by Mara Jacobs
The notebooks, tablets, lists, all became a security blanket for her. A benchmark of her weight loss. An emblem of success. And a safety net against backslides.
She couldn’t explain any of that to Annie. She could barely explain it to herself. She just knew that the lists were a crutch she couldn’t walk without. Yet.
She just shrugged, and that seemed to be answer enough for the little girl.
They spent the better part of an hour like that. Lizzie picking, taking the occasional call on her cell phone. Stevie hovering nearby in case he was needed. And Annie pedaling. Lizzie was astounded at the girl’s endurance, and wondered if she should put a stop to it before Annie overdid it.
Clea brought out fresh lemonade at one point and it provided Annie with a much-needed rest, but she refused to get off the bike, even for just the time it took to drink her glass of lemonade. Lizzie also decided to pick up a sports water bottle when she was at the store, one that would fit in the basket of the bike, so Annie could have fluids throughout her trek.
Clea, knowing Annie so well, did not fawn over the child’s accomplishment, but gave a quick, “Looking good, Annie”. She did however, make deep eye contact with Lizzie and reach out to squeeze her arm before she returned to the house.
Soon, it was time for the pickers to take their lunch break, which was usually a couple of hours, most of them going to the beach with bags of McDonald’s, taking a cooling swim, then returning for the afternoon pick. They were paid by the amount of berries picked, not by the hour, so they often took the hotter afternoons off then returned to pick in the early evening.
As they passed Annie and Lizzie, most of them said hello and gave words of encouragement to Annie. Lizzie could see the sense of pride in the girl’s eyes. She had to be dog-tired, and yet her pace seemed to pick up as the workers walked by. Her back rigid due to the brace, her head held high, her white-blonde hair damp along her face from her exertion and the heat of the sun. The hinting pink of sunburn across her nose made Lizzie realize it was time to go inside.
Finn made his way in behind the workers and Lizzie got up and brushed herself off. “Time to stop, Annie, I need to go inside for a while. Besides, if you’re going to be outside again this afternoon, we need to get some sunscreen on your face.”
The idea of being outside long enough to actually burn was obviously new to Annie. Lizzie could see the girl warring with herself internally. She didn’t want to leave the bike, but she had to be exhausted, hungry, and in need of a potty brake. Lizzie sure was. She tried to make it easier on Annie.
“I’ll have Stevie put the bike in the barn, and we can do it again tomorrow morning, okay?”
That seemed to please her and Annie nodded. Finn was nearing them and began helping Lizzie disengage Annie from the bike. “My, my, my…my own little Lance Armstrong,” he said.
“Just who the hell is Lance Armstrong?” Annie said.
Lizzie couldn’t help but laugh as Finn chided Annie for her language, much like Katie constantly chided Alison. He lifted her and put her in her chair as Lizzie knelt to put Annie’s feet in the stirrups and disengage the break. She looked up past Annie’s glowing face to Finn’s and her heart stopped at his expression. It beamed with affection. And this time it wasn't directed at Annie, but at her.
He mouthed a silent “Thank You” and turned his attention to his daughter.
“No wonder you went into PR, Lizard, you always did plan the best parties. I’m starting to think that’s all you do for a living.”
Lizzie raised her head from her tablet that contained her notes and numerous lists for the fundraiser and accepted the glass of lemonade that Alison brought to her at the picnic table. She stuck her pen behind her ear, and took a long swallow of the sweet, icy-cold drink. “Mmm, thanks, Al, that hits the spot.”
Finally registering what Alison had said as she’d approached, Lizzie answered, “This is definitely the up side to my business, that’s for sure. You know how I love to plan things.”
Alison chuckled. “Yeah, right down to the time line for having introductory sex with a man you haven’t seen in years.”
She took the ribbing good naturedly. “Anything worth doing, is worth planning out several times over.”
“Heaven forbid you ever do anything spontaneously.”
