Hope in a Jar

by Beth Harbison

  less where you don’t.

  —ad for Silkience Shampoo

  It didn’t matter that half the people milling around the room were bigger than Allie, she did not want to get on a scale in front of anyone, much less a crowd.

  Yes, they made it private.

  Somewhat.

  But weighing in, it seemed to her, was the kind of thing one should only do in the privacy of one’s home, with a large glass of vodka on hand in order to ease the bad news.

  The pools had opened a couple of weeks ago, over Memorial Day weekend, so chances were that most of the people here had experienced the same shock and pain she had—that of putting on a bathing suit for the first time in a year and going out in public.

  Somehow, going to the pool didn’t hold the same excitement as it used to, back when she was eight.

  She stood in line for the scale at the Weight Watchers meeting, feeling like a doe in hunting season, looking left and right for the perfect escape. Because she was not going to go up there and have a stranger record her weight, maybe even say it out loud for others to hear.

  At best, it would amount to a single night of humiliation, and at worst, it would be week after week of coming and being shamed into losing weight.

  Most people were getting hearty congratulations, even for a quarter of a pound down. What happened if you didn’t lose weight one week? What if you gained? Were you flogged publicly?

  She could see how that could conceivably be motivating, if not actually fun.

  “Next.”

  Could a person get kicked out of Weight Watchers? If you just flat-out failed, couldn’t do it, didn’t do it, gained a pound a week, or even if you just stayed steady and didn’t lose anything—what happened then?

  “Excuse me, Miss . . . ?”

  Maybe they put your picture up behind the counter, like businesses did with bad checks.

  Someone poked her back and she whipped around, startled.

  “You’re up,” a large man said in a faint Jersey accent. He pointed a sausage like finger in front of her.

  “What?” She turned around and saw the scale was empty and there was a woman with a clipboard next to it, looking at her expectantly. “Oh.” She moved forward, like she was going before a firing squad.

  This was seriously uncomfortable.

  She hadn’t even been to the doctor in years because she didn’t want to get weighed; why would she do it here, and now, and under these circumstances?

  Because she wanted to look good, that was why. And be healthy and blah blah blah, but really it was about looking good. She wanted to be hot again. She wanted to be annoyed with construction workers who yelled foul things when she walked past, because their current silence was far more upsetting.

  Then there was that one guy in Georgetown who’d turned off the jackhammer and watched her cross the street before starting to sing “Baby Got Back.” “I like big butts and I can not lie . . .”

  She took another step toward the scale. “Can I get on backward?” she asked.

  “Why?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t really want to know the number. Maybe you can just write it down for my file, but not tell me. Oh, and don’t gasp or otherwise indicate it, either.”

  The woman smiled, revealing a gap between her front teeth. Allie’s brother, Ross, had had a poster of the model Lauren Hutton on his wall a thousand years ago and she had the same gap.

  Beauty had all kinds of definitions.

  “Like at the doctor’s office?” the woman asked.

  “Exactly!”

  “Sorry, we’re not here to administer the correct dosage of antibiotics. You’re going to have to face it, own it, and take tremendous pleasure in watching that number go down.”

  What if it doesn’t? Allie ignored the pitiful voice in the back of her mind and instead asked, “Is it not possible for you to just record it in silence for a few weeks until my pants maybe get a little looser and I feel like I can handle it?”

  The woman shook her head. “It only hurts for a minute.”

  “The first time’s always the hardest,” the man behind Allie said. She turned to see him and he stuck out his hand. “Glenn Steckman. Lifetime member.” He was tall and broad even apart from being a little heavy in the middle. With his shock of white hair and smiling visage, he looked a little like Santa Claus’s older, taller, slimmer brother.

  “Allie Denty.”

  “Yeah, Allie, like I was saying, the first time is the hardest. Everyone says it. But like Arlene said, as soon as you lose even half a pound and you see you can do it, you feel a whole lot better ’bout yourself.”

