The Worst Years of Your Life (18 page)

I peeped out of my window. What was I scared of? There weren't going to be enough cable channels?

On the way there I'd told myself that there wouldn't be anything so terrible about the house. I was wrong. It was a long white trailer. It had a yellow stripe. There were empty plastic buckets around the front porch. Something rusty was half buried in the yard. My mother pulled up so even the car wasn't too close to the curb. Her face was fine.

When she got out of the car Crystal's dad came out of the house. He looked like any other dad. He had on a Nirvana T-shirt. While they said hello I got the keys from my mom's hand and opened the trunk. I pulled out the bag and lugged it to the front door.

Her dad's name was Tom.

“Where you goin' with that?” her dad said.

“Lynn's givin' me some clothes,” Crystal said. “The ones that don't fit her anymore.”

My mother was wincing. Like Crystal and her father were blind.

I was still at the front door of the trailer. I could see people inside.

“It's just a lot of weird stuff, Dad,” Crystal said.

“Hey, I don't care,” Crystal's dad said. “If it's all right with Lynn's mother here,” he said.

“It's fine with me,” my mother said. After a second she crossed the yard to give me a hug. She looked at me. “You behave yourself,” she said. She got back in the car and drove off.

“So what're we havin' for dinner?” Crystal's dad said.

“We should have hot dogs,” Crystal said.

We all went in the house.

Her mother and her retarded brother were in the living room with the shades down, watching TV. I thought it was weird that her mother hadn't come out.

“Nice to meet you,” I told them.

They were both fat, but not hugely fat. The brother had black hair combed sideways and his eyes were half closed. I couldn't tell if that was part of the way he was retarded or if he was just sleepy. His mother had next to her the biggest ashtray on earth. It was wider than the lamp table it was on.

Crystal said I should get the bag from the porch. She told them while I went to get it that I'd given her this huge bag of clothes. They were looking at me when I came back in.

“Merry Christmas!” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else. I put it on the rug in front of the TV.

The house smelled. There were dirty coffee cups on the windowsill. I had my hands flat against my thighs.

Her father poked in from the kitchen and said, “What's in the bag?” but then didn't wait to find out. He called he was starting dinner.

Her brother dug around in the bag. Her mother watched. I still didn't know his name. I was still standing by the front door. Crystal felt bad at the way things were going but I couldn't do anything to help her feel better.

“So what's in there?” she said, like everything was okay. It was horrible.

Her brother pulled out stuff I didn't even remember throwing in. Some things I could still wear, and a blue velvet dress.

“Oh,” her mother said, when her brother held up the dress.

A
Penthouse
magazine was lying around in plain sight. The room was cold and everyone was bundled up. You could smell sweat. The kitchen was on one side and they had framed pictures of Crystal and her brother around the door leading to the other rooms. It was a longer trailer than it looked.

The kitchen was clean. We ate in there, watching the TV on the counter. I looked every so often at the floors and the ceiling, and Crystal caught me at it.

We had pound cake for dessert. Her father and brother got into a fight about how much her brother could have.

Afterwards we hung out in Crystal's room. It was across from her mom and dad's. Her brother was going to sleep on the sofa. I thanked her parents for the very nice dinner, even though I hadn't seen her mother do anything. They said we should get ready for bed soon.

That was fine with me. It was about 7:30.

Her half of the room was neat. She had a throw rug, and her bed was made, with some books arranged big to small on a bookshelf in the headboard. Her brother's side was filthy. You could see that she'd tried to pick up. There were loose Oreos in some slippers under the dresser.

“You can sleep on my bed,” Crystal said.

A poster of a muscle car flapped out from the ceiling over her brother's bed, like a sail. I told her I could sleep over there, but she said no.

I was still standing in the middle of the room. I didn't want to be there, and she knew it.

“Do you want to see some of my books, or play a game?” she said. “I got Clue.”

“Okay,” I said.

She didn't move. She sat on her brother's bed. I sat on hers. I smelled soap.

“Should we go to bed?” I finally said. She shrugged, looking down at my feet.

We brushed our teeth and got into our nightgowns. Even the water tasted weird. I was glad I brought my own towel. We called goodnight down the hall and got into bed. Then she had to get up to turn off the light. She got into bed again. The parking garage across the street lit up the whole room.

“Are you having an okay time?” she said, from her brother's bed.

“Yeah,” I said. She shifted around on her back. They were watching some kind of travelogue in the living room and we both lay there, listening to it. I think she felt so bad she couldn't even ask them to turn it down.

