Life in the Fat Lane (23 page)

She pulled out some paper towels and dried her hands. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, Lara,” she began slowly, “but … well, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You really have a very pretty face, you know? And I know it must be hard for you. I mean, some people in this school can be really cruel.”

I stood there, rooted to the spot, mute.

“In junior high,” she continued, “I weighed, like,
fifteen pounds more than I do now, and I found this great diet to take the weight off, and it worked.”

My face burned with rage and humiliation. “You want to give me your
diet
?”

“I don’t want to offend you,” she said quickly. “I just know what it’s like to want to lose weight, and—”

“You don’t know anything,” I said in carefully measured tones. “You look at me and think you know, but you don’t.”

“Listen, just forget I said anything—”

“No,” I replied, “you listen. A year ago, at my old school, I was homecoming queen.
Queen!
I was thinner than you are. Then I got this disease called Axell-Crowne Syndrome, and it made me gain all this weight. You think I’m just this fat girl that you pity—”

“I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Yes, yes, you did,” I said earnestly. “I know you did, because I was once exactly like you.”

She gave me a kind look. “If it makes it easier to say it’s because of some disease—”

“It is!” I cried. Two girls came barreling through the door of the bathroom, laughing about something, but I ignored them. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“Okay, sure,” Jane said. She checked her reflection in the mirror. It was perfect. She turned back to me. “Well, if you ever change your mind or anything …” She smiled at me again, then walked out of the bathroom.

All I could do was stand there. She didn’t believe me. Neither did Allegra and Willow, probably. They all thought I was a big fat liar. And even if they did believe me, it wouldn’t make any difference.

I mean, fat is fat.

“A
ll your test results look fine, Lara,” Dr. Goldner told me over the phone.

Every month he gave me the exact same news.

All the tests looked fine. No change.

“Are you staying on your food plan?” he asked.

I plucked at a stray thread on my bedspread. “Most of the time.”

“Well, try to stick to it. And the aerobics plan, too. The best way for us to know if you go into remission is for you to follow this plan.”

I sighed. I had heard this same thing from him each time I’d seen him. I said good-bye and hung up the phone.

Remission. It seemed too much to hope for. Thin again. I would destroy Allegra Royalton. I would demolish Dave Ackerly. Jett would come groveling back to me on his knees, but I wouldn’t even take him back because—

I caught my fat reflection in the mirror on my dresser.

Who was I kidding?

I grabbed my car keys. I had a piano lesson. There was zero point in dreaming dreams that would never come true.

“M
ore flowing into the
fortissimo
,” Suzanne said, leaning toward me. She cupped her hands as if she were playing the keys of the piano and sang a line of my sonata. “And then dum-dum-de-
dum!
—like a volcano at the end there, but with control, right? Okay, try it again.”

I closed my eyes, willing myself to block out the world except for the music, and played the last movement
of the sonata again. It was my third lesson with Suzanne. She talked about music like it had color, weight, passion. She got so excited, and her excitement was infectious.

“Yes, that’s it!” Suzanne cried, jumping up and applauding when I finished playing. “Didn’t it feel great?”

“Yeah, it did, actually,” I said, “but I’m curious. You’re so passionate about music, but you love jazz. And jazz is so cold.”

“Nah, I just need to turn you on to the good stuff.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got an hour before my next student. You want to get some dinner?”

“I’d have to call home …”

“So call.” She indicated the phone on the desk in the office outside the studio.

I left a message on the answering machine. It didn’t matter, since we never ate dinner as a family anymore, anyway. That little charade was history. Scott grabbed food and ate in his room. My mother didn’t seem to eat at all.

“You like Italian?” Suzanne asked.

“Sure.”

“Good. We’ll go next door to Antonio’s. It’s great.” The restaurant was small, with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and a blackboard listing the daily specials.

“It doesn’t look like much, but the food is amazing,” Suzanne said. As she studied the blackboard I studied her.

