Teenage Waistland Read online

  “Maybe I should wear it in a ponytail?”

  “You’ve always got it in a ponytail or a bun. Leave it down today—it looks beautiful—and open the box,” she says, motioning toward it impatiently.

  “Just one more minute,” I beg as I flip frantically through my closet. “Where are my new black jeans?”

  “You’re so not wearing jeans today,” Char says—not as an order or a question, but as a statement of fact. “Now, if you don’t open this damn box pronto, you’ll have to get your own ride into the city.” She watches me pick at the knot in the gold string for a few moments before she yanks the box out of my hand, rips through the string with her teeth, and tears off the wrapping.

  “Now,” she says, and hands the box back to me. I remove the top and peel off the layers of white tissue paper one by one in slow motion just to annoy her. “You’ve got exactly one second to—” she starts, but I just laugh and whip out the small neatly folded pile of silky black cloth.

  “It’s so my color—how’d you know?” I giggle. “What is it—a shirt?” Char helps me unfold it and lay it out on my bed. It’s a little black dress with cap sleeves and a scoop neck—just like the one Jen showed up at Coco’s quince party in—and almost as tiny. I look up at Char. She’s smiling with tears in her eyes.

  “This is what you’re wearing today.”

  “Yeah, right. Funny.” I laugh. Char frowns and I realize she’s not kidding. “Look, Char. It’s beautiful, and it’s so sweet of you to get this for me, but this dress is sizes too small. I won’t fit into it for months—maybe never!”

  Char just shakes her head. “You’re still wearing baggy clothes several sizes too big, and for months I’ve let you get away with it. No matter how fat your head thinks you are, scales and tape measures don’t lie and I’m not going to let you catastrophize yourself any longer.”

  I reach over and hug her. “You’re such a good friend to me, Char, and none of this would have happened if not for you. But you’re certifiably insane, and the reality is, this dress can’t possibly fit me.”

  Char wriggles out of my grasp. “Listen, Ms. I’m-So-Normal-and-Char’s-the-Crazy-One—I embrace my craziness and you try to hide yours, my friend. That’s the only difference between us, and I bought you this dress in the right size to prove it. So just try the freaking thing on and let’s see once and for all who’s the bigger mental case.”

  “It’s a deal,” I laugh, and toss off my bathrobe. “Give it.”

  Bobby (−131 lbs)

  We’re stuck in traffic outside the Midtown tunnel toll-booths, and Dad is tapping his fingers on the dashboard. “I told you we’d be better off taking the Queensboro Bridge,” he mutters, “but you had to have it your way.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t know the inbound tunnel was going to be down to one lane,” I mutter back.

  “It’s Friday rush hour, for God’s sakes. Three lanes coming out, one lane going in.” He raps his fingers harder and I take a quick swerve into the next lane before the bearded stoner in the Subaru tries to cut me off. This lane’s crawling a lot faster through the tolls and I’m feeling pretty good about my big move, so it takes a moment for me to notice Dad pointing at a big purple E-ZPass sign right in front of me.

  “Crap!” I say, and pound my fist into the dashboard. I don’t have a damn E-ZPass, so now I’ve got to wait for someone to let me back into the cash-only lane while Subaru and the sixty million E-ZPass holders behind him lean on their horns.

  Having Dad in the passenger seat is not exactly a boon to my visibility, and he won’t look over his shoulder to help me out, so I lower his window and lean forward to make eye contact with a driver who might let me in. I figure that some mom with her own kid at home will show some pity, and it’s a pretty redhead in a yellow Volkswagen convertible who finally waves me in. Now we’re back in the same lane we started in, but something like fifty cars that were once behind us have since sailed through the toll. Dad doesn’t say a word, about that or the redhead. He’s just chewing on the inside of his mouth—a nervous habit of his—and shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry!” I finally snap. “I usually take the train in. I didn’t know. You should have just insisted that I take the Queensboro exit.” I turn up the air conditioner and fiddle with the vents to get air to my face. It’s hot as hell.

  Dad lets out a deep sigh and hits the button on his armrest to close his window. “This might help cool things down a little.”

  “Why are we even doing this, Dad?” I fume. “Why was it so important that we drive in together?”

