Bigger (The Nicky Beets series) (5 page)

A woman walking in front of me was wearing a pencil skirt, opaque black
back-seamed pantyhose, and three-inch pointed-toe heels. I trudged behind her
in my decidedly unfashionable flat mules; flat shoes are the only style of shoe
I considered practical for people who work in a walking city like San
Francisco. I invented stories in my head about the woman in the pencil skirt.
This woman has been up since six a.m. for her customary five-mile morning run
along Embarcadero. This woman has a personal shopper. This woman goes to the
salon just for a blowout. This woman gets pedicures every Friday afternoon
while sipping Chardonnay.

I arrived at the front entrance to my building and the pencil-skirted
woman continued walking briskly down the sidewalk in her heels, as though it was
nothing to walk on one’s tiptoes for four city blocks.

The uniformed security guards in my building smiled wanly in recognition
as I huffed through the marble-floored lobby with my greasy box of donuts. I
boarded the red-carpeted elevator with four dark-suited men, all deeply
engrossed in their Blackberries. I swiped my access card through the elevator’s
card reader and pressed my floor number – thirty.

“What floor?” I asked the men, and each, rather than responding, simply
leaned over to jab the buttons for their floors.

We flew upward in silence. I swallowed to clear my ears when they popped
from the elevation change. The cab lurched to a stop on my floor and I exited
into the law firm’s stainless steel and glass lobby, shaking my head as the
elevator doors closed on the mute men, all still intently scrolling through
e-mail on their cell phones. I walked through the glass doors that were
stenciled with the name of the law firm: Carnes, Rickles, Alexander &
Payne.

I was at least an hour and a half late for work and hoped to sneak into
my desk chair before my boss, Robin, noticed. Summoning the stealth of a
corpulent ninja, I walked as silently as possible toward my desk, but as I
passed Robin’s office door, I heard a stern “Nicole!”

I braced myself.

“You’re late again,” Robin belted out. Although she wasn’t a smoker,
Robin had the rasp of one, and was a naturally loud talker whose voice
reverberated around the office.

As one of three associates I worked for, Robin was the busiest and the
most outgoing. She was usually friendly with the secretaries and could gossip
with the best of us, but she did not tolerate a poor work ethic.

However, she was easily won over with ass-kissing and gifts.

“Sorry, boss!” I exhaled dramatically. Sometimes I called her
chief
or
madam
, which she seemed to love. I wasn’t above buttering up my
boss in order to make my life easier. “No good deed goes unpunished – I
went to pick up donuts for the office and traffic was awful.”

Normally, this would have won her over immediately, but today was
apparently a different story. I belatedly noticed Robin’s stress-vein throbbing
in her forehead.

“I’m afraid there won’t be time for donuts this morning,” she said,
giving me a once-over as if to relay that the last thing I needed in the first
place was another donut. She glanced at her watch before thrusting an
eight-inch thick court filing into my arms. “I need twenty copies of this,
like, yesterday. I need them bound, covered: The works. Pronto. We’re meeting
at eleven.”

“Shit. Sorry, Robbie,” I started to explain. “Traffic was …”

“I don’t have time, Nicole,” Robin was walking away. “Let me know when
that’s finished.”

Although I needed to rush to get the file to a printer, I couldn’t resist
watching my manager walk away. I don’t know a single person who would be able
to tear their eyes from the spectacle that is her butt. She’d gotten butt
implants a few months earlier, and I was still getting over the dramatic
difference between her old flat butt and the new, crazily swollen and globular
glutes. Robin absolutely loved it. Best thing she ever did, if anyone ever
bothered to ask. She wore tight everything these days to ensure everyone got a
chance to fully appreciate her perky new posterior. Today she had on a tight
blue skirt, black heels, and a filmy black blouse. A little less professional
and she’d have been ready for her close-up in a rap video.

With the file under one arm, I dumped my purse into my chair and flopped
the box of donuts onto my desk.

“‘Sup, Rox,” I greeted Roxanne. She answered, “Blergh,” rolled her eyes
and went back to scrolling through her personal email. I grinned and began
hauling the stack of documents back to the elevator, which I had to take to a
lower floor to have a print-shop copy and turn into twenty sleekly-bound
booklets.

