~BBW,Eating, Romance, MWG - a classic WG story of emerging liberation and beauty
Mirrors? She tried to avoid them, on bad days at least: days when she saw little reason to get out of bed, when her self-esteem crawled along the bottom of the scale and she felt like something you'd want to scrape off the sole of your shoe. If she looked into a mirror then, she would only feel worse about herself: she would see those sharp features, those cheekbones, that aquiline nose, so unattractive she thought, or the little signs of age creeping round her eyes and forehead. She was all of 35: old enough to be firmly established in work, love, and happiness. None of this had come about.
Some days it was difficult enough to face the bathroom mirror for the brief time it took to drag a comb across the top of her head, or to check that washing and drying her dark, bouncy hair had produced no unruly strand curling out like a question mark. But she forced herself. She knew she needed to look approximately presentable for her part-time jobs, serving at the counter every Friday and Saturday at the picture framers Frame of Mind, or sitting blankly two afternoons a week as a custodian at the Estorick Collection, the little art gallery in north London devoted to Italian art. For a former art student with dreams of creative fulfillment these were scarcely dream jobs. But they earned her some money. They filled in the hours.
What else had she to do? The gym, of course. There was always the gym. She avoided the mirrors there too, though her body was among the trimmest and tightest on display. She had worked at that. She had walked her five feet eight inches up and down the Stairmaster. She had rowed and swam distances stretching half way across the Atlantic. Along the way surplus fat, a painful feature of her adolescence, had been rigorously banished.
"Lard Tub," the other girls at school had called her. She could still hear them from twenty years before, taunting her in the playground. And she could still hear herself trying to fight back. "My name's Tania," she used to say, tears in her eyes. "Sticky Bun Tania!" her tormentors would cry. She couldn't win then; she felt she couldn't win now, even when she was in her mid 30s and had sculpted herself long ago to 125 pounds. She still saw herself as the oddball, the failure, the woman at whom fingers pointed and words were said behind her back.
Boyfriends? There had been a stream. None of them lasted. It was their fault. It was her fault. It was both their faults. Some could not take her moods. She was demanding, capricious, and for all the brightness of her mind not always fun to be with. Most of her catches, on prolonged acquaintance, had proved insensitive boors. It was very discouraging.
So far this year two of them had taken up brief residence in her flat. There had been Dermot, God forbid, first met in a pub; full of surface Irish charm but with nothing solid to back it up. "He's like wilting celery," she'd told her colleagues when they grilled her at Frame of Mind. "In bed?" they had asked, grinning broadly. "Everywhere. He wilts everywhere". She sent him packing pretty quickly. Then there was Edmund, a City stockbroker, friend of a friend of another gallery custodian, met on a blind date. Better prospects here, Tania had thought; but he was loud, often tactless, and grew fed up of her doleful days. "Oh snap out of it," he would snarl in the mornings when she told him, factually, not begging for sympathy, that she looked and felt like a pile of soiled clothes. In the event, it was he who had snapped, storming out after a flaming row, leaving part of her hurt and another part relieved.
Now there was no-one, and she was not on the prowl. She kept her head down at the gallery, reading her magazines or staring at her feet. At Frame of Mind, she did her job like a machine, taking the measurements, grudgingly helping to select the frame, dealing with payment, all the while keeping the person on the other side of the counter at arm's length.
Here she was, a qualified art student with creative ambitions, servicing other people's art: a child's daubs being packaged for granny, or a calming Monet reproduction, bound for a dull hallway or a dentist's surgery. Galling. Some came in with old photos, of parents and grandparents, of school groups staring ahead while the cameraman said "Smile!". These were galling too. These customers had family lives and a past fit to celebrate. What did she have? A broken home, two bickering parents, one of them now dead, who had barely offered any encouragement when she did well at school. Classmates who had made her life miserable whenever she wasn't making things gloomy herself. Nothing to hang on a wall there. She did not begrudge her customers' happier lives; she just did not wish to interact with them.
Not even with Gary, a hospital nurse, in his early 30s, handsome in a nonchalant way. When his budget afforded it, he collected old prints of London, and in they would come, one by one, to Frame of Mind. Tania had caught his eye: the striking profile, the bright burning eyes, the lithe physique in tight jeans and t-shirt, the dark hair with a mind of its own. He soon realized she always worked the counter on Saturdays, and came with pleasantries to prolong their conversation. It was hard work opening up Tania, but Gary persisted. He talked about his weekend activities and going on holiday; he delicately asked about her interests.
