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Sept. 24 -- Friday night

I did it. I asked Dave from accounting to lunch. Not the gang lunch. Lunch lunch.

For those just tuning in: Dave is the guy up on four who does the reserve reports, has a laugh you can hear through two cubicle walls, and once told me my memo about subrogation was "honestly kind of gripping." Nobody has ever said that about a subrogation memo in the history of the English language. I have been in a low-grade swoon since June.

We went to the diner on the corner. He had the meatloaf. I had the club sandwich and, I want this on the record, I did not order a salad to look dainty. Old me would have ordered the dainty salad and then gone home and eaten crackers standing over the sink. New me ate a club sandwich like a citizen. Then we split a piece of coconut cream pie. SPLIT.

Walking back, before I could chicken out, I asked if he'd be my date to Bridget's wedding. He got a funny look and said, "Can I let you know Monday?"

Can he let me know Monday.

I have decided that is not a no. The women on the list say I'm allowed to decide that. My mother would say a man who needs a weekend to think is a man with a girlfriend in Erie. My mother is not getting told about this.

Days till the wedding: 22

Sept. 21 -- Tuesday

Final fitting tonight. Bridget, Mom, me, and Rose, the seamstress in the back room of the bridal shop, who is about seventy and has pins in her mouth at all times, including, I suspect, at Mass.

The dress fits. I need to say that again, because after August I didn't think those words would ever come out of me. The dress fits. It's sage chiffon, sweetheart neckline, no sleeves, and I look like a woman who is going to a wedding, not a woman being punished at one.

Rose did that. At the second fitting she took one look at how the shop had ordered it and said, "Honey, the dress is wrong, not you," and took the whole thing apart and put it back together.

Then Mom, from the chair by the mirror: "Did you think about a little jacket, Colleen? A little bolero? For your arms?"

And I said, and I heard myself say it: "No, Ma. I thought about my arms. They're coming to the wedding."

Bridget laughed so hard she had to sit down on the fitting platform. Rose took the pins out of her mouth to laugh. Mom said, "Well, I was only asking," and she was, and she wasn't. We went for ice cream after. She didn't get any. I got a double. I'm not proud. Okay, I'm a little proud.

Days till the wedding: 25

Sept. 13 -- Monday

The Browns came back to the NFL last night after three years away and the Steelers beat them 43 to nothing, and the entire building is behaving like we did it personally. Somebody hung a Terrible Towel over the fax machine. The claims supervisor, who has not smiled since the Carter administration, said "good morning" to me.

Dave came down from four with a box of doughnuts for the third floor. He put a jelly one on my desk and said, "You look like a jelly person." I am choosing to take this as romance.

Also: a woman on the list in Oregon posted a thing called "The Booth Is Not Your Friend," about just asking for a table at a restaurant instead of wedging yourself into a booth and smiling like it's fine. Plain, simple, and I'd never once done it in my life. I did it at lunch today. The waitress said "sure, hon" and that was the whole thing. Thirty-one years of wedging, for nothing.

Days till the wedding: 33

Sept. 5 -- Sunday, sunburned

Today I went to the pool. In a swimsuit. In public. On purpose.

This was the list's fault. In August a woman in Minnesota posted that she had not been in a pool since 1979, and then she went, and wrote about it, and about forty of us wrote back crying. Then somebody said, "Who's next?" and I typed "Me, Labor Day weekend" and hit Send before I could think. So.

The suit came from a catalog. Navy, white piping. When I tried it on in my bedroom I sat on the edge of the bed with my face in my hands for a while. Then I put a T-shirt over it, which was cheating, and drove to the city pool in my neighborhood, last weekend of the season.

Things I thought would happen: everyone stops talking. Some teenage boy says something. I die.

Things that happened: I paid at the window, found a chair, and took off the T-shirt. A little boy stared at me. I stared back. He went back to his hot dog. Two teenage girls looked and whispered, and I felt it in my chest like a hand, and then they went off the diving board and forgot I was alive. A lady about sixty, bigger than me, in a flowered suit with a little skirt, gave me a nod like we were in the same lodge.

Then I got in. I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten that water holds you up. I'd forgotten the chlorine smell and how sound goes funny when your ears are under. I swam four laps, badly, and then floated on my back and looked at the sky until a lifeguard blew her whistle at some kid and I remembered where I was.

