Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (25 page)

We all go through the clothing thing. Mimi kept a few beloved smaller sizes, and Katie purged hers. I kept my smaller sizes, classic clothes that wouldn’t go out of fashion, and I’d be goddammed if I gave up on fitting into them. We packed this stuff up and got it out of our way whereas Wendy tortured herself with the mess.

It could have been genetic. Wendy’s parents kept a stuffed baby fawn in the closet. “When I mention it’s a bit odd, my mom says, ‘Why is that odd? We keep it there because of the cat.’ The cat has been dead for five years.”

Wendy
suffered
from her clashing desires to get more and get rid of. She was convinced that one of the reasons Cal and Mark broke up with her was because of her clutter. It seemed her drives always came back to her pursuit of weight loss (the calorie-counting and points, the cups and halves, the clothes, the gym, the scale, the photos, the blogging, the new makeup, the new hair cut), and her weight loss always came back to men.

Each particular of weight loss became so obsessional that it partly obscured (to herself, at any rate) the obsession to find a man. “My scale has ranged from 263 to 255 in the past thirty-six hours. I’d just like it to be a certain number. Before I left for Weight Watchers, my scale said 257. The Weight Watchers scales said 258.8.” Wendy also had several gym scales to consult and not infrequent visits to her doctors, making her weight notoriously complicated.

So was her food. Wendy’s participation in Weight Watchers was mostly, in her Goldilocks world, to batten down a single, final, authoritative weight. After she weighed in, she had a ritual that, of course, involved Five Continents. “I selected the biggest pieces of huevos rancheros with the biggest piece of cheese on it,” she blogged on a mid-November Saturday. I was faint with lust reading it: the last leaves in Brooklyn were bristling in a stiff wind that portended winter, and I was longing for something warming and fatty. “It was really delicious but I wanted more. I went back and got my fruits and vegetables and strolled past the breakfast bar again. I got two more pieces to go. AND I picked up four double chocolate cookies that they sell by the package, the smallest one at $2.04.” Then she went back to the meeting for discussions of point-wise recipes and not going grocery shopping on an empty stomach.

Her blog reports of eating out were Gordian knots of points: “We split a pork carnita dinner (all meat), refried beans (with an extra order), lettuce, guacamole (about a 1/4 c. total) and I probably had about ten to twelve chips” or “I did have
¹
/4 of a slice of pound cake today but I’ve been bringing in an apple and a banana each day along with a controlled lunch.”

“Am I more attractive and lovable losing weight?” Wendy asked. It’s an interesting and universal question in the dating world. Even the thinnest man or woman might wonder if he’d gain from shaving off his mustache or having a second piercing in her ear. To question if a pound or two can make one more attractive is not that unreasonable in how it affects confidence. And the answer to Wendy is yes, but not as much as women think. “Why wouldn’t I want to go away with you for Thanksgiving?” Mark said when he finally called and she pushed him on why he’d broken up with her but still wanted to see her. “You’re great company. I love being with you.”

To someone like Wendy, whose flailing for self-improvement was caused by her drive to get a boyfriend or was an escape from not having one, that “love” was as confusing as parking signs in New York City. I was going through the same confusion with Scott and not unlike my breakups with him three and four years earlier, Wendy was hitting the Internet in a hard, lost-girl fashion. I was baffled how to respond to the email she sent to the Angry Fat Girlz bloggers.

Uh
, I kept thinking as the message waited for an answer,
you could
be
fun, you could
have
a life
. “Deep down inside,” she had blogged earlier, “all of us want to be accepted and it hurts to know that our weight keeps people away from us. We’d all like to think we are more than our weight,” and yet here she was, putting herself up for sale without knowing what her “more” was or how to gloss over the ninety pounds she had yet to lose in addition to the hundred she’d been victorious in shedding. Why not take a full body shot and not worry about describing your body?

My brain wheeled with the things I could have said, but in the end I advised her to post what
she
wanted from a man. Maybe—possibly—such a list would have landed her a man she wouldn’t have to twist herself into a different person for, that she wouldn’t have had to time-share with kids, work, or another woman.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the morning after seeing
Marie Antoinette
and going out for Mexican food with Mark on a “just friends” date, and four days before they were going to Pulaski, Wendy threw gasoline on the fire.

