Teenage Waistland (34 page)

Mom’s ear to ear with smiles, even with all the work and chaos. That Julius is coming home to help deal with all his last-minute wedding details has put her—us—in a ridiculously happy state of anticipation. It’ll be the three of us alone for an entire week—and then his fiancée, Karina, and her family will descend, and we’ll finally have a huge extended family. Before that, though, I plan to have a long talk with Julius about Char. I was in the same pain he was, so how could I ever be angry or not understand what he was going through? But his guilt over what happened is probably what’s been keeping him so distant from me, and I need to be close to my brother again. The idea of having such an honest conversation would have terrified me once, but now that I’ve finally opened up to my mom, not only have I helped her with her issues but she’s helped me with mine.

Mom’s bedroom gets the midafternoon sun, especially with the new curtains open. And with the new off-white-on-white color scheme, her room is so bright, it almost hurts. I head into her bathroom and spot my blow-dryer, its cord neatly wrapped around the handle, on top of the wicker hamper. But what really catches my eye is the digital scale on the floor next to it—Mom must have gotten it yesterday, immediately after I mentioned that I weighed a quarter pound less on the Park Avenue Bariatrics scale fully dressed than I did
on our old scale naked. Mom and I have been doing weekly weigh-ins together since she started dieting with me last fall, and they still make me laugh out loud. Mom starts off by gently nudging the scale back and forth with her toe to get it into the exact right position. Then she mounts it like a surfboard, shifting her weight from one foot to the other to find the lowest reading. Another one of Jen’s
universal rules encoded in fat cells
: every ounce on the scale matters. Even when they’re the difference between 248.6 pounds and 247.8.

I grab the blow-dryer and try to leave, but the lure of the new scale is too powerful to resist and it stops me at the doorway. I put the dryer back down, nudge the scale to where the floor’s most level with my big toe, and remove my bathrobe—it’s a light summer cotton, but 2.4 pounds is 2.4 pounds. I take a deep breath and step onto the scale gently so as not to wake the higher numbers. The digits race back and forth as I take my hand off the sink and slowly release my full weight.

“Holy Mother of Shroudness!” Char shrieks from over my shoulder. She grabs my arm to steady me as I almost go flying off the scale.

“Char! Don’t sneak up on me like that! And I thought you weren’t picking me up for another half hour.” I pull my bathrobe in front of me even though I’ve got panties and a bra on.

“Who’s sneaking? Your mom and I both called up to you—what’s making such a racket outside?”

I shrug. My mind has been acclimated to hearing
one
sound in this house—it’s still learning to parse aggregate noise. “C’mon back to your room and get dressed,” Char orders. “I got you a surprise.”

“You’ve surprised me enough for one day,” I mumble as I put on my robe and trot after her.

There’s a box wrapped in Saks’ signature paper on my bed, and Char plops herself down next to it. “Go on, open,” she says.

“Char—what is that? Why’d you get me a gift?”

“Because it’s your very special day.”

“It’s
our
special day, and I didn’t get you anything. Let me do my hair first before it dries funny.” I glance at Char in the mirror as I blow out my hair. She’s only lost about eighty-five pounds since her surgery last October, but she’s tall enough to carry the sixty extra pounds she’s got left and looks drop-dead gorgeous. Not gorgeous for a fat girl. Gorgeous for any girl—any woman. Of course, today, she and her cleavage are at full volume in a strapless close-fitting yellow sundress. I run the flat iron over my hair one final time—it’s silky and shiny, and finally reaches my lower back, but it’s jet black and covers almost half my body—a shroud indeed. I apply a bit of the anti-frizz smoothing serum Mom bought and turn to Char.

“Maybe I should wear it in a ponytail?”

“You’ve always got it in a ponytail or a bun. Leave it down today—it looks beautiful—and open the box,” she says, motioning toward it impatiently.

“Just one more minute,” I beg as I flip frantically through my closet. “Where are my new black jeans?”

