How to Get Thin
It was a few days into my time at Wonderland. The children were off at the club for a golf clinic. I was down by the water. I’d fallen asleep with my book. I woke up to find Forrest standing over me with his shirt off. Tanned and handsome as always, bare chested, in his shorts.
“You looked so peaceful and happy there I almost didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “But it’s a perfect day for a ride on the lake.”
I’d ridden on his boat before, on summer visits with my parents, but this was the first time it was just Forrest and me.
“What we have here is a classic,” he explained, stroking the wheel of the Chris-Craft as we headed out onto the open water.
“There’s plenty of faster boats around, and just about every one of them is easier to maintain.
This one here is wood, not fiberglass. But for my money, what we have here is the sweetest ride on the lake. ”
I had no basis for comparison, never having ridden in any other boat, but I agreed, naturally.
“The thing about a Chris-Craft is the lines,” he told me. “The motor’s inside the body, not stuck on top like every other boat. That’s why it’s so quiet. In a boat like this, you could come up alongside the shore, and the birds wouldn’t even take off.
“Then there’s the upholstery . . .”
The way he stroked the leather, it was almost as if he were touching a woman. I knew little about how a man touched a woman—I’d just seen a few movies and TV shows—but I’d cooked up scenarios in my head.
Forrest was right about the day. There was something about the way the sun hit the water that afternoon. A heron circled over our heads. A girl on a Sunfish drifted by. As much fun as it looked, I wouldn’t have traded places with her.
“My kids are spoiled,” Forrest told me. “This little baby’s a prime example. You know what a Chris-Craft like this one goes for, if you can even find one for sale?”
I knew Forrest wasn’t expecting me to guess. All I had to do was listen.
“But Hayward thinks a Chris-Craft’s not fast enough. Just the other day he started in on me that we didn’t have a Glastron GT-150.”
I figured that must be a boat. An even more expensive one.
We were motoring past a stretch of houses along the eastern shore of the lake, most of which, like the Emersons’, had been in the same family since the early 1900s. Each one situated to take full advantage of the sunset.
“When I was my son’s age, I was picking cans and pop bottles out of the trash to redeem them for pennies,” he said.
“If I held back some of the money instead of giving it all to my father, there’d be a belt on my backside.
Even if I gave him my whole take, I’d probably still get the belt.
My dad never needed a reason for hitting me. ”
I heard no particular bitterness in his voice; he was just stating a fact. That was Forrest. He didn’t dwell on difficult experiences. Forrest was a man who saw himself as lucky. Which he was, of course.
“Then you’ve got Hayward,” he said, grinning. “My son’s idea of hardship is not having a wide-screen TV in his room.”
We stood side by side at the wheel of the Chris-Craft, looking out toward the island. It was a perfect day. Not just because of the weather.
“Want me to show you how to drive this boat?” he asked.
He stood behind me with his arms encircling my body then, so both of us had our hands on the wheel.
He took his baseball cap from his head and placed it on mine, then placed his large hand—surprisingly rough—over the fingers of my right hand as he showed me how to work the throttle and guided me as we changed the gears.
For a moment, I could forget about my parents, at war with each other back home in New Jersey, and the way that tennis mother had looked at me at the tennis court, and Jilly, when I’d told her it was time to put her pajamas on, throwing her Teddy Ruxpin across the room, and Hayward’s eyes, looking me over when I wore my training bra.
I put away thoughts of my own disappointing body and the unopened box of tampons in my drawer, the girls at the tennis court with their cute little pleated skirts and their brand-new sneakers, huddled over their Cokes at the snack bar, giggling together, while I zipped Jilly’s racquet into its bag and then searched around the pool for the floatie she’d left there, crawling under the lounge chairs as they painted each other’s nails.
To the girls at the country club, I didn’t exist.
“Next time I take you out on the boat,” Forrest said, “we’re getting you on water skis.”
I’d heard this before. But I always believed him.
“Regina’s still the queen around here,” he said. “But I’m making you my princess.”
If I could have stopped time forever right then, I would have done it.
Very soon Forrest would be turning the boat around and heading back to the house, where Jilly would be wanting to play Candy Land with me, or set up another tea party for her American Girl dolls.
But in that moment, I wouldn’t have changed anything.
I might not have been an actual part of the Emerson family, but there I was, and the next day I’d be parking my wonderful yellow bicycle in front of the Lake Catherine Country Club and pushing open the big wooden doors into the beautiful sunny lobby, with its daily arrangement of fresh-cut roses.
I might not have been an actual member of the club, but the woman at the desk nodded to me when we came in these days.
The man who cleaned the pool smiled when I walked by, as did the men who rolled the clay on the courts.
I knew where the dispenser was that held the ice water with the lemon slices floating in it, and the table with the basket holding thick cream-colored towels with the club insignia (“LCCC”) woven into the plush. In my own way, I had become a regular.
A regular. I liked the sound of those words.
Sometimes in these moments the thought would come to me, clear as an acorn hitting my head or the sound a tennis ball makes when somebody hits it just right: This is what happiness feels like.