Getting Waisted (5 page)

My mother started waving like a maniac. She had found my sister, her husband, and their baby, and then I saw them, too. They were searching for us, too, and I waved and jumped up and down in excitement as my beautiful (thin) half sister found us. She nudged Phil hard in his ribs when she saw my father and I realized my mother hadn’t told them he was coming. But then Gerda saw
me.
Her mouth opened as if making a horror movie scream. We hadn’t seen them in nearly two years and I was a little heavier. I hated them, and I knew I was going to hate Canada, too.

4

Firsts

Diets #4 & #5
Dexedrine & Metrecal

Cost
$62.00

Weight lost
15 pounds

Weight gained
22 pounds

It was hot and sticky
and hard to breathe, and there were giant spiders that bite, and black flies that bite, and teeny mosquitoes that bite, and they could all see in the dark. We were living with Gerda, her husband, and their screaming baby who had a chronically runny nose. I was his aunty, but even worse, I had to share a room with him. At night when he’d cry, no one came because they knew I was there to pick him up. What I really wanted to do was put a pillow over his snot-nosed face.

Canada was weird. Everything was new; even the trees outside my sister’s house were the same height as I was and everywhere we went there were these boring shopping plazas, whereas in Scotland all the shops were jumbled together on busy main streets. My dad was having a really hard time, having no idea what he was supposed to do, who he was supposed to be, or how to fit in. And nobody paid any attention to him. I felt bad but we didn’t really know how to talk to each other either.

One day we were having a special dinner for all the family
and friends to welcome us to Canada. The table was already set and it was only seven in the morning! My sister was already running around fluffing and picking up lint that wasn’t there, straightening cushions and wiping up spots that didn’t exist, when she stopped to give me a long, appraising look. “You should watch what you eat and then you’ll lose weight.” It really bothered her that I was overweight. Well, it really bothered
me, too, but
I wanted to tell her to shut up and mind her own business.

The chairs soon filled with new relatives who were old and
neighbors who kept wanting me to talk so they could try and mimic my accent—badly, I might add—and they all had opinions on everything. Everyone was loud and had stories to tell and there was tons of food, but my plate had hardly anything on it because I could feel I was being watched. I pretended to go to the bathroom but instead I slipped into the kitchen and started shoveling potatoes, brisket, and everything else into my mouth. Then I heard them coming—all the women, carrying plates, and then scraping the leftovers into the sink. I swallowed without chewing and gave them a guilty wave.

Suddenly, the house started shaking and everyone looked out
the window to see if it was thundering. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; instead, the whirling vortex of energy was my sister, in her bedroom, furiously pedaling on her Exercycle and sending shockwaves through the house. “I’m just burning off what I’ve eaten,” she said, patting little beads of sweat from her chest.

Looking me up and down, I could see her making mental cal
culations of every fat cell in my body. “Phil knows a doctor who
would prescribe diet pills for you that would do the trick,” she said breathlessly. “You might start smoking . . . but you wouldn’t have an appetite, so it’d be worth it.” I reminded her I was only twelve.

She made me an appointment with my first diet doctor. I didn’t want to go to a “fat” doctor but my sister convinced my mother that my very future was at stake if I didn’t lose weight. My mother interpreted that to mean no one would ever marry me, so here we were, sitting in a room full of fat people all waiting for their miracle.

The doctor was old and stick thin. He looked me over and then pointed his finger in my face. He was very angry with me. I wanted to kick him. I tried to make eye contact with my mother but she was fixated on everything in that little office except me. The doctor began his tirade. “You are too young to be so fat! I can help you but only if you promise to take these special pills I am going to give you. Do you understand?” I nodded in agreement so we could get out of there. I was afraid I would cry and I didn’t want him to know how upset I was. The pills were little black-and-white tubes called Dexedrine. As he walked us out and back to the waiting room to greet his next victim, he dismissed me: “Take the pills at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” I scurried away as fast as I could get me and my mother out of there.

What Doctor Meanie really meant with his stupid pills was that I wouldn’t
need
breakfast, lunch,
or
dinner. I was jittery and cranky all the time. I had no appetite and I was unable to fall asleep. I didn’t like them, so then I pretended to take them but I flushed them down the toilet instead. That meant I was hungry nearly all the time. I hid chocolate bars in the back of the freezer, wrapping them in foil as if they were leftovers.

Soon my own personal Gestapo, my sister, found them and confronted me, “Look at me. This figure takes work. It doesn’t just happen; it takes discipline. I am trying to save you from yourself.” I had gone from having a mother who didn’t care what I was doing to having a maniac sister and brother-in-law who followed me around as if they were food police. The evidence of my transgression was laid out on the kitchen table to rub my face in it. I was humiliated and angry that it bothered them that I was fat. Yet for some weird reason that I didn’t understand, it also made me happy. I quickly understood my size gave me power and, with that knowledge, I began to carve out my identity. I told my sister that I already had a mother and she should butt out of my life.

