Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions

by Lisa Scottoline

  I was thrilled. I’d been dying to take a ride in the Porsche since her boyfriend got it six months ago. Not only was it a marvel for any of my friends to have a car in the city, but this was a too-die-for beautiful, bona fide sports car.

  As Ferris Bueller once said, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

  “Babe, can we take the car?” my friend called into the house from the porch.

  “Sure,” her fiancé answered, then added, “But only if Francesca drives.”

  Moi?

  “Wait, why can’t you drive it?” I said, offended on her behalf.

  But she explained that her wallet was stolen and she hadn’t gotten around to replacing her license, so she’d never driven the car. It still didn’t explain why I was deemed trustworthy to drive it, but who am I to ask questions?

  I took the keys like Gollum receiving Precious.

  Just sitting in the driver’s seat was fun. The inside of this car looked like a jet cockpit.

  But I couldn’t even find the ignition—“Uh, just give me a minute,” I said—not exactly Top Gun material.

  “Don’t be nervous, we’re just going to be driving ten minutes, nothing over 35 mph, and basically all one road. It’s the easiest drive in the world.”

  When I finally got the engine running, I tapped the gas and lurched forward. My previous driving experience was all but exclusive to a 2002 Volkswagen Cabrio, a windup toy by comparison.

  The Carrera needs to be caressed.

  So I recalibrated my plebeian foot to one light as a ballet dancer, and we were on our way.

  We got to the lunch spot, no problem. I parked about fifty yards from the nearest car, terrified of someone scratching or even sneezing on this gorgeous machine.

  Especially since it wasn’t my gorgeous machine.

  When we were finished, we got back in the car, my friend said, “The gas tank is almost empty, let’s do him a favor and fill it up before we go back.”

  “Is there a station nearby?” The community where we were staying was pretty remote.

  “Google Maps on my phone says one is not far at all.” She put the address in the car’s GPS, and a woman began to direct me back onto the main road in soothing tones.

  Even her voice sounded expensive.

  We were going along, when the GPS directed me to take a right. “You know, this looks like an on-ramp. Do you still want me to take it?”

  “It’s not,” my friend said, glued to her iPhone. “Turn here.”

  Thirty seconds later, we were on a major highway, where the 65 mph speed limit was treated by drivers as a suggestion, at best.

  “I don’t know what happened, I thought we were staying on the main road!” my friend cried.

  Then the GPS had us get off at the next exit.

  “See?” she said. “Phew, I knew it was a mistake.”

  Before it redirected us right back on the highway in the opposite direction, this time leading us to a huge bridge over the water.

  “Omigod, are you okay?” she asked, sounding not-so-okay herself.

  I didn’t want her to panic, nor did I want to betray mine. I tried not to stammer. “I’m fine, we’re perfectly safe, but I’m anxious just because, you know, it’s not my car, and it’s a very expensive car…”

  “No kidding! It’s a—”

  She said how much the car cost, and it was double what I had guessed—my stomach dropped deeper into the bucket seat.

  You know how they say, don’t borrow anything you can’t afford to replace?

  As I white-knuckled the wheel over the crest of the bridge, I envisioned the final scene in Thelma and Louise. Because if I damaged this car in any way, that seemed like my best option.

  I’d say, “Let’s not get caught. Let’s keep goin.’”

  She could get out first—her fiancé loved her—but I’d have to drive into the sky.

  My only regret would be I didn’t get a night with Brad Pitt first.

  I had checked that the parking brake was on three times before this photo was taken.

  But the growl of six cylinders brought me back into the present. What was I afraid of? I had the power of the Porsche on my side. I put my foot on the gas and felt the car bite into the asphalt.

  I started to have fun.

  The hard part came later, when we needed to cross a lane of traffic in order to turn into the gas station. No one was letting us in, and I couldn’t really blame them.

  Two blondes in a Porsche don’t exactly inspire sympathy and friendship.

  I needed a bumper sticker that said, “my other car is the subway.”

  Cue the next round of bystander scorn as I had to approach the fueling station twice to get within reach of the gas tank, located in front of the passenger side.

  I mean, for such a nice car, you’d think they’d put the tank in the right place.

  The return trip was easier. I even felt comfortable enough to play music although I had my friend find the radio stations. I still wasn’t taking my hands off ten and two.

  When we safely pulled into the driveway, we were both giddy with relief. I walked into the beach house on jelly legs.

  “Hey, you guys were gone a long time,” her fiancé said. “I was almost worried.”

  “Oh no, everything was fine,” my friend said. “And we filled up the tank for you.”

  “Aw, thanks.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  “Thanks for letting me drive it,” I said in a small voice, handing back the keys as sheepish as a kid in the principal’s office.

  “Oh, anytime,” he said.

  I glanced at my friend.

  She smiled.

  The Second-Greatest Generation

  By Lisa

  I give my generation a lot of credit.

  Somebody has to.

  Why do I think credit is in order, in addition to my general mode of goodwill and self-congratulation?

