Nothing To Lose (A fat girl novel) (6 page)

These days he rose quickly in the mornings, showered and left without eating. If she rose with him and made coffee, he was silent and moody. “I’ve got a lot of paper work to catch up on” was the password out of the apartment. Out on the street and out of her sight. It was such an unimaginative excuse. The worst of it was that it was probably true yet paper work had never driven him out early before.

On these mornings, she would eat nothing until ten or eleven. Then, in a fit of hunger, she would stand in her nightgown at the open refrigerator and look for the most satisfying easy food. Usually something sweet. Leftover dessert. But that made her hungrier.

She would return to the refrigerator several times, searching for something else to haul back to bed. This would go on until mid-afternoon – hopping in and out of bed with portable food. Sometimes, she ended up by heating the leftover rice and bits of meat from the previous night’s meal. After a while, she realized it was useless to cook because Harald was seldom hungry. “I had a big lunch,” he would say. “It’s not healthy to eat two big meals.”

“What about one long continuous meal?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

At her slimmest, April was twenty pounds over her ideal weight. Now, within four weeks, she gained twenty more. One night after Melissa’s visit, she heard the front door close. She knew Harald was out in the hall, too, because both had walked to the door and no one had walked back into the room. She surmised he was kissing her. She had felt his desire and could see the tortured, stolen kiss as if she were directing it. He looked ill and feverish. He was on fire for Melissa Montini, who, with consummate skill, appeared totally innocent of her effect on him.

She quickly ate two chocolate bars and drank a glass of milk. The candy was cold and tasteless and did nothing to make her feel less hungry. She drank another glass of milk. She heard the door open and close and footsteps to the couch.

She experienced an agonizing need to expel gas. In the deathly quiet, it was not some small, indefinite noise that could have been the scrape of a chair or the systematic ripping of paper. It could only have been what it was – a long, noisy fart. She was sure Harald had heard it. They probably heard it across the river in Hoboken.

When she came into the room he was looking out of the window the way people do when they are grief-stricken or restless.

The potential danger in the air made her feel heroic. She sat down on the sofa. Would he sit down beside her? No. He chose the chair and stared at her feet, which were bare.

“Look at your ankles,” he said with total dismay. “And your feet. How swollen they are.” Nothing could have hurt her more. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. She knew it was not going to be a quickie fight. The cold, desperate look in his eyes told her he had shaped and saved his words like huge wads of gum. “I know your hurt silence,” he said, as if warning her that it was a useless tactic now. “Your philosophical silence.” She was amazed at the finesse. “Look at your knees…and your eyes…you look like a stranger. I can’t live with it.”

She noticed that his shirt was showing a little under his vest, punctuating the slope of his hips. She had ironed that shirt many times because it was his favorite and he feared the laundry would be too harsh with it. She could not have foretold the sense of relief at hearing him spell it out. Concrete terrors are better than those imagined. Relief was followed by a suffocating fear. “I’m pregnant,” she shouted impulsively. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. She was in the midst of one of her heaviest menstruations. He looked so horrified she couldn’t continue. “No. No. I’m not!”

Many days after that she would lie on the couch, shading her eyes from the sunshine she had once thought cheerful. She could get up and close the drapes but it was too much of an effort and there was something gratifying about being uncomfortable. It kept her from giving full attention to the problem of what she should do with the rest of her life. It never occurred to her that she could keep the apartment.

She thought a lot about where she would go. Not that she had a place in mind, but it comforted her to think about the kind of place she’d like to have. Clean, comfortable, small.

Sylvie had always not so secretly suspected she didn’t deserve Herald and now she would be proven right. She invented things that Sylvie might say, playing the scene a dozen ways. She wondered if Sylvie would feel any satisfaction.

She wept for all the babies she might have had. That would have made it real. Her stupidity had been in not getting pregnant. Men strayed all the time but they always came back to their wife and children. She could not believe how stupid she had been. She deserved this arid, hopeless life.

For some, when they picture perfect happiness or freedom, they picture themselves dancing or jumping. Jumping for joy. Not so with April. She had always felt the moment of greatest happiness would be perfectly still, a moment of exquisite finesse between lovers, when their minds and spirits meshed. When their every move and word is of compelling interest to the other. She couldn’t convince herself that there would be anyone or anything that would hold her interest again as Harald had done. She knew more about him than she knew about herself. She had watched over him for almost five years, taking in facts and hammering them like tiny nails into her memory. The loss was immeasurable. She felt her heart physically sinking over and over.

Her refuge was food. What was there to do but eat?

The official parting was remarkably simple. She received a lump settlement of thirty thousand dollars as well as her stock portfolio and was lucky to find an inexpensive studio apartment in the thirties. A few days after she moved in, her telephone rang.

“Mrs. Tierney?” asked an official-sounding voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Randolph Tobias of Bear Stearns. We have purchased a Ginny Mae which yields effectively six and one eighth annual percent. You can buy into it for twenty thousand dollars.

“I’m totally illiquid,” she said. “I’m not a good bet for you.” It ended almost exactly as it had begun: with an investment offer.

Chapter Six

With her thirty thousand dollars and her cozy, dark apartment, April felt temporarily safe. She didn’t have to think about anyone hating her and she didn’t have to fear any disasters. All the worst things had happened. Many days, she would grab her coat and run into the street, walking briskly as if to some important destination. Then, realizing she had no place to go, she would stand in the middle of the sidewalk, men cursing her stupidity for blocking their path.

It was a remarkable winter, bright and cheerful with many days of blue skies and brilliant sunshine. It snowed frequently and the light reflecting off the snow added to the brightness. She didn’t go out much and the sunshine was a reproach. To be indoors on a sunny day in America was worse than Communism.

