Life in the Fat Lane (24 page)

“Y
ou’re the best pianist in the quartet, you know. That Mozart really rocks,” Perry said, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

I laughed. “I never heard Mozart described quite that way before.”

“Hey, he was a major rebel. Beethoven too—totally out there. If they lived today, they’d be dating supermodels and trashing hotel rooms.”

It was the next evening, and I was giving Perry a ride home after orchestra rehearsal. For once he wasn’t eating anything.

“It’s the third house on the right,” he told me, and I turned the car into his driveway. It was a two-story colonial with a wide front porch in need of paint, very homey looking, lights shining from every window. A colorful flag that read
WELCOME
hung over the porch.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“Sure.”

I waited for him to get out of the car. Instead he turned to me. “Hey, um, so, some friends of mine are having a party Saturday night. I … uh … thought you might like to go.”

“Oh, gee, I’d love to, but I already have plans,” I said quickly. It made it somewhat easier to say this, since it was true. I was going to Captain Bizarro’s birthday party with Devon and his friends.

“Oh, yeah, okay. I guess I didn’t give you very much notice. Maybe another time.”

“Sure,” I lied.

“See ya.” He heaved his huge body out of my car.

My house was dark when I pulled into the driveway. The grounds were immaculate, the lawn perfectly trimmed.

“Hello?” I called out. I wandered into our black-and-white family room and set my schoolbooks down on the black marble coffee table. “Anyone home?”

It was so quiet. I went upstairs, past my room and Scott’s and poked my head into my parents’—now basically my mom’s—room. She was sitting on the bed, smoking. The only light in the room was a small Tensor lamp trained on the family photo album she had open in her lap.

“Hi,” I said. “I didn’t think anyone was home.”

“These photos are so wonderful,” she said, not looking up at me.

“Where’s Scott?”

She took a puff on her cigarette. “Come look at these, Lara.”

I sat down next to her on the bed. The album was
open to the photo of her and Dad at her homecoming dance, when she had been crowned queen. He looked impossibly handsome, impossibly young, and his arm was snaked proprietarily around her tiny waist. She wore a pink satin dress and a tiara. Her arms were full of roses.

“You were so beautiful, Mom,” I said. “I was, wasn’t I,” she agreed. “And you know what’s funny? I thought I was fat.”

“No!” I exclaimed. “How could you? You were so thin. You’ve always been thin!”

“But I never
felt
thin,” she said. “Or pretty. Not really. So I never got to appreciate it.” She turned to another page in the book. “Oh, look: Scott’s tenth birthday party. Remember how we took a family trip to Hawaii? Look, here we are on the beach. We were all so happy. Everything was so perfect!”

It was Mom, Dad, Scott, and me on the beach in Hawaii. We looked like an advertisement for America.

God, I was so thin then, I thought, staring longingly at the photo.

“God, I was so young then,” my mom said. She put her hand to her cheek.

I looked at her gaunt face in the harsh light of the gooseneck lamp, and for the first time I saw lines, shadows, the stark signs of aging. For the tiniest moment, mean gladness filled my heart. But then it was gone, and I realized how much weight she had lost, how sick she looked.

“Want me to make you some dinner, Mom?” I offered.

Puff, puff on the cigarette, her eyes still on the photo. “I’m not hungry.”

“You really need to eat something, Mom.”

“I’ll get something later,” she said vaguely.

“Where’s Scott?”

“At a friend’s, I think.”

Fine, I thought. Sit here and obsess about what used to be, when you were pretty and young and life was perfect. Abdicate all maternal responsibility. Scott and I don’t really need parents anymore, anyway.

I left her there and went back downstairs, where I pulled some cheese and an apple from the refrigerator and went into the family room to do my homework. My bio teacher had given us twenty pages to read on arachnids—also known as spiders—and we had to do a cute little spider diagram.

I had read all the pages and was halfway through my spider diagram when I heard the front door slam. Scott walked noisily into the kitchen, which I could see from where I sat, opened the refrigerator, and took a long drink out of the milk carton.

“Did you eat?”

