150 Pounds (38 page)

Shoshana frowned, holding the newspaper closer to her face. Alexis looked caught unawares, her eyes wide and confused, trying to shield her midsection with a shopping bag. Shoshana frowned.

“She might not be the nicest person, but I don’t think she deserves being called a cow in the
Post,
” she said finally, setting down the paper. “It’s not exactly a win for feminism today. Besides, she definitely did not gain seventy-five pounds.”

“She looks about fifty pounds heavier, at most,” Andrea said. “The
Post
always exaggerates.”

It was the weekend, so everyone was gathered at the farm. Emily had moved in three weeks ago, and took the train into the city every day. Andrea, Pam, and Greg slept at the farm Fridays and Saturdays only. They’d stayed up last night playing
The Sopranos
Trivia Game. Pam had shocked everyone by winning with the correct answer to: “Who helped Christopher bury his first victim in the start of season one?” Shoshana and Andrea guessed Paulie, but it was Big Pussy. Emily and Shoshana had collapsed in a fit of giggles at their mother saying, “Big Pussy,” and even Greg kept asking Pam for the answer again, just to hear it.

Joe Murphy was often ill these days, but he and Greta came by for the game. Shoshana worried about his health from time to time, but she figured at his age he was not about to quit drinking whiskey or smoking cigars. Shoshana had never had this much fun, surrounded by the people she loved most. The farm was a magical place.

Emily was still stuck on the
Post
article. “Shosh, don’t you see you’ve won? She might have had the last word on
Oprah,
but she looks like a fool in the paper! You deserve to gloat over this. Please gloat.” Emily was wearing two slim silver rings in her nose, and she’d dyed her hair flamingo pink. Today it was in pigtails, and she wore black-and-white-striped tights and yellow overalls the color of a parakeet. She looked like a plus-size punk-rocker bee.

“I don’t know.” Shoshana glanced down at Alexis’s picture once more. “It doesn’t feel like a win. I just feel sorry for her, to be honest with you guys.”

After breakfast she wandered upstairs to make her bed and get out the old junior high school yearbooks of her father’s she’d found in the attic. He’d been on the basketball team, a surprise to all. The pictures were hilarious; he had long hair to his waist and a sweatband wrapped around his forehead. He’d been a big guy even then, the number 5 on his jersey stretched out across so it looked like an
s
. A Superman costume.

“Hello, honey.” Pam wore scrubs with puppies on them; she was about to leave for work at her nursing job in the pediatric ward. Shoshana could hear her ragged breathing as she caught her breath after walking up the flight of stairs, and wished for the thousandth time there had been some way that instead of losing seventy-five pounds all herself, she could have taken the pounds from her mother and sister, with all three of them losing twenty-five each instead. Emily and Pam couldn’t be happier for her, which made it somehow all worse. Or, as Emily put it, “Hell, you lost the weight through hard work fixing up this dump. You should be fucking proud.”

“Hi, Mom. Driving to work?” She hugged her mother, inhaling her sweet smell of soap and cinnamon.

Pam looked around the room. Mimi’s quilts still hung on the wall, and Shoshana had added some personal touches with Lilith Fair posters, her father’s pretty paintings, and small, colorful blue and green vases of different sizes carefully placed on the fireplace mantel.

“Yes, just leaving, sweetie. Hey, I don’t know if I’ve said it enough, but you know how proud I am of everything you’ve done with this farm. Your father would have loved to see it fixed up.”

Shoshana rolled her eyes and smiled. “I know, Mom. You say it, like, a hundred times a day.”

“Well, it’s true. Your sister and I love spending time here with you.” She sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. Shoshana wished Pam didn’t always look guilty about sitting down on beds, chairs, and people’s living room couches. She seemed constantly aware of her weight, as if it were an evil twin who went around offending people.

“I wanted to tell you that I agree with what you said about that girl from
Oprah,
the one in the picture?”

“Alexis?”

“Right. Can you call the newspaper up, maybe give a counter-quote?”

Shoshana stared at her mother. She fingered the patches on the quilt bedspread, and placed the yearbooks beside her. “Mom, she was horrid to me on TV. I feel badly that the press is slamming her, but I dealt with people judging me because of my size my entire life. And she’s not even a Fattie! She probably weighs the same as me. I don’t think it can hurt for her to walk a mile in my shoes for a little while.”

