by Jackie Rose
8
The holidays passed pleasantly enough, partly because for once I didn’t stuff myself to the gills with chocolate and pie. It’s not that Mom doesn’t cook well; she does (although the turkey was a little dry), it’s just that I’ve had an epiphany of sorts. A real Christmas miracle.
According to the most recent literature on the subject, the key to getting rid of those unwanted pounds forever is not what you put in your mouth, it’s about changing your perspective and using positive visualization (Shape, January: “See It, Be It: Get Fit in Your Mind First”). It was such a relief to hear that Mars bars have nothing to do with it. Instead of torturing myself over every delicious, forbidden morsel, all I have to do is actively imagine how fabulous I’ll be when I’ve dropped forty-five pounds, and then the weight will magically melt away. You see, when the end result is more appetizing than what you can eat today, you just won’t be as hungry. You will completely lose your desire to snack. Poor Pruscilla—if only she had known, she could have avoided unnecessary surgery.
Why hadn’t anyone told me about this sooner? The information has already completely revolutionized my relationship with food. To think, I’ve spent all these years cursing calories, instead of just embracing them as the fuel my body needs to sustain energy. It was all so simple, really. Armed with this healthy new approach, I felt certain I’d be able to circumvent any unnecessary diet-related craziness on my part. Bruce would be thrilled.
Before the big Christmas dinner, as an appetite suppressant, I went into Mom’s closet and peeked at The Dress. It was as stunning as ever. I imagined myself in it, walking down the aisle. “She’s thin as a rail,” guests would whisper to one another as I floated by. “How ever did she do it?” Even the minister would suck in his breath when he saw me. This visualization technique worked so well, in fact, that I didn’t even have dessert.
It was all part of the master plan, which I’d hammered out very carefully during a particularly bad wave of nausea the morning after the KW Christmas Party. And wouldn’t you know it? Pruscilla’s rapidly emerging collarbones were enough to spur me on to the gym, too. I’d been going religiously three days a week, for one week so far, and it was going fantastically. I wouldn’t want to counteract the effects of my new workout regime by forcing myself to eat dessert just because it happened to be Christmas.
Mom and Claire couldn’t help but notice my resolve.
“No fruitcake, Evie?” asked Claire.
“Not tonight. I’m stuffed.”
“But you love my fruitcake,” Mom said, her brow furrowed.
That may have been true at one time. I’ve always felt that fruitcake got a bad rap. If you like Sara Lee pound cake, I used to say, and you like maraschino cherries, then what’s the problem?
“I just don’t feel like it, Mom.”
“Leave her alone, Lillian. She doesn’t want any.” Claire, who has always been quite slim herself, understood these things.
“All right. Will you at least have some tea?”
“Yes, please. With milk.”
And so it went.
It was actually quite a nice evening. Bruce even stopped by later on, after his dinner at Bertie’s was finished. He showed up in a Santa beard and hat, which his school let him have a few years back after the kids proved to be more interested in sled aerodynamics and Amundsen’s trip to the North Pole than Bruce’s anorexic interpretation of Saint Nick.
“It was nice of you to come,” I said, feeling festive. “How was your dinner?”
“Why, Santa has no time to eat dinner on Christmas Eve, little girl! It’s my busiest night of the year!”
Claire rolled her eyes and Mom laughed. “Maybe I could make a nice plate for Santa?” she asked hopefully.
“Well,” Bruce said, rubbing his nonexistent belly, “maybe just a small one. But go easy on me—I don’t want to get stuck in a chimney!”
“Maybe Santa should take off his beard before he eats,” I offered.
“Maybe you should have a seat on Santa’s lap and tell him what you want for Christmas,” he slurred. “More gravy, please Lilly.”
Mom beamed, and loaded it on. Disgusting—there’s enough fat in one spoonful of that stuff to put a girl over her limit for the day.
“No wonder the kids were afraid of you,” I said.
“Santa will deal with you later, little girl,” he said slyly, jiggling his belt buckle.
“Bruce!” Mom gasped.
