“Let’s get the hell out of here.” Elliott took Joanna’s hand and pulled her through the deafening crowd. Rosary beads clutched to their breasts, women were crying while men cursed either the police or the young man. A stream of cruisers arrived, sirens blaring, lights flashing.
“Holy shit!” Elliott said when they were settled into their car.
“Holy shit!” Joanna repeated.
***
They breakfasted at a little Cuban restaurant on the corner of Centre and Paul Gore Streets in Jamaica Plain. He ate a roast pork sandwich with side orders of black beans, rice, and ripe plantains, along with a tall glass of fresh orange juice. All she could manage were two eggs over easy and whole-wheat toast.
She liked the way the simplicity of the décor set off the artwork on the walls, the bold but simple lines and vibrant palette of Caribbean artists.
“Thanks for coming with me.” She sipped thick hot chocolate from an oversized black mug with a cinnamon stick in it.
He reached across the lacquered wooden table and covered her hand with his. “Wouldn’t have missed it,” he said, his tired eyes taking her in — drawing her in, asking if the morning had been disappointing, empowering her with his love. She would stay with him always.
***
Forty-five minutes later, lying on their king-sized bed in nothing but his shorts, he clicked his teeth several times, a signal that he had entered the first stage of sleep. Fully clothed, she climbed in beside him and rested her head on the nest of his hairy chest as it rhythmically rose and fell. There she remained staring sideways at the painting she had purchased from a gallery in Rockport, that hung on the opposite wall, until the man in a tuxedo and the lady in a long purple gown began to sway to the notes the musician beside them coaxed out of the trumpet he caressed. Round and round they twirled, sinking their feet into the wet sand. The tide repeatedly kissed the shoreline goodbye and pulled farther and farther away. It grew chilly as the orange sun dipped ever so slowly below the horizon, where the woman with the leopard kerchief and perfectly applied makeup smiled at Joanna, lifted a brown-sleeved arm, and stroked across the bay.
“I hope you’re not doing this for me,” Roy said. “I like you just the way you are. You’ve never been fat in my eyes.”
“Then you’re blind,” Angie fired back.
She had made it perfectly clear on their first date that she was seriously considering having vertical gastric bypass surgery. She hadn’t said it to impress him, but rather to warn him of her intentions. Risks or no risks, whether or not Roy liked her fat, she’d made one of the most important decisions of her life, and for once she had no doubt that it was the right one. This was about her. Besides, did he really find her attractive below the double chin?
“I saw that face, when you pulled into the parking lot of the Branding Barn, and I shouted, ‘Hee haw!’ I got so excited,” he had said when she answered his personal ad in the local newspaper. “I didn’t even see your body.”
But that was just it: he hadn’t looked at her body, and nothing about her body had made him want to look.
She knew she had a pretty face; she had been told that her whole life. It was amazing how people always categorized her anatomical parts when it came to compliments. She also had a pretty smile and pretty hair. Her ears were referred to as perfectly formed and petite. It was as though people were scrambling to name anything they could above the neck, because the neck and all the rest was too broad to take in, too grotesque to view. Once in junior high school, without her knowing, a boy had taped onto the back of her T-shirt a sign that read OVERSIZE LOAD, in red Magic Marker. He then attempted to wave the hallway traffic out of her way. When she caught on, she’d laughed, then locked herself in a stall in the girls’ bathroom and cried for the entire period she should have been in chorus. Oh yes — she had a lovely voice.
