Once There Was a Fat Girl Page 4

  Shirley ordered an ice cream soda. “I’m starving,” she apologized. “I skipped dinner.”

  “I’ll have coffee, black,” Martha told the waitress. “And do you have Sweet ‘n Low?”

  She looked at Shirley, and smiled. “Well, what else would you order in a coffee shop?”

  Chapter 3

  The next day, Martha followed the diet religiously. She weighed her cottage cheese at breakfast. For lunch, she ate fruit, bread, and hard cheese she had brought to work. At three o’clock she had a Tab. She felt wonderful.

  “How’s it going?” Shirley asked in the ladies’ room, when no one else was around.

  “Terrific,” Martha beamed. “It’s easy, too.”

  Later that night, Martha fulfilled her supermarket fantasy.

  Grand Union had always been one of her favorite places. She could get lost for hours in the candy aisle. She had, over the years, developed a classification system for candy; different kinds served different purposes. The tiny, chewy ones were good for the movies, especially M&M’s, Raisinets, and Jordan Almonds. Then there were the hard-core candy bars for chocolate cravings: Mr. Goodbar, Hershey with Almonds, Cadbury bars of all kinds. Hershey Kisses when she felt unloved. Tootsie Rolls when she missed her childhood. Mason Mints when she felt sophisticated. Chunky’s when she felt decadent. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for depression, Clark Bars for insomnia, Butterfingers for cold or flu.

  All these to choose from, yet she often wondered, what ever happened to lee Cream Bon-Bons? Did the Peter Paul people know what agony they had caused when they discontinued both Caravelles and Almond Clusters? Were there no more Triple Decker bars to be had, even for a king’s ransom? Was she really expected to go on without Root Beer Barrels in the world?

  She couldn’t mourn for long. For she had discovered that one of the advantages of living in New York was a particular local brand of cakes, made way out on Long Island and unavailable in less privileged areas of the country. Martha guessed that at least ten percent of her weight was the direct result of Entenmann’s cake consumption. Their varieties were endless. Luscious coffee rings, interlaced with ribbons of delicate almond paste, topped with fat walnuts and draped in sugary white icing. Buttery pound cakes, so dense that each slice fell onto the plate with a slight thud. Rich nutty brownies that filled the mouth with lovely explosions of chocolate. Coconut layer cakes, banana nut crunch cakes, spicy carrot cakes.

  Martha had tried them all. And whenever a new variety was introduced, she felt obliged to sample it immediately, just in case it proved to be the most worthwhile of the Entenmann offerings. After all, she wouldn’t want to miss out on anything good.

  It had been a glorious day when Entenmann’s threw off the shackles of its image of cake magnate and entered the realm of donuts and cookies. The donuts were the sweet, cakelike variety, each one plump and shiny in its clear sugar glaze. The cookies were big and round and soft, in conventional flavors like chocolate chip and sugar and fudge, but what the Entenmann’s people did with those standard cookie flavors deserved a Nobel prize. They came close to rivaling the king of cookies— Pepperidge Farm.

  Martha knew all of the varieties of Pepperidge Farm cookies by name, as if they were friends that she ran across every time she went into a supermarket. This was an ability that distinguished the true cookie connoisseur from the indiscriminate shopper in search of a quick thrill from Keebler or Nabisco.

  The names promised the mystery of a visit to an exotic land: Bordeaux, Zanzibar, Orleans, St. Moritz, Lido, Milano, Brussels, Capri, Nassau. Martha had rarely been disappointed. She had often thought that a polka-dot pattern of different Pepperidge Farm cookies would make perfect wallpaper for kitchen or playroom. There would be true beauty in a line-up of the single-layer cookies: Cinnamon Sugar, Fudge Chip, Brownie Chocolate Nut, Chocolate Chip, Lemon Nut Crunch, Irish Oatmeal, Oatmeal Raisin.

