Autobiography of a Fat Bride Page 3

  And I was still the sucker.

  “If you have ever competed in the Special Olympics or another woman is carrying your progeny at this moment, the deal’s off,” I said slowly and cautiously. “And lift up your pant leg; I know the difference between a diabetic ID bracelet and an electronic monitoring cuff, you know, so don’t even try it.”

  “All clear,” he assured me.

  “And if your mom always gets the top bunk, this is so over,” I informed him.

  “We’ve been fighting over that a lot less since my landlord fixed the air-conditioning in my apartment,” he said.

  “Let’s get one thing straight then,” I said as I looked him dead in his sensitive eyes. “It’s not me, it’s you, got it? It’s YOU, it’s not ME. It’s never going to be me. IT will always be YOU. Got it?”

  “So it’s not you, it’s me?” he said.

  “Right,” I said.

  The Good Guy

  I had wanted a good boyfriend all of my life, and when I finally got one, I had no idea what to do with him.

  He called when he said he would.

  He held my hand when other people were watching.

  He had his own car, which, coincidentally, actually ran.

  His ex-girlfriend lived in another state and although she was currently pregnant, it was BY ANOTHER MAN, and a demonstrated pie chart/time line proved that my boyfriend’s chromosomes could not have, in any way, been detected in a DNA paternity test.

  One night, after an evening of drinking, he told me he loved me in a Denny’s parking lot at 2 A.M., and then he bought me a Grand Slam breakfast. When he sobered up the next day, he didn’t even take what he said back or ask me to pay half of the check.

  What do you do with a guy like that?

  I had no idea. I have to admit I was completely perplexed.

  All I could do was keep waiting for the Real Boyfriend in him to come out, because I knew the craven creature had to be in there somewhere, lurking. I mean, it’s inborn. This one, I figured, was the most patient and affectionate sociopath I had ever dated. One night as he slept, I hovered over the breathing patterns of my boyfriend and whispered, “I command thy demon to show himself!” but all that happened was that the poor little fellow started to drool.

  I tried to ask my friends for advice, but they all looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “What do you mean he’s never made you cry?” my friend Nikki said. “How else are you supposed to know he likes you!”

  “Are you serious that he’s never stood you up?” my friend Sara said. “That sounds a little . . . clingy if you ask me.”

  “I can’t believe he hasn’t asked you for a loan yet,” my friend Kate said. “He must have another girlfriend with a better job.”

  “I agree, it’s highly unusual,” my best friend Jamie mentioned, scratching her chin. “But could it be—Nah. No. Nope. No way. I mean, I don’t think so, what are the chances? Are you really, completely sure that he’s not working undercover, perhaps as a religious missionary attempting to save your damned soul or a guy who’s trying to sell you life insurance or a mutual fund?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” I disclosed.

  “You know, I’ve heard there was one out there, one left, running and living among them.” She nodded. “I always took it as a tall tale, an urban legend, an archetype of mythical proportions, but maybe he is out there. I believe there were several strands of hair discovered on a bush one time, as well as a questionable poop. Apparently, he’s been spotted, according to several notable anthropologists, but never identified. Based on what I’ve heard, from his appearance, he’s indistinguishable from the rest.”

  “The rest of who?” I asked.

  “Men,” she said simply. “The rest of men. I don’t want to freak you out, but I think you’ve found him.”

  “Found who?” I asked.

  She smiled. “The Good Guy,” she said with a wink.

  I freaked out. I mean, this was pressure. If he really was a Good Guy, the weight on my shoulders was insurmountable. Because that meant I had to keep him; if I spooked him or chased him away or introduced him to any of my attractive friends, I would never find another of his kind. Therefore I was facing incredible challenges.

  He was an endangered species; the only thing that could make him more valuable was if he were albino. If I had any chance of keeping the Good Guy, I was going to have to start wearing clean clothes. Stop eating sugar and let my face clear up. I was probably going to have to cook. I was definitely going to have to shave. It looked like I might have to compromise on occasion.

