Such A Pretty Face

by Cathy Lamb

  Eddie was so ticked at the pregnancy. “This is your fault. We can’t afford it. You’re hardly making any money, and you sure as hell aren’t going to stay home with it…. Find a day care…. Don’t expect me to help with it. This was your idea, not mine. I’m not ready to be a dad. You’re too fat already.” He was so mad, he wouldn’t sleep with me for two months. “You’ve pushed me out of bed, Stevie, so now you’re responsible for the consequences.”

  Except for his response, though, I was thrilled…and scared to death for the mental health of my child. Memories of my experience with Helen in the cave deluged me, and that brought on another wave of emotion that I battled back down with piles of food, but the joy was still so…present. Continual. At the end of three months, he moved back into our bedroom and forced himself on me. “You better lose weight after you have this brat or we’re done.”

  That was his foreplay. I was dry because I wasn’t remotely turned on, and he told me, “You can’t even get yourself oiled up, can you? God, you’re bad in bed. You can’t even move. You squish around. You’re gonna smother me. I can’t even find your hole!”

  I cried into my pillow. The next day I lost the baby.

  Eddie said, “Good. We weren’t ready. Don’t screw up on the birth control again, Stevie. That was stupid of you. How come you haven’t got that raise yet?”

  I mourned for the baby until I thought my heart would burst.

  Another year into our marriage, I got pregnant again. The pill had made me sick, so I had gotten a diaphragm. He had refused to get off of me so I could put my diaphragm in one night. I had told him I didn’t want to have sex with him because he was drunk so he had to exert control. He told me I was getting to be a shrilly, fat, fishwife nag head. (His father had been a fisherman.) I told him to get off. He told me he was my husband and that was his right and he hated working for Herbert and had I bought more beer?

  That was his foreplay.

  He blamed me when I told him I was pregnant. I lost that sweet baby in the fourth month. I bled profusely, left work, called him.

  He never showed up at the hospital.

  In fact, he came home drunk, and I mourned that baby until I thought my heart would burst a second time.

  And I still stayed with Eddie.

  If that, folks, doesn’t give you an idea of how screwed up I was, how profoundly depressed, I don’t know what will.

  In the middle of the night, for weeks on end, I blamed myself for both miscarriages. The doctors had been blunt: I needed to lose masses of weight. I wasn’t healthy enough to be pregnant. I was high-risk. I could put the baby at risk and my own life. Don’t try to get pregnant again, Stevie, until you’ve lost weight.

  Devastating.

  My fault.

  My guilt. More guilt.

  I went on a low-dose birth control pill that made me nauseated only one week out of the month, and stayed for another miserable year, sinking deeper and deeper into a sludge-filled emotional pit. I quit thinking, quit reacting, quit making chairs out in a shed in our backyard that Eddie had reluctantly let me have for my “fucked-up brain.” I quit being a person the second I walked into our home each night after work. I could help handle the complex litigation at our firm. I had attorneys tell me all the time that I “saved their lives,” I had attorneys (seriously) fight over who got to work with me, and Cherie told me repeatedly that Zena and I easily do the work of four people.

  But at home, with Eddie, I was a profoundly scared, continually-on-alert, mentally battered shell of a woman. In the back of my mind I knew I had to leave, but I couldn’t.

  What made me finally take that step?

  My near death.

  Besides Lance hitting Eddie in the face twice, “knocking the snot out of him,” as Lance put it, and Polly screaming at him on multiple occasions that he was a “short, hog-faced, abusive, cigarette-sucking, slobbering drunk, and I hate you and will always hate you. What the hell is wrong with you, Stevie, why are you still with him?” the defining moment was my heart attack.

  I said to Eddie, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  He grabbed a beer and said, “It’s all your fat squishing in on you.”

  I said, “I can’t breathe.”

  He said, “Shut up. The game’s on.”

  I said, “I’ve got shooting pains.”

  He said, “That’s your arteries cracking from fat.”