She hadn’t heard from Cal since May or June, when he quit agonizing over missing Wendy and apologizing for staying with the woman Wendy called the “she-male.” But now he was calling her again. When she grabbed the phone, she saw his number on the LCD and for two rings considered whether she ought to answer. She was curious about what he would say and felt she had nothing to lose. She would salve some of her hurt and loneliness by calling him a bastard and hanging up on him.

All it took was “I wanted to wish you a happy Thanksgiving, Wen. I’ve been thinking about the party at your cousin’s and the Comfort Inn in Pulaski.” She invited him over, to which he answered he was in her parking lot, and in what seemed like fifteen seconds, she was on top of him, fucking both their brains out until she stopped and said, huskily, “Tell me I’m better than her. Tell me I’m sexier and better in bed.”

What was he gonna say, as close to orgasm as he was?

Mimi was impressed with the way her Weight Watchers leader had set up the room, with paper plates at each seat of the conference table and a card table with bowls and plates labeled “mashed potatoes,” “turkey,” “cranberry sauce,” “pumpkin pie,” each filled with different-sized pieces of paper. The leader had them go through the buffet line and choose what they would select for Thanksgiving dinner, then went over the points for the portion each person selected and showed them the size they should be aiming for of the food they’d be served.

“Go ahead and have pie,” she said, “but keep it to a one-and-a-half-inch slice and don’t put whipped cream on it. If you make great dressing, think about skipping the potatoes, or vice versa. Remember this is a holiday not a pig-out. Try to keep your mind on the company.”

Mimi found the portion sizes fascinating and resolved to skip gravy, mashed potatoes, rolls, and cranberries. She would make her casserole, and she loved the cornbread stuffing and pecan pie her hostess and sister Wiccan, Jolene, always served. Mimi would save her points for them.

I went to my potluck with my pie and a ton of Brussels sprouts. There was no plum pudding or mincemeat pie left when I went home.

Katie and I didn’t get pumpkin pie at our celebrations, but the stores were still open and Entenmann’s did in a pinch.

Jalen and Lindsay got to her parents’ house too early. Like a good son-in-law, he settled in to watch a football game, and she joined her mom and sisters in the fragrant kitchen. Janice was wearing skinny black jeans and Alison a short denim skirt with cabled tights.
At least we’re all in bulky sweaters
, Lindsay thought, but as the big pot for potatoes added plumes of steam to the heat of the oven and Crock-Pot, she knew the sweaters would be coming off.

“You look goood,” Alison cooed. “You’ve lost more weight.” Alison lived in Minneapolis, and they hadn’t seen each other since the wedding.

“Thanks,” Lindsay said. “You look good, too.” She had prepared this response in order not to fall to her knees in floods of questions at each compliment.
Do you really, really think so? Can you see it in my butt? How about my thighs?

Their mom walked by with a relish tray. “I’ve already had a couple of carrots,” she said. “I was starving. Do you think the men would like some snacks, too?”

Janice took the tray, the bride eager to join her groom, and seeing nothing to do in the kitchen, Lindsay followed. Janny was perched on Evan’s lap as the Lions got a third down. The men hadn’t been going hungry before the arrival of the celery and olives. Mom had set out onion dip and potato chips, salsa and Tostitos. And a floral china plate, Lindsay saw with glee, of snowman and jack-o’-lantern Peeps.

Jack-o’-lanterns! They’d be just a tiny bit stale, just the way, as everyone in the family knew, she liked them. Ripened to perfection.

The naked trees on the mountains driving into Pulaski always give Wendy the willies. Their famished arms seemed to try to snatch her back, reminding her of the couple of generations of Wickses buried in Pulaski’s and nearby Hillsville’s cemeteries: two dead of black lung, a suicide, a blast furnace victim. The stories of her paternal grandfather are of a harsh, brutal man, but at least he got his family out of the mines and foundries. As an itinerate market farmer, he was poorer than his brothers, and when her dad was growing up, the family never had a place they called home for long, but they all had an up-and-out bent bred into their natures for which she had to be grateful.

