Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  Head down, I hurried out of the restaurant and back to my car. I drove home. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, pulled a trash bag out of a kitchen cupboard, and then, before I could lose my nerve or change my mind, I swept every piece of junk food in the house into that bag, the chips and cakes and candies, the cups of pudding and frozen pies, the boxes of muffin and brownie mix, the Valentine’s Day chocolates, the canisters of heat-and-eat biscuits and cinnamon rolls. I filled the first bag, then another, then loaded them both into the trunk of my car, drove them to the dump, and tossed them. Then I drove to Dr. Shoup, the oncologist who’d treated my mother twelve years before, the only doctor I knew.

  I gave my name to her secretary, explaining that I didn’t have an appointment but that I needed to see the doctor as soon as she could manage. Then I sat in her waiting room, holding Good Housekeeping open in front of my face, trying not to let any of the other patients, the ladies in wigs and scarves, see that I was crying, because if they saw, they’d probably think that I was sick, like they were, that there was something wrong with me besides too much dessert.

  Dr. Shoup was wonderfully calm. Her eyes did not widen as she saw me for the first time in over a decade, and her hands, when she took my blood pressure and listened to my heart, were steady and gentle.

  “There’s no big secret to weight loss,” she told me. “Burn more calories than you’re taking in, and you can expect to lose a pound or two a week.”

  Dr. Shoup handed me a sheet with a twelve-hundred-calorie-a-day diet, a prescription for a diet pill that, she said, might take the edge off my appetite, and, after I’d told her that I was having trouble sleeping, a prescription for pills that would help with that. “Good luck,” she said, and sent me home.

  My diet, which was a mash-up of every weight-loss plan I’d read in any women’s magazine, started the next morning. For breakfast, I’d have two poached eggs, a slice of multigrain toast, and water. For lunch, I’d have a big salad with sprouts and beans, a drizzle of olive oil, and four ounces of salmon or chicken. For a snack, I’d have blueberries and almonds and a stick of string cheese. For dinner, I’d have another four ounces of chicken or fish and a bowlful of broccoli or spinach, plus half a cup of brown rice or half of a potato. For dessert, I’d have sleeping pills, enough to knock me out until the next morning. I had twelve hours’ worth of willpower. I couldn’t let my days go any longer than that.

  It was brutal. There were nights when I’d lie awake practically crying until the sleeping pills took hold, thinking about warm corn muffins with melted butter and honey, crisp-skinned fried chicken and biscuits soaked in sausage gravy, chili with a dollop of sour cream and chopped onions on top. Pound cake, shortcake, blackout chocolate mousse cake, gelato, biscotti, biscuits and popovers, caramel popcorn and warm apple pie, which I knew I’d probably never be able to eat again.

  In eight months’ time, I’d made my way from scary-fat into the neighborhood of regular-fat, where I could fit into the clothes at the plus-size shop at the mall, instead of having to order everything on the Internet, where I could walk down a street and not feel like everyone was staring at me and I was going to collapse from the effort. I could tie my shoes without sweating, I could wear pants with snaps and zippers. “You look fantastic,” said people I’d never spoken to before, people I’d never noticed noticing me. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing special,” I would say. “Just cutting back.” Meanwhile, I would think, suffer. What I did was suffer.

  “Nice work,” said Dr. Shoup when I came for a checkup. “We can do a tummy tuck when you’ve hit your goal weight and stayed there for a while.” She looked me over dispassionately. “You should get some exercise. Tone up a bit. Find something you like.”

  I looked at her. If there’d been an exercise I’d liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

  She noticed my expression. “Find something you can tolerate,” she amended. “And do it for at least thirty minutes, five times a week.”

  “Does sex count?” I asked. Ha—like I was having any of that.

  “Anything that gets your heart working at its aerobic threshold,” she said. Trust Dr. Shoup not to get a joke. “Maybe start with something low-impact. Walking or swimming.”

