Pretty Leslie (23 page)

“Don't worry, Lessy, you have lovely hair and a flawless skin,” her mother told her. “You'll mature with a very nice figure like everyone else.” Leslie said most women had disgusting figures, but she accepted the praise for her hair. Her daddy said, “What's the difference, Tubby? You're not going anywhere. Not yet a while.” Leslie said if he ever called her Tubby again she would set fire to the house while he was asleep. He was really scared. Probably her eighth year took two years off his life. He didn't sleep well because he knew she meant at least what she said.

She had valued her avoirdupois because of these and other opportunities for spite. Then she valued the spite for emphasizing that she really was superior to most others her age or any age. If she had been, at that time, meeker in disposition, she might have accepted the illusion that she was like anyone else. When she began to lose weight before puberty, she had a sense of privilege fading. She could no longer tyrannize over those who wanted the best for her, and she had acquired a taste for tyranny. She knew the melancholy of a convalescent who weeps at the prospect of a necessarily normal life.

As a matter of fact, she had never once imagined that she might pass into her teens as an overweight wallflower. The problem—with its oblique advantages—had been a very present one. Her mental life of fantasy, mixed with superlative shrewdness, had left her few occasions to think about the future at all.

In her pre-teens she was already obsessed with romantic love, and by being able either to inhabit or desert the Fat Girl, she could either be one of the Handsome Pair or the gloating nemesis who did them in for their impudence. The Fat Girl caught the Handsome Pair when they tried to register at motels, for example. (Leslie knew about going to a motel—one of her brothers told the other he had done it and the other, poor weak Bob, was bullied into telling her. She could not, of course, imagine very exactly what went on inside. She supposed that the Pair meant to talk very intelligently and sweetly—with some nice kissing—where no one could interrupt them with boring distractions.) The Fat Girl always found them out when they went to a motel and made everything seem more disgusting than it could really have been. She spread rumors about them that made them quarrel very sadly, and she put offensive odors on their clothing or poisoned their breath with natural halitosis or bad candy.

At other times Leslie's fantasies unwound from the premise that the Fat Girl was a disguise or enclosure of herself, like the stylized plump stone sarcophagus enclosing the reedlike body of an Egyptian princess. Some Sunday mornings when her parents had gone to church without her, or had left her alone in the house while they went to clean up Daddy's boat for the sailing season, she used to creep into their unmade bed and “play through” the whole fantasy of rebirth, imagining how the sarcophagus body of the Fat Girl would open on hinges to let her out. From that shell which was both death and protection, she would jump up and run for her life.

In the winter of her tenth year she had the opportunity twice to go to the Brooklyn Museum where she greeted the plump, stylized smiles on the sarcophagi with a knowing, sisterly smile of her own.

Then—past puberty—her mother's predictions all came true. She had a nice figure. (If it was not quite like anyone else's, so much the better.) For all practical purposes she forgot the fantasies, which had outlived their usefulness when she thinned down. She learned the disadvantages of spite. She lost her obsession with herself when romantic love became something in which she could actually participate. (No anonymous handsome couple moved now at the center stage of her daydreams, but Connor and Leslie, Burchy Hare and Leslie, then Tom or Jeff with Leslie beside him, and not headed for any motels either, since Leslie
didn't
, and being with the gang was more fun anyhow, though necking
afterward
, of course.)

The Fat Girl was nowhere, except maybe in the museum's Egyptian collection. The Princess had run far, run well, to her life. Until Leslie got engaged to Ben and subsequently moved into an apartment of her own, it would have been hard to remind her that she had ever been overweight.

Just after college she had shared an apartment on King Street with Sarah Coleman from Smith and Irene Dale from Baltimore and Barnard College. The girls were really fond of each other, mutually respectful, and keyed up to a fine pitch of expectation by living in a Village apartment. Sarah was a dancer—the most
intelligent
dancer in New York, as she said of herself with possible truth. Irene had a job not much better than Leslie's—cut and paste and make coffee for the Lady with the Hat at a women's fashion magazine.

