by Jen Larsen
DEDICATION
FOR MONIQUE VAN DEN BERG,
THE ROBERT PENN WARREN OF GRATENESS
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
Back Ad
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
Every year on my birthday, my grandmother, my father’s mother, the woman we owe our whole lives to, reminds me that I am risking everything. That I am making a gigantic mistake. That big dreams like mine—Harvard; changing the world, medicine, social justice for all (and for all a good night)—rely on being flawless and unassailable.
She tells me that refusing to budge on the issue just means I am as stubborn and obstinate and fool-headed as my mother was. Just tell her to stuff it, my mother whispers in my head, and I shake that thought out.
The issue, my grandmother will be quick to tell you, is that I am fat.
I am also valedictorian, class president, former volleyball team captain, and was voted both Most Likely to Succeed and Best Personality two years in a row in our school’s yearbook, which is really more of a pamphlet. I scored the winning point during the state volleyball finals last year. Unfortunately it was because I spiked the ball into the face of our rival captain, but still. I have a Platinum Star (which is an A plus at normal, less weird schools) in AP Organic Chemistry, and I earned that star despite being distracted by the presence of my best friend Laura’s twin brother, who always seems to sit directly in front of me.
I have been described as ambitious, smart, outgoing, driven, stubborn, and sometimes bossy by people who love me, though that last one is not true. I’ve also been described as fat by my grandmother and select others, which is true.
But my grandmother thinks that not being fat is the part of me I should focus on. That being a size 18 (or sometimes 20) will ruin my life. She says, “You do not deserve to be automatically dismissed for utterly arbitrary aesthetic reasons that have nothing to do with your worth as a human being.”
People in my life have a tendency toward pronouncements, which I respect.
I say, “That is unimportant. If they don’t know the whole story they are not important and I do not care.”
I don’t have the gift of pronouncement. Maybe that’s why I admire it.
“Oh my beautiful darling,” my grandmother says. She is tall and elegant and blue-eyed and silver-haired and gorgeous. I look just like my mother—brown skin and brown eyes and waves of brown hair. Curves, rolls, softness. Boys have told me I am beautiful, but I look nothing like my hard and glimmering diamond grandmother, who says, “I admire your bravado. Truly I do. But they care. And you can’t escape it.” She looks at my thighs and the width of my hips and my solid arms, and my cleavage, of which I admittedly have a lot, and sees bravado instead of just my body. She says, “The deck is already stacked against you.”
“No,” I say. “That shouldn’t be true.” I flush and I shift and I hate the feeling this fills me with. Like she’s digging hard in the sand at the bottom of my mind and stirring it all up into a cloud that obscures everything, tiny particles floating in front of all the things I could say or should say or need to say.
“That’s the only argument you have for me?” my grandmother says when she sees me fidget. When I can’t look at her directly. “You argue passionately about everything else in the world, Ashley, but you cannot argue with me here.”
This is my grandmother: When she was thirteen she was saving lives. When she was exactly that age she leaped into the water, right off the pier in town and into the Pacific Ocean, and towed back a boy who was drowning. And she’s never stopped rescuing the world. She saved her mother, who was drowning in her second marriage, by reporting her stepfather for securities fraud; her sister, who lost her child—the money they won from the settlement didn’t fix her sister’s heart, but it gave her room to breathe. Of course my grandmother saved countless others in her career as a surgeon. And, finally, most salient to me, she saved my mother—pregnant with twins and in love with my father, who couldn’t support a family as an artist and couldn’t support my mother in college. She took them into her old and crumbling house; she found my father a job.
My grandmother’s rescues are concrete and impregnable. Her advice to me is this: You are fat. Do not give them that foothold.
She’s not wrong. There really are people in the world who have ready a list of adjectives about a fat person—including lazy, stupid, messy, incompetent—that they are certain describes her before she ever opens her mouth. And that is unimportant, because I won’t let it be important.
But my grandmother insists on this because she loves me. She says this because she is never wrong. She says knowing how to succeed means knowing how the world works and playing the game.
I say, what about the element of surprise? She shakes her head at me.
Every year on my birthday she reminds me that she knows how my future will turn out. She’ll hand me an envelope just a couple of days from now, as she does every year. She handed me the first one on my thirteenth birthday.
“Ashley,” she said, with the small white card in her small white hand. “I want you to consider this very carefully.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Open it,” she said. She never got irritated at my questions. I tore it open.
“A fair bargain,” my grandmother said, tilting her chin at the slip of heavy paper in my hand. And it took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. Her writing again, slightly neater:
Ashley Maria Perkins.
Good for one shopping trip every ten pounds.
My heart lurched. Across from me, my grandmother with her head tilted to the side. She looked like a bird, watching me.
