You're Not Pretty Enough (8 page)

“No…no, I really love you, it’s just that…I want our children to look back at our wedding photos and see you looking beautiful…”

I was five-six and 127 pounds when I met Leo; with the added
weight, I was up to 145 pounds. And while my boyfriend, who implied he would soon be my fiancé, made me feel like a fat piece of shit, I was also beginning to get a lot of attention. I became increasingly aware that for every male who
wasn’t quite into curves, there were others who had a different “type” in mind. And for those men, I was the gold standard.

When I was “heavy,” I preferred photos taken from the neck up
– including a set of Glamour Shots I gifted Leo with as an effort to prove I was pretty. All I proved is that my hair is fabulous and chokers aren’t my thing.

So while I was confused, I desperately wanted to get back to
the fun days, the sex days, the days when Leo would make me feel like I was the only person who mattered. Stupid fairy tales! Seriously, for as much as I loved
Star Wars,
I loved princesses roughly the same. The story of Princess
Jen: Chubby Duckling into the Swan! I knew that if I applied myself I could do it, but I also knew in my core that I was not losing the weight for me, and it burned me up. However, as things got back to normal, much to everyone’s relief,
I placed that burning resentment in a box, buried it, and positioned a headstone on it: “Jen’s Better Judgment, RIP.”

Leo proposed at the end of my senior year at Cleveland’s most fancy restaurant—the Top of the Town—and I said yes. After
college I moved back to Newbury to live with my mom, plan the wedding, and find a job. Leo owned a small condo and was planning on selling it to help fund the purchase of our new home. We set up appointments to look at houses for sale,
and when we went to viewings, Leo’s parents were always in tow. My mother-in-law, Sophia, was a 110-pound spitfire. She and her husband, Luca, had emigrated separately to the US from Italy when they were both around sixteen, and there was no way they were going to let their firstborn,
American-influenced boy make such a large decision on his own.

After a couple of appointments, I pulled Leo aside. “Do your parents need to come with us to every open house?”

“Well, they know a lot about this stuff, so they thought it
would be helpful.” Luca built and managed several properties in the West Side Cleveland suburbs.

“Yeah, sure, once we decide to make an offer it makes sense
for them to check it out, but on the first look?”

“Jen, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. It will still be our decision.”

And then, just six weeks before our wedding, shortly after all two hundred invitations had been mailed, Leo called me, excited, and said,
“We just bought our new house, Kissy!” (Of all the pet names we could have chosen, “Kissy” was what we landed on). I was stunned.

“What do you mean?”

“Dad saw a place that was open right next to one of his
properties, so it’ll be perfect—I’ll help with the upkeep there, and in exchange, they’re going to help with the down payment.”

“Did you sign the papers? I mean, is it a done deal?”

“Yep—I can’t wait for you to see it!”

“Let me get this straight. You just bought the house that we are going to live in without me seeing it AND your parents are part owners?”

“Yeah….so?”

“So you don’t you think I should have been part of that decision?”

“Look, it was too good to pass up, and we had to act fast. You’re going to love it!”

“But what if we want to move and your parents don’t want us
to sell? What then?”

“Jen, my parents are not going to screw us, if that’s what you’re implying.” I imagined steam coming out of my ears like in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you did this.”

“I don’t know why you’re so pissed. After all, it was
my
money from
my
condo that helped make this happen.”

“And your parents’ money, don’t forget that!” And then I
hung up. People talk about red flags, and this one was raised high on the flagpole, waving prominently. I was conflicted and thought about calling off the wedding. For two weeks I stewed and analyzed and fretted and sought advice.
My parents maintained the dynamic that we established after I went to college: it’s your decision, and we’ll support you no matter what. My friends, like everyone else, were thoroughly charmed by Leo (or “Raymond”—remember, everybody loved him).

“So what? You have an awesome soon-to-be husband who bought you a HOUSE! What the hell’s the problem?”

For me, it always came down to the embarrassment factor of calling off a wedding and losing the money already invested. Oddly, I didn’t
focus on the relationship at all. Three weeks before the big day, I still had no idea whether I was going to go through with it, though I kept that to myself. And always playing in my head was the fact that where I came from and
in that time, marriage was the next step. We’d been dating for five years, and in Ohio in the early nineties, if you didn’t break up by that time, you got married. Between 1993 and 1995 I was in at least ten weddings.

Two weeks before the wedding Leo took me to the house. The
previous owners had just vacated, and he brought me there, blindfolded me, and set up candles and a picnic on the living room floor. He took off the blindfold and stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders.

“What do you think?” he asked, his face excited and hopeful, like a child presenting his first real attempt at an art project.

“I love it.”

I hated it. The house itself was fine—nice, actually—but
I didn’t have a hand in it, and I would forever feel like a renter, a squatter. During that picnic Leo told me how he couldn’t wait to start our life together and that this was just the beginning of how much fun we were going to have.
Before long, we were having sex on the floor, and I was thinking about the moment Leo would see me walk toward him, soon to be his wife.

