CHAPTER EIGHT

“Sometimes I think you haven’t got a brain in your head,” my mother used to say. When I was crying, for some invalid reason or other. To her mind, tears were an evidence of stupidity. I’ll give you something to cry about. That’s nothing to cry about. Don’t cry over spilled milk.

“I’m lonely,” I told her. “I don’t have anyone to play with.”

“Play with your dolls,” she said, outlining her mouth.

I did play with them, those crotchless frizzy-haired plastic goddesses, with their infantile eyes and their breasts that emerged and receded gently as knees, unalarming, devoid of nipples. I dressed them up for social events they never attended, undressed them again and stared at them, wishing they would come alive. They were chaste, unloved, widowed: in those days there were no male dolls. They danced by themselves or stood against the wall, catatonic.

When I was nine I tried for a dog. I knew I wouldn’t get one but I was softening her up for a kitten; I’d been offered one by a girl at school whose cat had six, one with seven toes on each foot. This was the one I wanted. What I really wanted was a baby sister but this was out of the question, and even I knew it. I’d heard her say over the phone that one was more than enough. (Why wasn’t she happier? Why could I never make her laugh?)

“Who would feed it?” my mother asked. “Three times a day.”

“I would,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” my mother said, “you don’t come home for lunch.” Which was true, I took my lunch to school in a lunch box.

With the kitten it was house-training and scratching the furniture. Next I tried a turtle; there didn’t seem much that could go wrong with a turtle, but my mother said it would be smelly.

“No it wouldn’t,” I said, “they’ve got one at school and it doesn’t smell.”

“It would get lost behind the furniture,” my mother said, “and starve to death.”

She wouldn’t hear of a guinea pig or a hamster or even a bird. Finally after nearly a year of failures I backed her into a corner. I asked for a fish. It would be noiseless, odorless, germ-free and clean; after all, it lived in water. I wanted it to have a bowl with colored pebbles and a miniature castle.

She couldn’t think of any good reason why not, so she gave in and I bought a goldfish at Kresge’s. “It will only die,” my mother said. “Those cheap goldfish all have diseases.” But when I’d had it a week she did give in enough to ask me its name. I was sitting with my eye against the glass, watching it as it swam up to the top and back down again, burping out pieces of its food.

“Susan Hayward,” I said. I had just seen With a Song in My Heart, in which Susan Hayward made a comeback from a wheelchair. The odds were stacked against this goldfish and I wanted it to have a courageous name. It died anyway; my mother said it was my fault, I overfed it. Then she flushed it down the toilet before I had a chance to weep over it and bury it properly. I wanted to replace it but my mother said that surely I had learned my lesson. I was always supposed to be learning some lesson or other.

My mother said movies were vulgar, though I suspected she’d once gone to a lot of them; otherwise how would she know about Joan Crawford? So it was my Aunt Lou who took me to see Susan Hayward. “There, you see?” she said to me afterwards. “Red hair can be very glamorous.”

Aunt Lou was tall and heavy and built like an Eaton’s Catalog corset ad for the mature figure, but she didn’t seem to mind. She piled her graying yellowish hair onto the top of her head and stuck extravagant hats with feathers and bows onto the mound with pearl hatpins and wore bulky fur coats and heavy tweeds, which made her look even taller and fatter. In one of my earliest memories of her I’m sitting on her wide, woolly lap – hers was the only lap I remember sitting on, and my mother would say, “Get down, Joan, don’t bother your Aunt Louisa” – and stroking the fur of the fox she wore around her neck. This was a real fox, it was brown, it wasn’t as mangy as it later became; it had a tail and four paws, black beady eyes and a cool plastic nose, though underneath its nose, instead of a lower jaw, it had a clamp by which it held its tail in place. Aunt Lou would open and shut the clamp and pretend that the fox was talking. It often revealed secrets, such as where Aunt Lou had hidden the gumdrops she had brought me, and it asked important questions also, like what I wanted for Christmas. When I grew older this game was dropped, but Aunt Lou still kept the fox in her closet, although it had gone out of style.

