You Can't Buy Love Like That Read online

  That was far from a comforting thought. In fact it was scary, as no meaningful conversation followed the film. So I was on my own to connect my bleeding with boys, sex, and pregnancy. Given this information, the long-sought-after goal of growing up was rapidly losing its appeal.

  My mother made her most serious attempt at a deeper conversation about sex when I was fifteen. She cautiously came into my room one evening and sat tentatively on my bed, where I was reading—on the edge as though ready to catapult herself away if need be. Without warming up to the subject, she just blurted out, “I think we should talk about the birds and the bees.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the sparrows and yellow jackets outside or if this was code for something else. It soon became evident. The conversation went something like this:

  “Well, you know, love is a wonderful thing, and when you find someone you really care about, then—well—you know— physical things can be very nice.”

  As she spoke, I noticed red blotches start to appear on her neck, creeping up from her chin to her cheeks and finally her forehead until her entire face was scarlet. I wondered what sort of physical things she meant. Up to this point, I was afraid dancing might get me pregnant. Despite her obvious discomfort, she continued talking, staring not at me, but rather at the purple-and-white pattern on my bedspread, tracing the spirals on the cloth with her forefinger.

  “Don’t ever let a boy touch you,” she said. “He won’t respect you after that.” She glanced at me quickly and then returned her focus to the bedspread. “Your dad and I waited until we were married, and that made it all the more special.” She didn’t say exactly what they waited for, but by this time, I was getting the general idea, and my teenage cruelty was somewhat enjoying the sight of her struggle.

  She did acknowledge that she and my father had “felt the same exciting feelings that love brings,” and that “sometimes it’s hard to say no, but . . .”

  She didn’t finish her thought, leaving me to fill in the blank. She stopped her imaginary drawing on the bed with a pleading look, as if to say, I hope you get what I’m talking about. A slight smile crossed her face, and she looked relieved that she had made it through her presentation. Then she asked if I had any questions.

  I smiled back, and though I had plenty of questions, I thought it would be easier to figure out the answers myself than to watch her endure this torture; my pleasure in seeing my usually adept mother fidget like a shy teenager was wearing off. She left me with the overall impression that I should stay away from all physical contact with boys until I was married, that no one would respect me if I didn’t, and that good Christian ladies just didn’t do things “like that,” though “like that” was never explicitly defined. It never occurred to her that she should be warning me about these outrageous feelings with girls.

  chapter

  2

  the diet

  I loved my mother as well as liked her, and I didn’t know how to navigate the tension that began to weave its way into our relationship as I made my way through adolescence, still keeping my secret about Gina.

  My mother didn’t (couldn’t) understand what was going on in my emotional world and seemed intent on lovingly trying to improve what she observed on the outside. Among her concerns was a desire that I act more like a lady and less like a tomboy. She would have liked it better if, as a youngster, I had treasured the exquisite new doll she bought me for my birthday, complete with hand-sewn wardrobe, rather than her finding blond ringlets of its hair in the bathroom sink after I had administered an impromptu cut. Or that I asked for a new skirt for my birthday rather than a saber saw. Probably most pressing was her desire for me to lose weight and take up her penchant for dressing well.

  One day, while I was getting ready for softball practice, she followed me into my bedroom. “Remember my friend Joe Greenbaum? Well, I ran into him today, and he had lost fifty pounds.”

  This was not a conversation I really wanted to have. Knowing I was overweight was embarrassing enough, and I didn’t want to hear her recount success stories of old, previously fat friends of hers. I buried myself in my closet, scrounging for my softball cleats. “So I was thinking that maybe you and I would like to go on a diet together,” she went on. I kept rummaging deeper into the tangled mess of shoes, hoping she would get a clue and disappear. “Well, what do you think?

  Now I was stuck. I couldn’t stay in the closet forever. Go on a diet with my mother? I would rather eat carpet tacks. While I had noticed a few more love handles rolling over the waist of her rose-colored Butte Knit dress, she didn’t need to lose too much; but she was also smart enough to know that if we did it together, I would have a better chance of success.