Later on, after I’d set the booklets around the polished mahogany
conference table and arranged croissants, napkins, bottles of water, paper
cups, a carafe of coffee, cream, and every packaged sweetener known to man on a
credenza for all the suits who’d be in Robin’s last-minute meeting, I trudged
back to my desk.

The donuts were gone – such is the way of food in well-staffed
offices. I unearthed my own personal donut stash from my purse and took a huge
bite of fried goodness as I sank wearily into my ergonomic chair.

“What crawled up Robin’s ass?” Roxanne asked me with not a little irony.
She was clicking through Crate & Barrel’s winter line of décor on her
computer screen.

“Gah,” I said, mouth full of delicious donut. “Emergency meeting of
twenty shitheads.”

“Figures,” Rox rolled her eyes.

I decided to run the story of my public humiliation by Roxanne. It would
be nice to have a little empathy from a friend.

“So dude,” I said to Rox. “Get this. I was on the news last night.”

I explained the whole debacle and my ensuing humiliation and topped it
off with the stimulating conversation with my mother.

Roxanne listened with her brows furrowed in sympathy.

“That is awful,” she said. Rox was a girl’s girl. She knew the right
thing to say and didn’t offer advice unless you were asking for it. “How are
you feeling now?”

“Like an idiot. Of course, what do I do first thing? Run out for donuts.
I’m basically completely out of control. It’s so embarrassing. I think I need
to do something about it.”

“Well, you know what I always say,” Rox said. “You’re a Type O, like me,
and you are really supposed to be a meat eater. Carbs are like death for us.”

Roxanne had been on the same diet for years – not that she’d ever
needed to go on a diet. She had been thin since I’d met her in college. At some
point, she bought a book that proclaimed one’s diet should be dictated by their
blood type.

“Type O blood is the oldest kind of blood there is,” she continued. “So
you really should be eating like a caveman. Meat and a few vegetables thrown in
here and there.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Easy for you to say. You have restraint. And
you’re naturally thin.”

“It’s really all about moderation,” Rox told me, probably for the
four-hundredth time since I’d known her. “If you want chocolate, you should
have a piece of chocolate. Just don’t eat
all
the chocolate.”

“I don’t know
how
to not eat
all the chocolate,” I moaned, taking another bite of donut, which had begun to
turn my stomach. “You know how you have no restraint on the J. Crew web site?
That’s like me at Ben & Jerry’s.”

“Well, are you really looking to turn over a new leaf?” she asked.
“Because if you are, you should come to yoga with me.”

Roxanne had known me at my thinnest and, of course, my heaviest, and had
been trying to get me to attend yoga for years.

I thought of the news program the previous night, and my surprise at how
terribly fat I’d looked on television, and how utterly humiliating the whole
thing was. I felt my cheeks flush.

“All right. Tomorrow. Let’s do it,” I agreed.

Just then, I caught a flash of blue out of the corner of my eye.
Everywhere she went, Robin walked quickly, and now she was speeding toward my
desk.

She arrived at my cubicle with her own gust of wind, smiling as though
her irritation at me earlier that morning had never occurred. She had a blonde
bob that was sprayed into a submissive but large helmet, and bright orange
lipstick.

“What’s going on?” she asked casually as she reached for a handful of
M&Ms from the candy dish I keep stocked on my desk. The crisis must be
over, I thought.

“Not much!” I said.

“Nic was on TV last night,” Roxanne chimed in. We were used to gossiping
with Robin, but this wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to share with my loud-mouthed
boss. I braced myself.

“Really? What for?” Robin asked, crunching on candy.

I sighed. “Well, long story short, it was a news story about obesity.
They had video of me walking down the sidewalk, looking … obese. It was
humiliating, to say the least.”

“Holy shit,” Robin breathed, staring at me in wonder. “Well, that’s it.
You’ve got to do something about it.”

Unlike Roxanne, Robin was annoyingly free with her advice, and was often
foisting it upon the secretarial staff, uninvited. I sighed again.

“Yeah, I’m going to go to yoga with Rox,” I began.

“Fuck that,” Robin interjected. She was definitely not
Tyrannical Manager Robin
anymore and was
back to being
Gossipy Friend Robin
.
“You need to run. It’s the only thing that works. That, and no carbs. You’ve
got to stop with the fucking donuts.”

“Yeah,” I glared at her. “I’m getting lots of great advice today from the
high-metabolism twins.”