Aunt Lou took me to the movies a lot. She loved them, especially the ones that made you cry; she didn’t think a movie was much good unless it made you cry. She rated pictures as two-Kleenex, three-Kleenex or four-Kleenex ones, like the stars in restaurant guides. I wept also, and these binges of approved sniveling were among the happiest moments of my childhood.

First there was the delightful feeling of sneaking out on my mother; for although she claimed to give her consent when I asked permission, I knew she didn’t really. Then we would take the streetcar or a bus to the theater. In the lobby we would stock up on pocket-packs of Kleenex, popcorn and candy bars; then we would settle down in the furry, soothing darkness for several hours of guzzling and sniffling, as the inflated heroines floating before us on the screen were put through the wringer.

I suffered along with sweet, patient June Allyson as she lived through the death of Glenn Miller; I ate three boxes of popcorn while Judy Garland tried to cope with an alcoholic husband, and five Mars Bars while Eleanor Parker, playing a crippled opera singer, groped her mournful way through Interrupted Melody. But the one I liked best was The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer as a ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband. I adored her: not only did she have red hair and an entrancing pair of red satin slippers to match, she also had beautiful costumes, and she suffered more than anyone. I munched faster and faster as she became more and more entangled in her dilemma – I wanted those things too, I wanted to dance and be married to a handsome orchestra conductor, both at once – and when she finally threw herself in front of a train I let out a bellowing snort that made people three rows ahead turn around indignantly. Aunt Lou took me to see it four times.

I saw a number of Adult pictures long before I was an adult, but no one ever questioned my age. I was quite fat by this time and all fat women look the same, they all look forty-two. Also, fat women are not more noticeable than thin women; they’re less noticeable, because people find them distressing and look away. To the ushers and the ticket sellers I must’ve appeared as a huge featureless blur. If I’d ever robbed a bank no witness would have been able to describe me accurately.

We would come out of the movie red-eyed, our shoulders still heaving, but with a warm feeling of accomplishment. Then we would go for a soda or two or for a snack at Aunt Lou’s apartment – grilled crab-meat sandwiches with mayonnaise, cold chicken salad. She kept a number of these things in her refrigerator or in cans on her cupboard shelves. Her apartment building was an older one, with dark wood trim and large rooms. The furniture was dark and large, too, frequently dusty and always cluttered: newspapers on the chesterfield, afghan shawls on the floor, odd shoes or stockings under the chairs, dishes in the sink. To me this disorder meant you could do what you liked. I imitated it in my own bedroom, scattering clothes and books and chocolate-bar wrappers over the surfaces so carefully planned by my mother, the dressing table with the sprigged muslin flounce, bedspread to match, rug in harmony. This was the only form of interior decoration I ever did, and the drawback was that sooner or later it had to be cleaned up.

When we’d had our snack Aunt Lou would pour herself a drink, slip off her shoes, settle into one of her podgy chairs, and ask me questions in her rasping voice. She actually seemed interested in what I had to say, and she didn’t laugh when I told her I wanted to be an opera singer.

One of my mother’s ways of dismissing Aunt Lou was to say that she was bitter and frustrated because she didn’t have a husband, but if this was true Aunt Lou kept it well hidden. To me she seemed a lot less bitter and frustrated than my mother, who, now that she’d achieved and furnished her ultimate house, was concentrating more and more of her energy on forcing me to reduce. She really did try everything. When I refused to take the pills or stick to the diets – neatly drawn up by her, with menus for every day of the week listing the number of calories – she sent me to a psychiatrist.

“I like being fat,” I told him, and burst into tears. He sat looking at me with the tips of his fingers together, smiling benevolently but with trace of disgust as I gasped and puffed.

“Don’t you want to get married?” he asked when I had subsided. This started me off afresh, but the next time I saw Aunt Lou I asked her, “Didn’t you want to get married?”

