Who You Know (8 page)

Sharon appeared at the door of our office, rubbing her swelling belly. “Thank God it's Friday! So are you going to join us for drinks after work? Well, of course I'll be drinking ginger ale,” she said with her I'm-a-pregnant-woman-and-don't-you-forget-it smirk.

Sharon had asked us earlier in the week to join her and her husband for some drinks after work tonight. Jen and I had held off letting her know if we'd go, always hoping something better would come up, which it hadn't. I didn't feel like going out, but I knew I should. Now that I was no longer safely coupled off, I got invited out less and less, and when I did go out, I felt freakishly, alarmingly single. But how was I going to meet anyone if I spent every weekend with takeout and a romance novel?

“Yeah, I'll probably go,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, me too,” Jen cooed.

Back when I was with Gideon and still had a semblance of a social life, there were five of us couples who would regularly go out after work for drinks, barbecues, and dinner parties. Sharon and her husband, Mitch; Lydia from sales and her husband, Dan; Pam from marketing and her husband, Joe; me and Gideon; and Jen and whoever her beau du jour was. If she and Dave were separated, she would date one of the vast stores of guys she kept in reserve, all of whom were madly in love with her. Her seamless transition from one boyfriend to the next assured her continued invitability at all outside-the-office functions, whereas I had been mired in an abyss of solitude for nearly two years. No one liked adding a single person to the mix—I was like a neutron threatening to rage out of control without a balancing proton to keep me in check. Now, with both Lydia and Sharon pregnant, I could see that I was drifting farther and farther from normalcy. I wouldn't have anything intelligent to add about diaper rash remedies or the breast milk/formula debate, and soon, no doubt, Lydia and Sharon would tire of me and my only friends would be Oprah Winfrey and Danielle Steel.

“See you two tonight then,” Sharon said and turned to leave.

I rang Pam's extension.

“Pam, what are you doing tonight?”

“Working. That's what I'll be doing all weekend. This Expert account is going to be the death of me,” she said with a laugh. She didn't sound bitter or angry, but I could hear the fatigue in her voice.

“Well, we're going to Rios. Maybe you can stop by for a drink if you don't get off too late.”

“I appreciate the offer, but if I don't get off too late, I'd really like to spend a quiet night with my husband.”

“Of course, I understand. Hey, how are the kids?”

“Good, really good. Rebecca's in her second month at Cornell. She was a little homesick at first, but she's really enjoying it. Jackson has two more years at Columbia. Audrey's into your usual sophomore dramas. She's in drivers' ed now.”

“You're kidding? She's driving?” I'd met Audrey only once, about a year ago, but she'd seemed impossibly young. Maybe Audrey was small for her age. I knew she had asthma because Pam had been called out of the office on emergencies a couple times. Maybe the asthma made her smaller than other kids her age. In any case, I could barely envision her riding a ten-speed.

“Joe is teaching her. She says I make her nervous. She claims I clutch my heart in a panic-stricken sort of way that makes her too anxious to concentrate. All lies of course.”

I laughed at the image. “It's too bad you can't make it tonight. Let's do lunch sometime.”

“That would be great.”

“Have a nice weekend. Don't work too hard.” I knew that last part was futile. Pam always worked like a horse. She was a truly talented writer, and she generated an amazing amount of material. I would have loved to work for her as a copywriter or something. But since what she did—deliver products promised by sales to clients—wasn't a revenue-generating department, it, like editorial, rarely got the budget for additional staff.

Pam was attractive for her age, but she'd aged a lot in the past year. No matter how talented she was, I doubted she would be hired if she were applying for a job at McKenna Marketing today. These days Morgan wanted a young, energetic company filled with people who looked like they belonged on an episode of
Friends
.

 

 

A
fter work, the seven of us met over at the Rios for appetizers and drinks. After a few glasses of ginger ale for Lydia and Sharon and a lavish number of margaritas for the rest of us, Jen, Lydia, Les, and Sharon's husband, Mitch, went to play pool. When Sharon got up to use the bathroom, I was abruptly alone at the table with Lydia's husband, Dan, in a suddenly awkward silence. It occurred to me that in the three years since I'd first met Dan, we'd never had a conversation, just the two of us.

