Read Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) Online
Authors: Kathryn Harvey
Hannah sat back in shock. She pressed her lips together and fought the rising tears. "He said that?" she whispered. "Mr. Katz actually said
that?
Do they all think that, the brokers, everyone in the office? Do they all think of me as a fat girl?" she asked, suddenly looking back and realizing things she hadn't been aware of before: the interviews she had gone on, not getting one job offer; the interviewer who had asked her how much she weighed, penciling it in the corner of her application; Mr. Driscoll accusing her in a teasing way of eating the entire box of office donuts, even though Hannah hadn't touched even one; and finally, Mr. Reardon trying to talk a client into buying some stock, the man saying, "Is it a good investment?" and Reardon saying, "Do fat girls fuck?"
"Is that how the world sees me, Ardeth?" she asked in a tight voice. "They look at me and all they see is a fat girl? They don't see who I am; they don't see me?"
"Hannah," Ardeth said, trying to be reasonable. "Mr. Katz's secretary deals with important clients. She is the first person they see; she represents this firm to the public. It's important how she looks."
"What am I? Don't I iron my clothes? Do I smell? For heaven's sake, Ardeth, I take pride in my appearance; I'm always careful about how I look! I make all my own clothes. You yourself are always telling me how smartly
dressed I am." Her chin trembled. She had never felt so ashamed. "Ardeth, you act as if you agree with him!"
"I don't, Hannah. I honestly don't. But if you could just lose some weight—"
"Lose weight! Have you ever been fat? How can you know what it's like? If you've never had to lose weight a day in your life, how can you
know?
"
Ardeth couldn't respond. It was true that she had always been slim and had never had to watch what she ate; she just assumed that people were fat because they ate too much.
"Ardeth, I've been fat ever since I was a child. My parents are overweight. I know for a fact that I don't eat as much as you do. Just compare your lunch with mine."
"I'm sorry, Hannah," Ardeth said, wishing Katz hadn't put her in this unpleasant position.
"Tell me, does everyone who looks at me think of me as a fat girl?" Oh God, Mr. Scadudo—
"Let me give you some advice, Hannah," Ardeth said firmly and a little impatiently. "First of all, if you want to get ahead in this world, lose weight. That's a fact of life. And second, I've got to be honest with you, if you want to be a fashion designer, face it, no one is going to take a fat fashion designer seriously." She bit into her egg and said with a full mouth, "Well? Are they?"
The women sat in molded plastic chairs that looked too fragile to bear their weight, occupying themselves with magazines or needlepoint, trying not to look as if they were in the waiting room of the Tarzana Obesity Clinic. As Philippa checked in with the receptionist, she looked around at the patients, eight of them, who ranged in ages from their early twenties, like herself, to one who she guessed was around seventy. All were overweight, some severely so. And she wondered what each of them had tried before coming here, to this place of last resort.
In the year since Philippa had lost her baby and had decided to change her image, she had attempted many popular reducing diets. The first had come out of a magazine, "guaranteed if followed to the letter." It started off each day with half a grapefruit, a dish of strawberries, and a glass of skim milk. But by midmorning Philippa was shaking so badly and feeling faint, a film of perspiration covering her body, that she had eaten her lunch, which
had consisted of cottage cheese and half a peach. But by noon she was shaky again and so weak that she could barely stand. Since her lunch was gone, she had been forced to eat, blowing the diet.
Then she had purchased the best-seller
Calories Don't Count
, by Herman Taller, M.D. The food required for the regimen was high in fat: steaks and ground round, bacon, sardines and tuna fish packed in oil, blocks of cheese, eggs and margarine to fry them in. In addition, she was supposed to drink two tablespoons of oil before each meal. The diet called for 65 percent of her intake to be fat, which meant eight ounces of meat for lunch and twelve ounces of meat for dinner, along with fried eggs and fried potatoes and the tablespoons of vegetable oil. The diet had made her nauseous; she gave it up. She had then tried the lemon juice gimmick, but had only ended up with a hyperacidic stomach. Laxatives were another currently popular solution, an experiment that lasted half a day. The egg-and-grapefruit-only diet had been so boring that she'd gone off it after a week. Then she'd simply restricted herself to five hundred calories a day and had nearly fainted at her job. Now, almost a year after Rhys's death and the loss of her baby, after months of trying to diet, she was five pounds heavier. In desperation she had finally taken Mrs. Chadwick's advice to seek professional help. Unfortunately, the only help available was from private physicians, who charged enormous fees.