“I want you to be happy,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I want that too.”
“You’re never going to be happy if you’re . . . of size.”
“Of size,” I said. “What is that supposed to mean?” I am a size, I thought, but so is everyone else. My older brothers are taller than I am but narrow, taking after my father. He got too skinny sometimes, when he forgot to eat. My mother, I didn’t remember, but everyone said I looked like her.
“You are gaining quite a lot of weight, Ashley,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I knew the width of my own hips: I fit precisely between the two coast live oaks on the path behind my father’s studio—the one that winds down to the beach. My hips brushed each side as I walked between them. I knew I was as tall as the curio cabinet in the kitchen, where all my mother’s dishes were. My feet fit in my mother’s old shoes. My head fit in my grandmother’s elaborate hats. These were all the sizes I had in my head.
“You’re getting big,” she said.
“Well, I just turned thirteen,” I said. My friends’ parents always said things like that, how big you’ve gotten, oh you’re growing up so fast—but this felt different, and my grandmother was shaking
her head. I had never thought about size, that it had any meaning beyond measurement.
“I mean fat, darling,” she said. “You’re getting somewhat fat.” She continued, “That’s what you get from your mother’s side of the family. . . .”
But I wasn’t listening anymore, because that’s when the word fat became something real. Something that would follow along behind me and settle in dark corners and slither around the back corridors of my mind. Whether or not I acknowledged it, the idea was inside me.
For my birthday that year, my grandmother gave me my body. Or her idea of it. I learned what it meant when my uncle Gomer called me gordita that single visit we took to San Diego before my mother left. My grandmother never liked my mother’s family.
The coupons have become a never-changing ceremony. My grandmother hands me the envelope and I try to give it back to her. She clasps her hands at her waist. She waits for me to open it. My hands shake and I hate every tremor. She wants the whole world for me, and this is the only thing I have to give her in return. She tells me this without actually saying the words. This is the only change I have to make.
The sensible, incisive voice inside my head, the one I rely on, goes incoherent and says, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I hold on to everything I know about myself. The fact that I should not have to do this, should not.
The first time I just said “No,” and she didn’t argue with me. She took the card and she looked at it. She folded it neatly in half and slipped it into her pocket. She said, “I taught you to trust your instincts, Ashley.” Her face was very serious but I couldn’t help but find signs of disappointment all over it. Disappointed eyebrows and a disappointed mouth. We never talked about it again.
Instead, the cards kept appearing every birthday, because I did gain weight. Puberty changed the shape of my body and I got tall and broad and rounded and I saw that the definition of the word fat fit me, its length and width and breadth, but I refused to acknowledge its depth.
Ashley Maria Perkins.
50 pounds for a trip to Disneyland.
I said, “I don’t want it.” She wouldn’t take it back that time, and it sat in my desk until I threw it out.
Ashley Maria Perkins.
75 pounds for a shopping trip in Paris.
I said, “I don’t care about Paris.” My grandmother said, “Don’t be a barbarian.” That one I crumpled into a ball and threw in the garbage disposal. I turned the water on and let the motor run for a long time.
And then last year. The look of pleasure on her face like she had finally found the button to push, the vulnerable spot to prod.
Ashley Maria Perkins. 80 pounds for a new car.
I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
She said, “You know I never kid. Any car is better than that rusted-out thing you’re always running off in.”
The ancient wreck of a Volvo is my father’s car but I’m the only one who can drive it. I drive down the coast with my foot on the floor. I have to, to get away from a sagging house and incomplete college applications, and panic about getting the scholarship that is my only chance, and the noise in my head that sounds a lot like my grandmother but is starting to sound too much like it belongs to me.
My grandmother, attempting to bribe me with a car like she’s Oprah. “How can you possibly afford that?” I said, throwing it across the room. It didn’t go very far; it kind of fluttered down and landed face-up.
New car. My father and brothers and I have no money. No cash. I have no idea what Grandmother has, or doesn’t. She thinks talking about money is uncouth, but here she was, waving her hand in the air and saying, “I can move around some investments. I can sell some things. I can unbind your trust. You don’t have to wait until I’m dead.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want it.” I picked the card up and tore it in half, right between “for” and “a new car.”
I don’t want it was the extent of the argument I was able to muster up, and still is. That is the best I can do and the only thing I can use to defend myself.
I try, “Why do you keep giving me these cards?”
She says, “I hope you’ll change your mind, of course. I hope you’ll understand what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear it anymore,” I tell her.
My grandmother thinks this is resignation. That even perfect things should never stop being perfected.
I will never admit this: The part of me that wonders how I fit in this family of tall and slender people, the part that trusts my grandmother unconditionally, the weak little part that forgets who I am, that quakes every birthday when she gives me another coupon—is tempted.
