Thirteen

The next morning it is still dark when we set out. It’s no earlier than usual, but the clouds are so low that eight o’clock feels like the middle of the night. We begin walking in a direction that Tess informs us is northwest, retracing our route and heading back away from the sea. I hope this means things will calm down soon, that we will be able to spread farther apart and begin to walk and talk normally. For now we are packed shoulder-to-shoulder, marching almost in lockstep, a single mass against the shards of cold rain. The conditions are hardly ideal for storytelling, but we have three of them to get through today and we have barely begun our descent from Dover when Tess turns to Steffi.

“You have a tale?” she says, and Steffi nods.

She’s ready. Of course she is.

 The Tale of Steffi 

“When I was growing up,” Steffi says, “there was one thing in my family that everyone knew, but that no one was ever permitted to say aloud. At least not in public. It was like my parents believed that if we never talked about it, nobody would notice that my sister was fat.

“For a mother like mine, having a fat daughter was the ultimate shame,” she goes on, turning her head from side to side as she speaks and almost shouting over the wind. “It was nice if you were smart, or kind or talented in some way, or if you had a pretty face, but it wasn’t essential. Skinny was what counted.”

We nod in unison, and wipe the droplets from our faces. It is almost as if the whole group has started crying and merely a few words in, Steffi’s story has already explained so much. Just this morning at breakfast they brought us something called a Scotch egg, which had turned out to be sausage wrapped around a boiled egg and then deep-fried. The hard brown ovals had rolled around on each plate like balls and Steffi had said to the poor innkeeper, “You have brought me a plate of death.”

A plate of death. It had been a strange breakfast, true, and none of us had known quite how to eat it, but that hardly made it a plate of death. Steffi’s food quirks make more sense now.

“My mother had been a model before she married and had us,” Steffi says. “Not like Beverly Johnson, not that high up the food chain, but during the seventies she’d been in her share of ads in magazines like Mademoiselle and Glamour and Seventeen. She was the black girl they always included in every group shot of white friends. You know, the one that’s supposed to imply a level of diversity that doesn’t really exist. I’m sure that had something to do with why she cared so much how everything looked. When you’re the only one . . .”

She stops, pulls a wayward strand of hair from where it has stuck to her heavily balmed lips. “The thing is, nobody had any real idea how much my sister was eating, because she ate alone most of the time. She would carry food into her room, and once I think I even heard her talking to it. Like a friend. Which sounds utterly crazy, if you didn’t grow up in my house and never saw how fast a dining room table could turn into a battlefield. My mother would watch everyone while they ate, calculating the calories they were consuming in her head. The damage, that’s what she called it. A doughnut had a damage of four hundred and fifty calories. An orange just had a damage of fifty-five. It’s funny after all these years how many of her calorie counts I still remember.”

“What’s your sister’s name?” Valerie asks.

“Tina,” says Steffi, rather slowly. “Named after my mom, who’s Christina, and that made it even worse. You have to understand that my mother would have preferred almost anything else over the stigma of having a fat daughter. A child who was stupid, a husband who beat her, bankruptcy, drugs, affairs . . . any of that would have been better, because any of that could have been hidden. But you can’t hide fat. All Tina had to do was walk into a room and the jig was up. She was immediate proof that we weren’t some perfectly photogenic black family, like the Huxtables were then or like the Obamas are now, and that we’d never be perfect, no matter how much Mom tried to pretend.”

She waits for us to nod before continuing. We oblige. We nod. Nothing sucks quite like being fat sucks, so there’s no point in pretending we don’t understand.

“Tina’s humiliations were endless,” Steffi says. “The regular gym uniforms at school didn’t fit her. One had to be special ordered. When we went to Disneyland, she had to ride in her Dumbo by herself. Dumbo. She was supposed to be a little girl, but she was too heavy to ride with the rest of us in an elephant. Can you imagine the kind of jokes people made? And if a fat girl walks down the street eating an ice cream cone . . .” Steffi shudders. “Strangers stop and stare and some of them even say things to you. I remember one time the man selling ice cream wouldn’t give her a cone, because that was her favorite thing, you see, ice cream, and Mom knew it and wouldn’t keep it in the house. So the minute we were on our own, which was rare because my mother watched us like a hawk, we’d head straight for the park. This man . . . he sold ice cream for a living, that’s the whole point. He owned the cart. It was his job to sell ice cream, but he wouldn’t sell any to her. He held up a cone of strawberry—that was her very favorite—and he said, ‘You don’t need this,’ and he handed the cone to me.”

