The Sweetest Revenge (3 page)

“
You’re like a bad penny,”
I said.

He had brown hair with a little
wave in it and strong, even features that could only be described as
handsome. Hell, he was great looking. But he was with someone.

The day after that party, Jim
called me. He got my phone number from Sheila, who had given the
party.

“
Hey,” he said when I
answered the phone.

“
Who’s this?” I asked
suspiciously.

“
It’s the bad penny,” he
said.

And that was how we began. It was
months later that I learned about Kimberly Williams. I was glad I
hadn’t been the rebound relationship—the poor girl at the party
with Jim had been that. I was the next one, and that felt a lot safer
when I realized how hard Jim’s break-up with Kimberly had been.

I knew very little about Kimberly
back then in our early days. Jim said she was an artist. She was tall
and brunette, but I only learned that after questioning him with as
much subtlety as I could muster. And that was the end of it. We never
talked about Kimberly again. We dated the rest of our junior and
senior years. We met each other’s parents. His lived in Louisiana,
mine lived right there in Marshall.

We married in August following
graduation and right before Jim entered law school. We had agreed
that I would work while he attended law school. I got a job in the
development department of the university and began my career as a
communications specialist. I learned to write fast and furious,
putting out press releases and writing copy for brochures and alumni
magazines.

By the time Jim graduated from
law school, I had advanced to assistant manager of communications in
the development office. He started working as an associate at Watkins
& Watkins. It wasn’t long after that that we decided to start
trying to have a baby. Jim was making pretty good money and I had my
salary. We were living in a townhouse at the time, but our plan was
to buy a house in the next five years.

We bought the house, but we
didn’t have a baby. I never got pregnant. We tried, oh how we
tried, but it didn’t happen. I went to specialists, Jim went to
specialists, but no doctor, no test, could find anything wrong with
us.

By the time we were thirty, Jim
had become a partner in the firm and I had become the manager of
communications for development for the university. We had no baby,
but we had careers. And we had a house we had lived in for two years.

I threw myself into renovating
and decorating our old Federal-style house. I studied paint colors
and wallpaper. I had the hardwood floors refinished. I hired a
seamstress to make drapes for all of the rooms. I redesigned the
kitchen with new cabinets and countertops and a travertine floor.

Still, at the end of the day, Jim
and I had no baby. By the time we were thirty-two years old, we had
given up on that. We had given up on in vitro and adoption. We never
mentioned it anymore. We had parties with our friends, at our house
or at theirs. We went in groups to vacations at the beach and the
mountains. I thought we were having a pretty good life together, even
if we didn’t—couldn’t—have children.

Through the stress of the
infertility, I had started to gain some weight. Not much, at first.

On my wedding day, I had starved
myself for a month on a liquid diet to squeeze into a size six, very
fitted dress. I looked fantastic. I remember being afraid to eat at
my own reception; I thought I might bust the seams of the dress.

As soon as the wedding was over
and we were on our way to Jamaica for our honeymoon, I started eating
normally again and quickly got back to my usual size eight.

I maintained that size for
several years. When the infertility regime began to take its toll, I
expanded to a size ten. That was okay. I could still buy cute clothes
and looked good. Jim made an occasional joking comment about me
getting fat, but he didn’t seem unhappy about it.

Near the end of our infertility
traumas, I blossomed into a size twelve. I could handle that, though
I tried not to think it was double the size of my wedding dress. Did
that mean I had doubled in size? I didn’t think so. I wished the
number on the label of my clothes didn’t matter so much to me. But
it did. I can’t deny that it mattered a lot.

So I joined Weight Watchers with
my co-worker Jenna. WW had set up a weekly meeting at the health
center and Jenna and I trudged over there every Thursday for a
weigh-in and encouraging words from the counselor, who had lost
eighty-two pounds on Weight Watchers.

I weighed 174.5 pounds that first
day at WW. Jenna weighed 176 even, just a pound and a half more than
me! And I thought she looked pretty fat! Jenna shared her weight with
me unashamedly that day, but I didn’t share mine with her. I was
too embarrassed. I was squeezing myself into my size twelve clothes
at that point, but knew I was really at least a fourteen.
Embarrassing.

I bought the special chocolate
bars and cookies WW had on display as soon as you walked in the door.
Only two points! I measured my food faithfully. I avoided the
fattening spreads at events that I had to attend for my job. I got a
plate of fruit and told myself I didn’t care about the meatballs or
stuffed new potatoes. I worked hard at WW.

At the end of a month, I had lost
ten pounds and Jenna had lost fourteen.

Jenna, my fat friend, weighed
less than me! I could not believe it. That was not going to do at
all. I doubled up my efforts, ate even less than WW recommended.

And I lost a half a pound. Jenna
lost another four pounds! This was not going the way it was supposed
to go. Not at all.

Still, I kept at it. I was
determined to get below Jenna’s weight. I walked every day at
lunch; I ate like a pauper.

And then Jenna lost another three
pounds and I stayed the same weight as the week before! It was so
unfair! I was starving myself, walking every day.

The next Thursday, I told Jenna
that I had too much work to do to go to Weight Watchers that week.

“
Okay,” she said with a
little concern.

“
It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll
go next week. Just can’t do it today.”

But I didn’t go the next week.
I made another excuse to Jenna. “Got to run errands today,” I
said.

By the next week, Jenna didn’t
ask me to go. She went by herself and when she came back, she was so
excited. She had lost twenty pounds total and received her second
gold star from WW!

I hated her.

Chapter
Four

I was thirty-three years old when
I joined Weight Watchers. By that point, Jim was working late hours
every night. He had made partner, but he still worked late. Now, I
wonder if he was cheating on me then.