  “Would you be willing to give it a try?” Having found my cleats, I was now just hiding, my hair brushing against the bottom of my hanging skirts. My face grew hot with a mix of shame and annoyance. The only thing worse than being overweight was your mother talking about it.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled as I exited the closet. “What would I have to do?”

  “How about I just make an appointment and we will see?” I didn’t want to say yes, but I didn’t want to say no either, so I just got up and nodded as I walked past her, the click, click, click of my rubber cleats hitting the wooden floor.

  Without hesitating, she made an appointment for the following week. The closer the time came, the more I wanted to back out. I headed to Gina’s after school the day we were scheduled to go, hoping my mother would forget about it. As we played catch in the street in front of her house, I saw the big brown Fairlane 500 turn off of Capital and head down Abington. It stopped in front of us.

  I walked over to the passenger’s side and leaned into the window.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, pretending I didn’t know why she was here. She looked at me with one raised eyebrow, letting me know she was serious when she spoke.

  “Carol, you know we have an appointment with the diet doctor at six o’clock.”

  “I forgot,” I said, looking away and twisting the toe of my tennis shoe into the pavement. “You know, I don’t think I want to go,” I continued. “It probably won’t make any difference, so why bother?”

  I was stalling now and could feel ripples of ambivalence run through me like streamers tied to the back of a bicycle. A part of me did want to go and see if I could change the way I looked. Another part of me was afraid to go through the anticipated embarrassment of it all.

  “Well, I’ll have to pay for it whether you go or not,” she said, staring at me and waiting for an answer.

  I wasn’t sure if this was true, but knowing that my parents were always riding on the rim of financial desperation, her comment about having to pay struck the intended chord, and I gave in.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll go,” I said, and I got into the car. “See you tomorrow, Gina,” I shouted over my shoulder out the window as I slumped down in the front seat and stared ahead.

  As we drove along in silence, I thought back to the time when I was ten and my mother had heard about some diet specialist downtown. I had been overweight since kindergarten, and my parents had been concerned. My dad took me in a cab, and we sat in a musty waiting room that smelled like a used-furniture store. The creaky chairs were filled with really fat people—a lot bigger than I was. Eventually a nurse took me behind a curtain and made me take off all my clothes and get on a big scale. I could feel the shame rush through my body from my toes up my legs to my torso, flaring out in blotches on my neck, as I watched the black dial on the scale go up, up, up until it hit seventy-four pounds. My best friend, Michelle Davenport, probably weighed just fifty. I remember thinking that if I didn’t eat for two years, I could maybe be the right size when I turned twelve.

  This diet doctor was thirty minutes across town—and each ride started with the same inquiry: “How was your day, honey?”

  When I was young and we rode in the car together, my mother would make up names for us—she was Mrs. Roosevelt, an
d I was Mrs. McGillicuddy, personas that allowed us to express any opinion we wanted about anything because we were in a role.

  “How was your day, Mrs. McGillicuddy?” she would ask in earnest as she glanced at me while pulling up to a stop sign.

  “It was awful, Mrs. Roosevelt. The cat got out and ran for six blocks, and I had to chase him,” I would say in my most animated and dramatic way. “He hurt his front paw, and I took him to the vet and had to leave him there. Can we stop for ice cream, Mrs. Roosevelt? I’m really hungry.”

  And my mother would pull into the Dairy Queen and get us both a cone dipped in chocolate.

  I remembered how she made up stories about Tilly the Termite and read me Highlights magazine every night until she fell asleep from exhaustion in the middle of a story. She often hid my Raggedy Ann doll before leaving for work so I would have to search for her when I got home from school. She once concealed her in the ceiling light in my bedroom, which burned off her red yarn hair and scorched the nape of her neck before I discovered her. We had to rush her to the urgent care facility in the kitchen, where I learned that Mrs. Roosevelt was also a surgeon who then performed a combination skin graft and hair transplant in a double emergency operation.