As she took a seat and waited for her name to be called, Philippa looked around the waiting room and wondered about the other women there, what their stories were, what had motivated them to come to a place like this. The woman in the unfortunate purple pants and shell top, for instance—was she here because her husband was tired of her? The lady in the ill-fitting skirt and yellow blouse—was she facing a twenty-year class reunion? Philippa tried not to stare at them, but her curiosity drove her to study their faces surreptitiously while she pretended to read a magazine. And in all their expressions she saw one feature in common: the look of dejection that accompanies low self-esteem. What unhappiness with themselves, she wondered, had brought them here?
The scene had an almost surreal quality to it. Out in the real world, at the Cut-Cost Drugstore, for example, where she still worked, or at West
Hollywood Junior College, where she was taking the final night classes that would earn her a degree, people came in such a wide range that they all kind of blended in. Her political science class, for instance, had some elderly people, a few young high school dropouts, Hispanics, some very fat people, some very thin ones, and a woman who was terribly short. But no one stood out. The mix somehow evened them all out—crowds, the great equalizer. But here, in a small room where eight women sat self-consciously as if they were waiting to audition for some movie fat-lady role, the effect was stunning, to say the least.
The air in the waiting room seemed to hang heavy with apology, eight women generating a single thought: Forgive me for the eyesore that I am. They seemed to sit with drooping eyes and downcast shoulders that said, I hate myself. It made Philippa think of Mouse, the little half-developed thing that had almost blinded herself in a desperate attempt to become normal. Mouse had given off this same signal, an apology for being what she was.
Philippa watched in fascination as one very large woman in an unflattering avocado-colored dress worked savagely at creating an enormous afghan right there in the waiting room, spinning out an orange and brown zigzag pattern with such nervous zeal that the blue crochet hook was but a blur. Another woman was polishing off the last of a very large 3 Musketeers bar, and when she opened her purse to stuff the wadded wrapper in, Philippa glimpsed more wads. Were they a week's worth, she wondered, or the result of a mere morning's work?
She was suddenly upset for all of them. She wanted to say something, to bring to a halt whatever inexorable process was under way in this little waiting room. But she had no idea what to say. And as it occurred to her that these women were in some way doomed, just as Rhys had been, hurtling themselves toward some subtle, grotesque form of self-destruction, her anxiety deepened.
At that moment, the door to the inner office opened and a young woman came out, nearly running. Her cheeks burned and her eyes were full of fire. When she slammed her purse down at the receptionist's window, everyone looked up, startled. A heated exchange passed between her and the receptionist. "That's not the price you quoted me over the phone!"
The receptionist, embarrassed, tried to say in a low voice, "There is an additional charge for the weekly menus."
"But the doctor didn't
do
anything! No examination—he didn't even take my blood pressure! He barely looked at my face, and he wouldn't answer any of my questions. For goodness sake, I was in there less than ten minutes!"
"I'm sorry, Miss Ryan, but—"
"And on top of that I have to pay for bus fare because I live in Woodland Hills. Both ways! I can't afford this!" As she fumbled for her wallet with shaking hands, her purse fell. Lipstick, eyebrow pencil, compact, a roll of Life Savers, and an unusual number of pennies went skittering everywhere. As Philippa, who was seated near the reception window, helped her gather up her things, she said, "If you wait for me, I'll be glad to give you a ride home."
"If it's not out of your way," Hannah said, eyes glistening with incipient tears. "I'd appreciate it."
Philippa was called in a minute later.
