Chapter One: You Should Feel Lucky It is 1972. I am twelve years old. It is the first day of sixth grade, and I am standing in the girls'' gymnasium waiting to be weighed. My last name begins with L, so I am exactly in the middle of the line. The thinnest girl in class stands directly in front of me. At the front of the line, our gym teacher, Miss Match, with her butch haircut, slim boy hips, and two-pack-a-day gravelly voice, barks out our names. Looming beside her is that gray piece of metal: the scale. Miss Match weighs each girl and calls out the number for her assistant coach to record on her clipboard.
Her assistant jots the numbers with her ballpoint pen: 100, 105, 88, 120. The line moves forward and I begin to sweat. The girl ahead of me has arms and legs like twigs. Her thighs swim inside her gym shorts. She is blond and has huge, soulful eyes. In seventh grade she will become my best friend, but for now she is this skinny thing and I hate her. Three girls behind is my current best friend, Anna Mankowicz, who has shot up over the last year to a sinewy five foot six. She towers over us and has bona fide breasts.
I also know that she has hair down there. I love her, but I am also afraid of her, of her recent developments. Boys like her. A few girls behind Anna is Wanda Mueller. She is not my friend or anyone else''s. The reason is obvious: she''s the fattest girl in the class. She''s really, really big. Tall and fat.
She usually wears skirts, and her legs look like telephone poles that dead-end at her sensible brown shoes. Her cheeks flush quickly and are often either firing up or fading out. For me, she is the safety net. She''s the one everyone picks on, the one who gets ostracized. She protects me from the same fate. Even at age twelve, I have developed an elaborate set of coping mechanisms to keep people from teasing me. They include being funny and being nice and behaving in such a fashion that everyone in the world will like me. Maintaining this facade takes a great deal of energy, since I am filled with self-loathing and a good dollop of misanthropy.
Still, I am able to hide my outsized feelings because the desire to be liked and not ridiculed is stronger than all the hatred I can conjure. I have always been able to befriend my deepest enemy and thus keep him -- or her -- from hurting me. In the sixth grade, hurting people took the form of name-calling: fag, fairy, wimp, fat. When I read a purloined copy of The Godfather that was making the rounds through our sixth-grade class, mostly for the sex scenes, I found instead Vito Corleone''s famous line, "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." I kept his counsel, for I knew exactly what he meant. By the time I reached the sixth grade, I couldn''t stand most of my closest friends. * The line moves up. I hate the way my gym shorts cling to my skin.
It''s a one-piece rayon suit, and its goal in life is to cling and ride up my ass. The line continues. I start to panic. I tell myself, I''m not Wanda Mueller. At least I''m not Wanda. Then I feel guilty. I think about lunch and how my mother always packs the same thing: an egg salad or tuna fish sandwich and a piece of fruit. Never a cookie or a sweet.
No little bags of potato chips or Fritos. Too fattening. I hate Miss Match. She''s been known to make remarks about weight, and though she''s never directed one at me, I live in terror that she might. The skinny flower in front of me steps up to the scale. Match slides the balance to the left, lower and lower. Finally, she calls out, "seventy-eight." That''s what I weighed in the third grade, for Chrissake.
My face is grim as I step up. I watch Miss Match''s knuckly fingers work the balance toward the upper end of the scale in five-pound increments. It takes forever. This slow torture, I am certain, is deliberate. On that day of my twelfth year, I weighed 134. I was five feet tall. It was too much. What I would give to see that number again.
* After school, and much cajoling, Anna Mankowicz''s mother agrees to take us to Dunkin'' Donuts as a back-to-school treat. We live in a suburb of New Haven and have to drive the fifteen or so minutes into town, down Whalley Avenue, a main thoroughfare that is home to most of my favorite fast-food chains. I sit in the back seat with Anna while her two younger brothers maul each other in the way-back of the station wagon. Anna''s brothers are big guys, destined to play all manner of contact sports. Anna''s mother is petite. She secures her frosted hair beneath a velvet navy blue hair band. She wears culottes and a polo shirt and always looks as if she is coming off the golf course triumphant after sinking a difficult putt. I am afraid of her, though I have no reason to be.