  Today, at age fifteen, I hated her question, “How was your day, honey?” I wanted so much to tell her about these strange and wonderful feelings I had for Gina, how I felt special to her, how she, more than anyone I had ever known, made me feel different. I wanted to spill out all of my emotions, let them rush out of my mouth into the air, past all my defenses, to be gently received and understood by her. I wanted to gush on about how good it felt when Gina put her arm around me when we slept together, how alive and safe I felt in her presence. I wanted to tell her that I thought I was in love and ask her if she had felt that way when she met my dad.

  Well, that wasn’t going to happen. My mother would have driven me straight to a psychiatrist, not to the diet doctor, and I wouldn’t be allowed to see Gina again.

  The feelings for Gina intensified my felt need to hide inside of myself—telling partial truths out loud and keeping secrets within—my mother and I both suffering from a loss of meaningful connection, because I didn’t trust that her love for me was greater than her allegiance to the Almighty. So, when she asked, “How was your day, honey?” I just said, “Fine.”

  “How about we stop for a corned beef sandwich at Billie’s deli afterward?” she said.

  I sat up straighter and knocked off the sulk routine. Billie’s was a great restaurant with the most opulent corned beef sandwiches I had ever seen. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. I turned toward her and smiled.

  “I doubt that that is in their diet plan, Mrs. Roosevelt, but I like the idea.”

  “Well, Mrs. McGillicuddy, we just won’t tell them,” she replied, chuckling as we rolled down the road.

  This was 1963, long before weight-loss clinics were on every corner and Weight Watchers was a billion-dollar industry. The bald doctor waiting for us was a little patronizing, but I figured I could put up with it if this actually worked. The worst part was getting on the scale again and watching Nurse Charlotte slide the bar farther and farther to the right as I held my breath and watched it creep up from 120 to 130, 140 150, 155, 158 pounds. At 5 feet 4 inches tall, that was a hefty number, and I jumped off the scale even as she recorded it on her clipboard.

  My mother tipped the scale at 145, thirteen pounds lighter than my weight. She seemed less distraught then I was, but both of us were grateful that part was over. We returned to the doctor’s office and sat through an overview of the program before he sent us on our way with a packet of instructions and a small envelope of diet pills.

  For five months I ate eight hundred calories a day—feeding on two meals of protein and veggies with carrot snacks in-between. In addition to the pills, we received an injection at our weekly visit. It was many years later that I realized the little pills were likely speed, transforming both my mother and me into hyperactive maniacs that made the Energizer Bunny look like he had chronic fatigue syndrome.

  At my first weigh-in, one week later, I had lost eight pounds. My shorts were already starting to feel loose, and I was spurred on by my early success. The second week I lost four pounds, and two the next. In the first month alone I had dropped a total of fourteen pounds. I was dizzy with the excitement of finding a slimmer me inside a body I always felt was destined to be fat. My mother cheered me on, happy to see that I was using my stubbornness and will power in service of a positive goal, and we bonded over our shared objective.

  Though our conversations were limited to relatively inconsequential things during our weekly drive, there was comfort in splurging on the one good meal a week at Billie’s. Once there, though, my mother would persist with what felt like an interrogation.

  “Are Gina’s parents home when you are over there?”

  “Yeah, why?” I asked in an annoyed voice as though I were being accused of something.

  “Gina just seems to be a little more worldly. What’s her mother like?”

  I didn’t want to tell her she looked like a close cousin of Mae West, so I just said, “She’s nice.”

  I wondered if these were just innocent questions and my fears were triggered by the knowledge that she wouldn’t approve of what we were doing, were she to know, or if she had a hunch that something was going on and was trying to get me to tell her.

  When I returned to school in September, I weighed a sleek 115 pounds, forty-three pounds slimmer than when I started my diet. Walking to my history class my first day back, I passed my friend Becky in the hallway and said hello. She walked right by me.

