Getting Waisted (3 page)

My father had taken to visiting me every other Sunday unless my mother had other ideas for me, like the dreaded elocution classes
she signed me up for to cure my sibilance—it didn’t. He always
arrived with a bag filled with hard candy and various vitamins for my growth. Could he be to blame for my ever-growing girth? We sat together sucking candy with me mimicking his breathing patterns just to fill the uncomfortable pauses between him reading the labels on the candy bags and on the bottles of kelp: “Brain food, can’t get too much of that right?” Bee pollen: “Mark my words, excellent for arthritis, nasty business.” I nodded. I was seven. I had no idea what arthritis was, but I knew I didn’t want it. I took the pills.

Mummy and Greta were deep in cahoots with their next big plan: to find Peter a rich wife. I think my mother felt guilty and desperately wanted to make up for not being there to protect him, and to make sure that from now on he would have a safety net to fall back on. She zeroed in on one of the wealthy Austrians whom she knew had a single and not-yet-married daughter. Suzie was pretty but extremely heavy, and in Glasgow’s closely knit Jewish community, there were few pickings. It was perfect. Neither my brother nor his intended had much say in the plan, but a wedding was soon enough in the works despite the fact that neither Peter, nor Suzie, seemed ready or enthralled by the prospect. However, both succumbed to the pressure of pushy parents.

I wasn’t quite sure what was happening but I knew it wasn’t good, especially when I had to stand still for endless pin-sticking fittings for a yellow bridesmaid dress that had skirt wings trimmed in black rick-rack. “Ouch!” Another pin stuck me as I tried to escape. “I look like a bumble bee. You should cancel the wedding, he doesn’t love her.”

My mother twirled me around and looked straight into my eyes with fierce determination. “Your brother is getting married and he’s going to be happy and that’s final.”

Weddings were supposed to be happy and beautiful. This one didn’t seem that way to me. Me and two other prettier bumble bees, Suzie’s cousins, followed the bride and groom down the aisle to tie the knot that seemed more like it was around their necks than anywhere else.

At the reception, I have a distinct memory of clinging to my brother’s leg as he danced the first slow dance with “her.” She tried to dislodge me, but I was not that easy to shake off and I was on a mission to make my brother see he was making a terrible mistake. He bent down and patted me on the head as he tried to pry me loose. “It’s going to be okay, I will still take you to our special places.”

I didn’t believe him and I whispered, “Would you marry me if I was older? I can cook and I can iron and I can be charming. I can.”

He pulled away as he twirled Suzie in the opposite direction but not before whispering back, “Yes you can.” But he was gone.

I went directly toward the man cutting the wedding cake into uniform little slices and asked for two pieces.

2

Abominable

Diet #2
Eat nothing that tastes good

Cost
My ability to fly

Weight lost
Not enough

Weight gained
None

My sister,
after leaving half a dozen broken hearts in her wake, married Phil, a newly minted doctor, and there was rejoicing all through our large, unaffordable house. Along with the usual Austrians there were irascible Scots and a smattering of outrageous, loud Brits, but best of all there was apple strudel, Sacher tortes, Punschkrapfen, and all the whipped cream in the kingdom. I was in heaven, my fingers and mouth sticky with evidence. After the wedding, unlike Peter and Suzie, the happy couple left for “Dusseldorf . . . Dusseldorf . . . Dusseldorf,” (how I loved that word) Germany, where Phil was stationed and where he and Gerda would live for a year.

The giant house felt even bigger; it was definitely colder as my mother didn’t have money to pay for a wedding
and
heat, but the party was far more important to feed her delusions of grandeur. Whenever I said I was cold, her response was to tell me to put on more sweaters and stop complaining as it was more important to live in a good neighborhood where there was opportunity to meet a better class of people. She was furious when I wondered,
What if all these people are pretending to be rich, too?

When she wasn’t working, which was hardly ever, my mother was plotting get-rich schemes with Greta or playing kill-or-be killed bridge games with her posse of temperamental blue-haired Viennese ex-pats, and their endless swirls of blue smoke curling upwards from their overflowing ashtrays. I would sit watching, mesmerized momentarily by the glass shelves filled with sterling silver candy dishes, fruit bowls, and silver bric-a-brac all engraved with her name on them for being the best bridge player in the world. I sat watching, waiting, and then willing the games to end, followed by gentle but malevolent chair-banging against the wall until my mother would either shoot me a death stare or suggest in no uncertain terms that I take a piece of cake and go to my room to enjoy it. It was hard to imagine that these so-called games brought on pleasure with all the shouting: “You are a cheat!” “You are a liar!”
“Accch
, I fold . . .” Inevitably came the volley of guttural native-tongue swearing, the sound of chairs scraping backward, coats put on, followed by the slamming of doors. Everyone was always leaving in a huff, yet they’d be back two nights later to engage in more warfare. I hated bridge.

I had always been a little pudgy, but when my mother had me try on whatever new itchy wool dress she was making for me, I could see frustration in her face followed by her favorite “
Aaacch . . .
” and then a seam would be ripped apart and re-pinned, this time looser. She never said a word but I knew. I believe I began my lifelong love affair with food to fill some hole, but also so that I would get bigger and bigger so that I couldn’t be ignored. Food soon filled any void created by too much information and isolation, allowing my skin to thicken, along with all my other parts.

Despite my being as solid as a tree trunk, I desperately wanted to be a ballerina. I loved my ballet classes with Miss Bellshaw, the beautiful teacher who really looked like a long-necked swan and who told
me
before anyone else that we were going to have our first recital in a real theatre. I practiced every day at class and when I got home from school; at night I had dreams of myself in pink tulle, twirling and leaping in magnificent
grand jetés
across the stage to thunderous applause. But there are rules about what a fat person can and cannot do and I learned them at age seven in my premiere ballet performance.

