Summer's Awakening (21 page)

'I'm fine, thank you.'

Although she would have been embarrassed to step on a public weighing machine where other people might read her weight from behind her, here Summer felt no such awkwardness. The people in the queue all had the same problems as she did. They would sympathise, not deride her. Also, she was by no means the heaviest there. Compared with some, she was a lightweight.

'How tall are you, Summer?' asked Eleanor. 'That's an unusual name. Pretty, too.'

'Thank you.' She gave her height.

'How much do you think you weigh right now?'

Summer told her. Before leaving the hotel in Miami, she had checked her weight on the bathroom scales. But she knew that such scales were seldom completely accurate.

'You're a couple of pounds above that. I'm going to give you a temporary goal of one hundred and thirty-nine pounds. If, later on, you want to go lower, we'll discuss it. Okay?'

When everyone had been weighed, Eleanor read out the number of Members present, the number of new Members, and the number of Lifetime Members. She also announced the weight lost by the class as
a
whole since the last meeting. It totalled more than one hundred pounds.

Next, she called each member by name and asked for their individual weight loss. When it was two pounds or more, she praised them and called for applause. If they hadn't lost any or—more disheartening—had put some on, she didn't reprove them but asked how much they had lost since starting their 16-week course. This was usually a substantial amount, meriting another round of applause. Nobody was made to feel uncomfortable or guilty. They were encouraged to persevere.

When she came to Summer, and other newcomers, she said, 'Welcome', and smiled as if she meant it.

Next she talked for a while about bingeing; the uncontrollable orgies of eating, usually between, meals and often in secret, which were some overweight people's way of coping with problems and worries, and their own shaky self-esteem.

She said she herself had been a binger till becoming
a
Weight Watcher had cured her. She compared
a
binger's compulsion with that of an alcoholic.

When she added that most people at the meeting had probably had a little too much to drink at some time in their lives,
a
male voice called out, 'Speak for yourself, ma'am.'

There was an outburst of laughter and Summer leaned forward to see the author of this interruption.

He was seated at the end of her row, a burly man with brown hair, a beer-drinker's belly and a neck too thick for his age, which was probably twenty-six or -seven. But he had a nice, humorous face, and eyes of an even deeper blue than the lecturer's.

Eleanor was laughing as much as everyone else. Afterwards, Summer thought that good humour and rueful self-mockery had been the keynotes of the meeting.

The new members stayed after the others had gone home. Each was given a Personal Program book and Eleanor went through it with them, explaining and answering questions.

The book contained three different diet plans—Full Choice, Limited Choice and No Choice. They were all to begin with the Full Choice. Reading the sample menus, Summer was surprised at how much she would be allowed to eat. Even such things as popcorn and bagels, wine, beer and peanut butter were allowed, in limited quantities.

When the meeting finally broke up, she was surprised to notice that, although he was not a new member, the brown-haired man was still sitting at the back of the room near the diet soda dispenser.

He intercepted her on her way to the door. 'Hi! Where are you from? You're not an American, are you?'

'Yes, I am, but I've spent the past twelve years in England.'

'Oh, really? My grandparents came from England. A place called Southport. Do you know it?'

Because America was so unimaginably vast, and England looked so small on the map, she had already found that a lot of Americans who had never been to Europe were under the impression that all English people must know their little country like the back of their hands.

'I know
of
it
.
It's up north, near Liverpool.'

'Why is it called Southport if it's in the north?'

'I've no idea. I've never been there. It's a long way from where I lived.'

By now he was pulling open the door for her. She thanked him and looked around the parking lot. The Antonios had said they would be back by nine, but at present there was no sign of them.

'Are you living in Florida now?' he asked her.

'Yes, for the winter, at any rate.'

'I'm Hal Cochran.' He held out his hand.

'I'm Summer Roberts.'

They shook hands, and his grip was painfully firm. The last man to shake her hand like that had been James—she remembered his hands very clearly. Well-kept and more shapely than Hal's, but with the same latent power. Hands which could crush an apple. What her employer did to maintain his strength, she didn't know. Worked out in a health club perhaps. Judging by the calloused roughness of his palm, Hal did some kind of manual work.

'Is someone picking you up?' he asked.

'Yes, some friends. They're shopping, but they won't be long.'

'If you don't mind, I'll stick around until they show. Sometimes there are young guys around here who might get fresh if they saw you waiting alone.'

She smiled at him. 'That's very nice of you. Have you been a Weight Watcher long?'

'A couple of months. Since my mother went into hospital. She lost her leg, and they're teaching her to use an artificial one.'

'How terrible. Was it a road accident?'

'No, nothing like that. It was her own fault, I guess. She weighed over two hundred pounds and she had bad varicose veins. My sisters and I tried to make her see a doctor, but she kept putting it off. By the time she went, it was too late to save the leg. While she was away seemed a good time for me to do something about my weight. I've lost thirty pounds in eight weeks. Men seem to take it off faster than women do.'

'Have you found it hard to stick to the diet?'

'Not too bad. Giving up beer was the hardest. I'm allowed three small beers a week, but that only makes me want more, so I stay off beer altogether.'

