Getting Waisted (18 page)

I needed to get away, someplace where I could get some perspective. Montreal was only a few hundred kilometers away, but there must have once been an ancient ocean between it and Toronto; it was French, need I say more? Every woman there knew how to tie and twist a scarf; even the homeless beggar women looked better than I did. It was a revelation to see how effortless it was for French women to embrace their own style. I vowed to shake off the couture restrictions my mother lived by and become more fully myself. But first, I needed to soothe my wounded soul. I took refuge in Atwater Market, a food lover’s paradise. The cheese counters brimmed with hard and creamy blues and Bries so ripe they oozed. Braided and twisted breads covered in nuts and seeds were piled mountain high, and pastry vendors beckoned with layer cakes, chocolate mousse cakes drizzled with white and rich dark chocolate ganache, and custard oozing out of everything else. I filled two shopping bags and checked into the first hotel I bumped into.

I was in full pity-party mode; pity I was alone, pity I had the appetite of a walrus, pity I had no self-control, and pity the maid who had to clean up the trays, candy wrappers, and my fat-ass carcass because I planned on dying here. A few hours later I woke up from my food coma . . . hungry! How could I be hungry? I had just eaten enough food to lift a small Third World country out of its misery.

But there I stood at the doorway of a crowded café looking for an open table, when a hawklike woman looked me over and shook her head. I was terrified she was going to shout,
“
Av you not ’ad enough?”
I kept my head down and found a table in the corner; the sound of chairs scraping, plates clanging, and all the fast, French-talking, alien babble was weirdly soothing.

I was immersed in the origami-mess of trying to make my scarf look nonchalant and fabulous when this way-too-good-looking French guy interrupted by asking if there was room at my table for him. I would rather have been impaled on a church spire. I wanted to be left alone but nodded. My scarf was now knotted like a noose. He introduced himself as Gilles. Apparently he was the chatty type. I mumbled my name, which he instantly Frenchified, “Ah, Monique.” I had had enough of pretty men; I stood up, grabbed my coat, and prepared to leave, rattling on about all the important things I needed to accomplish in the next hour or two: buying socks, washing my hair, promising to be in a police line-up and judging a shwarma-shaving competition.

He thought I was funny, he thought I was charming, and he said something about, “The snow being big balls now and how I must sit for the time.”
I thought he was hilarious, even though I’m not sure what he said exactly or why I listened but I sat back down. His English was terrible, my French worse, but the day turned into evening and we were still talking; maybe I was talking, maybe I was dreaming. He wanted to show me “ees Montreal.”

I ventured into the slushy night with this beautiful English-challenged man, wearing a pair of ridiculous platform shoes that I had no idea how to walk in, but thankfully, he hailed a cab and I stepped forward onto the frozen pavement . . . and immediately slipped right onto my rear, one leg under the taxi, the other splayed off to the side. Embarrassed, I pretended it was a party trick, claiming it was a specialty of mine. Gilles picked me up; I knew I had twisted my ankle and it hurt, much like my pride. He offered to take me to my hotel. I was horrified; my room looked like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. I was too embarrassed to even let room service see it but I couldn’t walk so I nodded. Somehow we arrived and I threw a blanket over the mountain of food entrails that he, for some reason, appeared not to notice. Of course, he was blind! That’s why he was here with me! But then, this man got ice for my foot, ordered tea from room service, and picked up everything, saying, “You resting, I will make the dinner, yes? I am make for you the bath and then you be refresh and
voila
then we will have the eating.”

I found myself lying in the bathtub going over everything he had said, not understanding most of it, and wondering why I felt okay about being in a bathtub, naked—I guess that was the only way to have a bath—even with a total stranger in my hotel room. What did he mean, he would
“
make the dinner?” There were no dishes and certainly no stove but still my eyes closed in relaxation. Then, “did he send me off to have a bath so that he could rob me? Was this some pervert scam? No one was that nice . . .” Oh my God! He was coming in. I grabbed a towel—shit, it was a face cloth. I tried to cover
. . . what? One boob? One knee? He said something about needing, “ze showere cap.” Had he come in to get a shower cap or to kill me? And then he was gone. In shock, I got out of the tub and wrapped myself in the biggest towel, a little late, shook out my hair, pulled on my clothes and limped out of the bathroom.

