The Sisters Club Read online

  “You know,” I’d said, “it’s not like I haven’t done everything under the sun to lose weight, but nothing ever lasts for more than just a little bit.”

  “Some people,” Lise had said, clearly referring to Sylvia, “just don’t understand that weight isn’t always a choice for other people. It’s a medical condition, just like so many things.”

  “Exactly,” Cindy had added eagerly. “A lot of it’s genetics, just like with substance abuse. I think sometimes, because my sister’s a druggie, if I even take two pain-killers for cramps, I’ll follow in her footsteps. Is it like that for you? Were your parents really big too?”

  I was sure she was trying to be helpful, but it didn’t help, not really. And no, my parents weren’t big too. Everyone else in the Richards family was normal size. I was always the lone fatty.

  Despite the efforts of Lise and Cindy to make me feel better, the next morning Sylvia’s words still rang in my head: “And you, go on a diet.”

  As if it was that easy. As if I hadn’t already tried the no-fat diet, the no-carbohydrate diet, the nothing-but-vitamin-water diet. The weight always came back. Still, maybe there was something drastic I hadn’t tried yet?

  “Do you think I should lose weight?” I asked Dan as he was leaving for work.

  Funnily enough, it was a question we’d never addressed, not directly.

  “No.” He looked at me puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged. “I just thought maybe it would make you happier with me, that’s all.”

  “I don’t need you to lose weight for me to be happier with you,” he said, touching my face with his fingers. “But I do wish you were happier here.”

  “I am happy here!” I protested.

  “But you never see anyone but me,” he pointed out, echoing Artemis’s words about my status here. “Except for the bookstore, you never see anyone. It can’t be much fun for you, me being gone all day.”

  “It’s fine. Really.”

  “I know!” he said. “We could have some people in from work, or maybe some of my golf buddies and their wives.”

  I pictured what such an evening would be like: the inevitable stares of “What’s he doing with her?” from each person who came through the front door.

  I’d not met many of the people in Dan’s world yet. Since we’d been married in London, and during the holidays no less, the only people to make it across the pond had been Dan’s parents and sister, plus her family. They’d been pleasant enough—they’d surprised me by not judging me at all—but they all lived in Michigan where Dan had grown up, so they were hardly within calling distance.

  Yes, they had been very pleasant, even when Artemis had made everyone uncomfortable by grilling Dan at the pre-wedding party. She’d made everyone uncomfortable except for Dan, of course.

  “Isn’t it odd,” Artemis had said, winding one of her pretty golden locks around her manicured finger, “that a man should reach the age of forty-four, a successful man, and not have been married at least once?” I know that sounds awful, but in her own way, Artemis was only giving voice to what everyone else in my family was obviously thinking. “Don’t you American moguls usually have at least three families by your age? You’re not covering up for something, are you? Like one of those Hollywood actors who marry and adopt a few kids just to prove to everyone he’s not gay, when of course everyone knows otherwise?”

  If Artemis had been that sot in the private club, Dan might’ve picked another snot out of his nose to prove a point about her. But it was supposed to be a nice family gathering and he dealt with her inferences with equanimity.

  “Hmm,” he said, his expression cloudy as though considering the issue. “Why haven’t I been married before?” Then he brightened. “I know!” He took my hand, looked me in the eyes, and then kissed me full on the lips before turning back to Artemis with an easy smile. “It’s because I’ve never been in love before.”

  Dan was always so good to me, that even though the suggestion of having people from his work life or golf life in for an evening sent all kinds of insecure worry raging through me every time he mentioned it, I couldn’t deny him.

  “Sure.” I forced an easy smile. “Whenever you like.”

  Once he was gone, though, I got busy doing research, Sylvia’s words goading me on. She may have had a crass way of putting it, “You, lose weight,” and I’d reacted negatively to her negativity at the time. But just like a hurtful truth in Artemis’s clothing could still be a truth nonetheless, I saw a glimmer of validity in the terse words Sylvia had spoken. Sure I’d tried a lot of things to lose weight before, but had I really tried everything?

  I went online, first looking under weight loss. But nearly everything there, I’d tried before. Some of the things more than once. I was just about to give it up when I saw a link for surgical solutions and there it was:

  Gastric bypass surgery.

  Surgery. It was an option I’d always assumed was reserved for the truly desperate, and I’d never thought myself to be one of those people before, but now I saw that I was.

  It said it was only recommended for people one hundred pounds overweight or more. I certainly qualified for that. It listed other conditions: patients needed to have been obese for over five years, should not have a history of alcohol abuse, should not have untreated depression or other major psychiatric disorders, and should be between the ages of eighteen to sixty-five. I fit in perfectly. Well, except for the part about depression. But who in the world that weighs two hundred and seventy-five pounds doesn’t get depressed occasionally? As for “other major psychiatric disorders,” it was possible I had a few of those, but none that had been formally diagnosed as such, thank God.

