Authors: Kate Rockland
Two days ago, Shoshana went back to Hoboken to power-walk with Nancy, her wealthy, cop-dating friend who lived uptown and helped Shoshana with her blog from time to time. Afterward, she and her roommates ironed out Jane’s final preparations with her wedding favors. Jane declared if the four girls did not help her stuff three hundred high-heel-shaped cookie favors into cellophane she would never speak to any of them again.
“Have I been a Bridezilla?” she trilled, after Shoshana’s fingers felt like they’d fall off any second. She glanced at the clock. It was three in the morning, and they’d finally finished the favors.
“Of course not,” Andrea said, massaging her wrist.
“Don’t be silly,” Aggie said, rubbing her eyes.
“You’ve been like an angel sent from the heavens,” Karen said, yawning.
The girls caught each other’s eyes and burst out laughing.
“Liars!” Jane screamed, though the worry line that had been in her brow in recent months was slowly dissolving.
“Oh, you gave it away with that silly angel line,” Shoshana said to Karen, throwing a shoe cookie at her.
“Just wait until you all get married,” Jane yelled. “You’ll see how crazy it makes you. I feel like I was kidnapped by aliens and now I’m just getting my brain back.”
Needless to say, Shoshana hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep last night, so when Greg asked if he could crash at the farm and the two would drive to Long Beach Island the following morning together, where the wedding was to be held, Shoshana agreed, as she’d have a ride. Greg had quit drinking alcohol recently to be healthy, so she loved forcing him to be the designated driver. Besides, she hadn’t seen him in nearly three months, though they still talked on the phone every day.
Wanting to hear more about his latest conquest, Shoshana invited Greg out to see her new digs, and accompany her to Jane’s wedding. He’d shown up around eight, when the fog was still a glistening blanket over the hills. She heard the crunch of the white gravel she’d had refilled by a local contractor, then the slam of his BMW door. She ran outside barefoot, excited to show him all the improvements she’d made on the farm.
She looked at Greg. He’d dressed his short and muscular frame with khakis, a polo shirt from a Montclair golf course, and brown boat shoes. She took in his thick eyebrows, full lips, and hazel eyes that twinkled mischievously. And above the top lip, could it be?
“Dude, what’s with the ’stache?” she asked, giggling. “It’s very hipster.” Except it wasn’t exactly manly, more like light brown fuzz.
Instead of answering, he’d just stared at her.
“Uh, who are you and what did you do with my best friend?” he asked finally.
Shoshana blushed. The crazy thing was, after years of wishing she were thinner, followed by years of accepting herself just as she was, she was feeling insecure about her weight loss. Over the last twelve weeks, after walking the mile back and forth to Joe Murphy’s house, sometimes twice a day, clearing weeds and vines, chopping back apple tree branches, eating local food, and digging in the dirt to plant a vegetable garden beside the house, Shoshana had lost thirty pounds.
She started noticing her jeans slipping off her waist, and, not thinking anything of it, looped one of Mimi’s old scarves through as a belt. It was also the lack of a damn ShopRite for miles that brought Shoshana to the farmers’ market here on Saturdays. Also, Greta put Joe Murphy on a low-sodium diet for his heart (although Shoshana caught him sneaking all kinds of snacks when he was out walking in the fields with Patrick O’Leary), and as a result of eating dinner at their mansion nearly every night she grew to like the zucchini soup, ham sandwiches on wheat toast, and good, healthy cooking Greta served.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Shoshana said nonchalantly to Greg. A bird called out and received a hurried reply from a feathered friend inside a nearby willow tree as she turned and walked over the threshold into the house. She’d replaced Mimi’s large, moth-eaten Oriental carpet with an oatmeal-colored sisal rug, and found a pretty, blue-colored glass light fixture for the entryway ceiling. Joe Murphy painted the walls a deep burnt orange, swaying frighteningly on the ladder while drinking from his flask. “This is fun!” he’d exclaimed. “Used to paint houses for a dollar a day back in Ireland. Haven’t held a paintbrush in sixty fockin’ years!”
