Jen rang Lana’s doorbell and when she saw a shadow move behind the door’s side window, she chortled, “Fa la la la la, la la la LA!”
A tall, broad-shouldered man with a shaved head opened the door and looked at her.
Jen turned pink. “Oh sorry. I thought Lana was opening the door. You must be Eddie?”
“Yep. You must be the infamous Jen?”
“I guess—I’m not sure about the infamous part.” Jen stepped into the entranceway as Eddie beckoned her in, and a delicious scent of mixed spices, cumin and coriander greeted her. The small ground floor suite was painted a creamy yellow and glowed with candles. A little tree sparkled with white lights in one corner of the living room, nearby a beautiful, shiny cello and gleaming piano.
“I didn’t know you played an instrument,” Jen greeted Lana as she came out of the washroom.
“She doesn’t.” Eddie smiled.
“Oh, of course. I knew you were a musician,” Jen covered.
“I’m sorry you had to come in. I meant to see you drive up and meet you in the driveway.”
“Why would you do that? I’m happy to see your place. It’s fantastic.”
Lana smiled a bit and seemed to relax. Eddie offered Jen a drink, which she declined, and then asked if she and Lana would be hanging around long enough to have a samosa. They’d be coming out of the oven soon.
“They’re for a Christmas party,” he explained, “but I cook every chance I get.”
“Ah, that explains the scrumptious smell! I’d love to stay. The mall’s open until midnight.” Jen looked at Lana. She was picking up serious “I want to get out of here” vibes, and she didn’t want to agree to stay if it was going to make Lana upset. Maybe she and Eddie were fighting?
Lana nodded slowly, like she was weighing something over. “Sure, what the heck. We can stay,” she finally said.
Laughing around the table, nibbling on the baked samosas—just as tasty but not as greasy as deep fried, Eddie explained—Eddie teased Jen about doing an encore so that Lana wouldn’t totally miss out on her Christmas serenade. Jen felt a twinge of jealousy mingle with happiness for her friend. Eddie was really great, openly adoring of Lana. Jen tried not to stare at his lovely mocha skin and stubble-rough chin that begged to be touched.
“Well, we should go,” Jen eventually conceded, “but I admit, I’m so happily warm and stuffed that the idea of heading into the blizzard winds and packed mall seems a little less festive than a nap on the couch.”
Lana looked concerned. “You don’t want to go now?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I want to go. I just shouldn’t have eaten three samosas.”
Eddie walked them to the door, told Jen it was nice to meet her, and he and Lana exchanged a quick kiss. For some reason, Jen felt a bit embarrassed—or perhaps it was just envy again—by the tenderness between them when Eddie stroked Lana’s arm and whispered in her ear, so she went outside first to let them have their “good-bye.” Lana came right behind her though.
“So that was Eddie,” Lana announced as she slammed Jen’s car door and clicked on her seatbelt. “I’m sorry if we kept you longer than you liked.”
Jen shoulder checked and pulled out. “What are you talking about? It was great. He’s great.”
“Yeah.” Lana sounded like she was going to say something else, but had changed her mind.
“Yeah what?”
“Oh, nothing.” Lana changed the subject from Eddie, and chattered about what she was going to purchase, and for whom, and about how the way she always left her shopping until the last minute drove her nuts.
The mall was packed, but after circling through three levels of the parkade, they finally found a spot. They went from shop to shop, talking only sparsely because of the crowds, their conversation consisting of nothing more than quick affirmations of gift choices.
Eventually, Lana let out an exhausted, “Whew, I’m wiped.” She was flushed and looked overheated.
Jen remembered days when just shopping and mall walking felt like a marathon. She shuddered and hoped she wasn’t headed back to them.
“Wanna grab a coffee?” Lana asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you want to head out of the mall or just stay put?”
Jen checked her watch. “Nah, it’s twenty to eleven, a lot of coffee shops nearby will be closed and I don’t feel like going downtown. Let’s just go to Beans & Bites.”
The little mall café was crowded with fellow footsore shoppers. As Jen and Lana walked in, a table of five guys whistled and one called out in a pseudo jolly voice to Jen, “Merry Christmas, ladies—I’m Santa Claus, wanna sit on my knee?”
Jen gave him a withering look and pushed past him as he went on to say something equally endearing about how if she was naughty, he’d treat her good.
“Oh oh, don’t let her friend sit on your knee, she’ll break your lap,” one of Casanova’s friends jumped in. He directed his next comment directly to Lana. “You should lay off the Christmas cookies, babe.”