  Honestly, there was no chance that a girl like me, with all of her scratches and her dents, was going to be able to hang on to a guy like that, not even if I grew hawklike talons—it might take my nails up to a week to reach their full, puncture-level maturity. I was not a shiny, gleaming, firm Red Delicious or a fuzzy, blushing Georgia peach. My fruit was bruised and came with its own colony of Med flies.

  I embarked on the only option open to me, considering the limitations of my talents and skills. Plan A involved taking him to the bar and plying him with alcohol, keeping the man as inebriated and befuddled for as long as humanly possible. By the time he sobered up, it would be time to send him off to work, where he would be too consumed with dehydration and alcohol poisoning to realize there was a gap between my two front teeth. Or that they were slightly bucked, given the four years of relentless lying on my behalf when documenting the usage on my headgear chart. Or that they were the color of butter. Or that I had a mole under my lip, which by the time I reached middle age would be mistaken for an M&M, and by the time I had gone gray and my ass was slapping the back of my knees when I walked would effloresce into the size of a giant gumdrop, undoubtedly knocking my nose into second place in the pecking order for the largest feature of my face.

  Oh yeah. I had problems, all right, and they were about to get worse.

  He mentioned that he wanted me to meet his family over the Christmas holiday, and that was when I felt the possibility of the love balloon deflate. What was I going to do then? How could I possibly intoxicate all of his kin, including the children? Nyquil would probably work for any of them in the featherweight category, but for the full-size adults, I’d have to inject commercial-grade heroin into the Butterball. My cover would be blown, and I would be revealed for the day-old fruit that I was. Besides, I didn’t want to meet his family so soon—we had only been dating for a couple of months, and frankly, that’s not even enough time for a primate to bond with its mother, let alone try to get the Catch of the Century attached to me. I had visions of myself walking through the door and meeting his mother for the first time, as she looked at me as if she had just seen me slide down a brass pole wearing nothing but a string of fake pearls.

  So I was forced to stop getting my boyfriend drunk, which was probably a good thing, I figured, since sobriety may have given him the opportunity to learn my last name. I started trying to prepare myself for the family introduction, telling myself, “How bad could it be? There’s bound to be an introduction in the history of the world that had more horrific consequences; President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Rush Limbaugh and a microphone.” I had miles to go before I reached that level of disaster, and the time had come to call in my reinforcement talents now that I could no longer turn my boyfriend into a blithering alcoholic. Aside from getting a bartender’s attention quickly and ordering drinks at the bar, I only had one talent left: frying cutlets.

  Certainly, in some areas of the world, frying cutlets is a menial task, but in the land of the Italian-American-Catholic hierarchy, cutlet frying could easily take the place of beauty and could even forgive a sin as ugly as infertility, especially in a marriage-aged woman with an above-average number of moles. Now, in this specific culture, frying a perfect cutlet, comparatively speaking, is equal to the ability of a woman of Germanic stock to plow a field by herself without even assistan
ce from livestock, of an Englishwoman for keeping most of her teeth a variation of the color “pale,” or the duty of a Mormon woman to pop out a baby every birthing season for a decade straight without missing even one year.

  And it just so happens, I can fry a mean cutlet.

  I’m sure it’s no mistake, either. I’m nearly positive that when I was five and the baby freckle under my lip began to assert itself as a growth, my mother gasped, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, when the time comes to marry her off, that thing will be the size of a brown Volkswagen. Egg, bread crumbs, frying pan, Laurie! Egg, bread crumbs, frying pan, pay attention!” If there had been a fry-off, I would have won it hands down before I even realized this was my only chance at love, but due to the fact that my parents had uprooted my sisters and me from our native Brooklyn to the desolate shit hole known as Phoenix, Arizona, my title as the Cutlet Queen tragically went uncrowned. There was no way my gift could be appreciated, let alone recognized in a land that called a dinner roll a “bagel.” In hindsight, our neighbors were nice to us simply because they were afraid my Italian New Yorker father would, at any minute, start shaking down the block for protection money or insist on selling them fur coats in 118-degree weather that he said fell off a truck (though in Arizona, you’d say “fell offer this here waggin”). After all, they believed we must have been related to the Gambino crime family because our last names ended with the very same letter. Arizona was new territory to New York Italians, evidenced when, on our first day in our new desert home, the unafraid and impeccably tanned leader of the Welcome Wagon ladies brought over a pan of lasagna made of cottage cheese, Ragu, and Velveeta. My mother promptly responded by running out to the front yard, waving her arms and screaming, trying frantically to flag down the disappearing Mayflower moving truck as it turned the corner and was gone forever.

