I had that idea I tried to shove it out of my head, but it kept oozing back.
Then one sunny afternoon early in June I came home from work and opened the mailbox, and there among the bills and circulars was a postcard from Scott. There wasn’t any apology for not writing, just a couple of lines about a beautiful temple he’d visited, and a scrawled ‘love and kisses’. On the other side was a picture of a sexy over-decorated Indian woman and a person or god with the head of an elephant, both of them wearing smug smiles.
As I looked at that postcard something kind of exploded inside me. For weeks I’d been telling myself and everyone, ‘If only I knew Scott was all right, I’d feel fine.’ Now I knew he was all right, but what I felt was a big rush of suspicion and fury.
Pictures from the coffee-table books on India Scott had borrowed from the library crowded into my mind. I saw sleek prune-eyed exotic beauties draped in shiny silk and jewels, looking at me with hard sly expressions; and plump nearly naked blue gods with bedroom eyes; and closeups of temple sculptures in pockmarked stone showing one thousand and one positions for sexual intercourse. The ideas came to me that at that exact moment Scott was making out in one thousand different positions with some woman who had an elephant’s head or was completely blue. I knew that was crazy, but still he had to be doing something he didn’t want to tell me about and was ashamed of, or he would have written.
I didn’t go on upstairs to the apartment. Instead I got back into the car, not knowing where I was going till the Honda parked of its own volition in front of a gourmet shop and cafe that I hadn’t been near for weeks. There were five other customers there, which wasn’t unusual at that time of day. The unusual thing was, all of them were fat; and not just overweight: humongously huge. All of them looked at me in a friendly way when I came in, as if maybe they knew me and had something to tell me.
For a moment I couldn’t move. I just stood there stuck to the indoor-outdoor carpeting and wondered if I was going out of my mind. Five out of five; it wasn’t reasonable, but there they were, or anyhow I was seeing them.
The fat people knew about Scott, I thought. They’d known all along. That was what they’d been trying to say to me when they smiled and held up cones or candy bars: ‘Come on, honey, why should you deny yourself? You can bet your life Scott isn’t.’
A huge guy with a grizzly-bear beard left the counter, giving me a big smile, and I placed my order. A pound of assorted butter cookies, a loaf of cinnamon bread, and a date-walnut coffee ring with white sugar icing. As soon as I got into the car I tore open the box and broke off a piece of the coffee ring, and it was fantastic: the sweet flaky yellow pastry and the sugar-glazed walnuts; a lot better than sex with Scott, I told myself.
For the next four days I pigged out. I finished the cookies and coffee ring that same evening, and on Friday afternoon I sneaked over to the grocery without telling Dale and bought everything I’d dreamt about for weeks: bacon and sausages and sliced Virginia ham, butter and sour cream and baking potatoes, pretzels and barbecue potato chips and frozen french fries. And that was just the beginning.
When I went in to work Monday morning with a box of assorted jam doughnuts I let Dale know I was off my diet for good. Dale tried to shove me back on. It didn’t really matter about the weekend binge, she yipped. If I skipped lunch all week and cut way down on dinner and jogged two miles a day I’d be back on track.
‘I don’t want to be on track,’ I told her. ‘Eight weeks Scott has been gone, and all I’ve had from him is one disgusting postcard.’
Dale looked pained and started talking about self-respect and self-image, but I wasn’t having any. ‘Leave me alone, please,’ I said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
Two days and a lot of pork chops and baked potatoes and chicken salad and chocolate almond bark and cherry pie later, I walked into my building, steadied a bag of high-calorie groceries against my hip, and opened the mailbox.
Jesus, I practically dropped the bag. The galvanised-metal slot was crammed with fat white and flimsy blue airmail letters from India. Most of them looked as if they’d been opened and read and crumpled up and walked on, and they were covered with stamps and cancellations.
An hour later, sitting on my sofa surrounded by two months’ worth of Scott’s letters, I faced facts. He was dieting: his second letter said so, mentioning that he didn’t want to look overfed when he walked through a village full of hungry people. All right. I had three weeks, which meant – I went into the bathroom and dragged out the scale from the bottom of the cupboard where I’d shoved it on Friday – which meant, oh God, I’d have to lose over two pounds a week just to get back to where I was when Scott left.
It was an awful three weeks. I had cereal and skimmed milk and fruit for breakfast and lunch, to get through work, but otherwise I didn’t eat anything much. Pretty soon I was blurred and headachy most of the time, in spite of all the vitamins and minerals I was scarfing down, and too tired to exercise. And I was still behind schedule on losing weight.
What made it worse was the fat people. I was seeing them again everywhere, only now they didn’t look happy or friendly. ‘You’re making a big mistake, Ellie,’ they seemed to be telling me at first. Then they began to get angry and disgusted. ‘Sure, he wrote you, stupid,’ their expressions said. ‘That doesn’t prove he’s not helping himself to some Indian dish right this minute.’
I quit going out after work; I didn’t have the energy. Mostly I just stayed home drinking diet soda and re-reading Scott’s letters, kind of to prove to myself that he existed, I guess, because there hadn’t been any more. Then I’d watch a little television and go to bed early, hoping to forget about food for a while. But for the first time in my life I was having insomnia, jolting awake in the small hours and lying there starving.
The day Scott was due back, I woke up about four a.m. and couldn’t doze off again, even with Valium. For what seemed like hours I thrashed around in bed. Finally I got up and opened a can of diet soda and switched on the TV. Only now, on all the channels that were still broadcasting, everybody was overweight: the third-string newscasters, the punk MTV singers, the comics in an old black-and-white film. On the weather channel I could tell that the girl was hiding thighs like hams under t
he pleated skirt she kept swishing around as she pointed out the tornado areas. Then the picture changed and a soft plump guy smiled from between chipmunk cheeks and told me that airports were fogged in all over Europe and Scott would never get home.
I turned off the television, dragged on some jeans and a T-shirt, and went out. It was a warm June night full of noises: other tenants’ air-conditioners and fans, traffic out on the highway; and planes overhead. There was a hard wind blowing, which made me feel kind of dizzy and slapped about, and it was that uneasy time just before dawn when you start to see shapes but can’t make out colours. The sky was a pale sick lemon, but everything else was lumps of blurred grey.
Pine Grove Apartments is surrounded on three sides by an access road, and I’d just turned the corner and was starting towards the dead end. That was when I saw them, way down by the trees. There was a huge sexless person with long stringy hair waving its arms and walking slowly towards me out of the woods, and behind it came more angry fat grey people, and then more and more.
I wanted to run, but I knew somehow that if I turned round the fat people would rush after me the way kids do when you play Giant Steps, and they would catch me and, God, I didn’t know what. So I just backed up slowly step by step towards the corner of the building, breathing in shallow gasps.
They kept coming out of the woods in the half-light, more and more, maybe ten or twenty or fifty, I didn’t know. I thought I recognised the women from the bakery, and the big guy with the beard – and then I realised I could hear them too, kind of mumbling and wailing. I couldn’t take it any more, I turned and raced for home, stumbling over the potholes in the drive.
Well, somehow I made it to the apartment, and slammed the door and double-locked it and put on the chain, and leaned up against the wall panting and gulping. For what seemed like hours I stood there, listening to the sounds of the fat people coming after me, crowding up the stairs, all grey and blubbery, and roaring and sobbing and sliding and thumping against the walls and door.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 111