by Kelly deVos
He returns his attention to his phone and texts furiously for the rest of the drive. We arrive in Salta right before sunset. The sky could be made from cotton candy. Gareth misses the lights as they pop on and glow in the windows of little shops, the laughing old men clustered around an old-fashioned newsstand and something that smells like sizzling ribs on a grill. We travel through the historic district, which is filled with creamy, pastel colonial-era mansions with wrought-iron accents that are now an array of stores, hotels and offices.
Gareth checks us in to the Plaza Hotel. I totter along behind him, wishing I could imitate the jet-set way he marches through the lobby. The concierge has real, old-timey, metal keys that hang from green tassels and he gives Gareth only one.
I stare at the key as Gareth takes it. One key. One room.
Our bags are carried off by a bellman in a green uniform. Gareth takes me outside to a courtyard as a waiter brings out a bottle of white wine. “Salta is famous for its Torrontés wine,” Gareth says. He uncorks the bottle and pours me a glass. “Why don’t you take a few minutes and unwind out here while I unpack?” I nod and watch him climb the staircase that hugs the building and disappear through a set of double doors.
I call Grandma to make sure she knows I’ve gotten in okay. The patio walls have been painted a terra-cotta color that glows orange as the sun sets, and cobalt blue tile covers the floor. Through an iron gate I can see the brighter light of the street, where the blue doors are opening and closing, and people passing by in their bright clothing. It’s clear what Gareth means about the city. It has a pulse. A cool facade with a heart of fire.
Gareth is gone about thirty minutes, long enough for me to wonder if I ought to go searching for him. I start to have panicked visions of him waiting for me to go upstairs and seduce him or something. And believe me, I’m not experienced like that. When you divide your time between sewing with your grandma and blogging alone in your room, opportunities don’t tend to present themselves. I don’t even think I’ve seen enough romantic movies to be able to give a plausible performance.
I tell myself I’m being stupid. The room must be one of those giant suites for rich people. The kind rock stars trash with massive, epic parties. I’ll probably get up there and find Pete Wentz passed out on the couch. Otherwise, it’s a sexual harassment lawsuit in the making.
When Gareth returns, he’s already shaved and is wearing a new pair of jeans, a freshly ironed white shirt and a black blazer. I think about my rumpled skirt and gunked-up sweater. Then I imagine the poor bastard that had to run around with the iron.
“Wow. Is there a valet up there or something?” I ask.
“A valet?”
“The shirt. They ironed it so fast.”
“They? Cookie, I was making clothes professionally when you were doing the Cha Cha Slide at the middle school dance. I can iron my own damn shirt.”
He sounds irritated but as my mouth falls open, he grins at me. “I’m going to sort out some dinner for us. Take as much time as you like getting ready.” He presses the green tassel in my hand and continues into the main hotel building.
Get ready.
For what?
I get into the room and it is enormous. It’s got a sitting room, a dining area and a library where it looks like Sherlock Holmes should be hanging out smoking a pipe. There’s wood paneling as far as the eye can see. My luggage is sitting in front of the door to the suite’s smaller bedroom. I step inside. I’ve got my own little twin bed. From where I stand, my eyes trace the parquet floor to the larger room at the other end of the hallway. To Gareth Miller’s bed.
And now there’s one question.
What shall I wear?
I drag my suitcase to the bed, open it and rifle through the clothes I’ve packed. If Claire McCardell is right and when you know who you are, you know what to wear, then why am I standing here staring at my suitcase? Who am I? What am I trying to do?
In one hand, I hold a little black dress. It’s a GM Lycra minidress so short that, in my pre-NutriNation days, I would have considered it a shirt and been sewing up a pair of leggings to match. I drop the dress on the bed.
I pick up a blue-and-white-striped dress I made myself. It’s a midi-length version of McCardell’s Future Dress with a high neck and a bow that sits right below the chin. This is a dress that says I’m serious about fashion.
This is really it. The moment of truth. I could be the intern that falls into bed with my boss or the one who tucks myself into my own twin bed at the end of the night. I clutch the blue dress. Maybe I’m not ready to go to dinner in a dress that barely covers my ass.
Except what’s my big alternative plan? Stay a virgin forever? An impossibly sexy man, a man whose talent has preoccupied me for years, has brought me to an exotic land and has presented me with the perfect time and place. I think that what I want is to experience his world. To experience him.
I leave both dresses on the bed and hit the bathroom.
I’m in the shower so long that I begin to wish I’d packed a chair. I shave my legs twice, lather up with the hotel’s own brand of lotion and wash my hair. I rinse and repeat. I’m checking every inch of myself. Every weird freckle I’ve ever noticed. Every random hair. The stretch marks on my stomach have faded. A little. I’ve spent the last year lathering myself up with Mederma and Cocoa Butter. It’s working.
Slowly.
After a rough blow-dry of my hair, I twist it into a top knot and apply light makeup. Decision time.
I pull the short black dress over my head.
I guess I’m ready.
Or I could climb out the window. I’d survive the fall.
