Such a Pretty Face by Annabelle Costa
Chapter 7
Ever since I left home to go to college years ago, I’ve been dreading my weekly phone calls with my parents.
Abby talks to her mother nearly every night. I can’t even imagine that. Once a week is about all I can stand.
If you think my parents are thrilled that their daughter has crossed into the territory of morbidly obese, you would be wrong. My weight has been a huge area of contention between my parents and me for my entire life. Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing we ever talk about. I can almost imagine my mother plucking me off her nipple, shaking her finger at me, saying, “Baby Emily, slow down! You’re getting too fat!”
My mother isn’t skinny herself, but she’s practically emaciated next to me. She was always putting me on one diet or another when I was a kid. I don’t even have any memories of a time when I wasn’t on some kind of diet. When I was very young, I used to plot ways to sneak food. Like, I would use my allowance money to buy extra treats at the school cafeteria or I would wake up in the middle of the night to raid the kitchen cabinets.
But as I got into my preteen years, I became just as obsessed with my weight as my mother was. I would step on the scale and sob because I had gained five pounds. It didn’t matter though. I just kept gaining.
Meanwhile, Camille has always been skinny. Without even trying. I don’t understand genetics.
This week, my mother doesn’t waste a second before she starts in on me: “Emily, I heard about a diet that really works.”
Oh, a diet that really works. Thank the Lord, I’m saved.
“It’s called the cabbage soup diet,” Mom says. “Nancy Garrison’s daughter tried it and she lost fifteen pounds in a week!”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“You get to eat all the cabbage soup you want!” she says, like I’m supposed to be excited about this. I hate cabbage. It stands to reason I’d hate cabbage soup if I tried it, but I’ll never know because there’s no way I would ever try it.
“Great,” I say.
“So you can eat like twenty bowls of soup!” Mom says. I hear some shuffling of papers. “Also, Nancy said you have to take a laxative so you have three bowel movements a day.”
The sad part is if this were ten years ago, I would have done it. I would have tried the old cabbage diet, or whatever it took for the tiny chance of losing a little weight. But I’m more jaded now. I know a gimmick when I hear one. Eating cabbage for a few weeks will not make me look like Camille. Nothing will.
“I’m not doing a cabbage soup diet, Mom,” I say. “Can’t you just… leave me be?”
“But, honey,” Mom whines. “You’d be so much happier if you lost some weight.”
“I’m trying to lose weight,” I say through my teeth. “Believe me, I watch everything I eat.”
“Well, it’s clearly not working. Last time you were here, you looked bigger than ever.”
I flinch. “Gee, thanks.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, honey.” Her voice softens. “I want you to be happy. Don’t you want a boyfriend?”
Imagine growing up as a teenager and every time you even hint to your mother that you like a boy, she tells you that if you lose some weight, he’d like you better. I learned not to confide in my mother. I never told her about Norm, because I knew she’d think that relationship was weird. She doesn’t get how relationships work in this decade. People meet online and they go for long periods without actually physically meeting each other. This is what people do. It isn’t weird at all.
Except the part where I sent him the fake pictures of myself was a little dysfunctional. Well, more than a little.
The worst part is that in my darkest moments, I’m thinking the same thing she is. Most of the time, I put it out of my head. But there are days when I desperately long to feel the touch of a man who finds me physically attractive. And I’m seriously worried that may never happen for me.