“I do lots of things spontaneously. See.” She flipped through her day planner and pointed to an imaginary entry. “I have spontaneity planned for next Friday from two ‘til five.”
They were at Alison’s, catching up because Lizzie hadn’t seen much of them in the two weeks since she’d been back from Ann Arbor. Katie joined them, bringing chips and salsa with her from the camp and plunking it down in front of the three of them. Lizzie only briefly looked at the snack, then resumed writing a note to herself about confirming the menu of the banquet with the caterer.
She grabbed her cell to make a call, but Katie placed her hand on hers and gently tugged the phone away. “Slow down. This can all wait a couple of hours. Talk to us, tell us what’s been happening.”
Katie was right, this stuff could wait. Or better yet, she could call Sybil later and have someone at the office handle it for her. She was getting better and better at delegating.
She caught Alison and Katie up on the time she’d spent at the farm. About Annie now riding daily on the exercise bike. She didn’t tell the last part of the story to Katie and Alison as they sat on the dock, dangling their feet in the water. The part about the look in Finn’s eyes as he’d thanked her. It’d be just like them to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Besides, there was no way Finn could love – or almost love – her. He had always seen her as a conquest, nothing more. She supposed that this fundraiser would cloud things for him. His pride was an animal all its own and he probably struggled with everything that was being done for him. For Annie, she corrected herself.
“So that’s how you’ve been spending your days - playing trainer and getting your manicure totally ruined by picking strawberries - but how about the nights?” Katie asked, her voice sing-songy at the end.
“Have you fucked Finn yet?” Alison asked, getting right to it.
Katie bristled, as she always did at blunt language. “Al!”
Lizzie laughed at her girls. She knew Katie wanted to know the same thing, she just asked in a much more round about way. “No, not yet, and I’ll tell you it had better happen soon, or I’m going to have to totally reconfigure my time table.” She threw that in for Alison’s earlier lack of spontaneity comment.
Katie and Alison looked at each other and Lizzie waited to see which one would be the spokesperson. Obviously they had something they wanted to say.
It ended up being Katie. “I’ll ask again. Are you sure about this plan? You’re spending time with his kids, more time with Finn than you thought you would. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I appreciate your concern. But it isn’t necessary. Look, I’ve spent the last three years really examining my life…” she started to explain.
“You’ve spent the last three years working really hard to become half the size you were, and beautiful, just beautiful,” Katie emphasized, with just a hint of misting in her eyes as she took Lizzie’s hand and squeezed.
Lizzie could take a compliment from Alison and Katie, because they were always her friends, in thin, thick, really thick and then thin again. She was not nearly so accepting of compliments or encouragement from other people. Her staff knew not to even mention her diminishing size, because she’d brush them off with some self-effacing piece of humor, then be pensive the rest of the day.
“Thanks, Katie,” she acknowledged, returning her friend’s hand squeeze. She fingered the pages of her notebook; a talisman giving her strength to continue. “But during those three years, I had all that time on my hands that I used to eat with, so I did a lot of thinking,” Lizzie joked. She joked about her weight gain and subsequent loss, but only she knew what she had gone through to not reach for
a bag of Oreos after a stressful day.
Instead, she’d turned her focus onto herself. “The thought I kept coming back to is when and why I started putting on weight, it was a tree through the forest kind of thing for me, but I think I’ve got it semi-figured out. I started putting on weight our senior year in college, then it took off fast, so fast I didn’t even realize it at first. Sure your clothes don’t fit and you can feel the changes in your body, but you kind of stop paying attention to your body. The style was leggings and long sweaters then, remember? Those sweaters hid a lot of sins for awhile.”
Both Alison and Katie nodded, but remained silent. They weren’t about to interrupt this stream of consciousness from, she so seldom really opened up about herself. She was the keeper of other people’s secrets, her own as well.
They had been there when she began putting on weight and Lizzie knew they felt helpless as they watched. What could they do? They’d mentioned it, at first in a teasing way, then in a we’re-here-because-we-love-you-and-this-is-an-intervention kind of way, but to no avail.