  Because I’ve been thinking about the enormous changes my generation has seen in its lifetime, and despite the fact that people generally don’t like change, we’ve done remarkably well with it.

  Take the changes in technology alone.

  They say you should count your blessings, and I do. So let’s take a moment to count our digital blessings.

  On our digits.

  For example, my generation will remember that televisions were black-and-white and had only four channels.

  That happened.

  We know.

  We were there.

  We remember the first time somebody on the street got a color television, which was invariably in somebody else’s house. On my street, we actually stood outside their house, looking inside their picture window at the marvelous colors flickering on their faces in the darkness.

  Okay, now flash forward to today.

  When the TV has forty thousand channels, of course in color, plus movies and the like, and despite what people whine about, there’s usually something pretty terrific on somewhere—and if you decide you have to go to the bathroom during the best part, you can stop the television.

  Can you believe that?

  Can you believe that you can actually stop the television?

  I still don’t even understand that.

  I just take for granted that the planet has a rotational path as well as a gravitational pull, and so the very idea that I can alter, stop, or even reverse the forces of nature blows my tiny little mind.

  Not only that, but I remember the TV days of yore, when you actually had to make a point of being in front of the television when the show came on.

  Because the shows were on only at certain times.

  And everybody had to watch the show at the same time.

  We didn’t determine the time the show was on, the networks did, and we built our lives around the show.

  At least The Flying Scottolines did.

  If you didn’t, you would “miss the show.”

  What?

  Nowadays, you never ha
ve to miss the show. You can watch the show whenever you want to. You can watch it over and over again.

  Incredible!

  All you have to do is learn how to work your remote.

  We may not be The Greatest Generation, but at least we figured that out.

  We’re smarter than our remote controls.

  Even if we didn’t live through the Depression.

  Call us the Second-Greatest Generation.

  Take that, Tom Brokaw.

  Let’s not dwell on the fact that as cool as it was to tape TV shows, we never could figure out how to program our VCRs.

  It doesn’t matter. In the end, the VCRs died and we’re still here.

  Suck it, VCRs.

  Payback’s a bitch.

  And then there are computers, which are remarkable in every way, and without which I couldn’t do my job. I’m constantly writing and editing, and I can do that with the click of a mouse, instead of the old days, when I remember cutting and pasting.

  Do you remember having to type on a sheet, and then when you wanted to edit, physically getting a scissors, taping the line over the previous line, and Xeroxing it?

  Or using Wite-out?

  Which couldn’t even spell its own name?

  And there was something called carbon paper?

  What the hell were we thinking?

  And now the computers are so little we can hold them in our back pocket, and just the other day when I was walking the dogs, I was able to listen to one of two thousand songs, without even carrying a transistor radio.

  Do you remember transistor radios?

  And Walkman?

  And Discman, which showed you were superwealthy because you had something called compact discs?

  Shiny!

  But now we have phones, which not only play music but take our picture, make movies of our lives, and even, remarkably, let us talk to one another whenever we want to, wherever we want to.

  I know this sounds like Captain Obvious, but really, isn’t that incredible?

  By the way, you’ll always sound like Captain Obvious when you count your blessings.

  Care not.

  Count anyway.

  Meanwhile, while we’re on the subject of phones, do you remember when you had to hang around the house, unable to go anywhere, waiting for a call from a doctor, or your mother, or your new crush?

  That was then, this is better.

  And paradoxically, sometimes the new technology is the old technology.

  For example, the other day I was looking at my phone and discovered that it has a compass inside.

  Well, not inside.

  God knows where the compass is.

  The same place the phone is.

  The phone and the compass and the TV and the camera and the record player are the same thing.

  And all I can tell you is that after I discovered that my phone was also a compass, I spent a good part of the afternoon walking northwest across my kitchen and trying to orient myself in the cosmos.

  Until I realized that the cosmos was in my very hand.

  It’s the greatest.

  And so are we.

  Cliff Diving

  By Francesca

  If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it?

  Apparently, I would.

  With my toes at the edge of a slippery rock thirty feet above the choppy sea, I realized that at twenty-eight years old, I’m still as susceptible to peer pressure as I was at sixteen.

  I was spending the weekend with my best friend and her fiancé in Little Compton, Rhode Island, with a bunch of his friends, and on this particular afternoon, I’d let the boys talk me into going cliff diving.

  A fun fact about me: I’m terrified of heights. I mean truly phobic, in that there is no reasoning behind my fear, I know it’s stupid, but I have a physical reaction to feeling high up and precarious. My legs turn to Jell-O, my hands shake, my heart races, and I have the overwhelming urge to crouch and crawl—anything to get closer to sea level.

  And now I found myself literally looking down at the ocean.

  Let me rewind fifteen minutes, to when I was happily, safely lounging on the beach now a hundred yards out of reach. My bestie and I were sunning ourselves on this glorious day, picking out all the most horrible gowns from the stack of bridal magazines we’d brought.