  I called 911. Then Lance and Polly.

  I was wheeled away to the ambulance on a special stretcher for obese people who weighed 325 pounds or more. I thought I had a rhino lounging on my chest. I could hardly suck any air in, and there were shooting pains down both arms, like knives had been stabbed into my veins. Both Lance and Polly came running toward me after screeching to a halt outside my house in Lance’s Porsche. Both were crying, giant Lance crying harder than Polly.

  And there was Eddie, sitting on our front porch smoking a cigarette as they loaded me up into the ambulance. Polly got in with me, hysterical, saying over and over, “I love you, Stevie, I love you, oh, I love you,” and Lance would follow in his car. My last vision before the ambulance doors slammed shut?

  Lance hit Eddie, twice. Boom boom. I think it knocked the snot out of his nose.

  Eddie never came to visit me at the hospital.

  Polly, Lance, and Aunt Janet hardly left my side. Several friends, neighbors, and coworkers came by. Even Herbert came and, I was surprised to see, had to leave the room when his eyes filled up with tears. Before he left the room he did manage to utter, “This is what happens when you get so fat, Stevie. It’s not a surprise.”

  Cherie Poitras visited. I remember she was wearing ankle boots, a brown leather skirt, pink lace shirt, and matching brown leather vest.

  She brought me all the divorce papers to sign.

  Herbert was there when I signed the papers. Cherie said to him, “Hello. I’m Cherie Poitras. It says a lot about you that a man who has abused your niece for years is still working for you. How strange that is. How peculiar. How unprotective and unmanly.”

  Herbert blustered, turned all red. He hardly knew what to do with this woman towering over him in leather and ankle boots.

  “I know many people who know Eddie.” She put her manicured fingers to her chin, as if thinking. (This wasn’t true, she told me later.) “Everyone knows that deceitful, hunk of hairy prick works for you only because he’s married to Stevie. With this divorce, which will be very, very public (It wasn’t; Cherie was blowing smoke), are you concerned that people will think less of you if he still works for you? But maybe your reputation doesn’t concern you. (She knew it concerned the egomaniac immensely.) Maybe you’re not worried about what the people at your club and at private dinner parties are saying about you and the terrible way Eddie treats Stevie. Good for you not to care what anyone thinks!” She poked him in the chest, and he stumbled back.

  Herbert blustered again, turned redder. Fired Eddie that day. Eddie eventually ended up in Louisiana after the house sold.

  I went home and cleared out all my stuff with Lance, Polly, and a bunch of Lance’s ex–pro football friends. Eddie came home when we finished. He was semidrunk.

  That’s when Eddie said, “Good-bye, fat cunt.”

  Lance helped the snot fly out of his nose again.

  Twice.

  Then one of the pro football players, now a curator at a museum, tripped him flat.

  I had clarity for the first time in years.

  And this is what the clarity told me: You will never be with a man again who doesn’t treat you as Grandpa treated Grandma, complete with the dancing under the stars. That man probably doesn’t exist, but being alone is far better than this.

  And then I cried, thinking about Grandpa and Grandma, how this marriage would have been such a disappointment to them, how I was a disappointment, how I had failed them. I cried about that, then cried for them, and somewhere in that mess I swear I could feel their arms around me.

  Six mon
ths later, I had my stomach-shrinking operation. I had this choice: lose weight or die.

  After some debate I chose the former.

  As I was rolled down the hospital corridor on a stretcher by a nurse, my IV line pushed by a second nurse, I remember a woman self-righteously announce, “Whoa. I can’t believe that! It’s a woman! How does anyone get that fat?”

  “Ohhhhh. Myyyyy. Goooood!” the woman next to her gasped, not bothering to lower her voice. As if because I was fat, I was deaf. This is a common misconception in America. Fat people can hear. We hear what you say, and we know what you think of us. “She’s huge! That stomach! It’s a human mini-mountain. I’m surprised she’s not dead.”

  “That’s gross, that is so gross! Eww!”

