Bigger (The Nicky Beets series) (3 page)

Nothing seemed to make me hungrier than watching obese people try to jog
on a treadmill. Which is crazy, right? Being overweight myself, I should feel
shamed into eating a salad and then doing sit-ups while watching that program,
but I always found myself doing the complete opposite. While contestants ate
half a chicken breast and broccoli for lunch, I ravenously stuffed high-calorie
food into my mouth.

The program ended, and a woman with fresh lip injections appeared on the
screen to promote the eleven o’clock news.

I decided to obtain the ice cream that was beckoning me from its shelf in
the freezer. I tipsily stumbled to the kitchen and liberally scooped large
helpings of the dessert into two bowls, camera at the ready.

“Tonight,” the anchorwoman intoned, her bloated lips barely moving. “How
rising obesity rates are going to affect
your
wallet.”

I quickly snapped a few photos of the ice cream and handed Chuck his bowl
before sitting back down on the couch. I tucked my legs up under me and
contentedly spooned the peanut-butter-chocolate ice cream – my favorite
flavor – into my mouth. A small feeling of irony whispered at me. It was
quite the dichotomy – an obese woman eating ice cream while watching a
news clip about obesity.
 
The half
bottle of merlot I’d drunk dulled any feeling of guilt I might have had, and I
happily spooned my dessert.
 

The news began. Sausage Lips introduced a reporter named Cherry, who was
hot on the trail of the obesity story. Chuck and I exchanged an eye roll over
Cherry’s weird stripper-name.

Cherry began her report, speaking with an unnatural, sing-songy voice a
producer somewhere had probably told her appealed to viewers. It started in her
stomach and ended gutturally in her throat.

Cherry stood on a sidewalk during a report she must have filmed earlier
in the day, as suit-clad folks hurried by behind her, some throwing annoyed
looks toward the camera.

I suddenly recognized where she stood.

“Look babe! That’s my building,” I exclaimed. The downtown San Francisco
high rise in which I worked loomed in the background of the report.

“Huh!” Charlie took a large bite of ice cream.

“Experts say two out of three Californians are overweight or obese,”
Cherry’s throat said.
 
“And that
number is expected to grow.”

The camera panned to a group lined up at a hot dog stand. My stomach
dropped.

“As obesity rates go up and the baby boomers age, health care costs are
expected to increase exponentially,” Cherry coughed.

I stared in horror into my ice cream bowl, counting seconds, not wanting
to look up at the screen.

“Uh, babe?” Charlie said.

“Yep?” I studiously examined a swirl of peanut butter.

“Is that
you
?” he asked.

It’s hard to overstate what I saw next, considering the mental wallop
dealt immediately to my psyche. A meltdown was imminent, and in fairness to me,
I don’t think I know a woman who wouldn’t have seriously freaked out in the
same situation.

Because I was on the news. In a report about obesity. Except it wasn’t
all
of me being pictured in the report
– just me from the chin down.

This was much like other news stories I’d seen on TV about obesity.
Reporters illustrate what exactly obesity is by catching some anonymous fat person
innocently waddling down the sidewalk, his gigantic, jiggling beer belly
pushing threateningly against his shirt buttons. But you never see his face,
and why? Presumably to spare him the embarrassment.

But I was embarrassed. Because there was no mistaking it. For there I
was, in all my overweight glory, wearing the outfit I’d put on just that
morning.

“Oh my God,” I choked. “Holy shit.
I’m
part of a
fat
story?”

That morning I’d put on a bright blue sweater, with two large, round,
shiny black buttons securing the top. The rest of the sweater was made to
comfortably drape and camouflage my frame, or so I had believed.

I’d worn a white tank top underneath the sweater, and there, on the
screen – on the news! – jutted my tank-top covered belly from under
the sweater, rolling over the top of my pants like vanilla ice cream melting
over the sides of a sugar cone. I was muffin-topping like I’d invented it, for
everyone watching the eleven o’clock news to see.

I’d been caught on tape, heaving my mass through foot-traffic in downtown
San Francisco.