  The website described the procedure: how gastric bypass surgery makes the stomach smaller and allows food to bypass part of the small intestine; and how the patient would feel full more quickly than when the stomach was its original size, which would in turn reduce the amount of food eaten and thus the calories consumed. Bypassing part of the intestine would also result in fewer calories being absorbed. This would inevitably lead to weight loss.

  There were even before and after photographs of celebrities who’d had the procedure done. I had to admit, the celebrities looked abnormally unlike their before pictures in their after shots, as though they’d had part of themselves sucked away through a giant straw, and they were still trying to get used to their new state—but no one could deny they were now half the people they used to be. And in a good way.

  The website also outlined risks, but I didn’t pay any attention to that part. I was too busy focusing on one particular line:

  The average patient will lose two-thirds of their body weight within the first two years.

  I wondered if that held true no matter what the starting weight. If so, someone starting at one fifty would weigh fifty just two years later. But that couldn’t be right. And then I remembered: they only performed this surgery on the truly obese.

  I did the math. Not that I’d ever been terribly good at math, but I did it anyway.

  If my calculations were correct, in two years’ time I’d lose one hundred and eighty-three pounds. I’d weigh ninety-two pounds!

  I reined in my enthusiasm. Even I could see that ninety-two was just too small. But imagine, I thought, the difference I could see in just one year! In just a few months!

  Going to the online Yellow Pages, I began searching for surgeons.

  • • •

  It’s amazing, in America, how quickly you can get a surgeon to see you when you tell him or her your husband has an insurance policy that insures you to the hilt.

  “Mrs. Taylor?” the nurse called into the posh waiting room, chart in hand. “Dr. Rich will see you now.”

  Dr. Rich turned out to look very, well, rich. He had steel-colored hair that looked as though it cost two hundred dollars a pop to maintain. He was also naturally lean, and I got the impression when he looked at me sternly, that h
e didn’t have much patience for his obese patients. Oh, well. So much for bedside manner.

  “You certainly are a perfect candidate for the surgery,” he announced forty-five minutes later, having given me a complete exam. “Your blood pressure is high. You’re at grave risk for type two diabetes. The question is: Do you really want it?”

  I thought about my life thus far. I knew, on an intellectual level, that it was foolish to wholly define oneself by one’s weight. And I didn’t define myself wholly that way. But to say it didn’t make up a large portion of the equation, given the life I’d led, would be a lie. Perhaps, if I had the surgery, I could go on to live life like a normal person.

  “I definitely want it,” I said with conviction.

  “Terrific,” he said. “Then there’s just one question.”

  “And that is?”

  “How do you intend to pay for this?”

  “I assumed my husband’s insurance company would cover it.”

  He laughed, a vaguely nasty sound as though I were the stupidest twit who ever lived. “Mrs. Taylor, I’m afraid gastric bypass is considered to be, roughly, akin to cosmetic surgery. I highly doubt your husband’s insurance would cover it. And, even if they might, you’d need to jump through an awful lot of hoops first. For starters, you’d need a documented history at previous, unsuccessful weight-loss attempts.”

  “I’m two hundred and seventy-five pounds,” I said tartly. “How much more documentation do they need?”

  “You’d also need to prove that your obesity is an imminent threat to your health, which, however much I might believe that to be true, in the long run, they’d never believe it is imminent. You’d need documented attempts at exercise and/or pharmacological efforts, et cetera, and even if you were able to jump through all those hoops, at the other end of the line, after the operation, you’d still have a devil of a time getting the insurance agency to pay up.”

  He made it all sound so hopeless. And long. It sounded like I’d have to wait a long time to get what I wanted when I wanted results now. Hell, I wanted results yesterday. I sighed. “What other alternatives are there?”

  “Have you ever heard of, ‘In God we trust; all others pay cash’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cash, Mrs. Taylor, twenty thousand dollars of it, to be exact. Can you pay cash?”

  It was a startling notion. I’d assumed I could get this taken care of with insurance and get it done before Dan could talk me out of it, figuring by the time the claim was made to the insurance company the surgery would be over with, a done deal. But I couldn’t just take twenty thousand dollars out of our joint savings account without saying anything first. That would feel too much like stealing from my own husband. Then I remembered the savings I had from my job in the days before I became Mrs. Dan Taylor, CEO. Yes, I could just pay for it. I said as much.

  “Great,” Dr. Rich said. “In that case, I think we can speed through the extensive history and psych eval. When shall we schedule you in for? Did you want to do it next week sometime?”

  I hadn’t imagined it would suddenly be that easy after the hoops he’d made such a fuss about before. But then, I supposed, the idea of twenty thousand dollars in cash must have made my two hundred and seventy-five pounds look awfully attractive to him just then.

  “How long will I need to be in hospital?” I asked, thinking I should have thought to ask questions like that earlier.

  “Four to six days.” He shrugged as if it were nothing. “Recovery time? Typically you should be able to return to normal activities in three to five weeks.”

  Three to five weeks? It sounded like an incredibly long time to me. But then I thought about how I’d always been a fast healer. Even the time I’d needed extensive oral surgery, I’d been back at work the same afternoon. Surely I’d be up and around sooner than his prediction.