The suite has its own dining area, which I pass on my way to find Gareth. The room’s lit with tall taper candles, and tea roses have been set out on the table. Something in there smells amazing. It’s Provoleta, a gourmet Argentinean take on my favorite comfort food—grilled cheese. As much as it smells delicious, I’m so nervous I can barely choke down the sweet wine.
“How did you find out about this place?” I ask Gareth during dinner.
“This hotel?”
“This city. What made you think of buying property here?”
He smiles. “Ranchers talk. They’re always saying the grass is greener somewhere else, if you know what I mean. I heard about this place when I was a boy. It captured my imagination. I thought I’d be happy here.”
“Are you? Happy here?”
“I am right now, Cookie.”
We leave the dirty dishes on the table. Gareth doesn’t fuss with them. He kind of smirks while I stack my plates and refold my napkin. Rich people are like this. I guess you reach a certain income bracket and then there’s always someone waiting around to clean up after you. We end up milling around awkwardly in the sitting room. A table lamp bathes the room in soft yellow light and the windows open to the moonlight.
I’m holding my arms very close to my body, squeezing myself into a thin, stiff line. When you’re fat, you’re very conscious of the area you occupy. Of all the people in the universe, the overweight are the most conscious of personal space. We never want you to have to rub up against us. It’s possible that feeling never goes away, even if you lose weight.
I smile. A weird, fake smile where lips sort of catch on my teeth.
Gareth steps closer to me. “So...”
I’m not sure I’m ready for this.
I catch a glimpse of myself in an ornate, wood-framed mirror hanging on the wall. I’m flushed and overheated. There’s nothing especially romantic about my bug-eyed expression either. I’m more like the chief suspect in an episode of Law & Order than anyone’s love interest.
“We could, uh, watch TV or something,” he suggests.
Okay. I try to relax my face. “Sure. Right after that game of backgammon,” I say. I hope this sounds flirty, confident and sophisticate
d.
He leans down. Puts his hands on my hips. Kisses the spot right below my ear. His sharp stubble rubs against my neck. Together, we back toward his room.
The way he stares at me. With a hunger he didn’t satisfy during dinner. The rational part of me is internally screaming, He has done this a hundred times before. Models after shows. Interns working late.
But there’s power in this moment, which is the reverse of everything I have experienced until now. There’s no sitting around wishing and hoping and praying he wants me. I get to decide if I want him.
And I do.
I turn the lights off and try to tug that slutty thing GM calls a dress over my head.
Things start to hit me.
I take a few hot, panicky breaths.
Will Gareth see my boobs?
Will he touch my boobs?
Who is supposed to have the condoms?
Has everyone done that thing where they practice putting a condom on a banana? I haven’t done that thing. Not even one single time.
What happens after sex? Is it like in the movies where people snuggle for hours and have long conversations about important future plans?
Somehow, I can’t get my left arm out of the shoulder strap of the microscopic GM dress I’m half wearing. It gets caught in my hair, and I’m kind of twisting around trying to fix the mess. The whole thing is a so-not-cool, not even slightly sexy, dumbass dance.
I’m able to free my hair. I pull the knit fabric back down over me and trip over the bench at the foot of the bed just as Gareth snaps the light back on.
He comes to tower over me where I lay sprawled on the carpeted floor, with one of my legs stuck in an odd position on the bench. Gareth holds out one of his hands. I take it and he hoists me to a more normal seated position on the bench.
The bun that was positioned on the top of my head is sliding down to one side, leaving me with a ridiculous comb-over.
Gareth rubs his stubbly chin and covers his mouth so I can’t tell if he’s smiling or scowling or what. All of a sudden it hits me. His face is so unfamiliar. We barely know each other.
“You know...maybe...maybe we shouldn’t move...quite so fast,” I stutter.
He sits on the bench, puts his arm around me and gently guides my head onto his shoulder. “Well, good things are worth the wait. Always.”
Gareth kisses my forehead and I feel myself relaxing, my side molding into his.
“Besides,” he says. “This room really does have a very nice backgammon set.”
FAT: Day 13 of NutriNation
There’s a psychology to food consumption.
Major food companies keep a team of witch doctors hidden away. They’ve got PhDs in fields that sound harmless, like Consumer Behavior and Cognitive Psychology. Every once in a while, their corporate overlords let them out of the lab. When they do, there’s one question on the table.
How can we get people to eat more?
Ever looked at a nacho cheese corn chip and wondered why the hell it’s covered with a hyperactive orange coat of Maltodextrin and artificial flavoring? The first chips had the nacho flavor mixed in with the corn, but companies told their super scientists to deliver better sales. Research shows that taste buds metabolize powdered flavor faster and send high priority happy happy signals to the brain. The stomach doesn’t get a chance to say it’s full. It’s the definition of mindless eating.
Sure, some of the food scientists want to use their power for good. They’ll tell you about the Delboeuf illusion. This is the idea that people serve themselves more food if given a larger plate. The brain thinks things are relative. Prefer small portions? Get a small plate.
For the most part, though, food companies want your money. And need you to loosen that belt and help yourself to a second serving.
Which brings me to Donutville.
I show up at the tiny doughnut and coffee shop a little after six.