  At this point it didn’t matter what Allie thought about staying or coming back, she couldn’t spit in the eye of all this goodwill. “You’re probably right. Okay.” She took off her shoes. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good for you!”

  “I’m not sure about that.” She took off her bracelet and laid it on the counter. “But I’m going for it.” She took off her watch and caught Arlene’s eye. “Hey, I’m not taking credit for one gram more than I have to.” She reached up and looped her earrings out.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have any place private enough for you to actually strip,” Arlene said, looking a little concerned.

  “I’ve already thought of that,” Allie said, taking a rather heavy barrette out of her hair and wondering, for a moment, how much her hair weighed and if she should get it cut. “I’m adding four pounds for my clothes.”

  Arlene looked dubious.

  “Okay,” Allie said, anticipating the argument, “but consider this: These are heavy sweatpants. I chose them specifically because I plan to wear the exact same thing for every weigh-in, and since I don’t want to freeze to death in the winter, I picked something heavy. Besides, even if they don’t weigh four pounds, I’m taking that window with me to every weigh-in.”

  “All right.” Arlene smiled. “Everyone seems to have a system of one sort or the other.”

  “That’s mine.” Allie moved onto the scale, closed her eyes tightly, and said, “Give it to me.”

  Arlene said a number that was a good ten pounds higher than Allie had feared, even with the four pounds for clothes.

  She felt like she was going to faint.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, hearing the tinge of hysteria in her voice.

  “It’s not so bad,” Glenn said behind her.

  He’d heard! Everyone had probably heard! Allie could feel the color draining from her face.

  “I’m lookin’ at you,” Glenn said, splaying his arms. “It can’t be that bad.”

  So he hadn’t heard. He’d only heard her reaction.

  “Are you okay?” Arlene asked, looking alarmed. She set her clipboard down. “I’ll get you some water.”

  “No, I’m fine.” Allie tried to collect herself but she felt like she couldn’t breathe. This was horrible. How had she let things get so bad? How had she put on pound after pound after pound after pound without realizing she was out of control? If she’d known sooner, she might have been able to stop it, get back to her real weight sooner.

  Except that this was her real weight.

  For others it might have been a joke weight. The Thanksgiving night punch line to Oh, my God, I am so full, I feel like I’ve gained twenty-five pounds.

  Allie weighed twenty-five pounds more than she should.

  Five bags of flour. Twenty-five packages of butter. The grocery store checker would have to put those in multiple bags and she’d have to make multiple trips to the car to put it in, but here it all was, on her stomach, her hips, her butt . . .

  “I can’t believe it,” she breathed.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” Arlene said, putting a reassuring hand on her. “You’re in the right place. And you’ve taken the first step. The weight will be gone before you know it.”

  There was a certain amount of truth to the contention that the pain of the weigh-in was worst at first.

  A coup
le of days after the hell of her first Weight Watchers meeting—and the truth had been hell—Allie was still determined to lose the excess weight no matter what.

  So she went to Target and purchased a digital scale (one that had fractions included, so if she lost .01 pound she could celebrate it), some resistance bands (since the talk of the meeting had been about them and how great they were for building muscle, which in turn burned fat), a case of bottled water, and some of the various emergency snack foods that had other members’ seal of approval, and if there was one thing fat people knew, it was what tasted good.

  Getting the snack foods was key. Allie was nothing if not realistic about her appetite: There would come a time when she wanted benefit-free tasty junk food, so she had to have a reasonable facsimile at the ready or else she was in danger of eating the real (and good) thing.

  She did not want any huge remorse from a middle-of-the-night trip to Giant or Safeway.

  When she got back to her apartment, the answering machine was blinking. For one crazy moment, she hoped Kevin had called to apologize and grovel and beg to somehow make life the way it had been a year ago, a month ago even, before she had known that Noah was dating the Worst Person in the World and that she, herself, was a big fat pig.

