All Together Now

by Monica McInerney

  Looking back, our obsession started that day. We didn’t go so far as taking clandestine photos of Caitlyn and sticking them on our fridges, but we came close. If we felt ourselves slipping, reaching for the chocolate or the biscuits, we’d ring each other and talk about Caitlyn. We even developed our own dieting catchphrase around her. I was the one who coined it. At a party once, I’d met a woman wearing a necklace with the letters WWJD. I asked her what the letters stood for.

  She smiled, put her hand on mine and said, ‘I’m so glad you asked. It stands for What Would Jesus Do? It’s how I live my life, every day, from moment to moment.’

  Alice, Susan and Jenny had laughed about it when I told them afterwards. I remembered the phrase that day as we spoke enviously about Caitlyn.

  ‘I need to spy on her,’ I said. ‘Live my life the Caitlyn way. Ask myself every day, moment by moment, WWCD? What Would Caitlyn Do?’

  It was a joke that quickly became serious. We started living our lives by what we termed the Caitlyn creed. Would Caitlyn eat that biscuit? Of course she wouldn’t. Would Caitlyn put butter on her toast? No, she would not. Would Caitlyn serve chips instead of salad? Would Caitlyn decide she was too tired to exercise? Would Caitlyn sleep in or go for an hour’s walk every morning? We knew the answers. And if we kept doing what Caitlyn would do, then we would soon be as thin as her, wouldn’t we?

  We didn’t tell Margot about Caitlyn. There was never much conversation with Margot anyway, and we certainly didn’t want to draw any more attention to the perfect Caitlyn, in case Margot got it into her head to invite her to one of the meetings and parade her naked in front of us. Margot was busy enough with our four bodies. Week after week, she would pick on a particular area, force us to stand in front of the mirror and look at it, insult us, harangue us. Hips one meeting. Waists the next. Breasts after that.

  We’d undressed in front of each other since we were at school together, but even so, it was slightly embarrassing to do it. The light wasn’t flattering in that meeting room, even after Margot had, thankfully, drawn the curtains.

  Silent and stony-faced as always, Margot would inspect each of us in turn like an army major on parade duty. We could feel her glances at our tired old bras, our stretchmarks, our bulges.

  ‘Didn’t you ever look at yourselves before? Realise how ugly your bodies are?’

  She never encouraged us, never praised us. And yet we kept going back to her. We even upped the meetings to twice a week. Our suggestion, not hers. Why?

  Because it was working.

  Because all four of us were losing weight. And not just a little bit. A lot of weight. It was like some kind of miracle.

  Whenever any of us reached for something sweet or fatty, or for a second helping, or for something fried, we’d hear Margot’s haranguing voice, heaping scorn on our bodies, insulting us. That voice, combined with a mental picture of who we wanted to be – Caitlyn – was more powerful to us than diet pills, gym memberships and weekly weigh-ins put together.

  Our husbands started to notice a change. Our kids noticed, first that the cakes, biscuits and chips had disappeared from our houses, second that we had stopped driving them everywhere and were making them walk instead. Shop assistants, other friends and our relatives noticed. The more comments we got, the more driven we became, the more obsessed we grew – with our bodies and, increasingly, with Caitlyn.

  We’d call each other if there was a Caitlyn sighting, discussing in forensic detail her figure, her hair, her shoes, her accessories. We’d also ring if we’d managed to dress in a pair of jeans or a skirt long-consigned to the back of the wardrobe. We still met every Saturday morning, but only for a quick black coffee before we did an hour’s walk together around the lake. We did that walk every day, sometimes even twice a day.

  As the weight kept disappearing, some of the compliments from our families and friends turned to concern. Questions were asked. Were we on diet pills? Had we had liposuction? What was going on? Was it healthy to lose so much, so quickly? We became very skilled at deflecting their questions. We kept quiet about Margot’s methods, just murmured about feeling extra-motivated with summer coming, tired of having trouble finding clothes to wear, the usual reasons. We didn’t want anyone else coming to Margot’s meetings.

