Wedding Weight

Chapter 2 - Shriek!

As Cheesecake Factories go, this was a nice one.

Doric columns bathed in warm, golden light. Watercolor murals of ripe summer fruits shared the walls with smoked glass mirrors. Conical pendant lamps dangled from the ornate ceiling. An arcing, jagged metal sculpture hung, like a brass-and-copper rainbow, over the dark wood of the bar. Far less ostentatious than many of its culinary cousins, this Cheesecake Factory was, if not classy, at least classy-adjacent.

In short, it was a perfectly acceptable place to to celebrate your engagement with friends and co-workers.

Robyn was sitting at a large, round table. She was thirty-one now. Still on the plump side, her hair had settled into a medium brown and the springy ringlets of her childhood were now relaxed waves, cascading over the collar of her loose silk blouse.

Her ears were still ringing from the successive giddy shrieks of her girlfriends as they arrived one by one and got their first look at her sparkly new diamond. The comments ranged from the romantic ("It's so beautiful! You're going to be so happy together!") to the mercenary ("Hell, for a rock like that, I'd marry Brian!") to the pragmatic ("Make sure it comes off easily, so they won't have to chop off your finger to steal it!") and finally to the self-pitying ("I'll never find a guy who'll give me a ring like that!") with an after-thought of support ("But I'm so happy for you!").

The last was from Kendra. Kendra was a "big girl," which was the term the group used because it would have been cruel to call her "morbidly obese." Robyn liked having Kendra around, because it made her appear thinner by comparison. It was like having vertical stripes for a friend.

"Of course you'll find a guy," Robyn said, and the others nodded supportively as they had so many times in the past. "You have a great personality and such gorgeous eyes."

It was true. Kendra did have gorgeous eyes. They were blue-green with flecks of gold. And they gave people a comfortable place to focus on. An oasis of beauty in an enormous, fleshy face.

But this wasn't about Kendra. It was about Robyn! Robyn's going to get married!

Shriek!

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When Robyn had opened the little ring box and gotten her first glimpse of diamonds and platinum shimmering in the candlelight, she was overwhelmed with joy. 

And excitement. Joy and excitement.

And love, obviously. Joy, excitement and love.

After all, this was her soulmate. The man of her dreams. And now she'd get to spend her life with him. And it gave her a feeling of profound gratitude.

A mixture of joy, excitement, love and profound gratitude. That's what she felt when Brian proposed to her.

At least, that's what she told people.

In truth, though, that wasn't her first reaction. Those feelings followed her first reaction. Quickly. Almost instantaneously. But in those first few moments, between the time that Brian dropped down on one knee and Robyn squeaked out a tearful, rapturous yes!,  she had one all-consuming thought.

"I have got to lose weight."

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"There's this exclusive weight-loss program," Kendra said, sipping her apple martini. "It's called Tenacity for Women and it's unbelievably effective."

Everyone who stared at the portly Kendra — whose shapeless, pastel floral-printed dress violated all seven of Oprah's fashion rules for plus-sized women — was thinking the same thing. A brief stand-off ensued before Robyn finally broke down and asked, as nonjudgmentally as she could, "Um... do you use it?"

The other women choked down their laughter, desperately avoiding eye contact with Kendra, and each other. Whether Kendra didn't notice this, or simply ignored it, Robyn couldn't tell, but her response seemed guileless enough. "No. But Marcie Kaufman did it and she looks amazing!"

"She does look amazing," agreed Angie. This endorsement meant a lot, since Angie was famously critical. She would rarely admit that another woman was beautiful and then only grudgingly. Of Scarlett Johansson, she once said, "I guess some people might find her attractive."

"I'm thinking of signing up," Kendra said. "Swimsuit season is coming and this year, I was hoping to, you know, wear a swimsuit."

Then Julia, who had struggled to stay silent, could hold back no longer. "This is ridiculous!"

Julia was Robyn's boss and mentor. Zaftig, prematurely and unapologetically gray, and eschewing high heels — which she considered a fashionable form of foot binding — she had, through a combination of hard work and vicious political infighting, risen to the rank of Senior Vice President of Human Resources. And from that perch she had become the company's avenging angel of gender equality.

"You don't need to lose weight!" Julia inveighed. "You look great the way you are!"

"I do?" said Kendra, her hopefulness delicate and breakable, like candy glass.

Julia's face contorted into an apologetic grimace. "You do," she said unconvincingly, "but I was actually talking to Robyn."

"Oh." Kendra's hope shattered in a million pieces. She drained the rest of her apple martini and signaled the waiter for another.

"Brace yourself, everybody," Angie — who did not work for Julia —  said mockingly. "Julia's going to launch into another one of her feminist tirades."

Julia bristled. "I'm not going going to launch into a feminist tirade," she said. And then launched into a feminist tirade. Nobody listened particularly closely — they had heard all this before — but the gist was that women should stop accepting the damaging and degrading body image foisted upon them by the patriarchy and embrace the beauty of the natural female form.

When Julia had finished, Angie coughed the word, "Lesbian!" and, for some reason, everyone laughed like she had just won the argument with a witty riposte.

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