  But it wasn’t Kevin. The first two messages were from Temporaries, Inc. In the first, they offered her a job starting tomorrow and lasting a week that paid almost twice what she normally got. Pam, over at the Temporaries office, liked Allie and usually gave her first dibs on the really sweet jobs.

  Unfortunately, when Allie hadn’t gotten back to her quickly enough, she’d left another message, bemoaning the fact that Allie’s cell phone was off—she’d turned it off for the Weight Watchers meeting—and that she’d had to give the job to someone else.

  Probably Vickie Freedman.

  The third message was the clipped end of a recording imploring her to hold for an “important message.” Apparently unmoved, her answering machine had opted not to hold past thirty seconds so she’d have to either guess at which bill was late or unpaid or wait for them to call back.

  The fourth message was from her mother.

  “Hello there, I’m calling to let you know there’s a wine and cheese event at the Kennedy Center next Thursday at seven. There’s a concert on the Millennium stage first. A woman playing toy pianos, I hear it’s marvelous. Anyway, it’s all in the evening, that is, don’t worry. Let me know if you’re interested!”

  She’d been to one of those wine and cheese tastings at the Kennedy Center before, it was wonderful! But—oh, no—she’d have to look up the points value of wine. And cheese. And she’d have to decide from there if she had the willpower to go.

  Old Allie would have decided to go and just “forget the diet and enjoy life for one night” but New Allie was smarter than that. And hopefully New Allie was, or would be, thinner than that.

  In fact, New Allie didn’t even need to look up the points values to know that a little wine would beget a lot of cheese, which she would, in turn, need to wash down with a lot of wine, and . . . ultimately a lot of guilt and self-loathing.

  She made a sad mental note to decline the invitation.

  She started to pick up the phone when the machine played a fifth message, this one from Noah.

  “Hey, it’s like, I don’t know”—there was the sound of him fumbling a little—“six-thirty. Between six-thirty and seven. I’m out. Thought I could run by and talk to you. Well, that’s the point. I sort of need to talk to you. Give me a call.”

  That was weird. He sounded upset. Or something. She looked at the wall clock. It was five after eight. She dialed his number and pushed talk, wondering if the moment had passed or if she’d even be able to get ahold of him.

  “Allie.”

  “Noah, is everything okay?”

  “Sure! Great! Why? What have you heard?”

  “Your message on my answering machine. It sounded . . . well, never mind how it sounded. Is everything okay?”

  “Fine. Why? What have you heard?”

  She laughed and sighed at the same time. “Joke’s getting old, Noah.”

  “Sorry. I have another one. These three nuns walk into a bar and one of them says—”

  “Have you been drinking?” She carried the phone into the kitchen and opened the fridge to look for some Diet Coke. One of them needed to be awake and sober for this conversation.

  “I don’t think that’s how it goes.”

  “It isn’t. The nun was drinking. I’m asking if you are drinking.”

  “Depends what you mean by drinking.”

  Oh, he’d been drinking, all right. Was it too much to hope it was a postmortem blast because he’d dumped stupid Vickie? “Opening your mouth and imbibing liquid. Alcoholic liquid.”

  “Then yes.” She imagined him nodding. “By that definition, I have been drinking. Yes.”

  “Then I’ll ask again, and if you give me the same stupid answer, I’ll be pissed. Seriously. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!”

  “You don’t call me, drunk, from a bar, denying anything’s wrong unless something is wrong, Noah. Please. Now tell me what it is.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Are you alone?”

  There was a pause. “Nah, the place is full of people.”

  “What place?”

  “Durty Nellies.”

  He hated that place. Ever since the fire that had stopped it from being good old Durty Nellies and turned it into some slick yuppie bar with a new name. “Are any of the people there actually with you?”

  “Not actually, no.” He sighed, his breath making a loud hiss on the phone. “Listen, we need to talk.”