  I often wonder if Caitlyn had any idea how obsessed we all were with her. I’d see her in the supermarket, or walking down the main street, or out with her husband. She smiled at me once or twice, a nice, shy, inviting smile. I could have started a conversation with her. Invited her and her husband out for a drink. But I didn’t. How could I talk to her about ordinary things like the weather, or something in the news? She wasn’t an ordinary woman any more. To Alice, Susan, Jenny and I, she’d become the equivalent of Cindy Crawford or Elle Macpherson living in our town. We could look at her, yes, but talk to her? No way. What could we possibly say? Why would she be interested in us? She was the perfect one; we were the imperfect ones. But we were working hard to close the gap.

  The weeks went by. Two months after that first meeting with Margot, we had each dropped nearly three dress sizes.

  We were seriously the talk of the town. ‘What’s your secret?’ ‘You all look so great.’ People who had never dared suggest we had weight to lose were boldly telling us how much better we looked now we were thinner. Each word of praise was more motivation.

  Then Caitlyn went away. It took us four days to notice and another day to find out for sure. Yes, she and the doctor had gone on holiday. Margot’s meetings went on, the insults as bad, the competition between us as fierce, the weight loss as sought after, but something was missing. Someone. Our motivation. Her.

  To our amazement, Margot noticed we were distracted. ‘What’s wrong with you four?’

  Out it poured. We told her all about Caitlyn being our talisman – or taliswoman. Our idol. We were sheepish about it, expecting to be admonished. We were admonished about everything else, after all. But Margot approved. She asked us to describe her, and nodded thoughtfully, saying she recalled seeing her that day in the car park.

  ‘You’ve made a good choice. I remember her. Elegant, thin, well groomed. And so can all of you be. If you keep that greed of yours at bay and keep taking good hard looks at yourselves, that is. You’re only halfway there, you know. You think you’re thinner, but each of you still has a serious weight problem. When will this Caitlyn be back?’

  We didn’t know but we wanted – needed – to find out. Jenny made an appointment with one of the other doctors on false pretences, finishing the consultation with an apparently cheery, innocent enquiry about the new doctor and his wife and when they might be due back from holiday.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ he said.

  We were outraged. How could they not be sure? Typical doctors, taking holidays when it suited them. Didn’t they realise we needed Caitlyn?

  Nearly two weeks later, we saw her again. At least I saw her, and rang the others. We all made excuses to get down to the main street as soon as we could, before she finished her shopping.

  The first thing we noticed was that she looked different. She had a new, shorter hairstyle for starters. But even the shape of her face had changed. Her cheekbones were more pronounced, her skin even paler, her lipstick a bold red. She looked like Audrey Hepburn or a Parisian model. And not only that. We didn’t know how she had managed it, but there was no escaping it. She was even thinner than before.

  Susan asked around and got all the answers. Caitlyn and her husband had been to a spa in Indonesia, she reported back to us. One of those five-star luxury places. She’d obviously had the works. Colonic irrigation. Botox. Fasting. Mudwraps and facepacks and seaweed baths. Some sort of collagen implants too, judging by those new cheekbones.

  We weren’t just envious now, we were angry. That was unfair. That was shifting the goalposts. We could afford to eat less and do more exercise – doing that saved us money, in fact – but we couldn’t head away to some glamorous resort to be pampered and fuss
ed over and operated on.

  Something changed in all of us then. We turned on Caitlyn. All four of us. Alice had always liked to gossip, but she wasn’t usually vicious about it. Yet she started being spiteful about Caitlyn, suggesting she was a gold-digger, had a father-figure complex, that there was something, well, a little bit creepy, didn’t we think, about her husband being so much older than her? Once it was said, it changed the way we viewed her and the doctor when we saw them out together. What had been a source of envy to us – their whispered conversations, his attentiveness, the public displays of affection – now looked sordid.