  But, as with everything worth having, Pepperidge Farm cookies were not particularly economical. At times when sheer quantity was the important factor, Martha was forced to pass by their display and move on to the less expensive brands. Not that it wasn’t possible to feed her cookie addiction with cellophane packages of Hydrox, French Vanilla Cremes, Sunshine Wafers, and Fig Newtons. There was something extremely pleasing about a reclosable bag, printed in bright colors with cartoons of elves or towns, housing dozens of small but delectable possibilities. Chip A Roos, C. C. Biggs, Rich ‘n Chips, Chips Ahoy when chocolate chips were needed in a hurry. Pecan Sandies, Pitter Patter, Elfwich for more specialized moods. And when butter flavor was in order, only Kjeldsen’s imported Danish Butter Cookies would do, grainy sweet masses of richness. Who said money can’t buy happiness?

  Then there was the frozen food section. Frozen cakes were annoying; Martha rarely had the patience to wait for them to thaw, and many a still half-frozen cake had been consumed by her. Her teeth would ache from biting into a cold solid piece of frozen cheesecake or coconut layer cake, and the taste would be masked by its frigid state. But it would still manage to serve its purpose, and she usually had at least one Sara Lee number on hand.

  The frozen food section also housed America’s favorite, and Martha’s, too: ice cream. Whenever she walked through the ice cream section, Martha remembered a phrase from a song: “ice cream castles in the air.” She automatically conjured up an image of a frozen palace, constructed of half-gallon ice cream bricks. The outside was made of vanilla, with a few chocolate chip bricks thrown in for texture. Cherry vanilla and chocolate fudge swirl added a marbleized effect near the pool. The walks were chocolate almond fudge, or, better yet, Sealtest Heavenly Hash, dark brown chocolate with pebbles of nuts and chocolate chips.

  The walls of the rooms were also made of ice cream. Pink strawberry in the little girl’s room, green pistachio in the boy’s. Peach in the powder room, peppermint in the pantry. A happy combination of pink, white, and brown of Neapolitan ice cream bricks in the playroom. The den, an austere coffee. When it snowed, there were mounds of whipped cream topping every roof, dabbed on every sugar cone turret.

  Frozen entrees were another great source of pleasure. Lasagna, macaroni and cheese, fried shrimp, even waffles, all could be had, hot and steaming, with only a small toaster-oven and a twenty-minute wait. Martha often took advantage of this miracle of modern technology.

  While others dreaded the high prices and long lines and monotony of supermarket shopping, Martha actually looked forward to it. The entire store was a wonderland of delicacies. Cream cheese from the dairy counter, mayonnaise and salad dressings from the shelves, onion rolls and potato salad from the delicatessen.

  But tonight was different.

  Armed with her Thin, Incorporated recipe book and a copy of the Official Diet, Martha approached the first aisle with a new attitude. She was determined to turn her refrigerator into a greenhouse, to fill her cupboards with cans of tuna packed in water, non-fat dry milk, and wine vinegar.

  Martha was surprised that finding six unbruised apples and three perfect bananas was as challenging as deciding between Mallomars and Oreos. The sight of her cart filling up with lettuce, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers was as rewarding as seeing neat piles of boxed TV dinners. It was fun because it was a novelty; the delicatessen counter had become a place for sliced white turkey, the dairy counter, for cottage cheese and plain yogurt. There was a whole world of spices that Martha had never dreamed of. There was diet soda, in fun flavors like chocolate mint, pineapple, and citrus.

  The cookie aisle offered no temptation that night. The display of Triscuits did not even sway her, for Martha was determined. As she left the store, she felt thinner already. She carried two huge brown bags, one in each arm, with a head of lettuce, peeking out of one and three perfect bananas resting atop the other.

  * * * *

  Wednesday was not as easy. Martha felt tired, a little weak. Her body had begun to miss sugar. It was difficult to get excited about wine vinegar, knowing there was blue cheese dressing in the world.
The day was long, her buoyancy had waned.

  In the evening, Martha found herself home alone. She finished eating four ounces of chicken, bland broccoli, bland carrots, lettuce with that damned wine vinegar. That completed her food allotment for the day.

  “No matter what Irma said,” she grumbled, “an apple for dessert does not take the place of apple pie.”

  Martha was ready to give up.

  She started prowling around the house. The refrigerator was full of leafy green things. No comfort there. Betsy and Lisa rarely kept food around the house; they were always running off to have dinner with some guy. All they ever ate at home was yogurt. “Irma would love them,” Martha thought grimly.