There were flowers in an ice bucket and a salad in the shower cap; there were candles, two hotel place settings, and crystal stemware. Gilles explained, as if this were normal, “I have go to ze store for the baguette and ze things: prosciutto, a beautiful cheese and fresh figs, and a whole chicken. I take ze elevator for every floor and I pick up from the tray what we need. The flowers are from ze lobby. We will put some back maybe later. You will sit.”

I couldn’t eat. I had no appetite and I pushed food around on my plate as if I were an anorexic. What was happening? We finished dinner and he sat me on the bed. Momentary panic washed over me until this amazing man picked up my swollen foot in his hands and began to massage it but stopped immediately when he saw me wince. He got some ice from the ice bucket and grabbed a napkin, and bandaged my ankle and foot. He tucked me into my bed, kissed me on my forehead, and he was gone. Shit! He’s gay.

I woke up with a huge pillow crease across my face and my hair plastered to my head, as the key turned in the lock. I leapt back into bed thinking it was housekeeping, but Gilles stepped into the room carrying fresh croissants and two steaming
café au laits
. This man was unbelievable.

The day passed in a haze; somehow we never ran out of things to say. At a café we both noticed an old man who gave up his seat so a pregnant woman could sit and who was then rewarded by two ladies inviting him to sit at their table. He flirted with both of them—an arrangement that made them all happy. Store windows, passersby, and a shape-challenged construction crew struggling to fit a manhole cover back into place elicited mutual conversation and laughter, even though we could barely understand each other.

It was night when we returned to the hotel. At this point, I could no longer afford it, but I had no intention of checking out of that enchanted castle. We were in the hotel ballroom, and there was no one around when Gilles sat at the grand piano and began to play. Of course he could play. The teeny tiny ballet dancer that had always lived inside me quickly shaved her legs and strapped on a pair of toe shoes. I stretched out my long slender arms and arched my back. I was a swan and I
jeté’d
across the floor, on my toes—leaping, limping, twirling. I was a feather and I swanned across the room toward the piano. Momentarily I caught my reflection in one of the gilt mirrors. I was an ox—a fool. Gilles asked me why I stopped. He looked at me and suggested I was perhaps scared. I leapt into denial, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not scared of anything! Well, I’m scared of edges and bugs, all kinds, and . . . ”
He had my face in his hands and was looking at me, really looking at me.

“You are scare from something. You say it to me, then, it will not be so big, it will be outside of you and maybe inside me, my problem, not yours, eh
voila
. Okay?”
It wasn’t okay. I was terrified of getting hurt but he said that that was out of our hands. He couldn’t make promises, but we needed to take the chance,
c’est la vie
. I looked into his beautiful, ocean green eyes and saw nothing: no lies, no bullshit. I needed a little bullshit, but there was none there. I felt the bars around my heart pull away and I kissed Gilles as hard as an ox in toe shoes could.

I manufactured another trip to Montreal under the guise of having been made an interesting designing offer. I had to have more time with this man. I needed the time to convince him that I was the one. And if that failed, I was willing to resort to kidnapping and hobbling him until he got it. I have no idea what he was drinking but he didn’t seem to need my threats. He was as into me as I was into him. That was worrisome
. Why?

I had a boyfriend, maybe, but he lived 365 miles away. My phone bills were in another galaxy. I didn’t care. Fiddle-dee-dee
,
he was coming to spend the weekend with me and I bought new sheets. Seriously, I bought a whole new bed, but what if he didn’t come? Shut up, he’s coming; my brain was fuzzy from the lack of food. I hadn’t eaten in days. I wouldn’t have thought five teeny jars of baby food a day could be considered food, and yet some enterprising hustler had just come out with The Baby Food Diet, promising yet again that the weight would slide off while still providing the body with all the nutrition it needed. Yeah, if you were a baby! But I went for it, praying all those little jars would make me little. All I had to do was eat a complete breakfast; rice and bananas, just add water. For lunch, applesauce and sweet potatoes. And for dinner, turkey and vegetables with prunes for dessert. I could even have snacks. I was a 175-pound baby, sucking back jar after jar of pureed everything. I began to develop a retrograde crankiness and fussiness with an acute need to be rocked, possibly institutionalized. I desperately wanted to be erased, redrawn better, thinner.