  “You’ve got something in the city tonight, I’ve got something in the city tonight, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to spend a little quality time with my kid,’ ” he says with a shrug. “You haven’t been around much.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I mumble, feeling bad about making Dad say it. And also feeling bad about how much things have changed between us. It’s not like we had a fight or anything. We were just busy doing our own thing—or maybe more accurately, my thing and his thing weren’t the same thing anymore.

  With my running and stuff, I was losing about twenty pounds a month through the fall, so by the middle of November, Coach practically stopped playing me altogether. If I didn’t have that huge automation project for Dawson Depot on my head, I would have been okay hanging at football practice every day after school, even if I was spending most games on the bench. But I talked it out with Coach, and after he couldn’t commit to putting me in more regularly as halfback, we agreed that staying with the team wasn’t the best use of my time. Dad was upset that I didn’t talk to him about it first—he didn’t understand that there wasn’t any decision to make. As far as college football went, I was in no-man’s-land. No longer a suitable lineman, and too overweight to be seriously considered for a halfback position. With that gone, it seemed my focus had to be Dawson’s inventory system project—and finishing Park Avenue Bariatric’s online Patient Eating Behaviors (PEB) database I was getting paid to set up. It didn’t help that I was spending long hours at Dawson Depot and Dad didn’t have a Konopka & Sons Lumber to go to anymore.

  Then there was Char. Every free moment—and there weren’t a lot of those—I spent with her. Still, she ragged on me that I was always busy, always talking about colleges. She couldn’t see how hard it was to go from being a football hero to a nothing, which was the second mistake I made: not spending Super Bowl Sunday with Dad and taking Char to MT’s party instead. Char got all flirty with my friends and I wound up in a shoving match with MT. I acted like an idiot to him and to Char. She broke up with me on MT’s front porch and refused to let me even wait with her for her ride. I walked home, and found Dad snoring on the couch, TV still blaring, and Chinese food boxes stacked on the coffee table. Luckily, he sucks at ordering for just one, and I dove happily into an unopened container of fried rice. But I faithfully signed in to my PEB account and made my fried rice entry (feeling bad so wtf) and tagged another five miles onto my run the next morning as penance.

  “So this franchise seminar sounds cool, Dad. Are you really considering opening a Gold’s Gym? There’s nothing you don’t know about bodybuilding,” I say.

  “And nothing I do know about the gym business. There’ll be a lot of different franchises for me to look at tonight, buddy. I don’t know. I’m just going to get some ideas …,” Dad says. We’re finally in the tunnel, but he’s just staring out the window watching the grimy yellow tiles go by.

  “Dad?” I say. “Isn’t there anything you always wanted to do that you couldn’t because of the store and all? Maybe you can do that now.”

  “Yeah?” he says, turning to look at me. “I wanted to play college football. Maybe even go pro.”

  There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s only the Midtown tunnel—Dad’s just never going to let this go. I put on the radio and flick through the stations, not really even hearing anything.

  “Buddy?”

  I keep flicking. Dad puts hi
s hand on mine and pulls it gently away from the console.

  “Bobby. Listen. I shouldn’t have said that. That was about me, not you—my life, not yours.”

  I take my hand back and turn the radio off. “Dad, it’s hard for me too. I love football and I’ve lost a lot of who I am—or was—when I gave it up. But I don’t regret it.”

  “Don’t. Not ever. Look at what you’ve done. You bucked the tide, you got yourself into California Polytech—”

  “Which has one of the worst teams in college football history,” I add.

  “Yeah, but so what? It’s one of the top engineering schools in the country, and it was your brain—your RFID inventory gizmo—that did it. Plus, you’ve got a shot at their football team anyway. If you want it, that is. To tell you the truth, I’d have killed to play running back over lineman.” He pats his stomach. “Heart attack waiting to happen. Maybe it’s your turn to coach me—here, buddy, pull over. There, in front of that cab. You just head uptown and I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll try to meet you at the Sheraton, maybe check the franchises out with you a little—I think my thing will break up pretty early tonight.”