“Don’t be such a prude, Lillian,” Claire laughed. “They’ve been living together since college. And I think Santa’s been into the eggnog.”
Defeated, Bruce pulled off his beard. “Can’t a guy be in a good mood without being drunk?”
“Oh my God, it’s Bruce,” I said flatly.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he said. “Where’s your holiday spirit?”
Claire sighed. “Speaking of holiday romance, Lillian—”
“We were speaking of no such thing,” Mom interrupted.
“Yes, well, anyway, I’ve been meaning to ask you something, and I thought since we’re all in a such good mood….” Claire hesitated.
Mom’s no fool. “Go on,” she said suspiciously.
Bruce helped himself to a huge slab of fruitcake.
“He must be starving after that goose,” I explained.
“I met a woman last week in my sculpture class. She’s a very nice lady. Name’s Francine. Well, we got to talking and it turns out she has a son. A widower. And he’s only fifty-two, if you can imagine that.”
“Oh, I can imagine that very well, Claire,” Mom snapped, getting up to clear the table.
“I told her all about you, and she seemed very interested. I thought maybe this fellow could give you a call sometime. He’s a contractor, and he’s very handsome. I saw his picture.”
“What does he look like?” I asked.
“He could look like Wayne Newton for all I care, but it makes no difference because I’m not interested,” Mom yelled from the kitchen. “And the discussion is closed.”
“Well, he seemed tall. He’s got that, oh, whaddyacallit? Salt-and-pepper hair, that’s it. And a very distinguished nose. Very Roman.” Claire said loudly. What the hell was a Roman nose? “Maybe I’ll just pass her number along anyway,” she whispered to me and winked.
Mom came back in with a glass of wine and sat down.
Bruce, fortified by rum and fruitcake, had dispensed with his normal inhibitions. “Come on, Lilly! It can’t hurt to talk to the guy, can it?”
“Yes, Bruce, it can,” she said curtly, and shot Claire a nasty look. “You see? You see this? You and your nosy little friend should stay out of my personal life. Try and find some men of your own, why don’t you.”
Claire hooted like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “That’s exactly what I said! I told her that if you didn’t want him, I’d be happy to take him off her hands! He lives at home with her, so he sounds like a bit of a mama’s boy, if you ask me, but it’s not so easy for an old lady like me to get a date. I can’t afford to be picky!”
“Claire, really! You should be ashamed of yourself, carrying on like that. And, dare I ask, don’t you already have a boyfriend?” Mom was quite happy to change the subject.
“Oh, Eddie left me for an older woman. She’s seventy-six!” My crazy granny slapped the table so hard, some of Mom’s wine sloshed out of the glass. But we all laughed anyway—even Mom, who tried hard not to.
Despite everyone’s willingness to let her get away with being so difficult to talk to on this subject, I decided right then and there that one of my New Year’s resolutions would be to find Mom a date for the wedding. It didn’t seem fair. Here I was, marrying Bruce, on the verge of being thin, and deliriously happy at least once in a while, while Mom is all alone and miserable. The thought of going home to an empty house every night for, like, twenty-five years is the worst possible thing I could imagine.
I remember, vaguely, that she had a boyfriend at one time, when
I was in middle school. I was probably only twelve or thirteen, and I don’t remember his name or anything like that, but I do recall him coming over to our house for dinner once. Mom got all dressed up, put on her pearls and perfume. She made me wear my white confirmation dress, since it was the only nice dress I had. I hated it—all white and frilly and babyish—and I remember being self-conscious about my boobs. The guy had very bad breath and brought me a Barbie doll, even though I was far too old for them, so I pulled her head off and flushed it down the toilet. Then I screamed and cried until I threw up, and locked myself in Mom’s bedroom. We never saw that jerk again. With losers like him on the circuit, no wonder she swore off dating.
Still, though, it’s about time she tried again. I’ll see if Claire has any ideas on how to trick her into a date. Maybe she has another friend with a son or an ex-boyfriend or something. But hopefully not one who still lives with his mother. I can definitely appreciate Mom’s unwillingness to date a mama’s boy. She’s fifty-one years old, and the last thing she needs is some freak show who’s never done his own laundry.