We hadn’t “done it” yet but in the hopes that it could happen, I replaced all the light bulbs with dimmers. Maybe he
was
gay or worse—maybe he was a hermaphrodite. Again, he just walked through the door, no knocking and no warning. Thank God I had slept on my back, in my makeup. I was beyond nervous, having moved directly to fluster, “You’re here. You’re early—twelve hours early! I mean . . . hi.
Mi casa, su casa
. . . Wait, you’re not Spanish, you’re French . . . bonjour.”
He had brought me flowers but then said he thought he should have brought me tranquilizers. I had had enough of those. After we shared a bottle or two of wine—he had one glass—I was calm, a kind of drunken calm. It was as if we’d been together forever, and he was not gay. He was amazing. I prayed that what had just happened between us was not a figment of my parched imagination.

I had always hated Sundays. Everybody always had plans while I read books. Gilles and I were going for a walk in the park and I loved this Sunday. He was holding my hand and I was holding his, admittedly in a blood-drawing clench, but after a while I loosened my grip a little and he was still there. It was beautiful and I was happy until I felt something on the periphery and my body tensed up with a deeply embedded sixth sense. Warning! Danger!

A group of teenagers were hanging about a huge oak tree, smoking, and missile-firing acorns at each other. My radar was pinging loudly. I tried to steer Gilles in another direction but he was oblivious. One of them yelled, “Hey Friar Tuck! You want us to get you a turkey leg? Hey Fat Stuf
f
!” I was shaking. I couldn’t control myself and I began to shout, “Shut up! Shut up! You ruined it! You ’re ruining it!”

Gilles stroked my arm, attempting to reassure me that they were just a bunch of stupid kids showing off for one another. He couldn’t understand why I was so upset. How could he not? In a barely audible voice, I explained, “Because, now you know . . . you know . . . you know I’m fat.” Gilles gently assured me that he already knew this. He told me he liked me just as I was. I immediately called him a chubby chaser. I think he had no idea what that meant, but he did know it was some kind of accusation and he looked deep into my eyes.

I thought I saw a golden halo appearing just above his head as he softly spoke
,
“I like you, but it is you who don’t like yourself. This is your problem and for this you must decide: to accept you as you are, or change, but not for me, for you.” Who
was
this man? Did I just see him levitate? Okay, I must have eaten something (not a stretch), and now I really
was
hallucinating.

I decided to close my eyes and leap. What was the worst that could happen? So many nauseating thoughts began to collide; I blocked them out as quickly as they came.

Our relationship flourished in the two train stations where and whenever we reunited, and from a distance I was fairly sure we looked like post-war lovers from a bygone era as we ran into each other’s arms, but on closer inspection, I’m sure it appeared as if a tall handsome man was being dry-humped by his long-lost Saint Bernard.

17

In-Security

Diet #20
Cottage cheese, celery, and diuretic tea

Cost
Pennies

Weight lost
Not enough

Weight gained
None

We had astronomical phone bills.
We talked and talked, and when it was time to hang up, I was the Goddess of Good-byes. I could drag them out, even resorting to Pig-Latin, anything to keep Gilles on the phone. For several weeks, I existed on a starvation regime of one or two spoonfuls of cottage cheese accompanied by a few stalks of crunchy but totally boring celery—just enough to keep my charm-offensive from collapsing but not too much for my body to keep shrinking. Soon I began my whimpering campaign, “Think how much money we’d save if one of us were to move to the other’s city. If you moved here to my house, which is far nicer because it has that womanly touch . . .” My brain was whirring at full speed to find one more selling point. None was needed. To my shock, he said, “Okay.”

