A Shiner

Like a Diamond

I’D BEEN LIVING IN MANHATTAN for eight years when my father called, excited by the news that my sister Amy was scheduled to appear in a magazine article devoted to the subject of interesting New York women.

“Can you imagine?” he asked. “My God, put a camera in front of that girl, and she’ll shine like a diamond! Between the single men and the job opportunities, her phone is going to be ringing right off the hook!” He paused for a moment, perhaps imagining the life of a young New York woman whose phone rings off the hook. “We just have to make sure that none of the wrong people call her. You’ll take care of that, right?”

“I’m putting it on my to-do list as we speak.”

“Good boy,” he said. “The trouble is that she’s just so darn pretty. That’s the danger right there. Plus, you know, she’s a girl.”

My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughters’ physical beauty. It is, to him, their greatest asset, and he monitors their appearance with the intensity of a pimp. What can I say? He was born a long time ago and is convinced that marriage is a woman’s only real shot at happiness. Because it was always assumed that we would lead professional lives, my brother and I were free to grow as plump and ugly as we liked. Our bodies were viewed as mere vehicles, pasty, potbellied machines designed to transport our thoughts from one place to another. I might wander freely through the house drinking pancake batter from a plastic bucket, but the moment one of my sisters overspilled her bikini, my father was right there to mix his metaphors. “Jesus, Flossie, what are we running here, a dairy farm? Look at you, you’re the size of a house. Two more pounds, and you won’t be able to cross state lines without a trucking license.”

“Oh, Lou,” my mother would moan, “for Christ’s sake, give it a rest.”

“Aw, baloney. They’ll thank me for this later.” He honestly thought he was doing his girls a favor, and it confused him when the thanks never came.

In response to his vigilance and pressure, my sisters grew increasingly defensive and self-conscious. The sole exception turned out to be Amy, who is capable of getting even without first getting mad. Nothing seems to stick to her, partly because she’s so rarely herself. Her fondness for transformation began at an early age and has developed into something closely resembling a multiple personality disorder. She’s Sybil with a better sense of humor, Eve without the crying jags. “And who are we today?” my mother used to ask, leading to Amy’s “Who don’t you want me to be?”

At the age of ten Amy was caught taking a fistful of twenties from an unguarded till at the grocery store. I was with her and marveled at my sister’s deftness and complete lack of fear. When the manager was called, she calmly explained that she wasn’t stealing, she was simply pretending to be a thief. “And thieves steal,” she said. “So that’s what I was doing.” It all made perfect sense to her.

She failed first grade by pretending to be stupid, but the setback didn’t seem to bother her. For Amy school was devoted solely to the study of her teachers. She meticulously charted the repetition of their shoes and earrings and was quick to pinpoint their mannerisms. After school, alone in her simulated classroom, she would talk like them, dress like them, and assign herself homework she would never complete.

She became a Girl Scout only to become her Girl Scout leader. For Christmases and birthdays she requested wigs and makeup, hospital gowns and uniforms. Amy became my mother, and then my mother’s friends. She was great as Sooze Grossman and Eleanor Kelliher, but her best impersonation was of Penny Midland, a stylish fifty-year-old woman who worked part-time at an art gallery my parents visited on a regular basis. Penny’s voice was deep and roughly textured. She wasn’t shy, but when she spoke, certain words tended to leave her mouth reluctantly, as if they’d been forced out against their will.

Dressed in a caftan and an appropriate white pageboy wig, Amy began phoning my father at the office. “Lou Sedaris! Penny Midland here. How the… hell are you?”

Surprised that this woman would be calling him at work, our father feigned enthusiasm as best he could. “Penny! Well, what do you know. Gosh, it’s good to hear your voice.”

The first few times she called, Amy discussed gallery business but, little by little, began complaining about her husband, a Westinghouse executive named Van. There were problems at home. Her marriage, it seemed, was on the rocks.

Our father offered comfort with his standard noncommittal phrases, reminding Penny that there were two sides to every coin and that it’s always darkest before the dawn.

“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to… talk to someone who really… understands.”

I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and came upon my twelve-year-old sister propositioning our father with lines she’d collected from Guiding Light. “I think we’ve both seen this coming for a long… time. The only question left is… what are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let’s run wild.”

This is what my mother meant when she accused people of playing a dangerous game. Were our father to accept Penny’s offer, Amy would have known him as a philanderer and wondered who else he might have slept with. Everything he’d ever said would be shaded by doubt and called into question. Was that really a business trip, or had he snuck off to Myrtle Beach with one of the Strivides twins? Who was this man?

Amy studied her reflection in the oven door, arranging her white bangs and liking what she saw. “All I’m saying is that I find you to be a very attractive… man. Is that such… a crime?”

It is to his credit that our father was such a gentleman. Stammering that he was very flattered to be asked, he let Penny down as gently as possible. After offering to set her up with some available bachelors from his office and country club, he told my sister to take care of herself, adding that she was a very special woman who deserved to be happy.