“Did you take it?” says Becca.

“I’m ashamed to say I did,” says Steffi. “He was an adult and I was a kid and I didn’t know what else to do. I offered it back to her the second we were out of his sight, but by then I had licked it and it had sort of melted. She must have hated me. Felt I was the favored one and thought that it all wasn’t fair. And she was right. When you’re the fat girl, nothing is fair.”

We walk a bit in silence, except for the wind.

“She had one date during all four years of high school,” says Steffi. “It was the son of a friend of my father’s and a total fix-up. The four parents got together and made him do it. Or paid him, I don’t know. He went to a different school, so I guess he figured it would never get back to any of his friends that he’d gone out with someone who looked like Tina, but still, just to be on the safe side, he took her to a restaurant out of town. Some seafood place way down by the beach and he said it was because the fish was fresher there, but she saw through it. Of course she did. So she ate just a little bit, like she knew girls on dates were supposed to do, and he took her straight home afterward.

“When she walked in the kitchen, she was starving. It wasn’t just the fact she hadn’t eaten that night. She’d hardly had a real meal in weeks, because she’d been getting ready for her big date. My mother had insisted she could knock a few pounds off in time if she tried and she locked the kitchen—wait a minute. Have I told you that part? Mama didn’t believe in snacking. She always said that when the kitchen was closed, it was closed, and she would literally padlock everything before she went to bed.” Steffi laughs, a hollow sound. “I was in college before I realized that this wasn’t normal, that other people’s mothers didn’t put padlocks on the cupboards and refrigerators.”

“Tina came in, about nine, and she was upset. It had been an awful night and she was hungry, but there wasn’t anything anywhere. We weren’t the kind of family who even kept a bowl of fruit on the counter. She couldn’t find anything in the whole kitchen except for dog food.”

Steffi pauses, a pause that feels like forever. There’s tension within the group. I doubt there’s anyone among us who hasn’t already figured out that Steffi doesn’t have a sister, at least not a fat one named Tina. Steffi’s the one who went on the bad date with the boy who was ashamed of her, the one who couldn’t buy an ice cream cone, who had to fly solo in Dumbo. She’s been talking about herself all along, and the only suspense in the story is how long it will take her to admit that she is both the teller and the tale.

“She’d done it before,” Steffi said. “Reached in the big bag of dog food and snatched a handful of kibble whenever things weren’t going so good. The Alpo was the one edible thing in the house that our mother had never thought to lock up. But this night was an especially bad one, and she felt like she had to eat. Really eat. You have to understand that whenever she got like this, she was driven by pure compulsion, an addict needing her fix, and when she looked down at the dog’s bowl she saw there were the remains of pork chops in it. Which meant that we had celebrated while she was gone, because that’s another thing she loved, pork chops. Another food with which she couldn’t be trusted to restrain herself. So my mother never served them, except on those rare times when she knew Tina wasn’t going to be there. It was just one more additional slap in the face, that the whole family had been eating pork chops while she was off on her awful date, that even the dog was getting pork chops . . .”

Steffi’s voice trails off, becomes faint, briefly lost in the wind. “But the worst part is, the boy caught her like that. He’d come back for something. He’d left his keys or a glove or hat . . . who knows? None of us will ever be able to explain why that boy turned around. He had walked her to the door and shaken her hand, then walked to his car, and then for some reason he’d come back. He was looking through the glass panes in the kitchen door, getting ready to knock, and he saw Tina on her hands and knees in front of the dog dish, chewing on a bone.”

We exhale as a group. Turn our heads away from the center, afraid to even look at one another. We had known something bad was coming, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be as bad as this. Save for Valerie and her slight midriff pudge, which she wears rather defiantly, you wouldn’t call any of us fat girls. But yet, in a way, all girls are fat girls. We all have our oversize shirts, our ways of folding in upon ourselves, our instinctual three-quarter turn from the camera. Everybody’s trying to hide some sort of ugly, so that image of that boy looking at Steffi through the window, seeing her eating from a dog dish . . . it’s a lot to take.