I like big hair and I cannot lie.

We got married in August of 1994 in a Catholic church with a full mass, complete with Holy Communion, even though half of my family is Jewish and the other half are lapsed Protestants. In other words, I was married
in a ceremony in which I could not participate. I protested, but my mother-in-law was adamant, and if I pushed, she pushed harder. We had a really progressive priest, I justified to myself, so I lowered the new red flag down
the flagpole and thought,
What’s the big deal? It’s the
occasion
, not the ceremony, right?

At our rehearsal dinner my father-in-law yelled at me when he learned the salads would be served family style instead of individually. My
inner voice said,
Go to your happy place,
and that carried me through to the wedding where we were joyful and excited about our future. We went on a cruise to the Caribbean, and I cried several times. I thought I was letting go of
stress, but Leo told me I was acting like a baby. I was twenty-three. I felt like a baby.

****************

The red flags I ignored before banded together and merged as huge, crimson swaths of fabric that covered the walls and the floors and were
stacked high in the linen closet. Almost immediately after we got married, the dynamic shifted. Leo appeared to be becoming more…
traditional.

For example, he wanted to have dinner every single Sunday at
his parents’. Now, I liked his family, especially my sister-in-law, but I do
not
like having a lock on my calendar once a week. Never have. Rarely ever will. So I told him so.

“I mean, let’s plan dinners, I like dinner! But every single
week? Nuh uh.” Not my jam.

Soon after we married, I got a job as a marketing manager for a small economic development agency, and my commute was longer than Leo’s. One night I arrived home and found him sitting on the couch watching TV,
waiting for me to walk in the door. He greeted me warmly.

“Hi, honey, what’s for dinner?”

“I….don’t…know….want to go out?”

“No, let’s cook something.”

“OK, what do you have in mind?”

“Whatever you feel like cooking.”

I laughed. “Are you serious?”

He turned from the couch where he was watching TV and laughed back, but said, seriously, “Yeah, why?”

“Because we’ve been together for five years, and I have hardly ever cooked for you before. That’s why.”

“Yeah, well, we were just dating then. Now we’re married.” And then he went back to watching TV.

My first thought was to hit him over the head with one of the heavy pans we received as a wedding gift, but then I panicked and thought,
Maybe this
is
my duty
,
and I didn’t want to be a bad wife, so at
first I succumbed and attempted…cooking.

I was awful. And I don’t like being awful at anything. Mediocre is barely acceptable, but awful? Out of the question. So I alternated between caustically serving tubs of SpaghettiOs
and then feeling guilty
and actually attempting to make something that resembled a home-cooked meal, which yielded barely edible food and barely civil dinner conversations. I saw the disappointment in his eyes, so soon I gave up altogether. I didn’t cook, I
barely cleaned, and I sure as hell didn’t put much thought into the house.

“Why don’t you decorate or spruce up this place?” he’d shoot at me accusatorily.

“Why don’t you?” I’d shoot back.

I’d drink and smoke in the house, and he’d chastise me, so I’d meet my friends out at bars and smoke and drink and complain. After only six months, a malaise settled into our sparsely decorated home: married life wasn’t what we expected. We both felt it, but didn’t speak it.

****************

And then Charlotte entered our lives.

When I think about Charlotte, it becomes clear what was destined to happen. She was tall and thin and had long, bleached-blond hair. She looked
like what I imagined Pamela Anderson would look like if Pamela Anderson were an accounting intern. She worked out, didn’t smoke, and asked Leo for his opinion on decorating ideas she had for her new apartment.

The first time I met her was at a bar in early 1995. Leo was with his favorite people from the finance department at the hospital where he worked, and Charlotte, their intern, was the only woman invited besides me. Being twentysomethings, we were a fairly immature bunch, and once a few pitchers of
beer were tossed back, the conversation predictably turned to sex.

“What’s the weirdest sexual thing you’ve ever done?” one of the guys asked the six of us. A collective groan filled our space.

“I’ve got something,” said Charlotte. “But I’m afraid it’s too…I don’t know, too much. And I don’t want to tell you guys and then have you make fun of me or think I’m bad or something.”

“Tell it to Jen first,” Leo said. “She can be the judge.”

So Charlotte proceeded to whisper in my ear a story about her and her former boyfriend fooling around in bed and their dog, who was also on the bed, started getting uncomfortably close, and she asked her boyfriend to
move him. The boyfriend suggested that maybe the dog should be part of the mix, and at the end of the story the dog “sort of” went down on Charlotte.

I stared at her for a full five seconds, mouth agape. “Don’t
tell that story.”

The men were staring at us, literally on the edge of their seats.

“Why?” she asked. “Too much? Scale of one to ten.”

I whispered in her ear, “Honey, there’s no scale for
bestiality.”

“Oh, please—they’ll love it!” She retold the story and then went to the restroom. (After that, Charlotte bore the nickname “dog girl” among me and my friends.)

One of the guys said, “I would drink her bathwater.”

My husband looked transformed, like he had experienced something so profound that he would never be able to go back again.