By the time we got home after dinner, Bruce was so tired he fell asleep in his beard. I couldn’t help but be a little pissed off, because I had been seriously considering having sex with him. But he made up for it the next morning when we opened our presents. Although I never got around to telling him I wanted a Master’s degree for Christmas, he did pretty well shopping on his own.
“Do you like it?” he asked sheepishly. As if I wouldn’t like a diamond tennis bracelet.
“How could I not like it?” I held it up to the light. “Is it real?”
“Of course, Evie!” he laughed. “You think I’d slip you a fake?”
Sometimes I forget that Bruce comes from money. It really would never cross his mind that cubic zirconiums are actually an option. In fact, they can be quite pretty, as the entire contents of my jewelry box can attest (Glamour, May: “Diamonds Are Forever, But Paste Is Pretty, Too!”).
“It must have cost a fortune. Have you been saving for this forever? Here—do it up for me.”
Bruce beamed. “Since the summer. Granny Fulbright’s ring was free, so I thought this year, I could get you something really special.”
I jumped up and hugged him. “I really love it, Bruce. It’s perfect. And it looks so good on my wrist. I’ll wear it on our wedding day.”
“I hope so,” he said. “I really love my presents, too. Thanks, Evie.”
I’d given him a ludicrously complicated calculator I knew he wanted, and a book about Quidditch, some sort of Harry Potter thing.
“I feel terrible. They don’t even compare.” Truth is, I’d almost screwed up big-time yesterday morning when I realized I’d been at the gym for two hours and that the stores closed at noon. Thank God Jade remembered to remind me.
“Are you kidding? I’ll have more fun with this stuff than you ever could with that useless bracelet. Believe me.” Bruce always knows the right thing to say. “Although it does look pretty sexy on your wrist….”
He was right. I held out my arm to admire the bracelet from afar. Why, it could have been the wrist of Elizabeth Taylor, Ivana Trump or any such lucky lady. It even made my arm look skinnier. Come to think of it, the bracelet made Bruce look a whole lot sexier, too. Although I had the distinct feeling I was somehow being manipulated, we then tore off each other’s flannel pj’s and had quite a passionate romp on the floor next to the Christmas tree.
The only real low point of the holidays was New Year’s Eve, which was lamer than normal. We usually do something fun with Morgan—last year we went to an S&M-themed dinner club in the meat-packing district—but this year we couldn’t. She wanted us to go with her and Billy to a huge party at some bar, only I was having a body crisis and didn’t feel up to achieving the required level of trendiness. As late as that afternoon, she was begging us to come.
“Don’t be an idiot, Evie. You’ll look fabulous, you know you will.”
“Seriously, Evie, please come. Drinks are on Billy—all night!”
“I don’t think so. But don’t worry about us, we’ll find something to do.”
“You’re going to miss a great party. And Bruce will miss looking at my tits. Peter bought me a leather bustier for Christmas.” Morgan rarely misses a chance to tease Bruce about his wanting to sleep with her, which he probably does. I know she’d never bother with him, although she’s turned making him blush into a sport.
“Won’t Billy mind?” I asked.
“Mind what—Bruce checking me out, or Peter’s leather fetish?”
“Um, both?”
“He doesn’t care. Billy knows Bruce is too much of a puss to actually make a move on me—”
“How would he know that? They’ve never even met!”
“Well, I must have told him, then. And he has no clue Peter exists. Safer that way, don’t you think? Back to what about you, though. Are you really not going to come to a great party just because of some lame body image crisis?”
“I don’t think it’s lame. In fact, out of respect for me, you probably shouldn’t go there, either. I would never buy a Volvo, you know, out of respect for you.” Morgan’s parents split up when we were sophomores in high school after her mother caught her dad cheating with a Volvo salesgirl. “Safe cars, my ass!” Mrs. Russell used to say.