Dr. Hehr's was like no doctor's office she had ever seen. The walls were covered with photographs of women, fat and thin—before and after shots, Philippa realized when she looked more closely—accompanied by framed letters thanking Dr. Hehr. Clutter was everywhere; a stack of medical journals looked as if it was about to topple to the floor; plants and knickknacks seemed to have been placed about by an absentminded decorator; and the Venetian blinds that admitted sliced views of Ventura Boulevard were dusty. When Dr. Hehr finally walked into the office, he dominated the room with a jolly kind of largeness. He was huge, with bushy eyebrows, chubby cheeks, and a white lab coat that only barely buttoned over his stomach.
He took her hand into his big paw and, giving her a hearty handshake, boomed, "So, Philippa, you want to lose weight! Well, you've come to the right place. There is no better diet under the sun than the one I invented. Just look at these photos," he said, pointing to the pictures of fat-thin women on the walls. Many of them were inscribed "With my deepest gratitude" and "I couldn't have done it without you." Dr. Hehr said, "These are my girls. Aren't they wonderful?"
Some of the "girls," Philippa noticed, were many years older than he.
He opened her file and read the sheets that she had filled out in the waiting room. "I see here, Philippa," he said, "that you're five eight and weigh two ten." He looked at her. "That's sixty pounds overweight, according to the Metropolitan Insurance chart. How old are you?"
"Twenty-one."
He regarded her over the rims of his glasses. "It says here that you only eat dinner. Is that true?"
"Yes."
"And I'm not surprised!" he boomed! startling her. "You see, little girl, it's not necessarily overeating that causes obesity, it's
incorrect
eating. And all you girls are guilty of that. But don't worry, I have invented the perfect diet that is guaranteed to get you down to the weight you're supposed to be. It's no ordinary diet, I'll tell you that. It took me years to design and perfect. I'm sure you've been on dozens of diets before; all you girls have. It's a hobby with you. But the charm of my diet is that you don't count calories." He leaned forward and fixed his eyes on her. "But what you have to do is follow the diet
to the letter.
Is that understood?"
"Yes, Doctor."
"Now then, I am going to give you a menu each week that you must follow exactly—I mean to the letter."
"Yes, Doctor."
He paused and looked at her for a moment, then said, "You know, you're very pretty. It's too bad you're fat. But we'll take care of that. Just leave everything to me." He stood, indicating that the interview was over. "You'll do well on my diet, Philippa. I spent years devising this plan, I know it works. Well, just look at all my happy girls," he said, gesturing again to the pictures on the wall. "Just be sure you eat exactly what's printed here," he said, handing her a mimeographed sheet. "Don't try to make any changes. When you come back next week, you'll be weighed, and I'll give you the next menu. You see how easy it is? If you don't lose weight," he said, "it's because you're cheating. I can always tell."
As she walked out of Dr. Hehr's office, Philippa scanned the first sheet and saw that breakfast every day consisted of fruit and fruit juice. Mid-morning
snack was an apple. In fact, she saw with rising dismay, the diet was loaded with fruit. She knew already that she was going to be plagued with shaking and light-headedness.
Before she left Dr. Hehr's office, he said, "One last thing, young lady. The first and hardest thing you are going to have to do while you are my patient is cut out sweets. Is that understood?"
"But I don't—" she started to say.
He held up a hand. "I know what you're going to say; it's what all you girls say," he laughed, "that one donut in the morning isn't going to hurt, or a small slice of pie after dinner. But you must avoid all sweets—cakes, cookies, candy, ice cream. It will be hard at first, oh I know! But if you just stick to that one piece of advice, you'll see the weight drop off. Now then, girlie," Dr. Hehr said as he placed an arm around Philippa's shoulders, "just stick to this diet and you'll see amazing results. Some of you gals lose as much as seven or eight pounds in the first week. But only if there are no changes, no substitutions, no rearranging the order of what you eat. Is that understood?"
Philippa was reading the lunch listing for day five—a broiled hamburger patty—and wondering how she was going to broil a hamburger on the hot plate in the employees' lounge at Cut-Cost.
But she said, "Yes, Doctor," and left.
The young woman who had dropped her purse was waiting for her, and instead of heading straight for Woodland Hills, they decided to go across the street to the Cut-Cost Drugstore and get something to eat at the lunch counter.