Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (18 page)

“I bought a box of fudge,” she confessed. “It’s part of the experience of the island, after all. Half of it’s left. Almost half. We haven’t eaten all of it. It really
is
good fudge.”

I was not the grand inquisitor of what my friends had in their cupboards, and I knew Lindsay had a million better things to do than punish herself or Jalen with fudge. She had Pilates that afternoon, and tiger lilies to pick, a church supper, and Ann Richards’s speeches to review. Lindsay had stared her marriage—and possibly a life-threatening problem—in the face and had gone on to clean up her side of the street regarding it. That meant smothering her guilt, self-doubt, and worry about the future in order to go forward. It meant that the woman who married her college boyfriend at the age of twenty-two had had to map out her life beyond him and make her discoveries actual.
That
is living authentically. Her body was a piece of that life and her PhD would be a piece of it.

As is, one slowly savored piece at a time, the famous fudge that is part of experiencing Mackinac Island.

Twelve Million Women, Fat and Thin

W
endy Wicks has had the terrible misfortune of experiencing, and losing, a miracle.

No one knew what to make of the insecure, begging-to-please child who could read at the third-grade level before starting grade school but who failed her math and spelling tests. Her second-grade teacher gently broke the news to her mother that little Deesie was retarded.

“That cain’t be!” her mother exclaimed, and turned to Wendy, sitting next to her in front of her second-grade teacher’s desk, looking alternately at her spelling book and rubbing the scuff marks on her saddle shoes with spit. “She’s just lazy, that’s all. She lives in her own world. Honey”—she jerked Wendy’s hand away from her shoe—“I want you to swear, right here and now, that you’ll start paying attention more.”

Wendy looked up at her mother. “Come on now, honey. Tell Mrs. Kirkland and I that you’ll pay attention in class from now on.”

Wendy nodded. “I promise, Momma. I always do.”

It was hard to get Wendy to open up. Her parents said you practically had to beat the simplest answers out of her—did you dust the living room, did you remember to bring your lunch to school, do you want hot dogs or macaroni and cheese for dinner? It’s not like they were asking her why she liked the Laura Ingalls Wilder books so much that she kept on checking them out of the library or what she played with her Barbie dolls or if she had a crush on a boy in her class. Ida knew prying didn’t work, and it would never occur to Joe that a seven-year-old girl’s life could be any more complicated than obeying rules and doing well in school.

The doctors didn’t know what to say, either. One went so far as to recommend—very stridently, and in front of the child—that they shave Deesie’s head, put a couple of holes in her, scrape the inside of her skull, and analyze the findings. Ida stormed out of the office and a few months later they tried another doctor, who gave Wendy a thorough exam, including a hearing test. He, too, was baffled but said she was in good shape, although a little chunky, and they should watch her weight.

One night Ida announced a Beltone Man was coming to visit. Wendy thought that was a lovely name but probably more suitable for a woman. Even so, when he opened his big square case and started hooking things up, she shrank behind her mother and refused to look.

“Nothin’ to be scared of, Deesie-May. Watch me: Momma will take the test first and you can see it don’t hurt.”

Wendy watched round-eyed and intent. When the Beltone Man fitted her with the earmuffs, she did exactly what her Momma had done, just the way she’d been taught to do her chores around the house.

“Her hearing is perfect,” the Beltone Man announced, and gave Wendy a big Tootsie Roll. “You’ve both got perfect hearing.”

After a couple of years of failing more math tests and being pronounced a chubby but fine specimen, a doctor referred the Wickses to an audiologist. Wendy was terrified when he said he would shut her in a soundproof booth, but then she thought about the game shows and prizes of boats and Ship ’n Shore clothes, and she stopped crying before she’d started.

It was raining when they left the office, hard enough that it pelted down the last of the fall foliage into a squishy carpet as Wendy and Ida scurried to the car. As soon as they turned onto the highway, Ida started crying. Wendy slid down in her seat and scratched at the ridge of the upholstery.

“What’d I do, Momma?”

“Nothing, honey, nothing. It’s a good thing, what we found out. I just feel so bad about you—everything you’ve missed, everything everyone’s thought about you in school. But we’re gonna fix it, Deesie-May. Now we know what to do.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“You need hearing aids. All these years, you haven’t heard half what you should. Me and Daddy are gonna get you hearing aids.”

