A PRETTY FACE MARISA LABOZZETTA

"I hope you're not doing this for me," Roy said. "I like you just the way you are. You've never been fat in my eyes."

"Then you're blind," Angie fired back.

She had made it perfectly clear on their first date that she was set on having vertical gastric bypass surgery. She hadn't said it to impress him, but rather to warn him of her intentions. Risks or no risks, whether or not Roy liked her fat, she'd made one of the most important decisions of her life and, for once, she had no doubt that it was the right one. This was about her. Besides, did he really find her attractive below the double chin?

"I saw that face, when you pulled into the parking lot of the Branding Iron, and I shouted, 'Hee haw!' I got so excited," he had said when she answered his personal ad in the local newspaper. "I didn't even see your body. It didn't matter."

But that was just it: he hadn't looked at her body, and nothing about her body had made him want to look.

She knew she had a pretty face; she had been told that her whole life. It was amazing how people always categorized her anatomical parts when it came to compliments. She also had a pretty smile and pretty hair. Her ears were referred to as perfectly formed and petite. It was as though they were grabbing onto anything they could above the neck—not the neck, just above—because that and the rest was too broad to take in, too grotesque to view, too—just too. Once in junior high school, a boy had taped a sign onto the back of her T-shirt without her knowing. OVERSIZE LOAD, it said in red Magic Marker as he attempted to wave change of class traffic out of her way. She had laughed when she caught on, then locked herself in a stall in the girls' bathroom and cried for the entire period that she should have been in chorus. Oh yes. She had a lovely voice.

She'd been a heroine in her family as a small child, however, unlike her cousin Nancy who had been made to suffer alone at the table so long after dinner was over that the greasy juice surrounding her steak hardened into white wax and her milk began to curdle. Angie couldn't comprehend Nancy's lack of appetite. At family gatherings, Angie had been the first of the cousins—even some adults—to clean her plate. The other children peeled off the hated skin of their chicken and sneaked it from their parents' view over to Angie. They slipped her the burnt pieces of roasted potatoes. They fought to sit next to her—to be in easy shot of her dish—not to be ostracized and made to suffer like Nancy, whose mother once forced Nancy to dunk a Genoa salami sandwich into a glass of chocolate milk, with the promise that it would be more palatable and go down easier. No. They had Angie to thank for their after-dinner freedom. And Angie had her expandable stomach to thank for her popularity. Why couldn't Nancy be more like Angie? The adults asked as they counted each of Nancy's mouthfuls. And Angie took the seconds and thirds that were offered to her. She accepted the chicken skins and the leftover sausage links. She lifted two eclairs off of a platter of pastries. She ate tripe and stuffed rolled pig's skin simmered in tomato sauce when her cousins wouldn't touch the stuff. She ate and ate. And the more she ate, the more she was praised—raised up as an example for the others to emulate. And while Nancy's parents cried and fretted over their malnourished daughter and forced upon her tonics to stimulate her appetite, Angie's mother and father preened with pride at having produced such a healthy offspring.

Then puberty made its debut, and everything seemed to change before Angie knew what had happened. By the time they were fifteen, Nancy's angles had smoothed out into proportioned curves. Even her appetite had improved. Angie, however, remained one enormous measurement below her thick neck to her buttocks. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. Her feet burst around the straps of her shoes. And now, the negative attention was cast onto Angie. She was too heavy, they all warned her parents. It wasn't healthy; it wasn't nice for a young girl. They must do something before she burst.

"Nonsense. It's all muscle," Doctor Mazzo, her pediatrician had said.

After all, she'd won a swimming tournament at the Y in sixth grade—the first girl, the youngest girl in the family to take part in athletics.

"And," he had added, privy to gossip about his patients,  "I hear she has a boyfriend. What are you worried about?" 

She needed the nourishment, he insisted; the exercise and the desire to be loved would keep her weight in check.

Love did sustain Angie until she was a size sixteen and her boyfriend said that if she gained another pound, he was gone. When she tipped the scale at 210, he called her a cow and broke up with her. Her parents' eyelids flew up like two pairs of window shades.