'I've never drunk beer so I shan't miss that. Bread will be my problem, I expect.'

It seemed a peculiar subject to be discussing with a man. Or perhaps it was talking to a man at all which felt peculiar. Hal was the first man who had ever made friendly overtures to her without being obliged to. From his reference to his mother's absence, she concluded that he was still single and living at home.

'Who cooks for you?' she asked.

'I do. Frozen stuff mostly. Tonight I'm having Weight Watchers chili con carne with beans, and a serving of Frozen Dessert. Have you tried them? They're good. I know you only just joined, but you don't have to belong to Weight Watchers to use the food made for them by their licensees. They're on sale in most supermarkets.'

Summer saw the Antonios' car approaching.

'Here come my friends. Thank you for keeping me company.'

'You're welcome. I'll look forward to talking to you again next week.'

He stepped off the sidewalk where they had been standing to open the back door of the car for her.

'I'm sorry we kept you waiting, Miss Roberts,' said Mrs Antonio, turning round in her seat. 'Was that young man trying to pick you up?'

The idea of anyone attempting such a thing made Summer laugh.

'He's a member of my class, Mrs Antonio. He was keeping me company until you arrived.'

'Good. That was nice of him. You have to be careful at night. There are bad people around. Next week, when you come by yourself, be sure to keep the doors locked or someone might try to jump in when you stop at traffic lights.'

'Really? said Summer, astonished.

From the little she had seen of it so far, Sarasota seemed a most peaceful locality, the indigenous population swollen by large numbers of sun-seekers from colder parts of the United States, most of them elderly.

'It's not as bad as New York, thank goodness,' said the gardener's wife. 'But there's crime everywhere nowadays. Bag snatchers in the mall parking lots. Thieves breaking into people's houses.'

By this time Summer had learned that the Antonios were second-generation Americans who had lived all their lives in New York where Mr Antonio had inherited a small greengrocery business from his father. At fifty, he had handed this over to his son, and come to Florida to enjoy an early retirement. But as he was not a golfer, and had bought a house on a condominium where the gardens were communal and kept in order by professional landscapers, he and his wife had soon become bored with unlimited leisure.

Their present employment was disapproved of by their children who couldn't understand them engaging in what the younger Antonios considered to be menial tasks, beneath their parents' dignity.

But the older Antonios were happy. Mrs Antonio was a woman who couldn't sit still, and who found it no trouble to keep her apartment over the garage immaculate and help Mrs Hardy in the big house. The hard work—windows and floors—was done once a month by contractors. The two women had only to dust and attend to the bathrooms.

In spite of his lack of previous experience, Mr Antonio had become a knowledgeable gardener; and even though the garden was large, the fact that there were no flower-beds, only shrubs and creepers to tend and grass to cut, meant that he was not overworked.

The maintenance of the swimming pool was not his responsibility. It was handled by a company specialising in pool-care. Someone came every other day to skim it and check the chemical balance of the water, and also to look after the jacuzzi close by the swimming pool. But up to now the pool-minder had been a young woman, not the boy whom James had suggested might give Emily coaching.

Skip Newman entered their lives the following morning.

At Mr Antonio's suggestion, Summer had bought Emily a pair of inflatable arm-bands which supported her weight in the water and enabled her to practise swimming while her tutor was doing her exercise laps.

A great deal of their first week at
Baile del Sol
had been spent in the pool, or lying on two of the pale green cushioned chaise-longues on a shady part of the paved deck. By this time Summer was able to swim several lengths without tiring, and the stiffness she had suffered from at first was also wearing off.

She had swum four lengths and was leaning against the side at the shallow end, breathing hard but not panting, when a young man as blond as she, but with a deep golden tan, came whistling along the path through the shrubbery which surrounded the pool.

Seeing the two girls, he grinned and said, 'Hi!'

'Hi!' they both echoed.

She wished she were standing in deeper water which would conceal her size from him. Because, like James Gardiner but in a different way, the young man was one of the beautiful people; those exceptional human beings who, whether by nature or self-discipline, had lithe, graceful, fat-free bodies which made them appear like gods compared with lesser mortals.

This young man was a Norse god. His Scandinavian ancestry was as clear to see as Mr Antonio's Italian extraction. Long ago, in the dawn of history, Vikings with his hair and eyes had ravaged the northern coasts of Europe. But ten centuries had transmuted the ferocious energy of his sea-roving ancestors into the smiling friendliness of an ail-American college boy who looked as if he worked off his aggression in athletics.

'I'm Skip Newman. And you're Emily and Summer, but which is which?' he asked, probably having been told their names by Mrs Hardy.

'I'm Emily.'

She climbed out of the water by the steps at the deep end. Because of her tutor's insistence that she must only sunbathe for short periods in the early morning and late afternoon, never—at least at this stage—in the hot middle hours of the day, her thin body was now the very palest shade of toast, with darker patches which, close to, could be seen to be freckles.

'Glad to know you, Emily.' He offered a hand which, compared with her bony little paw, looked as large as a baseball catcher's mitt. 'I hear you want to be drown-proofed.'