She gave one of her raucous laughs. She was sitting in her overstuffed easy chair, drinking a martini. “Oh, I was married, dear,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

I’d always assumed Aunt Lou was an old maid because her last name was the same as my father’s, Delacourt, pronounced Delacore. “French nobility, no doubt,” said Aunt Lou. Her great-grandfather had been a farmer, before he decided to improve himself. He got into the railroad, she said, on the ground floor, sold the farm to do it; that was how the family made its money. “They were all crooks, of course,” Aunt Lou said, sipping at her drink, “but nobody called it that.”

It turned out Aunt Lou had been married at nineteen, to a man eight years her senior, of good social standing and approved by the family. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler. “In one pocket and out the other,” she wheezed, “but what did I know? I was madly in love with him, dear, he was tall, dark and handsome.” I began to see why she liked the kind of movies she did: they were a lot like her own life. “I tried, dear, I really did, but it was no use. He would be gone for days on end, and it wasn’t as though I knew anything about running a house or managing money. I’d never shopped for food in my life; all I knew was you picked up the phone and someone brought it to your house in a box. The first week I was married I ordered a pound of everything: one pound of flour, one pound of salt, one pound of pepper, one pound of sugar. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. The pepper lasted years.” Aunt Lou’s laugh sounded like an enraged walrus. She liked telling jokes on herself, but sometimes it made her choke. “Then he’d come back and if he’d lost he’d tell me how much he loved me, if he’d won he’d complain about being tied down. It was very sad, really. One day he just never came back. Maybe they shot him for not paying. I wonder if he’s still alive; if he is, I suppose I’m still married to him.”

I found out even later that Aunt Lou had a boyfriend of sorts. His name was Robert, he was an accountant, he had a wife and children, and he came to her apartment on Sunday evenings for dinner. “Don’t tell your mother, dear,” Aunt Lou said. “I’m not sure she’d understand.”

“Wouldn’t you like to marry him?” I asked her when she told me about him.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” said Aunt Lou. “Besides, I never got a divorce, what was the point? I just took back my own name, that way I don’t have to answer so many questions. Take my advice and don’t get married until you’re at least twenty-five.”

She assumed there would be suitors clamoring at my heels; she didn’t even acknowledge the possibility that no one would ask me. My mother’s version was that nobody who looked like me could ever accomplish anything, but Aunt Lou was all for dismissing handicaps or treating them as obstacles to be overcome. Crippled opera singers could do it if they would only try. Gross as I was, something might be expected of me after all. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

After her bad experience with the gambler Aunt Lou had gone out and gotten herself a job. “I couldn’t type, dear,” she said, “I couldn’t do anything, the way I was brought up; but it was the Depression, you know. The family didn’t have money any more. So I had to, didn’t I? I worked my way up.”

When I was younger my father and mother were vague about Aunt Lou’s job, and so was she. All they would say was that she worked in an office for a company and she was head of a department. I found out what she actually did when I was thirteen.

“I like being fat,” I told him, and burst into tears. He sat looking at me with the tips of his fingers together, smiling benevolently but with a trace of disgust as I gasped and puffed.

“Don’t you want to get married?” he asked when I had subsided. This started me off afresh, but the next time I saw Aunt Lou I asked her, “Didn’t you want to get married?”

She gave one of her raucous laughs. She was sitting in her overstuffed easy chair, drinking a martini. “Oh, I was married, dear,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

I’d always assumed Aunt Lou was an old maid because her last name was the same as my father’s, Delacourt, pronounced Delacore. “French nobility, no doubt,” said Aunt Lou. Her great-grandfather had been a farmer, before he decided to improve himself. He got into the railroad, she said, on the ground floor, sold the farm to do it; that was how the family made its money. “They were all crooks, of course,” Aunt Lou said, sipping at her drink, “but nobody called it that.”