She’d kept Mimi’s photographs up around the house, enjoying their black-and-white nostalgic vibe. Joining them on the wall were three of her father’s paintings; she felt happy each time she walked by them. Her mom and Emily were sleeping over frequently, and, along with Greta, had helped her wash all the dust from the dishes in the kitchen, beat the rugs outside with a broomstick, wash the linens, and replace the old sixties refrigerator with a new one. She’d taken the silk handkerchiefs off the living room lamps and thrown out the living room curtains, flooding the small room with light. Shoshana was proud of the changes; she’d kept the heart of the place intact but contributed her own flair in the decorating. She surveyed the room with Greg as he stepped inside, and noticed he was still gazing intently at her.
“Okay, I may have lost some weight.”
“Shoshana, you look fifty pounds lighter!”
“No. Not fifty pounds.” She blushed. “Thirty.” After posting many times about the importance of not weighing one’s self, Shoshana had finally bit the bullet and found a rusty old-yet-functioning scale in the upstairs bathroom and tentatively climbed on. She’d bitten her lip in surprise when she saw the number read back to her, the needle hovering very closely to the 175 mark. She hadn’t been under two hundred pounds since middle school.
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Greg, I don’t know what to do.”
He smiled and put his arm around her. “Shosh, you should be proud of yourself.”
“I didn’t do this on purpose!” she wailed. “It was all that damn climbing up ladders and trimming apple trees and hauling branches to the road and walking Sinatra over these hills. I miss being fat.”
He chuckled.
She stuck her tongue out at him. “It’s not funny!”
“You’re a babe both ways, but…”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“What? Just say it.”
“Okay, don’t hit me again. But isn’t it a little easier to get around now? To fit into clothes? To
breathe
?”
“But I’m not Fat and Fabulous anymore,” she moaned, sinking onto the new couch. Greg sat beside her, patting her knee. She wore her favorite brown cords she’d had since high school with her Birkenstocks, and a light, airy hippie blouse in a size ten she’d bought at a neighbor’s yard sale down the road and which she still couldn’t believe she fit into.
“Don’t worry, you’re still pretty fat,” he said.
She punched him in the arm. “I’m serious,” she said, but she was smiling now.
“Look, Shosh. Your whole blog … its purpose is to make chubby chicks feel good about themselves, right? Give them self-esteem, all that good stuff? Be yourself, healthy at any size, isn’t that your motto?”
“Right,” she said, picking up a circular pillow (a gift from Emily) that had the words
I HEART APPLES
sewn on it. She hugged it to her chest.
“So? Can’t you continue to do that? You’re not going to lose your audience if you’re honest with them.”
“Greg, you don’t know my readers. Some of them get mad if I even mention that I like whole wheat bread. They think I’m going outside of the rules of
Fat and Fabulous
and dieting, or watching what I eat. If they find out I’ve lost weight, my career is over.”
He wasn’t going to be easily put off. “Since when are you someone who pays attention to rules? Besides, aren’t there always extremists in the blogosphere? Didn’t you tell me that once?”
“Shit.” She blew hot air out through her mouth, pushing a thick lock of auburn hair from her forehead. “I did say that, didn’t I?”
“From what I can tell from reading your blog, which I do once in a blue moon, is that a woman’s main goal is to be true to herself. If you’ve dropped some pounds because you got this farm and you’ve turned it into a beautiful thing, a real working orchard, shouldn’t you tell your readers about it? Your real fans will still respect you. They’re not going to stop reading all of a sudden just because you’ve lost weight. You can still help them feel good about themselves through your positive attitude, Shosh. People just like talking to you, or reading your posts. Your job is to make them feel good, and you can do that at any weight.”
Shoshana was taken aback.
“Wow. Who would have thought you’d give this, like, beautiful feminist speech? My Greggie, the biggest misogynist on the East Coast!”
She didn’t say it, but it was also out of character for him not to talk about himself for so long. But she realized he was right. She’d been hiding from her readers. It was all too convenient to set up others to blog for her while she was fixing up the farm and shedding weight. It was time to reclaim
Fat and Fabulous
. And, as Greg had so eloquently pointed out, surely by America’s standards she was still fat. The idea cheered her up. She closed her eyes and leaned forward to give him a hug.
Suddenly she felt a wet warmth on her mouth, followed by a tickling brush of lip hair.
“What the hell?” She jumped up from the couch.