  Word went around, fuelled by gossip – from us – that Caitlyn was even younger than we thought. A rumour started that she had actually once been engaged to the doctor’s son, and had then set her sights on the doctor himself. It wasn’t true, of course. I don’t even know where that story came from. Not from us, I know that. But once it aired, it was out there and there was no way of getting it back. It grew into other stories, travelling around the town, increasing in size and detail each time we heard it. She’d actually gone away to Sydney, not Bali, and not on holiday but to have an abortion. She’d told her husband she never wanted to have kids and she meant it. No, another rumour announced, it was a holiday, but it was because their marriage was in trouble and it was a last effort to stay together. Then someone else said they’d seen the doctor’s son in town, all three of them out dining together. Was it a ménage à trois?

  As the gossip swirled around the town, we saw Caitlyn less and less. I spotted her in the main street one afternoon and actually crossed the road to avoid passing her. I told myself that I needed to keep a distance, to keep her on that pedestal, to keep my goals intact.

  A month later the doctor and Caitlyn went away again. Another holiday, Alice heard. Well, so what? we told ourselves. We didn’t need her any more. We kept paying Margot to insult us twice a week. She had put up her prices but we’d have paid whatever she wanted by this stage. I was now a size 12 for the first time in my life. Jenny and Susan had lost fifteen kilos each. Alice was winning, down sixteen kilos, but then she had had the most to lose. We bought new clothes. We flaunted our new bodies. We barely ate anything any more. We were too busy exercising. We told each other we had never been so happy.

  I was at home when I heard the news. Jenny rang me. I had to ask her to tell me three times before I believed it.

  ‘Dead? Caitlyn’s dead?’

  I asked Jenny all the questions she had been asking people too. How? An accident? When? Where? There’s no mistake? Caitlyn’s dead?

  Jenny didn’t know any more details. She’d heard it from her cousin who had heard it from the medical centre receptionist who’d taken the call from the doctor’s son. No details, just the basic facts.

  If there had been a swirl of gossip about Caitlyn before this, there was now a hurricane. It was a car accident; the doctor had been drink-driving. No, she was a drug addict and she’d overdosed. No, it was suicide. No, the doctor had killed her and was now covering it up.

  I didn’t go to Margot’s meeting the morning after I heard the news. The others did. They were as shocked by the news about Caitlyn as I was, but they still went. Jenny rang me straight afterwards. I listened, but only barely. They’d told Margot about Caitlyn. That the perfect specimen, the role model she’d held up to us, was dead.

  ‘Do you know what she said then?’ Jenny was crying.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to hear what Margot might have said.

  ‘She said, “Sad, yes, but it doesn’t change the way she looked when she was alive. Keep that image in your minds. That’s your goal.” ’

  None of us went to the funeral. It was held in a town a hundred kilometres away, where Caitlyn had grown up and where she would be buried. I didn’t hear any details about it until the following week.

  I had decided to go back to Margot’s meetings. I thought it would focus me again. I was finding it hard to care about dieting and exercise any more. I needed that hectoring voice in my ear: ‘Hate the body you’re in. Love the body you’ll get.’

  I was early, for once. The others weren’t there yet. As I waited, the receptionist came into the room with some files. We got talking. About Caitlyn, unsurprisingly. The receptionist had been to the funeral, she told me. It was beautiful. A celebration of her life, the way a good funeral should be. Her husband had given the eulogy.

  ‘Everyone was crying by the end. He loved her so much.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked, choosing my words carefully in case it had been an overdose, or suicide. I had to know. The rumours were still flying and the truth hadn’t reached our ears yet.

  She looked at me as if I was a bit stupid. ‘Her cancer came back.’

  ‘Caitlyn had cancer?’

  ‘That’s how they met. He was doing a research paper about her. That’s why they moved here.’