“You’re so not wearing jeans today,” Char says—not as an order or a question, but as a statement of fact. “Now, if you don’t open this damn box pronto, you’ll have to get your own ride into the city.” She watches me pick at the knot in the gold string for a few moments before she yanks the box
out of my hand, rips through the string with her teeth, and tears off the wrapping.

“Now,” she says, and hands the box back to me. I remove the top and peel off the layers of white tissue paper one by one in slow motion just to annoy her. “You’ve got exactly one second to—” she starts, but I just laugh and whip out the small neatly folded pile of silky black cloth.

“It’s
so
my color—how’d you know?” I giggle. “What is it—a shirt?” Char helps me unfold it and lay it out on my bed. It’s a little black dress with cap sleeves and a scoop neck—just like the one Jen showed up at Coco’s
quince
party in—and almost as tiny. I look up at Char. She’s smiling with tears in her eyes.

“
This
is what you’re wearing today.”

“Yeah, right. Funny.” I laugh. Char frowns and I realize she’s not kidding. “Look, Char. It’s beautiful, and it’s so sweet of you to get this for me, but this dress is
sizes
too small. I won’t fit into it for months—maybe never!”

Char just shakes her head. “You’re still wearing baggy clothes several
sizes
too big, and for months I’ve let you get away with it. No matter how fat your head thinks you are, scales and tape measures don’t lie and I’m not going to let you catastrophize yourself any longer.”

I reach over and hug her. “You’re such a good friend to me, Char, and none of this would have happened if not for you. But you’re certifiably insane, and the reality is, this dress can’t possibly fit me.”

Char wriggles out of my grasp. “Listen, Ms. I’m-So-Normal-and-Char’s-the-Crazy-One—I
embrace
my craziness and you try to hide yours, my friend. That’s the only difference between us, and I bought you this dress
in the right size
to prove it. So just try the freaking thing on and let’s see once and for all who’s the bigger mental case.”

“It’s a deal,” I laugh, and toss off my bathrobe. “Give it.”

We’re stuck in traffic outside the Midtown tunnel toll-booths, and Dad is tapping his fingers on the dashboard. “I told you we’d be better off taking the Queensboro Bridge,” he mutters, “but you had to have it your way.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know the inbound tunnel was going to be down to one lane,” I mutter back.

“It’s Friday rush hour, for God’s sakes. Three lanes coming out, one lane going in.” He raps his fingers harder and I take a quick swerve into the next lane before the bearded stoner in the Subaru tries to cut me off. This lane’s crawling a lot faster through the tolls and I’m feeling pretty good about my big move, so it takes a moment for me to notice Dad pointing at a big purple E-ZPass sign right in front of me.

“Crap!” I say, and pound my fist into the dashboard. I don’t have a damn E-ZPass, so now I’ve got to wait for someone to let me back into the cash-only lane while Subaru and the sixty million E-ZPass holders behind him lean on their horns.

Having Dad in the passenger seat is not exactly a boon to my visibility, and he won’t look over his shoulder to help me out, so I lower his window and lean forward to make eye contact with a driver who might let me in. I figure that some mom with her own kid at home will show some pity, and it’s a pretty redhead in a yellow Volkswagen convertible who finally waves me in. Now we’re back in the same lane we
started in, but something like fifty cars that were once behind us have since sailed through the toll. Dad doesn’t say a word, about that or the redhead. He’s just chewing on the inside of his mouth—a nervous habit of his—and shaking his head.

“I’m sorry!” I finally snap. “I usually take the train in. I didn’t know. You should have just insisted that I take the Queensboro exit.” I turn up the air conditioner and fiddle with the vents to get air to my face. It’s hot as hell.

Dad lets out a deep sigh and hits the button on his armrest to close his window. “This might help cool things down a little.”

“Why are we even doing this, Dad?” I fume. “Why was it so important that we drive in together?”

“You’ve got something in the city tonight, I’ve got something in the city tonight, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to spend a little quality time with my kid,’ ” he says with a shrug. “You haven’t been around much.”

