Life in the Fat Lane (9 page)

I
stared at my dinner plate.

One half piece of plain bread. One half cup of fat-free cottage cheese. A colorful medley of raw vegetables. One small orange.

This was my Thursday night dinner on the eight-hundred-calories-a-day diet, handwritten by my mother, now posted on the refrigerator. I’d been on it for a week.

The reason I was limited to eight hundred calories was simple. It was two days before Valentine’s Day now. Since Thanksgiving I had gained another twenty-two pounds. If you included the five pounds I’d temporarily lost when I switched from prednisone to Doxepin, I had actually gained twenty-
seven
pounds.

I weighed 158 pounds. God, I could hardly bring myself to
think
the number.

I looked over at Scott’s dinner. Meatloaf. Mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. Buttered biscuits.

The nightmare of the past ten weeks washed over me again, and I closed my eyes. I had been so hopeful, so full of resolve when I’d weaned myself off prednisone and had success with Doxepin.

Then I’d started gaining again.

We called Dr. Fabrio in a panic. He said the prednisone would take some time to leave my system, and I needed to be patient.

My mother didn’t want us to be patient. She took me to the top diet guru in Nashville, who put me on a twelve-hundred-calorie-a day diet, and I stuck to it, too. Okay, I cheated now and then when I got so hungry I couldn’t stand it, but that wasn’t enough to make me actually gain weight, was it? When I was working out five days a week?

And yet I got fatter. And fatter. After three weeks we called Dr. Fabrio again. He said that at this point my allergy drugs had nothing to do with my weight, and he urged me to seek counseling for my emotional problems. My mother told him that was absurd. So with great reluctance, he referred us to an endocrinologist—a specialist who could see if my weight gain had a metabolic cause.

My mother called the endocrinologist, Dr. Laverly, immediately, but she had absolutely no openings available until mid-February. We took the first appointment we could.

I continued to gain. My mother cried and took me back to the diet guru. She begged him to put me on some new wonder drug. He refused. He said I was too
young and not overweight enough for him to even consider prescribing drugs for me. Then he lectured me about feeding emotional hunger with food, while Mom nodded in agreement.

I gained more weight. Photos of the thin me mocked me. I mourned for my old self the way you mourn for a lost loved one. And sometimes, when I got really sad, I ate. And then I’d hate myself. Which made me want to eat even more, just to numb the pain.

With every pound I gained, I was filled with an ever growing, impotent rage. Some monster was swelling up inside me, making me get fatter and fatter. I had to force myself to be nice, sweet, good Lara, when actually I felt like this ugly, angry, hideous monster-Lara.

I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

At the beginning of February I’d gotten in to see the endocrinologist. Someone had canceled, and I was moved up. Mom came along, though it was clear she didn’t believe there was anything wrong with me.

Dr. Laverly examined me and asked a million questions while her nurse took gallons of my blood. Yes, she was concerned that I’d gained forty pounds but said that the odds of its having a biological cause were very small. In any case, she promised I would have the test results the following Friday.

I called Dr. Laverly that Friday, my heart pounding, but her nurse said that someone in her family had died, and she’d had to go out of town, and that it might be the following Saturday before we would hear from her.

The following Saturday. More than a week more to wait. The days themselves felt fat and heavy—time crawled by. The worst thing was, I didn’t know what I’d
do if Dr. Laverly couldn’t help me. Not only was I getting fatter—I was also losing my mind.

I opened my eyes and the tasteless, meager dinner still confronted me. I pushed the food—the enemy—away and stood up.

“I’m not really hungry,” I lied. “I think I’ll just go work out.”

“That’s the spirit, honey,” my mother encouraged. “Eating when you’re not hungry is a trap.”

I went into our gym and tried to avoid my reflection in the floor-length mirror. I got on the treadmill and walked quickly, then raised the speed until I was running. I ran until I felt like throwing up.

I had done that instead of eating dinner for the past three days. In school I felt faint. I couldn’t concentrate. I got a C+ on a history test. But as long as I didn’t eat, I didn’t care.

I walked over to the scale in the gym and stepped on it. 159. I had gained another pound.

I stood there, shaking with impotent rage.

“Honey?”