I watched Jenna become a stick
figure while I stuffed my face. I stopped at Krispy Kreme on the way
into work every morning and got a chocolate covered donut and a
regular donut. I ate one on the way into work, the other after I
reached my desk.

A few months after my Weight
Watchers debacle, Jenna moved to the Education Department with an
upgrade. I was glad to see her skinny ass go. Her dwindling figure
was a constant reminder to me of the failure I was.

Over the next four years, I
continued to eat, making lavish suppers that involved pasta and
potatoes and rich sauces. I might not have been attracting Jim with
my figure anymore, but he certainly loved the food. Usually, he ate
it later when he got home. I had already gorged hours earlier and was
glad he couldn’t see how I shoved the food into my mouth like a
starving person. When he got home, I scurried to make his plate, then
hovered around him, waiting for the compliments. He always gave them
to me.

But he didn’t compliment me
about anything else anymore. He didn’t grab me out of nowhere like
he used to do. Like when I was doing dishes at the sink and he would
come up behind me, pressing himself into me. Our intimate moments had
dwindled from at least once a week to every few months. I tried
several diets after my WW failure—Atkins, South Beach, Sugar
Busters, cabbage soup, HCG drops—but nothing worked beyond a few
pounds lost before I caved in again to my love of carbohydrates.

A few weeks before I caught Jim
in bed with his mistress, I was forced to go to the doctor with a
debilitating case of bronchitis and got weighed for the first time in
three years. I wanted to slap the nurse that forced me on the scales.
My heart sank when the nurse moved the scales from the 150 mark to
the 200 mark. She tapped it gently with her fingers and I turned
away, refusing to see the number. I wanted to protest, wanted to say,
‘This is not me! This is just a temporary nightmare. The real me
wears size eight!’

The nurse didn’t seem to notice
my anguish; she dutifully wrote down my weight so Dr. Sanders could
look at it, further humiliating me. When I finally saw Dr. Sanders, I
asked him to check my thyroid because I was sure something was wrong.

He did. It wasn’t.

That was when I tried the HCG
drops diet that promised a pound lost every day. I dutifully ate my
celery sticks and three ounces of fish or chicken every night. I was
on five hundred calories a day. Who wouldn’t lose weight with that?
And damn if I didn’t lose a pound a day! I was so encouraged. So
what if I could barely walk anymore? So what if my vision became
blurry? I was losing a pound a day!

And then my body must have
protested, because after fifteen pounds, I stopped losing a pound a
day. I stayed the same or, God forbid, gained a pound!

I was so weak by that point that
I had to start eating more if I planned to continue working. And that
was the end of the HCG diet.

And that was when I caught Jim in
bed with Kimberly.

Chapter
Five

I had been avoiding mirrors for
years, but every now and then, I caught my reflection—in a window
or mirror—and was horrified by the rotund person I saw. I tried to
forget the awful image, push it away. I refused to recognize myself.
But deep down inside, I couldn’t deny that was me in the
reflection.

I managed to haul my fat ass to
my job every day. I had a good job, but worried constantly that I
might lose it because I had gotten so fat. It seemed that every woman
hired in our department was twenty-six years old with three years of
communications experience. And they looked good. They sidled up to
the Vice President of Development in their pencil skirts with
matching jackets and heels showing off their well-formed calves.
Development was all about appearance. Those chicks could steal my
job!

So, when my department, which
handled communications for the entire university, was given the task
of promoting Kimberly Williams, alumni and accomplished artist, my
insecurity took a stranglehold on me. Chubby me was going to have to
promote Jim’s old girlfriend who had broken his heart.

I assigned the task to a
twenty-six-year-old who had been hired recently as a communications
specialist. Red-haired Carly wrote the press release and the Facebook
messages, along with the brochure that was mailed to all alumni.

Even though I chose a hands-off
approach to the promotion of Kimberly Williams, that didn’t stop me
from obsessing about her. I read every single thing I could find on
the Internet about her, sometimes scanning twenty pages of searches
when I was feeling particularly obsessive.

After graduation from Wellington,
Kimberly had gone straight to New York City to become a famous
artist. Every young artist’s dream, right? Only it happened for
Kimberly. I suspected that her Mediterranean looks and long dark hair
advanced her career because I didn’t think her art was that good.
Oh, yes, the critics thought she was good. But I found her
semi-impressionistic, semi-abstract works to be almost childish.
Totally lacking in talent.

The worst thing about it was that
Kimberly would be teaching painting as a visiting professor for the
spring and fall semesters. That really got under my skin. I hoped
that I’d never have to meet her or have anything to do with her. If
I was honest with myself—and I often wasn’t—I would admit that
I was embarrassed to meet her, to have her know who I was and who I
was married to. I could envision the pity for Jim in her eyes when
she saw what a cow his wife was. I cringed to think about it.

But I did not get my wish. As
Director of Communications for the university, I was expected to
attend Kimberly’s art show. I dreaded it. I tried to think of ways
to get out of it. I would call in sick that day with a terrible flu.
But in the end I knew I’d have to do it. My entire department was
counting on me. I decided I could hide out at the reception, send the
twenty-six year-olds to gladhand her. That was doable.

I didn’t mention Kimberly to
Jim. That was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Maybe Jim didn’t
even care, I told myself. But then he mentioned it to me!

“
I see Kimberly Williams is
having a reception,” he said one night as he wolfed down his
lasagna, late as usual. I had wolfed down my food earlier, as usual.

“
So?” I said. The
communications director couldn’t think of anything better to say
than that.