“Why did you say this was a story about love?” Becca says, although even she seems tired of the question. “It’s about everything except love.”

“But I haven’t finished,” says Steffi. “Give me time. It’s a love story because a man saved her. Broke her out of her prison of fat. Her tower of fat, maybe that’s a better way to say it. Because if we’re all living fairy tales, Tina was Rapunzel, locked away from the world. The prince was a doctor with a contract from a pharmaceutical company, who was doing a medical study on obesity, and she was one of his guinea pigs. They met three times a week as part of the protocol and then, out of nowhere, on Valentine’s Day he gave her a box of Godiva chocolates. No man had ever given her anything, much less Godiva chocolates—” She stops to wipe the collected mist from her brow and I think about the gold box I’d seen in her bag that first day in London. She had seemed so surprised to find it there.

“That’s awful. He was trying to ruin her chances before she even finished the study,” says Claire. “Because secretly he liked his women fat. I’ve heard about men like that on the Internet. They call them chubby chasers. Bastards.”

“That does seems cruel,” says Jean. “You take a man who has some sort of obsession with heavy women, and of course he goes into obesity research. It’s a perfect target-rich environment. And he finds someone, this poor girl who has never been loved, not really, who thinks it isn’t possible, and he sabotages her. Singles her out, feeds her chocolate, makes her feel special, and keeps her just like she is.”

“No,” says Steffi. “You’re both wrong. Or maybe I’ve described it wrong, because it wasn’t like that at all. Tina never ate the chocolates. She didn’t have to. It was enough to know that he had given them to her, that he wanted her to have them. After a lifetime of food being locked away, even her mother withholding . . . No, she just kept them. They were a symbol of the fact that he could see through the fat to the real person inside of it. Because he had done what a normal man does when he likes a normal girl. He brings her candy. It’s been fifteen years now, and she still has the box. Do you know what chocolates look like after fifteen years? They turn white. They’re like rocks. But she still has them. She knows what they mean.”

“What do they mean?” asks Claire. “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe this is the story of Beauty and the Beast,” says Steffi. “Yes, not Rapunzel, I don’t know why I said that. Tina’s story was more like Beauty and the Beast, and I don’t blame you for not seeing it, because I didn’t see it myself, not for years. In order to have the miracle of transformation, something must be loved before it is really lovable.”

“Like Sir Gawain and the hag,” says Valerie.

“That too,” says Steffi. “We’re all just telling the same story in different forms. I thought about that last night, when I was in the shower. Because there have been these strange little overlaps, haven’t there?” She shrugs, not waiting for an answer. “Okay, maybe it’s just me. But the point is that in order for a cursed creature to become beautiful, for the magic to work, someone has to see that she already is beautiful. Because the moment the doctor gave her those Godivas, she lost the taste for them. She never craved chocolate again.”

“That’s impossible,” Claire says flatly. “All women crave chocolate.”

“No, all women crave the forbidden,” Steffi says. “And when food was no longer forbidden, it lost its power over her. She found, for the first time in her life, that she could think of other things. Because someone had loved her just as she was right then, in the here and now, and not because of what she might be someday if she could just learn a little bit of self-control.”

“Well, if that’s magic, it’s only magical because a man did it,” Claire says. “Women love the unlovable every day. We fall in love with a man’s potential and then we marry his scruffy, unemployed ass. We treat him like a house we’re trying to flip, a fixer-upper, and we convince ourselves all he needs is a little imagination and some elbow grease. That’s how we get stuck. How we end up with all those losers sleeping on our couch. But men never fall in love with a woman’s potential. They just aren’t capable of it—a woman’s beauty has to be served right up on a plate for them to see it, and then half the time they still can’t. And you’re saying this man was a doctor, which means he was successful, which means he could have had anyone he wanted. For a man like that to see past a fat body and fall in love with the woman hidden inside of it . . . I’m sorry, but I find your story completely unbelievable.”