  But it was now apparent to me that my cutlet prowess had not been in vain; now was my time to shine in order to keep my boyfriend hooked. I pounded, I floured, I dipped. I fried. And I fried. And I fried. Veal cutlets. Beef cutlets. Chicken cutlets. If I could hit it with a hammer and it stayed still long enough for me to submerge it in an egg wash then bathe it in bread crumbs, it became a cutlet. Soon, I didn’t own a single piece of clothing that didn’t bear the scars of an exploding oil bubble, my skin was covered with tiny red oil burns that looked disturbingly like the pox, and everything I owned became laminated with a thin, grimy sheen.

  And my poor boyfriend, who had been raised on a steady diet of pressed meats and Dinty Moore stew, didn’t have the first inclination of how to handle it.

  “Wow, I never knew you could do this,” he said the first time I placed a pan of chicken Parmesan in front of him, as he looked at me with a smile that said he thought I was a goddess. “I didn’t know you could cook! You can cook! You never told me you could cook! I haven’t had a home-cooked meal since the last time my mom made . . . toast . . . for our chopped ham sandwiches! This is incredible! Wow! You can cook!”

  And then he gobbled the whole pan of chicken Parmesan down like he was a hominid who didn’t know if he would survive long enough for a next meal. It was simply beautiful. I had laid the cutlet trap, and the Good Guy had fallen headfirst into it.

  When I felt that I had securely gotten him hooked on cutlets, that he was now a junkie with a hunger that no other woman could fix or satisfy, I stood above him as he ravaged a casserole dish of veal piccata.

  “Look at this!” I yelled, pointing to my lip. “Look at this mole! Some day, especially if I’m exposed to enough radiation, this thing will be mammoth enough in size to require its own pillow at night! Do you understand that?”

  “That’s a mole?” he said, barely looking up. “I thought that was just a permanent smudge because you eat so much chocolate. I’m glad to know it’s not a food particle, that’s a relief!”

  Then he wolfed down another piece of veal as a caper rolled from his chin.

  I had dared the demon to show itself, and it had.

  It just turned out that it was me.

  Dog Girl Bites Back

  When the phone rang, the last person I expected to hear on the other end was Dog Girl.

  It had been months since I found both of them, my boyfriend and his newly reinstated girlfriend, packing up his stuff into her VW van right before they planned to flee the state as if they had been profiled on America’s Most Wanted the night before.

  “I know it’s weird that I’m calling,” Dog Girl said nervously.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I offered the first comment that volunteered itself. “Do you still have my stereo?” I asked.

  “No,” she answered. “We sold it and bought beads and hemp cord so we could start a hair-beading booth on the Renaissance-fair circuit.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” I mentioned. “I forgot how good you were at braiding hair. What do you want, what can I help you with? Why are you calling me?”

  “Well, I—I—I have bad news,” Dog Girl sputtered. “I have GONORRHEA!”

  I just held the phone, shocked.

  “And so do you!” she added, then broke down into sobs.

  I didn’t know what to say. All I knew at that moment was that I wished my skin would slink off my body the way it does on a boiled tomato.

  “What are you talking about?” I finally shot out as Dog Girl wept hysterically.

