Her daughter, noticing her stricken face, ameliorated her words. “But you looked nice before you went away! Even Uncle Macon says so.”
Damn you, Macon.
Alice should have been stuffing her face right now to show them fat was just fine. The hell with smart is beautiful. Who wasn’t judged by her face and butt?
“Listen up. I like being strong. So I exercise. I like being muscular and lean because I can run faster and bend easier. Ski. And ice-skate. That’s why I lost—” She stopped and tried to think of a better word to describe her journey.
“You got skinnier to be strong?” Libby seemed less than convinced.
Parsing life had become motherhood. “Yes. Losing weight was the route to feeling better. For me.”
“But, come on, Miss Alice. We want to be smart. Sure. But isn’t it good to look cute?” Keely ran her tongue around the edge of her lollipop. “My sisters are happier doing themselves up for a date than doing homework.”
Libby looked from Keely to Alice. “Do you think studying is more fun, Mama?”
“Fun could be the wrong word, girls. Amused, satisfied, and rewarding are different ways to be happy in this world. Nobody should try for all one way.”
Screw it. What would Alice’s mother say? She might find faults in Bebe, but being dishonest was never on the list. Alice trusted her. Whatever came out of Bebe’s mouth was what her mother believed to be the solemn truth. It might not be the truth, but it was her mother’s certainty.
Marbles in a glass container glinted in the corner. Pale yellow for neutral. Bright orange for happy. Purple for misery. For the first six months, each time a yellow marble interrupted the purple jar, she felt gratitude.
It began with the smaller gestures. Clancy helped Alice pick out a soft cobalt-and-yellow couch. He solicited her feminist perspective on his films. She asked what he thought of each iteration of Smart Is Beautiful as she shaped the program. They adopted a kitten, litter box and all, thrilling Libby. Alice made her parents call before coming over.
Baby steps.
“Fun can be a bunch of things,” Alice said. “Getting a new doll makes you happy, right? Eating a hot fudge sundae is incredible. Watching cartoons on Saturday morning feels terrific.”
“All those things are good, Mama. But you only let me do some of it. How about fun all the time? That would be smarter.” Libby nodded at the wisdom she spoke.
“But we need other things. If you never fed Skitty because you were too busy looking at cartoons, what would happen?”
“She’d starve. But feeding her only takes a minute.”
“True, but life is filled with Skitty feeding. Taking care of those we love. As we grow up, we find out that there’s quick fun, like watching cartoons, and must-do work, like cleaning your room. Work we share, to make it fair, is another kind.”
“Why can’t nobody clean?” Libby asked.
“ ’Cause everybody would be smelly and sick and disgusting,” Keely said.
“Right. And there’s work you do for yourself.” Alice grabbed a cherry pop.
“Like washing up and stuff like that?” Keely crossed her legs on the chair, moving into her listening-hard position.
“Sure. Scrubbing and brushing your teeth is a great example of work we have to do for ourselves.” Alice opened her eyes wide. “Unless you girls are planning to have no teeth by the time you’re fifteen years old.”
“And pimples!” Libby added.
“And dusty, crusty elbows!” Keely and Libby giggled.
“Life is all about balance. Just like a clean face feels better than a muddy one, working to meet your goals can be the most rewarding thing in the world. I went to college so I could get a job like running the Cobb. Every day, I get to come here and make sure tons of kids like you guys are cared for, and seniors get to teach people to knit, and we have sports to keep everyone healthy and strong. My work makes me happy in a way that eating a hot fudge sundae never will.”
“Is that why you went away to that place, Mama? To help you get happy in a different way?”
“I went away because I felt confused.”
“About being fat?” Keely asked.
Alice took a moment, daring herself not to jump to the most facile answer. “That was part of it. I didn’t like that it made people think I looked less attractive.”
“Like Daddy?” Libby’s voice shook.
“Sort of.”
“Daddy likes people to be skinny.”