“They call me Deesie,” she warned Mark as they drove into town. “Actually, my mother calls me Dee-Rett. She believes everyone should be called by versions of both names. Wendy Harriet—Dee-Rett. But everyone else calls me Deesie.”

“Okay, Deesie. Anything else you want me to know?”

“Yeah.
You
don’t call me Deesie. Elsewise I’ll tell my mom your full name.”

“Wait!” Mark Luke John Nixon grabbed her arm. “We gotta look at the VFW. It’s a classic.”

“You’ll see a lot of those false-front places heresabout,” she said. “We can drive ’round in the morning if you want. Go up and see where the Boss Men lived.”

“‘Heresabout’?”

“Ah’m goin’ ta see mah people, son. Ah’m goin’ ta Cousin Tanny’s, where mah aunt Darla’ll make jokes about us bein’ salt ’n’ pepper, Darla and Dessie. Get it?” She slapped him on the thigh and pulled up to a white and stone tract house distinguishable from its neighbors for the wishing well on the front lawn. The driveway was populated by three motorcycles and a flat-bottomed fishing boat on a trailer.

Mark was absorbed into the crowd like water into a sponge, carried off by Tanny to meet Wendy’s mother. This meant she was left to the clutches of her aunt and uncle, Darla and Floyd. “Oh. Mah. Gawd!” Aunt Darla yelled. “You all come look at Dee-Rett! She’s thin!”

Aunt Darla pronounced “thin” as two syllables.

“What
haaave
you been doing to yourself, child?”

“I just lost some weight, Aunt Dar. Just thirty pounds or so since I saw you in July.”

“An’ all dressed up and with a new friend, too,” she said knowingly.

“Well…I have to admit I’ve fallen in love with Talbots.”

“Ah can
see
that! Ah
love
that jacket.” She fingered the lapel of Wendy’s navy blue blazer. “What size is it, honey?”

Wendy was exhausted. There were twenty or thirty people at this party and she’d only survived two of them.

“I don’t right remember. The label might have been torn off. I got it for twelve dollars. Could you excuse me? It’s been a long drive, and I need to use the bathroom.”

Wendy locked the door and slumped against it. She was perspiring, and her hair was matted along her hairline, her blazer wrinkled in the back from being in the car. She needed to pee, she needed a Diet Coke, and she needed to see if Cal had called her back. She smiled when she saw his number on her cell phone.

“You interested in NASCAR?” Uncle Floyd was asking Mark. “We have races up here over the summer. You and Deesie’d be more than welcome.”

“I’ve never been a fan,” Mark said, “but I’d like to check out the fishing.”

A chorus of ah’s went up. Mark was in. He was on his own.

“So how are you really?” Tanny asked Wendy. Wendy turned, and Tanny could see her eyes were red from crying. “Uh-oh.”

“Why are men such idiots?” Wendy asked.

“Did you and Mark have a fight?”

“No. No. We’re past fighting. We’re just friends. I’m in love with somebody else. I always have been.”

“And he’s not—?”

“In love with me? Yeah, he is. I think. He said so. That’s what makes it hard. But he’s living with this witch, this…this…
vampire
. ‘Carol,’” she said in a baby voice and with a toss of her head. “
Carol
does her best not to let him out of her sight, but she doesn’t always do a very good job.” She started to cry then. Tanny took her in her arms and petted her hair.

“It sounds awful, honey. Awful.”

“Yeah,” Wendy whispered. “Sometimes he slips up. Like saving his cell phone messages.”

“Deesie, don’t you think—”

“Ah
think
,” she cut in, all those Wickses stretching in their graves at Dora Cemetery and thickening her accent to the viscosity of Aunt Dar’s candied yams, “ah’m gonna pay ’em
both
back. Ah’ll get thin, you wait. Then he’ll regret it. And
her
…Ah might let her know a thing or two about Cal.”