Jen’s jaw clenched, her face heating up. She continued to scan for an empty table. Poor Lana. She shouldn’t have to deal with those kinds of asshole comments. Someone should tell the little idiots where to go. Jen rounded on her heel to blast them, but Lana put a restraining hand on her arm and shook her head, a big cheerful smile on her face. The smile hit Jen in the stomach. The worst part of being a fat girl was this continual denial that people’s comments hurt you. Not every big person is happy and jolly. Jen stepped forward, prepared to ignore Lana, but Lana gave another barely perceptible shake of her head and held fast to Jen’s arm. She looked the offensive speaker up and down and smiled at his friend—the “Santa.”
Her voice was liquid honey. “I’m not your ‘babe.’ Your comments offended my friend.” She broke off speaking to nod at Jen who blushed. So did the guys. “It’s not socially acceptable to make comments like the ones you made to women you don’t know—I’m assuming you guys like women, that you want to be with one someday?”
There was an expressionless, embarrassed silence among the once loud crowd. Lana nodded as if to agree with her own words.
“Then you might consider learning how to treat them better.”
She grinned again when one of the guys, who hadn’t been laughing with the rest, laughed now and whispered, “Ouch—burned!” to his embarrassing friend.
“Have a nice Christmas, guys,” Lana said, and headed toward an empty table.
“You too,” a couple male voices chorused after her. “Did you see the knockers on her?” Jen heard one of them whisper in awe. She shared his awe, but for different reasons. Shaking her head, she followed Lana. It really didn’t seem to bug her. She really seemed as cool as she acted. Jen was stunned.
“Gee, it’s such a mystery why some men are single, eh?” said Lana, settling into a chair. “And thanks for carrying all the bags. I kind of saddled you with them. Sorry.”
Jen thought of the original comment to Lana, of the group’s come-on to her, of a hundred similar comments and responses she’d endured over the years. It had never mattered that the men were nothing to her, or that they were obviously idiots. Somehow the randomness of attacks, the fact that someone who didn’t even know her felt free to be so hurtful, made them almost worse than insults that came from friends or family.
“How on earth did you do that?” she finally said. “Didn’t they hurt your feelings?”
Lana raised an eyebrow. “I’d have to care what they thought for them to hurt my feelings. They’re just kids trying to figure things out.”
Feeling hungry, Jen ordered two appetizers, crab cakes and mushroom caps—they sounded festive—and a banana split that had enticed her. She and Lana could share.
“There,” she said to Lana as their server walked away. What she meant by the word suddenly hit her and she blanched. She was her mother—constantly extolling the virtues of thinness but on the other hand, first to the emotional rescue with some calorie-laden anesthetic. But Lana didn’t need her bolstering. What was she doing? Lana apparently heard her thoughts and began to talk.
“Half the time, Jen, I don’t even realize I’m bigger than other people. I’ll be breezing by one of the mirrored walls in a store and I’ll catch a glimpse of this big woman—sometimes I’ll even think, ‘Hey, she looks great!’ but even when I think that, it’s always a shock a second later when I realize the big woman in the mirror is me.”
So Lana hadn’t always been a fat girl. She had the “who’s that person in the mirror?” thing going on too, just in reverse.
Lana continued, “Sometimes I feel like shaking you. Thin as a stick practically, but you’re still insecure and body conscious. Yet, you can be ferocious, absolutely fearless, like nothing will get in your way. I appreciate that you were good to go off on that kid, but I really don’t need people to stick up for me.”
“Yeah, so I see.”
Lana waved her hand dismissively. “People say such stupid things. Don’t they ever notice my hair? I’ve got kick-ass hair.”
She did. It was chocolate brown these days, falling in a heavy, shimmering sheet past her shoulders.
“I’ve got good skin, bright eyes, white teeth. I’m obviously, if anyone would care to notice, healthy. I’m always clean. I dress well, don’t show my rolls to the world, but I don’t hide in burlap sacks either—maybe that’s the problem? Maybe people are affronted because I don’t cower and hide like a fat person should? Or maybe they think that I don’t know I’m fat and they’re doing me a favor by enlightening me? Anyway, it can be exhausting and it can piss me off. I feel like saying, ‘If I gross you out, don’t look!’ but then I always come back to my belief that the rest of society’s just victimized by body issues too—like those guys. They don’t actually find bigger women unattractive. They just think they do—and big women often act like they’re unattractive, so it’s a vicious circle.”
Jen had always thought that she’d considered weight from every angle, but this one was new to her.
