Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (38 page)

     She said her name was Hannah Ryan, and as soon as they were settled into one of the turquoise booths at the back of the drugstore, just on the other side of a partition from lawn care products, she slammed her purse down again the way she had on the receptionist's counter and said, "They have no right to charge that much! I'm so mad! I thought they were going to
help
me! I was so
sure.
I've tried everything else, even that ghastly grapefruit-and-egg diet, but nothing works! I'm desperate, you know?" she said, presenting two probing eyes to Philippa.

     "Yes, I know," Philippa said, and then she confessed her own dissatisfaction over the visit with Dr. Hehr.

     "He kept calling me 'girlie,'" Hannah said. "I hate that. I'll bet if I went back in there right now he wouldn't know me from Mamie Eisenhower. So why should we go there? What do they have to offer us? This stupid diet looks like any ordinary low-calorie diet." She waved the mimeographed sheet that was an endless repetition of eggs, cottage cheese, string beans, and fruit. "So what are we paying such an exorbitant fee for?"

     "The incentive," Philippa said. "We've hired ourselves a policeman. Dr. Hehr will make us stick to the diet. It's the weekly weighing-in, by someone other than ourselves, that we're paying for. The commitment, in a strange way, to someone else, because we can't seem to commit to ourselves, I guess. We'll dread getting a lecture from Dr. Hehr if we don't lose weight, and we'll be thrilled with his praise when we do. That's what we're paying for."

     "I suppose you're right," Hannah said more quietly. "I am lousy dieting on my own, I always give up. I know I need policing, or encouragement, or whatever. And a weekly menu, too, I suppose. Oh shoot, it's just so expensive. But there is nothing else, is there? I tried going to a gym in Reseda, and they put me on this awful wheat germ and carrot juice and then made me do half an hour of calisthenics. And that was expensive, too, so I quit. I've got to be careful with my money if I'm going to go to Greer."

     When the waitress came to take their order, wearing a faded turquoise uniform with a large starched handkerchief in the blouse pocket, Philippa thought of her own Cut-Cost Drugstore over the hill in Hollywood, where she still worked, after five years, as a stock clerk, because she couldn't be promoted to lunch counter waitress on account of the uniforms being only small sizes. Philippa and Hannah ordered the Cut-Cost chef's salad and two glasses of iced tea. When they were alone again, Hannah explained to Philippa about her ambition to become a fashion designer and her determination to go to Greer Art Academy.

     "But I can't do it unless I lose forty pounds in five months. Yikes..."

     She shook her head and Philippa noticed for the first time tiny gold earrings under the edges of Hannah's cap of short brown hair. She noticed with fascination that Hannah's ears were pierced; Philippa had never known anyone who did that. "I have so many strikes against me," Hannah said as she took a straw out of the plastic container on their table, picked off the end of
the wrapper, and very slowly peeled the wrapper down. "Heredity, for one," she said. "All the women in my family are fat. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers were fat. Heck, I was a fat baby! That's why I don't see how Dr. Hehr's diet can work for everyone. I mean, I was expecting some sort of custom diet, you know, like where he analyzes each of us and comes up with a diet to suit? One of the women in the waiting room was telling me that she had been thin all her life until she had her two babies. She gained thirty pounds all at once and can't get it off. But isn't her chemistry different from mine? Won't she have an easier time of it? I knew a girl in high school—Maria Monokandilos, from Greece. She binged in the eleventh grade and got very fat, fatter even than me. In the twelfth grade she got a boyfriend, went back to normal eating, and the fat just melted off. So you see, our cases are all different. Yikes," she said again, pulling the wrapper back up the straw and slowly drawing it down again. "And what an awful name for the place. Tarzana Obesity Clinic. It's degrading, it sounds like a punishment. It should have a more encouraging name."

     Philippa lined up her spoon, knife, and fork on the paper napkin, then said, "How about...Lovely Ladies Beauty Society?"

     Hannah laughed. "Young Princesses of America!" She smiled. "I'm sorry. I've been doing all the talking. I just got so mad."

     "That's all right. You're only saying all the same things that are on my mind."

     "Are you married, Philippa?"