However, she’d been a heroine in her family as a small child, unlike her cousin Nancy, who’d been made to suffer alone at the table so long after dinner that the greasy juice surrounding her steak hardened into white wax. Angie couldn’t comprehend Nancy’s lack of appetite. At family gatherings, Angie had been the first of the cousins — even faster than some adults — to clean her plate. The other children peeled off the hated chicken skin and sneaked it to Angie. They slipped her the burnt pieces of roasted potatoes. They fought to sit next to her, in easy shot of her dish. No one wanted to be ostracized and made to suffer like Nancy, whose mother once forced her to dunk a Genoa salami sandwich into a glass of chocolate milk, promising that it would be more palatable that way. No, they had Angie to thank for their after-dinner freedom. And Angie had her expandable stomach to thank for her popularity. Why couldn’t Nancy be more like Angie? the adults asked as they monitored Nancy’s mouthfuls and Angie took the seconds and thirds that were offered her. She accepted the chicken skins and the leftover sausage links, she lifted two éclairs off of a platter of pastries, she ate tripe and stuffed rolled pigskin simmered in tomato sauce when her cousins wouldn’t touch the stuff. She ate and ate. And the more she ate, the more she was held up as an example for the others to emulate. While Nancy’s parents fretted over their malnourished daughter, who was all legs and arms, and forced her to drink tonics to stimulate her appetite, Angie’s mother and father preened at having produced such a healthy offspring.
Then puberty made its debut, and before Angie knew what had happened, everything seemed to change. By the time they were 15, Nancy’s angles had smoothed out into subtly proportioned curves. Even her appetite had improved. Angie, however, remained one enormous measurement, from below her thick neck to her buttocks. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. Her feet burst the straps of her shoes. Now the negative attention was cast onto Angie. She was too heavy, they all warned her parents. It wasn’t healthy; it wasn’t nice for a young girl. They must do something before she burst.
“Nonsense, it’s all muscle,” Doctor Mazzo, her pediatrician, had said.
After all, she’d won a swimming tournament at the Y in sixth grade — the first girl, the youngest girl in the family, to take part in athletics.
“And,” he had added (he was privy to gossip about his patients), “I hear she has a boyfriend. What are you worried about?” She needed the nourishment, he insisted; the exercise and the desire to be loved would keep her weight in check.
Love did sustain Angie, until she was a size 16 and her boyfriend threatened that, if she gained another pound, he was gone. When she tipped the scales at 210, he called her a cow and broke up with her. Her parents’ eyelids flew up like window shades.
“I’ll buy you a fur coat if you lose 25 pounds,” her father, Sal, offered.
“I’ll take you to Italy,” her mother, Terry, said.
“You’ll be able to fit in an airplane seat,” Sal added.
But there had been no comforting words for Angie, only comforting food — lots of it — sneaked into her room after her parents retired for the evening, bought from vending machines at her community college, shared with cousins who pretended that her eating habits were normal, that everything about her was normal, because they loved her. As Dr. Mazzo had said, love was sustaining.
***
Angie filled out the questionnaire from the Bayside Surgical Group that arrived in the mail. List every diet you’ve ever been on and the results. Where should she begin? Nancy had announced her engagement just around the time fen-phen had come on the market. Lose weight; eat like a normal person, the ad had said. It was supposed to be taken for only two months; Angie took it for three. She lost 50 pounds and she developed a leaky heart valve. At least she hadn’t died, like some others who had taken the drug, although there were times when she wished she had.
She had refused the fur coat and the trip to Italy. Despite the weight loss, her mother had had to sew her bridesmaid’s dress while her cousins bought theirs off the rack. In every one of Nancy’s wedding pictures, she hid
behind the other attendants and in her cousin Rosemary’s wedding photos, and in Barbara’s and Joanna’s. Nancy’s wedding had bothered her most, however; maybe because Nancy and she were only two days apart in age. She had seen countless black-and-white photos of them wrapped in bunting and held up for the camera by their mothers on their first day home from St. Mary’s hospital as though to say: Look what we’ve just done! Nancy and she had grown up like Siamese twins, side by side in identical attached row houses. They had held hands in line on their first day of kindergarten, eaten lunch in school cafeterias together, and later hung out at bars together. They had never been served at the same time, however. When Angie put her empty glass down, it remained empty, but Nancy’s no sooner hit the counter than bartenders would appear with a refill.