She had on shocking-pink denim overalls over a white lace T-shirt, and a faded denim jacket. Her hair was up on her head in a cute, messy ponytail. One of her little dangling earrings was a bass clef, the other one a treble

Why would someone so fat wear shocking pink? I wondered.

“You know what you want?” She looked over at me and caught me staring.

I blushed. “Oh, I’m not that hungry.”

“Well, I’m starved, and I hate to eat alone, so order something.”

A young waitress with spiky black hair came to the table, depositing a basket of fresh, hot rolls. The smell was fantastic. “Hey, Suze,” she said. “Wazzup?”

“This is a new student of mine, Lara Ardeche. Lara, this is Carolyn Tucci. Her mom owns this place.”

“How ya doin’?” Carolyn asked.

“Fine.”

“So, what’ll it be, ladies? The lasagna is to die for today, by the by. Mom says to push it.”

“Sold,” Suzanne said. “And a green salad with blue cheese dressing, and tea.” She looked over at me.

“Oh, a small salad, no dressing,” I said. “And water.”

“Uh-huh,” Carolyn said. “What else?”

“That’s it.”

Carolyn looked at me like I was crazy. “Be back in a jiff.” She hurried off.

Suzanne reached for a roll. “Are you on a diet or something?”

“I told you, I’m just not very hungry.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question.” She buttered the roll and took a bite.

“Obviously I don’t need to be force-fed, okay?” I eyed her buttered roll pointedly.

“Oh, that look is supposed to tell me you don’t think I should be eating this, right?” She took another bite.

“Well, now that you mention it …”

Suzanne smiled at me. “People are so funny, you know?” she mused. “Did you ever hear this one? Groucho Marx said he would never join a club that allowed someone like him to be a member, something like that.”

“Meaning what, that because I’m conscious of my weight I hate myself or something?”

She took another bite of her roll. “Do you?”

“What?”

“Hate yourself.”

“No.”

“But you hate that you’re fat.”

“So? Don’t you?”

“No,” Suzanne said. “I used to. I just tell myself I missed my era. This thin obsession is a very modern American thing. I mean, I heard Mae West weighed like two hundred pounds.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“Why?” Suzanne asked. “Just because
they
say it’s so doesn’t make it so.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The billion-dollar diet industry,” she said. “Every year the standard of beauty gets more unattainable, and every year they make more money.”

“So that’s why you shouldn’t diet?” I asked dubiously. “Because someone might make
money
off of you?”

“Diets are self-abusive and they don’t work.”

“If you combine a low-calorie diet with exercise—”

“I do exercise,” Suzanne said. “I take a dance class three times a week.”

“Look, no offense, but it sounds to me like you’re just looking for an excuse so you can give up on your weight.”

Carolyn brought Suzanne’s tea and my water.

“When I was a kid,” Suzanne said, stirring sugar into her tea, “I was already chubby. What can I tell you? I come from a family with chubby genes, and we all love to eat. Not that I ate more than other kids, because I didn’t. But I got fat, and they stayed thin.”

Like Molly and me, I thought.

“I remember in sixth grade, we all got weighed and measured in the gym by the school nurse,” Suzanne continued. “The nurse would call out each kid’s weight to her assistant, who sat at a little table writing everything down. So she’s calling out each kid’s name and weight—‘eighty pounds, seventy pounds, ninety pounds’—and then she gets to me.” She made her hands into a megaphone. “ ‘
Suzanne Silver! One hundred fifty-eight pounds
!’ Everyone laughed. I thought I was going to die.”

“No, you
wanted
to die,” I corrected her.

She nodded. “I guess you know how it feels, then. After that, I went on a diet. I didn’t eat anything but lettuce for a week. My parents were crazed, begging me to eat, but I refused to give in. I remember I felt so virtuous, and it felt so good.”

