Nothing To Lose (A fat girl novel) (24 page)

Don placed her on the bench and secured her feet under a strap. He held her feet and supported her knees in a half bent position. With great effort, she did two sit-ups. They had already done their limbering and stretching and she had hip-walked twice the width of the exercise area. All that was left was the wogging that was now three quarters jogging. She had been doing a mile now for a week but because he seemed sad, she kept going and did a mile and a half. If he noticed, he didn’t comment.

They finished up early that day and the store was still dark. “Watch out,” said Don, menacingly, “the K-9 force is still around.”

“What’s the K-9 force?”

“K-9 as in canine. Dogs. Get it?”

“Dogs? They let dogs roam through the store at night?”

“In case anyone stays in to rob the place. They would sniff you out and tear you apart.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know. What else would they do? These people trained in detective work are vicious. They don’t see men, women, nephews, veterans and widows. To them, everyone is a potential thief, felon, murderer.”

She knew they placed ordinary-looking people throughout the store as plainclothespersons. At her heaviest, she suspected one of them was watching her. They watched the fat ones, thinking part of their heft was a clever coat with built-in pockets to receive merchandise.

“They caught a woman,” Selma had told her, “she looked like she weighed four hundred pounds but then they opened her coat and she had a toaster, a facial sauna, a waffle iron, a blender, two curling irons and assorted men’s sweaters all fitted snugly in the lining of her coat.” She also told her about two men who walked out with a piano. They put a sold tag on it and carried it out. No one said a word. This sent her into a fit of laughter. “The floor walkers held the door for them.”

She re-told all this to Don in an effort to cheer him up. He was only half listening and after a while she gave up and ate her grapefruit and hard-boiled egg in silence.

She didn’t see Don for the next three days. When she called his apartment, Pierre said he was too sick to come to the phone. The day he returned his eyes looked sunken and his hands weren’t the steadiest things she had ever seen as he held his Styrofoam cup of coffee. “This is poison,” he said, “but there’s nothing like it for opening the old beepers.”

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t ask.”

“You look pale. You’re the only black person I know who can look pale.”

“You know you’re funny,” he said without smiling. “Now that you’re not fat, you’re getting funny.”

She didn’t feel funny. She felt like crying. She knew Don felt he had missed his chance in life but he had decided to live with it cushioned with his cynicism and a few snorts of whatever was handy. He never talked about the specifics but what did it matter? What could she do even if she knew the specifics?

That was the day, too that Luis O’Neill, came down, strolling the narrow aisle of the advertising department to look around.

“Hello.” She was so startled to look up and see him, she didn’t answer right away. He looked at the ad pinned to her board. It was for culottes. It showed three girls jumping in the air. It’s time to spring for some real fashion sense.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“They look like a skirt but…they’re sensibly…sensibly comfortable.”

“Not my favorite fashion,” he said. His right arm was propped over the partition to her cubby. He looked as if he were going to settle in for a chat but Missy came down the aisle and pulled him away. April was relieved she had washed her hair the night before. And she had on her brown blusher that Don had told her to use to punch up her cheekbones.

“They’re not my favorite fashion, either,” she said after he was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Four

By the time April spent her first weekend on Fire Island, she had lost thirty-two pounds. Her loyalty to the Universal Gym and Miss Craig’s exercises had firmed her stomach and thighs. She insisted that Don needn’t come with her in the mornings but he still accompanied her most of the time. Her breasts and stomach were separated by an indented, if not totally flat, midriff. She bought two black, one-piece bathing suits cut high on the thigh in the season’s style. This gave her an impressive expanse of leg, smooth and glowing from her daily buffing with the Scrubee pad. Her saddlebags had been twisted and pummeled into submission and only a manageable ripple remained. The sun had begun to streak her hair with red and gold. Stretched out on the beach with her slinky maillot and oversized sunglasses, she was noticed.

Jogging on the beach in the early morning, she met a social studies teacher from Philadelphia, her first admirer as the new April. They talked a couple of times and he said, “I like you because you’re not hungry.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t hungry for him, but it was nice to be pursued.

The house Susan Scott had rented was a modern one-story box with many skylights. The Sunday supplement would have said: unexpected light makes this modest row house a triumph of originality. Its best feature was a square ground level deck just steps from the bay. Its second best feature was the house next door occupied by ten male lawyers who also alternated weekends.

Susan’s other recruits for the even weekends were Lana and Tina, college students from wealthy families who lived in Short Hills. Lana and Tina were buxom and energetic. Before long, they had collected a directory of men and came home only to change and shower.

By the beginning of August, each of the lawyers next door had been to bed with at least one of the girls from April’s house. Two of the lawyers had had more than one of the girls from next door and one of the lawyers had had three of the girls. April fell into the third category, having succumbed to George Tandy, a personal injury expert whose divorce wasn’t final. April came after Lana but before Tina, which was a compliment of sorts. Considering the circumstances, it was not a bad experience and George had hung around her all the next day smoothing suntan lotion on her back and generally behaving as if he wouldn’t mind repeating his performance.

“Do you realize those louses have screwed all of us?” said Lana.

“Look at it this way,” said April. “We’ve screwed all of them and we’re going to keep doing it until they get it right.”

“Hey, that’s good,” said Lana. She had found a point of view she could live with and was off again.

As for April, she didn’t feel used. George Tandy, a teddy bear of a man, was likeable and a good neighbor. She was grateful that he had sprung her from two years of celibacy without trauma. She didn’t consider the encounter from the man from Saks more than an out of body experience.