More than their affection for each other, the girls valued the independence of being on their own. But perhaps it was just the degree of their independence that became the fly in the ointment. Having this much freedom prompted them to want more, and within a few months each was keenly aware that they were living in the “King Street dorm” rather than separately because their several fathers and mothers breathed easier in the knowledge that they were together. “Nothing very bad” could happen when there were three of them. “I mean if one of you got
sick
, for heaven's sake,” Leslie's mother said with patent hypocrisy, “the other girls could at least call the doctor.”

Each of them “made out like bandits” (as her friends at Smith had put it in Leslie's time) on the front room couch, and it was an open secret (Irene admitted to Leslie she had listened from inside the bedroom door) that Sarah had gone all the way twice. With different men. Further, Sarah came home late once with a fighting dike she'd picked up in a bar on Sullivan Street. The dike had wanted money or horse more than sex, so there was no loss except a certain amount of kitchen breakage to be allowed for after her departure. The parents might have stopped breathing altogether if they had known this much.

But this much was not much for well-to-do girls underprivileged in experience. So more and more they fought about the rent always being late when it was Irene's turn to pay, about spoilage in the icebox, about whether someone hadn't
deliberately
knocked down stockings hung up to dry in the shower and purposely
trampled
cockroach wings into the mesh an hour before someone had a date with someone else's ex-boyfriend. The literary and theatrical tastes they had shared in college began to seem like naïve misunderstandings of terms (“You think you're talking to someone and it turns out just to be
words
. There's no communication.”) as various men commanded them to pay attention to quite distinct sorts of books and plays.

Then eventually Irene laughingly accused Sarah of
mas
turbating. She had been listening again at the bedroom door one night when Sarah was on the front room couch
alone
. The wounded Sarah replied, with no laughter at all, that she was
on
the couch rather than in the room she shared with Irene because Irene's latent lesbianism had shown plainly enough to dis
gust
her lately.

Leslie said with somber quiet that she was goddamned if her nerves could stand this wrangling any more. Both of them disgusted her. Both of them fell silent in respect, knowing that she would never have missed the opportunity to take sides unless she really meant to move. And if she meant to move, then presumably her parents had agreed she could have an apartment all to herself.

That was right. She was engaged to Ben by this time. She had met Ben's Aunt Peg, and Ben had spent several evenings at her home in Manhasset, establishing in her parents' eyes the reality of that always hypothetical male who would someday multiply and divide the family by the formalities of legal marriage. In allowing her to take her own apartment (by this time
allowing
did not so much mean altering a commandment as simply scaling down the fuss to a degree that permitted her to overcome it, no longer making it all More Trouble Than It Was Worth), they trusted her not to waste the prospects Ben offered. She even went so far as to suspect them of nudging her into an availability which would make it easier to keep him lined up until he was ready to marry. That was damned old-fashioned of them, if true, but damned convenient for her and Ben.

Convenient generally, but in the first several months of living in that apartment the unforeseen degree of loneliness had humiliated her to the soul. For literally the first time in her life she was living alone. At home there had been an older brother and a younger brother besides parents in the house. At college there had been roommates and the solid female cordon of the whole dorm, while on King Street there had been a traffic of male and female, busy as a bus terminal, always to rely on.

She wasn't bothered by the threat of muggers or by the dark entrance to her new apartment building where—as her mother pointed out on an early visit—a
person
might conceal himself behind the garbage cans, lying in wait.

It was herself alone within four walls that began to scare her, as if that self could only emerge in isolation, as ghosts would need the trappings of a haunted house in order to make themselves visible. The female self, what a monster it was when it stood night after night in rude nakedness beside her desk or bed—the Fat Girl come back to deride the little, educated social doll she pretended to be. The fears of the dark she had long since outgrown and discarded seemed to know that now she was ready to entertain them better, and so they came back.

The oddest thing, though, was not merely that she remembered the Fat Girl fantasies (so amusing and pathetic, really, that she meant to write a story about them), but that she started to get fat. She put on fourteen pounds in the two months after leaving Sarah and Irene, this in a springtime when her consumption of emotional and physical energy ran at a pace she had never matched before.