“At Gordon’s, but it sucked.” This was his new friend, Gordon Pinzer, who lived down the street. Gordon claimed to know someone who knew someone who was actually related to Kurt Cobain, which was how Gordon had acquired the signed photo of Kurt that hung over his bed. The week before, Scott had asked why Gordon’s handwriting matched Kurt Cobain’s handwriting on the poster, and they’d had a big fight. Evidently they had made up.

“Do you have to drink from the carton?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just drank some more, then left the empty milk carton on the counter. Then he rummaged
in the fridge for food, found some cold chicken our housekeeper had broiled the day before, and stuck a drumstick in his mouth.

“You could wash your hands, at least.” I said as he came into the family room gobbling the chicken. Watching him eat made me hungry. I went to the fridge and got out a piece of chicken, too.

“You don’t need that,” Scott said, his mouth full of chicken. “Who are you, the food police?”

“I’m just saying—”

“Well, just don’t,” I snapped, wounded. “I didn’t even eat dinner.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” he muttered under his breath.

“Okay, class, let’s review,” I said in a singsong voice. “
Someone
gained weight because she has a disease, not because of how much she eats, and that someone would be …? Anyone? Scott?”

“Well, you could fight it or something,” Scott said. He threw his chicken bone at the wastebaket, missed, and left the chicken bone lying there on the rug.

“What’s your problem tonight?” I asked. He threw himself on the couch. “I’m sick of kids saying stuff about you.”

“Like what? No—don’t tell me, I know what.”

“It’s just … I hate it here,” Scott said. “I don’t even like Gordon—he’s an idiot. And when people say stuff about you …” He shrugged. “It was just a lot easier when you were thin.”

“Well. I’m so sorry if my
disease
has made you
suffer
in any way,” I said sarcastically.

“Forget it,” Scott said, getting up. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. Where’s Mom?”

“Up in her room reliving her glory days.”

“I should just run away,” he said.

“Don’t say that!”

“I should just hitch back to Nashville. Mom wouldn’t even notice I’m gone, I’ll bet.”

“She would too. And I would.”

“Yeah, sure.” He picked up his skateboard and headed for the stairs.

Gee, didn’t
I
have a happy home. Lah-dee-da. I picked up my pencil to finish the spider diagram and decided to click on the TV for company while I worked. “There’s word this week of a health breakthrough that might change the lives of millions of people,” came Barbara Walters’s voice. “It’s a hormone that researchers claim drastically and rapidly eliminates fat. Just imagine if this hormone proves successful in humans!”

My head rotated toward the TV. It was a special Tuesday-night edition of
20/20
.

“As you saw in very revealing story that John Stossel brought you awhile back, coming of age is hard enough, but for overweight kids, it is particularly painful.”

“No kidding,” I muttered.

The screen filled with a chubby young girl and her mother at the mall, clothes shopping. “I wish I could shrink,” said the little girl. “I’d rather be Thumbelina.”

“Kids call her names,” John Stossel’s voice-over said, “such as Shamu the Whale.”

“It gets my heart broken,” the little girl on the screen said.

“Now, in this age of enlightenment where kids are taught not to make fun of disabilities or differences, are kids still mean about someone being a little overweight? Well, listen to what happened when I offered these five
year-olds some choices. Who would they pick as a friend?”

Now the screen filled with a group of little kids. John Stossel sat with them. “Would you rather have as a friend a stupid kid or a fat kid?”

“A stupid kid,” piped up one little boy.

“I hate fat kids,” said another.

“Well, which would you rather be,” Stossel asked them, “ugly or fat?”

“Ugly!” the kids all yelled.

“Okay,” John Stossel said, “if you had to live your life without one arm or be fat, which would you pick?”

“One arm!” the kids yelled again.

I clicked off the TV. Five-year-olds would rather have one arm than be me. Even Scott, Mr. Looks-Are-So-Superficial, hated me for being fat.

And
I
hated me for being fat.

A solitary tear tracked down one of my cheeks. I felt as if I were starring in someone else’s life, and her life sucked.

I closed my books and trudged up to my room, dropped my clothes in a heap, and went into my bathroom to take a shower. I don’t know what possessed me to get on the scale. It wasn’t my workout week. After my first visit to Dr. Goldner I’d set my home scale to match the one in his office. But it never changed. So I only weighed myself every other week so that I could report to my mother and Dr. Goldner. Who wanted to look at 218 pounds on the scale any more often than was absolutely necessary?