So tempted.
And there’s this feeling I have: This year, she’ll make the stakes higher. This year she will offer me something I truly can’t refuse and every time I think about it I feel like I am full of ants.
But I can’t think about that. I am swimming hard for the shore, paddling madly, towing everything I have to do behind me—an AP calculus quiz two days from now and a layout proposal for our laughably short yearbook and a list of potential charity trips to present at the student government meeting and the double shift I have to work at my job after school to cover Amy and sometimes it feels like maybe this is the time I won’t make it—I’ll drop something, forget something, screw up, and it will sink me.
But I will never screw up. The idea of it is enough to keep my eyes on the shore, keep breathing even when the air feels like acid in my lungs and the water below me is dark, and cold, and deep.
I will never screw up.
Because that would mean that my grandmother is right.
CHAPTER 2
I’m awake at two a.m., waiting for the storm. The air’s getting thick with the smell of ozone washing in from over the ocean and swallowing us all whole. Everything is holding its breath, waiting for the sky to crack open. Especially me. I am sixteen years old and thunder still makes me jump. Lightning makes me wince.
Because this is centralish California and it is the law, we got 340 days of sunshine last year. There are days when everything and everyone looks bright and flawless and washed clean by sunshine. The sun makes it easy to forget that it won’t always be there. Sitting on the boardwalk, stretching out on the sand, strolling down the whole two blocks of Main Street—everyone talks about the genuinely miraculous healing power of the sun’s invisible gamma rays. This is my oddball little town, a place full of people too weird for San Francisco.
On the sunniest days I’ve found myself leaning against the railing overlooking the beach, where the water always seems like rolling glass and the sky is an impossible, pure blue. When I tilt my head back and close my eyes against the light and heat, I find myself believing, just a little bit, in the magic of those invisible gamma rays.
It’s easy then to forget that rain is eventually going to pour down the roof of my grandmother’s ancient house, sweeping away more shingles and splashing through the holes in the gutters and sheeting down the windows and gushing through the cracks and the seams and making puddles all over the house. The attic will flood. My father will sit up on the couch and put his romance novel down and complain about the damp. I’ll go get armfuls of towels and put out pots all over to catch the leaks before they warp the floors even more. Every time a board creaks under my feet I cringe. I hear my mother’s voice in my head, the voice I’ve made up, since I don’t remember her real one. She’s arguing with my father: Why doesn’t your mother fix the damn roof? Does she leave it to spite me? while my father murmurs something soothing and pointless.
The storm is coming, and the faraway rumbling underscores the drumbeat of two-a.m. thoughts pounding through my head—all the things I have to do, all the things I haven’t done.
The house is sighing at me as the wind skims over the surface of the ocean and tumbles onto shore, crashing into us.
The worst of it is my college-application essay. The essay
that has to get me into school. Win me a scholarship or I can’t go, even if I get in. Establish world peace and cure cancer.
It sits undone, the impossible thing I don’t want to do for no real reason that I can figure out, because my only other choice is to stare at the ceiling and feel the essay deadline ticking like a countdown to failure.
Sotomayor flops over and lets out her long, satisfied, rumbling grunt. I lean down and press my face to the side of her thick neck. She smells like a dog and that is the most comforting smell in the world, ahead of the smell of wood fires and Ivory soap and that fresh-ink, new textbook smell. Toby, our latest foster dog, is lying on his back with all four paws in the air. She’s a quarter of Soto’s size, a squirrely little dachshund to a big muscular pit bull, but she takes over most of the bed. When Soto snorts and rolls half on top of Toby, I wish I could roll over too and turn off the light and we could all just sleep. Or I could shake them awake and creep down the back stairs and out to the driveway and be gone, Soto hanging out the window with her tongue flapping like a flag and Toby spinning in circles in the backseat and the wind in my hair and everything left behind.
But you’ve always got to come back. My father could need something in the middle of the night—he sleeps worse than I do. My grandmother could check on me. She never sleeps, period. She doesn’t make a disappointed face, she doesn’t sigh or scold me, but when I do escape down the coast for brief, glorious moments, no matter what time I get back she is sitting in the drawing room right off the foyer, in her dressing gown, sipping tea. I know she can hear the creak of the hinges but she doesn’t call out. And I can never stop myself from peering around the door to see if maybe this is the time she won’t be there waiting for me. She looks up at me and says, “Good night,” and I know I am dismissed back to my room to work or study or write an essay or try to sleep until I can’t stand it again and have to just go.
Sometimes the thought of her waiting when I come back means I never leave.
I can’t leave now. The important things, they have a gravity that’s impossible to escape. This essay is the most important thing.