“You know, I’ve been looking at you for 15 minutes,” Angie once chewed out a male server. “As soon as my cousin takes her last sip, you’re there. Why is that? Because she’s thin and I’m not?”
“I didn’t see you,” the young bartender had stammered.
“Bullshit!”
But he had been right on the mark. Her bulk made her invisible.
After the fen-phen near fatality, she had tried Meridian, then Dexatrim. She added them to the list. Then Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, the Stillman water diet, the Atkins fat diet, the South Beach diet, the ice cream diet, the Hollywood miracle juice diet. She had done them all — countless times. She had lost a little but gained it all back and more. For six months she had drunk nothing but Slimfast, then gagged on a piece of steak and had to have her cousin Joanna’s doctor-husband perform the Heimlich on her at a family barbecue. NutriSystem products made her vomit. NuSkin Appeal shakes gave her gas. Chocolate-and-vanilla flavored Ayds appetite suppressants had added 15 pounds and made her a size 24.
Are there any eating disorders in the family? Yes, if she counted her own compulsion. She had tried purging once, but it disgusted her. She circled no. Then came the list of risks: one in every 200 died from the surgery. Angie put the pen down.
“You don’t have to do this,” Roy sang out, his chin resting on the crown of her head. She felt the vibration of his jaw.
“At work today one of the residents asked if I’d gained weight. God bless old people; what’s on their minds is on their tongues.”
“You’re around too many old people.”
“I work in a nursing home.”
“Get a new job.”
“I love my work. Besides, it isn’t easy for me to get hired. I can’t bear to look at one more personnel officer’s condescending stare and hear them tell me how the job has just been filled.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I live this, Roy, you don’t. Do you know that sometimes I have to move furniture around in the rooms to get closer to patients? Wheelchairs fit better in most spaces than I do!”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“That’s your answer to everything. You don’t have to make me feel better all the time.”
“Honey.” He only called her that, the pitch of his voice rising as he pronounced the word, when he wanted to point out that he was right and she was wrong. “You think I only make love to you for your sake?”
Angie always took a long time to get ready to retire. She liked Roy to be in bed when she arrived so she could shut off the lights before she slipped in alongside him.
“Keep it on,” Roy said, indicating the light.
But she doused it just the same, and unbuttoned the gaily printed smock of her uniform and unhooked her bra, releasing the heavy weight of her breasts. She felt their warmth against the cool skin that protected her heart. She tugged down the elastic waistband of her white polyester trousers, taking the panties down along with them. She had forgotten what it was like to unfasten zippers and buttons. She couldn’t imagine life as the light-as-a feather woman a man whisked into his arms and spun around and wouldn’t put down because he wanted her with him wherever he went.
“Ta-da!” she exclaimed when the last article of clothing was off. Then she lifted the covers and performed her vanishing act before Roy’s pupils had time to adjust to the blackness and he saw her body, covered with the white quilt, looking like Mont Blanc. He kissed her lips and face. He sucked on her nipples. He fondled her clitoris. And he entered her. Spot A. Spot B. Spot C. Spot D. He might have been on a road trip, hitting brief but familiar rest stops until reaching his final destination. For Angie, this was making love. She was grateful for the attention and felt she didn’t deserve to ask him to linger here and there a while longer.
***
Angie’s parents liked Roy. He wasn’t a lawyer or a doctor or a high-powered stockbroker, but he was solid, hardworking, and devoted to their 42-year-old daughter. He also, most likely, represented her last chance for babies. It was more for Angie, though, that they hoped for grandchildren: how could anyone — especially a woman — live without children, without a family? No one had ever believed that childless Nancy and Jean-Georges were really happy — not until little Pierre, that is, came along. Childlessness had been the one negative trait Angie and Nancy shared, but then Pierre materialized out of nowhere to remove the last shred of solidarity. Despondent and jealous, Angie had agreed to a blind date with a friend of a friend whom nobody knew very well. He waited for Angie in the parking lot of a popular local bar, just as Roy would one day do. But when he saw Angie get out of her car and walk toward the entrance, he stopped her and suggested they might prefer a quieter, more intimate place in the next town. They could talk more easily and get to know each other better; he would follow her there in his car. When Angie pulled out of the parking lot and took a left in the direction of the designated restaurant, he took a right. She left unreturned messages on his voice mail, then shut herself in her room for days, until her parents had to break down the door because she had fainted from dehydration.