This is as much as Wendy remembers about being diagnosed with her hearing impairment in fourth grade, this and how the drive home to Hillsville was so emotional that her mother stopped and picked up a present for her, a salt-and pepper-shaker set of George and Martha Washington to go with her doll collection.

That gift is still a marvel to Wendy. “I mean, we were poor. I’m sure that one thing that was troubling her was the cost of the hearing aids, which they had to cover.”

Wendy
does
remember getting glasses two years later. “I had no idea what it was to see things
clearly
.” But unlike glasses, which made the world sharper, Wendy had to learn to hear. It took practice. Background noise was overwhelming and distracting; the cheeping of sparrows was equally compelling as her teacher at the blackboard; finding the tune of a Sunday hymn was difficult when for so long she had only the words. The audiologist suggested she listen to classical music to learn the nuances of sound and silence.

The hearing aids lasted until she was twenty-eight and died while Wendy was in a movie theater watching. Although she is a notorious spendthrift, Wendy still has not replaced her miracle.

In September 2006, Wendy was taking stock of the turns her life had taken, starting with her hearing impairment. “I compensate, nod my head. I have a stock set of phrases that imply that I understand perfectly well what’s going on without actually agreeing to anything—I loved the episode of
Seinfeld
where Jerry’s with the quiet talker, and he mistakenly agrees to wear the puffy shirt. I’ve been Seinfeld. Again, more fakery.”

Memories like these can send Wendy’s spirits plummeting, and it didn’t take much that September to bring on her regrets and moods. After four or five months, the Angry Fat Girls were getting used to her temperamentalness. If she goes into a funk about Cal or doing taxes with Leo because after almost two years they still weren’t legally separated, she goes doggo on us, writing, “I hope everyone is doing really well. I just don’t have anything to say right now. I’m alright but I have nothing to contribute.”

It infuriates us when she does this. She continues to blog on her own site, which is how we know what’s on her mind and calendar, but her withdrawals from our group blog and Instant Messenger felt manipulative. We knew we were supposed to rush in and ask what the problem was, how we could help, doesn’t she know how smart, funny, pretty, and fabulous she is?

Sometimes we gave in and sometimes we didn’t. Mimi would cave first, posting comments on Wendy’s blog and leaving her IM on so that she could offer the sympathy or consolation Wendy craved. I’d be next, calling for information about her weight history or high school boyfriend and find we were talking about how she just didn’t feel comfortable with the other AFGs, the same line with which she’d coaxed Mimi into a momentary confederacy that felt like the partnership she wanted so much. Lindsay flat-out refused to indulge her, and Katie wanted stories secondhand. It was definitely fodder for gossip among us.

September was one of those spells in which Wendy disappeared from us. We learned why from her blog.

One evening, after she sank doing the freestyle in swimming class, she considered whether she should give up trying to learn to swim. Just why was she putting herself through this terror every week? Oh yeah…Because once upon a time she didn’t want to be afraid of going out with Cal on his boat.

It was a Friday night, and she had no plans for the weekend. She could be abducted by aliens and no one would know. She sucked at swimming because anything she wanted to accomplish, she couldn’t. She’d never, in a year with Cal, seen his boat.

There is something of Alice down the rabbit hole in Wendy, who worries that, separated but not divorced and not in a relationship, she will fall through the earth, that she will be silenced until she shrinks into nothingness. She looks to people and things to take charge of her self-esteem, constantly lecturing herself, like Alice, not to appear ignorant or impolite, to follow the rules, not to overreact (in the middle of overreacting):

“‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you,’ (she might well say this), ‘to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!’ But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her…”
⁵⁰
Or does Wendy remind me of Tinker Bell? Watching the blog responses that metaphorically punch her on the shoulder and say, “Don’t you know how courageous you are to keep taking swimming lessons? You’re so lucky to have Cal out of your life. You’ll meet the right guy at the right time: don’t worry” are akin to clapping our hands if we believe in fairies.

The Tinker Bell pleas are one of the great bonuses of the blog world—if you can absorb the support. But like everyone who’s ever set foot on the set of
Dr. Phil
, until Wendy gets it for herself that she is courageous and lucky and a prize, all the reassurance, and all the weight loss, will never be enough.

Having nearly drowned, she stopped at McDonald’s for french fries and a Diet Coke that was flat, got home to a hot apartment and hot cats, who wouldn’t leave her alone. The day turned cruel in less than an hour, and she cried for two more, then called me, trying too hard to turn it all into a stand-up routine. “The pool is a good place to cry,” she sniffed. “You can keep your goggles on or take them off or, if you can breathe underwater, just stay down there and be sad.”

