*Non-Fiction — September 8, 2022
Making Lemonade
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“Can we eat al fresco?” I ask the hostess, trying out how it feels to be chic, sophisticated, to slip into other languages like lingerie. The hostess is a small-town kind of pretty, wearing all black to hide the stains. Her hair is at-home highlighted and gathered up in one of those toothy clips, but a few strands fall down in front to frame a portrait of her face. Above her heart, a green name tag introduces her as Marie, assuring we’re all family here at this dining establishment. In the crook of her arm, tall plastic menus rest like newborns. “Good choice, Sweetie,” she says, “Such a gorgeous day for that! How many of you will be dining with us today?”
“Just two.”
“And can I have a name for the wait list?”
I give her my own. When she calls, I will practice belonging to the sound of a woman who dines al fresco.
The cobblestone lobby is meant to resemble Old World Italy and I saunter across it like it’s my stage. Mom is frazzled on the green vinyl couch with her pleather purse open in her lap, digging for her menu-reading glasses, which she appears to need a prescription for regular glasses in order to locate. Fellow fat-campers fill the place, chatting with their parents and practically drooling, but outside of camp’s gate we pretend to be strangers. We only have five hours in the real world once per summer; we are not about to waste it branding ourselves as from the fat farm if we can pass as regular kids. It’s my fifth summer at Shane, which will earn me an award at the end of August ceremony: a pin acknowledging my Fatty Five.
The cobblestone lobby is meant to resemble Old World Italy and I saunter across it like it’s my stage. Mom is frazzled on the green vinyl couch with her pleather purse open in her lap, digging for her menu-reading glasses, which she appears to need a prescription for regular glasses in order to locate. Fellow fat-campers fill the place, chatting with their parents and practically drooling, but outside of camp’s gate we pretend to be strangers. We only have five hours in the real world once per summer; we are not about to waste it branding ourselves as from the fat farm if we can pass as regular kids. It’s my fifth summer at Shane, which will earn me an award at the end of August ceremony: a pin acknowledging my Fatty Five.
But I’m not fat anymore. Not really. While my thighs still touch and I’m not allowed extra servings at meal times yet like Kendall is, I can tie my t-shirt up during soccer and expose my stomach and no one laughs or points or cringes or ever will again. I swear.
“Got ‘em!” Mom says, pulling her paisley tank top away from her body and rubbing the smudges off the lenses so she can see the world.
I pretend to interest myself with what’s on the walls of the dark, heavy lobby of the Olive Garden, feigning curiosity about the establishment’s history, performing investment in the employee of the month—but mostly I want to waltz around the floor in my short skirt and be noticed. There’s pageantry to finally being thin. I draw my left hand toward my shoulder, lift a section of flat-ironed hair to reveal my neck’s new slimness, then let the locks cascade down in a brunette waterfall. I cock my head like a New York socialite considering photographs in a gallery. I think of the women you can tell are ballerinas even without the tutu—even on the subway. When the smell of garlic and bread rising reaches for me, I won’t even notice.
“Megan, party of two,” the hostess calls. I like the way my name sounds next to party. I raise my hand to indicate that I am, indeed, here. A rainbow of friendship bracelets slide down my arm and clang together—my popular pretty girl music. Mom rises and we follow Marie outside, into the July light. I offer Mom the chair in the shade and take my place in the sun so that it will make me bronze, make me gold.
“Anything to drink before I get you ladies started?” Marie asks. I’m a lady.
“Ice water with lemon, please.” I hope Mom will notice my good choices and rest assured she made a worthwhile investment.
We’ve got a spectacular view of the parking lot and the entrance to the Middletown Galleria. It would be an easy walk from there to The Olive Garden but still, people point their key fobs and click their cars open and drive from one end to the other. The almost-August asphalt smells chemical; the trees are green and appear happy enough—despite being marooned in concrete islands. Overhead, fake ivy weaves through wooden slats, giving the feel of Italy to people who will never go to Italy.
“So, tell me about you!” Mom says, screeching her chair closer to mine. Frank Sinatra serenades us through the speakers. Across the street, in the mall, inside the stores I’m pretty enough to shop in now, the music is so obnoxious she comes down with a migraine. “Tell me a story.”
I unroll the white cloth napkin and set free my silverware, but hesitate to cover my thighs with the fabric. They are almost thin enough now and it would be a shame to not let them out in public. The ivy overhead casts lacy shadow patterns on my new lap and transforms my legs into a doily—beautiful in the way only something useless can be.
“Well, last week it was movie night and they sent a counselor from Hungary to the video store to get the movie Heavyweights—”
“Wait, really? The Ben Stiller one?”
“Yeah it was actually based on Shane. They play it like three times a summer.”