It turned out Aunt Lou had been married at nineteen, to a man eight years her senior, of good social standing and approved by the family. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler. “In one pocket and out the other,” she wheezed, “but what did I know? I was madly in love with him, dear, he was tall, dark and handsome.” I began to see why she liked the kind of movies she did: they were a lot like her own life. “I tried, dear, I really did, but it was no use. He would be gone for days on end, and it wasn’t as though I knew anything about running a house or managing money. I’d never shopped for food in my life; all I knew was you picked up the phone and someone brought it to your house in a box. The first week I was married I ordered a pound of everything: one pound of flour, one pound of salt, one pound of pepper, one pound of sugar. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. The pepper lasted years.” Aunt Lou’s laugh sounded like an enraged walrus. She liked telling jokes on herself, but sometimes it made her choke. “Then he’d come back and if he’d lost he’d tell me how much he loved me, if he’d won he’d complain about being tied down. It was very sad, really. One day he just never came back. Maybe they shot him for not paying. I wonder if he’s still alive; if he is, I suppose I’m still married to him.”

I found out even later that Aunt Lou had a boyfriend of sorts. His name was Robert, he was an accountant, he had a wife and children, and he came to her apartment on Sunday evenings for dinner. “Don’t tell your mother, dear,” Aunt Lou said. “I’m not sure she’d understand.”

“Wouldn’t you like to marry him?” I asked her when she told me about him.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” said Aunt Lou. “Besides, I never got a divorce, what was the point? I just took back my own name, that way I don’t have to answer so many questions. Take my advice and don’t get married until you’re at least twenty-five.”

She assumed there would be suitors clamoring at my heels; she didn’t even acknowledge the possibility that no one would ask me. My mother’s version was that nobody who looked like me could ever accomplish anything, but Aunt Lou was all for dismissing handicaps or treating them as obstacles to be overcome. Crippled opera singers could do it if they would only try. Gross as I was, something might be expected of me after all. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

After her bad experience with the gambler Aunt Lou had gone out and gotten herself a job. “I couldn’t type, dear,” she said, “I couldn’t do anything, the way I was brought up; but it was the Depression, you know. The family didn’t have money any more. So I had to, didn’t I? I worked my way up.”

When I was younger my father and mother were vague about Aunt Lou’s job, and so was she. All they would say was that she worked in an office for a company and she was head of a department. I found out what she actually did when I was thirteen.

“Here,” said my mother, “I suppose it’s time you read this,” and she put into my hands a pink booklet with a wreath of flowers festooning the front. You’re Growing Up, the cover said. On the inside page was a letter, which began, “Growing up can be fun. But there are also some things about it which can be puzzling. One of them is menstruation.…” At the bottom of this page was a picture of Aunt Lou, smiling maternally but professionally, taken before her jowls were quite so large. Around her neck was a single strand of pearls. Although she did wear pearls in real life, it was never just one strand. Underneath the letter was her signature: “Sincerely yours, Louisa K. Delacourt.” I studied the diagrams in the pink booklet with interest; I read the etiquette hints for tennis games and high-school proms, the wardrobe suggestions, the advice on washing your hair; but I was even more impressed by Aunt Lou’s picture and signature – like a movie star, sort of. My Aunt Lou was famous, in a way.

I asked her about it the next time I saw her. “I’m head of Public Relations, dear,” she said. “Just for Canada. But I didn’t really write that booklet, you know. That was written by Advertising.”

“Then what do you do?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I go to a lot of meetings, and I advise on the ads. And I answer the letters. My secretary helps me, of course.”

“What kind of letters?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Complaints about the product, requests for advice, that sort of thing. You’d think they’d all be from young girls, and a lot of them are. Girls wanting to know where their vagina is and things like that. We have a form letter for those. But some of them are from people who really need help, and those are the ones I answer personally. When they’re afraid to go to the doctor or something, they write me. Half the time I don’t know what to say.” Aunt Lou finished her martini and went to pour herself another one. “I got one just the other day from a woman who thought she’d been impregnated by an incubus.”

“An incubus?” I asked. It sounded like some sort of medical appliance. “What’s that?”

“I looked it up in the dictionary,” said Aunt Lou. “It’s a sort of demon.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked, horrified. What if the woman was right?