It sounds very much like the lonely privilege of not being able to hear or of living fat—faking that you’re no different from anyone else. Breaking out of those privileges takes ear-and ego-splitting practice.

Wendy had met a nice guy online in the second half of August. I was more practiced at dating than Lindsay or Mimi, so Wendy marked me out for talking about boys. Mark was fifty, so I wasn’t surprised when, in a fit of the pot calling the kettle dented, she told me he had baggage. At least Mark was fully divorced, but he had two kids in grade school. He was on the road most of the week, supervising construction sites. His ex-wife had run up an enormous credit card tab, which he was struggling to pay off, and he lived an hour away in Richmond. But he gasped with laughter when Wendy put
Fawlty Towers
on the VHS after they had lunch on their first date, and as she walked him out to his car, he promised to bring
A Fish Called Wanda
the next time they got together. The sun, as he kissed her good-bye, was heavy in a western sky that was the color of molten lead from the humidity.

“You’re wonderful,” he purred in her ear.

God
, Wendy thought.
I love it when a man talks in my ear.

“So are you,” she said. “When will you come back to see me? Could you come midweek?”

“I can’t,” he sighed. His breath in her hair was a bit of heaven in the still evening. “I’ll be upstate Tuesday to Friday.”

“Oh.” She kissed him again, with pent-up intention. He matched her eagerness. “What about next weekend?”

“I’ll try. I need to see my kids, and I’ve been thinking about getting a weekend job, but I’ll try.”

“Just say when. I’ll be waiting.”

He managed, the following Saturday, to make it to Williamsburg in time to watch about twenty minutes of the movie before he drifted toward asleep. She led him to her bedroom, and he sank into a deep, dreamless sleep before she’d brushed her teeth. She crept into bed next to him and tried to count how many words she knew that began with the letter
Y
. It wasn’t yet ten thirty, and she was full of nervous energy at the same time that she figured it would be rude to leave him there, alone.

She woke up in the morning with his erection pressed against her right hip. Mark stirred, and she whispered that the sex they had when he woke up briefly at two a.m. was goo-oo-ood. And it was, although she kind of wished he hadn’t fallen asleep afterward. And she wished he stuck around for brunch at her favorite diner. But she understood. Really. He needed to get back to Fredericksburg to do some paperwork and laundry and help his seventh grader with her algebra before leaving for Annandale at the crack of dawn on Tuesday.

“I wish I could help,” she IM’d him that night. “You could bring your laundry here next weekend.” Cryptically, he responded with a kissy emoticon.

In less than a month, Wendy emailed Mimi, Lindsay, and me that she wasn’t mad at us or anything, but she had nothing to say when we started chatting on Instant Messenger. On her blog, she referred to him as the Invisible Man.

Having made her grand pronouncement, she broke down and called me. “I don’t want a full-time boyfriend. I’m tired of men.”

“Good,” I said. “Mark sounds perfect for you, then. You can take some time for yourself but still enjoy him every once in a while.”

“I shouldn’t complain,” she went on. “I have a few nibbles online, but I keep thinking when they say I’m attractive, ‘Did you just get out of prison?’”

“So take down your profile and use the time to think about what
you
want.”

“My food has been
feh
. Not really bingeing but not good, either. I want to get under 250 by New Year’s. I bought these camel flannel trousers at Talbots. They almost fit…”

“What kind of man would you really like to date?” I cut in. “Have you ever spelled that out? What would you like to do for a living, if you could do anything you wanted?”

“I need to get back to the gym,” she said as if this answered either question. “I don’t start Terrified Swimmers for a couple of weeks yet.” She laughed. “I told my teacher he should call this class ‘Considerably Less Frightened but Still Haunted by Fears of Drowning’ Class.”

I didn’t know if she was ignoring me, couldn’t hear me, or couldn’t listen to me, but it was, I told Katie, who knew my blog cohorts only slightly, a classic Wendy move. She called about one thing and then reversed the conversation into yet deeper Wendy waters. Even when she called because
I
was in crisis, she managed to turn it back to her sadnesses. I think it has a lot to do with being hard of hearing and the social subtleties she hasn’t learned as a result. She talks about herself because she doesn’t hear other people talking about themselves.