“My cousin Katie has so much money,” she said.

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“What am I supposed to say?” I said.

She sighed. It was like a bubble filling the house, pressing on my ears. I hated it there.

“I don't know why I say some things,” she said. She started to cry.

“Are you crying?” I said. “What are you crying for?”

It just made her cry to herself. I hadn't asked very nicely.

“Why are you crying?” I said.

“Oh,” she said, like she was going to answer, but she didn't.

We both lay there. I made a disgusted noise. I breathed in her smell on the pillow. She was quiet after that. The travelogue went off. I wondered if her brother had to stay up until her parents went to bed.

It was so bright in the room I could read my watch. When it was 11:30 I said, “I should go.”

“What do you want from me?” she said, exactly the way my brother does.

I got up and got dressed without turning on the light. “I should use the phone,” I said. She was still on her back.

I went out into the hall. The house was dark. The phone was in the kitchen. My mother answered on the second ring. I kept my voice down. I was worried she was going to make me explain, but she didn't. She said, “Are you all right?” Then she said my father would come.

It would take about a half hour. I had to wait. I hung up and went back into the bedroom and shut the door. “My father's coming,” I said.

“Fine,” Crystal said. She was sitting up. “You want the light on?”

“No,” I said.

We sat there. I thought about the way I'd thought of her the night before. The night before I'd thought she needed beauty in her life.

“Take your clothes with you when you go,” she said.

“This is totally me. I'm just being weird,” I said.

I was going to quit the classes the next day by phone. If she tried to call me she'd find out the number I'd given her was fake. Like we said when a total dork asked for our number: I gave him my faux number. And she'd think I couldn't deal with her being so poor. She wouldn't realize it was everything else I couldn't deal with. I knew I deserved exactly what I got, all the rest of my life. And when I was stuck with her in her bedroom I didn't want her to deserve any more, either. But before that, for a little while, I wanted good things for her; I wanted to make her life a little better. I wanted to make her think, That Lynn—that Lynn's a nice girl. And wasn't that worth something?

M
Y MOTHER PROMISED TO TAKE ME SHOPPING AFTER
the car was fixed, so that was how I found myself sitting next to her at the mechanic's that morning, reading over her shoulder as she wrote a letter to my Aunt Mitzy saying I was still fat. “Hey, you can't write that!” I said, pointing to the sentence about me with an orange fingertip. We were sitting in the small office beside the garage, where people popped in to pay for gas or buy themselves a snack for the road. I had just eaten two bags of Cheetos myself and was considering a third when I saw my name in my mother's fine hand.

“Oh,” my mother said, acting as if she hadn't just written it. “You're right, Roz.” She began crossing it out and her face turned red. She was pretty embarrassed, which shocked me, since I figured she would turn the tables on me and say something like “Well! You shouldn't have been reading a private letter over my shoulder!” Even though I knew she would go home and finish it later (rewriting the crossed-out part and telling Aunt Mitzy how touchy I had gotten about it), I felt kind of powerful. When we went clothes shopping that afternoon, I hardly noticed I was the only thirteen-year-old in the misses department flipping through the size sixteen rack.

We got home before dinner, so I put on my snow clothes and crossed Hermitage Road, where they were putting up a new development—one much nicer than ours. Several foundations had already been dug and were now half-filled with snow, while a forklift sat abandoned in an empty lot. There were cement blocks piled up all over the place, metal barrels filled with construction trash, and a short row of Porta Pottis. The door to one was open and inside I found a picture of a half-naked woman in a skimpy Santa Claus outfit taped to the wall. I took it down and put it in my pocket for Jennings, who was at his grandmother's for the weekend.

It was hard work running around in the snow. Each time I hopped down into one of the foundations, it took me forever to pull myself back out again. I saw this as a challenge—another way to burn more calories, which was why I was out there in the first place. When I got home and the scale said I had only lost a pound, I thought it should have been more.

Mom and I ate spaghetti with Ragú for dinner. We usually made that or Old El Paso tacos, or else we went to McDonald's. We had eaten more natural foods when Jonquil was still living with us since she liked to cook, but now that she was gone Mom said it was crazy to go to that kind of trouble for just two people. Mom said it was on Jonquil's head that I had gotten so damn fat, and she hoped my sister could live with that.

After dinner Mom left to spend the night with her beau, a retired army sergeant who felt that any of the four branches of the military would serve to set Jonquil straight. I had a job babysitting for the two Hermann boys. We made a deal that I would let them stay up as late as they wanted as long as they didn't tell on me for smoking their parents' cigarette butts. Once the boys had fallen asleep in front of the TV, I carried them upstairs, put them to bed, and called my sister.