It was my mother. She stood in the doorway of the gym, looking impossibly thin.

“Did you lose?” she asked anxiously.

I didn’t answer her. I just stepped off the scale.

“Would you like some raw vegetables for a snack?”

I couldn’t speak. I felt like putting my fist through the raw vegetables, the wall, my mother.

That night I lay in bed in the dark and promised myself I would not give in. But the other me, the crazy, out-of-control me, whispered seductively in my ear.
What’s the use? You starve yourself and gain weight anyway. Just go eat. Just go do it
.

I did it. I snuck downstairs and, standing in front of the refrigerator, stuffed my face with every leftover I could find, all the while keeping my ears open for any sound. If someone came, I would throw the food into the sink and pretend I’d been getting a glass of skim milk.

No one came.

I went back to bed, my stomach now distended, groaning.

I was disgusted with myself. Action. I needed to take action. I rolled off the bed, ran into my bathroom, and knelt in front of the toilet. I put two fingers down my throat and tried my best to make myself throw up. I tried and tried. But I couldn’t do it.

So I laid my head down on the toilet seat and silently cried.

“W
hich one?” My mother held two dresses up to herself, one in each of her arms.

One was long, slinky, and silver, with sheer chiffon inserts from the neck to the cleavage. The other was short, strapless, and black.

It was Valentine’s Day, and my family was throwing its annual Valentine’s Day party. My friends and I would get dressed to the max. It was always a blast, and this year would be no different.

Except for the fact that I didn’t plan to attend.

Not that I had mentioned this yet to anybody. But there was no way I was going to be there, with everyone looking at me, whispering behind their hands, their eyes full of pity.

It was bad enough that everyone at school had watched me blimp up to 159 pounds. Now I was supposed
to greet my parents’ friends, many of whom had not seen me since last year, and stand there while their faces went from shock, to pity, and then to some mask of false gaiety while they tried to cover up what they really felt: disgust.

And who could blame them? I
was
disgusting.

I stared at the row of pageant trophies on my dresser, and at the photo of me and Jett from homecoming, which I had stuck into the edge of my mirror. I felt tears coming to my eyes again. I was getting used to them.

“Honey?” Mom asked. “Maybe I should wear silver, and you can wear black. Black is very slimming.”

I wanted to kill her. But of course she hadn’t done anything. It wasn’t her fault if I was an out-of-control disgusting fat pig.

“Okay, fine, I’ll wear black,” I told her.

She sat down next to me. “I want you to know I’m with you a thousand percent, honey,” she said quietly. “It’s the new year, and a new start, right?”

I nodded dully.

“First, we have got to acknowledge that there’s a problem, which we do, right?”

Not we
, I wanted to scream.
Me. You still wear a size six. You still have a twenty-five-inch waist
.

“Maybe Dr. Laverly will find something,” I said.

Mom sighed. “Maybe.”

I rubbed my temples. “Mom, I’m really not feeling well. I might just stay upstairs tonight—”

“Lara, you can’t run away from your problems,” my mother said. She snapped her fingers. “I know! Tomorrow we’ll go register you for Jenny Craig. And we’ll simply find a doctor who will put you on diet drugs. That—”

“Please, Mom,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “I’m not going to Jenny Craig. And I’m not taking drugs, either. Those things are for fat failures with no willpower.”

Mom’s silence said it all.

I
was the fat failure.

She put her arm around me. “Come on, honey. We can lick this together. Where’s the girl who accomplishes anything she puts her mind to, huh?”

Mom went to my closet, took out my new black dress, a forgiving size twelve, and laid it on the bed.

“What did Dad say to you?” I asked, my voice tight.

My father had just returned that morning from a weeklong trip to New York. He had walked into the house, his usual perfect-looking self, and come into the kitchen to see me there, pouring coffee. I had on my long, oversized sleeping T-shirt. I saw the look of disgust in his eyes as he scanned my porky body.

“Hi,” he’d said. He didn’t rush over to hug me.

“Hi.”

“Just having coffee?” he had asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, good. How’s the diet going?”

I felt like throwing up.

“I’m working really hard at it, Daddy.”