She saw his attractions, but hesitated. She didn't want to get her fingers burned. Yet he seemed unthreatening and gentle. Her stock of friends had dwindled: some had moved away, or buried themselves in married bliss. Some she had lost through fierce arguments, like most of her boyfriends, or her former flatmate Beth, who had shared too many of her own problems with mood swings, food, and self-esteem to be the best companion. There was a hole in her life. Maybe Gary could fill a tiny part of it.
"You don't need to keep bringing in things for framing if you just want to see me," she said one Saturday, with a smile. She'd awoken that day in an unusually good mood.
Gary looked bashful, but relieved. This courtship, if that's what it was, was getting expensive. "Do you have a lunch break?"
"I don't really eat lunch. We could have a quick drink if you'd like." "What am I saying?" her inner voice piped up. "I don't want this. I don't need this." But the words were out, and Gary was saying yes, yes, yes.
The pub, the Old Goat's Head, was starting to fill. They found a small table in a corner. "Oh God," Tania thought, "here we go, this awful business of making polite conversation. Nothing will come of this." But she surprised herself. The pint of lager helped, lubricating her mind and easing fears. "What do you do for a living?" she found herself asking. Awful question, but she wanted to know.
After talk about medical school and being squeamish, they moved on to parents, childhood, and what they once thought they'd be when they grew up.
"I'm not sure I'm grown up even yet," Tania said. She kept guarded about her past, and her hopes. Gary, wanting to encourage her, offered a few intimacies. A loving mother. A distant father. And he'd wanted to be a brain surgeon.
"That would have been good. You could have operated on me. I could do with a new brain."
Was she joking or serious? Gary was unsure. He searched for ways to make her more comfortable, and asked if she wanted a snack. From the way her head shook, it was as though he suggested taking poison.
"No, no. I'll eat later."
Gary thought to himself, "Two sprouts and some lentils, I bet." Sitting opposite, he noticed how little spare fat she had on her body. She was skin, bone, some light upholstery, and nothing more. In his job he saw quite enough of emaciated figures: patients too sick to hold food down, sustained only through intravenous drips. His own preference was for women with a few curves and something to grasp. This had first dawned on him at medical school when several female students, no money in their pockets, no time for anything else, had gone all out for fast food and steadily fattened up. They looked so much more attractive, he'd realized, with little bulges round their waists.
One of them, Moira, had become his first serious girlfriend; though not serious enough to stop her taking a nursing job in the States as soon as it was offered. She sent him a photo later: grown gorgeously plump, hair cascading towards opulent breasts. Paradise lost. Tania, he knew, was not his type. Yet he still was transfixed. He was drawn to her like a magnet: drawn by the things he saw, and the things she kept hidden. He was aching to see her again.
Back home, Tania kicked off her shoes, got a quick meal -- there were some lentils to heat up -- and looked around at the four walls of her living room, empty and sad. Bowl of beans balanced on her lap, she became painfully aware of the space beside her on the sofa. No company. No boyfriend. 35 years old. Saturday night. She was sharing her evening with a cushion.
She thought about Gary. Did she truly wish a relationship to develop? There were so many hoops to jump through, and she did not feel very athletic. She was also bemused. She wasn't a dolt, she knew that; she had things to say, points of view. But inside, she felt she was such a mess, and the mess had a habit of spewing out over anyone in the vicinity -- friends, lovers, colleagues at work.
"What does he see in me?" she sighed as she caught herself in the bathroom mirror, cleaning her teeth. She noticed the signs of a spot developing on her cheek. "Typical. Just what I deserve." Then it was off to another piece of sad, empty furniture: her bed.
WOULD YOU CARE FOR ANY DESSERT?
Wednesday afternoon. She sat slumped on her stool at the Estorick Collection, the morning's newspaper on her lap, eyes glazed over with boredom. The art gallery's current show, Italian still life portraits of the 20th century, was not drawing the crowds: some days only four arrived to stare at the bottles, dried figs and wilting flowers strung out on the canvasses.
A creak on the stairs signaled a new arrival. Tania focused her eyes on the newspaper's medical briefing page. How to cure hiccups. Might come in useful, she thought.
"Hello, Tania!" She jumped, and a gulp of air rushed into her throat. It was Gary.
"I thought I'd try to see what your other place of work was like. My shifts were suddenly changed."
"You paid money to see this?" Her eyes turned toward the nearest drab daub, a bowl of yellowing vegetables left out too long in the sun.