     An image flashed in her mind, Rhys slumped over his typewriter as if he were asleep, the dark smudge on his temple looking like the smudge of ash one received on the forehead on Ash Wednesday—a final benediction. After she recovered from the miscarriage, she had gone back to Rhys's apartment, but there was no trace of him there. Mr. Laszlo had told her that the brother had come and cleared out all of Rhys's things. He'd even taken the body back to some hometown up north, so there wasn't even a grave she could visit to say good-bye. It was as though Rhys, and the baby, had never even existed.

     "I'm single," she said, "and I live in a boardinghouse. That's one of my problems. My landlady is a terrific cook, and her feelings get hurt if you don't eat what she fixes. I haven't the heart to turn her food down, she's like
a mother to me. The mother I never had, I guess."

     At Hannah's questioning eyebrow, Philippa added, "I was adopted as a baby. I don't know who my real parents are."

     "You don't have a family?"

     "No. No brothers, no sisters, no relatives at all."

     Hannah couldn't imagine what that would be like, her own family being so extensive that she sometimes thought she must be related to half the world's population. She could recognize a relation in an instant, her mega-family being divided between two sets of genes, the boys always inheriting the Ryan proclivity for adultery, the girls, the LaCross Indian eyes.

     "When I was a kid, it was humiliating to be fat," Hannah said. "Kids choosing teams, and I was always left standing. And when the teacher assigned me to a team, they all groaned."

     Philippa told her about St. Bridget's, about Amber throwing up.

     "What do you suppose it's all about?" Hannah said when their salads and iced tea arrived. "I mean, does it all boil down to sex? Girls want to be thin to catch men, don't they?" she asked, thinking about Alan Scadudo and that tight fit of his pants across his buttocks. Sometimes, when she allowed herself to look, she noticed the snug fit across the front as well. "Do men really only want thin women? If only they could be fat-blind like they're sometimes color-blind!"

     They both laughed and began to eat.

     "I feel better," Hannah said after she added a lot of sugar to her tea and too much Thousand Island dressing to the lettuce. She attacked her food with the gusto she had been taught since childhood.

     "You notice that Dr. Hehr is no slim chicken," she said between crunchy mouthfuls. "He doesn't have to be. He's a man. Men don't worry about the same things we do. I wonder if they worry about anything at all."

     "I suppose they have their insecurities," Philippa said, picturing Rhys.

     "I suppose you're right. They worry about being too short, I guess, or that they might lose their hair, or that they aren't supermen in bed." Mr. Scadudo popped into her mind again. "There's this man where I work. He's around my age, maybe twenty-two or-three. He's short, but it doesn't seem to bother him, and I like short men. He's very quiet and sweet. He's going to
night school to study for the CPA exam. I fantasize about him all the time, but I don't think he's even aware that I'm alive. Do you suppose he'll notice me when I'm thin?"

     Suddenly, the salad seemed too green. The colors weren't natural beneath the drugstore's bright fluorescent lights. Hannah pushed her bowl aside and reached for her iced tea, holding the glass before her with both hands like a bridal bouquet. "When I was a senior in high school and had yet to have anything even remotely resembling a boyfriend, my cousin took pity on me and set me up with a blind date. She and her boyfriend picked me up, and when we went to get Ernie at his house, he started to get into the car, saying hiya and all that, but when he saw me his face fell so hard you could practically hear it hit the curb. And I saw how he hesitated before he got in, like he was thinking all in a split second, I can get out of this if I run right now."

     She fished into the glass for the wedge of lemon and toyed with it with her spoon. "He went through with the date. Brave boy. We went to the Reseda Drive-In to see this foreign film called
La Strada
that none of us could understand, and my cousin and her boyfriend had the audacity to make out right in front of us. Ernie never said a word to me, never looked at me; he pretended he was interested in the movie. When he and my cousin's boyfriend went off to the snack bar during intermission, I heard Ernie say, 'Jesus, Don, you didn't tell me your girlfriend's cousin was—' I didn't hear the last word, but I sure can guess what it was."

     "How awful," Philippa said.

     "What about you? Any luck with boys?"

     "My luck is worse than yours. I never made it to a drive-in."