***
Her appointed nutritionist found Angie’s body mass index acceptable for the procedure. The psychotherapist confirmed that she did not have an eating disorder. Fine with me, Angie told herself, thinking that if she wasn’t a walking eating dysfunction, who was? Her required attendance at support group meetings was to be spread out over a six-month period and, while one meeting a month would have sufficed, Angie attended more frequently to prove how much she wanted the surgery. She listened as lecturers identified themselves as if they were addressing an AA group and explained in painful detail how they had become obese and what had led them to surgery. All were now average weight — normal looking. Their lives had changed.
About a week before Angie’s surgery, she began to experience pain radiating from below her breastbone when she got up to pee during the night. She attributed it to stress and, breaking the rules, told no one, knowing that if she did, the surgery would be postponed for who knew how much longer.
“If I die,” she said to Roy the night before her big day, “make sure you pick up all your clothing off the floor and hide it. My parents still don’t know we live together. They can’t believe you’d want to.”
It was a joke. Getting in the first laugh about herself had become a habit, one that made it less likely that someone else would laugh at her. It was the fat person’s secret to jolliness, yet Roy had never found it funny.
“We could have gotten married a long time ago,” he said.
Several hours later she was still unable to sleep, running her hand over the smooth flesh of her stomach for the last time before it was cut open and left to scar. She woke Roy up. “What time is it?”
“Two a.m.”
“Four and a half more hours until we leave for the hospital?” she said with a sigh.
“You really ought to try and get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
“I think I’m losing my nerve.”
“You’ve just got cold feet. Before you know it, it’ll all be over.” He put his arm around he
r and pulled her closer. “But remember, you can always change your mind, because as much as I’ll try to help, this is something you have to do alone, Ange. You’re in this by yourself. ”
***
A four-hour surgery turned into eight due to an ugly gray gallbladder — the source of her prior discomfort — that was hard to cut through. And so it took additional time to trim away the top part of her stomach and block the bottom, to make a new sac the size of an egg, to take part of her intestine and bypass it to the new stomach, which would allow food to pass through her faster, without sufficient time for digestion. After three days she was sent home with a diet of puréed foods. On her post-op visit, the nutritionist told her to eat the way she wanted, that she would know when she was full. She tried but, by the time she felt full, she had already become too full, and was nauseated.
Certain foods made her gums and mouth tingle. She became lightheaded, and crawled around the kitchen floor tiles in search of the coolest spot, like a dog lying down on a hot summer day. Roy placed cold compresses on her forehead while water seeped out of her pores and onto the floor. Her sweatpants became soaked until they could absorb no more. Unable to move, she watched until she was sitting in a puddle of her own body fluids. Why was she still wearing sweatpants? She was supposed to be thin now. She was supposed to be normal.
“Get me out of my clothes,” she implored Roy. “Get me out of my clothes! I’m drowning!”
They promised it would get better: the doctor, the nutritionist, the former patients at the support lectures all promised her, and it did. She learned how to adjust to this new digestive system of hers that had been turned upside down, right side up, and inside out. They told her to eat her proteins first, then her vegetables, then her carbohydrates, but when she did, it made her sick. She changed the order, but had to constantly juggle it. No sooner had she found foods that agreed with her, than they turned on her, just as men had. Peanut butter gave way to ham, which gave way to hard-boiled eggs, which led to cheese. Sweets lowered her blood sugar. Caffeine and pasta put her to sleep. She slept for days — weeks — shivering under two heavy quilts.
Thieves Never Steal in the Rain Page 10