After a few long months, we moved to a place of our own—my mother, my father, and I. Was this to be the beginning of their new start? It wasn’t going as well as I had hoped, the first hint being the horrifying knowledge that we were poor. Having come from a huge, drafty Scottish house (now home to a whole nest of nuns) we were now huddled in a shockingly small two-bedroom apartment—all three of us! My father was in one bedroom and my mother and I hunkered down in the other. I guessed they were never really going to be like other married couples. My mother had found the apartment she had to have, almost in Forest Hill, the richest neighborhood she could find, where everyone was snobby and dressed exactly the same. It was like living right next door to a bakery, with the mouthwatering scent of
chocolate éclairs wafting out the door from dawn until dusk, but
never having enough money to actually have one.

The kids at my new school looked at me as if I was from Jupiter. Not only was I poor, but I was also fat and had an accent—a troika of undesirableness. The popular kids rejected me instantly, but I found my soul mates. The misfits, artists, and outsiders were waiting for me with open arms. I couldn’t have asked for a better fit. Being disallowed united us, and being different became our art form.

Up until now, my mother had always worked at home, but here
in Canada, in order to elevate her profile and attract business, she
signed a lease on a shop in the very upscale Yorkville neighborhood. This was a big risk and added to her financial burden. My father once again undersold himself and got a job at the University of Toronto as a caretaker. I was mortified, but because he was English, “tweedy,” and very smart, I pretended he was a professor. I was definitely my mother’s daughter in the delusions of grandeur business.

My parents always got home late from work and I hated arriv
ing home to an empty apartment. I stood outside every afternoon
and steeled myself against my own spiraling imagination. With
every rustle of the leaves or settling of the foundation, I conjured up images of serial killers lying in wait, or burglars in the bushes casing the joint. I climbed the stairs and before opening my door, I’d shout in my most manly and scary voice, “You have three minutes to get out!”
Then I would fling the door open to crush whoever might still have the audacity to be lingering, pick up the phone to make sure the wires hadn’t been cut, pull a steak knife from the drawer, and finally do a thorough check under the beds and in the closets. Once I was sure our home was free of intruders, I would relax and load up on cake and chocolate ice cream. We always had cake—my mother was, after all, Viennese.

After school everyone else went to hang out at either some very cool ice cream shop I would never see, or one of their enormous houses, to try on each other’s clothes. I was glad I wasn’t invited—I would never have fit into any of those crappy designer clothes anyway. Instead, I had a job three days a week after school and on Saturdays at my Uncle Carly and Aunty Mara’s delicatessen, slicing meat and packaging it to give to a lot of garlicky smelling old people.

This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be my life. I had read about
Anastasia, the missing daughter of the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and I prayed every night that someone from the Russian royal family would realize I was their Anastasia and come and rescue me. The fact that she was alive decades before my birth didn’t phase me. No one ever came, and I sliced meat for two years.

My mother couldn’t stand her brother Carly; she had tried to spend most of her life not speaking to him. My family could have created a board game about who was not speaking to whom. Someone was always on the outs with someone and I’m pretty sure my mother was one of those someones. Carly had a history of making bad business deals and sketchy investments with other people’s money, and more than once he scorched my mother when she bought into whatever nonsense he was peddling. He was good at selling and he lost not only her hard-earned money but Greta’s as well.

Carly reminded me of a boiled potato who had married another boiled potato, shapeless and without definition to their features. He appeared stupid but he wasn’t; he was as canny as a fox. He wore
lederhosen
and his wife Mara wore dirndls and they both dyed their hair Russian salad-dressing blonde, making them look like a matching pair of scary cuckoo-clock inhabitants.

I think my mother’s fury toward him really came when he
hap
pened to buy a delicatessen in Toronto’s financial district and it
unexpectedly became a gold mine, with a daily lineup of customers that was almost as long as the line of relatives all wanting their money back from his previous bad investments. In truth, she was jealous. Carly made promises to repay her in a few months when he was sure he was on solid ground. My mother wasn’t falling for anything he said; she had heard his promises and lies too often and she wanted her pound of flesh and then some, and she was willing to take it in bratwurst, schinken, Hungarian salami, pickles, or sauerkraut. It was my job to sneak it out of there and bring home the bacon—literally. Mara was hawk-eyed, mean, and suspicious.
She stood watch over the ham-slicer in case I had any ideas of
stuffing myself with their profits. They watched me from dawn to dusk, hoping to catch me in the act, but they never did. I was only allowed to eat the things that didn’t sell; stinky headcheese (what the hell was that?) and shaky things that were coved in aspic (what the hell was that?). I’d go next door to the bakery and load up on cherry cheese Danish and donuts just to get the taste out of my mouth.