Many of my classmates were scared and had trouble breathing normally, but when I stepped onto the stage and looked out at all the parents, uncles, and aunts sitting in the audience, I couldn’t stop smiling—this was where I wanted to be. Dressed in identical tutus, we all held hands as we came out onto the stage and made a circle of fluttering feet and hands. Then we let go, and each of us twirled into the light and leapt as high as we could, which at our age was minimal. The goal was to have our
attempt
at greatness be appreciated, but what I got instead at my first public performance was a crescendo of ever-building murmurs of, “
Aaw
, how cute and so chubby! Watch her jump,” followed by the sound of laughing. From that time on, all my dance performances were done behind closed doors in my bedroom.

Extreme caution and hypersensitivity to the lurking danger zones became second nature. No swim parties for me; I never wanted to give any of those splashing, happy, skinny, mean kids the opportunity to shout out, “Nessie!”—the common nickname for the Loch Ness Monica. At school I tried to walk in the center of the largest crowd, hoping to have it swallow me up; the danger was heightened if I was ahead of the pack, alone and out there asking for ridicule. I never, ever volunteered an answer in class, and I never ate in front of anyone because that would only have encouraged the smart-asses.

One truly humiliating moment of complete abandon came during an unusual snowstorm. Making my first-ever snow angel in the fresh powder, I lay on my back, exuberantly flapping my arms and legs. The sounds of happy kids pelting each other with snowballs must have desensitized my tuned-in, fat-attack meter, but suddenly, feeling all eyes upon me, the alarm bells rang. I got up and scurried away but not before hearing one of the older kids yell, “Abominable Snowman sighting! Look at that huge hole in the snow, there’s the proof!” The others ran over to look at the crop circle made by an alien spaceship.

I was not yet strong enough to stand up to bullies so I ran home, the sound of their taunts still ringing in my ears. I was in desperate need of comfort, but everyone was busy so I found my comfort in other ways—food and dismemberment. I loved to take things apart. I had a giant doll almost the same height as I was and I was fond of operating on her, removing limbs to see how they were attached; I was never quite as good at putting them back. I loved to cut her hair and her clothes. My mother was not pleased. I turned a fallen-down, heavy window shutter into a stage and I took my old baby carriage apart and turned it into a go-cart and a rocker. I lured the neighborhood children to our back garden with promises of rides and a host of ever-changing plays, which only I would star in. I finally had the attention I had been craving. There was a backlash brewing, but I was too enamored with my position as ringmaster to notice until all of my newfound friends rebelled, calling me bossy, and then left.

My father continued his every-other Sunday visits and still we mostly spent that time together not getting to know each other. It was just something that we did and I accepted it as my normal. Out of boredom and loneliness I started to hang about my mother’s workroom with all of her seamstresses. They had far more patience for my stream of questions than my mom. I wanted to know why the cloth-covered dress form was called a dummy and why it didn’t have arms. It didn’t make any sense. “People have arms, don’t they? If they are having dresses made, they will need them to fit their arms and there’s none there to make sure their sleeves will be okay.” Estella, one of the seamstresses, gave me a pad of paper and drawing pencils and told me to draw some dresses. She probably did this to get me to shut up. My first drawing was a soft green, silk, long gown and had long pearls hanging all over the front. It turned out I could draw and Estella showed it to my mother who showed it to one of her clients, who really liked it and had my mother make it. It was not quite the same but close enough to be the dress from my drawing. It was the first time I remember feeling proud, but even better than that, I knew my mother was proud of me, too. I was eight.

My euphoria didn’t last as my mother had signed me up for swimming lessons. Bathing suits and baring skin was already a sensitive issue but that wasn’t to be my problem. It came in the form of the instructor who was really old and really mean, with wrinkly brownish skin from being in the sun too much. I don’t think he liked children. There were eight of us and Mr. Simpson treated us all equally—he yelled at every one of us. He bellowed nonstop: “Pay attention! Face in, bubbles out, left arm in, right arm out, breathe, kick, breathe, kick . . . ” I still didn’t understand which came first and I always swallowed a lot of water. To make matters even worse, the black lake was freezing cold. At least we wore cork belts to help keep us afloat. Mine, unfortunately, was too tight but I didn’t dare say anything because I didn’t want to be singled out.

We were all scared of him but, after two weeks of swimming about in the frigid lake, at last I began to feel more secure—then Mr. Simpson told us the belts were coming off and we were going to swim away from the dock to the deep part of the lake. I wasn’t at all ready for this step! I was terrified and told him I couldn’t do it. He spun around and shouted, “Yes, you can!”

“I can’t!” I whimpered.

He barked over and over, “Yes, you can!”

I tried to walk away but he came and got me and stared into my eyes, saying, “Get in the water or you won’t be given your swimming certificate.”

I started to cry. “I’m afraid. . . . ”

Then, out of nowhere, Peter appeared and told Mr. Simpson that I didn’t have to do it because he was taking me sailing. My brother had saved me just like some handsome prince in a fairy tale.

As we headed out into the lake, the water was a little choppy and I felt a little bit seasick but I knew it would go away because I was so happy and that feeling was bigger than any other. We were way out in the middle of the lake when Peter dropped the anchor. The wind was calmer now and we played a game of twenty questions. I won. Peter stood up, looking out onto the water. “Come see,” he said. I did but I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for when I felt a hand on my back and he pushed me. I fell overboard and into the deep water. I felt myself sinking, going below the surface.
Glub, glub, glub
. I popped back up, gasping for air.