I sense that she can be mean. At the doughnut counter, Anna and I ask for our usual: glazed. The boys scarf down crullers. Mrs. Mankowicz sips at her black coffee. We are happily eating our doughnuts when the youngest, a strapping boy nearly six feet tall, announces he wants another. His brother chimes in that he does, too, and Anna follows suit. I keep silent, not because I don''t want another -- those glazed things are like air -- but because I am afraid the request might appear rude.
After all, I am not a member of the family. I know Mrs. Mankowicz is going to treat me, but I am anxious about presuming the lengths of her generosity. Too, my silence shelters a deeper fear: I am afraid of looking like a pig. I already feel self-conscious next to my svelte friend, my thighs sticking to the pink vinyl stool. "Boys, you may choose another doughnut," Mrs. Mankowicz begins, "but Anna, I don''t want you eating another. You''ve got a figure to watch.
" I sit there frozen. I can''t believe my ears. For all the hinting and prompting and gesturing and glancing my mother does to convey her disapproval of my eating too much, she has never once come out and said "You can''t eat that." She has never denied me a bite. I know that she wishes I would lose weight, disapproves when I take seconds or order something fattening at a restaurant, but she never uses her authority as my mother to limit my food intake. "Betsy, would you like another?" Mrs. Mankowicz smiles at me, her hot pink lipstick now faded, imprinted instead on the lip of the mug before her. I know she is being polite.
But her words cut through me. If I take the doughnut, then I am admitting defeat. After all, doesn''t her offer imply that my figure is beyond watching? Already too chubby, I might as well pile it on. Or I could decline the doughnut and act as if I am full. (Full? There aren''t enough doughnuts in the state of Connecticut!) Mrs. Mankowicz''s dark eyes are on me, waiting for my response, seeming to know that I want to eat everything in sight. I look into her eyes, trying not to cry and trying to understand if she is being cruel or if I am being too sensitive, as I am usually charged. I am also trying to maintain a shred of dignity in front of my best friend and her two brothers, who seem oblivious to my dilemma.
Mrs. Mankowicz is waiting. It is a simple question: Do I or do I not want another doughnut? Reinterpreted, however, through the web of self-loathing known as my inner life, it sounds more like: Do you want to die by lethal injection or the electric chair? By now the boys have nearly finished their seconds. I want to kill Anna''s mother. I want to rip every pink thing from this shit-box of a doughnut shop and smear it with chocolate custard. I want to scream in her tight little face: You know I want another doughnut, you fucking bitch. But more than anything, I want to race home to my mother and lambaste her for letting me feed my face. I want her to control me the way Mrs.
Mankowicz controls Anna, so I can be beautiful and slim. I want to throttle my mother for letting this happen to me. But then I pull myself together. I tell myself that I am happy I have my mother and not this controlling bitch. I am happy that my mother doesn''t tell me what to eat. I am happy because I am my own person and I will deal with my weight in my own way. Who would want a mother like that, anyway? "No, thank you," I say. "I''m not hungry.
" * The following year, Anna went to private school and I attended public school in our suburb. We continued to see each other at our temple for the final year of Hebrew school classes, which would culminate in our being bas mitzvahed. Our circle hated Hebrew school and felt that the required two afternoons a week were a waste of time. In our religious ennui, we regularly gathered in the woods behind the school to play truth or dare and smoke cigarettes. The game required players to either make good on a dare or answer any question truthfully. The questions we asked were aimed to humiliate and were usually about sex, attempting to determine how much experience each of us had had. Since we were all completely inexperienced, the game became one of bluffing. Once Reva, the skinny girl from gym class, was asked if she swallowed or spit it out.
After searching our faces for a clue, she blurted: "Spit what out?" The boys broke up in guffaws. And when my friend looked at me, I made a superior, sorry face as if I knew the answer. It all sounds innocent enough, but as we pushed each other further and further, waiting to see who would crack, it became an unrelenting game of chicken. Uptight about my body and convinced that my inexperience with boys was related, I found the game agonizing. But beyond the social politics of our little game, something else was becoming clear: all the boys were in love with Anna. And the alpha male of our group, Petey Marks, was clea.