Presto, chango! Gilles and I began to live together, and I began to fall apart. All my internal strategists were on high alert. In order to survive, they had to contribute ideas or they were going to be bounced from the all-you-could-eat buffet of brain-crazy I provided. One of the voices told me to be funny, another said be sexy. I fired that one on the spot. Be yourself, came from another department; I fired that one too. Wasn’t that exactly what I was trying to avoid? It had never worked for me before, but then one of the voices assured me this man was different, that he liked me for who I was. That made no sense. Clearly, he must be damaged goods; it just didn’t show on the outside. But there he was . . .

A gargantuan, monstrous, insatiable hunger swept over me. I had a boyfriend, but I didn’t really believe it. No matter how much this beautiful man did or said to make me feel secure, I was pre-conditioned to believe that I wasn’t the girl who got the guy; I was the girl who wore the big pink butt-bow bridesmaid dress. I was the girl who didn’t get asked to the prom. I was going to wreck this; I could feel it and I needed to fill the hole before I got any nuttier.

Why couldn’t I have been like Sleeping Beauty and go to bed fat only to emerge weeks later sallow, wan, thin, ethereal. It wasn’t in the cards. I ate when I was happy. I ate when I was sad. I fed a cold, I fed a fever, I fed—period! I was Dracula in search of cheese, chocolate, bread . . . I tore apart the kitchen in search of anything edible, preferably not moldy, but in a pinch I could always scrape. Still, the hunger grew. “Gilles do you love me?”
I felt this falling from my lips like crumbs in search of a napkin. He shook his head patiently, as if talking to a very young child, saying that everyone told me they loved me; it was the price of admission. It was like this liquid soap; it pours out so easily but it is nothing but bubbles.

“I do more; I show you. The actions, more important than the words . . .
oui
?
”
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have both show
and
tell.

He must have really loved me because I kept coming up with more and more hoops, some of them lit with white-hot fire, but he jumped through them and stayed. I was insatiable, wanting, needing proof of his fealty. Once, he happened to leave his passport on the dresser and I hid it, thinking he wouldn’t ever be able to leave me. I know
, insane,
but when he went looking for it, I never said a word. It was my insurance policy. I was on overdrive trying to appear casually comfortable rather than my clingy mosslike self around everyone who ventured into his path. I wanted him to like my friends but when he did, I felt threatened, possessive, panicked, unhinged—all of which I knew enough to mask with a ridiculous representation of faux-graciousness.

At a girlfriend’s birthday party filled with gorgeous young up-and-comers, I was standing by the buffet just to test my willpower. It was a game I knew I’d fail. I was really standing there to give me a place to casually survey the room—okay—to keep an eye on Gilles without appearing Velcro-like and possessive, which I was but didn’t want him to know. I watched as a very beautiful, tall, feline hung all over him as if he were her personal scratching post. I reached for the cheese tray. A few minutes later she slithered her way over to me and picked a grape from my fully loaded plate, popped it into her vixen-red mouth, and hissed, “What did you do to get him?” I felt sucker-punched. I desperately wanted to make a sharp and funny comeback but my mouth was full. I caught Gilles’ eye and we connected. I knew then and there I wouldn’t need to knock the teeth out of her vicious, lipsticked mouth.

But
the crazy-train kept coming. One magical winter’s day with snow gently swirling as it fell, Gilles and I had plans to go skating. He clearly didn’t know my history with blades, but my heart was willing even if I doubted the body would get the memo. We made our way hand in hand to the subway; he held mine in a gesture of affection and I held his so as to stay upright on the icy sidewalk—so happy, so surreal that this was my life, and not some lie I made up to impress some crap-guy who had hurt me in the past. Gilles dropped my token into the turnstile and I went through. He looked down at his hand,
“
I have dropped my glove. I will come back.”
And he was gone . . .