  Then she remembered: Lisa was going through a Nestle’s Crunch phase. She probably had some chocolate stashed away. She started rifling through Lisa’s drawers, something she had never done before. She went through her purse, the pockets of her coats, and finally, yes, there was half a Nestle’s Crunch bar in Lisa’s raincoat pocket.

  Martha held it in her hand, staring at it as if it were a bomb. Stealing food? It had never come to this before. Of course, she could replace it as soon as she finished it. She could run down to the store right away, before Lisa got back. She need never even know...

  And then the phone rang.

  Martha guiltily stashed the candy bar back into the raincoat pocket, hoping her body heat hadn’t melted it. She picked up the phone. ,

  “Eddie! Hi! How are you?” Saved, at least temporarily.

  “Fine. Listen, I can’t come over tonight,” he said brusquely. “I’m working late again.”

  “That’s too bad, Eddie. But, speaking of work, I’ve got some good news.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a new job opening up at AmFoods. A Public Relations Assistant. Today I signed up for an interview with Personnel.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s so exciting! You get to travel and meet people and go to all kinds of public relations events that the company sponsors. It pays better, too. I think I have a good chance at it. I mean, I’ve been working there for a long time, and it’s sort of time for a promotion. I’ve certainly been there longer than Aimee, who I know is also interested in the job. She just started a while ago. I think I’m exactly what they’re looking for!”

  “That’s great.”

  “Guess what else happened?”

  “Martha, I don’t have much time to talk...”

  “Listen, I have to tell you about this diet club I just joined. It’s really neat. It’s called Thin, Incorporated. You’ve heard of it, haven’t you?” Martha chattered away gaily.

  “What? You mean you’re spending your evenings sitting around with a bunch of fat old ladies? What for?”

  “It’s not like that, Eddie,” she said patiently. “It’s wonderful. They have this diet, and you follow it and go to meetings once a week and...”

  “Hey, come on. You don’t need a diet. You’re perfect the way you are. You’re not fat.”

  “But, Eddie, what about...”

  “Hey, look, I gotta run...”

  “Wait, wait, I have one more thing to tell you. The Big Eight accounting firms are sponsoring a three-mile race for women. Kate at work keeps talking about it. It sounds like kind of a fun idea...”

  “What? A race? For women? Come on, Martha. You know women are no good at sports. They simply have no strength. Their muscles are arranged all wrong; they have no stamina.”

  “But I read somewhere that...”

  “Hey, babe, look. I’ve really got to take off. You want to go to a movie Saturday night? I’ll buy the popcorn!”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Eddie, we can go to the movies if you want, but I’m on a diet now. I’m gonna get really thin. But, yes, let’s go to the movies.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you Saturday night, then. Bye.”

  Martha sat in her silent apartment, alone with the Nestle’s Crunch.

  * * * *

  Saturday brought the sun and temperatures that reminded everyone that summer really was just a few weeks away. Betsy, in an unexpected burst of generosity and friendship, invited Martha to join her and a new beau on an outing to the beach.

  All through junior high, Martha had lived in fear of the beach. It was hard to avoid when you grew up on Long Island, where at the first sight of sun, everyone would pile into the car to make the first of a summer full of pilgrimages to the blue water and white sand. Every person on Long Island, it seemed, loved the beach, from the toddlers flinging sand to the bald old men in straw Rheingold hats. Streets and stores and movie theaters were deserted on weekends, but the parking lot at Jones Beach was full by 10 A.M.

  Beach parties suddenly became popular when Martha was thirteen. A sixteen-year-old brother could always be procured to drive a carful of squealing adolescents across the bridge to Robert Moses Beach 2 on a Saturday morning. Martha was often invited on such jaunts, but she usually resorted to pleas of colds, dentist appointments, and that new phenomenon—her period.

  Some beach parties, however, were inescapable.

  Martha’s best friend, Ellen, had one great flaw: her birthday was in late June. And Ellen invariably celebrated the occasion on the hot shores. On her thirteenth birthday she invited eight or nine girlfriends, including Martha, for lunch, barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs followed by a huge homemade birthday cake. The afternoon’s entertainment then began with Ellen’s older brother, Steve, scowling and complaining, “Aw, Ma, do I have to drive these creepy girls to the beach? What if someone I know sees me?”