There were the black pants with white pinstripes – my Monday pants.
Well, they were my Wednesday pants, too, because only two pairs of
work-appropriate pants fit anymore. Fridays were “casual day,” and I usually
wore my nicer pair of jeans. Although, I admit a time or two, my hideous
acid-wash jeans had made an appearance.

My Monday pants were whiskering out from my crotch, stretched across my
ample hips and the stomach under – well, under my other stomach.

My second stomach. The roll under the roll.

To add insult to injury, I saw myself carrying the two fully-loaded hot
dogs I’d picked up from the cart in front of my building for lunch.

“Oh my God. I never eat at the hot dog stand,” I said, not knowing if I
was talking to Chuck or myself. “Today was, like, maybe the second time I’ve
ever even eaten there!”

Chuck watched in fascination, head cocked slightly to the right.

“High blood pressure and diabetes are just a couple of the health
problems caused by obesity,” Cherry burped, as the image of me in my Monday
pants crashed down the sidewalk with two hot dogs in tow.

I watched in dread as the image of myself lifted one hot dog to her mouth
and took a bite you might expect a construction worker to take, but probably
not a neat-freak legal secretary. The camera panned up slightly, showing the
hot dog being shoved in and my cheeks bulging with food. Mustard and chili
smeared onto my face.

The news report ended abruptly. The room seemed to go silent, or maybe it
was just that the rushing sound in my ears blocked all other noises out. Chuck
had frozen in place and was staring at me half with the terror of my reaction
and half with a smile lurking in the corner of his mouth because, God help him,
he just couldn’t help but be a little amused by what he’d just seen.

In shock, I didn’t react right away. I set my melting bowl of ice cream
down on the coffee table and felt my eyes begin to well up with tears.

“Oh God, Nic, don’t cry,” Chuck said, all traces of mirth now removed
from his features. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad, right?”

“That was a news report about obese people, Chuck,” I said. “Yeah, it
was
that bad.”

“You’re not …” Chuck began, but I was already halfway to the bathroom,
holding my hand over my mouth to contain the hiccupping tears that were well on
their way.

I locked the door behind me, sat down on the edge of the tub and sobbed
into a handful of tissue.

How had this happened? Was I really
that
person
? Was I enormously fat enough to be shown as an example of an obese
person on television?

What I truly knew at that moment was
Yes
.
I was overweight. Although I’d made noncommittal remarks about wanting to lose
weight to Chuck or over lunch with girlfriends, in truth I had largely ignored
my weight problem for years.

I overate when I was happy or when I was sad or bored. I overate to
celebrate or to comfort myself.

And extraordinarily, I was somehow surprised that the two-hundred-seventy-pound
creature I’d become was not, in fact, attractive, as evidenced by what I’d just
witnessed on the evening news.

“Babe,” Chuck said, as he tried to turn the locked doorknob. “Open the
door.”

I cried harder.

How could I expect my boyfriend to be attracted to me, to love me, to
stay with me, when I was grotesquely overweight enough to warrant an appearance
in an obesity report on the news? Chuck had never told me I was fat or
unattractive, but I had to admit to myself that his compliments on my
appearance these days were far and few between. Worse – I wasn’t sure
when we’d last had sex. It might have been a month before. Thinking of the
bloated image of myself on the TV screen, I shuddered. I could hardly blame
Chuck if he never wanted to have sex with me again. How could he want to be
with me and my giant stomach rolls? And surely he’d noticed the three chins
that appeared on screen as I’d opened my mouth to rather unattractively shove
in a hot dog.

Chuck tapped at the door. “Honey?”

Tears were running down my cheeks, but I opened the door anyway. He held
me as I cried into his shoulder.

“I don’t even know why you’re with me. I am so fucking huge,” I told him.

“Hey!” He pushed my shoulders back so I could see the seriousness in his eyes.
“You’re beautiful. Yeah, we need to lose weight. We know that. We’ve talked
about that. But you know I love you.”

I heard what he said and what he didn’t say. He loved me, but probably
not my cellulite. He could say I was beautiful and maybe even mean it as he was
staring into my eyes, but I wasn’t going to force him to tell me he was
attracted to my body. Even I hated my body and how out of control I’d obviously
gotten. I couldn’t expect him to love it.

