Future Perfect

FOR MONIQUE VAN DEN BERG,

THE ROBERT PENN WARREN OF GRATENESS

E
very year on my birthday, my grandmother, my father's mother, the woman we owe our whole lives to, reminds me that I am risking everything. That I am making a gigantic mistake. That big dreams like mine—Harvard; changing the world, medicine, social justice for all (and for all a good night)—rely on being flawless and unassailable.

She tells me that refusing to budge on the issue just means I am as stubborn and obstinate and fool-headed as my mother was.
Just tell her to stuff it,
my mother whispers in my head
,
and I shake that thought out.

The issue, my grandmother will be quick to tell you, is that I am fat.

I am also valedictorian, class president, former volleyball team captain, and was voted both Most Likely to Succeed and Best Personality two years in a row in our school's yearbook, which is really more of a pamphlet. I scored the winning point during
the state volleyball finals last year. Unfortunately it was because I spiked the ball into the face of our rival captain, but still. I have a Platinum Star (which is an A plus at normal, less weird schools) in AP Organic Chemistry, and I earned that star despite being distracted by the presence of my best friend Laura's twin brother, who always seems to sit directly in front of me.

I have been described as ambitious, smart, outgoing, driven, stubborn, and sometimes bossy by people who love me, though that last one is not true. I've also been described as fat by my grandmother and select others, which
is
true.

But my grandmother thinks that
not being fat
is the part of me I should focus on. That being a size 18 (or sometimes 20) will ruin my life. She says, “You do not deserve to be automatically dismissed for utterly arbitrary aesthetic reasons that have nothing to do with your worth as a human being.”

People in my life have a tendency toward pronouncements, which I respect.

I say, “That is unimportant. If they don't know the whole story they are not important and I do not care.”

I don't have the gift of pronouncement. Maybe that's why I admire it.

“Oh my beautiful darling,” my grandmother says. She is tall and elegant and blue-eyed and silver-haired and gorgeous. I look just like my mother—brown skin and brown eyes and waves of brown hair. Curves, rolls, softness. Boys have told me
I am beautiful, but I look nothing like my hard and glimmering diamond grandmother, who says, “I admire your bravado. Truly I do. But
they
care. And
you
can't escape it.” She looks at my thighs and the width of my hips and my solid arms, and my cleavage, of which I admittedly have a lot, and sees bravado instead of just my body. She says, “The deck is already stacked against you.”

“No,” I say. “That shouldn't be true.” I flush and I shift and I hate the feeling this fills me with. Like she's digging hard in the sand at the bottom of my mind and stirring it all up into a cloud that obscures everything, tiny particles floating in front of all the things I could say or should say or need to say.

“That's the only argument you have for me?” my grandmother says when she sees me fidget. When I can't look at her directly. “You argue passionately about everything else in the world, Ashley, but you cannot argue with me here.”

This is my grandmother: When she was thirteen she was saving lives. When she was exactly that age she leaped into the water, right off the pier in town and into the Pacific Ocean, and towed back a boy who was drowning. And she's never stopped rescuing the world. She saved her mother, who was drowning in her second marriage, by reporting her stepfather for securities fraud; her sister, who lost her child—the money they won from the settlement didn't fix her sister's heart, but it gave her room to breathe. Of course my grandmother saved countless others in her career as a surgeon. And, finally, most salient to me, she saved
my mother—pregnant with twins and in love with my father, who couldn't support a family as an artist and couldn't support my mother in college. She took them into her old and crumbling house; she found my father a job.

My grandmother's rescues are concrete and impregnable. Her advice to me is this: You are fat. Do not give them that foothold.

She's not wrong. There really are people in the world who have ready a list of adjectives about a fat person—including
lazy
,
stupid
,
messy
,
incompetent
—that they are certain describes her before she ever opens her mouth. And that is unimportant, because I won't let it be important.

But my grandmother insists on this because she loves me. She says this because she is never wrong. She says knowing how to succeed means knowing how the world works and playing the game.

I say,
what about the element of surprise?
She shakes her head at me.

Every year on my birthday she reminds me that she knows how my future will turn out. She'll hand me an envelope just a couple of days from now, as she does every year. She handed me the first one on my thirteenth birthday.

“Ashley,” she said, with the small white card in her small white hand. “I want you to consider this very carefully.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Open it,” she said. She never got irritated at my questions. I tore it open.

“A fair bargain,” my grandmother said, tilting her chin at the slip of heavy paper in my hand. And it took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. Her writing again, slightly neater:

Ashley Maria Perkins.

Good for one shopping trip every ten pounds.

My heart lurched. Across from me, my grandmother with her head tilted to the side. She looked like a bird, watching me.

“I want you to be happy,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I want that too.”

“You're never going to be happy if you're . . . of size.”

“
Of size
,” I said. “What is that supposed to mean?” I am
a
size, I thought, but so is everyone else. My older brothers are taller than I am but narrow, taking after my father. He got too skinny sometimes, when he forgot to eat. My mother, I didn't remember, but everyone said I looked like her.

