Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read Free Page B

has spent most of this summer with her sister/mother, who is seventeen years her senior, and she has already told me the caretaker/charge relationship she had hoped might mellow into sisterhood has remained as rigid and role-defined as it was when she was four. Susan has spots chafed raw by too much exposure to big sisters. Big sisters, Susan maintains, have no concept of what it means to be the baby.
    Nor am I younger than any of them by very much. In order of seniority we are Mary and Susan, who are within months of each, then Nancy, then me. Age is not the issue and birth order hardly matters to women our age: like old hens in the yard, we just like to keep the pecking order straight. We are four women packed into Mary’s SUV and headed for a psychic camp for a short weekend.
    Nancy loves the SUV. It’s big. It’s white. It commands authority on the road. Drivers who might challenge her little green Toyota hesitate and give way to the SUV. It looks like a man’s vehicle. There is no man in it or anywhere near it, but it muscles us down the road like a bodyguard.
Step aside, step aside.
We feel little and important and protected inside, although it is a proud member of the most dangerous class of vehicles on the road.
    I had written an article about fat girls shopping for dress-up clothes that Nancy has me read to the group. She and I are women of size: Mary and Susan are not. Nancy has heard it at least three times by now (she also lived it) and she laughs at my best lines. She and I are in the front and I can’t tell how the women in the back are reacting.
    It’s clear to me that appearances are important to Susan. She is a small blond, a configuration of color and appearance I have in the past jokingly referred to as “the enemy.” Susan is not my enemy. My “enemy” is some small, arrogant blond who may or may not have existed back in junior high school or perhaps even further back than that. A stereotype gleaned from after-school soap operas or romance novels. My enemy is a lifetime of total strangers walking up to me to recommend diets their great aunt Sarah tried with amazing results, and she was “almost as big as you are” when she started. My distrust of Susan has nothing to do with Susan, the woman who is my partner’s childhood friend, and it is not Susan’s fault she reminds me of the daughter my mother wished she had or the popular high school cheerleading career I once so desperately wished I had. I have grown confident enough in my writing and angry enough about what presumptions about size and character do to all of us that I can read out loud about being as wide as I am tall to small and exquisitely proportioned women without gritting my teeth or flinching. I always know where they are.
    We stop for dinner at a restaurant in downtown Auburn that turns out to be a cafeteria. They advertise “over 50 selections” on the way in. We settle in, order our drinks, drift along the salad bar adding bits of this and that to our composite. By the time I sit down at the table Susan is already talking to Mary, who answers, “I wore them for Bob because he was so curious about them.”
    Bob is a friend of ours, a gay man studying the ministry. It is a tribute to my affection for him and his tolerance for different points of view that he and I are even friends. (I have issues with conventional religion as well.) Bob was supposed to come with us on this trip but had to cancel at the last minute.
    I study Mary thoughtfully, trying to imagine what she might have worn that my friend Bob would be curious about. I check her clothes, her earrings, I am about to duck discreetly under the table to check her shoes when I realize she has breasts. This gives me an interesting insight into my friend Bob, and I laugh. “You’re wearing boobs,” I note. “I like them—they look very nice.”
    Mary had a radical mastectomy four years before. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer she studied all of the