  I don’t remember the questions I must have asked, but I soon knew the story of Caitlyn’s life. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early twenties. She had fought it with chemotherapy, lifestyle changes, determination and won. It was how she and her husband had met, the year she turned twenty-three. Already divorced from his first wife, single and a workaholic, he’d been undertaking research into alternative cancer treatments. They had fallen in love. Yes, they had both always known there was the possibility the disease could return, but they lived life well and joyously. Eighteen months previously, there was a bad test result. They decided to change their lives. They moved to a country town. Our town. Hoping the slower pace of life, the fresh air, living in a close-knit, friendly community could help Caitlyn. Close-knit community? We had barely spoken to Caitlyn. As for help her …

  The receptionist told me there were attempts to fight the cancer with trials of new drugs. Visits to alternative-therapy centres in Bali. Attempts to live a normal life. That’s why people hadn’t been told. Caitlyn had wanted friendship, not sympathy.

  The doctor’s eulogy had been so honest and so sad, the woman said. He’d spoken of the two of them realising that this time her body wasn’t strong enough to fight it again. He talked about his love for her spirit, her humour, her zest for living, her kindness, her gentleness. Of how much he would miss her. Of how much she had meant to him. Of the plans they had made together, the children they had longed to have together, the memories they had still managed to make.

  Even as I listened, my own thoughts were crashing into my head, the pieces falling into place, the real story of Caitlyn pushing out the fantasy we had created around her.

  Caitlyn wasn’t thin because she dieted. She was thin because she was so ill. She hadn’t changed her hair for fashion reasons. She’d bought a wig to cover her baldness, a side effect of her treatment. Her husband hadn’t cared for her so tenderly because it was a winter–spring romance. It was because he knew better than anyone that she was not going to be with him for very long. Each of those loving glances, those romantic dinners, had been precious moments in a long, sad, drawn-out farewell to the woman he loved. Those shy, inviting smiles she had given me had indeed been that – invitations to be her friend. And I had ignored them.

  I left the medical centre then, before the others arrived.

  I never went back to Margot’s meetings again. Jenny went for one more week, before leaving midway through, calling me, barely able to speak for her tears. She came to my house to talk, rather than to the café. We didn’t want any comments about our weight, our new bodies, our new looks.

  She said that afternoon all that I had already decided. That it felt wrong to sit in a room, to be healthy and alive and yet be told to hate our bodies, our strong, healthy bodies. To hate our legs that had carried us throughout our lives, to hate our bellies and our breasts that had grown and nurtured our children. To think of food as the enemy and our bodies as battlegrounds when we should be celebrating our bodies and our lives every day.

  Jenny and I decided I’d be the one to tell Alice, Susan
and Margot that we didn’t want to go to the meetings any more. Three times I tried to call them. Each time I put down the phone. In the end I wrote notes. Cowardly to the last, I didn’t tell the truth. I said Jenny and I were too busy. Perhaps that wasn’t a lie. We had decided to get busy. Busy being glad we were alive and enjoying all the good things that we could, while we could.

  That was six months ago. Alice and Susan still go to Margot’s meetings. Jenny and I heard that we’d been replaced by two other women within a week. Word spread. There are now twenty women attending the two meetings each week. I heard that Alice is planning on setting up her own group. I don’t know for sure. Alice and Susan don’t really talk to Jenny and me any more.

  We see them quite often, though. It’s a small town; it’s hard to avoid each other. The most recent encounter was yesterday. Jenny and I had organised a picnic beside the lake, with our husbands, our kids and several other friends, including a new couple who recently moved to town. I met the woman in a queue at the post office. Where once I would have left it at that – a conversation about the weather – that day I took the extra step of inviting her for a coffee. She’d accepted even before I’d finished delivering the invitation. Since then we’ve socialised together at least once or twice a week.

  I’d done the baking for the picnic – oatmeal biscuits and the sultana cupcakes my kids love. I used less butter than I might have in the old days, but they still tasted delicious.

  We’d just set out all the food and drink on the picnic rugs by the lake when Alice, Susan and five other women went jogging past. They looked great. Thinner than slim, tanned and toned muscles, fashionably dressed in designer exercise wear. They waved at us and Jenny and I waved back, sitting there surrounded by food. I knew what they were thinking and they knew what we were thinking. Jenny and I didn’t need to say anything about them after they’d gone, though. We’d done that enough, for hours, talking about how guilty we felt, and how we hoped we would never let something like that take us over again.