It wasn’t fair to him, really, for me to expect him to behave as though
nothing had changed. I’d gone from sexy to schlumpy in the six years since we’d
started dating. It was one of many changes we’d been through together.

We’d graduated from our respective colleges. We’d gotten real, grown-up
jobs. We’d moved in together.

And I’d gained one-hundred-thirty pounds.

TWO

I wasn’t always like this.

When I was in college, people noticed me because I looked good. No need
to be modest about it; I was young, healthy, and good-looking. I earned my
share of whistles and catcalls. At the time it seemed crude, but now I remember
it fondly.

One rare warm day I’d worn a bright pink, low-cut tank top, and a scruffy
fellow I passed on the sidewalk exclaimed, “Damn, girl! You should be locked up
for looking that good!”

That’s something I’ll never forget.

Getting a drink in a crowded bar never seemed to be a problem. As soon as
I bellied up and caught the bartender’s eye, my drink was forthcoming, and so
were refills. I noted the glares from exasperated patrons who’d been waiting to
place their orders, but at the time I possessed what I can only describe as a
sense of self-entitlement that I believe all attractive people acquire after
even a short time of being treated preferentially. Now I, too, am one of the
exasperated multitude, waiting impatiently to place my order.

Likewise, store clerks were always attentive and polite when I was at my
most svelte. No request seemed too outrageous and everyone always seemed more
than happy to help me out. Now, I sense even retail cashiers regarding me with
disgust and impatience. America has a problem with fat people; a belief we are
dirty, lazy, and just overall disgusting and unworthy. We certainly do not
deserve the same treatment as thin people. I find myself putting on the
cheerful, smiling face everyone seems to expect from the obese; it’s our way of
apologizing to the world for being fat. If we can’t be skinny, we will at least
be merry.

Men swarmed around me and my girlfriends in nightclubs and we batted them
away like so many buzzing flies, until we needed another drink. Cute girls
almost always got into clubs for free, and once we were in, we rarely paid for
our own drinks; one of the many benefits of beauty. Nowadays, I wouldn’t dream
of stepping foot in a club for fear of being laughed off the dance floor.

One of the only downfalls of being thin and pretty was that women were
sometimes unfriendly. Particularly women who themselves were thin and pretty.
We all seemed to be striving for the position of Alpha Female in any given
setting. You enter a room and immediately assess it. Who is the most beautiful,
and who is not? I never intended to threaten other women with my appearance,
but judging by their reactions, they were nonetheless threatened.

Lots of girls gain the dreaded freshman-fifteen in college, but I lost
forty pounds in a matter of months after I moved out of my parents’ house and
into a dorm room.

It was a conscious decision. No one wants to go to college and be the fat
girl. Everyone always goes on and on about how college is the best time of your
life; well, I didn’t see how that would be true if I hated how I looked.

So I cut way back on food. I was eating miniscule portions compared to
what I’d been consuming during my high school years. When I finished my tiny
meal, I’d still be hungry. It was a bit like torture, and I wondered
occasionally if I might be developing an eating disorder. But at the same time,
I was developing an admiration of my own ability to refrain from eating, even
when I was nearly starving. I felt triumphant every time I went to bed hungry,
knowing that sensation always translated to pounds lost on the scale.

And then there was the exercise. All the walking helped; living in San
Francisco, I didn’t really need a car. I hopped on a bus or just walked where I
wanted to go. And there are always places to go in the city. Bars, restaurants,
coffee houses, eclectic shops, concerts, farmer’s markets, the beach.

I’d also joined a cardio kick-boxing class with my friend Laurie, and
suddenly had muscle definition in my arms and legs. When I wasn’t kick-boxing,
I was running. It hurt, and I hated it, but I made myself do it even when I was
exhausted, which was most of the time.

All that misery paid off. The fat slipped off, although perhaps not in
the quantities you or I might expect, given the effort. I ended up a size
eight. Standing five feet, nine inches, I wasn’t in danger of becoming a runway
model, but I felt more comfortable with my body than I ever had. I had visible
collarbones, and just one well-defined chin. My hip bones pulled upward against
my skin when I laid down on my back. I had long, thin fingers, and actual
ankles.