  There’s an open spot on the street, but I pull my new Prius into the overpriced parking garage anyway—no point risking getting it stolen. Yeah, that “RFID inventory gizmo” has been good to me. All of this has. And, as I turn to walk into Coco Rosa, it keeps getting better. There, in front of me in line, is a beautiful girl with long flowing black hair in a tight short black dress. I hear Char’s voice in the crowd calling, “Shroud, where are you?” and then it hits me. That’s East.

  Marcie (−113 lbs)

  Marcie Mandlebaum here: seventeen years old, five feet four, 175 pounds, and reluctantly—albeit fabulously—sporting a pair of $300 black formal Dolce & Gabbana trousers and a $135 cap-sleeve Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt, both in size 14, and both courtesy of my mama, the big spender. As it turns out, I’ll need to drop a few more sizes to fit into their $325 denim jeans, but Mom winked and said I looked spectacular and we can go jeans shopping in a few months.

  We’re seated at a large round table for ten in the private dining room of Coco Rosa beneath a large banner that reads BON VOYAGE, TEENAGE WAISTLAND, and I’m not the least bit tempted to point out that the sign is tacky, childish, and, most important, patently incorrect—that we’ve already embarked on our journey, exactly one year ago today. After all, whoever thought of it and took the time to make it—Coco, undoubtedly—meant the very best.

  East and Bobby are the last to enter, though East arrived twenty minutes ago with Char, and it was the same funny routine with the two of them—East pulling on her freaking tiny dress and saying, “Why did I even wear this, I’m like popping out of it,” and Char saying, “You look so amazing, stop adjusting.” Finally, East had to teeter to the ladies’ room—Char lent her a pair of mad high pumps to go with the dress—for some last-minute reassurance from the mirror that she wasn’t popping out of anything, and Char rose to follow her and then sat down again. “My Shroudette’s all grown up,” Char said, leaning into me, and when I saw she really had tears in her eyes, I put my arms around her. “You done good.”

  Bobby pulls the chair next to Char out for East and waits for her to be seated. I get the urge to bellow, “Remove your eyes from my friend’s backside, buddy,” but don’t. I was born with a flap between my mind and my mouth—it’s just another muscle that needed to be developed.

  As Bobby seats himself on the other side of the table between Alex and Tia, Betsy takes the floor and shoos the waiter away as he approaches with water pitchers. But she doesn’t have to clap for attention—there’s no taking our eyes off her. She’s as big as a house, a week overdue, and if she makes it through our Teenage Waistland grand finale before that baby pops, it’ll be a miracle. Not so bitsy anymore—and not all of it baby.

  “Everyone,” Bitsy announces, waving a stack of printouts, “the results of your final weigh-ins are online, but if you haven’t seen them yet, I have them here.” I snort and everyone else laughs. Betsy tosses the papers on her chair and laughs too. “Right. Of course you’ve seen them.”

  Bobby clears his throat. “My—the Eating Behaviors application automatically e-mails each patient when their weigh-in results are posted,” he offers.

  “A round of applause, everyone, for Bobby, our technology expert. The online food diary, weight charts, and other tools will help you stay on track. Speaking of which, Bobby, you certainly look like you’ve been on track—the running track, that is,” Betsy quips painfully. The clapping and hooting cover some groans, and then Char leads us into chanting, “Bobby, Bobby, he’s the man, if he can’t do it, no one can,” until Betsy signals for us to simmer down.

  “I want to tell you how proud of all of you I am, and how beautifully you’ve all done. Keep in mind that teen weight loss with the Lap-Band typically averages between one and two pounds a week and everyone has come in above the low end of the range, so I’m very impressed.” We break out into a spontaneous round of applause. For ourselves, for what Bitsy’s taught us to do for ourselves, and for the grilled cilantro shrimp appetizer being set down on the table.

  “I was hoping that Michelle would be able to join us so that we could all be together as a full group one more time, but she had a scheduling conflict and sends her regrets,” Bitsy says.

  Char elbows me under the table. “Michelle told me she couldn’t help cheating the band and couldn’t lose enough weight with it, so she’s scheduled for gastric bypass surgery next week—if they can’t bring her weight down quickly, she’ll need to go on insulin for her diabetes,” she whispers—a little too loudly.

