Wendy’s habits of keeping her failures to herself—“Sparkle, Wendy!”—warred with the sympathy she saw in Linette’s eyes. “What happened,” she said, aware of a sense of relief, “was Wendy the Whale.”
“What? Who?”
“That was me.”
“What? You’re so pretty!” Linette was sincere. Wendy could see that though there was nothing wrong with Linette’s looks, she had been the type of girl everyone overlooked: dull brown hair, ordinary features, and a figure that was often called spare. Or fence slat by the sort of “wit” that had termed her Wendy the Whale.
Wendy gave another ragged laugh. “My birth mother stowed away on someone’s yacht that had stopped in Amsterdam. We were in the mid-Atlantic before the owners discovered us, probably because I was crying. When we reached the States, she was arrested, but after giving the authorities a bunch of false data, she vamoosed, leaving me behind. I grew up in foster care, as no one wanted to adopt a fat baby with snaggle teeth who squinted constantly, until I got coke-bottle glasses, which didn’t help my looks. At least the glasses fixed my constantly tripping over things I couldn’t see, but made me look even more pathetic to the other kids. And to potential adoptive parents. I was bounced from foster home to foster home, eventually landing in Los Angeles.”
“That sounds awful.”
“Oh, they weren’t bad. Just indifferent, mostly. Until a couple who’d hit middle age without getting pregnant decided to adopt, and preferred an older child. Gertrude Poulet was a loving, good-hearted woman, and when she said she saw a beauty in me, I would have died for her. Beauty fixes everything, she insisted. Seemed true to me, because my life sure was rotten as an ugly kid. All a girl needs is beauty and the world will smile on her. You get the picture.”
“Oh, I remember those days,” Linette exclaimed. “And the media hammered it in. Still does. I grew up hearing how boys should be smart, but girls needed to be beautiful. When I failed a math class, both my parents cheered me up by saying that boys didn’t like girls who were good at math.”
“Exactly. I got braces, and Mom put me on a permanent diet. Though I’ve got a big build, she was determined to discipline me into the all-powerful hourglass figure. And it worked. I lived mainly on lettuce, spinach, grapefruit, and tuna, and Mom signed me up for every dance class the community offered, which helped melt me down to the Marilyn Monroe look. I was never very good as a dancer, but by high school I was competent. I was also hungry all the time. It seemed a small price to pay to have a figure like Marilyn Monroe. She was my idol because she was Mom’s idol.”
“I’ve always felt a little sorry for Marilyn,” Linette admitted. “She was a terrific actor, but all we ever heard about was her sex appeal. And maintaining that look had to have taken work.”
“I can attest to that. The big change for me was Lasix for my eyes. Suddenly I was pretty, and I have to admit, I loved it. I weighed myself twice a day, and mainly existed on spinach salad and boiled eggs, but when I went out, guys walked into doors. It felt like power.”
“It was power,” Linette said.
“A very limited sort of power. Which only gets you…well, I went to college and majored in screenwriting, which is a different conversation. Let’s just leave it at the fact that most of my interviews were with men, and their eyes didn’t go above here.” Wendy put her hands at the level of her breasts. “So, while I was working for the big break, I got a job at a big firm. Bill’s hedge fund group. I had no idea what they did, other than it had to do with banking. They were all about appearances. Big offices full of chrome and steel and glass and modern art. They wanted someone pretty out front, just smart enough to handle the phones—this was before everyone had cells—and in free time they didn’t care what I did, so I could write.”
“Don’t tell me, that’s where you found him.”
“Exactly. He was in really good shape then, wore great clothes, and that fancy fraternity ring. He had his own office. Bill presented like the real deal. He wined and dined me, though I discovered that I didn’t really like expensive clubs, and as for fancy restaurants, I had to stick to salad with three olives for dessert, so there was no excitement in it for me, but Mom was impressed. The first time I brought him home, my mom and dad were even more impressed with his big talk. To cut this short, Bill wanted a trophy wife, and I felt like I had won the pony and the Olympics and the lottery when he picked me. And I tried to be that wife.”
“It sounds more like what he wanted was a Stepford wife.”
“That, too. The man makes the decisions. If he wanted a new car, he got a new car, because the man brings home the bacon. Which is why I’m still driving the old car my parents left behind when they died. As soon as the honeymoon ended, the fancy club nights ended, except for business. Okay by me. I did my best to be the perfect wife, and though I cooked steak and potatoes and fried chicken for him, and his weight began to show it, if I gained a pound, he’d start in with the comments about fat. He couldn’t be seen at company gatherings with a fat wife. It would ruin his reputation, and his work was all about reputation.”
“It was all about him and his needs, it sounds like. Tell me at least it wasn’t that way in the bedroom.”
“Especiallyin the bedroom.”
Linette actually shuddered. “You’re a braver woman than I.”
“I was a twit,” Wendy said. “But I didn’t know any better. Or, I did, but I still felt that I didn’t deserve better. And Mom, who was such a good woman, meant well, but she talked on and on about how it was work to keep a man, women had to suffer for their beauty, and I should smile and remember that now I was Mrs. Champlain, blah blah. To wind it up, I wanted a family, but he didn’t want kids because he didn’t want to share attention with ‘a howling brat’ and even more important, he didn’t want me to get fat. But his parents—like Bill, but older and snobbier—wanted to carry on the family name, and every single time we visited, Mrs. Champlain would look at my flat stomach that I worked so hard to keep, and mention her empty room all furnished for grandkids, and describe all the accomplishments of her friends’ grandkids, blah blah blah.”
“That’s when little Sam came along?”
“Oh, yes. As soon as the test was positive, the Champlains picked the names—Sam is named after her grandfather, who had more money than Bill’s side, though when he died all the money went to a cousin. The Champlains signed Sam up for the waiting list to a horrible, pretentious prep school, and they bought kits of flashcards for teaching a child to read by two years old, and after the amnio proved Sam was a boy, they filled their guest room with footballs and sports stuff, to shape the sports star to come.”
“Nightmare,” Linette said. “Kids are who they are.”
“Well, the problems began right away, when it was clear Sam had inherited my eye issues. He couldn’t see the flashcards, which they would grill him on before they’d let him out of the high chair. He was small, not the hefty future football star that Bill wanted. Meanwhile, while I was pregnant I’d been able to eat what I wanted for the first time in my life, and I felt so much better to eat real food! The cravings vanished, my headaches were all but gone, but the weight stayed on.”
“You look great to me,” Linette said.
“This is my natural weight. Northern European dairy maid. There are pictures in museums of peasant women like me all over Holland. But Bill didn’t want me to be seen. And if we ran into someone we knew, he’d lead with jokes about Miss Piggy. I might have gone back to starving myself but when he started in on little Sam, before he could even talk…well, by then I’d gotten to know Godiva, who offered me a place to stay if I left Bill. But my parents couldn’t bear the thought of divorce. When Mom died, I packed our clothes and left the next day. And I learned to like being alone.”
It was true. And yet… Wendy’s thoughts slid to Alejo. In the time after her divorce, therapy had helped her to learn to enjoy each day, to enjoy her own body, to enjoy solitude, but none of those gave her that leap of the heart that had come the first time she saw him, and heard his voice.
That first meeting could have been a nightmare, her with those ripped jeans and that terrible chicken suit, and her awful T-shirt with the owl eyes over the boobs, but he had smiled that wonderful smile of his, and none of it had mattered. And the night they watched the comedy, and she laughed until her face was a mess of laughter tears, but he was laughing, too…
“Wendy?”