“You are gaining quite a lot of weight, Ashley,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I don't think so.” I knew the width of my own hips: I fit precisely between the two coast live oaks on the path behind my father's studio—the one that winds down to the beach. My hips brushed each side as I walked between them. I knew I was as tall as the curio cabinet in the kitchen, where all my mother's dishes were. My feet fit in my mother's old shoes. My
head fit in my grandmother's elaborate hats. These were all the sizes I had in my head.

“You're getting big,” she said.

“Well, I just turned thirteen,” I said. My friends' parents always said things like that,
how big you've gotten, oh you're growing up so fast
—but this felt different, and my grandmother was shaking her head. I had never thought about size, that it had any meaning beyond measurement.

“I mean
fat
, darling,” she said. “You're getting somewhat fat.” She continued, “That's what you get from your mother's side of the family. . . .”

But I wasn't listening anymore, because that's when the word
fat
became something real. Something that would follow along behind me and settle in dark corners and slither around the back corridors of my mind. Whether or not I acknowledged it, the idea was inside me.

For my birthday that year, my grandmother gave me my body. Or her idea of it. I learned what it meant when my uncle Gomer called me
gordita
that single visit we took to San Diego before my mother left. My grandmother never liked my mother's family.

The coupons have become a never-changing ceremony. My grandmother hands me the envelope and I try to give it back to her. She clasps her hands at her waist. She waits for me to open it. My hands shake and I hate every tremor. She wants the whole world for me, and this is the only thing I have to give her in
return. She tells me this without actually saying the words. This is the only change I have to make.

The sensible, incisive voice inside my head, the one I rely on, goes incoherent and says,
I don't want to do it. I don't want to. I don't want to.
I hold on to everything I know about myself. The fact that I should not have to do this, should not.

The first time I just said “No,” and she didn't argue with me. She took the card and she looked at it. She folded it neatly in half and slipped it into her pocket. She said, “I taught you to trust your instincts, Ashley.” Her face was very serious but I couldn't help but find signs of disappointment all over it. Disappointed eyebrows and a disappointed mouth. We never talked about it again.

Instead, the cards kept appearing every birthday, because I did gain weight. Puberty changed the shape of my body and I got tall and broad and rounded and I saw that the definition of the word
fat
fit me, its length and width and breadth, but I refused to acknowledge its depth.

Ashley Maria Perkins.

50 pounds for a trip to Disneyland.

I said, “I don't want it.” She wouldn't take it back that time, and it sat in my desk until I threw it out.

Ashley Maria Perkins.

75 pounds for a shopping trip in Paris.

I said, “I don't care about Paris.” My grandmother said, “Don't be a barbarian.” That one I crumpled into a ball and threw in the garbage disposal. I turned the water on and let the motor run for a long time.

And then last year. The look of pleasure on her face like she had finally found the button to push, the vulnerable spot to prod.

Ashley Maria Perkins. 80 pounds for a new car.

I said, “You've got to be kidding me.”

She said, “You know I never
kid
. Any car is better than that rusted-out thing you're always running off in.”

The ancient wreck of a Volvo is my father's car but I'm the only one who can drive it. I drive down the coast with my foot on the floor. I have to, to get away from a sagging house and incomplete college applications, and panic about getting the scholarship that is my only chance, and the noise in my head that sounds a lot like my grandmother but is starting to sound too much like it belongs to me.

My grandmother, attempting to bribe me with a car like she's Oprah. “How can you possibly afford that?” I said, throwing it across the room. It didn't go very far; it kind of fluttered down and landed face-up.

New car. My father and brothers and I have no money. No
cash. I have no idea what Grandmother has, or doesn't. She thinks talking about money is uncouth, but here she was, waving her hand in the air and saying, “I can move around some investments. I can sell some things. I can unbind your trust. You don't have to wait until I'm dead.”

“No,” I said. “I don't want it.” I picked the card up and tore it in half, right between “for” and “a new car.”

I don't want it
was the extent of the argument I was able to muster up, and still is. That is the best I can do and the only thing I can use to defend myself.

I try, “Why do you keep giving me these cards?”

She says, “I hope you'll change your mind, of course. I hope you'll understand what I'm trying to tell you.”

“I don't want to hear it anymore,” I tell her.

My grandmother thinks this is resignation. That even perfect things should never stop being perfected.

I will never admit this: The part of me that wonders how I fit in this family of tall and slender people, the part that trusts my grandmother unconditionally, the weak little part that forgets who I am, that quakes every birthday when she gives me another coupon—is
tempted.

So tempted.

And there's this feeling I have: This year, she'll make the stakes higher. This year she will offer me something I truly can't refuse and every time I think about it I feel like I am full of ants.

But I can't think about that. I am swimming hard for the shore, paddling madly, towing everything I have to do behind me—an AP calculus quiz two days from now and a layout proposal for our laughably short yearbook and a list of potential charity trips to present at the student government meeting and the double shift I have to work at my job after school to cover Amy and sometimes it feels like maybe this is the time I won't make it—I'll drop something, forget something, screw up, and it will sink me.

But I will never screw up. The idea of it is enough to keep my eyes on the shore, keep breathing even when the air feels like acid in my lungs and the water below me is dark, and cold, and deep.

I will never screw up.

Because that would mean that my grandmother is right.