She always stretched her lips to get it into the furthest corners of her mouth and she was speaking in what Ginger thought of as her lipstick voice.
She’d heard that voice countless times: in school bathrooms when Liza had been upset and Ginger had been the one to comfort her; after their big exams when Liza had done badly and Ginger, who could have gone and whooped it up with her pals from higher level English, had stayed and taken care of Liza who’d done so badly.
‘Honestly, Ma, I said. I’ve taken her under my wing my whole life! But Ma said I had to, what with Ginger having no mother.’
‘But ...’ Charlene’s voice was almost a whisper as she said it and, alone in the stall, Ginger felt herself tense because she knew just what word Charlene was going to use, ‘... she’s fat. The photos! You don’t need a fat bridesmaid! Liza, you’re too gorgeous to need a fugly.’
A fugly – a fat and ugly friend, Ginger knew.
Liza laughed, happy at being called gorgeous, not saying that looks weren’t important – all the things she said to Ginger when Ginger stared at herself in mirrors and hated what she saw.
Clearly, that was what she said to Ginger – not what she felt.
Charlene was on a roll now.
‘At the fittings for the dresses, did you see the way she kept trying to hide in the dressing room?’
Stand up for me, Liza,whispered Ginger in her lonely bathroom prison.
‘She’s always been like that. Buys her clothes from catalogues,’ Liza said dismissively, as if she understood what it was like to go into a shop and search in vain for something modern and in her size when there was always one saleslady who looked at her as if she were an alien beamed down onto Planet Thin. ‘Some people just want to be fat, they hide behind it, comfort-eat and whine that they can’t get thin.’ She paused. ‘You finished?’
‘Yup,’ said Charlene.
The door slammed and they were gone.
When she was sure she was alone, Ginger came out of her hiding place. In the mirror, she was the same Ginger as she had always been: big and curved in her dreadful pink ship of a dress. She had worn this dress for Liza, even though she had hated it. Knowing she was the biggest woman in the bridal party had sliced through her today, especially beside Liza and Charlene, who were slender in columns of cream silk and blush silk respectively rather than in enormous ballgowns.
‘The sort of thing Charlene’s wearing won’t suit you, Ginger,’ Liza had said that day in the bridal shop, standing back to assess her friend’s outfit.
‘Whatever you want,’ Ginger had said valiantly, even though she was sure something a bit more fitted would be better than this dress with its acres of fabric and boob-enhancing qualities. But if Liza wanted her wearing this, Ginger would wear it. That’s what friends did.
Friends.
She’d thought Liza was her friend.
But Liza thought she didn’t want to be thin, that she hid behind her body when, really, she wanted to be seen in spite of it. For people to see the tenderness of her heart; to see that a larger physical body could as easily hide a fragile soul as a thin one.
That the outside and the inside were so terribly, terribly different.
Today, on her thirtieth birthday, it turned out that her best friend only thought of her in terms of her body weight.
Thought she was fat. That horrible word. As if being fat was the worst crime in the world.
You could be anything you wanted in this world, but you couldn’t be fat. No matter what else you achieved, that wiped out the achievement or whatever was on the inside.
To add to the pain, Liza wanted to edit her friends list and Ginger hadn’t made the cut.
Just like that.
Time, friendship – none of it mattered except for her weight.
Ginger wanted to cry, could feel the traitorous tears rearing up, but she wasn’t going to, not now. She would not rush around, red-faced and blubbering.
Blubber and blubbering: that was her.
Oh yes, she could insult herself just as easily as Liza and Charlene did.
Ginger did self-hatred on an industrial scale.