“So,” I began, groping for a conversation topic, “a baby on the way. Pretty exciting.” Lydia and Dan made a cute couple. I'd always been a little jealous of their relationship. I'd gone to a dinner party at their place one time—this was toward the end of things with Gideon, when I was feeling acutely lonely in my marriage—and I'd been struck by the happy pictures of Lydia and Dan around their house. On the coffee table was a framed photograph of them smiling beside a sign that said “Welcome to Rocky Mountain National Park.” Lydia's hair was blown back by the wind; Dan's friendly smile seemed so content. On the bookshelf was a picture of them sweaty and smiling after their run in the Bolder Boulder and another picture of them playing with their dogs. On the refrigerator were several photos of them held up with smiley face magnets: one in which they were on a mountain with their arms wrapped around each other; another of them at Disney World; another of them fishing off a pier. Soon the house would be filled with pictures of them with their kid, who would no doubt be a cheerful, adorable child with an infectious giggle.

“I couldn't be more excited. I've been trying to knock her up since we got married seven years ago, but she kept putting it off,” Dan said, smiling. His smile caught me off guard. Until then I had never really noticed just how good-looking he was. “She'll be such a great mom. She's so giving, so considerate, you know?”

I nodded. Lydia wasn't the most exciting person in the world, but she was nice. She'd be the kind of mom who would smile sweetly down on her dimply faced kid as they baked Christmas cookies together. She'd say something like, okay, you can have just one, but you have to save room for dinner! The kid would eagerly agree to this arrangement and devour the cookie happily, miraculously not spilling a single crumb.

“Like this week she knew I was really busy at work and didn't have time to go out to lunch, so she made my lunches. Isn't that sweet? Today it was tuna fish on wheat and an apple. She's just really supportive, you know? We just can't wait until the kid gets here. It's going to be so much fun. I mean it will be work, we know that, but we both just love kids.”

I nodded. All at once I ached to be a part of a “we,” to be the other half of a good-looking man's “we.” I wanted a man to pack a lunch for, the kind of man who hours later would still appreciate the gesture.

“Is it hard that she travels so much for work?” I asked.

“Oh, it's awful, but, on the other hand, whenever she gets back from a trip, we fall in love all over again. It keeps our relationship fresh. She hasn't been required to travel as much lately, and we both hope she won't have to start traveling a lot again when the baby arrives. She talked to the VP about sticking to the Colorado and Wyoming areas for a while. He wasn't too happy about it since she's one of the top salespeople, but he doesn't want to get an anti-family rap, so it looks like he'll let her stick to local gigs, at least for a while.”

Over Dan's shoulder I saw Sharon coming back from the bathroom. She stopped at the pool table to tell Mitch something. I watched Mitch put down his pool stick and start walking back to the table with Sharon. Just then, Jen came behind me and announced there was a good-looking guy up at the bar who would be perfect for me.

“Who?”

“Just come on, trust me.”

When we were far enough from the table she said, “I can't believe you almost foiled my getaway plan for you. I saw Sharon was about to make her return, and, being the kind of friend I am, I swooped in for the rescue.”

“There's no guy?”

“Don't be such an ingrate. There is a guy, but I have dibs on him.”

“Like you need another guy. Both Les and Tom are totally hot for you.”

“Yeah right. Do you see Tom here?”

“He had plans with his friends, he told you that. But he's into you, I can tell.”

“He would have changed his plans if he was into me. Blue shirt,” she whispered as she sat next to a nice-looking blond guy in a blue shirt.

The guy was not my type, so it was no loss that Jen flirted outrageously with him while Les cast unsubtle glances at her from the table.

Since Mitch and Jen had abandoned the pool game, the others had returned to the table. I sat beside Jen on the barstool, quietly sipping my margarita, watching from across the bar as Dan lovingly rubbed Lydia's shoulder.

JEN

I
woke up with a searing headache. As I pried my eyes open, I had the strangest feeling there was someone else in bed with me.

Must focus.

How much did I drink last night? I'd never hallucinated before. That couldn't be . . .

Les opened his eyes and smiled. “Good morning beautiful,” he said.

My tired eyes shot open. I realized with horror that I was naked, and, worse still, it appeared that Les was naked, too.

“Les?”

“Isn't it a beautiful day?” he asked, and leaned toward me, as if to kiss me. I reared back.

“Les? What happened last night?”

He laughed. “You're joking, right?” He tried to tickle me, but I slapped his hand away.

I rolled over on my back, setting off a maelstrom in my head. I gripped my palm to my forehead in an effort to keep it from exploding. What on earth had happened? Les had given me a ride home from the bar because I'd had too much to drink. Okay, I remember that . . . I invited him in for a drink . . . I got us each a beer . . . He sat down on the couch, and I lay down on the couch with my head in his lap . . . We talked . . . He began stroking my arm . . .