"I paid money to see you!"
She shifted uncomfortably. "Gary, that's nice, but --". She sheathed that thought for the moment. "What do you think of the show?"
Without moving a step, head swiveling, he made a rapid circuit of the room. "Terrible." He asked how many other visitors had come. Two others, she said. One had a dog collar.
"Someone holy?"
"Yeah. Wholly without taste."
"Don't be hard. He might have thought the pictures boring, just like us."
"Didn't. He bought a catalogue."
Gary suddenly changed tack. "You -- you wouldn't be free for dinner tonight, would you? Or some other night?"
For a moment she looked down at her feet. Then she surfaced, eyes guarded. "Gary, don't rush me. I like you, OK, but I don't really know you very well and you certainly don't know me."
"I want to. I'm trying to."
She looked away, sighing. "You don't know what you're getting into. I'm not the easiest person to get on with. It's roses one minute, barbed wire the next."
"All I'm suggesting is dinner. You do eat dinner, don't you, occasionally? Forget the barbed wire. I'm a nurse. I can dress wounds."
"Not my wounds you can't," Tania wanted to say. Instead she smiled faintly, weighed her life in her hands, and said yes. Dinner together. On Saturday. In public. At a restaurant.
"Got it," Gary said, grinning.
On Friday Caroline noticed a new jauntiness in Tania when she arrived at Frame of Mind. When her colleague said her customary good morning and asked how she was, Tania said "Fine". Usually the response was silence, or a pained "Don't ask". "Today," Tania said, "is a good day."
Tania had started her good day with herbal tea and a slice of melon. Lunch would not exist; well, maybe a crispbread. Dinner would probably be a small bowl of pasta, with a salad on the side. Her date with Gary was over 24 hours away, but she had already thought it prudent to prepare for her meal by further reducing her calorie intake. Saturday morning, she had decided, she would go to the gym for a heavy session. If she could get away with it without becoming faint, she would prefer eating nothing at all during the day. Then perhaps she could face the menu without worrying.
"Crispbread again?" Caroline said as Tania took her lunch break.
"Aha."
"You can't possibly enjoy that, can you? It's so dry. Smear some cream cheese on it, for God's sake," she said, hands comfortably perched on either side of her tummy bulge, a relatively new acquisition.
"Can't. Calories. Besides, I don't eat for enjoyment. I eat to stay alive."
"You're a funny one, Tania," Caroline grinned. "Life's for enjoying, not suffering."
If Tania hadn't felt so perky she wouldn't have let that last line pass. But today she had pocketed the moody blues. She crunched down on her crispbread, and glanced at Caroline's departing bottom, fuller than she remembered it before. Maybe others could gain weight without qualms. But not Tania. Her slender body, she felt, was her one success in life and nothing was going to take it away from her. She was not going end up like her roly-poly mother. She had made this decision years ago when a holiday snapshot caught the two of them walking on a seaside promenade, her mother plump as a juicy pear, and herself alongside, a little pudgy, awkward, embarrassed. "If I don't take care," she had written in her diary, "that is my future walking beside me."
On Saturday morning hunger kicked in and she made herself two thin pieces of toast. Still, she raced to the gym, lifted weights, and managed eight laps in the pool. Drying her hair in the changing room, she braved her enemy, the mirror. Bearable, she thought. The spot near her nose seemed to have disappeared. She raced to work, cheeks a little flushed.
By eight o'clock they were sitting opposite each other at one of the local bistros, the Blue Danube, menu in hand.
"I hope you're hungry," Gary said, a nervous laugh tucked into his voice.
"Sort of." She was famished, but determined not to show it. Roaming down the menu's columns, she skipped over anything with a creamy sauce, anything fried, anything with potatoes or garlic bread. That left her, principally, with poached fish. She chose salmon, served with a selection of vegetables and few sprigs of lettuce.
Gary went for the duck a l'orange. He noticed how methodically Tania ate, the knife slowly slicing into the salmon, the fork spearing the small pink wedge towards the mouth. It was almost a mechanical process. Did this girl ever smack her lips and say "M'm"? It seemed impossible. At least her eyes appeared blazing with life. They were large, dark brown and lustrous, and he wanted to dive right into them.
"What do you think of the Government's health spending plans?" she said, knife and fork taming a clump of broccoli. Talking about the National Health Service on a Saturday night was not Gary's idea of a good time, but she sounded genuinely interested and he could not disappoint those burning eyes.