The thick waves of hair I’d hidden behind in high school, I pulled back
from my face. I hung funky hippie jewelry from my ears. In the mornings, I
spent time carefully doing my makeup. I wore snug jeans, the occasional
high-heel and fashionable tops.

I fit comfortably into coach seats on airplanes and had no trouble
finding belts to wrap around my slim waist. I was a sexy nurse for Halloween
one year, and enjoyed a brief make-out session with a cute guy dressed as a
pirate.

And actually, there were suddenly quite a few cute guys asking for my
number or buying me drinks. I began dating regularly, although never seriously
– until Chuck came along.

SIX YEARS EARLIER

We stepped off the BART train in downtown Berkeley and headed east toward
the university. Roxanne wore high-heeled black leather boots and looped arms
with her man-of-the-moment – a dark-eyed guy named Neil. I was flying
solo that evening and had opted for a cute pair of sneakers, knowing we’d be
trekking across campus.

Once we arrived at the Greek Theatre, the opening act was wrapping up and
the crowd had already infused the air with an impressive haze of marijuana
smoke. We found our section and sat down to await Massive Attack’s appearance.

The opener finished and exited the stage. It’d be a little while –
stage hands in black T-shirts needed to set up for the next band. Rox and I
passed a flask of tequila between us and shared gossip about the girls in our
dorm.

Relaxed and a little buzzed, I let my eyes roam the crowd until they
landed on another pair of eyes staring back, a few rows up. They almost glowed
in the dim light. I smiled and he smiled back. Our gazes lingered until we both
broke away and turned back to our friends. Except we couldn’t stop sneaking
peaks at each other, and continued to catch one staring at the other.

Massive Attack took the stage and “Angel” began to blare through the
crowd. A deep, pulsing bass vibrated through the theater. I snuck another peak
at the boy with the bright eyes, but suddenly, he wasn’t in his seat. My eyes
darted around to locate him, and finally landed on him, climbing the steps
upward, toward me, his gaze fixed purposefully on me.

I watched him nervously, knowing he was coming over to meet me but
suddenly feeling shy about what he might say and how I might respond. The
opportunities to embarrass myself by saying something stupid seemed limitless. All
too soon, he was standing next to me.

“Hi,” he shouted in the din, grinning a dimpled, spine-tingling smile.
Now that he was up close, I could see his eyes were glacier-water blue next to
his tanned skin, and his thick, dirty blond hair looked like an afterthought
– mussed and completely sexy.

“Hi,” I responded intelligently. I was smiling widely and uncontrollably.
Chuck took this to be a welcoming sign and wedged himself into the empty spot
to my left. Seating in the theater was a free-for-all at this level.

“I’m Chuck,” he introduced himself, yelling into my ear over the music.
He offered me his hand in greeting and I shook it, shivering a little at his
touch. His hand was warm and swallowed mine whole.

“Nicole!” I answered loudly.

We sat in tense silence through the first song. As soon as it ended,
Chuck asked, “Do you go here?”

“No,” I answered. “I’m at SF State. Do you?”

“Yeah, I’m in my last semester.”

“Cool.”

We were still smiling foolishly at each other, but seemed at a bit of a
loss for words. The next song was starting.

“You wanna go somewhere we can talk, Nicole?” Chuck drawled slightly,
revealing Southern origins.

I hesitated. The concert had just started, and I wasn’t sure I should
leave Rox and Neil behind. But, casting a glance at Rox, I got the go-ahead.
She waved me away with an expression that encouraged me to enjoy myself.

“Um, sure … what about your friends, though?”

“I already told them I needed to go,” he said, grinning beguilingly.

I laughed, already charmed.

We waved goodbye to our amused friends; I think we both already knew we
wouldn’t be returning to the concert. He held out his hand to guide me out of
the concert and didn’t let go until we’d reached level ground. Standing next to
him I realized he stood a good head above me and had the broad and well-muscled
shoulders of an athlete.

I could feel the body heat that came off of him in waves; not in a sexual
way but in a way that made it clear this man was his own space heater. It made
him seem strong, invincible. The smell of laundry detergent wafted off of him,
and I barely resisted the temptation to press my nose to his baby-blue
button-up and inhale deeply.