She paused. “so then I went to this coffee shop with my older cousin, Lorraine. She went off with some guy and left me sitting alone, sipping this fat-free hot chocolate. So, this guy is sitting at the next table, and he’s having real hot chocolate—you know, with a pile of whipped cream on top—and he’s got these two huge chocolate chip cookies. So he eats one, and he gets up and leaves, and the other cookie is just sitting there.”

She sipped her tea, a slight smile on her lips.

“Anyway, I stared at that cookie for what felt like forever. I was so hungry. And he had just left it there.
And my cousin had deserted me. So finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached over, picked up the cookie, and took a huge bite. And just at that moment the guy came back to the table with another cup of hot chocolate.”

“That’s horrible!” I clapped my hand over my mouth.

Suzanne laughed. “It’s funny to me now, kind of. But it felt like the end of the world at the time.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran out crying. And I gave up on my diet. I’ve been on a zillion of them since then. You name it, I’ve been on it. I always lose weight for a while. And then—same old story—I gain it all back, and more, as soon as I eat anything more than what you’re eating now, because I have totally trashed my metabolism! I used to be so ashamed. I just
hated
myself for being fat. I thought I deserved to die, I was so disgusting. But then, finally, one day after I’d binged and purged and cried until I thought I would die from dehydration, I just said: No more diets. That’s it.”

Carolyn set two green salads on the table, mine plain, Suzanne’s covered in creamy, fattening blue cheese dressing.

“That’s it? You just gave up?”

She picked up her fork. “It’s more like I changed my attitude. I decided I don’t have to believe the world when it tells me I’m not okay.” She dug her fork into her salad. I fiddled with the earring in my left ear. “Look, I know you assume we have a lot in common, but we really don’t. A year ago I weighed one hundred eighteen pounds. I never had a weight problem in my life. Then I got this disease. It’s called Axell-Crowne Syndrome. It’s very rare, and it makes you gain a lot of weight no matter what you do or what you eat. And there’s no cure.”

“I had heard something,” Suzanne said.

I was surprised. “From who?”

“Your piano teacher in Nashville told Dr. Paxton that you’d gained a lot of weight in a really short period of time, and you were talking about giving up piano. But I didn’t know you had a disease …”

“Well, now you do. So if you want to rationalize why
you’re
fat, go ahead. But it doesn’t apply to me.”

Suzanne tapped her chin with a finger. “Not that it’s the same, mind you, but you know who you remind me of? A doctor who gets AIDS from a needle stick, who feels superior to a person who gets AIDS from sex.” She took another sip of her tea. “But, hey, they, both still have AIDS, right?”

She was so irritating.

“No matter what you say, it doesn’t change the reality of being fat,” I said. “People laugh at you, you can’t wear cute clothes, guys don’t ask you out—”

“Guys ask me out.”

Carolyn set Suzanne’s huge, steaming plate of lasagna in front of her, and Suzanne picked up her fork and dug in.

“Tristan, you mean,” I said. “You are so lucky that he’s attracted to … well, you know what I mean.”

“I do,” she agreed. “It’s insulting, but I do.”

“Devon says Tristan asked you to marry him.”

“He did.” She looked down at her plate a moment, and then her voice changed. “I love Tristan. And Tristan loves me. But I don’t know if I can ever marry him. The thing is, he hates that I’m fat.”

She smiled, but the smile never reached her eyes.

“If I married him, I’d always feel judged and found
wanting, insecure, diminished, constantly scared of losing him …”

“Which is worse than not having him at all,” I finished.

“So you know,” she said, her eyes meeting mine.

I nodded and forked a dry lettuce leaf, then put my fork down. “If you ask a thin girl with no talent or brains if she’d rather be her or you, she’ll pick her. Skinny girls who chain-smoke four packs of cigarettes a day would rather get lung cancer than get fat. Being fat is the worst thing in the world. Everyone knows it. So no matter what you say, the world wins. And we lose.”

She didn’t bother to contradict me. She just picked up her fork and ate her lasagna. Which meant I had won the argument, in a certain way. But all it made me feel was really, really sad.