"Too little, too late. And the problem is, there's no guarantee that the money proposed will end up where it's needed, on the wards."
She looked so composed, cutlery resting on the side of her plate as she digested. Didn't she ever dig in to anything? Gary looked at her slender body, no gathering of fat along the upper arms, the chin taut, the breasts small and pretty.
They talked about politics and private health care. They talked about sports, about mothers, music, the moon and the stars; talked so much they scarcely noticed the plates being removed, the crumbs swept away. Their hands inched closer across the table. "Dare I hold her hand?" Gary thought. "Dare I let him?" murmured Tania.
Suddenly the waiter was hovering. He sensed two lovebirds mating, and spoke softly. "Would you care for dessert?"
"Not for me," Tania jumped in.
"Come on, please! It would round the meal out nicely."
"It would round me out too! I've already eaten much more than usual." Yet she so wanted to prolong their evening, and she realized food would help. Perhaps just this once. She studied the menu long and hard.
"They have fruit salad," Gary suggested.
An impulse grabbed her. "No, if I'm going to commit a sin it may as well be a big one. I'll go for the chocolate fudge log."
His eyes widened. So did hers when her order arrived. The log was so long that it hung over the plate. "I can't possibly eat all this!"
She scooped up a small spoonful. She scooped up another. "M'm," she cried. "This is actually good! I guess I was hungrier than I thought." She looked guilty and shy. It was very fetching.
Gary was amazed. How could someone who picked at salmon as though it was the devil's food suddenly wolf down a chocolate fudge log? This was obviously a girl who was suppressing a healthy appetite. What would happen, he wondered, if she ever let nature take its course? He tried to imagine her with a fuller face, a hint of a double chin, and breasts bigger than a pair of apples. It was difficult.
They walked out of the restaurant, smiling broadly, intoxicated by each other's company. They agreed to phone the next day, and make further arrangements: another meal perhaps, a film, or maybe an evening in at her place or his.
The streets were crowded with Saturday night revelers. As Gary walked her to the Underground station, they passed two women, in their late 20s, standing outside a pub, clutching the little pot bellies surging out of their slacks. They were obviously comparing their recent weight gains, and they were laughing.
"Oh that's horrible," said Tania with a shudder. "Isn't it sad when people let themselves go?"
Gary reined in his thoughts. Maybe some other time.
TAKING IT SLOWLY
For the first two months they moved cautiously. Gary himself would have been happy seeing her every night, but Tania had sustained enough bruises in relationships to know that she had to take things one step at a time. By the end of the first month twice a week had become three times, with regular stop-overs. There were meals out, meals in, drinks in the pub, evenings round the video recorder, and increasing hours under the covers, exploring and talking. After six weeks, Gary began leaving a toothbrush. After eight, his clothes followed. After twelve, only Tania's fear of commitment kept them from accepting that they were now living together, sometimes at his place, mostly at hers.
Tania tried not to think too much about how happy she felt. One puff and her good fortune might blow away. But on the occasional evening when Gary worked the night shift, she couldn't help looking at the bed's empty space, touching his pillow and whispering, "Come back, I need you. Don't get run over. Don't get kidnapped. Come back safely with the dawn."
And he did, just in time for breakfast. She had breakfast herself now; Gary always needed fuel to stoke himself up for the hard day ahead, and Tania never wanted him to eat alone. Her other meals were more regular, and larger, than before. At home by herself, she found herself having soup and bread for lunch, with perhaps some cold cuts. At work at the framers, she still had her meager crispbread, but varied it with the odd sandwich. In the evening, the two of them would buckle down to pasta or something fancier if time permitted. To offset the extra food, Tania determined to step up her gym visits, though she didn't always put her good intentions into practise.
Tania's colleagues soon noticed a difference. She was happier, more at ease with herself and life around her. Before, smiles had to be pried out of her with a blunt instrument. Now they appeared without prompting. At the framers she talked more with customers. At the gallery she stopped glaring at visitors when they disturbed her reading and asked her the time.
Not only was she smiling more. She also had more to smile with. For all her exertions at the gym, in the three months she had been with Gary she had begun to gain a little weight. Fat had crept up on her gently, silently, tiptoeing over her body like thieves in the night, nestling into its hollow crevices, settling lightly round her stomach, padding out her cheeks, blurring her jawline, slightly increasing the bulk of her breasts, the heft of her hips and thighs. The fat came so surreptitiously that at first she had no reason to notice, to fret or complain. A mirror might have given her a hint, but she rarely looked in mirrors.