Alice didn’t want to throw Clancy under the bus or trash him, but she couldn’t lie. “Daddy likes to be thin and thinness is a quality he likes. Just like Uncle Macon loves when his girlfriends have curly hair. Grandma always adored tall men. But those are preferences. Uncle Macon has had straight-haired girlfriends. Grandma had short boyfriends. Daddy loves me no matter what size I am. Funny, generous, kind—love is made up of tons of ingredients. Nobody should choose just one thing. Or expect anyone to hold every quality they like.”
“Grandma likes tall men, but she’s so tiny!” Libby pursed her lips, becoming a Clancy replica. “Does Grandma like black men? Is that why she married Zayde?”
“Grandma married Grandpa because she fell in love with him, not because he was tall or black. Grandpa and Grandma acted very smart in their choices. They married the goodness each of them had on the inside.”
“But isn’t that why Daddy married you?” Libby asked. “Or was it because you were skinny, like in the pictures. Did you have to go to Vermont because you wanted to get like that again for him? To make him happy?”
Telling truths pained her more than making up stories.
“I thought I went to make him happy. But I was wrong.” Alice came around her desk and scooped up Libby. “Finally, I found the real reason.”
“What?” Libby asked.
“I wanted to be strong in every way. Strong in my body, strong in my mind, and strong in my heart. And smart about you, baby girl.”
CHAPTER 34
* * *
ALICE
A heady mix of pink and blue streaks in the sky, margaritas, and chlorine dizzied Alice. Late September weather in Provincetown ranged from fifty to ninety degrees. Tonight, as the sun set on the third day of their Waisted reunion, temperatures in the eighties warmed the seven women lounging in the pool. Everything from the tequila, to the sultry breeze, to the ocean water lapping only a few yards away brought a heady buzz to Alice’s mood.
Cape light sparkled on her new silver bracelet. She and Daphne had stopped in every store on Commercial Street until they found matching bangles, feeling as young and goofy as Keely and Libby when they slipped them on. They walked out twinned, “Smart Is Beautiful” engraved on the metal.
At least fifty emails had zipped among these so-called women of privation—named thus by People magazine—based on the shot of the mansion provided by Hania, via Mike, which showed the sign dangling at the entrance.
Welcome to Privation.
“Who could have imagined us here, swimming in Provincetown, when we first met?” Susannah stretched out her legs and kicked.
“I barely imagined us getting out alive after that first hour,” Seung said.
“I’m waiting for them to pop up and throw us on a scale.” Hania sank a bit lower in the water, grinning as she pretended to hide.
Alice stayed quiet, immersed in the joy of being together with these women, free and lovely, fighters all.
“I’m looking around in case they come up from behind and grab my monster hips.” Susannah shifted her hands on the concrete lip of the pool.
“Childbirthing hips.” Jennifer reached behind her for a towel to wipe her fuschia sunglasses. “They’re damn useful. Once women start pushing a baby out, they all wish they had them.”
Susannah twisted her face into a wry expression as she slapped her sides. “What a waste for me. A shame I never had kids.”
“But if you do, you’re ready.” Lauretta dunked under and came back with water stream
ing down her Madonna-like face. “My mother would kill me for doing that. Cloro, mi hija! The woman is obsessed with my hair. Chlorine is a tool of the devil.”
The women, some with arms resting on the edge of the pool, others submerged up to their necks, appeared at ease to Alice. Some of them had gained weight since leaving the house of horrors, like Susannah and Daphne, but were still thinner than the day they’d arrived at the mansion, if not tremendously so. Seung, like her, had lost additional pounds, while Jennifer seemed about the same as she’d been upon leaving.
Lauretta and Hania arrived at the reunion having gained all the weight they’d lost and maybe more.
Alice tried to figure out if their individual net outcomes matched what she knew of them. Lauretta and Hania remained perfectionists with glossy manicures and seemingly waterproof makeup—until Lauretta did something like dunk herself in chlorine, and Hania came to breakfast wearing a ragged college tee shirt of Mike’s and messed up Alice’s theory. She’d tried to formulate an analysis based on how uber-control meant their letting go all squeezed into one outlet: eating.