Steve’s working at the baker’s table, punching a large ball of dough. He never says what his age is, but if I had to guess, I’d go with midfifties. He’s sort of like a Pete’s Dragon–era Mickey Rooney. He doesn’t have any kids and maybe that’s why he takes care of me. When I get to Donutville, he’s got stacks and stacks of boxes of doughnuts that are “left over” from the earlier shift. But they’re fresh and warm.
“Say hi to your boyfriend for me,” Steve calls as I leave.
“Tommy’s just a friend,” I tell him. But I blush. I guess I’ve realized I no longer want that to be true and have no idea what to do next.
“Right,” Steve says, pulling down the brim of his Donutville hat.
I load my car, pray my last gallon of gas holds out and drive over to the Riparian Preserve. It’s just before dusk at the landscaped desert park that serves as a sanctuary for Arizona’s birds. It’s actually kind of pretty out here. A narrow stream runs into a small lake that’s bordered by yellow flowering graythorn. Off in the distance, a few snowy egrets hop on their spindly legs.
The Astronomy Club members are there, setting up their telescopes. Tommy is waiting for me with a jug of 5W-30 motor oil and an iced latte. “You know, you’re not supposed to hear that ticking noise,” he says as he pops the hood and empties the contents into my car.
I take a sip of caramel yumminess. “Thanks for the joe.”
He nods, gets out his own telescope and a few minutes later he’s being crowded by a gang of ten-year-olds jockeying for first place in line to look through the lens of the scope.
They all take turns. Tommy shows off Arcturus, which is low off the horizon. The boys are way more impressed by the moon, rising with a silver shimmer into the night sky. The craters have names. This is what Tommy tells them as he swivels the telescope in that direction.
“All of them?” one of the boys asks.
“They’ve named a couple of hundred at least. Some after astronauts like Neil Armstrong. Some after the ancient Greeks. Um...Aristotle has a crater. And Euclid.”
“Why does it look so big?” I ask.
“The moon?” He’s surprised by the question.
“It looks so much bigger when its low and then when it’s overhead it’s so small.”
He smiles. It’s his wide-eyed, goofy grin, the expression of a boy who stargazes with his dad and builds robotic cars out of Lego. “They think it’s an illusion.”
He explains about the Ponzo illusion. It’s the idea that the brain compares objects when it judges scale. Something on the horizon looks big because the brain compares it to trees and buildings and other things it expects to find in that space.
When the moon floats alone, high in the sky, the mind has nothing to gauge its size by. It’s like the small portion of food on the giant plate.
It turns out that relativity is everywhere.
I set the doughnuts up on a picnic table and spend much of the rest of my time wiping sticky hands and chasing away random cats.
We’re packing the boys back into the church van when another car pulls into the parking lot. A shiny black German car that barely makes any noise as it arrives.
There she is. Slumming around in a distressed Wildfox sweater covered with blue stars and a pair of cutoffs that fall an inch below her ass cheeks. Kennes Butterfield.
“Hurry,” I tell Tommy. “If we can get everything loaded in the next thirty seconds we won’t have to talk to her.”
There’s a pause.
“I invited her.”
My heart drops into my stomach. For the first time since camp at Fairy Falls, I want to kick Tommy. After buckling the last kid in a seat belt and slamming the side door, I whirl around to face him. “What the hell—”
Kennes is coming closer and Tommy whispers, “She doesn’t know anybody. If you don’t want to talk to her, you can take the boys back to the church.”
“How will I get ba
ck here to get my car?”
I’m making no effort to keep my voice down and Tommy has his hands up defensively, trying to calm me down. “I’ll meet you there in ten minutes and give you a ride back here.”
Kennes is standing a few feet from us now. She scrunches her nose and gives a cute little wave to the boys in the van. “Hi, Tommy. Hi, Cookie.”
Hi, Cookie?
I’m silently willing her to call me some sort of name so that Tommy will be forced to choose where his loyalties lie. But she doesn’t. She just stands there with her perfectly straightened hair and perfectly glossed lips and a pleasant but confused expression on her face. Like she’s baffled by the fact that I hate her.
“Fine,” I snap at Tommy.
I grab the extra boxes of doughnuts and put them in the back of the van. As Tommy tosses me the keys, I call back, “Ten minutes.”
Of course he doesn’t come for me.
Most of the parents are already in the Christ the King parking lot, waiting when I pull in with the white van. Only little Eddie Marshall’s mom isn’t there, but she shows up after about five minutes.
Then I wait.
I stand there holding on to the extra doughnuts for dear life, like they’re a fucking security blanket I can’t live without.
I wait as the church building empties out. As the lights go off. And until Father Tim comes out. “Tommy’s supposed to come and drive me back to the park.”
“You can’t stand out here all night.”
The gray-haired priest doesn’t like to talk. He avoids doing counseling and discourages people from coming to confession. But I appreciate his silence as he drives me to the Riparian Preserve in his old minivan.
The park is empty and completely dark with only the parking lot lit by a series of creepy yellow lights. My car is alone in one corner. Dilapidated and used. Like me.
“Can I assume that bucket of bolts has enough gas to get you home?” Father Tim asks.