  I drove home thinking about my mother, the way I’d always pictured her as a teenager, swimming through the lake at summer camp with my father’s arrow in her hand. I got online and ordered a swimsuit, a one-piece in dark purple from a company that specialized in “the active lives of larger women.” The morning it arrived, I bundled the swimsuit and a beach towel into a tote bag and drove myself to a fancy health club I’d passed on my way to see my brother. There I allowed myself to be bullied into a one-year membership by a woman who was maybe twenty-two years old and approximately the size of my right thigh. My gold-level membership, she recited, while keeping her eyes carefully trained on the wall above my shoulder, came complete with one session with a personal trainer, free towel service, and a half-off coupon for the juice bar.

  “We also offer complimentary body analysis,” she said. In addition to being tiny, she was deeply, alarmingly tanned. She looked like a tangerine with a ponytail.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Height, weight, body-fat percentage…”

  “I’ll skip it,” I said hastily.

  “… Then you run on the treadmill for twelve minutes…” She looked at me. “Or walk. Whatever. Then there’s a sit-up test, and a flexibility test, and we enter all the data into the computer…”

  “Skip! Skip! Skip!” I was positive that I couldn’t do a sit-up to save my life, and what would the computer tell me after they’d sent it my data? Probably that I owed the treadmill an apology. I glanced through the wall of windows, toward the Olympicsized pool. There were three swimmers, a man and two women, all of them in swim caps and goggles. I didn’t have a swim cap or goggles. “Do you sell swim stuff?” I asked the tiny tangerine.

  “Oh. Um. No.” She giggled. I guessed that she’d never seen anyone as big as I was. People my size were, most likely, infrequent and unwelcome visitors to the land of free weights and stairclimbers and Yogalates stretch classes. I felt like telling her that she didn’t have to worry, that I wouldn’t break anything or eat anyone, but I decided that calling attention to her discomfort would only increase it.

  I struggled out of the little foam-and-wire armchair across from her desk. “When is the pool the busiest?”

  “Mornings,” she said. “It’s real crowded right when we open, which is at six, and it stays busy until eight. Then it’s busy at lunchtime, and then it kind of empties out, and it gets real busy after four or five.”

  “So how are things at ten in the morning?”

  “Ten’s pretty empty.”

  I thanked her and made my way to the locker room. In my purple skirted suit, in the unforgiving three-way mirrors at the end of the locker room, with wobbly white flesh fore and aft, even with the weight I’d lost I bore a disconcerting resemblance to Barney. Ah well, I thought, and dunked underneath the shower and made my way into the steamy, chemical-scented air of the pool.

  The two women swimmers were gone by then. There was just one man with silvery hair and black goggles doing the crawl, plowing up and down the lap lane closest to the windows. I stuck a toe into the water, which was as warm as a bath, then eased myself, inch by inch, down the steps and into the shallow end, all the while maintaining a death grip on the metal handrail, terrified that I would slip and fall and hit my head and drown, and that my death would be written up in News of the Weird: TITANIC-SIZED WOMAN DROWNS ON MAIDEN VOYAGE.

  I walked toward the deep end, letting my feet drift up and back behind me, until I was floating. Then I put my face in the water, the way I’d been taught at my swimming lessons long ago. I blew a gentle stream of bubbles out of my mouth and stretched my arms in front of me, parting the water as if it were a curtain. I hadn’t been swimming in years, but I had to hope that
it was like riding a bike, that it would come back to me once I got started.

  I put my face back in the water, set my feet against the concrete wall, pushed gently, and did a tentative breaststroke toward the opposite end of the pool, twenty-five yards away. I figured I’d try two laps—one out, one back—and then call it a day, but I felt okay. Before I knew it, my fingers were brushing the lip of the deep end. I turned around, pushed off again, and stroked gingerly to the other side. I looked at the clock. The entire enterprise had taken me less than three minutes. I started off again. My eyes were starting to sting from the chlorine, so this time I kept my face above the water. I fanned my hands out in front of me and fluttered my legs behind. Every four laps, I checked the clock, and before I knew it, twenty minutes had gone by.