Tania Looks in the Mirror
by Swordfish
by Swordfish
Mirrors? She tried to avoid them, on bad days at least: days when she saw little reason to get out of bed, when her self-esteem crawled along the bottom of the scale and she felt like something you'd want to scrape off the sole of your shoe. If she looked into a mirror then, she would only feel worse about herself: she would see those sharp features, those cheekbones, that aquiline nose, so unattractive she thought, or the little signs of age creeping round her eyes and forehead. She was all of 35: old enough to be firmly established in work, love, and happiness. None of this had come about.
Some days it was difficult enough to face the bathroom mirror for the brief time it took to drag a comb across the top of her head, or to check that washing and drying her dark, bouncy hair had produced no unruly strand curling out like a question mark. But she forced herself. She knew she needed to look approximately presentable for her part-time jobs, serving at the counter every Friday and Saturday at the picture framers Frame of Mind, or sitting blankly two afternoons a week as a custodian at the Estorick Collection, the little art gallery in north London devoted to Italian art. For a former art student with dreams of creative fulfillment these were scarcely dream jobs. But they earned her some money. They filled in the hours.
What else had she to do? The gym, of course. There was always the gym. She avoided the mirrors there too, though her body was among the trimmest and tightest on display. She had worked at that. She had walked her five feet eight inches up and down the Stairmaster. She had rowed and swam distances stretching half way across the Atlantic. Along the way surplus fat, a painful feature of her adolescence, had been rigorously banished.
"Lard Tub," the other girls at school had called her. She could still hear them from twenty years before, taunting her in the playground. And she could still hear herself trying to fight back. "My name's Tania," she used to say, tears in her eyes. "Sticky Bun Tania!" her tormentors would cry. She couldn't win then; she felt she couldn't win now, even when she was in her mid 30s and had sculpted herself long ago to 125 pounds. She still saw herself as the oddball, the failure, the woman at whom fingers pointed and words were said behind her back.
Boyfriends? There had been a stream. None of them lasted. It was their fault. It was her fault. It was both their faults. Some could not take her moods. She was demanding, capricious, and for all the brightness of her mind not always fun to be with. Most of her catches, on prolonged acquaintance, had proved insensitive boors. It was very discouraging.
So far this year two of them had taken up brief residence in her flat. There had been Dermot, God forbid, first met in a pub; full of surface Irish charm but with nothing solid to back it up. "He's like wilting celery," she'd told her colleagues when they grilled her at Frame of Mind. "In bed?" they had asked, grinning broadly. "Everywhere. He wilts everywhere". She sent him packing pretty quickly. Then there was Edmund, a City stockbroker, friend of a friend of another gallery custodian, met on a blind date. Better prospects here, Tania had thought; but he was loud, often tactless, and grew fed up of her doleful days. "Oh snap out of it," he would snarl in the mornings when she told him, factually, not begging for sympathy, that she looked and felt like a pile of soiled clothes. In the event, it was he who had snapped, storming out after a flaming row, leaving part of her hurt and another part relieved.
Now there was no-one, and she was not on the prowl. She kept her head down at the gallery, reading her magazines or staring at her feet. At Frame of Mind, she did her job like a machine, taking the measurements, grudgingly helping to select the frame, dealing with payment, all the while keeping the person on the other side of the counter at arm's length.
Here she was, a qualified art student with creative ambitions, servicing other people's art: a child's daubs being packaged for granny, or a calming Monet reproduction, bound for a dull hallway or a dentist's surgery. Galling. Some came in with old photos, of parents and grandparents, of school groups staring ahead while the cameraman said "Smile!". These were galling too. These customers had family lives and a past fit to celebrate. What did she have? A broken home, two bickering parents, one of them now dead, who had barely offered any encouragement when she did well at school. Classmates who had made her life miserable whenever she wasn't making things gloomy herself. Nothing to hang on a wall there. She did not begrudge her customers' happier lives; she just did not wish to interact with them.
Not even with Gary, a hospital nurse, in his early 30s, handsome in a nonchalant way. When his budget afforded it, he collected old prints of London, and in they would come, one by one, to Frame of Mind. Tania had caught his eye: the striking profile, the bright burning eyes, the lithe physique in tight jeans and t-shirt, the dark hair with a mind of its own. He soon realized she always worked the counter on Saturdays, and came with pleasantries to prolong their conversation. It was hard work opening up Tania, but Gary persisted. He talked about his weekend activities and going on holiday; he delicately asked about her interests.