  We were debating whether or not ribbon belts are figure-flattering or hopelessly played-out when her fiancé and his handsome British friend found our beach towel.

  “It’s that time of the day!” her fiancé cried. “We’re going to the cliff!”

  “Huh?” I said, squinting up at them.

  He pointed out to the ocean, to where people the size of specks were lined up and throwing themselves off a tall, rocky outpost and into the sea, like lemmings. “It’s really fun, the best part of my day.”

  “Yes, Francesca, you have to jump with us,” added the Brit. The only thing I liked about the sentence was my name in his brogue.

  “Oh-kay. I’ll go,” I said, getting up slowly.

  “Have fun,” my friend chirped.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

  “Absolutely not,” she answered.

  I looked back at the guys, as if to say, wait, “no” was an option?

  “I’ll watch,” she said, without lifting her eyes from the magazine.

  I instantly regretted my hasty agreement. But I wanted to seem like a fun gal, up for anything. Maybe my fear of heights had diminished with age, I thought.

  Wishful thinking.

  I swam out to the cliff with the guys, my dread growing with every stroke. When we reached the rock face, a lifeguard posted on the cliff—yes, before you get too impressed, this cliff was so “rugged” it had a lifeguard—called down to us as we bobbed in the choppy water.

  “Sorry guys, you just missed the last jump. Tide is too low, you’ll have to come out later.”

  Welp, too bad, let’s swim back.

  “Aw, can’t we go real fast?” pleaded the fiancé.

  “All right, be fast.”

  The Brit beamed. “Great! Thanks, mate!”

  Yes. Thanks.

  The guys quickly scrambled up the ladder nailed into the side of the rock, while I struggled to grasp the slippery, algae-covered rungs.

  But I couldn’t wimp out now. What would they think of me? I sucked in my breath and climbed up.

  My legs were so shaky, I could barely lift my leg over the top rung and onto the rock, but I did it. There were ledges of graduated heights, and, of course, the boys had to climb to the very highest one.

  I followed just so I didn’t have to be alone.

  I decided I had to go second if I was going to go at all. The Brit went first, and the fiancé agreed to stay behind for moral support.

  While I stood trying to screw up my courage, below me an attractive, shirtless man with an accent was beckoning me—in most circumstances, any one of those traits would do the trick, but, at the moment, I was numb. The only thing that was going to get me to jump was the knowledge that only jumping would get me off this miserable rock face with the wind whipping across my body.

  If I didn’t jump soon, I was likely to faint.

  So I counted to three and leapt. I held my breath and my nose, but the cliff was so high, I nearly ran out of breath before I hit the water.

  The impact gave me an atomic wedgie worthy of the Bikini Atoll.

  Check back in nine months, I may give birth to a fish.

  But I survived, my top stayed on, and I was back at sea level—I was elated. The boys congratulated me for my courage. Apparently I’m a better actress than I thought.

  The cliff at its most welcoming

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said. “You know, it wasn’t so bad. If the lifeguard had let us, I would’ve gone a second time,” I lied.

  “Let’s ask!”

  Damnit.

  So I jumped off the cliff twice that day.

  And I hated it both time
s.

  As the weekend progressed, more and more of the fiancé’s friends arrived, most of whom I had never met before. I did have my best friend there, but she was often busy playing hostess with her hubby-to-be, or I imagined they were trying to get some rare alone time, and I didn’t want to seem clingy. The new people were all friendly and cool, but they were old college chums with an easy comfort. I tried to be my most “on” to win them over, but I still often felt a beat behind. I hadn’t been so desperate to be liked since I switched districts in sixth grade.

  What does it feel like to be the new kid when you’re almost thirty?

  The same.

  So I continued to go with the flow, even if doing so required me to swim upstream. When we all got stir-crazy one Saturday night, someone suggested a drinking game, but the only liquor we had extra of?

  Warm red wine.

  And another fun fact about me? I’m not very good at drinking games.

  So I got more sloshed than I have in years. While several other girls demurred, I was easily goaded into being the last woman standing.

  Later, one of the guys who works for an e-cigarette company produced samples of the product. I have never smoked a regular cigarette, or anything else, in my life, not even the lone joint in college. And although I don’t have the same heath aversion to e-cigarettes, they’ve always struck me as kind of douchey.

  And yet that night, I declined only once before caving. Soon I was puffing away on an e-cig, feeling like a complete idiot, but a popular one.

  But, Mom, everyone was doing it.

  The next day, thanks to chugging red wine and sucking enough nicotine vapor to keep Kate Moss buzzed, I had one of the worst hangovers of my life. And somewhere between the headaches and the dizzy spells, I thought, what the hell am I doing?

  They say, if I knew then what I know now …

  My motto of the weekend should’ve been, if I knew now what I used to know then.

  In high school I was actually more immune to peer pressure and truer to myself than I had been that weekend. Because back then, I was in my comfort zone. I grew up there, I knew everyone, and I went home every day to my mom. I wanted for nothing.

  It’s easy to jump with a safety net.