gave me a tentative smile. She was wearing one of those outfits I always thought of as fat-lady chic: leggings and a tunic top in a soft, periwinkle blue, with silk-screened daisies across her chest. A beautiful outfit, and not cheap, either, but play clothes. It’s as if the fashion designers decided that once a woman hit a certain weight, she’d have no need for business suits, for skirts and blazers, for anything except glorified sweatsuits, and they tried to apologize for dressing us like overaged Teletubbies by silk-screening daisies on the tops.
“I’m laughing to keep from crying,” I explained.
“Gotcha,” she said. “I’m Lily.”
“I’m Candace. Cannie.”
“Not Candy?”
“I think my parents decided not to give the kids on the playground any extra ammunition,” I said. She smiled. She had glossy black hair twisted back with lacquered chopstick-y things, and diamond studs the size of cocktail peanuts in her ears.
“Do you think this will work?” I asked. She shrugged her thick shoulders.
“I was on phen-fen,” she said. “I lost eighty pounds.” She reached into her purse. I knew what was coming. Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest. Lily showed me the full-figure view, in a black suit, and then the side profile, in a miniskirt and sweater. Sure enough, she looked terrific. “Phen-fen,” she said, and sighed gigantically. Her bosom looked like something governed by tides and gravity, not mere human will. “I was doing so great,” she said. Her eyes took on a faraway look. “I was never hungry. It was like flying.”
“Speed’ll do that to you,” I observed.
Lily wasn’t listening. “I cried the day they took it off the market. I tried and tried, but I gained everything back in, like, ten minutes.” She narrowed her eyes. “I would kill to get more phen-fen.”
“But…,” I said hesitantly. “Wasn’t it supposed to cause heart problems?”
Lily snorted. “Given a choice between being this big and being dead, I swear I’d have to think about it. It’s ridiculous! I could walk down two blocks and buy crack cocaine on the corner, but I can’t get phen-fen for love or money.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You never tried phen-fen?”
“No. Just Weight Watchers.”
That brought a chorus of complaints and rolled eyes from the women sitting around me.
“Weight Watchers!”
“That’s a crock.”
“Expensive crock.”
“Standing in line so some skinny thing can weigh you”
“And those scales were never right,” said Lily, to a chorus of enthusiastic uh-huhs! The size six behind the desk was looking worried. Fat lady insurrection! I grinned, imagining us surging down the hall, a righteous, stretch-pant-wearing army, tipping over the scales, toppling the blood- pressure machine, tearing the height-weight charts off the walls and making all the skinny clinicians eat them, while we feasted on bagels and fat-free cream cheese.
“Candace Shapiro?”
A tall doctor with an extremely deep voice was calling my name. Lily squeezed my hand.
“Good luck,” she whispered. “And if he’s got any samples of phen-fen in there, grab ‘em!”
The doctor was fortyish, thin (of course), and going gray at the temples, with a warm handshake and big brown eyes. He was also extremely tall. Even in my thick-soled Doc Martens I barely came up to his shoulders, which meant he had to be at least six and a half feet. His name sounded like Dr. Krushelevsky, only with more syllables. “You can call me Dr. K,” he said, in his absurdly deep, absurdly slow voice. I kept waiting for him to drop what I took for a misguided Barry White impression and talk normally, but he didn’t, so I guessed that basso profundo was the way he did talk. I sat, holding my purse against my chest, while he flipped through my forms, squinting at a few answers, laughing out loud at others. I looked around, trying to relax. His office was nice. Leather couches, a comfortably cluttered desk, a real-looking Oriental rug covered with piles of books, papers, magazines, and a television/VCR in one corner, a small refrigerator with a coffee machine perched on top in another. I wondered if he’d ever slept there… if maybe the couch unfolded into a bed. It looked like the kind of place you’d want to stay in.
“Humiliated in national publication?” he read out loud. “What happened?”
“Ugh,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”
“No, really. I do. I think that’s the most unusual answer anyone’s ever given.”
“Well, my boyfriend…” I winced. “Ex-boyfriend. Excuse me. He’s writing this column for Moxie ”
“Good in Bed?” asked the doctor.
“Why, yes, I like to think so.”
The doctor blushed. “No… I mean…”
“Yeah, that’s the column Bruce writes. Don’t tell me you read it,” I said, thinking, if some fortysomething diet doctor had seen it, I could pretty much assume that everyone else in my life had, too.
“I actually clipped it out,” he told me. “I thought our patients might enjoy it.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, it was actually a fairly sensitive appreciation of… of…”
“A fat lady?” The doctor smiled. “He never called you that.”
“Just everything but.”
“So you’re in here because of the article?”
“Partly.”
The doctor looked at me.
“Okay, mostly. It’s just, I don’t… I never thought of myself… that way. As a larger woman. I mean, I know I am… larger… and I know I should lose weight. I mean, it’s not like I’m blind, or oblivious to the culture, and how Americans expect women to look…”
So you’re here because of America’s expectations?”
“I want to be thin.” He looked at me, waiting. “Well, thinner, anyhow.”
He flipped through my forms. “Your parents are overweight,” he said.
“Well… kind of. My mom’s a little heavy. My father, I haven’t seen in years. He had kind of a belly when he left, but…” I paused. The truth was, I didn’t know where my father was living, and it was always awkward when it came up. “I have no idea what he looks like now.”
The doctor looked up. “You don’t see him?”
“No.”
He scribbled a note. “How about your siblings?”
“Both skinny.” I sighed. “I’m the only one who got hit with the fat stick.”
The doctor laughed. “Hit with the fat stick. I’ve never heard it put quite that way.”