  “At A Royal Afayre in Sacramento, Ben said that he was burning a bit, but he thought he just took some bad peyote or something,” she said, in between gulps and gasps. “And by the time we were setting up for Gates of Thyme Faire the next weekend, he said he was on fire. He smoked a whole quarter ounce and he was still crying so hard I had to help him to the first aid station. He just kept saying, ‘Ow ow ow ow ow! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!’ the very same thing he said when Jerry Garcia left us for the next plane of reality.”

  “Wow, the first aid station, huh? A regular trip to the hippie hospital,” I replied. “Can you skip to my link in the venereal disease chain, please?”

  “Well, the nurse looked at him and said that it was probably gonorrhea,” Dog Girl answered. “And that’s when he mentioned your name.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said rather dryly. “He didn’t care enough to say good-bye before I found the two of you leaving on the midnight train to Georgia, but I’m supposed to believe he has enough compassion to ask you to call me as a courtesy?”

  “Well, in a way, I guess,” she continued. “Since he said he got his burning penis from you.”

  If I had had enough money to buy a new phone, I would have thrown that one into the wall. If I had had enough money to build a new wall, I would have thrown that phone very hard. If I had had medical insurance, even with an HMO, I would have put my fist through the wall right after I threw the phone, even though the HMO would have only paid for three of my five broken fingers.

  “How could I have given him VD?” I instead raged into the phone. “I went to college! I have a car! I’m not the one that cheats! And I can’t name one Grateful Dead song besides ‘Truckin’ ‘!”

  “Well, that’s what he said,” Dog Girl said limply.

  “Put him and his flaming genitals on the phone,” I growled. “Right now!”

  “I can’t!” Dog Girl said as she started to cry again. “He ran off with someone else, and I’m pretty sure it was Lady Jane, because her face-painting booth hasn’t been set up all day! Why would he leave me like that, and take all of the penicillin, too? I can’t believe it! We were even talking about getting our own Kettle Korn cart to hook up to the van!”

  “Wow, that’s even a broader horizon than his previous life goal of growing his own pot,” I added. “Well, aside from learning ‘Old Man’ on a five-string so he could sing it to a stranger that might be his dad.”

  I realized that this was really starting to sound like the Leif Garrett episode of Behind the Music.

  “I guess I should have known something was fishy when Lady Jane showed up at the van with a guitar one ni
ght and started singing that same, exact song. It always makes Ben cry, especially the ‘twenty-four and so much more’ part,” Dog Girl recalled sadly.

  “I have to go,” I said quickly. “I think I’d better call the clinic before word gets out in this part of the country that Ben has VD. Once that happens, I might not be able to get an appointment for months. Renaissance fairs all up and down the West Coast will empty out and head for Planned Parenthood. But I suppose they can call it ‘Plague Day.’”

  After I hung up, I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, until I had smoked almost a pack of cigarettes, until it got dark, until my new, hopelessly perfect, wonderfully wonderful boyfriend came over.

  “Hi!” he said as he flipped on the light and exposed his sexually transmitted disease–ridden girlfriend. “I’m starving! What kind of cutlets are we having tonight?”

  “I’m not cooking,” I said, staring at the floor. “I’m breaking up with you. I’m sorry.”

  “What?” my boyfriend said hoarsely.

  “It’s not you,” I heard myself say. “It’s me. It really, truly is me.”

  “I’m not getting this,” he said as I kept my eyes on the floor.

  “You don’t have to, because I’m doing you a favor,” I told him, finally looking at his bewildered face. “I should only be the Backup Girlfriend. You deserve someone better than the backup for your first string. I can unjam a Xerox machine, I can get a drink in seconds flat, and I can fry cutlets. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “You have way more than that,” he said, sitting down next to me on the bed. “Those are silly things. You have so much more than those things.”

  “Actually, you’re right,” I agreed. “Because apparently, I have the clap, too. Or I may have the clap. Which means I might have graciously passed it on to you, brought to you by the Ghost of Boyfriends Past. Dog Girl called today to pass on the news of what Ben passed on to her, and maybe me. I’m sorry, I’m beyond sorry.”