  “They should have stapled her up a long time ago.”

  I tried to shut out their voices, their giggles, their snorts of laughter. One of my nurses, an African American with the most gorgeous, greenish eyes I’ve ever seen, said to them, “Thank you for keeping your rude, judgmental comments to yourself.”

  My other nurse snapped, “Be quiet this instant.” We stopped to glare at them, and then I said, “Guess what? I can hear. Fat people have ears. They work.” I flipped my middle fingers up, which is so unlike me, and said, “Let’s see if you have eyes. Can you see this? That’s right, my fingers are saying, Fuck you. Do you see that? Fuck you.”

  My nurses laughed and we turned the corner.

  I felt bad instantly for using that language. I could almost hear my grandma saying, “Never cuss unless it’s at Herbert, praise the Lord. The Lord knows what Herbert’s like and He’ll give you a pass.”

  But here’s the thing that obese people live with: I am enormously fat; therefore, I do not exist. I do not have value in a society that judges thinness and money above all else. It’s the last acceptable prejudice. You could never say about an African American, a gay person, a Hispanic or a Jew what people say about fat people. Never. You’d be considered a raving racist.

  But to address the woman’s question in the hallway of the hospital: How do you get as fat as I was?

  It’s not too hard.

  Eating copious amounts of food will do the job splendidly, and avoiding the gym as one might avoid a cobra having a menopausal hot flash might be another.

  But that’s not the right question. The right question is this: Why did I, why does anyone, get this fat?

  Why is the question.

  And for that, I am convinced, you have to go way back, for most people who are morbidly obese, into the depths of their childhood, no matter how dark and murky and disturbing, and you will find that answer.

  How do I know? Because I’ve been in group counseling for ages with obese people. With rare exception, they all had trauma in their childhoods: Abandonment. Poverty. Neglect. Abuse. Parents on drugs or alcohol. Sibling sicknesses or deaths. One woman’s mother beat her until she passed out on a regular basis. Another was attacked each morning by her brothers. One man ate because he lost his father in a war and his mother dealt with it by dropping him off at a series of relatives’ houses. He was on his own at the age of thirteen.

  Yes, pause a second and take a peek into their pasts, if they’ll let you, and you will find the answer to the fat question.

  You will also find, almost without exception, the answer extremely, horrifyingly, ugly.

  A few days later I ventured to my garage, pulled out a rocking chair, and asked it: Have you ever lost yourself in a relationship? Has the most lonely part of your life occurred while being married to someone? Have you ever been married and sucked it up but in your truest heart you knew you would never marry that person again if God gave you a second chance?

  Is there someone you wished you had married instead? If you had to do it over, would you marry at all? What is the purpose of marriage? Who does it benefit?

  What’s your name? Answer: Question Mark. I laughed.

  I decided to carve a giant question mark for the back of the rocking chair. I would paint a bride and groom on the seat. The bride would wear a short, fluffy red dress, the groom a tux. In a balloon above her head the bride would be thinking of a beach in Mexico and the groom would be thinking about a beer. The armrests would be painted with pink and white flowers.

  What would it be like to be Jake’s wife?

  I would not need a question mark for that, I would need an exclamation point! See, like this!!

  Lance and I went to visit Polly at the clinic.

  Polly told us she would have to drink three scotches on the rocks, not many rocks, before coming to the anniversary party. “Maybe a daiquiri, too. I could come in stumbling drunk. Then Dad would tell everyone he had a ‘mentally ill, alcoholic daughter who refuses to lift her fork to her mouth and put food in it. It’s an attention-getting mechanism. She gets it from her mother’s side of the family. They’re insane. All men carry a burden, this is mine, but I will shoulder it, as is my duty.’”

  And Lance said, “I would rather have a vampire bite off a testicle than go to this party.” He snapped his fingers. “Do you think that there’s a market out there for vampire blow-up dolls? I’ll bet there is!”

