Where we are

BRIT HAS CUT HER HAIR really short and bleached it blonde. From the back she looks like an albino and from the front she looks plain weird with her thick black eyebrows, her long black eyelashes, and bright red lipstick painted thick on her wide mouth. She says she is making a statement.

“I don’t care if I look odd as long as I get noticed,” she says.

She tells me she keeps the sign in the fridge, and that Chris has been right, it is helpful. YOU’RE TOO FAT,” a daily mantra to live by, in big yellow uppercase letters.

Meg just cries all the time now. She is planning her and Jon’s big social wedding. She seems to think that a shiny new ceremony will fix everything, and that their marital woes only came because they eloped. She buys Jon a huge square gold ring with diamonds from a pawnshop. He wants one with white gold braiding on the side as well but they can’t find one like that.

Mathew and I are going to the wedding but Brit says she can’t.

Meg wants carrot cake for her wedding, so we have all been testing carrot cakes for weeks.

Miranda is onto her second therapist. The first one told her she needed to start eating more fresh fruit and vegetables, not just chips and junk. The therapist said Miranda’s angry with life, that anger resides in the liver, and that Miranda feeds her anger with chips and grilled cheese sandwiches, and that if she ate healthier foods, she’d feel less angry. I seem to remember Madison’s doctor telling her a similar thing.

Anyway, Miranda fired that therapist and found a new one who’s helping her rewrite the stories of her life. She even seems to be having fun with it. Apparently Dr. Lit.’s reappearance was short-lived and she told him to get lost. She says there is no hope for her and Nate but the child-support will come in handy. And, what do you know, guess who called her the other day but Sanjiv? She told him she’d see him but she warned him she was big as a house because she’s having a baby. Sanjiv’s got two kids with Rijuta so I’m not sure what Miranda thinks might happen, and I don’t say anything.

My sister is seeing a therapist, a hypnotherapist who is digging into her past to find the root of all her unhappiness and all her problems. He thinks, right now, that it is her near-death experience when she drank herself into a coma at fourteen. She still believes she is Princess Isis reincarnate; I try to explain she means the goddess but she won’t listen. She is still seeing Greg but she has stopped running. She says hot yoga makes her feel sick and then she wants to smoke even more. She says this makes Greg very angry and she is not sure about their future. I miss her a lot.

My mother has found a new cure for all the ills in life. It’s called Nutri-Green and she is sending me some so that I won’t even need to eat. She says if I just take this, I will get all the nutrients I could possibly ever need.

I miss Janet very much. She has left to go to another job. She came to hug me when she left and I nearly cried. I was taken aback by my sadness.

Before she left, Janet told me she and her husband had been discussing a slim woman friend of theirs and that he’d said he wished the friend would get pregnant because then she’d be fat like Janet and it wouldn’t be so hard for him to look at Janet.

I was horrified but Janet just laughed. Then she left to go her new job and I went to the washroom and cried.

And me, well, despite the endless hunt and the various job interviews, I never thought I would actually leave. While I seem to spend my whole life trying to exit whatever job I am in, when I do it, no one is more surprised than me. I tell myself I should be happy. I have got the clean slate I want, my fresh new start. I have a sneaking suspicion however, that unless I do something different this time, that this job will just be a new rug under which to sweep old problems.

Brit throws me a party and Kenneth makes a really nice speech and they give me a potted plant and all I can think is that I have escaped without them ever knowing the truth of what a mess I am in private. Both the Miss World Contenders are there, Thin Lisa is thinking of moving to New York. Colleen has bought me a bottle of mineral water onto which she has stuck a bowtie and drawn a happy face.

“Keep your water happy,” she tells me, and there are tears in her eyes as she hugs me.

Brit also hugs me and tells me we must stay in touch but I think she knows I am no good at that. Meg says she’ll see me at her wedding. Kenneth says I am a legend and my new place is lucky to get me and if they ever need an editor…. They all seem really sad to see me go.

And I am just numb, which is how I live most of my life.