  Steve’s misery was nothing compared to Martha’s. For Ellen and all her friends were hatefully thin, some of them still with little girls’ bodies, flat and straight up and down. At thirteen, Martha was not only bumpy, but curvy. While Rachel and Linda and Karen ran around, thin and pale in bands of bright knits that represented bikinis, screaming in the surf and hoping for sun-bleached hair, Martha hid beneath a baggy man’s shirt.

  “I burn easily,” she offered as explanation. As her friends ran off to the refreshment stand, eyeing the pasty, equally emaciated teenaged boys, talking loudly in the hopes of being noticed, Martha sat huddled on a beach towel with bold letters reading, “For The Whole Damp Gang.”

  The sunburn excuse only lasted for a while. When her friends decided that refreshments were overpriced and attempts at flirting were futile, they headed for the waves. Then Martha, torn between her desire to protect herself and her need to fit in, was forced to come out of hiding, to leave the refuge of the shirt, to reveal her body.

  Oddly enough, Martha’s friends never seemed to notice her self-consciousness. They never really looked at her, and Martha was careful to take advantage of their surprising sensitivity on this particular occasion by running to the water’s edge far behind them, then immersing her body in the icy waves as quickly as she could make her way through their turbulence.

  It was all right then, and she blended in with the others. They were all just bodyless heads, floating on the wavy surface of the ocean. It was fun to splash and tease and dunk each other, to point out gooseflesh on naked arms, even to joke about the handsome lifeguards.

  It was amazing how comfortable Martha could feel when she was free of her body.

  So it was that Martha declined Betsy’s invitation. She thanked her profusely and said that she would make it some other time.

  * * * *

  Saturday night brought warm stillness, uncommon humidity, and the usual date with Eddie. The pattern was set by now, and the dinner-movie-snack part of the evening was uneventful, except for Martha’s refusal to eat.

  “Pre-menstrual cramps,” she mumbled. Eddie looked pained and embarrassed. But the explanation seemed to appease him, and Martha was glad that there was no further discussion.

  When they had finished the dating ritual, they returned to Eddie’s apartment. It was a closet-sized studio on Sullivan Street, overlooking a wrought-iron fire escape right out of West Side Story. Martha a
lways felt claustrophobic there. There were cockroaches and spiders crawling around in the kitchen, and the toilet never seemed to work. But it allowed her to be alone with Eddie, without worrying about the sudden appearance of an unexpected roommate.

  It was the first time they had been alone since the night of the Stroganoff and the sour cream brownies. Martha was worried, but she decided to act as though everything were normal. For Eddie, everything was the same as it had always been.

  He took off his shoes, opened the window; and turned on the television. He tried channel after channel, sighing with disgust. Martha sat on the foldout couch, picking orange lint off the arm.

  “There’s nothing on.” He turned to her, his dark brown eyes shining. “Hey,” he grinned, “wanna get laid?”

  It was a phrase of endearment, Martha had learned, an expression meant to show affection in their more intimate moments. Eddie wrapped himself around Martha, and she reveled in the sensation of his wet mouth on hers, his hands running along her body. Their caresses were interspersed with giggles and whispers, an abandonment derived from familiarity.

  It was this familiarity that afforded Martha a sense of comfort about her naked body. There were no surprises anymore, at least not for Eddie, and that provided great relief to Martha. She knew she did not have to worry about Eddie’s reaction to the extra roll of flesh that encompassed her waistline like a money belt, nor the voluminous curves of her hips and thighs which, like the moon, were always present, but became more apparent at night.

  “You’ve given me a wicked erection, you know that? Why don’t we turn off the TV and fold out the bed and,” he began unbuttoning his shirt, “call it an early night?” He twirled his black moustache sinisterly and, doing his imitation of a dirty old man’s laugh, unbuttoned Martha’s shirt.

  “Okay. Just let me put in my diaphragm.”

  As Martha went into the bathroom, she heard Eddie sigh deeply.