“Yeah, I know,” I mumble, feeling bad about making Dad say it. And also feeling bad about how much things have changed between us. It’s not like we had a fight or anything. We were just busy doing our own thing—or maybe more accurately, my thing and his thing weren’t the same thing anymore.

With my running and stuff, I was losing about twenty pounds a month through the fall, so by the middle of November, Coach practically stopped playing me altogether. If I didn’t have that huge automation project for Dawson Depot on my head, I would have been okay hanging at football practice every day after school, even if I was spending most games on the bench. But I talked it out with Coach, and
after he couldn’t commit to putting me in more regularly as halfback, we agreed that staying with the team wasn’t the best use of my time. Dad was upset that I didn’t talk to him about it first—he didn’t understand that there wasn’t any decision to make. As far as college football went, I was in no-man’s-land. No longer a suitable lineman, and too overweight to be seriously considered for a halfback position. With that gone, it seemed my focus had to be Dawson’s inventory system project—and finishing Park Avenue Bariatric’s online Patient Eating Behaviors (PEB) database I was getting paid to set up. It didn’t help that I was spending long hours at Dawson Depot and Dad didn’t have a Konopka & Sons Lumber to go to anymore.

Then there was Char. Every free moment—and there weren’t a lot of those—I spent with her. Still, she ragged on me that I was always busy, always talking about colleges. She couldn’t see how hard it was to go from being a football hero to a nothing, which was the second mistake I made: not spending Super Bowl Sunday with Dad and taking Char to MT’s party instead. Char got all flirty with my friends and I wound up in a shoving match with MT. I acted like an idiot to him and to Char. She broke up with me on MT’s front porch and refused to let me even wait with her for her ride. I walked home, and found Dad snoring on the couch, TV still blaring, and Chinese food boxes stacked on the coffee table. Luckily, he sucks at ordering for just one, and I dove happily into an unopened container of fried rice. But I faithfully signed in to my PEB account and made my fried rice entry (
feeling bad so wtf
) and tagged another five miles onto my run the next morning as penance.

“So this franchise seminar sounds cool, Dad. Are you
really considering opening a Gold’s Gym? There’s nothing you don’t know about bodybuilding,” I say.

“And nothing I
do
know about the gym business. There’ll be a lot of different franchises for me to look at tonight, buddy. I don’t know. I’m just going to get some ideas …,” Dad says. We’re finally in the tunnel, but he’s just staring out the window watching the grimy yellow tiles go by.

“Dad?” I say. “Isn’t there anything you always wanted to do that you couldn’t because of the store and all? Maybe you can do that now.”

“Yeah?” he says, turning to look at me. “I wanted to play college football. Maybe even go pro.”

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s only the Midtown tunnel—Dad’s just never going to let this go. I put on the radio and flick through the stations, not really even hearing anything.

“Buddy?”

I keep flicking. Dad puts his hand on mine and pulls it gently away from the console.

“Bobby. Listen. I shouldn’t have said that. That was about me, not you—my life, not yours.”

I take my hand back and turn the radio off. “Dad, it’s hard for me too. I love football and I’ve lost a lot of who I am—or was—when I gave it up. But I don’t regret it.”

“Don’t. Not ever. Look at what you’ve done. You bucked the tide, you got yourself into California Polytech—”

“Which has one of the worst teams in college football history,” I add.

“Yeah, but so what? It’s one of the top engineering schools in the country, and it was your brain—your RFID inventory gizmo—that did it. Plus, you’ve got a shot at their football
team anyway. If you want it, that is. To tell you the truth, I’d have killed to play running back over lineman.” He pats his stomach. “Heart attack waiting to happen. Maybe it’s your turn to coach me—
here
, buddy, pull over. There, in front of that cab. You just head uptown and I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Thanks, Dad. I’ll try to meet you at the Sheraton, maybe check the franchises out with you a little—I think my thing will break up pretty early tonight.”