My mother had kicked her out the year before for becoming unruly. Jonquil, who had been seventeen at the time, moved in with her boyfriend, Vic, and got pregnant. She and Vic made plans to marry but then Jonquil had a miscarriage and they called the wedding off. The family was relieved, which so infuriated Jonquil (since she had suffered such pain), that she put the wedding back on again. Her bridal gown was her senior prom dress, while Vic, who was reedy and slack-jawed, borrowed one of his father's suits. I cried like a fool at the ceremony because now I knew there was no chance in hell Jonquil was ever coming back to us. Aunt Mitzy and my mother told me not to worry—that Vic was an inbred and it wouldn't last—and for once I was glad about how nasty they got when they were together.

Jonquil knew everything about sex and she taught it to me. She said she didn't want me to end up marrying a screwball like Vic just to prove a point, like she had. She said this right in front of him, on the weekends when I went to stay with them in their apartment, and he just laughed like she was telling a joke. He kissed her, too, and I watched as both their mouths opened and their tongues came out, all rude and wet. I could watch them kiss for hours and, in fact, sometimes that was what ended up happening.

But Jonquil wasn't kidding, and what I knew that Vic didn't was that she was going to leave him as soon as she saved up enough money. He was pursuing an art degree at a community college, which Jonquil described as “double jeopardy.” Meanwhile, she supported both of them on her receptionist's salary from Dr. Flay, the TV hypnotist. He didn't perform on TV but he ran a lot of ads describing how he could stop people from smoking, overeating, or a combination of the two. He was a blond, handsome man, and sometimes, my sister told me, spoke to his clients in a made-up foreign accent. As an employee, Jonquil was entitled to a 50 percent discount on his services, and since he liked her so much (feeling her natural thinness made him look like a success), he extended that privilege to her family and friends. I had saved up some babysitting money, so when I called Jonquil that night from the Hermanns' house, it was to ask her to make me an appointment.

“What for?” she said.

“Because,” I said. “Mom wrote and told Aunt Mitzy I was fat.”

Jonquil made a light blowing sound.

“Are you smoking again?” I asked her.

“Uh-huh.”

“But I thought Dr. Flay cured you.”

“He did,” Jonquil said. “I just forgot to say the key word before I went to the grocery store and it screwed me up. I bought a pack.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” Jonquil said, “when I was your age, Mom wrote and told Aunt Mitzy I was a tramp, so don't worry about it.”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why did she say you were a tramp?”

“Don't be such a dumb ass, Roz.”

“Sorry,” I said. I blew smoke from one of Mrs. Hermann's cigarette butts. I could tell it was hers from the purple lipstick on the filter tip.

“What's that noise?” Jonquil asked me.

“Nothing. I was just sighing.”

Eventually she gave in and made me an appointment for that week. I sat in a dentist's chair while Dr. Flay indeed spoke softly in an accent that reminded me of Count Dracula. He dimmed the lights and projected a small red dot on the white wall in front of me, which I was to focus on intently. Meanwhile, Dr. Flay stood behind me, massaging my temples and telling me I was getting sleepy, even though I wasn't. I felt bad for him that he was doing such a terrible job, so I played along, making my eyelids bob up and down when he came around front to see how I was doing. “
Thaht's eet,
” he said. “
Thaht's eet.
”

With my eyes now closed, Dr. Flay spoke frankly to me about the state of my body, saying I had three rolls of fat on my stomach, and wouldn't it be nicer to have just one? He said I had a pretty face, like my sister's, but that a double chin on a seventh grader was nothing short of heinous. He noted that my thighs squashed together so tightly as to be prohibitive, which I didn't understand, and then asked me point-blank how I thought I would ever get a boyfriend. I wanted to bring up Jennings then, but I was supposed to be hypnotized and so kept my mouth shut. It alarmed me somewhat that Dr. Flay's voice was getting closer and closer, so I took a quick peek. He stood directly in front of me with his hand on his groin. I shut my eyes immediately but it was too late; he had seen me. He dropped his accent, gave me my key word (which would remind me of our session and instantly decrease my appetite), and snapped his fingers. I assumed this meant I could open my eyes, and I did. Dr. Flay wished me luck and gave me a bill for fifty dollars, to be paid in cash to my sister.