  And I said, “I hate the Atherton case,” and then told them about Danny, the boy who loved dragon stories. Lance blubbered. Polly said she would have her henchmen kill Crystal as soon as she got out of the clinic.

  Polly had finally agreed to work with Annie Sinclair. She was humbler this visit, more emotional. Broken, but in a good way. She was finally, finally trying to save herself.

  Annie was half Hispanic and half African American. She had a long black ponytail and huge, dark eyes. I talked with Annie in her office for about an hour, answering all the questions she had about Polly. In particular she focused on Herbert.

  Then she asked me about me.

  I clammed up.

  In a gentle way, she asked again.

  I sidestepped.

  A third and fourth time, a gentle prod for information.

  I declined.

  I think it was on the fifth time around that I caved.

  I think I had been wanting to cave, probably for my whole life. I had had some counseling before the bariatric surgery, but not much. I had said I hadn’t known my dad and my momma drowned. I left out a couple hundred other details.

  I filled in a few of those details for Annie.

  I was a mess when I left.

  She agreed to see me through her private practice.

  I agreed that was a good idea.

  Jake called and asked me out to dinner for Friday. I had to decline, but said, “How about Saturday around eleven for brunch?”

  He said that was fine, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. On Saturday he took me out on the Willamette on a boat his brother owned, and the weather cooperated—blue skies, sunny day.

  We talked about his bridge-building work. He loved it; he travelled all over and would be going to Venice in late fall. We talked about my work. We talked about politics and social issues and even about art, and we agreed to go see a new display at the museum. I don’t think that Jake and I ever stopped talking around each other, ever.

  “Tell me about your family,” he said.

  I told him about Herbert, referred to him as a cannibal who did not exactly eat people, simply chomped around the edges, and Aunt Janet. I did not mention the alcoholism. He knew about Polly, but I told him how I could not have had a better cousin in my life, the same with Lance. He knew who Lance was. “He’s your cousin? I met him a few times at meetings in Portland. He’s a great guy.” I told him about the blow-up dolls and said he was not allowed to have one. He said he did not desire one.

  “What about your parents?”

  I did not want to lie. But I didn’t want to talk about it, either. “My mother’s dead, and I didn’t know my father.”

  He stared at me pretty intently, then linked an arm around my shoulders. “Anytime, sweetheart, anytime.”

  I had to be back in the late after
noon. He didn’t question why, but I could tell that this man was not going to be put off much longer. It wasn’t in his nature.

  We did, however, have the very best kisses on the boat, hot and delectable, made better by wine and cheese and turkey sandwiches he’d brought.

  I was beginning to think I could fall in love with this man, I could.

  Crystal was in full-blast, Victory-Is-Near mode.

  I felt that victory was not near.

  Since the case started eons ago, she had smothered the Athertons’ attorneys in paperwork, engaged in aggressive discovery, required depositions of eight million people, filed a barrage of motions in court, continued to argue that the medical outcome could have been expected because it was detailed in the paperwork the Athertons signed, etc., etc.

  “Smother them into submission until they can’t breathe and are totally broke and despondent. That’s how I work,” Crystal said.

  We had another meeting with the Athertons, which for some reason Crystal wanted me to come to. Sonja Woods and Dirk Evans were working out of Sonja’s garage so they had no office.

  Crystal had told them she wanted to meet them on their “turf,” and as Sonja and Dirk had no turf, we were now sitting in an office they had borrowed. You see, this was Crystal’s way of sticking it to them. “Let’s see where you all work. You’ve seen the glamorous place where I work in downtown Portland. You’re obviously nothing. I’m something, so roll over and die.”

  The office was in a worn-down office building. There was a table that wobbled and eight wooden chairs. I would be delighted to have those chairs for my obsession.

  Crystal rolled her eyes when she saw their “office.” “Nice, glamorous.”

  Sonja and Dirk did not comment. Both of them were exhausted, grayish, and sported huge circles under their eyes. Sonja was bone thin and Dirk was gaining weight. The Athertons were sagging.