Put Down the Peanut Butter!

Leslie Lisbona

Author on Canadian vacation.

Word Count 1367

I was wearing a blue bikini with flowers on it. The sun was high in a clear sky. The lake was shimmering. Viviane and I were chasing each other and playing with a bouncy and squishy red ball. We were shouting, screaming, and laughing all at the same time. We were eight. The grownups were at a picnic table nearby, smoking, eating, drinking Fanta, and being boisterous.  

This was in Canada, where the air was crisp even in summer. The grass was prickly beneath my feet. We stopped to get some water. Viviane had an older sister, Claire, pronounced Cligh. As I was gulping down water in between my giggles, Claire pointed at my belly and puffed out her cheeks. When I didn’t respond, she said, “You are fat!”  

“No, I’m not!”  

“Yes, look,” and she squatted down with parted legs and pushed her belly out, miming reaching over it to pick up a ball. I knew she was making fun of me. I was about to say something, but everyone laughed – raspy, knee-slapping, wheezy. It felt conspiratorial, and it silenced me.

I had gone to Canada that summer with Lucy for two weeks, something I had been doing since I was a toddler. Lucy was the super of our building and also my babysitter, and aside from my mother, the person I loved most in the world. She was French-Canadian and spent all her vacations in her hometown of Longueuil. Viviane was her niece and my best friend.

I slept on the long drive home to Queens that August to the sounds of Elvis, Bing Cosby, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, and Frank Sinatra on orange 8-track tapes. The smells of my neighborhood woke me: Queens Blvd, the buses, exhaust. The sounds of the ice cream truck, the screams of the kids at the schoolyard on 83rd Avenue. Suddenly, I wanted to see my parents so badly. I spotted them on our second-floor terrace and ached for them. As soon as Lucy released me from her big car, I dashed up the stairs to our apartment. My dad had his pipe between his teeth, an ascot around his neck; my mom wore her Pucci dress with the blue waves. I dove into their arms, but instead of smiles, they looked alarmed. I felt my father really look at me. My mother, too, and then they looked at each other. They fell a sliver away from recoiling. I tried to make them laugh by speaking in Quebecois. I could do it really well, and this always worked before. I attempted to tell them about the time Lucy laughed so hard she almost made in her pants. They were stoic. They only wanted to know what I ate while I was away. “Why?” I shot back. Then my father had a quick conference with my mother in Arabic, which I didn’t understand fully. It was something about my appearance. I disappointed them. I didn’t like upsetting my parents. I knew my Dad didn’t like when my hair was too curly, but then he would just tell me to brush my hair. This was different. Much worse. My yellow shorts were a bit tight. 

My mom started the bath. My knees were filthy, and my hair needed a washing. She scrubbed while I kept up my chatter, hoping I could engage my mother. She was distracted, and I finally got quiet, watching the dirt from my knees muddy the water I was sitting in. As I sat on her bed wrapped in a towel, my skin pink from the bath, she opened her phone book and dialed the pediatrician. On the phone, she said that I had to be seen right away. Something about my weight. “Mom, what’s wrong?” “Nothing,” and then she said, “Merde” under her breath. I went to my room and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t see anything different, but I didn’t like how I was feeling standing there.  

My pediatrician, Dr. Dreifuss, was German. He had a thick accent and seemed old. We went into his examining room, where I was asked to step onto the scale. As he adjusted the weights, my mother took a sharp breath and held her hand to her mouth.  

“You are overweight and need to go on a strict diet,” Dr. Dreifuss said, looking at my mother through his spectacles. On our way out, he didn’t offer me a chocolate like he usually did. Everything was getting worse.  

The new rules of my life were stringent. The pizza place and sweet shop were off-limits. I had to go home for lunch while Leslye, Cherise, Jackie, Aileen, and Lauren went to Lefferts Blvd without me. Once home, my mother was waiting for me. I was offered tuna with lemon and a melba toast. On the side was a sour-tasting grapefruit. I sat on the stool in our kitchen and didn’t want any of it. I wanted to be with my friends eating greasy pizza with the oil dripping down my fingers.  

I wasn’t allowed to have lebne and pita anymore.  

I wasn’t allowed to dip my hand into Lucy’s cookie jar at her apartment, which was just below ours.

I wanted to cry. I hated myself. I ran to the scale to see if my deprivations made any difference. It was all for nothing. I hated the scale, too.  

One night when my parents were out, I started to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and Debi, my older sister, stopped me. She grabbed the jar of peanut butter out of my hands with such ferocity that I cried and screamed at her at the same time, “I hate you!” The next day she gave me her calorie-counting book and showed me how to use it. I scribbled on the cover defiantly with my multicolored pen.

I only saw my dad on Sundays because he worked so much. We usually went for a car wash before heading to the Forge Diner and sometimes the local toy store for a Barbie. Now our diner days were over. I missed how he asked the waitress for “two burgers, two cokes, and the check.” How it was just the two of us in a booth.

I was used to being on my own from the time school let out until dinner. But now my mom was there every afternoon. We did errands together, and she kept me busy till it was time to eat. She was so animated it was exhausting. I didn’t see how it was supposed to help. We even shopped for new clothes, but nothing seemed to fit right.  

At ballet class in the city, my teacher, Madame Zorina, patted my stomach while I was at the barre and said I would never get point shoes if I didn’t slim down. Point shoes were what I wanted most in the world. It was a constant thought, the day I would finally be able to buy point shoes, my favorite fantasy. I couldn’t even tell my mom what the ballet teacher said. I had no words.  

My friends all had experiences without me, and I was constantly trying to catch up. We had a sleepover, and I woke up with marker on my face that I couldn’t wash off. It was purple. I tried to gulp down air so that I wouldn’t cry as I scrubbed it off as best I could in Lauren’s bathroom. I called my mother, and she picked me up earlier than scheduled.  

When school started that fall, Leslye, Cherise, Aileen, Lauren, and Jackie were in Miss Gold’s fourth-grade class. She was the young teacher who had a guitar and long hair. Everyone wanted to be in her class. I got a very old teacher with teased hair who I hated. I wanted to be with my friends. When I spied them in the hallway, they didn’t seem upset not to be with me.  

I was not like them anymore. I was fat. I was ugly. Everyone must be right. I didn’t know what I had become or how I got here. I didn’t know if I would ever be the same again. 

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Leslie has been part of a writing group for ten years. Her parents were immigrants from Lebanon and she grew up with her family in Queens, NY. She just had her first essay published in Synchronized Chaos, a literary journal.