     Hannah leaned forward and said in a low voice, "I'm twenty-one years old and still a virgin. Of course, I'm not married, but it still makes me feel somehow unaccomplished. Maybe there will be some cute guys at Greer." She sat back and said, "If I ever get there. God, I'm starting to hate myself. I'm starting to believe all those years of anti-fat propaganda. Maybe the rest of the world is right, maybe I am just fat and worthless."

     "No you're not," Philippa said. "Don't say that."

     "That was the way Dr. Hehr treated us. Making us feel guilty. How can those other women who sat there waiting to see him put up with that?"

     "Hannah, when I was twelve I almost submitted to a humiliating act because I believed I deserved it. I thought I was worthless. But at the last minute, I stood up for myself. Those women just haven't learned to do that, they haven't found a way to believe in themselves. They're still convinced they're worthless and deserving of whatever rotten treatment they get."

     "I can't go back to that ghastly clinic. I can't afford it. If I go there, I'll never be able to afford to go to school. But if I don't lose weight...Oh, what the heck!" Hannah said, looking over at the glass display above the counter, where a few weary-looking triangles of pie sat on white plates. "I'm going to splurge and have some cheesecake. That's what my mother always has when she's feeling low. How about you? I'll spring for it!"

     "I can't eat cheesecake," Philippa said. "I can't eat anything sweet. I react funny to it. I don't know why."

     "Maybe you have a metabolic disorder, you know, like diabetes. You see? That's why I think Dr. Hehr should have taken blood samples or something, to see what our individual needs are. What a jerk."

     While they waited for her cheesecake and Philippa's coffee, Hannah said, "You know, if you changed that round collar to a V neck, you'd take ten pounds off."

     When Philippa gave her a puzzled look, she said, "Sorry, I didn't mean that as an insult. Fashion design is my hobby. I've been doing it ever since I was a kid. A
fat
kid. I learned a long time ago how to make clothes help me to look thinner." She blushed a little. "I guess I don't look like a fashion designer, do I? I mean, fashion designers aren't fat. But do you know what Coco Chanel said? She said if you dress shabbily, people remember the clothes. But if you dress well, they remember the woman.

     "You know what I think would work on you?" she said. "Because, actually, the dress itself is really very nice. It's just that round collars fatten the face. Here," she said, and she lifted over her head a thick gold chain with a heavy medallion at the end, a round piece with some kind of bird sculpture on it. She placed it over Philippa's head and straightened it on her chest. "There! It softens the curve of the collar, draws your lines down, makes you look thinner on top. Scarves and heavy necklaces are good for that."

     Philippa turned and tried to see her reflection in the plastic wall of the
partition. "You're right, it does make a difference. I'll have to remember that," she said, and she started to remove the necklace.

     "Keep it," Hannah said. "It wasn't expensive. And it certainly isn't real gold!"

     "But it's lovely. I really couldn't."

     "Philippa, you've helped me to feel better by listening to me. There's no one I can talk to. My friends are all thin, and my family sees nothing wrong with being fat."

     As she looked into Hannah's smile and felt the weight of the heavy medallion "draw down her lines," making her ten pounds thinner while she just sat there, Philippa suddenly experienced an old feeling, one that hadn't touched her since the night of her thirteenth birthday, when Frizz surprised her with a secret midnight birthday party in the dorm. Nine girls had come, bringing small presents, and clever Frizz, knowing Philippa's difficulty with sweets, had somehow managed to sneak down to the kitchen and fashion a birthday cake out of Spam. It had even had candles in it. Philippa knew that she and Hannah Ryan were going to be friends.

     "Listen," she said. "Let's meet again, here, one week from today, at this same time. For the next seven days, we'll both follow Dr. Hehr's diet, we'll follow it religiously. If we think we're going to fall off it, we'll give each other a call. Next week we'll weigh ourselves on those scales there." She pointed to the drugstore entrance. "We'll give each other incentive. You won't go back to the clinic, but I'll go, and I'll get the new menu next week and pass it on to you. That way you'll save money. What do you think?"

     "Oh, yes!" Hannah said, and two things popped into her mind: the lovely oak-shaded campus of Greer Academy, and Alan Scadudo's wonderfully sculpted ass.