“I told her,” said Aunt Lou reflectively, “to get a pregnancy test, and if it came out positive it wouldn’t be an incubus. If it’s negative, then she won’t have to worry, will she?”

“Louisa is beyond the pale,” my mother said when she was explaining to my father why she didn’t have Aunt Lou to dinner more often. “People are sure to ask her what she does, and she always tells them. I can’t have her using those words at the dinner table. I know she’s good-hearted but she just doesn’t care what kind of an impression she makes.”

“Count your blessings,” Aunt Lou said to me with a chuckle. “They pay well and it’s a friendly office. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

The psychiatrist gave up on me after three sessions of tears and silence. I resented the implication that there were yet more things wrong with me in addition to being fat, and he resented my resentment. He told my mother it was a family problem which couldn’t be resolved by treating me alone, and she was indignant. “He has his nerve,” she said to my father. “He just wants to get more money out of me. They’re all quacks, if you ask me.”

After that she entered her laxative phase. I think by this time she was frantic; certainly she was obsessed with my bulk. Like most people she probably thought in images, and her image of me then must have been a one-holed object, like an inner tube, that took things in at one end but didn’t let them out at the other: if she could somehow uncork me I would deflate, all at once, like a dirigible. She started to buy patent medicines, disguising her attempts to get me to take them – “It’ll be good for your complexion” – and occasionally slipping them into the food. Once she even iced a chocolate cake with melted Ex-Lax, leaving it on the kitchen counter where I found and devoured it. It made me wretched but it didn’t make me thin.

By this time I was in high school. I resisted my mother’s plan to send me to a private girls’ school, where the pupils wore kilts and little plaid ties. Ever since Brownies I’d been wary of any group composed entirely of women, especially women in uniforms. So instead I went to the nearest high school, which was second-best in my mother’s opinion but not as bad as it might have been, since by now we were living in a respectable neighborhood. The catch was that the children of the families my mother viewed as her peers and models were sent to the kind of private school she wanted to send me to, so the high school got mostly the leftovers, from the smaller houses around the fringes of the area, the brash new apartment building which had been opposed by the established residents, and even worse, the flats above the stores on the commercial streets. Some of my classmates were not at all what she had in mind, though I didn’t tell her this as I didn’t want to be forced into uniform.

At this time my mother gave me a clothing allowance, as an incentive to reduce. She thought I should buy clothes that would make me less conspicuous, the dark dresses with tiny polka-dots and vertical stripes favored by designers for the fat. Instead I sought out clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violently colored, horizontally striped. Some of them I got in maternity shops, others at cut-rate discount stores; I was especially pleased with a red felt skirt, cut in a circle, with a black telephone appliquéd onto it. The brighter the colors, the more rotund the effect, the more certain I was to buy. I wasn’t going to let myself be diminished, neutralized, by a navy-blue polka-dot sack.

Once, when I arrived home in a new lime-green car coat with toggles down the front, flashing like a neon melon, my mother started to cry. She cried hopelessly, passively; she was leaning against the banister, her whole body slack as if she had no bones. My mother had never cried where I could see her and I was dismayed, but elated too at this evidence of my power, my only power. I had defeated her: I wouldn’t ever let her make me over in her image, thin and beautiful.

“Where do you find them?” she sobbed. “You’re doing it on purpose. If I looked like you I’d hide in the cellar.”

I’d waited a long time for that. She who cries first is lost. “You’ve been drinking,” I said, which was true. For the first time in my life I experienced, consciously, the joy of self-righteous recrimination.

“What have I done to make you behave like this?” my mother said. She was wearing a housecoat and slippers, even though it was four-thirty in the afternoon, and her hair could have been cleaner. I stomped past her, up to my room, feeling quite satisfied with myself. But when I thought about it, I had doubts. She was taking all the credit for herself, I was not her puppet; surely I was behaving like this not because of anything she had done but because I wanted to. And what was so bad, anyway, about the way I was behaving?