Hania and Lauretta struggled to make their parents happy by pretending they lived by their rules. That constituted the most potent clue. When you tried to please everyone, or pretended you followed directions that you secretly ignored, or you tried controlling every single nuance in your life, then the world became a vise where only food snuck past rules.
Food held the position of being the very last friend in your life.
Or maybe they just loved food.
They all looked like they were just the women they should be.
“I miss M&M’s. And Reese’s Pieces.” Alice didn’t know from where that came. She lifted her toes out of the water, admiring the perfect coral polish.
“Don’t you ever let yourself have them? Just a few?” Susannah asked. “My problem is every time I let myself have one, soon I’m eating the bag. Giant-sized of course.”
“Hell, I can even gorge on Tic Tacs, but M&M’s are my special weakness. I can allow splurges on other things. But never M&M’s. Or bagels.” Alice concentrated for a moment. “And—oh God!—my aunt’s chocolate chip elephant ears. With any of those, even as I’m chewing, I’m holding the next bite ready to go in.”
“Calories on deck. All the time.” Seung opened her mouth and mimed throwing in food. “Landing strip. And go.”
Seung’s bright smile advertised her skills. Three of the women now went to her dental practice in Kenmore Square.
“What is that about? The way we’ll hold a handful of popcorn up even as we’re still chewing.” Alice tilted her head and stared at purple streaks in the sky. “Are we so afraid of privation that we need to have it ready for the first moment of an empty mouth?”
Susannah scooped small eddies in the water with her hands. “I’m terrified of food and petrified I won’t have food.”
“Fear makes it worse. At least for me,” Daphne said. “I learned that at the mansion. The place turned out to be the very worst form of my mother. I spent my whole life hiding, sneaking food from the kitchen, petrified my mother might catch me eating. Naturally, every moment alone, I ate. The mansion became my mother on steroids.”
“Did that help at all?” Jennifer asked. “Making you confront your monster?”
“It made me crazy. I came home and thought about food, 24/7. Privation? Their motto? Also, my mother’s slogan. I guess it worked in one way: if there is no food to eat, you lose weight.”
Seung snorted. “Prime example of what leads to people wiring their mouths shut.”
“Exactly. All the outside stuff in the world won’t provide magic. No one’s giving us lifelong monitors. Do we even want one? Because of them, because of my mother, because of battling this shit my entire life, I ended up having no damn idea what I wanted or didn’t want. I just stuffed in everything.” Daphne twirled her new bracelet.
“And now?” Lauretta asked. “Speaking as someone with a mother who weighs and measures her with every glance, I feel what you’re saying.”
“My work is learning how to eat. Really,” Daphne said. “I have to figure out how I want to approach food—not how my mother doesn’t want me to eat. I declared Independence Day.”
Alice laughed. “Don’t let my mother catch you talking like that, Daph. Not unless you want a lecture about what freedom actually means.”
“When I work on my body, my mother says, ‘Stop that business, girl! Are you trying to look white?“ ‘ Jennifer said.
“Me too,” Alice said. “My mother almost says the same thing—except she is white. My life has been a course in cognitive dissonance.”
“My father, he walks through the supermarket pointing out all the thin Asian women,” Seung said. “ ‘Look, look,’ he says. ‘Do you see any fat Asian women? Look, look. What’s wrong with you?’ ”
“We’re too old for this,” Daphne said. “Carrying these voices. The strangest outcome of this entire thing was my mother’s reaction to my declaration of independence from her. Not immediately, but after a few weeks she came over and apologized. In a way that made it possible to accept. ‘We always want to protect our children from pain,’ she said.”
“And you believed her?” Lauretta shook her head as though it were difficult to imagine.
“She thought wearing anything larger than a size six guaranteed an awful life. I think, finally, she understood how it backfired and had the opposite effect from what she wanted. We’re different people. The terrors she tried to guard me against were her terrors. She passed them on to me, but I couldn’t change my body to please either of us, so the anxiety made me think about nothing but food. And, like I said, she apologized.” Daphne laughed. “Kind of.”