“So, anyway, I’ve realized that my eating got out of control not too long after I’d become sexually active, which could be Freudian enough, but now I think that was a red herring, and the true trigger was not becoming sexually active but why I did it then, after waiting all those years, being pretty much the oldest virgin any of us knew. I mean, my God, Sparty’s helmet was only a few months away from dropping!”
The women all laughed. Sparty was a statue on the campus at Michigan State of a Spartan warrior. Lizzie always felt he had been modeled after Michelangelo’s David, strong, gorgeous, very virile. He held his shield in one hand and his helmet in the other. The legend went that if a virgin ever graduated from Michigan State, Sparty would drop his helmet. Lizzie had been close, she was midway through fall term of their senior year when Sparty sighed with relief that he’d hang on to his headgear a while longer.
“So, why then? It certainly wasn’t because you had found true love,” Alison asked. The guy Lizzie had finally relented with, Matt, was a guy from Hancock, someone Lizzie had known forever and was also going to State. They had been at a party, chatted all night like the old pals they were, gotten drunk, and went home together. Matt was shocked when he realized Lizzie was still a virgin, and tried to put the kibosh to the whole dealings, but a drunken she was adamant that tonight was the night.
They hadn’t gotten together after that, neither of them had expected to. She then had two more encounters like that in the next 5 months. All had been friends she had grown up with, or had know her three plus years at State, trusted completely, thought of as brothers, and slept with one time. She felt nothing, either emotionally or physically, during any of it.
The first time with Matt she’d been pretty drunk. Drunk enough, she rationalized, that she had numbed out in her body, not feeling any sensations at all. The second time, she had drunk less, but was still numb. She tried again cold sober, but came away with the same feeling of inadequacy in her sexuality. She hadn’t climaxed in any of the couplings, or if she had, didn’t realize it, which in Lizzie’s opinion may have been worse.
After the five month-long debacle she and to her two pals had dubbed “Bad Romancing in East Lansing”, Lizzie subconsciously swore off sex and instead concentrated on upcoming graduation and entering the real world. She thought of her future, what she would like to be doing and where she would like to ideally live, but mostly, she thought about food.
“I think it was ‘then’ because a month earlier my mother had sent me a batch of clippings.”
“So? Your mother sent clippings all the time, what was in this batch?” Katie questioned.
Lizzie’s mother, Doris, had sent a thick envelope every month or so, filled with clippings from their local paper. There were engagement announcements, wedding photos, drunk driving arrest bulletins, scores from football games, reviews of movies that Doris thought the girls would like. Each clipping had a hand written note with Doris’ convoluted reasoning as to why that particular clipping was included. “Wasn’t she in your class, or was it her sister?” would accompany a birth announcement. “This sounds like something you could do when you get out” scribbled around a job posting that inevitably would be something Lizzie either had no interest in whatsoever or was not remotely qualified for.
Alison and Katie teased her mercilessly whenever an envelope arrived, but were always found going through the clippings after she’d read and discarded them.
The clippings were never too exciting, but always seemed to come at a time when Lizzie would be homesick, or missing her parents, or feeling small and insignificant amidst her 40,000 fellow students, and the sight of the bulging envelope would brighten her day.
Along with online links to the Ingot, and near daily emails, Doris was still sending envelopes to Lizzie in Detroit, and she still got a smile on her face when she would receive them. Though now she recognized more names in the divorce announcements than the wedding column. And the birth announcements for her classmates were for their fourth or fifth child.
“This particular clipping was a wedding announcement for Finn Robbins,” Lizzie quietly said. There was silence while Alison and Katie exchanged confused glances.
“I don’t get it, are we supposed to yell Eureka! and everything becomes crystal clear? Twelve years of using Krispy Kreme as a significant other and three years of turning that around, and it’s all because you saw a clipping of Finn Robbins’s wedding announcement? I don’t buy it,” Alison said.