“You could buy a thousand Volvos for all I care. If it hadn’t been for that little Swedish meatball, my mom wouldn’t be with Marco today.” After the divorce, which was quite ugly, her mom met Marco, a nice-guy carpenter who won slightly more than four million dollars in the New York State Lottery three days after they got married. “Luck of the Irish, my ass!” Mrs. Russell now says.
“I still wouldn’t do it,” I told her. “And I won’t go to the party!”
“You suck,” Morgan said, and hung up.
“And a happy New Year’s to you, too,” I said into the receiver, and slammed it down. “She can be such a bitch.”
“You knew that when you married her,” Bruce sighed.
“So what are we going to do?” I whined. Not having Morgan to automatically tag along with meant we were dangerously close to the dreaded New Year’s Couples’ Fight. It happens when you and your boyfriend can’t agree on what to do, so you end up having a huge fight, doing different things and resenting each other the whole night, or else having a huge fight, doing nothing together and resenting each other the whole night.
“We could see if Chad and Mimi wouldn’t mind us coming to their annual shindig,” he suggested ignorantly.
“Or, we could just kill ourselves now.” Did he really think I’d say yes to that?
If I’ve neglected to mention Bruce’s friends thus far, it’s because I hate them. A dinner party with private-school boys from Greenwich, Connecticut, and their twin-setted wives does not a wild New Year’s make. The first and as it turned out final time I agreed to socialize with them was at Bruce’s five-year high-school reunion. If you’re wondering who the hell bothers with a five-year high-school reunion, the answer is people who are such overachievers that they can’t wait ten years to shove their accomplishments in each other’s faces. If I sound bitter, it’s because Bruce went off with his football friends and left me stuck trying to make small talk for four hours with sorority types named Charity and ’Lizbeth, not to mention that I was the only fat girl there (and I wasn’t even that fat five years ago). At least his college buddies are a little better, but most of them are pretty boring, too, albeit in a completely different way.
So with few options remaining and the clock ticking, we finally decided to hook up with Nicole, Kimby and Theo, who were on their way to a drag-queen party at some bar in the Village. Annie couldn’t come because she was committed to a ridiculously small understudy part in an ABBA-themed musical production of The Nutcracker Suite. If I didn’t know for a fact that it existed, I wouldn’t have believed it myself. But it does, I assure, you, and good luck getting tickets—it’s been sold out for mon
ths.
By the time we finally got dressed, got to the city and found the place, it was almost eleven. The bar, as promised, was packed to the rafters with cross-dressers and queens in various stages of undress. Theo, clothed rather conservatively in a zoot suit, chaps and a feather boa, was trying to convince some of his friends that Nicole was really a guy. It wasn’t such a stretch. She was wearing the most dreadful sequined top and a miniskirt with go-go boots. And the ten pounds she’d lost in the fall seemed to have been sucked directly from her chest. Kimby, who nobody, no matter how wasted, could ever mistake for a man, was laughing hysterically, pointing at Nicole’s crotch.
“If you squint and tilt your head this way, you can see it,” Theo said to a cute guy he was obviously trying to impress.
When he noticed us, his eyes widened. At first I assumed it was because he could tell I’d lost some weight—six pounds since the office Christmas party two weeks ago!—but he was far too smashed to notice.
“Evie! Hi! This is Phillip. Phillip, this is Evie and her fiancé Bruce. Oh, how I wish I had a fiancé,” he shouted above the music, and winked at Phillip, who rolled his eyes. “Bruce, you old dog, I can’t believe you actually had the balls to show! You look like my father in that sweater vest, why don’t you take it off?”
Bruce smiled and looked around nervously. “Be nice, Theo,” I laughed. “It was hard enough to get him to come here at all and—”
But Theo was already trying to convince an obviously uncomfortable Nicole to enter the wet T-shirt contest.
“Just do it!” he said. “They’ll love you, I promise! I’m sure you’ll win. It’s so ridiculous, how could you not?”
“Forget it! I won’t!” Nicole whined, stirring her Bloody Mary.