Pam looked thoughtfully out the window, which had a stunning view of the orchard. A crow flew by, its wings spread widely. Fall was her favorite season, always so beautiful in New Jersey. It had been Bob’s busiest time for work, tending to people’s lawns after summer droughts, planting new trees and bushes.

She paused before answering her daughter. “I understand what you’re saying. But I disagree with Emily. I don’t think people watching
Oprah
that day saw you on the losing side of the battle. I think they saw you as victorious, because you took the higher ground. You didn’t get personal, the way she chose to do about Dad. You kept things professional, and even made everyone laugh.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re my mom,” Shoshana said, smiling slightly. But there was bitterness in her words. The
Oprah
experience had truly hurt her feelings—crushed them, really. She was fine with being questioned about the motivations behind
Fat and Fabulous
; it was a fight she was willing to take on, for all the fellow Fatties out there. But when Alexis brought up her father, and the way his weight had contributed to his death … it knocked all the air out of her chest, left her defenseless. It was like the scene in
Gladiator,
where Joaquin Phoenix stabs Russell Crowe in the chest quickly and stealthily, seconds before battle. Russell fights back, but he’s been weakened by the wound. Alexis was a dirty fighter.

“Of course I’m saying that because I’m your mom,” Pam said, throwing her arm around her daughter. “But I also mean it. I’m not alone in thinking you took the higher ground. All my girlfriends in my book club agree with me. I’m asking you to consider standing up for her.”

“But isn’t it enough if I just privately agree the article is mean?” Shoshana asked. “Calling up the paper and making a statement just continues this stupid rivalry the media has made between us. The press loves instigating fights, and this would add fuel to their fire.”

“Just think it over, honey. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Will do, Mom.” She pulled the yearbooks onto her lap. “Hey, guess what? I found these old yearbooks of Dad’s. From junior high.” She called loudly to her sister. The farmhouse was small enough that you could easily hear from one level to the other. “Emily!”

Her sister peeked her head in the room a few seconds later. “What?”

“Come see these crazy pictures of Dad with hippie hair!” The three Weiner women lay on the bed and pored over the yearbooks, another present from Mimi unearthed.

“He looks so young,” Pam breathed. “I hadn’t ever seen these.”

“He must have forgotten Aunt Mimi’d had them all these years,” Emily said. Then she hooted with laughter and jabbed her finger at a page. “Look at this one, from shop class! Who knew Dad hung out with all the stoners?”

Bob stood surrounded by a shaggy-looking group of lanky, long-haired adolescents and holding a boat he’d carved out of wood. He wore red bell-bottoms and a tight blue-and-white-striped boat shirt.

“I know that boat, I used to play with it when I was a kid!” Emily exclaimed.

“Yes,” Pam said, smiling. “I just never knew he made it.”

There was another photograph of their father dancing awkwardly at a school prom, his date so short she looked like a midget. He wore a plaid jacket and his long hair was tied back in a ponytail. His hands rested on her petite shoulders, and he looked so uncomfortable that Shoshana burst out laughing, her mother and sister following suit.

“Oh, my god, how freaked out does Dad look?” Emily said, pointing. Shoshana noticed she’d gotten a tattoo across her knuckles that spelled out
LOVE
.

“Bob was not much of a ladies’ man,” Pam said, chuckling. “That was one thing I never had to worry about, your father running around with other women.”

She clipped her badge to the pocket of her scrubs and gave each girl a kiss before leaving for work.

Emily was still sifting through the yearbook, looking for more pictures. “It was just the two, believe me, I looked,” Shoshana said, pushing herself farther back on the bed so she could rest against the bentwood frame. Emily shimmied over, placing her head on Shoshana’s shoulder.

“Dad would have loved knowing we’re living here,” she said. “Remember he used to always bring us here when we were kids? It felt like an obligation, like going to temple. But now I’ve fallen in love with the place.”

“It’s cast its spell on all of us,” Shoshana agreed. Then, “I feel badly I didn’t come more after Dad died.”