Every day she awoke with the resolve to do something. Today would be the day she would begin eating sensibly. She would even start out by cutting up a bagful of carrots and celery sticks to munch on when her habits got the better of her. By eleven o’clock, she had begun nibbling. First a piece of toast with cottage cheese. That was wholesome. Commendable. She dribbled a smidgen of honey over the cheese so she wouldn’t be left with a cheesy taste in her mouth. Still okay.

Ten minutes after the toast and cheese and the smidgen of honey, she was back in the Pullman kitchen. She felt like something juicy. A ripe pear or an apple and while she was there a few peanuts – a nice complementary taste and texture. Thirst took over but the idea of water alone wasn’t appealing. Perhaps a milk shake, something frothy and sweet. She had kept the blender.

Her jaw ached and her head buzzed. She could feel the chemical changes taking place inside her, the crossed signals, the weariness, the torpor and ultimately, about four o’clock in the afternoon – that began the loneliest time of the day – a stone-like immobility. She would sit there in her giant club chair, unable to move or think. She did this almost every day for the next eight months.

One morning she awoke after sleeping fourteen hours and didn’t know what day of the week it was or what hour of the day. She went into the bathroom returned to bed and flipped on the television. A talk show host was interviewing a black woman who had given birth to Siamese twins and they had been successfully separated. It was a poignant story but after listening for one or two minutes, April heard only gibberish. She tried to concentrate but all she got was a garbled sound.

Her first desire was to leave the apartment. It was claustrophobic. She had been alone for four days and wanted to be surrounded by people. She put on a dress, a pretty print made of a cheap synthetic picked out at Macy’s. It was cut in an a-line and had once fit well. Now it bunched up in the back above the hips and was indecently short. She put on a raincoat to hide the shortness. It was not raining. It was the perfect season for a suit. She had always admired women who wore well-cut suits with ironed dimity blouses that buttoned up the back. Sara Davis’ mother had worn suits all through school and was now an assistant to the mayor. She had gone back to school – Harvard or Yale or some other big deal school.

In her dress and raincoat and sneakers without socks, she walked from the Thirties to Fifth Avenue and then to 50th Street. It was close enough to lunchtime to make the sidewalks crowded. The sun really hurt her eyes and made her want to close them but she couldn’t just stand on a busy sidewalk with her eyes closed. She fished into her large shoulder-strap bag for sunglasses but her eyes still hurt so she stepped into Saks Fifth Avenue where it was cool and dim. She would look around at the merchandise until she felt like going home again.

It was 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon and she had all the time in the world. She wasn’t especially clean but her hair was pulled away from her face with two barrettes. She couldn’t remember if she had lipstick on or not and decided to put some on with her pinkie from the freebies on the cosmetic counters.

She had entered from a side door and was in the men’s department. It was so cool and softly lit; she didn’t want to leave right away although a salesman behind the underwear counter gave her the once-over. He was staring at her sneakers and bare legs. It was too cold for bare legs. She moved to another counter and picked up some sale pajamas that were strewn in a pile. As she was standing there, she looked up and noticed a middle-aged man – a customer, with thinning well-combed hair – starring at her. He was holding a sports jacket on a hanger in one hand and had a quizzical look on his face. He wasn’t just looking out into the air; he was definitely staring at her. He began to walk in her direction.

“Pardon me,” he said. He was still holding the jacket. “I can’t quite see in this light. Is this green in the tweed or blue? I need green but not blue. I don’t think any good Harris Tweed would be blue, do you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Would you mind looking at it?”

“No.” She took off her glasses, remembering about the lipstick. She hadn’t washed her face. “It’s definitely green,” she said and put her sunglasses back on. He was about forty-eight or fifty, grey at the temples and quite young looking except for puffy jowls.

“Could I ask you one more favor?” He tried to get her to look at him. “Could you come with me to the sports jacket rack and look at one other one?”

“All right.”

He kept looking back to see if she was following him and gave her a shameful little smile, as if he was really sorry to involve her like this.

He took off his own jacket and placed it on a chair while looking through the rack. On his wrist was one of those thin watches whose face was made of lapis or jade. She wondered how he told the time. It wasn’t the sort of watch a really mature person would buy. The ads for those watches said something snobby like: Only twelve people on the planet can own one of these for Christmas. Yeah, she had always answered aloud: twelve jerks.

Now she was face to face with one of the jerks. But he was rich. He selected a jacket off the rack. “What color is this?”

“Yellow,” she said.

“Last fall, I bought a jacket here,” he was trying to explain his dilemma, “and when I got it home it was all the wrong colors. I didn’t have any shirts that really looked well with it. I don’t want that to happen again. Am I keeping you from something?”

“No. I have some time to kill.” She was immediately sorry to have said it. Perhaps he thought she had been waiting for someone to pick her up. “Actually,” she added quickly, “I’ve got to go. It’s later than I thought.”

“What time did you think it was?”

He was trying to trap her. She didn’t know what time it was. “It doesn’t matter,” she said curtly. “I’ve got to go.”

“Of course,” he said gently. “I’ve got to go, too. I’ll save this for another time. Are you going downtown? Maybe we could walk a few blocks together.” Tiny spikes of terror shot through her. Since she had gained all this weight, the least little thing made her heart beat like crazy.

“Just a block or two.”

“Of course.” He gave her a warm, reassuring smile and walked as if protecting her from the crowds. He held the door and when she was safely out, maneuvered to the outer edge of the street, the perfect gentleman.

“Going back to work?”

“No.” Now she didn’t want him to leave so quickly. After all, he was kind and treated her well. He wasn’t a bum or anything like that. She would really have liked to sit down and have a drink with him or something. “Just home.”