On the way home Jonquil and I stopped at a Wendy's drive-thru. I said
hiccup
and she said
lizard,
and we neither overate nor smoked. “Do you think I'll really get thin?” I asked her as we sat in the parking lot, eating our baked potatoes. Jonquil didn't want to eat in the dining room because it was nonsmoking and if her key word hadn't worked, she would have been screwed.

A section of her long brown hair dipped into her potato, and she tucked it behind her ear, sucking the nonfat sour cream from the ends. “It's hard to say,” she said. “The data are inconclusive.”

Jonquil dropped me off at the end of my driveway, then spun her tires on the ice for a couple of seconds, trying to peel out. When I got inside, my mother said my sister had no manners, coming and going like that without so much as a hello, and demanded I agree with her on this point. I did so reluctantly, after which she further demanded my key word. I lied and said it was
Sputnik,
which we had just learned about that day in social studies. She had taco meat for Old El Paso simmering on the stove and asked me suspiciously if I was hungry. I said no and she beamed. It was nice, being able to make her happy for once, so I didn't bother mentioning Wendy's.

I finished my homework quickly, then ran across the street to see Jennings, whose bedroom light was on. His mother, a handsome divorcee who wore high heels and a small brunette hair-piece at the crown of her head, answered the door. “Well,” she said, “don't you have pink cheeks! The cold agrees with you, Roslyn.” She told me Jennings was in his room and to go on up. I think she thought we couldn't possibly be making love since I was so overweight and Jennings was sort of handsome, but we were.

We had been making love since a few months before, when I had beaten Jennings at the spelling bee. I was the best speller in school, while Jennings was second best, and when I got ejected early for misspelling
quietus,
I could tell he thought he had the whole thing wrapped up. After losing, however, I went to the library to see what the word meant, and found the main pronunciation to be qui-
ee
-tus, not qui-
ay
-tus, as Mrs. Googan had said. My face burned with injustice. Had she not been so obscure I would never have spelled it Q-U-I-A-T-U-S, and, furthermore, would still be in the running. I lugged the dictionary back to the classroom to plead my case.

Mrs. Googan was shocked and appalled. Frankly, so was I. Jennings had a lot of friends—mean friends, who were already deeply offended by my weight. It wasn't like spoiling Jennings's chance to win the bee was going to make them treat me any better. At the same time, I wasn't sure things could get all that much worse.

In the end, Mrs. Googan allowed me back into the competition and I won. After school that day, I went across the street to apologize to Jennings, for what it was worth. He lay on his bed, inconsolable. I waited for him to kick me out of his room or call me fat ass or something, but he didn't. I went over to his bed and put my arm around him, and was momentarily surprised at how easy it was to get close to a popular person. Of course, Jennings and I had grown up together, so even though he was more popular than I was at school, there was a different hierarchy in the neighborhood. All the kids I babysat for adored me, and even though they were several years younger, the sheer volume of them conferred upon me a vague status of local, albeit fat, hero. Jennings knew this. He could call me names and play mean tricks on me at school all he wanted, but in the neighborhood we were nearly equals.

I had spent the weekend preceding the spelling bee with Jonquil and Vic, studying the dictionary and learning what an orgasm was, and all the ways a woman could get one, if she was lucky. “Jennings,” I said that day in his room, “would you like to make love?” He stopped sniffling so much and said yes. I might not have offered except I believed his secondary sex characteristics had come in over the summer, and Jonquil told me when this happened, boys weren't so little and slippery inside you anymore.

After we had done it, Jennings thanked me and said he'd like to do it again soon. Having experienced my first orgasm with the minimum of effort, I agreed. Mostly we did it after school, before his mother got home. Then it didn't matter how noisy we were, or how long it took, or how often we wanted to do it. Through all of this, Jennings started to become a different person. In school, he was crueler to me than ever before, or so it seemed. We staged scenes where he shoved me against lockers for being so fat, then caught me just before I hurt myself and banged his own fist against the metal, so it just sounded bad. He grabbed me in front of his friends and whispered threats in my ear, which were really words of love such as,
I can't wait to see you this afternoon.
When we were alone, he told me he wanted to be a stunt coordinator when he grew up, so this was all just practice for him. He assured me constantly that my main problem was not so much that I was fat, but that I smelled bad, which I appreciated, since at least I could do something about that.

Now, standing in his doorway after returning from Dr. Flay's office, I announced, “Jennings, I've been hypnotized.” He was lying on his side in bed, looking at
Playboy.
He set the magazine aside and I could see he had an erection inside his pants. He patted the bed for me to sit down beside him, and I did. “I think I got ripped off,” I said, even though I hadn't overeaten at Wendy's.