"I'll buy you a fur coat, if you lose twenty-five pounds," her father offered.

"I'll take you to Italy," her mother said.

"You'll be able to fit in an airplane seat," her father added.

But there had been no comforting words for Angie, only comforting food—lots of it—sneaked into her room after her parents retired for the evening; bought from vending machines at the community college she attended; shared with her cousins who pretended that her eating habits were normal, that everything about her was normal because they loved her. And, as Dr. Mazzo had said, love was sustaining.

•

Angie filled out the questionnaire that arrived in the mail from the Bayside Surgical Group. List every diet you've ever been on and the results. She searched for an additional ream of paper in the information packet. Where should she begin? Nancy had announced her engagement just around the time Fen Phen had come on the market. Lose weight; eat like a normal person, the ad had said. It was supposed to be taken for only two months; Angie took it for three. She lost fifty pounds; she developed a leaky heart valve. At least she hadn't died like some others who had taken the drug, although there would be times when she wished she had.

She had refused the fur coat and the trip to Italy. Despite the weight loss, her mother had had to specially make her bridesmaid dress while her cousins bought theirs off the rack. She still hid behind the other attendants in every one of Nancy's wedding pictures, and in her cousin Rosemary's wedding photos, and in her cousins Barbara's and Joanna's. Nancy's wedding had bothered her the most; however, maybe because Nancy and she were only two days apart in age. She had seen countless black and white photos of them wrapped in buntings held up to the camera lens by their mothers on their first day home from St. Peter's hospital, as though to say, Look! Look what we've just done! Nancy and she had grown up like Siamese twins side by side in identical attached row houses. They had held hands in line on their first day of kindergarten, eaten lunch in the school cafeterias together, and later hung out at bars together. Only they had never gotten served together. Whenever Angie put her empty glass down, it remained empty, but Nancy's empty glass no sooner hit the wooden counter than the bartenders would appear with a refill.

"You know, I've been looking at you for fifteen minutes," Angie once chewed out a male server. "As soon as my cousin takes her last sip, you're there. Why is that? Because she's thin and I'm not?"

"I didn't see you, " the young bartender had stammered.

"Bullshit!"

But he had been right on the mark. Her largeness made her invisible.

She had tried Meridian then Dexatrim after the Fen Phen near fatality; she added them to the list. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, the Stillman water diet, the Atkins fat diet, the South Beach Diet, the ice cream diet, the Hollywood miracle juice diet. She had done them all—countless times. She had lost a little, gained it all and more back. She had drunk nothing but Slimfast for six months, then gagged on a piece of steak and had to have her cousin Joanna's doctor-husband perform the Heimlich on her at a family barbecue. NutriSystem products made her vomit. NuSkin Appeal shakes gave her gas. Chocolate and vanilla flavored caramel Ayds appetite suppressants had added fifteen pounds and made her a size twenty-four.

Were there any eating disorders in the family? Yes, if she counted her own compulsion. She had tried purging once, but it disgusted her.  She circled, no. Then came the list of risks: one in every two hundred died from the surgery. Angie put the pen down.

"You don't have to do this," Roy sang out, his chin resting on the crown of her head; she felt the jackhammer vibration of his jaw.

"At work today one of the residents asked if I'd gained weight. God bless old people: what's on their minds is on their tongues."

"You're around too many old people."

"I work in a nursing home."

"Get a new job."

"I love my work. Besides, it isn't easy for me to get hired. I couldn't bear to look at one more personnel officer's patronizing gaze and hear them tell me how the job has just been filled."

"You're exaggerating."

"I live this, Roy. You don't. Do you know that I have to move furniture around in the rooms sometimes to get closer to patients? Wheelchairs fit better in spaces than I do!"

"Let's go to bed."

"That's your answer to everything. You don't have to make me feel better all the time."

"Honey." He only called her that, the pitch of his voice rising as he pronounced the word, when he wanted to point out that he was right and she was wrong.

"You think I make love to you only for your sake?"

Angie always took a long time to get ready to retire at night. She liked Roy to be in bed when she arrived so that she could shut off the lights before she slipped in alongside him.