Fifteen minutes passed and I began developing a heart-pounding case of flop sweat. Did he just pay for me to stand on this side of this little gateway so he could run home and pack his things to go back to Montreal? He’d made a mistake and he didn’t know how to tell me because he knew I would wig out just like I was doing right then. The teeny seed of doubt was growing and soon it would become a strangling trumpet vine. I couldn’t breathe . . . I needed to lie down but where? The concrete was wet and cold, and the parade of people double-wrapped in Gor-Tex and wool kept rushing by and I would be trampled to death—but that might be the best thing. Suddenly, Gilles, with a triumphant grin on his face, hopped over the turnstile, waving his ice-caked glove. I smiled, sweetly;
Oh my God, he didn’t leave me.
My face registered only normal. Palpitations and panic were never to be mentioned, sucked back into the vault, as this was a dark moment even for my runaway imagination.

It was right after that teeny panicky episode that I decided to introduce Gilles to my mother. She seemed skeptical when I told her I had met “the one.” I responded a touch shrilly, “He’s with me because he wants to be, not because he’s under house arrest, but because he thinks I’m awesome.”
I told her I was going to marry him, something I had not yet told Gilles.

She smiled. “I’m happy for you and if you can get him to marry you, don’t blow it.”

Everyone in my family loved Gilles. I think my mother would have met me at dawn with pistols drawn if she thought that I was ever unkind to him. Gilles laughingly told me she had said if we ever had a fight, and he felt the need to get away from me, she would completely understand. I didn’t know why he found that funny. The deck seemed so stacked; I was the one with all the faults and he was painted as some angel plucked down from the heavens to save me. I was riddled with flaws and not too many of them were hidden. I wore them defiantly to see what people were made of. Would they be able to see past the electrified, barb-wire fence?

There had to be something wrong with him. Like a chubby Sherlock Holmes, I sleuthed and surveyed Gilles every moment and I found things, bad things. He was forever forgetting his wallet, his watch, and appointment book, and he was often late. He liked weird food combinations: white bread with molasses and peanut butter, salt on blueberries—small infractions, I grant you, but then I found a biggie. In the kitchen my sweet man turned into Attila the Hun, fierce, warring, territorial, and worst of all insanely messy. It was a revelation and I was thrilled. I kissed him and thanked him, but he had no idea why.

Gilles took me to meet his family who lived in a small town in Northern Quebec. I began knocking back gallons of diuretic tea in the hope that I could pee the fat out of me. It seemed that peeing had become my new hobby. I had time for little else. I had always known we were primarily water but did it all have to thunder out like some break in a flood-zone levy? We had to make pit stops at every gas station and rest stop on the four-hundred mile drive. I thought his family would think I had some bizarre bladder infection. I was a basket case. He laughed and tried to assure me his family wouldn’t care whether I was wet or dry, thin, fat, black or white; they’d care about whether I liked his mother’s pies, his father’s Chrysler. His sisters would care that I liked him and I only cared that they all like me.

It turned out I had nothing to worry about. Gilles’ family swarmed about him as if he were the second coming. He was the baby of the family and the only boy. If he was happy with me, that was all they had to know. I spent three days with his family, none of them spoke English, but they laughed a lot, spun stories, and were as close as my family was not. They never seemed to leave the kitchen table as if it were a special kind of endurance challenge, a.k.a. The Kitchen-table Olympics. It seemed they were there at all hours and, if someone did leave, another appeared to take their place. Many pies were eaten, fortunes were told from a well-worn deck, and I was immediately made to feel one of them. It was easy to understand how my boyfriend came to be so special.
Oh my God, I had a boyfriend . . .

But I couldn’t calm my over-the-top-fear that I would lose him. On the drive home, I casually threw out my most winning pitch: that if we were to get married, it would make our lives far less stressful because I would be so much calmer. He didn’t understand why I, who had a mother who could not do this marrying thing well, not once but twice, wanted this so badly. I was too afraid to look at him, but I heard him loud and clear. “Marriage does not make love.” I had one last line of reasoning. If he were to marry me, then the whole world would know, well my whole world, would see someone as amazing as he was willing to put it on the line for me, have blood tests and stuff . . . Okay, mostly it would show my mother! The pause that ensued was way too long. I felt my heart was about to be smashed into smithereens. I had my hand on the doorknob ready to leap from the fast-moving car, when Gilles pulled to the side of the road. “I don’t really know what it is you have just say, or why it is the whole world that must see. I see, we both do, and that should be enough.”