Fiction Friday

From The Role Model. This should keep you busy for a while...heck, at this rate, you won't have to buy any of my books. ;)

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Diana had imagined that the moment when a person achieves a hundred-pound weight loss would be more...momentous, somehow. That flashbulbs would pop and music would play and confetti would shower from the ceiling. Or at least there would be someone else in the room with which to share the news. But it’s just Diana and Jeff among the motivational posters and the low buzz of fluorescent lights, in the back booth on the left. He in his stocking feet - a threadbare spot on the right pinkie toe - atop the same scale she’d been weighing him on every Saturday morning for the past two and a half years.

And at this moment, as the red diodes settle into place on the digital readout and she records this week’s loss on his file chart, Diana is the only one who knows. Swelling with pride as if she’d lost the weight herself, her body floods with warmth. Her Weight Away training had taught her that any success was wholly owned by the participants - coaches should take credit only for supplying the tools. But she feels at least partially responsible, like she’d created him somehow, week by week, pound by pound, coaxed him out of wet clay with patient and gentle hands. He’d joined the program a depressed, taciturn mountain of a man who couldn’t walk across the parking lot without gasping for breath, and now...

“I made it, didn’t I?” Jeff says.

She raises her gaze to his pale-lashed eyes, and smiles. “Congratulations.”

He doesn’t smile back. She’s disappointed that he isn’t acting happier. Maybe it’s simply anticlimactic. That they’d been talking about this day for so long that the actual fact has lost its significance.

“So I guess they’ll want to do that interview,” he says.

Weight Away Magazine publishes a profile when anyone makes a hundred pounds. To inspire others. With the disclaimer, of course, that actual results may vary. “Like we talked about before.” Diana curves her fingers over the outside of his forearm, surprised at its new firmness. “That’s completely up to you.”

A pink flush bleeds across his freckled cheeks and up his forehead into the thinner spots on his scalp, as he lifts one corner of his mouth into a sort of trepidacious hover. “They’ll want pictures?”

“I imagine they will.” She copies today’s weight onto his card.

“You’ll be in it, too, right?”

She feels his eyes on her, and as she looks up from her notations she sees him looking back, through her, until she feels warmth trickle down her shoulders.

“I...think there’s a form in here for submissions...” She turns away, thumbing through the literature rack, full of flyers with recipes and motivational tips and exercise suggestions. “We could check if the group leaders are also to be interviewed—”

“Diana...you don’t have to dig through all that stuff...I’ll do it. I guess...yeah.” She hears him draw in a deep breath, and she stops, and turns toward him. “I’ll do it. Except...” He looks down at his body, the baggy shirt, the shapeless trousers twisting around his knees, the heartbreaking thinness of the toes of his socks. One black and one navy. “Hell. Guess with that and a couple, three job interviews lined up, I should probably find something that fits a little better. And maybe, you know.” He forces out a smile. “Socks that match.”

“I was going to suggest that,” Diana says.

“Yeah, except I was waiting to go whole hog on the new wardrobe. For when I lose the last twenty.”

“But it’s important to take care of yourself along the way,” Diana says. “It’s hard to start seeing yourself as thinner until you get out of your old clothes.”

He nods. “Right, the body image thing. Like when you look in the mirror and keep seeing the fat guy.” His shoulders sag. “I don’t know, but I look, and look, and all I see is that fat guy Noreen walked out on. I see a fat slob standing in the driveway, holding a note and a frying pan, with a ridiculous expression on his face.”

Don’t, she thinks, as something in her chest softens, as her mouth draws downward. Don’t do that to yourself, not now, not after this long, you’ve been doing so well. Diana was the only person he’d told about Noreen. A year into his weight loss, on a dark, bleak morning in November. He’d gained five pounds that week, and she was on a slight backslide following a series of arguments with Ted. Sitting together over coffee after the meeting, deconstructing what was happening in both of their lives to derail their healthy habits, he’d revealed the real reason he’d joined the program. So one day his wife and daughter would come back.

They hadn’t come back.

Maybe today is an anniversary of sorts, maybe this morning he’d found something of theirs, a toy, a sweater, a tiny little sock. Something must have happened. It happened to her, one Wednesday when she was going through a box of old clothes in the back of a closet, and found the elbow-length satin gloves from her first wedding gown, the one she’d never worn. She went down to the kitchen and started eating and didn’t stop until she heard Ted’s car in the driveway.