That August, April’s father unexpectedly married a woman he had met only six weeks before. The wedding took place at the Marble Collegiate Church where the woman was a parishioner. April wore a silk, Victorian-collared dress and had her hair wound in a French braid. At the reception, held in a restaurant, Harlan kept looking at her as if she might do something to embarrass him. It was the hairdo, she decided. It was definitely not a Queens hairdo.

That was the month, too, that Sylvie gave birth to her second child, a little girl, at Lenox Hill Hospital. “I’m a multipara now,” she said over the phone. April visited twice to see the little bundle, but Sylvie was far more interested in staring at April, fascinated by her emerging figure and admiring her harem style polished cotton slacks with the matching boat-necked top in coffee brown.

“I think central casting sent that kid over to play the world’s most beautiful baby,” she told the new mother after peeking at the newborn in the nursery. That was stretching it, but April was alarmed by Sylvie’s lack of maternal enthrallment.

“Did she at least open her eyes for you?”

“Yes. She was also cramming her fist down her throat. Don’t they feed her?”

“My milk isn’t in. She’ll just have to wait.”

Such a callous dismissal. Alicia Beck Straight, as the baby had been named, was in for some hungry days. April looked around trying to saturate herself in motherhood, mother smell and mother air. Gift flowers were strewn everywhere. Tucked between vases were Tiffany boxes with silver accessories. There was even a little machine fitted with five cassettes to play mood music for baby. On each cassette was a picture of a baby with the corresponding expression: sleepy, bored, cranky, happy, sad. Sad? Why would she be sad? “Is the music to change the mood or coax it out? Why would you want to tamper with happiness?”

“I know which one will get the most play,” said Sylvie. “The one that makes it sleepy.”

“It? You wanted a boy?”

“Of course not. I have a boy.”

“You didn’t want another baby?”

“Oh…I did, I guess.” Thirty seconds later, Sylvie burst into tears that quickly deteriorated into hard sobbing.

“Did I do something? Is it something I said?”

“No.” Sylvie waved her hand and cried harder. “It’s just…oh….everything.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the baby is there?”

“No. God, no. That would be too much.”

“Postpartum blues?”

“Oh, April, that doesn’t come until much, much later.” Almost as if to stop the amateurish diagnosis, she began to recite a litany of ills. Three people in her neighborhood had died. They were dropping like flies. Suicide. Leukemia. Heart. Any one of them could have been her. And her life…it really had no point except to do as Spencer said she must do. And keep their social aspirations high. “He’s openly ambitious. So am I.” She lowered her voice and her head as if revealing something dark – a sexual fancy for the dead – “He wants to meet better people. Always better than the last. Our boat’s named Ambition.”

There was more. She had to start over every day with the same awful routine: carpooling, dinner parties – who owed you, who you owed. Nobody ever said what they really meant except – get this – for terrible jokes and cracks about Jews. “And now, with her,” she pointed toward the nursery, “it’ll start again, except it’ll be piano instead of violin, horseback riding instead of hockey, tennis instead of baseball. And none of it, absolutely none of it, will leave me with anything.”

April was stunned. Sylvie, the Queen of the Gots, unhappy? How could that be true? She might as well say she’d like to trade places with April, which is exactly what she did say.

“Now you,” she said in an accusing voice, “you’ve got a terrific career. You look so much better; I can’t believe it’s really you. And…” she took a big sigh for the finale, “you can screw whomever you want instead of doing it every Tuesday with someone who just sticks it in and sometimes on Saturday, if we don’t get home too late or drink too much.”

If she had to credit anyone with changing her attitude about her job, it would have to have been Sylvie because it was that night, reeling from these revelations, that she decided to become openly ambitious. For all her woes, Sylvie had a small estate, a silver Mercedes – with a CB radio, she was Silver Momma – a membership in a yacht club, a near yacht, her own quarter million dollar stock portfolio, seeded with bonus money for each child, and two healthy children, one of whom would at least make it to be Secretary of State,

And what did April have? A studio apartment where the entry of the sun was so miserly even shade loving plants struggled to survive. She also had an exhausting daily round trip to downtown Newark. If she chose to walk to or from the train, she feared muggers and panhandlers and young bums who urged her to help support an alternative lifestyle. What’s more, she still had paralyzing memories of a failed marriage and sick daydreams about a man who probably had never entertained two consecutive thoughts about her.

Her new ambition must have sent out vibes because Missy began to give her more responsibility. Burdie’s had never had a real fashion image. It was not, like the old Best and Company, a place known for classics. And it was not, like Bloomingdale’s, expensive and trendy. Traditionally, ads were directed to faceless, nameless women with no discernible lifestyle. Headlines were blah: Junior fashions take a step toward fall. Or, We like this sailor chemise for spring. Or, The three-quarter coat is set for the cold.

With this new directive, April began to address her ads to a recognizable audience: young women coping with new ambitions, new personalities and new problems of identity. The business suit with the soft, gathered shoulders became The Un-Stern Suit. Feminine angora tunics were paired with briefcase-style handbags and sold under the reassuring message: Dress softly but carry a big briefcase. The season’s intimidating harem pants, knickers and jodhpurs were not solely for the anorexic. Knickers and harem pants are good for your hips, she told the less than perfect women of New Jersey.

There was a new playfulness that also instructed and reassured. New easy-care wools you can wash with impunity (or a capful of Woolite.) Peachy keen velveteen separates that won’t lose their fuzz.

Missy also asked her to sit in with the brainstorming group that met weekly in Ned Perkins’ office, the vice president for advertising and public relations. The group included Don, Erica and Ray Nolan from the art department as well as herself and Missy. The president almost always dropped in. Luis. She liked to say it. I felt my hipbone today, Luis, she would say aloud in her bed in the morning. You want to feel? Go right ahead. Feel all you want. Does this mean a promotion?