“Don’t make excuses, Nic,” Robin said. “I weigh one-hundred-twenty-eight
pounds because I run my ass off every day. And I still have five extra pounds
of junk in my trunk. Not that that’s a problem. Ha!”

Few things are more irritating to fat girls than when their skinny
friends nonchalantly reveal their ridiculously low weights.

“All right,” I said, casting a pleading look Roxanne’s way. She grimaced
apologetically.

“Hey, what’s up with Brad today?” Rox asked Robin suddenly. “I haven’t
seen him.”

I smiled in relief and chimed in with a “Yeah!”

Robin blushed a little at the mention of Brad’s name.

Brad Winters was one of the other associates I worked for – the
third associate, Charlene Chu, was strictly businesslike and rarely spoke to me
unless she needed something transcribed or filed.

Although he was married, Robin had an obvious puppy-love crush on Brad.
Brad, however, didn’t seem to want to give her the time of day. He was
geeky-looking, to be generous, with a large nose, small out-of-fashion glasses,
pasty skin, and hair that was probably supposed to look styled but always ended
up looking messy and stiff.

Robin’s attraction to Brad was complex, and probably tied up in her anger
toward her husband, whom, she had over-confided, had cheated on her during her
pregnancy. Their divorce followed soon after.

Robin had a six-month-old son named Cayden, who was looked after by a
nanny, Estelle. Every now and then I spoke with Estelle, who called to explain
that Cayden had a fever or to ask if Robin thought she would be home before ten
p.m. Cayden was Robin’s only child, and she said he was the only kid she’d ever
have. He was only three months old when she had her butt enhancement done.

We couldn’t be sure, but the butt job may have been done almost entirely
for Brad’s benefit. Robin was constantly strutting around in borderline inappropriately
tight outfits, and even I couldn’t help but stare at the two bloated boulders
on her backside. Brad noticed, too, and let his eyes linger longer than was
proper in polite company. But his acknowledgement of Robin’s existence seemed
to end there; he rarely spoke to her other than to discuss some aspect of a
case. Robin was strangely undeterred.

“He’s golfing,” she sighed and rested her chin on her hand. “I bet he
could teach me how to swing.”

Robin threw her head back, cackling clamorously, and then, in typical
abrupt fashion, she wheeled on her black heel and speed-walked back to her
office, where I heard her dialing Estelle on speaker-phone.

“Sweet Jesus,” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Let’s get some lunch. I’m
starving.”

Roxanne could eat.

That day at lunch, she ordered a hamburger and fries (no cheese –
God forbid. “Dairy makes Type-Os bloat!”), making a rare exception for the
carbohydrates in the bun and fries, and she ate almost the entire thing. Of
course, I knew she would be so full from lunch that for dinner all she was
likely to have was a rum and Diet Coke. And this would be following a
forty-five-minute workout at the gym.

This was the main difference between me and her: I also ate a hamburger
and fries for lunch, despite the two giant, calorie-laden donuts I’d eaten
earlier, but at dinnertime, I would be noshing just as hungrily on takeout Thai
food. And I certainly had no plans to visit the gym that evening.

We are a mismatched pair, to be sure – Roxanne’s a petite Hispanic
woman, always in heels and some variation of a black suit, her long hair
curled. She never seems to have an off day. She never looks unkempt or as
though she’s wearing something strange because the rest of her clothes were in
the wash. Those occasions were all too frequent for me, as I hated shopping for
clothes and my work wardrobe was down to just the aforementioned two pairs of
trousers and a handful of shirts and sweaters I rotated into the mix.

Walking next to Roxanne, I often felt freakishly large, lumbering along
in my barely suitable work gear, my butt and back-fat jiggling uncontrollably.
My hair was usually frizzed and untidy, as I rarely bothered with styling it in
the mornings these days, and I was often sweating. I couldn’t seem to walk a
block without my armpits dampening.

I knew Roxanne didn’t care how I looked and was my friend because she’d
always been my friend, since we’d roomed together in college. She’d known me at
my thinnest and watched me grow to my new sizable proportion with nary a word
of criticism. The only time she mentioned dieting or exercise was when I
complained about my weight, and then she always recommended her insane
blood-type diet or invited me to yoga or offered to give me her personal
trainer’s phone number. I always declined.