“Are you satisfied with what she said?” Alice asked.
“I suppose. Though, in truth, I know the problem that Sunny will never admit is that along with wanting me not to be hurt, I embarrassed her. Being with me was like wearing a pilled sweater.” Daphne shrugged. “Nothing I can do will change that.”
Alice floated, weightless. A pool was the perfect place to talk about fat.
Her blessings came into focus. Neither Zeke nor Bebe cared how much she weighed. Clancy did, but he kept it under wraps for now. She didn’t have a clue about her husband’s reaction if she traveled up the size chart again. But the world? She knew the voices of the world around her.
Alice knew that as much as the heartbreak of romance with Patrick made her skinny, the everyday unhappiness she’d pushed away with Clancy had made her fat.
Daphne gathered her wet curls and twirled them into a momentary bun. “My mother has as much power as I allow her. That’s what I’m trying to teach myself. Same as the damn Photoshopped magazine pictures, same as the people we faced down at Waisted. We just give them an immoderate amount of space in our head.”
“True,” Alice said. “But don’t they make a hell of a chorus?”
“I should move out from my parents’ house,” Lauretta said. “Between my father locking down the bread, and my mother sneaking me rice pudding, my favorite, I’m fighting their war in my body.”
“For me,” chimed in Susannah, “my boyfriend is the weapon. His pet name for me? WL. Wide load.” The laugh she attempted came out strangled. “But, hey, would anyone believe a freak like me could even have a boyfriend?”
“Stop that shit. You’re not a freak,” Hania said. “You’re terrific. The only thing I’d change about you is to tell you to start using brown eyeliner. The black is too stark against your face. But honestly, you rock. Mike says you remind him of an Amazonian woman, all grounded and threatening. Own it. And get rid of the loser.”
Susannah stretched across Lauretta and grabbed Hania’s hand. “You tell Mike to treat you right, honey.”
“You know what I think?” Alice asked. “Being alone and lonely is better than lonesome with a guy who doesn’t want you just the way you are.”
“But you’re still with Clancy,” Hania sa
id.
“I am. But not as who I was before: Angry. Stuffing my face and throwing up. I like the way I am now, but that can’t be the reason Clancy’s with me. My body is mine.” She rolled her eyes. “Sounds like bullshit, right? But for now, it’s my story. He’s loosening up. We’re shaking off the chains. Getting rid of what we don’t need and doesn’t work.” And daily her marble jar became sunnier.
“Good for you, working so hard,” Jennifer said. “Good for Libby.”
The others nodded in quiet agreement.
Thoughts of being alone with Libby had terrified Alice. Imagining the sad eyes. Passing her back and forth between two homes. But staying just to ward off her daughter’s unhappiness would never work.
Alice would die for Libby, but living for her might kill her. In some ways, the best time of being a mother was during pregnancy. Keeping your child safe and secure, tucked inside, made mothering a snap compared to after delivering them. Once born, life became their needs against yours.
As for her marriage, for now, she and Clancy walked the line.
Hell, the man had gone shopping for area rugs last week. Area rugs! That might not sound like much to others, but for Clancy it was the equivalent of dancing in the streets. Plus, the more they laughed, and the further they let each other talk, the more they shined in the bedroom.
She couldn’t deny that that helped.
More than that, Clancy finally cracked open his perfect cover. Vulnerability, the worst emotion he could feel, and the idea of losing Alice and Libby had forced him open, even if just a step at a time. All that need for perfection, in body, mind, and surroundings, didn’t pop out of the atmosphere. His parents had built him to be a superman. Coming to the realization that he lived in a mortal man’s body pained him. Giving up his steel shell was difficult, just as letting go of food as protection had unsheathed every one of Alice’s nerves.
Being fat had provided protection, muffled her mistakes. Every bite of a Milky Way soothed and loved her, but blind eating had indeed served to take away her sight. With purging, she’d found a way to empty the pain. Alice needed to own that—recognize the help being fat had provided—before she could give it up. Giving up the protective extra layers of fat had to be her choice alone.
Waisted Page 27