"Keep it on," Roy said about the light.

But she shut it just the same and unbuttoned the gaily-printed smock of her uniform and unhooked her bra, releasing the heavy weight of her breasts. She felt their warmth against the cool skin that protected her heart. She tugged at the elastic waistband of white polyester trousers, taking her panties down along with them. She had forgotten what it was like to unfasten zippers and buttons. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to be the light-as-a feather woman that a man whisked up into his arms and spun around, carried off and couldn't put down because he wanted her with him wherever he went.

"Ta-da!" she exclaimed when the last article of clothing was gone. Then she lifted the covers and performed her vanishing act before Roy's pupils had time to adjust to the blackness and he saw her body, covered with the white quilt, looking like Mount Blanc. In bed, he kissed her lips and face. He sucked on her nipples. He fondled her clitoris. And he entered her. Spot A. Spot B. Spot C. Spot D.  He moved as though hitting brief but familiar rest stops on a road trip until reaching his final destination. This was making love for Angie, grateful for the attention and, in her mind, undeserving of a request for him to linger here and there awhile longer.

•

Angie's parents liked Roy. He wasn't a lawyer or a doctor or a high-powered stockbroker, but he was solid, hard working, and devoted to forty-two-year-old Angie. He was also, most likely, her last chance for babies. It was more for Angie though, that they hoped for grandchildren: how could anyone—especially a woman—live without children, without a family? No one had ever believed that childless Nancy and Jean-Georges were really happy—not until little Pierre, that is. Childlessness had been the one negative trait that Angie and Nancy shared, but then along came Pierre out of nowhere to remove the last shred of solidarity. Despondent and jealous, Angie had agreed to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend whom nobody knew very well. He waited for Angie in the parking lot of a popular local bar just as Roy would one day. Only when he saw Angie get out of her car and walk towards the entrance, he stopped her and suggested that maybe they would prefer another quieter more intimate place in the next town where they didn't know so many people; they could talk easier and get to know each other better; he would follow her there in his car. Angie pulled out of the parking lot and took a left in the direction of the designated restaurant; he took a right. She left unreturned messages on his voicemail. She shut herself up in her room for days until her parents had to break down the door because she fainted from dehydration.

•

Angie's appointed nutritionist assessed Angie's body mass index at just barely the accepted limit. The psychotherapist confirmed that she did not have an eating disorder. Fine with me, Angie told herself, thinking that if she wasn't a walking eating dysfunction, who was? The required attendance at support group meetings was to be spread out over a six-month period; and while one meeting a month sufficed, Angie attended more frequently just to prove how much she wanted the surgery. She listened to the lecturers identify themselves as if they were addressing an AA group, and explain in great and painful detail how they had become obese and what had led them to surgery. All were now average weight—normal looking. All of their lives had changed.

About a week before Angie's scheduled surgery, she began to experience some pain radiating from below her breastbone when she got up to pee during the night. She attributed it to stress and broke the rules; she told no one, knowing that if she did, the surgery would be postponed for who knew how much longer.

"If I die," she said to Roy the night before her big day, " make sure you pick up all of your clothing from the floor and hide it. My parents still don't think we live together. They can't believe you'd want to."

It was a joke. Getting in the first laugh about her had become a habit—one that made it less likely that someone else would laugh at her. It was the fat person's secret to jolliness; only Roy never found it funny.

"We could have gotten married a long time ago," he said.

Several hours later she was still unable to sleep, running her hand over the perfectly smooth flesh of her tummy for the last time before it would be sliced into and left to scar. "What time is it?" She woke Roy up.

"Two a.m."

"Four and a half more hours until we leave for the hospital?" She sighed.

"You really ought to try and get some sleep. Tomorrow's a big day."

"I think I'm losing my nerve."

"You've just got cold feet. Before you know it, it'll all be over." He put his arm around her and pulled her closer to him. "But remember, you can always change your mind, because as much as I'll try to help, this is something you have to do alone, Ange. You're in this by yourself. "

•

A four-hour surgery turned into eight due to an ugly gray gall bladder—the source of her prior discomfort—that was hard to cut through. And so it took additional time to trim away the top part of her stomach and block the bottom; to make a new stomach the size of an egg; to take part of the intestine and bypass part of that to the new stomach, allowing for food to pass much quicker through her, without sufficient time to digest it.