I looked over at Les, who was still smiling happily.

“Les, you know I was wasted last night. You're not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”

His smile faded. He looked confused.

“Les, promise me you won't tell anyone about this.”

“I promise.”

“I'm not feeling very well. Would you please go? Please?”

“Yeah, of course. I . . .”

I turned over and covered my eyes with my hand. As I listened to him get dressed, all I could think was, I've slept with a fat man named Lester. Or did I sleep with him? Maybe we just slept slept. Naked, granted, but otherwise innocently slumbering. Yes, that was most certainly what had happened. Even if that was all that had happened, if anyone found out I was fraternizing with a naked fat boy, it would
ruin
my chances with Tom and it certainly wouldn't help my chances for a promotion. Weren't managers supposed to be responsible and do things like only sleep with their accountant husbands?

“Can I get you anything before I go? Some water? Some aspirin?” he asked.

“Oh god, yes. The Advil's in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Bring five, no six.”

He brought the handful of pills and a large glass of water.

“Can I call you?” he asked.

“Call? No! I mean Les, you and I are just friends. Acquaintances really. We work together. I was drunk. This was a mistake.”

My head felt like it had lost a fight with a chainsaw and Les's presence was doing nothing to curb my nausea.

“I'm sorry I . . .”

“Please, just go.”

I listened to him leave. He shut the door quietly behind him.

RETTE

I
always hoped I'd be the kind of person who would have an affair with a dark-eyed stranger whose name I never bothered to get to know. Maybe we'd be on the Eurail going through Italy or France and we'd have sex in the bathroom without ever saying a word.

The thing was, I was getting married before I'd done crazy stuff like that. I'd only seriously dated two other guys besides Greg. I was too shy and too self-conscious to flirt. While Jen, flirt extraordinaire, never missed a school dance, I spent every dance at home with a book in one hand and a candy bar in the other, under the admonishing eye of my mother.

As soon as I started my job and I had a normal schedule, I'd start working out regularly. I'd finally get serious about getting in shape.

True, I had said this once or twice or three million times before.

I was nine when I went on my first diet. It didn't go well. For about three days I worked out and starved myself, then I ate Fritos and chocolate chip cookies for a week straight.

When I was eleven, I stood in front of the mirror with
Seventeen
magazine opened to the special Beauty Plus section. The article, complete with illustrations of thin, healthy girls measuring themselves, detailed the proportions of the ideal body. My waist, according to this, should have been ten inches smaller than my bust, and so on. I was mostly proportional, though on a large scale, but I was a little thick-waisted. I made charts and goals. Over the years, I started many, many diets, not based on any fad, but merely a regimen of serious deprivation to the point of near starvation (or at least so it felt) and then binging, a cycle I repeated so many times over the years that my metabolism became schizophrenic, terrified of a mythical starvation conspiracy, and eventually, my body refused to let go of my bloated fat cells, clinging to them like a drowning person to a life preserver.

Now, I had thighs that were dimpled like the hood of a car thrashed by a hailstorm, slashed by angry lines and riddled with bumps that reminded me of the mottled flesh of a burn victim. My breasts were stretch-marked and had begun to sag; they were the breasts of a middle-aged mother of three. I had never experienced living with the taut body of a young, nubile woman who starred in romance novels and Aerosmith videos. I went from awkward preteen to fat old hag. And it would only get worse. One day I'd be a brittle old woman with breasts like week-old balloons. Every elastin will have waved a little white flag and quietly retreated.

I had always been plump. Not obese, but not skinny either. Sort of round. I was never athletic. As kids, while Jen took ballet and gymnastics lessons, I took piano lessons or sat around reading books from the library.

In high school I still wasn't overweight, just curvy, or, as my mother put it, solid. I used to binge all the time. Sometimes after a binge I'd kneel at the toilet and put my fingers down my throat and I'd try to puke, but I couldn't. I would gag, but that was about it. I was such a loser I couldn't even be a successful bulimic like Jen. She was even hospitalized for it, but I have to pretend I don't know. Jen didn't want Mom to tell me. Jen was able to confide in Mom because secretly she knew Mom wouldn't really disapprove. The only thing our size-six mother disapproved of were woman who were overweight.