  I didn’t realize how hard I’d been working until I pulled myself up the steps in the shallow end and felt the muscles of my thighs and calves trembling.

  “Harder than it looks, isn’t it?”

  The man in the other lap lane had gotten out of the water and was toweling off. He was thick-shouldered, barrel-chested, with brown skin and a thatch of silvery hair on his chest that matched his close-cropped silvery hair. I nodded, breathless, certain that my cheeks were red and that I was sweating as well as dripping. I dabbed at my face with the tiny towel I’d picked up on my way to the pool, wishing I hadn’t left my bigger one back in the locker, wishing that I wasn’t panting like an elderly asthmatic dog.

  “Have a good day,” the man said, and I managed, “You, too,” before wobbling back to the locker room and collapsing on the bench in front of my locker, where I stayed until I could breathe normally and trust my legs to support me.

  I went back to the pool every day, Monday through Friday. I would have gone on weekends, too, except then the pool was usually filled with kids, or the members of a water aerobics class made up of women age seventy and up, their swim-capped heads bobbing genteelly in the deep end. Each session, I’d alternate between trying to go a little longer or swim a little faster.

  After eight weeks of swimming five times a week, my Barney swimsuit was flapping around my hips. I ordered a smaller one, this time in black, figuring I’d be Orca, a killer whale, instead of a friendly dinosaur.

  “A new suit!” the man from the next lane said, and smiled his approval with teeth that were slightly stained and a bit crooked. “You are shrinking.” His accent clipped each of his words precisely. I watched as he shook beads of water from his hair, unselfconsciously rubbing his towel over his arms and his legs. I nodded and picked up my own towel. “Will you join me for some juice?” he asked. I was so startled that I couldn’t think of how to tell him no, or that I had somewhere else to be, which would have been a lie.

  Twenty minutes later, I sat in the juice bar with my smoothie, and the silvery-haired man from the pool sat across from me. His name was Vijay, he said, and he slid a business card across the table: Vijay Kapoor, M.D.

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Retired.” He rolled his r’s. I imagined his tongue, curled against the roof of his mouth, trilling lightly. “Now I do a bit of consulting for the drug companies. I fill in, here and there, to keep busy. And you?”

  It had been so long since I’d had a conversation like this with someone who wasn’t, in some way, paid to talk to me, to take my medical history or my credit information, to give me my prescriptions or my latte or my stamps. “I do illustrations for greeting cards,” I said.

  He smiled kindly. “And may I have your name, my dear?”

  I felt my blush intensify. “Addie Downs.”

  We lingered with our drinks as he coaxed the particulars from me. I told him where I lived, a little more about what I did, and how I’d started swimming. “I lost some weight,” I said. “I’m just trying to tone up a little.” He raised his eyebrows and said nothing. I felt my face getting hot, wondering if he was trying to figure out exactly how big I’d been before the weight loss began.

  “You look well,” he said, making me blush again.

  “What about you?” I asked. He said that he was fifty-nine, which was older than I would have guessed, and he was married, the father of two grown sons. He and his wife lived in a big house in Evanston. She volunteered for charities and as a docent at the Art Institute. He kept busy with part-time work, with the consulting he did for drug companies, the occasional lecture he delivered to medical students. “It is not a bad life,” he said, and he looked at his watch, a gold disc that glowed against his burnished skin. “Until next time?” he asked, and I agreed, bobbed my head shyly, an oversized schoolgirl in a sweatsuit. We were friends. That was all. He was old enough to be my father, and he was married, so what else could we be?

  Vijay was always in the pool by the time I arrived, and he’d lift his sleek, dripping head out of the water and raise one hand. “Halloo, Addie!” he’d call as I waded, as gracefully as I could, into the shallow end, and took the lane next to his. At first he was always faster, but eventually I found myself able to keep up with him. Our fingertips would touch the edge of the pool at the same time. We’d raise our heads, inhale, duck back under the water, and start swimming again.