  Then I thought about the hospital stay.

  “Could we wait a bit and do it the week after next instead?” I asked. “My husband will be going to Japan then for two weeks on business.”

  “And you thought to surprise him by being thin upon his return?” He smiled, but it wasn’t what you might call a friendly smile.

  I could feel my cheeks redden.

  “No, of course I didn’t think it would happen that quickly,” I said. “I just want it to be a…surprise.”

  What I was really thinking was, if I told Dan about it in advance, he’d surely try to talk me out of it, tell me I didn’t need it, tell me I was fine the way I was.

  “A surprise?” Dr. Rich raised his eyebrows. “Very well.”

  “And you did say my obesity was life-threatening,” I said, seizing onto something he’d said earlier, “didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said in all seriousness. “If you don’t do something drastic about all that excess baggage you’ve been carting around, you could very well die. Someday, at any rate.”

  There it was. Surely even Dan would come to realize in time that what I was doing was merely taking a necessary step to ensure my well-being. Once the initial shock was over, he’d understand it was all for health reasons.

  It was for the best.

  Lise

  “What are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy staring at the half-blank page on the screen in the blood-colored alcove that constituted my home office, trying to figure out how to introduce a physical description of my protagonist. I didn’t want to do anything so trite as have her look in the mirror. Then it occurred to me: I didn’t need to tell the reader what she looked like right off the bat. I could let that information emerge organically, perhaps through a comparison with another character or maybe through dialogue. That settled, I went back to crafting the setting.

  “What are you doing?” The question came again and with it, an accompanying nuzzle at the base of my neck.

  I swiveled in my chair, one pajama-clad leg still tucked under the other; the pajama bottoms were light-blue flannel with a cloud pattern on them, and, over the matching T-shirt, I’d donned an old gray and maroon university sweatshirt, protection against the creeping chill in the cottage located just off campus.

  There was Tony, in all his naked glory, the thatch of dark-blond hair surrounding a penis that was already rising to the occasion. It was very tempting but…

  I tucked my pencil behind my ear, readjusted my glasses, and then turned back to the computer screen.

  “I’m writing the Great American Novel,” I said, clacking away again, as if I spoke such sentences every day. But even I could hear the ironic half quotes I mentally placed around the words. After all, internally I treated my student John’s aspirations to do the same with irony, didn’t I?

  “Oh, of course,” he said. More nuzzling. “Anyone can see that.” Nuzzle. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s called Messia. It’s a contemporary literary retelling of Romeo and Juliet only in my version it’s about an Israeli girl and a Palestinian boy.”

  “Sounds intriguing. I hope they don’t die in the end.” More emphatic nuzzling.

  God, it was tempting. But how was I ever going to make any progress if…

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing my typing hand. A little known fact that probably would have made my students laugh at me was that I always typed with only one hand, resting my head on the clenched fist of the other as I clacked along. “In another half hour we’d only both have to get up anyway to make eight o’clock classes. I’ll even make you breakfast afterward.”

  “You mean you’ll put the toast in the toaster this time?”

  “If you’re really good, I’ll even turn on the coffee machine. Come on.” Taking both my hands now, he gently tugged me up off the swivel chair. He kissed my neck and whispered into my ear. “At the end of the day I’ll be off to that stupid Shakespeare conference in Toronto. I won’t see you for three whole days. Three whole days with no sex.”

  He had a point. What would be the harm in a little morning
sex? Once he was gone, I’d probably get plenty of work done.

  I let him lead me back through to the semi-dark bedroom, the illumination from the bathroom off to the side casting a beam of light against the rumpled sheets. It wasn’t as though we hadn’t just made love the night before, but we were always good at making love, Tony and me.

  He laid me down on the bed, pulled my pajama bottoms and panties off in one go, leaving my fuzzy socks, T-shirt, and sweatshirt on as he placed his tongue between my legs. Tony well knew how I hated to be cold and that it was always worse for me in the early morning. He’d only remove my twin tops when he was done down below and was ready to do other things. As for the fuzzy socks, he’d let me keep them on for the duration.

  There was something eternally wonderful about making love with someone I knew as well as I knew myself.

  As Tony trailed feather kisses on the insides of my thighs, teasing me by playing the sexual version of the children’s game Too Hot/Too Cold, my mind tiptoed its way back to the computer still on in the other room. What would be an important enough tale to tell? What could I do with my characters that would make readers say, “I’m glad I took this journey”? Perhaps more importantly, what could I do with those pages that would make me say such a thing?

  “So, what’s going on in the book now?”

  “Huh?” I propped myself up on my elbows and saw that Tony had ceased doing what he’d been doing and rolled off to the side, his right cheek resting on his open palm.

  “You’d gone back to work,” he said. He jerked his head backward toward my office. “You’re back with your magnum opus, aren’t you?”

  One of the truly awful things about making love with someone I knew so well was that he knew me sometimes even better than I knew myself.