She saw his attractions, but hesitated. She didn't want to get her fingers burned. Yet he seemed unthreatening and gentle. Her stock of friends had dwindled: some had moved away, or buried themselves in married bliss. Some she had lost through fierce arguments, like most of her boyfriends, or her former flatmate Beth, who had shared too many of her own problems with mood swings, food, and self-esteem to be the best companion. There was a hole in her life. Maybe Gary could fill a tiny part of it.
"You don't need to keep bringing in things for framing if you just want to see me," she said one Saturday, with a smile. She'd awoken that day in an unusually good mood.
Gary looked bashful, but relieved. This courtship, if that's what it was, was getting expensive. "Do you have a lunch break?"
"I don't really eat lunch. We could have a quick drink if you'd like." "What am I saying?" her inner voice piped up. "I don't want this. I don't need this." But the words were out, and Gary was saying yes, yes, yes.
The pub, the Old Goat's Head, was starting to fill. They found a small table in a corner. "Oh God," Tania thought, "here we go, this awful business of making polite conversation. Nothing will come of this." But she surprised herself. The pint of lager helped, lubricating her mind and easing fears. "What do you do for a living?" she found herself asking. Awful question, but she wanted to know.
After talk about medical school and being squeamish, they moved on to parents, childhood, and what they once thought they'd be when they grew up.
"I'm not sure I'm grown up even yet," Tania said. She kept guarded about her past, and her hopes. Gary, wanting to encourage her, offered a few intimacies. A loving mother. A distant father. And he'd wanted to be a brain surgeon.
"That would have been good. You could have operated on me. I could do with a new brain."
Was she joking or serious? Gary was unsure. He searched for ways to make her more comfortable, and asked if she wanted a snack. From the way her head shook, it was as though he suggested taking poison.
"No, no. I'll eat later."
Gary thought to himself, "Two sprouts and some lentils, I bet." Sitting opposite, he noticed how little spare fat she had on her body. She was skin, bone, some light upholstery, and nothing more. In his job he saw quite enough of emaciated figures: patients too sick to hold food down, sustained only through intravenous drips. His own preference was for women with a few curves and something to grasp. This had first dawned on him at medical school when several female students, no money in their pockets, no time for anything else, had gone all out for fast food and steadily fattened up. They looked so much more attractive, he'd realized, with little bulges round their waists.
One of them, Moira, had become his first serious girlfriend; though not serious enough to stop her taking a nursing job in the States as soon as it was offered. She sent him a photo later: grown gorgeously plump, hair cascading towards opulent breasts. Paradise lost. Tania, he knew, was not his type. Yet he still was transfixed. He was drawn to her like a magnet: drawn by the things he saw, and the things she kept hidden. He was aching to see her again.
Back home, Tania kicked off her shoes, got a quick meal -- there were some lentils to heat up -- and looked around at the four walls of her living room, empty and sad. Bowl of beans balanced on her lap, she became painfully aware of the space beside her on the sofa. No company. No boyfriend. 35 years old. Saturday night. She was sharing her evening with a cushion.
She thought about Gary. Did she truly wish a relationship to develop? There were so many hoops to jump through, and she did not feel very athletic. She was also bemused. She wasn't a dolt, she knew that; she had things to say, points of view. But inside, she felt she was such a mess, and the mess had a habit of spewing out over anyone in the vicinity -- friends, lovers, colleagues at work.
"What does he see in me?" she sighed as she caught herself in the bathroom mirror, cleaning her teeth. She noticed the signs of a spot developing on her cheek. "Typical. Just what I deserve." Then it was off to another piece of sad, empty furniture: her bed.
WOULD YOU CARE FOR ANY DESSERT?
Wednesday afternoon. She sat slumped on her stool at the Estorick Collection, the morning's newspaper on her lap, eyes glazed over with boredom. The art gallery's current show, Italian still life portraits of the 20th century, was not drawing the crowds: some days only four arrived to stare at the bottles, dried figs and wilting flowers strung out on the canvasses.
A creak on the stairs signaled a new arrival. Tania focused her eyes on the newspaper's medical briefing page. How to cure hiccups. Might come in useful, she thought.
"Hello, Tania!" She jumped, and a gulp of air rushed into her throat. It was Gary.
"I thought I'd try to see what your other place of work was like. My shifts were suddenly changed."
"You paid money to see this?" Her eyes turned toward the nearest drab daub, a bowl of yellowing vegetables left out too long in the sun.