  “Hey, Becky,” I repeated, walking back toward her. She looked at me and squinted as though she was trying to understand why a total stranger was talking to her.

  “It’s me, Carol. How was your summer?”

  “I can’t believe that is you!” she said, staring as though someone had jolted her with a cattle prod. “You’re so skinny. You look great. What did you do?” She kept staring like she couldn’t believe her eyes and saying, “Wow, wow, wow,” as we walked down the hall.

  I had had the whole summer to watch my gradual transformation from a hefty-looking, un-stylish fifteen-year old to a slim, attractive young woman, whose internal confidence had also flourished along with her outward appearance.

  This experience repeated itself with every person who hadn’t seen me all summer, and I could tell by the way their eyes lit up that the new me was a big hit. Suddenly, many people wanted to be my friend. While this newfound sense of celebrity was thrilling, it was also disconcerting. I hadn’t fundamentally changed as a person at all. I was still funny, smart, athletic, and curious. Only the outer shell had changed. It was like trading in an old beat-up Corvair for a brand-new Corvette convertible—everyone enamored with the outside, the sparkle of the shell, the way things look.

  Boys started asking me out on dates, and I, happy to declare myself normal, eagerly accepted. But I didn’t find them interesting; and as I listened to them talk on about their various accomplishments as we drove to a concert or out to dinner, I would daydream about Gina, lying in bed with her, feeling the touch of her hand on my stomach and the shiver that sent through my body.

  chapter

  3

  first broken heart

  My devotion to Gina was abruptly altered one Saturday afternoon in June when I went to the sidewalk sale at Wonderland Mall with my friend Mary to shop for a Father’s Day gift. It was my first awareness of attraction to a guy. Charlie was tall and tan, with short black hair brushed back in a pompadour. He had mahogany brown eyes and manicured brows that hovered over them. His square jaw suggested wealth and privilege, and I knew right away he usually got what he wanted. His hands were elegant, with long, slender fingers that ended in perfectly clipped nails. He was beauty incarnate; I think even my mother had a crush on him.

  He was standing in front of Sears and Roebuck behind a table pil
ed high with shirts. His face was a beautiful shade of brown, with a tinge of burn on his nose that made him look like a model for the Sierra Club. Pretending not to notice him, I kept my eyes fixed on the pile in front of me, sneaking a glance with my peripheral vision. At sixteen years old and fueled by my newfound confidence in being attractive, I enjoyed watching him watch me out of the corner of my eye. Then he moved in my direction, picked up a light pink shirt, and offered it to me. “Perhaps you would like something like this?” he said.

  I ignored him and kept on walking, but not too fast.

  He asked me what I was looking for, and I wanted to say, “I’ve been looking for you,” but I restrained myself and glanced up as though seeing him for the first time. “Oh, I am looking for a shirt for my dad for Father’s Day,” I said.

  He picked up a few colored shirts and offered them to me in hopes one would catch my eye. Finally, I told him my dad was more traditional and asked for something in white as I looked directly into his eyes for the first time. I felt like a swarm of butterflies were flapping their wings at warp speed inside me. I wanted to know why he created these sensations that I had never had before about a guy, a fact that was a wonderful relief. The smell of his cologne drifted past my nose as he reached across the pile and picked out three slightly different white shirts.

  “What size does he wear?” he asked, tripping over the guy next to him to get just the right one.

  “I think he is a medium. He’s about your size.” I stalled as long as I could before selecting one of the shirts he offered.

  “Do you need a tie to go with that?” he asked. I hadn’t needed one when I started, but I was quite sure I needed one now. He slipped around to the front of the table and took me by the arm. The touch of his fingers on my elbow sent waves of delight through my body, and I worked hard to stay balanced as he guided me to the tie racks on the other side of the table. Studying the selection, he carefully lifted off three ties and presented them for my approval.