“That’s funny—”
“Yeah, but listen. I guess Ambruz’s accent was so thick that he said it wrong? So we’re in the rec hall in our sleeping bags, and he presses play, and—” I pause for the punchline, “—it’s porn! Ambruz jumped in front of the screen so fast and put his arms out like—” I impersonate the counselor trying to block the screen. I laugh for Mom and everyone else eating al fresco to hear. I laugh with all my straight white teeth.
Marie trots over with a basket full of breadsticks and I don’t miss a beat in my speech. “Anyway, the cops came! I guess someone told their parents we were being sexually abused.” I slap my palms down onto the table to punctuate my sentence and Mom’s car keys jump a little. I am showing off my self-control, pretending I don’t notice things like breadsticks anymore. As if Marie just delivered a basket of nothing. I wait for Mom to reach for her menu before reaching for mine. Look at me—a girl who fills up on conversation.
“Hun? Hun?” is what my Mom calls Marie. “When you get a minute, I’ll take a Pinot Grigio.”
I squeeze lemon into my ice water, rip the top off a tiny pink packet of artificial sweetener, then stir it all together. It’s my magic lemonade.
“Be careful with that,” Mom nods to the Sweet & Low. “Causes cancer in lab rats.”
“Good thing I’m not a lab rat.” I take a saccharine sip. Mom disappears behind her multi-page menu. I hold mine like a pinup girl might hold a piece of tinfoil while sunbathing, trading a bit more melanoma for a bit more beauty. Inside, there are photographs of each meal. I open to the centerfold just to peek: one anatomical-heart-sized meatball plopped on a plate of angel hair; fettuccine twirled around a fork in a decadence of Alfredo; Lasagna Classico like a layered wedding cake of marinara and mozzarella—a fling with flavor but a marriage to the hips. An option to upgrade your pasta to be never-ending.
I glance up from my menu to check if Mom is peeking over the lip of hers to marvel at this new woman sitting before her, but I can’t tell because she’s wearing her giant orange sunglasses on top of her magnifiers—those lenses that suck the blue right out the sky. They remind me of that necklace of hers I hate, the dead bumblebee immortalized in amber. She nibbles on a breadstick like it’s no big deal.
“Are you ready to order?” Marie’s perfume announces her presence. It’s a smell I recognize. Love Spell, from Victoria’s Secret. One of my brother’s girlfriends not only wore it but sprayed it in his room whenever she left, so that when she was gone she was never really gone. But her name was Carmen and she was gorgeous of the drop-dead variety, so really her spritz was a failsafe, an insurance plan. When she left, I snuck into the Green Acres Mall with my lunch money and purchased my own bottle—but it didn’t turn me into Carmen.
“Another minute, Hun, we’ve just been catching up! I haven’t seen my baby girl in three weeks! Can you believe it?” Mom reaches across the table to squeeze my hand three times and I admire my fingernails—I painted them last night for the occasion of this five-hour visit. They shine like ten turquoise gems; a color called Naughty Nautical. Kendall did a fantastic job on my left hand.
“Well, where have you been all her life?” Marie asks.
“Camp.” I annunciate the p in a way that pops, emphasizes the period, the cue that the sentence is over. Ripping my hands from Mom’s, I wrap them around my drink. Inside our heads we both tally the amount of times she will say or do the wrong thing.
“Well, I get it. Take your time, girls. As long as you need.” Marie leaves a trail of Love Spell behind her, and I wonder if she has someone she goes home to. If he rubs her feet after her long shift, or falls asleep before she’s home with a beer in his hand that she lifts and carries to the sink to empty, toss, and clean.
“Well, you look great,” Mom says.
“Thanks.” I take a sip of my lemonade and feel sad for the lab rats. I wonder if they were born in that cage. If they ever knew another world. “I mean, I still think I have like, fifteen or twenty more to go.”
“Are you crazy?”
I lower my voice to a volume fit for a secret. “I’m one-thirty-five.”
“No way, you don’t look it.” We return to our menus. Nothing left to say.
I know it’s rude to eavesdrop on the drink orders of my fellow campers, but I can’t help it. There’s a big difference between an ice water and a raspberry lemonade with free refills, and that difference is about thirty-six grams of sugar and the rest of your life. They clink their pink sweaty glasses with their pink sweaty parents and I know it’s the closest some of them will get to touching anyone. The waitstaff weaves in and out of our tables, balancing trays and the tightrope of the narrow aisle, but we are the circus act.
Cracking the menu to the page with the lettuce, I notice two sets of numbers. First the cost of the meal in dollars, then in calories. My eyes drift from the picture of my intended order—the pillows of crouton peppering a bed of chopped romaine—and then I see it. Eleven hundred calories. I wonder if it’s a misprint. If my eyesight is fading, like my mother’s. Eleven hundred calories. That’s almost what I eat at camp in a whole day.