“Eh.” Emily waved her arm in the air. “Get over it. She knew we loved her. Besides, she got crazy as a fox. Remember when she made us egg salad with the shells still in it?”

“Totally. That crunching sound was awful.” They both giggled.

The sun moved in the sky, slanting in through the window, warming their legs.

“I feel closer to Dad here,” Emily said softly. She shut the yearbook and looked at Shoshana.

“Me, too,” Shoshana said. “I think … I think that’s why Aunt Mimi left the house to me, to us. It was like somehow she
knew
it would help us heal after he died, even though she made out her will years before.”

“And I love it that you turned it back into an orchard. I can’t wait for people to start showing up to pick their own! I asked at the tattoo shop, and I can work there mornings, so I’ll be here afternoons to help you. I can woman the stand. I’ll bring in lots of business. Everybody likes a woman with a big ass.”

Both sisters giggled.

“Awesome.” It was perfect placing Emily in charge of collecting the five-dollar entrance fee, since she was open and friendly and would talk to anybody. “I was actually going to go out there and pick some of the less ripe apples to make cider, do you want to come?” Shoshana asked.

“Totally.”

And so they spent the afternoon in the fresh air, collecting apples in wooden barrels found in the back shed. Joe Murphy had taught her to leave the ripe ones alone. (You could tell they wanted to be picked if they were yellow around the stem.) Frank Sinatra ran around the orchard, digging holes and chasing sticks. They had to use the pick ’en poles a few times for the higher apples, but the rest were reachable. Ripe apples twisted off easily, but since they were going for nonripe, they had to really struggle to get some off the branches. Bees and other insects hummed in the grass, and Shoshana worked up a sweat even with the cool breezy afternoon. Emily made for good company, telling funny stories about big, tough rock musicians who came into her tattoo shop, only to freak when she brought out her needles.

That night, Shoshana decided to host a wine-tasting. She had a full house, with all her Hoboken roommates plus Emily. When she’d moved into Mimi’s house, so many neighbors had brought over bottles of wine (made at local vineyards) she felt like she’d stepped back in time and it was ancient Greece, with the wine flowing freely, women in white togas lounging and feeding their young lovers grapes by the bunch. So she made everyone wear white sheets, finding several extra ones in the linen closet outside her bedroom. She and Emily made headpieces out of vines plucked from the orchard. She dragged a wrought-iron table out from the shed and cleaned it off.

On the wine bottles, she put numbered pieces of paper over the labels. She put out pens, paper, and a basket of bread to cleanse the palate between tastings. Last, she neatly arranged blue and green glass goblets for the wine. She was glad Pam was at work, especially when things got a little wild and witching-hourlike, with some friends stripping and running through the fields, Sinatra barking at their heels.

Greg brought over his new girlfriend, Jessica, a hairdresser at a Hoboken salon. She was tall and blond with a Jersey spray-tan, and had a large nose that Shoshana found charming. Shoshana had always liked women with big noses; it gave their faces character. After several bottles of wine, Jessica came up behind Shoshana, who was sitting on a kitchen chair. Jane and her new husband, Andrew, were telling a story about their honeymoon in Venice. Apparently Jane had fallen into a canal, whereupon she was told by an old woman in the street that she’d never be able to bear children as a result of the contaminated water. Shoshana sat hugging her knees to her chest, something she’d never been able to do when she was heavier. She felt hands running through her hair. Jessica patted her shoulder. “You know, with your cheekbones you would look fabulous with a pixie cut,” she said.

Shoshana reached over the table and poured herself another glass of Pinot Noir, then refilled a glass for Andrea, who winked at her.

Shoshana smiled. “Thanks, but females of the plump persuasion don’t get short haircuts,” she said.

Jessica looked around to see if perhaps she was missing something. “Yeah, but … you’re not plump,” she said. Shoshana blushed. It was so hard to remember this very obvious fact: that she was, indeed, no longer fat. She was the size of the average American woman. Smaller, even. There were so many ridiculous rules she’d cordoned off in her mind. Having short hair was on her list of things Fatties couldn’t do, like wear miniskirts or cross-country ski. She knew it was ridiculous and the very sort of prejudice she rallied against; if any of her readers had stated such absolutes she would have asked them what they were afraid of.