“What? You wanted me to kiss you! You were totally moving toward me!” Greg had jumped back, and was cowering on the couch as she smacked him with a nearby copy of
Us Weekly
Andrea had left on the coffee table. “Stop hitting me! What is the big deal? I’ve, like, seen you naked a bazillion times before.”
“That was in high school! Oh, my god. It was the mustache. The mustache is turning you into a crazy porn star! Besides, you only want to make out with me because I’m skinny now.”
“Shosh, you’re not exactly skinny.”
“Well, whatever. Shut up, Greg. Besides, you know it’s true.”
He gave her a brooding look. “I really did think you wanted me to kiss you.”
They looked at each other and burst out laughing. Then they fell off and rolled around on the new carpet.
“Porn … ’stache…” was all she could get out.
“Thought you wanted … me to kiss you…” Greg said, hiccuping.
“Let’s shake on never doing that again,” Shoshana said, putting out her hand for him to take.
“Okay. Promise,” Greg said.
“Pinkie swear, just to be safe.”
“Shoshana, we’re not five years old.”
“Just do it!”
“Okay, okay.” So they did, linking their smallest fingers, making the shape of the letter W with their pinkies.
She sat up on the floor. “Seriously, though, what’s with that fuzz on your lip? It looks like the pubic hair of a twelve-year-old boy.”
Greg bristled, picking up his brown leather overnight bag. “The new girl I’m seeing from my gym asked me to grow it. She likes men with facial hair.”
Shoshana giggled. “Okay, whatever you say, David Hasselhoff.”
“He’s more famous for having a lot of chest hair.”
This made Shoshana giggle even harder. “Thank you for educating me on the finer points of the Hoff. Want some lunch? Get you settled upstairs? Then I want to hear all about this new girlfriend. First of all, does she eat dessert?”
They spent the day eating fresh food from the local farmers’ market, then strolling around the hills surrounding the farm with Sinatra in tow.
She’d saved the best part of the farm for last. Joe Murphy had paid to replace the rotting fence surrounding the orchard. She swung the gate closed behind her. Sunlight beamed across their faces, and Greg popped the collar of of his polo shirt, his eyes wide.
“This is … this is unbelievable.”
She beamed. The apple trees were now just the right height, the branches perfectly horizontal. (She’d cut off all the “suckers” that grew the wrong way.) The apples were the size of golf balls now. Healthy, dark oval-shaped green leaves had formed on the branches. She’d gotten rid of all signs of apple scab, and as long as they didn’t have too much rain this summer, she’d have a fully working orchard ready for picking in September. A small gray rabbit hopped behind one of the nearby trees. Greg reached his hand out to pull a branch close to his face, inspecting the tree as though it were one of his legal briefs.
“At one point in the fifties Mimi grew ten different varieties of apples,” Shoshana said proudly.
“How many will you have?” Greg asked, picking up a leaf that had fallen, twirling it in his fingers like helicopter wings.
“Three!” she said, beaming, reaching out to rub one of the tree trunks like a proud mother patting her infant. “We were able to save almost all the trees for McIntosh, Winesaps, and Red Delicious. Some trees were too old, and the fruit they’d produce would be too small. So we cut them down, then removed their roots, and used the wood for firewood. We’ve got seventy-five trees here.”
“We?” Greg asked.
Shoshana laughed. “Everyone’s been so amazingly
involved
. Joe Murphy down the road, Greta, my mom, Emily, all four crazy girls I live with, you encouraging me on the phone … This isn’t my orchard. It belongs to everyone. I think that’s what Mimi had in mind when she gave it to me.”
Having lived in her house for three months, Shoshana felt she was communicating with the essential
Miminess
. Even more important, with her father.
“I can’t believe I didn’t visit for years,” Shoshana said, tearing up. “We were always playing here as kids, but in recent years Mimi had Alzheimer’s so bad … just my mom came. I should have been here,” she said, a tear spilling onto her cheek.
“Hey. Mimi knew you loved her. You always talked about her. Shosh, you’re the kind of person everyone feels loved by.” He hugged her, which was funny because she was an inch taller than him, so she was able to rest her head on his shoulder.
“You’re not going to try and kiss me again, are you?” she asked, wiping her eyes.
“I don’t want to get my ass beat, no.” He smiled. “Hey, did you ever go on that date?”
“What date?”