“That’s just the way I am,” Aunt Lou said once. “If other people can’t handle it, that’s their problem. Remember that, dear. You can’t always choose your life, but you can learn to accept it.” I was accustomed to thinking of Aunt Lou as wise; she was certainly generous. The only trouble was that the bits of wisdom she dispensed could have several meanings, when you thought hard about them. For instance, was I supposed to accept my mother, or was she supposed to accept me?

In one of my daydreams I used to pretend Aunt Lou was my real mother, who for some dark but forgivable reason had handed me over to my parents to be brought up. Maybe I was the child of the handsome gambler, who would one day reappear, or Aunt Lou had had me out of wedlock when she was very young. In this case my father was not my real father, and my mother … but here it broke down, for what could have persuaded my mother to take me in if she hadn’t been obliged to? When my father would comment on how fond Aunt Lou was of me, my mother would reply acidly that it was only because she didn’t have me on her hands all the time. On her hands, in her hair, these were the metaphors my mother used about me, despite the fact that she seldom touched me. Her hands were delicate and long-fingered, with red nails, her hair carefully arranged; no nests for me among those stiff immaculate curls. I could always recall what my mother looked like but not what she felt like.

Aunt Lou however was soft, billowy, woolly, befurred; even her face, powdered and rouged, was covered with tiny hairs, like a bee. Wisps escaped from her head, threads from her hems, sweetish odors from the space between her collar and her neck, where I would rest my forehead, listening to the stories of her talking fox. In the summers, when I was small and we wandered the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, she would hold me by the hand. My mother didn’t hold me by the hand, there were her gloves to think of. She held me by the arm or the back of the collar. And she would never take me to the Ex, which she said was not worthwhile. Aunt Lou and I thought it was worthwhile, we loved it, the shouting barkers and the pipe bands and the wads of pink cotton candy and greasy popcorn we would stuff into ourselves while rambling from one pavilion to another. We would head for the Pure Foods first every year to see the cow made of real butter; one year they made the Queen instead.

But there was something I could never quite remember. We went to the midway, of course, and on rides, the slower ones – Aunt Lou liked the Ferris wheel – but there were two tents Aunt Lou wouldn’t let me visit. One had women in harem costumes and enormous jutting breasts painted on it, and two or three of these women would pose on a little stage outside the door in their gauzy pants with their midriffs showing, while a man with a megaphone tried to get people to buy tickets. The other was the Freak Show, and this tent had the fire-eater and the sword-swallower in it, as well as the Rubber Man and the Siamese Twins, JOINED HEAD TO HEAD AND STILL ALIVE, the man said, and the fattest woman in the world. Aunt Lou didn’t want to go into this tent either. “It’s wrong to laugh at other people’s misfortunes,” she said, sterner than usual. I found this unfair: other people laughed at mine, I should get a chance too. But then, nobody regarded being fat as a misfortune; it was viewed simply as a disgusting failure of will. It wasn’t fated and therefore glamorous, like being a Siamese twin or living in an iron lung. Nevertheless, the Fat Lady was in that tent and I wanted to see her; but I never did.

What I couldn’t remember was this: were there two tents, or was there only one? The man with the megaphone sounded the same for freaks and dancing girls alike. They were both spectacular, something that had to be seen to be believed.

Aunt Lou’s favorite midway place was the one with the giant mouth on the outside, from which canned laughter issued in a never-ending stream. “Laugh in the Dark,” it was called. It had phosphorescent skeletons, and distorting mirrors that stretched you and shrank you. I found those mirrors disturbing. I didn’t want to be fatter than I already was, and being thinner was impossible.

I used to imagine the Fat Lady sitting on a chair, knitting, while lines and lines of thin gray faces filed past her, looking, looking. I saw her in gauze pants and a maroon satin brassiere, like the dancing girls, and red slippers. I thought about what she would feel. One day she would rebel, she would do something; meanwhile she made her living from their curiosity. She was knitting a scarf, for one of her relatives who had known her from a child and didn’t find her strange at all.