Worth the Weight (22 page)

“They help me remember stuff,” she answered.

“It doesn’t seem like you forget much,” Annie said.

That was true. Lizzie didn’t really need her tablets to remember things. She had a steel-trap memory and went over plans and lists in her head nightly before going to sleep and in the shower in the morning.

Always a bit of a list maker,
she
knew exactly when she’d taken her planning to this extreme level. It had been when she began to lose weight. She’d started journaling everything she ate. A humiliating experience. But eye-opening. The lists had then morphed into eating plans. And then she’d found herself writing down everything.

The notebooks, tablets, lists, all became a security blanket for her. A benchmark of her weight loss. An emblem of success. And a safety net against backslides.

She couldn’t explain any of that to
Annie. She could barely explain it to herself. She just knew that the lists were a crutch she couldn’t walk without. Yet.

She just shrugged, and that seemed to be answer enough for the little girl.

They spent the better part of an hour like that. Lizzie picking, taking the occasional call on her cell phone. Stevie hovering nearby in case he was needed. And Annie pedaling. Lizzie was astounded at the girl’s endurance, and wondered if she should put a stop to it before Annie overdid it.

Clea brought out fresh lemonade at one point and it provided Annie with a much-needed rest, but she refused to get off the bike, even for just the time it took to drink her glass of lemonade. Lizzie also decided to pick up a sports water bottle when she was at the store, one that would fit in the basket of the bike, so Annie could have fluids throughout her trek.

Clea, knowing Annie so well, did not fawn over the child’s accomplishment, but gave a quick, “Looking good, Annie”. She did however, make deep eye contact with Lizzie and reach out to squeeze her arm before she returned to the house.

Soon, it was time for the pickers to take their lunch break, which was usually a couple of hours, most of them going to the beach with bags of McDonald’s, taking a cooling swim, then returning for the afternoon pick. They were paid by the amount of berries picked, not by the hour, so they often took the hotter afternoons off then returned to pick in the early evening.

As they passed Annie and Lizzie, most of them said hello and gave words of encouragement to Annie. Lizzie could see the sense of pride in the girl’s eyes. She had to be dog-tired, and yet her pace seemed to pick up as the workers walked by. Her back rigid due to the brace, her head held high, her white-blonde hair damp along her face from her exertion and the heat of the sun. The hinting pink of sunburn across her nose made Lizzie realize it was time to go inside.

Finn
made his way in behind the workers and Lizzie got up and brushed herself off. “Time to stop, Annie, I need to go inside for a while. Besides, if you’re going to be outside again this afternoon, we need to get some sunscreen on your face.”

The idea of being outside long enough to actually burn was obviously new to Annie. Lizzie could see the girl warring with herself internally. She didn’t want to leave the bike
,
but she had to be exhausted, hungry, and in need of a potty brake. Lizzie sure was. She tried to make it easier on Annie.

“I’ll have Stevie put the bike in the barn, and we can do it again tomorrow morning, okay?”

That seemed to please her and Annie nodded.
Finn
was nearing them and began helping Lizzie disengage Annie from the bike. “My, my, my…my own little Lance Armstrong,” he said.

“Just who the hell is Lance Armstrong?” Annie said.

Lizzie couldn’t help but laugh as
Finn
chided Annie for her language, much like Katie constantly chided Alison. He lifted her and put her in her chair as Lizzie knelt to put Annie’s feet in the stirrups and disengage the break. She looked up past Annie’s glowing face to
Finn
’s and her heart stopped
at his expression
. It beamed with
affection
. And this time it wasn't directed at Annie, but at
her
.

He mouthed a silent “Thank You”
and turned his attention to his daughter.

“No wonder you went into PR, Lizard, you always did plan the best parties. I’m starting to think that’s all you do for a living.”

Lizzie raised her head from her tablet that contained her notes and numerous lists for the fundraiser and accepted the glass of lemonade that Alison brought to her at the picnic table. She stuck her pen behind her ear, and took a long swallow of the sweet, icy-cold drink. “Mmm, thanks, Al, that hits the spot.”

Finally registering what Alison had said as she’d approached, Lizzie answered, “This is definitely the up side to my business, that’s for sure. You know how I love to plan things.”

Alison chuckled. “Yeah, right down to the time line for having introductory sex with a man you haven’t seen in years.”

She
took the ribbing good naturedly
.
“Anything worth doing, is worth planning out several times over.”

“Heaven forbid you ever do anything spontaneously.”

“I do lots of things spontaneously. See.” She flipped through her day planner and pointed to an imaginary entry. “I have spontaneity planned for next Friday from two
‘til
five.”

They were at Alison’s, catching up because Lizzie hadn’t seen much of them in the two weeks since she’d been back from Ann Arbor. Katie joined them, bringing
chips and salsa
with her from the camp and plunking it down in front of the three of them. Lizzie only briefly looked
at the snack
,
then resumed writing a note to herself about confirming the menu of the banquet with the caterer.

She grabbed her cell to make a call, but Katie placed her hand on hers and gently tugged the p
hone away. “Slow down. T
his can all wait a couple of hours. Talk to us, tell us what’s been happening.”

Katie was right, this stuff could wait. Or better yet, she could call Sybil later and have someone at the office handle it for her. She was getting better and better at delegating.