  Afterward, he’d help me out of the water, extending one square hand, handing me my towel. I’d take my shower, change my clothes, and we’d sit at what I’d come to think of as our table in the juice bar, talking about everything: the election, the weather, a prime-time medical drama we were both addicted to, even though he said the technical mistakes they made were cringe-inducing, and that the show would be responsible for “an influx of idiots” into medical school. He inquired about my family. I told him about Jon, and he’d listened, asking thoughtful questions about the location of Jon’s injury and the length of his rehabilitation, what seizure medication he was on and whether it was adequate.

  “And Mommy and Daddy?”

  I blinked, caught off guard by the diminutives, thinking for an instant that he was talking about his parents. “Oh, they died when I was a teenager. My father had an aneurysm, and my mother had breast cancer.”

  “So you are an orphan.” I almost laughed—the word sounded so strange, like something out of Dickens, or a song I’d heard Emmylou Harris sing about being an orphan girl. Vijay clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I am sorry,” he said, and briefly placed his hand on top of mine.

  At night, in bed, I could call up every detail about him: the shape of his bare feet on the pool’s tiled deck, the tilt of his head when he asked me a question, the aggressive jut of his nose, his endearingly crooked teeth. I knew that I was being silly, that he didn’t like me as anything more than a friend, a person he saw in the pool, a fellow swimmer he barely recognized as female.

  Except I knew that wasn’t true. My black tank suit started bagging around my hips, so I ordered a new one. The smaller I got, the more cuts and colors were available. Now, if I wanted, I could buy a tankini, or a magical patented Slimsuit in an exotic tiger print designed to whittle inches off my waist and keep spectators’ eyes from resting too long on what the tag coyly called my “trouble zones.” I went for a variation of my comfortable, familiar black tank suit… only I bought it in a color the catalogue called “bright raspberry,” imagining how Vijay’s eyes might light up when he saw me, picturing his smile.

  I wasn’t wrong. “Addie,” he crooned when he saw me, “how nice!” I smiled at him, did a modest, mocking half-turn before hurrying into the water, tugging my swim cap over my ears. An hour later, we sat across from each other in the juice bar and, unprompted, he started talking about his sons. “American boys,” he said, his voice half proud, half rueful. One of them had an MBA, and the other was in medical school. The one with the MBA lived in Texas and was married with a baby, the other was engaged. Then he started telling me about his wife, whose name, I’d learned, was Chitra. It had been an arranged marriage in London. Vijay had met her the day before their wedding, and they’d been married for forty-two years. “The two of us rattle around
in that house like the last two peas in a can,” he said. “There is no passion left, no connection. We are like roommates; just two people living together.” Even as I made eye contact and sympathetic noises, I recognized this as a variation of the song that every married man who’d strayed had ever sung to another woman: My wife doesn’t understand me, but oh, you, kid. Still, I couldn’t keep my heart from lifting, couldn’t ignore the way his touch thrilled me when he pressed his hand on mine and then, as I held my breath, reached across the table to stroke my cheek with one blunt fingertip. “Addie,” he murmured. “Do you know how lovely you are?”

  He took me to a hotel downtown, not too expensive but not cheap, either. As I sat on the bed and watched him slip off his belt, then his shoes, then his wedding ring, the thought crossed my mind that I was no better than Valerie’s mother, no better than any woman who thought it was okay to help a man break his wedding vows. He has children, I thought as he embraced me, smelling faintly of the pool’s water. I could see our reflection in the mirror above the dresser, his middle-aged body, with the slight paunch that the laps hadn’t eradicated, the purplish discs of his nipples, the silvery tangle of his chest hair. His hands looked tiny on the vast white field of my back, his short, compact body dwarfed next to mine. I felt the old self-loathing rise up inside me, and I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself not to think, not to see, only to feel, telling myself that I deserved this, I deserved a little happiness; after everything I’d been through, I deserved some sweetness, even if it was only for an afternoon, in a rented room that smelled of cigarette smoke and bleach, even if it was with someone else’s man.