After three days she was sent home with a diet of pureed foods. On her post-op visit, the nutritionist told her to eat the way she wanted, that she would know when she was full. She did just that, but by the time she felt full, she had already become too full and was feeling sick.

Certain foods made her gums and mouth tingle. She became lightheaded—dizzy—and crawled around the tiled kitchen floor in search of the coolest spot on which to lie down like a dog on a hot summer day. Roy placed cold compresses on her forehead while water seeped out of her pores and onto the floor. Her sweatpants became soaked until they could absorb no more. Unable to move, she watched the water pool around her until she was sitting in a puddle of her own body fluid. Why was she still wearing sweat pants? She was supposed to be thin now. She was supposed to be normal.

"Get me out of my clothes," she implored Roy. "Get me out of my clothes! I'm drowning!"

They promised her it would get better: the doctor, the nutritionist, the former patients at the support lectures; they all promised her, and it did.  She learned how to adjust to this new digestive system of hers that had been turned upside down, right side up again, and then inside out. They told her to eat her proteins first, then her vegetables, then her carbohydrates, but when she did, it made her sick. She changed the order, but the order of remedy was constantly changing. She found foods that agreed with her, then they turned on her just as men had before. Peanut butter gave way to ham, which gave way to hardboiled eggs, which led to cheese. Sweets lowered her blood sugar. Caffeine and pasta put her to sleep. She slept for days—weeks—shivering now under two heavy quilts.

On her first day back to work, she missed her stop to get off the bus. She hadn't seen it coming and before she knew it, they were passed it.  But when had it become the last stop on the schedule? She ran frantically up and down the aisle of the bus as it whizzed by unfamiliar landmarks, but she could not bring herself to ask to be let off; the bus driver ignored her. She sat back down, immobilized, held hostage by frustration all way to the terminal where she waited for what seemed like an eternity until the driver began his return route.

"Too late," they said when she arrived at the nursing home. 

"But I'm here," she insisted, going for a wheelchair to take Mrs. Dunphy for her morning stroll.

"Too late, too late," they chanted—staff and residents alike. "You've been gone too long. You are too late."

She became Mrs. Roy Ostrander. She lost fifty pounds in six months, one hundred and twenty in a year. She went from a size twenty-six to a ten, just the way they had said she would. The sight of her in anything that reflected her image never failed to take her by surprise. She felt lighter. She went back to the nursing home to beg for her old job. When they failed to recognize her, she pretended to be a new applicant and was hired on the spot. She amazed herself by being able to slide in between nightstands and beds, clearing both sides with room to spare. She floated through the nearly closing doors of the crowded elevator in the lobby. There was no opening too small for her to pass through; she was like a mouse—a phantom. 

"Why so glum?" the director asked one morning. She smiled less now than before: there wasn't the need to be so jolly anymore; people noticed and liked her despite her mood. They all saw her now, especially Roy who studied every blemish, every mosquito bite, every black-and-blue. 

"Shouldn't you wear something over that?" he asked as they left for dinner one evening.

"Why?"

"You'll be cold."

And she was cold. She was always cold, so cold that a thin layer of ice formed on her skin like frost on a windowpane.

"Not to worry. Expect the abnormal," Dr. Barter said. "Your body is no longer normal; nothing about you is ordinary."

Angie dropped pounds without trying. She didn't bother to weigh herself anymore; she became ashamed to take her clothes to the tailor after they'd been altered several times, and bought new outfits instead. This weight-loss thing was costing her a fortune.

"Ange, I'm afraid you might be taking this too far. You're downright skinny," Nancy said on Christmas Eve as they set the table at Nancy's house. Angie was, in fact, the same size as Nancy now.

"You're not jealous are you?"

"Look, Angie. I've been like this my entire life. But you haven't."