Ben was proud to prescribe a diet for her, was not so much professionally abashed as just more professionally interested in her when she gained even more weight on the diet. Of course she cheated. Lunching with the office gang, she drank martinis and ate French sauces that would have given a pot to Don Quixote. But he never assumed her problem was merely one of calories. Both amateurs in that field of mystery where the soul shows itself in the form of the body (though he was trained and “psychiatrically oriented”), they guessed in many a speculative session that she had “hidden reasons” for wanting to be fat.

“It's psychogenic false pregnancy,” Ben guessed, smiling the Buddha smile that promised it didn't have to be that if she didn't like the idea. “It's a good sign of good intent. Marry me.”

“No,” she said, pouting coquettishly—and could afford the coquetry since they both knew full well she
would
marry him before much longer. “No. It's something you've done to me, making me so repulsive to man and beast.” She puffed out her cheeks to exaggerate her bloated condition. “It's the smart-young-thing equivalent of keeping them barefoot and pregnant to keep them out of circulation. It's really your psyche getting into
my
soma, and I'm such a loving broad I go along with your wishes. So you've got to stop wanting me this way. Tell me I'm hideous. Ben, you've got to be
revolted
by the way I'm puffing up.”

He promised he would be, but plainly wasn't.

“Hick, hick, hick,” she called him when he doted on her swollen breasts and middle.

All complacently, he answered, “I'm just a lad from Kansas.”

“You may like it,” she said morosely, “but they tease me at the office. Ben, you've got to
do
something.”

What he could not do—perhaps because she (or her female other self) misled him so cunningly—was make an effective connection between her fantasy life and this inexplicable increase in weight. She began to think quite persistently and consciously of the frightening self she must confront alone in her apartment as the Fat Girl and even to tell herself, like whistling in the dark, “Fat Girl's going to
get you
tonight, ha-ha,” as she rode home from work on the subway. Really there was a great mysterious shock in riding down from the busy, reassuring gregariousness of the office in midtown, where
everybody
loved Leslie (with such facility, so smoothly, as if she to them and they to her were a part of the famous employee-benefits policy provided by the magazine) to the silent varnished door one flight up from the garbage cans behind which nobody hid, setting the little brass teeth of her key in the receptive lock and opening with a quick thrust to catch, for once, a reassuring actual glimpse of the fat female who lived there. (If she had seen Her, she might have been excused from trying to swell enough to let Her see Herself in the bathroom mirror. Unable to glimpse and exorcise the creature she knew was there, she tried simultaneously to appease and subvert the presence.)

Her portable typewriter was a weapon of defense. She began to work on her diaries again, rattling out page after page of dialogue recollected from the office or self-analysis, to be mostly discarded as soon as Ben or Sarah or Irene or Mary Jo (
hardly
ever any other men; she wasn't dating much since she got engaged) came to rescue her by taking her out to dinner and drinks somewhere around the Village. The diaries now were not what they had been in adolescence, a way of learning herself, but rather a way of putting a screen of words between what she understood and what she was afraid of finding out. The act of typing earnestly, as much as anything, served to keep the Fat Girl at bay.

When she had no plans to see Ben at all or not until much later, seven o'clock of a May evening seemed to her the worst time. If she was not clattering madly at her typewriter then, she was compelled (almost literally compelled) to sit near the window and watch the street in order not to be aware of what was going on in the apartment behind her. But even the street became like a mirror, treacherously showing who lived in the apartment. In one fiery warm sundown she watched Bert, the policeman (whose name she knew just as she knew the names of the bartender in the neighborhood bar and the man in the delicatessen and the sweet couple who ran the gallery two doors south)—watched him wade into a gang of Puerto Rican boys with his club. Probably the boys had invaded the neighborhood from the Chelsea section, and more than likely they had given provocation. But she made no such interpretation. She saw the violent silhouettes moving in the garish colors of light that swept her street from the Hudson River end. Her heart leaped when she heard a boy scream with a broken arm. And she turned from the window to confront a smile like that on her own mouth.