"I paid money to see you!"
She shifted uncomfortably. "Gary, that's nice, but --". She sheathed that thought for the moment. "What do you think of the show?"
Without moving a step, head swiveling, he made a rapid circuit of the room. "Terrible." He asked how many other visitors had come. Two others, she said. One had a dog collar.
"Someone holy?"
"Yeah. Wholly without taste."
"Don't be hard. He might have thought the pictures boring, just like us."
"Didn't. He bought a catalogue."
Gary suddenly changed tack. "You -- you wouldn't be free for dinner tonight, would you? Or some other night?"
For a moment she looked down at her feet. Then she surfaced, eyes guarded. "Gary, don't rush me. I like you, OK, but I don't really know you very well and you certainly don't know me."
"I want to. I'm trying to."
She looked away, sighing. "You don't know what you're getting into. I'm not the easiest person to get on with. It's roses one minute, barbed wire the next."
"All I'm suggesting is dinner. You do eat dinner, don't you, occasionally? Forget the barbed wire. I'm a nurse. I can dress wounds."
"Not my wounds you can't," Tania wanted to say. Instead she smiled faintly, weighed her life in her hands, and said yes. Dinner together. On Saturday. In public. At a restaurant.
"Got it," Gary said, grinning.
On Friday Caroline noticed a new jauntiness in Tania when she arrived at Frame of Mind. When her colleague said her customary good morning and asked how she was, Tania said "Fine". Usually the response was silence, or a pained "Don't ask". "Today," Tania said, "is a good day."
Tania had started her good day with herbal tea and a slice of melon. Lunch would not exist; well, maybe a crispbread. Dinner would probably be a small bowl of pasta, with a salad on the side. Her date with Gary was over 24 hours away, but she had already thought it prudent to prepare for her meal by further reducing her calorie intake. Saturday morning, she had decided, she would go to the gym for a heavy session. If she could get away with it without becoming faint, she would prefer eating nothing at all during the day. Then perhaps she could face the menu without worrying.
"Crispbread again?" Caroline said as Tania took her lunch break.
"Aha."
"You can't possibly enjoy that, can you? It's so dry. Smear some cream cheese on it, for God's sake," she said, hands comfortably perched on either side of her tummy bulge, a relatively new acquisition.
"Can't. Calories. Besides, I don't eat for enjoyment. I eat to stay alive."
"You're a funny one, Tania," Caroline grinned. "Life's for enjoying, not suffering."
If Tania hadn't felt so perky she wouldn't have let that last line pass. But today she had pocketed the moody blues. She crunched down on her crispbread, and glanced at Caroline's departing bottom, fuller than she remembered it before. Maybe others could gain weight without qualms. But not Tania. Her slender body, she felt, was her one success in life and nothing was going to take it away from her. She was not going end up like her roly-poly mother. She had made this decision years ago when a holiday snapshot caught the two of them walking on a seaside promenade, her mother plump as a juicy pear, and herself alongside, a little pudgy, awkward, embarrassed. "If I don't take care," she had written in her diary, "that is my future walking beside me."
On Saturday morning hunger kicked in and she made herself two thin pieces of toast. Still, she raced to the gym, lifted weights, and managed eight laps in the pool. Drying her hair in the changing room, she braved her enemy, the mirror. Bearable, she thought. The spot near her nose seemed to have disappeared. She raced to work, cheeks a little flushed.
By eight o'clock they were sitting opposite each other at one of the local bistros, the Blue Danube, menu in hand.
"I hope you're hungry," Gary said, a nervous laugh tucked into his voice.
"Sort of." She was famished, but determined not to show it. Roaming down the menu's columns, she skipped over anything with a creamy sauce, anything fried, anything with potatoes or garlic bread. That left her, principally, with poached fish. She chose salmon, served with a selection of vegetables and few sprigs of lettuce.
Gary went for the duck a l'orange. He noticed how methodically Tania ate, the knife slowly slicing into the salmon, the fork spearing the small pink wedge towards the mouth. It was almost a mechanical process. Did this girl ever smack her lips and say "M'm"? It seemed impossible. At least her eyes appeared blazing with life. They were large, dark brown and lustrous, and he wanted to dive right into them.
"What do you think of the Government's health spending plans?" she said, knife and fork taming a clump of broccoli. Talking about the National Health Service on a Saturday night was not Gary's idea of a good time, but she sounded genuinely interested and he could not disappoint those burning eyes.