That night Nancy caught Angie and Jean-Georges in the sandbox behind Nancy's house. Angie hadn't been able to help herself: she had always been attracted to Jean- Georges. She had persuaded him because he was so handsome in his blue polo shirt that accentuated those sapphire eyes of his. His was trim where Roy was pudgy and he was French which went a long way, and her groin ached when she looked at him across the dining room table. She hadn't known if he would follow her out, but then he was there beside her. They sat down in the sandbox and kissed with the full moon exposing their entwined bodies; she could have kissed him forever. She took his hand and pressed it hard between her legs and convulsed with painful satisfaction. What she had done—all of it— was fine; it was just the normal abnormal behavior Dr. Barter had warned her about. Danny Haynes had pulled her pants down in the sandbox in his yard when they were eight, only it had been summer then and she had been mortified. Angie's sole concern with Jean Georges doing it had been the awful cold she felt out there on the frozen sand with her skin exposed to snow that fell and stung her belly.

By the time Easter rolled around, Angie was thinner than Nancy. She had started wearing baggy clothes again to hide her skeletal frame that drew stares like a freak in a sideshow. Her parents didn't need to worry about her nourishing a fetus; love making between Roy and her was all but nonexistent because Roy claimed that he was afraid to touch Angie—afraid he would hurt her she'd become so fragile. When Nancy told Roy about Angie and Jean Georges, Roy packed his bags.

" I'm so sorry, Roy." She sobbed, her gut wrenching.

What had she done? What had she been thinking? If only she could take it back. On her knees, she reached out to him and begged him not to go, to forgive her. He turned and took her hand.

"Please get up," he said. "You look pathetic. This is embarrassing."

He pulled; her brittle twig of a wrist snapped.

"Pretty face," the doctors and nurses murmured above her as she lay on the cold slab of an ER table that night: the moon full again, beaming through the glass ceiling of the room, instruments clinging and clanging, dropping onto metal trays while the doctors put Angie back together again.

Angie tried to eat more; however, her stomach had become the size of a pea, and a pea was about all she could digest at any given time. And her stomach continued to diminish until the morning she woke up and couldn't find herself. She cried out for Roy to help her look for her, but he was nowhere.

"Don't hate me," she cried out louder. "I can't bear it." She jumped up and down on the mattress. She sobbed.  She wailed. His face appeared over her. Thank God he was still there. His eyes were slits because he was squinting in an effort to see her she was that tiny. She was nearly invisible.

"Can you see me, Roy?

"Yes."

"Can you hear me?"
"Not too well. You're a little hoarse."

Of course she was hoarse. She'd been screaming so much her throat was dry and scratchy.

"What is it, Ange?"

"Cold."  She was whispering now, relieved to have garnered his attention. "So cold."

"Big day today, Ange. Big day."

Happy. He was happy again. He'd forgiven her. Relieved, she waited for him to kiss her, but he scooped her up and dropped her into his crisply pressed shirt pocket, as he would some loose change; he stepped into his pants.

"Roy!" She let out a muffled cry. She had fallen into a corner of the pocket and was struggling to get on her feet.

"Are you in pain?"

She was and it must have been because she was growing now—she was getting larger between what was not his pocket but the stiff sheets. She could see her hand on top of the blanket, inside of Roy's; they were almost the same size.

"Roy—" Her jaws moved slowly in their paralytic waking stage from an exhausting sleep. "I don't want to have the surgery."

He looked at her somewhat bewildered, only she was the one who became perplexed. He had said she could change her mind. Now maybe he had changed his.

"What are you talking about, Ange?" His words came in clearer now—louder.

"Will you call Dr. Barter for me, Roy?  I didn't sleep well; Bad dreams—terrible dreams. I'm so tired and my voice—call him and tell him I changed my mind."

"Honey." His voice rose to that insisting, high pitch.  He patted her forehead. He held out a plastic cup of water; the bent straw met her lips. "It was a really long surgery. There were complications. They said you might lose your voice for a few days on account of they intubated you. But the worst is over."

She concentrated on the image above her, trying hard to focus. He was smiling, standing tall. So high and unsuspecting. So far away.