She caught Alison and Katie up on the time she’d spent at the farm. About Annie now riding daily on the exercise bike. She didn’t tell the last part of the story to Katie and Alison as they sat on the dock, dangling their feet in the water. The part about the look in
Finn
’s eyes as he’d thanked her. It’d be just like them to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Besides, there was no way
Finn
could love
– or almost love –
her. He had always seen her as a conquest, nothing more. She supposed that this fundraiser would cloud things for him. His pride was an animal all its own and he probably struggled with everything that was being done for him. For Annie,
she
corrected herself.

“So that’s how you’ve been spending your days - playing trainer and getting your manicure totally ruined by picking strawberries - but how about the nights?” Katie asked, her voice sing-songy at the end.

“Have you fucked
Finn
yet?” Alison asked, getting right to it.

Katie bristled, as she always did at blunt language. “Al!”

Lizzie laughed at
her girls
. She knew Katie wanted to know the same thing, she just asked in a much more round about way. “No, not yet, and I’ll tell you it had better happen soon, or I’m going to have to totally reconfigure my time table.” She threw that in for Alison’s earlier lack of spontaneity comment.

Katie and Alison looked at each other and Lizzie waited to see whic
h one would be the spokesperson
. Obviously they had something they wanted to say.

It
ended up being Katie. “I’ll ask again. A
re you sure about this plan? You’re spending time with his kids, more time with
Finn
than you thought you would.
That wasn’t part of the plan.
”

“I appreciate your concern. But it isn’t necessary. Look, I’ve spent the last three years really examining my life…”
she
started to explain.

“You’ve spent the last three years working really hard to become half the size you were, and beautiful, just beautiful,” Katie emphasized, with just a hint of misting in her eyes as she took Lizzie’s hand and squeezed.

L
izzie could take a compliment
from Alison and Katie, because they were always her friends, in thin, thick, really thick and then thin again. She was not nearly so accepting of compliments or encouragement from other people
.
Her staff knew not to even mention her diminishing size, because
she’d
brush them off with some se
lf-effacing piece of humor,
then be pensive the rest of the day.

“Thanks, Katie,”
she
acknowledged, returning her friend’s hand squeeze. She fingered the pages of her notebook; a talisman giving her strength to continue. “But during those three years, I had all that time on my hands that I used to eat with, so I did a lot of thinking,” Lizzie
joked
. She joked about her weight gain and subsequent loss, but only she knew what she had gone through to not reach for a bag of Oreos after a stressful day.

Instead, she’d turned her focus onto herself. “The thought I kept coming back to is when and why I started putting on weight, it was a tree through the forest kind of thing for me, but I think I’ve got it semi-figured out
.
I started putting on weight
our senior year in college,
then it took off fast, so fast
I didn’t
even realize it at first. Sure your clothes don’t fit and you can feel the changes in your body, but you kind of stop paying attention to your body
.
The style was leggings and long sweaters then, remember? Those sweaters hid a lot of sins for awhile.”

Both Alison and Katie nodded, but remained silent. They weren’t about to interrupt this stream of consciousness from, she so seldom
really
opened up about herself. She was the keeper of other people’s secrets, her own as well
.

They had been there when she began putting on weight and Lizzie knew they felt helpless as they watched
.
What could they do? They
’d
mentione
d it, at first in a teasing way
,
then in a we’re-here-because-we-love-you-and-this-is-an-intervention kind of way, but to no avail
.

“So, anyway, I’ve realized that my eating got out of control not too long after I’d become sexually active, which could be Freudian enough, but now I think that was a red herring, and the true trigger was not becoming sexually active but why I did it then, after waiting all those years, being pretty much the oldest virgin any of us knew. I mean, my God, Sparty’s helmet was only a few months away from dropping!”

The women all laughed. Sparty was a statue on the campus at Michigan State of a Spartan warrior
.
Lizzie always felt he had been modeled after Michelangelo’s David, strong, gorgeous, very virile
.
He held his shield in one hand and his helmet in the other. The legend went that if a virgin ever graduated from Michigan State, Sparty would drop his helmet. Lizzie had been close, she was midway through fall term of their senior year when Sparty sighed with relief that he’d
hang on to his headgear a while longer
.

“So, why
then
?
It certainly wasn’t because you had found true love,” Alison asked. The guy Lizzie had finally relented with, Matt, was a guy from Hancock, someone Lizzie had known forever and was also going to State. They had been at a party, chatted all night like the old pals they were, gotten drunk, and went home together. Matt was shocked when he realized Lizzie was still a virgin, and tried to put the kibosh to the whole dealings, but a drunken
she
was adamant that tonight was the night.

They hadn’t gotten together after that, neither of them had expected to
.
She
then had two more encounters like that in the next 5 months
.
All had been friends she had grown up with
, or had know her three plus years at State
, trusted completely, thought of as brothers, and slept with one time
.
She felt nothing
,
either emotionally or physically
,
during any of it
.

The first time with
Matt she’
d been pretty drunk. Drunk enough, she rationalized, that she had numbed out in her body, not feeling any sensations at all. The second time, she had drunk less, but was still numb. She tried again cold sober, but came away with the same feeling of inadequacy in her sexuality. She hadn’t climaxed in any of the
couplings, or if she had, didn’
t realize it, which in Lizzie’s opinion may have been worse.