The humidity is violent. I fan myself with the menu, close it, open it again. Check its math. I gawk at all of the other patrons, suddenly aware of everything sharp. The serrated bread knife to the left of my hand. The blade-like edge of the table. The wine glass one hip-check away from breaking and becoming a weapon. All the things that can kill. The shrimp on a neighboring plate that could close my mother’s throat. A cherry tomato swallowed whole; no one around who knows how the Heimlich. An airplane overhead might drop a jet engine any time through this lunch. The kitchen overdue for a grease fire. The salad I was just about to order.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asks, when my own face betrays me. I snatch my drink. My glass is refilled but I never noticed someone pouring it. I didn’t even say thank you.
“You hot?” She half-stands up from her chair. “Want to switch places?”
“I’m good.” But I do think it would be nice. My mother, who the neighborhood men call Flaca. Mom who weighed 135 once, too, but only when she was pregnant with me. Only when she was two people.
Marie returns, plucking her pad from her apron, her pen from behind her ear that is pierced four times up the crest with hoops descending in size. A rock sparkles on her ring finger but I can’t remember which hand means married, and which hand means there’s still time for it to all be called off. “How are we doing, ladies? Do you know what you want now?”
Do I know what I want now?
“I’ll have the chicken marsala and another glass of Pinot, when you get the chance.”
“Um, I’ll have the caesar salad? But with the dressing on the side? And no croutons?” I turn everything I say into a question. Marie’s lips seal themselves and she nods as she writes my order, like I’ve been here before, like this is my usual. Or maybe she’s seen a hundred girls with these same substitutions this week. As she leaves, she fetches dirty plates off tables, erasing the evidence of eating, then disappears through the stone archway.
“I’m gonna go to the bathroom.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“It’s okay.” I stand up and head inside to the air conditioned lobby, goosebump cold. Mothers love this kind of place—so cold it proves them right; you definitely should have brought a sweater.
I catch up to our waitress, whipping through the lunch rush. “Marie?” She is balancing hot plates on her left arm, a platter of beverages filled to the brim on the other. I hate to add something else to what she must juggle, but I do. “Do you have any low-fat dressing I can have instead?”
“For the caesar?”
I nod.
“So you just want lettuce and then a low fat Italian dressing—on the side?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s perfect. Thank you.”
She smiles at me—maybe because she means it, or maybe because she’s paid to—then vanishes through the double doors that lead to the kitchen where I am not allowed. Some other mom-friendly singer croons on the radio, with a voice too sweet for anyone to believe he beats his wives. But the afternoon has its own music. Someone says, Did you save room for dessert? Someone else: Couldn’t possibly. Someone excuses himself to the little boy’s room just as soon as he spots the bill headed toward his booth like a wallet-eating shark. Siblings play an aggressive and competitive footsie beneath their table while parents are none the wiser. Breadsticks dissolve in mouths like snow. Someone drops a champagne flute and the whole moment shatters, just for a second, until a busboy scrambles onto the scene with a broom and dustpan, wipes up the interruption. Conversations resume. No one got hurt. Nothing is broken that cannot be replaced.
A strain of waitstaff hustles toward a table where there’s a little girl with a balloon tied to the back of her chair. I want to watch, so I lean against the bar and wonder if anyone will send me a drink. The girl’s got freckles and home-cut bangs, like I once did. I used to hate my freckles until Mom told me they were kisses from angels who’d just eaten chocolate. Two years ago, acne medicine bleached those kisses right off my face.
Marie is carrying what I recognize from the menu as a chocolate lasagna with a candle in it, cupping a hand in front of the flame to keep it from dying. And then she begins to sing: Happy Birthday, Dear Suzie. The little freckled girl claps in delight and I hope the Tooth Fairy treated her well for all those holes in her smile. Marie’s soprano suggests she once thought this waitressing gig might have been a temporary thing. And now the rest of them are asking Suzie, who is lit up by cake, “Are ya one? Are ya two?” and Dear Suzie is six. Her Dad’s got a cardboard camera and he keeps spinning the wheel, clicking, trying to keep Suzie six forever. I hope he captures it—the second when her cheeks, loved by angels, are puffed with air and she’s just about to make her wish.
As I head back outside, I catch a glimpse of a woman in the lobby mirror and am surprised to see that it’s me. For the first time I notice a jawline, a clavicle. Arms I don’t loathe. In two weeks I’ll be sixteen.
As I arrive at the table, so does my lettuce.
“Fresh parmesan?” a busboy asks, holding a bowl of cheese and a spoon over my plate.
“No, thank you.” I smile. I set my fork down between every bite, like they taught me at camp. I’m hungry. I’m lightheaded. I’m lucky. Ever since I was little, this has been all that I’ve wished for.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.