  “Okay. Let me come down there.”

  “No, no! I’ll go up to your place.”

  “How?”

  “I have my car.”

  No way. She wasn’t going to let him drive like this. If she had to physically block his car in, she would. “Are you parked in the Hyatt lot across the street?”

  “Yup. Give me ten, no, give me twenty minutes and—”

  “I’ll be there. You are not driving in this condition.”

  “I’m fine!”

  Tomorrow, or next week, or in a month, she’d lord that absurdity over his head, but at the moment, she needed to keep him from getting defensive so she could get to him before he got behind the wheel.

  “You’re also in the place with the best chicken wings in D.C.,” she improvised. She hated chicken wings, stringy little bony things, so they’d be easy to resist. “Order me some extra hot ones for carry-out and I’ll come get you and the wings.”

  “You hate chicken wings.”

  “I do not!”

  “Yes you do. You’re just trying to keep me from driving.”

  Drunk, maybe. Stupid, no. “You got me, Noah. I don’t want you to drive and in the morning you’ll be glad I felt that way. So will you just wait for me to get there? It’ll be ten minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “That was easy.”

  “I’m a little buzzed, Al. I’m not dumb. Not completely dumb. No, wait, I might be somewhat . . .”

  Thirty-five minutes later he was sitting on her sofa drinking coffee that he desperately needed.

  “Remember that time we went cow tipping?” he asked after his second cup.

  Cow tipping was legendary in northwest Maryland—drunk teenagers allegedly liked to run into pastures where cows were sleeping standing up and tip them over.

  Neither Allie nor, to her knowledge, Noah had ever done it.

  “We didn’t go cow tipping,” she said. “But we talked about it a lot.”

  “Yeah, we did, remember? We went? And we . . . tipped them over?”

  “No, Noah. We didn’t.”

  He contemplated that. “We should have, then. It sounds fun.”

  “It really doesn’t. I mean, think about it. If nothing else, it’s mean. And it has the potential for real danger. Who knows
how fast those cows can stand up again?”

  “They could be fast,” he agreed.

  “They could be really fast.”

  “Here’s the thing,” he said, holding the coffee mug in two hands and staring into it.

  She was ready for more cow-tipping philosophy, so when he said, “I have a situation I need to talk to you about and it’s not going to be easy,” it threw her for a major loop.

  “You know you can talk to me about anything,” she said, hoping she wasn’t about to find out the one thing he couldn’t talk to her about.

  He met her eyes and nodded. “Usually.”

  “But this is different?”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Noah, you’re kind of scaring me. Out with it.”

  He inhaled deeply, held his breath for a moment, then expelled with the words “Do you have a beer?”

  She eyed him for a moment, considering the options of playing Mom versus being a friend. “Are you staying over?”

  “I can get a cab.”

  She held out her hand. “Give me your keys.”

  “I’d have to walk forty minutes just to get to my car!”

  “Whereupon you might still be drunk. Or, knowing you, when I’m not looking you might whip a twenty out of your wallet and take a cab there so you could arrive both sooner and drunker.” She shook her head. “Give me your keys.”

  “But I need to get my car tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll take you to it tomorrow. After some coffee.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out a key chain containing three keys and an electronic fob. “Here.” He tossed them to her. “Satisfied?”

  “I am, actually.” She took them with her into the kitchen, hid them out of sight in a drawer, and took two Corona Lights out of the fridge, opened them, squirted lime juice from a plastic lime into each, and took them back into the living room. “Sorry, I don’t have any real lime slices.” She handed him one.

  “Last time I come here.”

  “Who could blame you? Now”—she sat down on the chair opposite him and looked into his eyes—“what the fuck is going on?”

  “You look really pretty tonight.”

  Completely scrubbed of makeup and wearing a very old pair of sweats from Rutgers with an equally faded MARY IS MY HOMEGIRL T-shirt, she knew, without a doubt, that he was full of shit.