213 pounds, the scale read.

My heart thudded in my chest. It couldn’t be true.

I got off the scale and got back on.

213.

I repeated this three times, but the scale showed the same thing.

213 pounds.

I had lost five pounds.

With trembling hands I threw a T-shirt over my head and ran down the hall to my mom’s room. The door was closed. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing.

Fine. Some mother. She had probably taken her little pills and nodded off to dreamland, where she could pretend she was still young and life was still a ducky little bed of roses.

I ran back into my room and quickly punched a familiar long-distance number into my telephone.

“Hello?”

“Molly? Oh, my God!”

“Lara? Are you okay?”

“Mol, I … I lost five pounds!”

“No!”

“Yes! I just weighed myself! I lost five pounds! It’s true!”

She screamed into the phone, and I screamed back. “I’m so happy for you, I am sitting here totally dying of happiness,” Molly said.

“Me too. I can’t even believe it. Wait, I have to weigh myself again. Hold on.” I dropped the phone and ran back into my bathroom, and got on the scale. 213.

“It’s true!” I cried into the phone. “It’s really true!”

“So, this means it’s all over, right? You’re just going to lose it all now, right?” she asked eagerly.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Dr. Goldner says there are now seventeen documented Axell-Crowne
cases, and four of them have lost all the weight they gained, so maybe.”

“That’s what’s going to happen to you,” Molly insisted.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” I decided. “You don’t think this is some, just, I don’t know, natural fluctuation in my weight or something?”

“No, no, the curse is broken; ding, dong, the wicked fat witch is dead!”

“I’m afraid to get my hopes up,” I admitted, even though my hopes were already up, through the ceiling, the sky, the stratosphere.

“So, listen, promise you’ll call me tomorrow after you talk to your doctor, okay?”

“I will. Oh, Mol, I’m so happy!”

“Me too,” she said, and then we both hung up.

I had to tell someone else, but who? I pulled on some sweats, padded down to Scott’s room, and knocked on the door. No answer. Then I heard noises downstairs. Scott was foraging for more food. Food. Who cared about food? If I could only lose weight and get my old life back, I would never eat again!

I stood outside Mom’s door and knocked again. Maybe she wasn’t that soundly asleep after all. I opened the door just a little and peeked in.

She was lying half on and half off the bed, a spilled glass of something next to a full ashtray, her bottle of sleeping pills on the rug near her lifeless-looking hand.

“Mom!” I ran over and shook her. Her eyes were closed. She was limp and cold. And so pale.

“Mom!” I screamed again. I looked at the pill bottle. Empty.

“Hey,” Scott said from the doorway, “someone named Suzanne is at the door and she says—”

Then he saw Mom.

“Call nine-one!-one!” I yelled, cradling my mother’s head in my arms.

“What happened?” he asked in a tiny voice. “Is she—”

“Just shut up and call nine-one-one!”

Scott picked up the phone and dialed. I tried to get Mom to sit up.

“It’s my mom, she took all these pills, I don’t know if she’s alive!” he cried into the phone. “Two-four-two-six Blooming Terrace Lane. Hurry! I don’t know what kind.” He turned to me. “What kind of pills?”

“Look over there!” I ordered.

Scott picked up the empty vial. “Valium,” he said into the phone. “No, I don’t know how many. No, I don’t know if she was drinking—why are you talking to me, why aren’t you doing something?”

“Give me the damn phone,” I demanded, still holding my mother. Her head flopped against me; her mouth hung open.

He handed me the phone. “Stop asking questions and get my mother an ambulance!” I screamed at the operator.

“Calm down, miss, we’re doing everything we can. An ambulance is on the way. Does your mother have a pulse? Is she breathing?”

I grabbed my mother’s wrist and tried to find a pulse. “No!” I shouted wildly. “There’s nothing! There’s—”

And then I felt something. Faint, but there. And she was breathing. Barely, but breathing.

“Wait, yes! I feel her pulse.”

“Good. Do you know how many Valiums your mother took?”

“No!”

“Do you know if she was drinking alcohol when she took the pills?”

“No, no, I don’t know anything! We just came in the room and found her—”