I stayed two hours. I burned my shoulders. Nobody died. I'm typing this with aloe on and grinning at the monitor like an idiot.

I was twelve the last time I went swimming without a T-shirt over my suit. I'm thirty-one. That's a lot of summers.

Aug. 26 -- Thursday, 1 a.m.

Full moon out the kitchen window and I can't sleep. Wrote three pages to the list tonight about my mother and deleted two. The one I sent says: I love her. She's scared for me in a way that looks exactly like being ashamed of me, and I've spent thirty-one years not being able to tell the difference. Going to bed.

Aug. 21 -- Saturday

First bridesmaid fitting today. My sister Bridget, the bride, 27 and sweet as pie, picked a bridal shop at the mall with a great many mirrors, which is a sentence that should come with a warning label.

The saleswoman's name tag said Tiffani, with an i and, I swear to God, a little heart over the i. She took one look at me and said, "Oh! We'll be ordering yours." Which, fine. The samples are all tiny. Every dress in America is a sample for somebody named Tiffani. But then she brought out the style Bridget picked and held it up against my front like a napkin, clipped the back together with a clothespin, turned me to the mirror, and said, brightly, "So you get the idea!"

I got the idea.

Mom, from the chair: "Maybe there's a style with more coverage." Bridget said, "Ma, stop, she looks nice," but she said it the way you tell somebody their casserole is interesting.

Then Tiffani measured me, out loud, in front of everyone, wrote it down, and said, "We'll order up, to be safe." Up, to be safe. Like I might swell.

I did not cry in the shop. I cried on the top level of the mall garage with the radio up so nobody would hear, and the radio was playing TLC, "Unpretty." Thank you, universe. Very subtle. Then I came home and wrote the list a post called "Tiffani With a Heart Over the I," and eleven women wrote back before bedtime. One of them wrote only: You are not the problem. The clothespin is the problem.

Aug. 16 -- Monday

Mom mailed me a clipping today. No note, just the clipping, which is how Mom says things. It's about some new diet pill. She means well. She always means well. That's my mother in one sentence, and that's the whole problem.

So I'm going to write about the pills, because I've never told anybody.

In 1996 I was on fen-phen. So were half the women on my floor and a couple of the men. We compared notes at the coffee machine like it was a club. A doctor out by the mall wrote the prescriptions and didn't ask many questions. I felt like a hummingbird on a wire. I couldn't sleep. I snapped at people. I got smaller for a while, and people said nice things to me they had never said before, and I hated them for it and wanted more.

I quit in the spring of '97. Not because I was wise, but because I ran out of money and nerve at the same time. That September they pulled it off the market over heart valve problems. I went and had my heart checked like they told everybody to. It came back fine. I sat on a bench in the hospital lobby, next to the gift shop, and cried. Partly because it was fine. Partly because I understood that I'd been willing to bet my own heart on a dress size.

I'm not betting it anymore. That's the whole deal. I threw the clipping away. Then I took it back out of the trash so I could write this. Now I'm throwing it away again.

Aug. 9 -- Monday

First entry. Hello, whoever you are.

A couple of weeks ago I found an e-mail list for size acceptance. I was only looking for a decent pair of shorts, honestly. Somebody's home page had a link to join, and I did, and now every night there are forty or fifty messages from big women all over the country, and a few big men, talking about their lives like they are actual lives. Not "before" pictures. Lives.

They talk about airplane seatbelt extenders without whispering. They talk about doctors who listen and doctors who don't. They talk about getting promoted and getting married and going to the beach. One woman signs every message "Size 26 and fabulous, Tucson." I read them at eleven at night with the lights off like I'm doing something illegal.

A lot of them keep online journals. I've been reading those too, and I thought, why not me. So: I'm Colleen. I'm a size twenty-two. I have spent my whole life apologizing for that, one way or another. Back row in every photo. "Oh, I'm fine" at every buffet. "Sorry!" when somebody else bumps into me.

I'm done. Okay, I'm starting to be done. My sister's getting married in October, and I'm in the wedding in a sleeveless dress, and between now and then I am going to practice.

Apologies today: 6. (I counted.)
Days till the wedding: 68

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Last updated Sept. 24, 1999
© 1999 Colleen Mahaffey