Chuck ran a hand through his thick hair, suddenly looking a little shy.

“I wonder if you’d like to have a drink with me,” he proposed. “I mean, I
don’t want to drag you away from the concert or anythin’, just …”

“No, that’d be nice!” I said. “It was a little loud for me.”

He smiled gladly. “Me, too.”

We walked slowly to a nearby dive bar we both knew of. It was still early
enough in the evening that we found a quiet table in a corner, near the front.
A server kept us well-stocked in beverages – I was downing screwdrivers
and Chuck’s drink of choice was Coors. The liquid courage loosened our tongues
and we talked freely and animatedly for hours.

Chuck turned out to be a Texas transplant, which explained the drawl. He
was chock-full of manners and his jeans were maybe a little tighter than was
fashionable for men at the time.

He was in his senior year at UC Berkeley, studying journalism, much to
his conservative father’s distress. Among his dad’s problems with Chuck’s major
were the school he was attending (for liberal hippies), the fact that he’d
never make any money in journalism (so very true), and most importantly? He’d
turned down two scholarships to play college football. Chuck had apparently
been something of a high school football star in Dallas. But he was simply
uninterested in football and didn’t want to play anymore, much to his dad’s
consternation.
 

I likewise confessed my own short life story to Chuck; my crazy mom, my
lack of direction at school as a second year liberal arts major, and the
problem with my future. As in, I had no idea what it held. I didn’t know what I
wanted to be when I grew up.

We shut the bar down and wandered back out onto the sidewalk in the cold,
where Chuck wrapped me in his warm arms.

“Wanna come back to my place?” he asked, peering down into my uplifted
face. “I mean, not for … you know. We can just have some coffee and talk …

“Yes,” I said.
Coffee schmoffee
is what I was thinking.
Take off my shirt
and kiss me like you mean it, more like
.

In fact, before he asked if I wanted to go to his place, I’d been
considering asking him if he wanted to come back to my dingy dorm room, where I
surely could have acted on my carnal lust. I had no idea he was such a Texan
gentleman though, as he sincerely intended to keep the evening relatively
chaste. Still, we kissed for hours like teenagers. Rays of sun were beginning
to peek through the curtains when we finally fell asleep, me in his arms, his
warmth settling around me like a blanket.

Within a week, I’d arranged a dinner so that Chuck could meet my best
friend, Laurie. We met at Laurie’s favorite vegan diner, and right away it
seemed as though the two would clash terribly. Laurie, in her hippie skirt and
Birkenstocks, critically appraised Chuck in his Levis and button-up. She
guarded her feminism fiercely, so I assumed that Chuck, with his “yes, ma’ams”
and opening of doors for women was going to rub her the wrong way. If there was
one thing Laurie had reminded more than one man, it was that she was perfectly
capable of opening her own doors, thank you. I, for one, still appreciated the
chivalry.

She and I excused ourselves to use the restroom during dinner, and Chuck
stood respectfully as we got up. Laurie burst out laughing and giggled all the
way to the bathroom. I shot Chuck an apologetic glance and kept following
Laurie. In the bathroom, she was incredulous.

“I have never –
ever
– seen a man do that, except on
Dallas,
”
she told me in the bathroom, still chuckling. “Where the hell did you say you
met this guy? A concert at Berkeley?”

She was scrubbing her hands vigorously under running water.

“Yeah?” I was anxious to hear what she thought but ready to defend Chuck
if she was going to toe a hard line against him.

“Well, dude,” she leveled her most meaningful hippie stare at me. “You
know that kind of stuff isn’t really my thing, but it’s obvious he hails from
another land. And he seems genuine. I think I can give him my tentative stamp
of approval.”

I decided to keep him around.

We were exclusive from the start. We never had to discuss it; it just
was. I’d been a goner since the moment I met him, so it was my luck that he
seemed similarly smitten. We spent as much time as possible together, and both
of us put on a little weight in those first couple of years – the result
of date nights spent enjoying the variety of restaurants available to us, and
curling up on the couch together.

But neither of us seemed to notice or mind the weight gain in the other
at first. The first time I noticed it in myself was when I was forced to buy
size ten pants. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I felt OK at that size –
as long as I didn’t get any bigger.