"Too little, too late. And the problem is, there's no guarantee that the money proposed will end up where it's needed, on the wards."
She looked so composed, cutlery resting on the side of her plate as she digested. Didn't she ever dig in to anything? Gary looked at her slender body, no gathering of fat along the upper arms, the chin taut, the breasts small and pretty.
They talked about politics and private health care. They talked about sports, about mothers, music, the moon and the stars; talked so much they scarcely noticed the plates being removed, the crumbs swept away. Their hands inched closer across the table. "Dare I hold her hand?" Gary thought. "Dare I let him?" murmured Tania.
Suddenly the waiter was hovering. He sensed two lovebirds mating, and spoke softly. "Would you care for dessert?"
"Not for me," Tania jumped in.
"Come on, please! It would round the meal out nicely."
"It would round me out too! I've already eaten much more than usual." Yet she so wanted to prolong their evening, and she realized food would help. Perhaps just this once. She studied the menu long and hard.
"They have fruit salad," Gary suggested.
An impulse grabbed her. "No, if I'm going to commit a sin it may as well be a big one. I'll go for the chocolate fudge log."
His eyes widened. So did hers when her order arrived. The log was so long that it hung over the plate. "I can't possibly eat all this!"
She scooped up a small spoonful. She scooped up another. "M'm," she cried. "This is actually good! I guess I was hungrier than I thought." She looked guilty and shy. It was very fetching.
Gary was amazed. How could someone who picked at salmon as though it was the devil's food suddenly wolf down a chocolate fudge log? This was obviously a girl who was suppressing a healthy appetite. What would happen, he wondered, if she ever let nature take its course? He tried to imagine her with a fuller face, a hint of a double chin, and breasts bigger than a pair of apples. It was difficult.
They walked out of the restaurant, smiling broadly, intoxicated by each other's company. They agreed to phone the next day, and make further arrangements: another meal perhaps, a film, or maybe an evening in at her place or his.
The streets were crowded with Saturday night revelers. As Gary walked her to the Underground station, they passed two women, in their late 20s, standing outside a pub, clutching the little pot bellies surging out of their slacks. They were obviously comparing their recent weight gains, and they were laughing.
"Oh that's horrible," said Tania with a shudder. "Isn't it sad when people let themselves go?"
Gary reined in his thoughts. Maybe some other time.
TAKING IT SLOWLY
For the first two months they moved cautiously. Gary himself would have been happy seeing her every night, but Tania had sustained enough bruises in relationships to know that she had to take things one step at a time. By the end of the first month twice a week had become three times, with regular stop-overs. There were meals out, meals in, drinks in the pub, evenings round the video recorder, and increasing hours under the covers, exploring and talking. After six weeks, Gary began leaving a toothbrush. After eight, his clothes followed. After twelve, only Tania's fear of commitment kept them from accepting that they were now living together, sometimes at his place, mostly at hers.
Tania tried not to think too much about how happy she felt. One puff and her good fortune might blow away. But on the occasional evening when Gary worked the night shift, she couldn't help looking at the bed's empty space, touching his pillow and whispering, "Come back, I need you. Don't get run over. Don't get kidnapped. Come back safely with the dawn."
And he did, just in time for breakfast. She had breakfast herself now; Gary always needed fuel to stoke himself up for the hard day ahead, and Tania never wanted him to eat alone. Her other meals were more regular, and larger, than before. At home by herself, she found herself having soup and bread for lunch, with perhaps some cold cuts. At work at the framers, she still had her meager crispbread, but varied it with the odd sandwich. In the evening, the two of them would buckle down to pasta or something fancier if time permitted. To offset the extra food, Tania determined to step up her gym visits, though she didn't always put her good intentions into practise.
Tania's colleagues soon noticed a difference. She was happier, more at ease with herself and life around her. Before, smiles had to be pried out of her with a blunt instrument. Now they appeared without prompting. At the framers she talked more with customers. At the gallery she stopped glaring at visitors when they disturbed her reading and asked her the time.
Not only was she smiling more. She also had more to smile with. For all her exertions at the gym, in the three months she had been with Gary she had begun to gain a little weight. Fat had crept up on her gently, silently, tiptoeing over her body like thieves in the night, nestling into its hollow crevices, settling lightly round her stomach, padding out her cheeks, blurring her jawline, slightly increasing the bulk of her breasts, the heft of her hips and thighs. The fat came so surreptitiously that at first she had no reason to notice, to fret or complain. A mirror might have given her a hint, but she rarely looked in mirrors.