“Was it a bad week?” Diana says softly. “You want to get some coffee?”

He shrugs, and jutting out his chin, exhales long and hard. His mouth begins to form a word - a tender word, from the softening of the muscles, the liquid quality of his grape-green eyes, pale brows arched above them, molding furrows into his forehead. But then he stops. Wendy, who leads the ten o’clock meeting, had just burst through the community room doors on her cheap and too-tall shoes, too-red lips stretched wide with her “good morning!” as effusively false as a kindergarten teacher with a hangover. She sees the two of them together, her face goes slack, the eyes knowing. Then says she’d left something in her car.

They listen until Wendy’s heels clip-clip down the corridor and disappear. Jeff sags into a nearby blue plastic chair as if he could no longer shoulder the weight of this stifled, tender word. Diana pulls a second chair beside him.

“Caroline’s birthday,” he says. “I sent a card, and a check, so Noreen could buy her something, a little dress, a doll, heck, I don’t know what a three-year-old wants. It came back, no forwarding address. And I still had a loss this week. Not like it matters anymore. Like it ever mattered, like she was ever planning on coming back even if I lost the weight.” He shoves a hand through thinning, strawberry-blond hair. “Christ. No wonder sometimes I look in the mirror and can’t see anything but that sorry-ass fat guy.”

Diana lets his words settle. Then reaches for his hand. It’s no longer the soft, paw-like appendage it used to be, and her fingers fit more easily around it. Screw Corporate’s warnings about physical contact, about invading people’s personal space. They could fire her, if they wanted. No one had complained yet.

“Can I tell you what I see?” she says.

His mouth forms a grim smirk as he begins pulling on his boots. “A pathetic, sniveling mess whose socks don’t match?”

She starts to smile back but then arranges her face more seriously. “I see a man who had the courage and the strength to change his life.”

He’s quiet a moment. “OK. OK, I don’t totally believe it, but it’s something to hang my hat on. For now.”

Wendy is back, trailed by her weigh-in assistants, and a few of the early birds for the next meeting. They begin to flutter about taking their positions, the participants finding their registration cards, the assistants setting up their stations.

“You want to tell them?” Diana says.

Jeff winks at Diana, then grins, curling up one arm to flex his bicep. “One hundred pounds!” he says.

And it’s different now, the women clap and Wendy squeals and in her head Diana can almost hear the music. After the imaginary confetti falls, and the fake flashbulbs are no longer blinking white spots before her eyes, the bustle resumes, of another meeting about to begin.

Jeff finishes tying the laces of his boots, leans over to Diana and says, “You’re right. I ought to go buy a few things to tide me over. Sort of celebrate. Sort of learn how to see the new me. But I could kind of use some advice. I’m all thumbs about this stuff. I don’t even know the right places to go.”

“Sure,” she says. She’s used to helping Ted with his wardrobe. The tie that goes with the shirt that goes with the jacket. “We’ll go have coffee and talk about it. There are sales all over, I could tell you where—“

“No,” says. “I’m asking if you could, you know, help me.”

“You mean...go shopping with you.“

“Well, yeah. You always look so good, you know, pulled together? I figured, maybe that skill translates over to guy’s stuff and you could help me look intentional instead of like some kind of accident of whatever fits from the Big Man’s store.”
Diana considers her schedule. The errands that Ted asked her to take care of. Replace a watch battery, get a pair of shoes re-soled. She hates how he does that, goes off leaving her a list, like his time is more important than hers.

“Heck, what am I thinking, it’s Saturday, you probably got plans. With your husband—“

“Ted’s in Detroit,” she says, too quickly.

“Think he’ll mind? You spending the afternoon with a pathetic, sniveling mess whose socks don’t match? If he gets mad, call it an act of charity. Call it doing your part to improve the landscape.” He lowers his voice. “Call it helping me look good enough to find a job so I don’t have to keep going to meetings on the Diana Blisko scholarship.”

She stares at him, a flush creeping into her cheeks. “You...know about that?”

“Diana, I’m not stupid. Corporate’s too greedy to let anyone slide that long. Besides, I’ve seen you sneaking money into the till after you checked me in. Several times.”

“I’m sorry...I didn’t mean to...make you feel...”

“No, it’s OK. Call it a nice person doing a nice thing.” He smiles. “But I got dirt on you now, so you’re obligated to help me, or I’ll sing like a canary.”

Diana smiles back. Ted could do his own damned errands. “I’ll get my coat.”