It was years before Amy finally admitted what she had done. They were relatively uneventful years for our family but, I imagine, a very confusing period of time for poor Penny Midland, who was frequently visited at the art gallery by my father and any number of his divorced associates. “Here’s the gal I was telling you about,” he’d say. “Why don’t I just take a look around and give you two a chance to talk.”

The passage of time has not altered my father’s obsessive attention to my sisters’ weight and appearance. He wonders why the girls don’t drop by more often, and then when they do, he opens the door asking, “Is it just my imagination, or have you put on a few pounds?”

Because she has maintained her beautiful skin and enviable figure, Amy remains my father’s greatest treasure. She is by far the most attractive member of the family, yet she spends most of her time and money disguising herself beneath prosthetic humps and appliquéd skin diseases. She’s got more neck braces and false teeth than she knows what to do with, and her drawers and closets overflow with human hair. Having dreamt of one for years, she finally broke down and bought half of a padded, custom-made “fatty suit,” which she enjoys wearing beneath dirty sweatpants as tight and uninviting as sausage casings. Unable to afford the suit’s matching top, she’s been reduced to waddling the streets much like two women fused together in some sort of cruel experiment. From the waist up she’s slim and fit, chugging forward on legs the size of tree trunks and followed by a wide, dimpled bottom so thick that she could sit on a knitting needle and never feel a thing.

She wore the fatty suit home one Christmas, and our father met us at the Raleigh airport. Visibly shaken, he managed to say nothing on the short ride to the house, but the moment Amy stepped into the bathroom he turned to me, shouting, “What the hell happened to her? Christ almighty, this is killing me! I’m in real pain here.”

“What?”

“Your sister, that’s what. I just saw her six months ago, and now the girl’s the size of a tank! I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”

I begged him to lower his voice. “Please, Dad, don’t mention it in front of her. Amy’s very sensitive about her… you know.”

“Her what? Go ahead and say it: her big, fat ass. That’s what she’s ashamed of, and she should be! You could land a chopper on an ass like that.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“Don’t try to defend her, wiseguy. She’s a single woman, and the clock is ticking away. Who’s going to love her, who’s going to marry her with an ass like that?”

“Well,” I said, “from what I’ve been told, a lot of men prefer rear ends like that.”

He looked at me with great pity, his heart breaking for the second time that day. “Man, what you don’t know could fill a book.”

My father composed himself when Amy reentered the room, but when she turned to open the refrigerator door, he acted as though she were tossing a lit match into the gas tank of his Porsche. “What in God’s name are you doing? Look at you — you’re killing yourself.”

Amy stuck a tablespoon into an economy-size vat of mayonnaise.

“Your problem is that you’re bored,” my father said. “You’re bored and lonely and you’re eating garbage to fill the void. I know what you’re going through, but believe me, you can beat this.”

Amy denied that she was bored and lonely. The problem, she said, was that she was hungry. “All I had on the plane were a couple of Danish. Can we go out for pancakes?”

She kept it up until our father, his voice cracking with pain, offered to find her some professional help. He mentioned camps and personal trainers, offering to loan — no, give — her the money, “And on top of that, I’ll pay you for every pound you take off.”

When Amy rejected his offer, he attempted to set an example. His Christmas dinner was gone in three bites, and dessert was skipped in favor of a brisk two-mile run. “Anyone want to join me? Amy?” He extended his age-old exercise regimen from ten minutes to an hour and trotted in place while speaking on the telephone.

Amy kept to her fatty suit until her legs were chafed and pimpled. It was on the morning of our return flight that she finally revealed her joke, and our father wept with relief. “Ha-ha, you really had me going. I should have known you’d never do that to yourself. And it’s really fake? Ha-ha.”

He reflected upon the fatty suit for the next several months. “She had me fooled for a minute there, but even with a big, fat ass she can’t disguise the fact that she’s a beautiful person, both inside and out, and that’s what really matters.” His epiphany was short-lived, and as the photo shoot approached, he began calling me with technical questions. “Do you happen to know if this magazine will be hiring a professional beautician? I sure as hell hope so, because her hair is getting awfully thin. And what are they going to do about lighting? Can we trust the photographer to do a first-class job, or should we call and see if they can’t come up with someone better?

There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky.

The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, “Thanks for asking, but I’m really not into white guys right now.”

That alone would have stopped my father’s heartbeat. “The clock is ticking,” he says. “If she waits much longer, she’ll be alone for the rest of her life.”

This appears to suit Amy just fine.

When my father phoned asking about the photo shoot, I pretended to know nothing. I didn’t tell him that, at the scheduled time, my sister arrived at the studio with unwashed hair and took a seat beside the dozen other New York women selected by the magazine. She complimented them on their flattering, carefully chosen outfits and waited as they had their hair fashioned, their eyebrows trained, and their slight imperfections masked by powder.

When it was her turn at the styling table, Amy said, “I want to look like someone has beaten the shit out of me.”

The makeup artist did a fine job. The black eyes and purple jaw were accentuated by an arrangement of scratch marks on her forehead. Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.

Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, “I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and I feel great.”