I didn't binge too often anymore, but every year I'd put on a few more pounds. It was a simple mathematical calculation that I knew well. If I wanted to maintain my weight, I needed to consume as many calories as my body needed to fuel itself every day, which was about 2,200 calories. If I wanted to lose weight, I had to consume 500 fewer calories each day, or between 1,500 and 1,700 calories a day, to lose one pound a week. Instead, I ate just a few more calories each day than I should have, and these extra calories hung out until they caught up with other lingering calories until they hit that hideous number, 3,500, and were able to gleefully ring up another pound on the scale.

Being with Greg didn't help. He could put away ridiculous amounts of food without gaining weight. He was eight inches taller than me and had a metabolism that worked at a frenzied pace, while my metabolism plodded along lugubriously. Plus, Greg loved me exactly the way I was. While I became frantic with desires of thinness around Mom, Jen, and any of the latest women's magazines, my lust to be svelte virtually disappeared around him. No matter how many times I tried to pick fights or get him to admit he'd prefer it if I were buff and fat-free, he insisted I was gorgeous the way I was. The bastard.

I really wanted to believe him. One of my favorite lines from Margaret Cho's show,
I'm the one that I want
, is about how for her, being ten pounds lighter is a full-time job, and she, for one, is turning in her pink slip. She's right; it takes so much damn energy for some of us to be a few pounds lighter than we are. There are times when I just genuinely want to be able to love myself the way I am. But as for me, a little feel-good feminist doctrine can compete only so much with an entire society that tells you fat is bad and thin is good. An entire culture or one mother.

No matter how many self-help books you read or how much you work on bolstering your self-esteem from within, you just can't help wanting to show off to your parents. I'd heard of people—and not just ones on daytime TV—who said that their parents called them dumb, useless, and the like. I would have taken a razor blade and ended it all right there if my mother had said anything like that to me. No, she was much more subtle, just a glance, just a slight frown or questioning look brought me to my knees.

While Jen went to just about every dance in high school—sometimes going to two or more homecomings at various high schools in the area a year—none of her relationships lasted more than a few dates. Until Dave, Jen had never been serious about anybody.

I, on the other hand, dated a senior named Alex for most of my junior year. He asked me out right after homecoming and we broke up just before prom (he didn't go with anyone else; my guess was that he couldn't afford to take me and breaking up with me was the honorable way to get out of it). We'd already decided not to do the long-distance thing when he left for school in Florida. He was just ending it a little before I'd expected. The problem with his timing is that in the photographic catalog of Jen and my high school history, Jen is featured in a gazillion prom photos, homecoming pictures, and Saddie Hawkins shots, whereas it looks like I was a complete loser, when in fact I was only mostly a loser.

Alex happened as a fluke, really. I was at a party with my two honors-geeky friends Julia and Ann. The guy hosting the party—I don't know his real name, everybody called him Schroeder—invited me in the hopes of getting Jen, who was a freshman at the time, to come. As soon as Schroeder said, “Hey, I'm having a party this weekend, wanna come?” I became giddy, wondering if perhaps I was turning over a new, nongeeky era in my life, if perhaps I'd underestimated the ability of my fellow classmates to judge me not by looks alone, but my wit, my intelligence, my
je ne sais quois,
and then he said, “See if your sister wants to come. Her name's Jen, right?” As if he didn't know.

Anyway, I didn't care that my presence was requested only to get Jen there. I'd been invited to a party, and I wasn't going to turn down the opportunity. I brought two friends and Jen brought two friends. I walked into Schroeder's parents' modest brownstone like Cinderella attending her first ball. When someone handed me a plastic cup of flat, warm beer, I felt like I'd been given Miss America's tiara.

As Jen flirted with what can only be described as a herd of boys, who stood around her in a horseshoe shape and never left her side, my geek buddies and I hid out in the basement. I thought we had the place to ourselves, and I was entertaining Ann and Julia by making fun of the drill team's dance numbers, overexaggerating wildly, including grinding my pelvis even more lasciviously than they did, which, believe me, wasn't easy. Ann and Julia were dying laughing, which was part of the reason I loved them—they found me hilarious—when I heard the clapping behind me and saw Alex. I'd seen him around. I knew he was a senior, not in the popular crowd but well above the sewer-dwelling stratum of the high school social structure. I was high on the unusual self-confidence inspired by Ann and Julia's laughter, so I did something I almost never did, I talked to a boy without stammering, stuttering, or acting like the shy, book-reading dork I was.