“Sweetheart? Is that you?” Mom had flown into the kitchen and wrapped her sinewy arms around his neck. She had on a pink leotard and black bike shorts. She was so thin. “Ooo, I missed you!” she’d squealed.

He’d given her a perfunctory kiss. “I’m beat. I’m just going to run upstairs and shower.”

That was the last I’d seen of him all day. I’d stayed in my room. He never came to see me. But I knew that
behind closed doors my parents had to be talking about their fat failure of a daughter.

“All he said was that he’s concerned,” Mom said. She hesitated, her nervous fingers plucking at my quilt. “Is this about me, Lara? Something I did?”

I felt such rage. And I felt so guilty that I felt it.

“No, Mom. You’re wonderful. Don’t blame yourself.”

“Something I didn’t do, then? You have so much going for you. I just don’t understand! You have parents who love you; we’ve never deprived you of anything, have we?”

I didn’t reply. The monster was choking me.

“I just can’t stand to see you ruining your life like this!” she exclaimed. “You’re lucky that Jett has stuck by you. Do you think your father would still be with me if I had let myself go like you have?”

Red-hot fury filled me, blowing me up with a burning acid. I stuffed the feeling down, down, until I could breathe again without breathing fire. Then I turned away from her.

I heard her stride out of my room.

I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

“Hi,” Scott said from the doorway.

My eyes were still on the ceiling, my arm over my forehead. “Go away.”

He came in instead. “So, this party thing tonight is pretty lame, huh?”

“Scott, I’m really not in the mood, okay?”

I felt the bed sag from his weight as he sat next to me. He threw his Hacky Sack in the air and caught it.

“Scott, please.”

“I kinda wanted to talk to you,” he mumbled.

I rolled over onto my hip so I could see him. “What?”

The Hacky Sack went into the air again. “Well, I guess you’re kinda, like, basically miserable.”

“Good guess,” I replied.

“Me too, a lot of the time,” he said. He threw the Hacky Sack again. “Well, see, I know you’ve, like, gained weight …”

“The whole world knows I’ve gained weight, okay?”

He shrugged. “But what I wanted to say is, well, it’s not important.”

I got up on one elbow. “It’s not
important
?”

Scott pulled at his T-shirt hem, stretching the shirt out even bigger. “Everyone in this family is, like, so into looks all the time. I always thought those pageant things you did were so stupid, you know? It’s just … it’s lame.”

“Well, lucky you, you won’t be bothered by pageants for a long time,” I said bitterly.

Mrs. Armstrong had called me a few weeks earlier, because I hadn’t gotten my application in for Miss Teen Tennessee. I told her I had decided not to enter. She refused to take no for an answer—after all, she had already invested years in grooming me—and asked if she could come over so that we could discuss it. I told her I had infectious mononucleosis. And that I was giving up pageants. And dedicating my life to piano.

Ha. I had stopped taking piano lessons in December and dropped out of the winter recital.

Scott stood up. “Look, it’s not like you’re some big fat freak, you know. I mean, you don’t look
that
bad. That’s all I wanted to say.” He headed for the door and practically collided with Molly.

“Whoa, traffic cop needed at this intersection,” she
said, dodging around him. She bounded in and plopped down next to me, dropping her overnight case on the rug. “So, what did the doctor say?”

Molly knew all about Dr. Laverly. What she didn’t know was how much I really weighed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. Because now I weighed more than she did.

“She hasn’t called me yet.”

“She’s gonna have the answer, I know it,” Molly said.

“You think?” I rolled onto my stomach.

“Absolutely.” She got up off the bed and stripped off her T-shirt. “I’m taking a shower, okay? Our water heater broke again.”

“Whatever,” I said, too depressed to move.

She dropped her jeans and padded into my bathroom in her underwear, closing the door behind her. I scooched over to the end of the bed and looked at her jeans, lying there in a heap.

I got up, pulled the extra-long T-shirt I had been wearing over my head, and tried on Molly’s size thirteen/fourteen jeans from The Gap. She’d made me promise never to tell anyone she wore such a huge size.

They fit.

I had been living in stretch leggings and baggy sweats. I hadn’t worn my jeans in weeks—in fact, I had pushed them all to the back of my closet. I didn’t want to know.