Alison wasn’t dubbed “the smart one” for nothing.
“And maybe there’s nothing to buy,” Lizzie conceded. “Maybe it’s all just coincidences, and I’m trying to psycho babble my way into one giant rationalization…maybe it just boils down to being really, really hungry for twelve years,” she joked with a small smile. That’s right, always keep ‘em smiling. Make them like me.
“Okay, let’s for the sake of argument say that his wedding announcement triggered your virginity loss, and that disappointment triggered the emotional eating, the eating spirals out of control for twelve years while you concentrate solely on the professional side of your life, becoming a mover and a shaker in your field and then one day, three years ago, you meet this Davis Cummings, have your epiphany and start to lose the weight. Have I got it?”
Lizzie nodded and watched as Alison ruminated on this.
“I don’t know, Lizard. This plan of yours could so blow up in your face. Having sex with no emotional connection is what caused you to turn to food for solace in the first place. Do you think it’s going to be so different if you have sex with Finn now?”
Lizzie didn’t answer right away. She finally shrugged her shoulders. “I think it will be different, because I know what I’m doing now. I know my reasons for being with Finn. And it’s not totally unemotional, I’ve always cared for Finn. I just know there’s no future there.”
Katie started to make a comment, but Lizzie, tiring of the analysis, quickly changed the subject. “Oh, I forgot, I’m naming the two of you as board members for the Hannah Robbins Foundation.”
Katie and Alison exchanged glances then blankly looked back to her.
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything, I just want to have a six person board, it looks better. Finn didn’t have anything set up in the way of a foundation or special status or anything for the money for Annie’s operation. I set up the Hannah Robbins Foundation that all proceeds from this and any other fundraiser will go to. As long as there’s a board of directors, the money is all accounted for and about a ton of other legalities, the money won’t be any tax burden to Finn.”
“Who are the other board members?” Katie asked. She laid her lean body back along her towel spread out on the dock.
Lizzie looked at Katie’s body with admiration, but didn’t feel the familiar twinge of envy.
“Finn, me, you two, Margo at the bank, and Petey.”
“Petey on a board of directors?�
� Alison laughed.
“Yep. I figured having a celebrity on it would make it look more legit. Not that there’s anything not legitimate about the whole thing.”
“The board just happens to be stacked with your friends, that’s all.”
“Exactly. Our first and probably only board meeting will be held near the keg during the Strawberry Festival Dance. Please plan on attending,” she said, in her best call-to-order business voice.
“Oh I wouldn’t miss that for anything,” Alison said, as Katie nodded in agreement.
When she got home that evening, she was surprised to find her mother packing. Lizzie sprawled across her parents’ bed and watched as her mother pulled things out of closets and dresser drawers and threw them on the bed. When she noticed Lizzie, she seemed startled. “Oh. Lizzie, I didn’t hear you come in. We got the call about Zeke. The carrier is due in seven days, the squadron into Jacksonville in four. Your father and I have decided to drive to Florida instead of fly. We’ll spend a week or two with Zeke, then leisurely drive back. I’ve always wanted to see the Smoky Mountains, and your father’s going to take his golf clubs.”
“That sounds great, Mom. I’m just sorry I can’t join you, but with the fundraiser and all...”
A concerned look came over Doris Hampton’s soft face and she sat on the bed next to Lizzie. “Dear, are you sure this is such a good idea? You spending so much time with Finn Robbins?”
Lizzie was surprised. “I thought you liked Finn, Mom?”
“Oh I do, I do, or.... I did,” she took a deep breath and let it out. “Until he hurt you so badly.”
Her mother remembered Finn more than Katie and Alison had. That’s because she’d heard Lizzie crying in her room every night for a week after Finn had broken up with her. She’d seen Lizzie struggle with the heartache that she’d hidden from her two best friends. Doris was a mom, and mom’s knew everything and forgot nothing.
Memories flooded over Lizzie, but she quickly set them aside. “That was a long time ago, Mom.”