  “Yes, Char, that’s true, unfortunately.” Betsy sighs. “While the band is the safer surgical weight loss alternative, it isn’t the fastest, and it only works for patients truly willing to modify their eating behaviors. When people like Michelle have health problems like diabetes and heart disease caused by obesity, the gastric bypass guarantees the fastest weight loss up front. By the way, Char, that was another disruption. See me after group.” Betsy pauses. “Just kidding.” Char nods her head fake-dejectedly, which garners more laughs than Bitsy’s original quip. You don’t mess with the Char-iff. “Seriously, Char. You created the name Teenage Waistland, but more important, you were a big part of making it the warm supportive family it is. A big round for Char, everyone.” We all clap and Char bows and then Betsy continues.

  “Now a big thank-you to Coco, who has so generously hosted this final group session,” Betsy says.

  “Yay, Coco!” Char shrieks, and we start banging the table in unison. “Yay, Coco! Yay, Coco!”

  “Okay, gang—I mean it. If I go into labor, we’re not going to fin—”

  “Tia!” Char shrieks. “What happened to your rings?” Tia eyes Char with her usual suspicion, and then I notice it too. Tia has lost her lip and nose rings!

  “You look really pretty,” Jamie offers, but the truth is the truth. Tia no longer looks scary and dangerous. In fact, she’s quite ordinary.

  “I had them removed,” Tia mutters.

  “Why?” says Char. “They were cool.”

  “The kids were going to call me something, and I preferred ‘Ringed Freak’ to ‘Goodyear Blimp,’ ” Tia says matter-of-factly, but it’s about the most personal thing she’s ever said about herself, and another round of spontaneous clapping erupts.

  “Actually, they started calling me ‘Saturn, the ringed planet,’ ” Tia grumbles, but there’s a full-blown smile on her face—another first.

  “Group—one more quick callout before we eat,” Bitsy roars to cut through the chatter, and has to steady herself again. “East Itou, you deserve a standing ovation, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I take my seat.” Betsy clears her throat. “East, in the very beginning, you made me a promise. You promised that you would be the very best teen Bandster we ever had, and, East, you kept that promise. You’ve lost an amazing one h
undred thirty-two pounds this past year—the best performance not only in this group, but the best of all the teen patients we’ve ever had! Congratulations, East!”

  Char and I scream in unison and jump to our feet. Char is whooping and pounding East on the back, and Coco tosses a shredded napkin in the air that flies like confetti, and Bobby follows suit by flinging a handful of tortilla chips in the air. East is grinning wildly, but tears are streaming down her cheeks and she looks like she’s going to vomit. Or, at the very least, put forth a productive burp. East hangs her head.

  “Shroudness, what’s going on?” Char says softly. “Are you okay?” East takes a napkin and dabs at her eyes. She looks up at Char questioningly, and Char whispers, “You’re good—no mascara running.”

  East turns to face Bitsy. “Betsy, you’ve been so kind to me, and being in Teenage Waistland is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But I have something to tell you. All of you. My Lap-Band never had enough restriction. I’ve had the fills, and it just never got tight. Everything kept going straight down. I’m not a Lap-Band success at all.”

  Bitsy shakes her head numbly. “East, why didn’t you tell us? It’s rare, but sometimes, during surgery, the band gets nicked by a scalpel or a needle and it springs a leak. Or, the needle can miss the port and puncture the tubing during a fill. If you’ve never had restriction after so many fills, that’s what it probably was, East. A leak. But I just don’t understand why you didn’t say something.” East is still studying her plate.

  “There was something more important I had to do, and the failure of my band gave me the excuse to do it,” East mumbles.

  “Shroud, whatever are you talking about?” Char says, pretending to pound her on the head. East brushes Char’s hand away and looks up at Betsy.

  “The thing is, as soon as I made the connection between the bad feelings I had inside and my eating, I found that I was able to control my eating and the weight kept coming off—even before the surgery. I knew I had to help my mother with her weight, and she was too terrified to even think about getting the surgery for herself. So I made her copies of the eating behaviors food diaries and we dieted and exercised together. I thought if I could do it without restriction, then she’d be able to also. And she did! She’s lost almost a hundred pounds since November!”