Jean is frowning. “But you wouldn’t find it unbelievable if a beautiful woman fell in love with an overweight man.”

“Of course not,” says Claire. “That’s my whole point. As a gender, women have a hell of a lot more experience in loving the unlovable.”

“It’s because we get pregnant,” says Angelique. The statement is so her. Out of nowhere and bizarrely genius. She does this. She says nothing for miles and then she suddenly comes up with one of these epic pronouncements, always delivered in her weird Jersey voice.

“What does getting pregnant have to do with it?” says Becca, but Jean is already cutting her off.

“It’s true,” she says. “Women have to protect a life that isn’t quite there yet. Our biology programs us to sacrifice everything for a mass of cells, which is just another way of valuing something for its pure potential. It’s what makes us the superior gender. Because there’s grace in that, this willingness to love something that you can’t see.”

“You may find it unbelievable, but I swear it happened just the way I told you,” says Steffi, who is still looking at Claire. “He was a man, and yet he loved her even when she was fat. I promise, all of this is true. Or most of it.”

“She’s thin now?” Jean says.

Steffi nods. “As it turns out, what she wanted all along wasn’t food as much as she just wanted permission to eat.”

“My father was like that,” I say, the words coming out in a rush. “He was an alcoholic, although nobody used that word, because he just drank beer and nobody paid much attention to beer, at least not in an era where there was so much worse stuff floating around. But I guess it must have been a lot of beer, because one day he said to my mother, ‘I’m going into the woods and in three days, I’ll either come out sober or you’ll find me in there dead.’ ” And all at once it hits me how that must have been for my mother. The cofounder of the commune, designated as one of the keepers of the flame, but yet she was so often alone while my father went off to fight his demons. He was a walker too, like I guess I am, although this is the first time I’ve ever really pondered this particular similarity in our natures. One time he walked so far that he came out on the other side of the woods disoriented and it turned out he was in a completely different state. He found a pay phone in the parking lot of a truck stop and called my mother collect to pick him up and when she said, “Where are you?” he had to ask some trucker. She always laughed about the time Rich called her from New York, but I wonder how funny it really was, being left so often on her own with no idea where he’d gone or when he would return. It puts the Davids of the world in a different light.

“Exactly,” says Valerie. “That’s exactly the point I was trying to make, that whenever you deny yourself something, it turns into an obsession. But if you know you can have it, you don’t have to have it, and that’s the key to all of life, isn’t it? And if a man offered you the one thing you’d always been denied, the one thing even your own mother wouldn’t give you . . . of course you’d fall in love.”

It’s a telling moment. Valerie said “you” instead of “she,” but Steffi ignores the shift in pronouns and keeps talking.

“I’m not suggesting it was easy,” she says. “She lost a hundred and forty pounds over the course of a year, but the day her doctor gave her chocolate was the start of it. And eventually she went back to school, and moved on with her life, and married the doctor and if you met them today . . . you would never guess that they started out as Beauty and the Beast, you would just think What an attractive couple. Oh, and after she had lost the weight she had to have skin-reduction surgery, all over her body. Around the hips and waist mostly, with little tucks in the arms and legs. More than fifteen pounds of skin was removed, can you imagine that? Fifteen pounds of nothing but skin?”

“So her story has a happy ending?” says Becca.

“The happiest,” says Steffi. “She now weighs a hundred and twenty-three pounds, and for women I don’t think there could be any happier ending. We should rewrite all the fairy tales—Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and The Little Mermaid. Forget the princes and the castles. Just type the line ‘And she weighed a hundred and twenty-three pounds happily ever after,’ and we would all close the book with a tear and a sigh.”

“How do you know all this?” asks Valerie. “How do you know what she thought and what she felt and how she ate the dog food but she didn’t eat the chocolates?”

“I’m being stupid, aren’t I?” says Steffi and she stops. Drops her backpack, pulls her shirt from the waistband of her jeans, and lifts it. “Here. You may as well look.”

The scars have faded over time to a watery shade of beige, pale slashes across her strong brown abdomen. Two of them, one on the right and one on the left, stretching around her waist from both sides, almost touching in the back and almost touching in the front. It is the body of a woman who, at some point in her life, has been virtually cut in half.