“So yeah . . . most of the time, I feel good about myself without even really trying. I have a lot of other interests besides my body, you know? But any self-esteem I have is in spite of our culture, for sure. Even plus size models, give me a break, what are they? Size twelves, maybe fourteens—a very rare sixteen? They’re the size of average women yet the companies who use them go on and on about honoring ‘plus size’ women, and we’re supposed to feel all pleased and represented?”
Jen sipped her tea. The server delivered their food, which neither she nor Lana acknowledged.
“I wish I could be like you, Lana, but I don’t know how. My whole life has been about losing weight. I try to not let weight issues consume me, and I’ve come a long way, but ever since I was little, someone was always watching my weight. It was just a natural progression for me to take over the obsession.”
Lana grunted to acknowledge that she’d heard Jen’s words. “It’s really not anything I’ve done—except what I just said, try to fight feelings of inadequacy with reality. Those guys’ comments were completely offensive and inappropriate no matter whom they were made to. They attacked my weight, but even if they hadn’t, was it okay for them to make the comment they did to you? Why do they feel entitled to say anything to stranger about her body?”
Jen nodded and Lana railed on. “I’m lucky. I come from family of big proud women. My mom and my aunts are all taller than me and just as heavy—and they’re all happily married with husbands who still drool for them. I’ve always had society telling me one thing, but luckily, my personal life showing something else. Still, I have my own glitches.”
“Like what?” Jen asked and picked at a mushroom without really seeing it, fascinated by what Lana was saying.
“I feel self-conscious about Eddie sometimes, feel that if I go on about how great he is, people will think I’m pathetic and lying. A fat woman get a guy that great? Yeah right. Or conversely, some women might feel sorry for him and make a play for him—‘Poor Eddie, what’s a gem like him doing stuck with a big thing like her?’”
Jen sensed there was more than fat girl paranoia behind Lana’s fear.
“It’s happened more than once,” Lana confirmed, and Jen winced. “It’s just so shitty. It’s one thing if some idiot men think fat women aren’t dateable, but it’s totally another thing when women agree with them.”
“But Eddie so obviously and completely loves you.”
“Yeah, and I know I don’t have to worry about him, but I still do sometimes. He just thinks I’m funny and says things like, ‘Really, Lana, paycheck-to-paycheck musicians that work as waiters aren’t as attractive as you’d think’ which is, of course, blatantly untrue. They’re every girl’s kryptonite. He just doesn’t know it.”
Jen laughed.
“And then he says, ‘I hate to break it to you, but you’re stuck with me forever.’” Lana did an uncanny imitation of Eddie’s voice and her eyes sparked with mischief.
Jen smiled and felt wistful. Their affection for each other was tangible. She’d felt it the minute she walked into their home. That’s what people are jealous of. That’s why women want Eddie. They’re jealous of Lana, not negating her at all.
Picking up a now cold mushroom cap and then discarding it, Jen said, “I’m not as pathetically insecure as you think, you know.”
Lana looked surprised. “Oh, I know that. You just fight the fat woman’s battle. It felt unacceptable to you to like yourself when you were heavy, but secretly, part of you didn’t mind your weight—felt like you should wear it proudly, even if you couldn’t. Now you kind of like being skinny and you think that makes you one of them, one of the fatists. A betrayer of fat girls everywhere.”
“How on earth could you have known that? I’ve never been able to articulate that, even to myself.”
“Well, sorry to break it to you, but you’re not unique. Every magazine ad, TV commercial, radio blip and billboard cries out against us feeling confident in our own skins. If women ever start to feel okay to just be themselves, our economy will collapse. Unhappy, look-obsessed women are big bucks.”
“Yeah . . .” Jen paused, thinking. “You’re one of the most confident women I know, but even you admit you’re not totally immune to body image issues.”
“Wishing to be free does not make one free.”
“Well, it almost does.”
“True—so true.” Lana waved her hands, as if her body couldn’t contain her passion. “And it really does come down to making a decision. Do I let my happiness be dictated by my size, do I focus on my body and my looks, excluding or forgetting everything else? Or do I focus on the larger picture, on my relationships, on issues that actually affect how I live, on bigger things?”
They were quiet for a few minutes, sipping their cooled teas. The waiter popped by, probably to take their plates, and looked at the congealing mass of cold food. “Was there something wrong with the food, ladies?”
Jen and Lana exchanged glances. “No, we just weren’t as hungry as we thought. Sorry.”
“Should I pack them for you to go?”
“Sure,” Lana said. “That’d be great.”
“And would you still like the banana split?”
Jen and Lana looked at each other again and grinned. “Yes, please,” they said in unison.