“I was just practicing my moves. I was thinking of trying out. I think there is no better way that one can serve her school than to put on low-cut sequined uniforms and do high kicks.”

“Really, when you think about it, you're not just doing a service to the school, but the whole community really.”

And off we went. Before the end of the night, he asked me if I wanted to go to the school's battle of the bands contest with him the next weekend, and I said yes and gave him my number. He called the next day and from that moment on we were inseparable—either attached through sound waves via telephone cords or together—for most of the next year. I said to my mom and Jen on every possible occasion, “my boyfriend” or some version of “I have to get ready for a date. Oh, did you hear, I have a
date
. Me.”

When we got to the part of the relationship when we were ready to have sex (he was ready eleven seconds after meeting me; it took me about a month), I spent the first several months wearing as many clothes during sex as humanly possible and insisting that the room was bump-into-walls dark. No matter how much he insisted I was beautiful, I just couldn't buy it. What's funny is that I wasn't even that heavy then. Maybe ten pounds over my ideal weight. Eventually, however, hating myself so acutely simply became too exhausting, and I eased up on myself until it was more of a low-grade self-disgust that I had toward my appearance.

By the time I got to college, I'd at least gotten over the fear that a guy would run screaming from the sight of my naked body, thanks in part (inadvertently) to Alex (not because he made me feel good about my looks, but because he helped remind me that I was a smart, funny woman who had a lot more going for her than just having a body made for
Baywatch).
Plus, I finally figured out that it would take a lot more than a few extra pounds and a little jiggle to stop a guy from getting laid.

Enter Ryan. It was the middle of my junior year in college, and I was at a bar with Jen and some of my friends and some of her friends. We'd all gotten in thanks to the fake IDs created by a friend of a friend of Jen's.

When the waitress came to our table and told me that the guy at the end of the bar wanted to buy me a drink, I promptly said, “Wait, are you sure he wants to buy
me
a drink?”

“Yep, he said the pretty red-haired girl in the green shirt.” (Jen, the only other redhead at the table, had been wearing black.)

I accepted another beer and turned to look at him, fully expecting someone who looked like he'd be cast in the part of
Über Nerd
in the teen movie of the week, and instead saw Ryan, who was actually really cute. He had a little bit of a potbelly, but he didn't carry himself like someone who was sorry for being imperfect. He looked like someone who ate, drank, and had sex with gusto, and couldn't always be bothered with something as confining as self-control, something I found strangely sexy.

We waved to each other, and later, he pulled up a chair to our table to talk to me,
me
—amidst a table of gorgeous women.

Like the night I'd met Alex, I was unusually outgoing and feeling atypically good about myself on the night Ryan came into my life—thanks to the thrill of being bought my first drink by a man I didn't know plus the drinks themselves, which had bolstered me with a liquid confidence. We laughed a lot that night and had a great time.

Ryan had never finished college and was in a rock band, although he made most of his money by teaching guitar. Though our interests were about as different as could be—mine were academic and future-thinking, his were street-smart and about living life in the moment—we ended up dating for two years, and sleeping together on and off for another year after that. Our relationship had many faults, but we always laughed and the sex was always good. It helped that he was a little overweight himself. I realized that I loved him despite his imperfections, and it helped me grasp that maybe it wasn't such a stretch to believe someone could love me even if I wasn't perfect.

People, that is, other than my mother.

Mom had never been more proud of me than when I'd gotten engaged. She'd beamed for weeks after we announced the engagement. She'd taken an interest in the wedding that she'd never shown in anything else I'd ever done.

Before the engagement, Mom and I talked to each other on the phone every other week. Now that I had a wedding to plan, Mom sometimes called a few times a day. She would mail ads for dresses she thought would look good on me, all of which I found virulently repugnant, and she constantly offered advice, little of which I wanted. Mom and Dad had eloped because they'd been young and too poor to afford a wedding, so this was Mom's first wedding. She'd been storing up visions of an elaborate reception since she'd eloped twenty-eight years earlier, and she was spewing all of her ideas my way.

Since Greg had proposed, Mom's crusade to get me to lose weight had spiraled out of control, though she feigned subtlety. If she saw me eating something, anything, with too much enjoyment, sometimes she'd say, “ Think of the wedding pictures” or “Think of the bridal gown.” More often, she would watch me eat and give me a look like I was a drug-addled prostitute who murdered small animals for sport. She did not hide her disappointment in my appearance well.