Before, she was just Katharine, college dropout and master of a million small talents: she’d pumped gas, peddled cemetery plots over the phone, sold Mary Kay cosmetics, even arranged appointments at an escort service. Anything to keep us in food and gas money until she started itching to travel again. But after a few days in Charlotte she applied for a job at a dry cleaner’s which she didn’t get and, in a fit of frustration, accidentally rear-ended a Cadillac in the parking lot. Since we were flat broke, she talked the owner of the car, who ran a gym called Lady Fitness, into letting her work off the cost of the repairs. She started by cleaning the machines and answering phones, but after a few weeks the woman liked her so much she gave her a full-time job and a free membership. A week earlier we’d been back to ketchup soup and ramen noodles, sleeping in the back of the car; now, we had a steady income and a decent apartment. Back in the Fat Years, things always seemed to work out at the last minute.
My mom had been trying to lose weight all her life. At Lady Fitness, it actually started to happen. She’d always loved to dance, and she got hooked on aerobics, taking classes whenever she could fit them in. After a week or two she started dragging me with her. It was kind of embarrassing. She was super enthusiastic, the one voice you could hear above all the rest, all three hundred pounds of her touch-stepping and heel-toeing, clapping her hands and singing along to the music.
The instructors, however, loved her. After a few months one of them started helping her prepare for the certification test so she could teach her own classes. When she passed she became the heaviest—and most popular—instructor in the history of Lady Fitness. She played the best music, knew all her students by name, and used the stories of our Fat Years to emphasize her message that anyone can do anything they set their mind to.
By the time we’d been in Charlotte two years, my mother had lost a hundred and sixty pounds, with me shedding forty-five and a half right beside her. Katharine disappeared, along with the breakfasts of doughnuts and chocolate milk, our love handles and our double chins, and Kiki was born.
She loved her new, strong body, but for me it was harder. Even though I’d been teased all my life, I’d always taken a small, strange comfort in my folds of fat, the fact that I could grab myself at the waist. The weight was like a force field, shielding me as I was plopped into one new school after another, food being my only comfort through the long afternoons while my mother was working. Now, almost fifty pounds lighter, I had nothing left to hide behind. Sometimes in my bed at night, I’d find myself still pinching the skin at my waist, forgetting that there was nothing there to hold on to anymore.
My body had changed, parts of me just disappearing like I’d wished them away. I had cheekbones, muscles, a flat stomach, clear skin, just like my mother. But something was missing, something that made us different. I could build muscle, but not confidence. There were no exercises for that.
Still, I kept working out—doing aerobics, jogging, lifting weights—driven by the echo of words I’d been hearing for as long as I could remember.
Fat Ass! I’d force myself to do ten more lunges, feeling the burning in my legs.
Lard-O! I’d push through another set of repetitions, curling the dumbbell tight into my arm, even when the pain was killing me.
Thunder Thighs! I’d go another mile, running fast enough, finally, to leave the voices behind me.
My mother and I had become new people: even the pictures in our photo albums didn’t look like us anymore. Sometimes I imagined our former fat selves were still out there driving around the country like ghosts, eating bags of Doritos. It was strange.
Meanwhile, my mom’s classes at Lady Fitness kept growing, with women crowding in hip to hip to follow her gospel. Then the local cable access channel asked her to do a live morning show called Wake Up and Work Out. I watched her before school as I sat at the kitchen table eating my nonfat yogurt and high-energy Grape-Nuts.
“My name is Kiki Sparks,” she said at the beginning of every show, while the music built behind her, louder and louder. “Are we ready to get to work?”
Soon you could almost hear the hundreds—then thousands—of women across the city shouting, ” Yes!”
It was only a matter of time before she went statewide, then national. The woman who’d hired her at Lady Fitness mortgaged her house to produce a high-tech “FlyKiki” video, which sold a million copies after my mom appeared on the Home Shopping Network and led the host in a five-minute Super Cal Burn. The rest is fat-free history.
Now we have a house with a pool, keep a cook who makes only low-fat meals, and I have my own bathroom and TV. The only downside is that my mother is so busy, spreading Kiki-mania across the country and around the world. But whenever I miss her too much, I can flip through the channels for her infomercial—KikiSpeaks: You Can Do It!—and find her, just like that.
Sometimes, though, I still think about us bumping along together in our old Volaré, me half asleep with my head in her lap while she sang along with the radio. And I miss that endless highway stretching out ahead, full of possibilities, always leading to a new town and another school where I could start again.
When the train pulled into the Colby station five hours later, the only person waiting was a guy with shoulder-length brown hair, a tie-dyed T-shirt, cutoff army shorts, and Birkenstocks. He had about a million of those Deadhead hippie bracelets on his wrist, and he was wearing sunglasses with blue frames.
I was the only one who got off in Colby.
I stood on the platform, squinting. It was really sunny and hot, even though the ocean was supposed to be close by.
“Nicole?” the guy said, and when I looked up he took a few steps toward me. His shorts were splattered with white paint and I was sure he’d smell of patchouli or pot if I bothered to sniff hard, which I chose not to.
“Colie,” I said.
“Right.” He smiled. I couldn’t see his eyes. “Mira sent me to pick you up. I’m Norman.”
Mira was my aunt. She was stuck with me for the summer.
“Those yours?” he said, pointing at the bags, which the porter had piled further down the platform. I nodded and he started after them, with a slow, lazy walk that was already irritating me.
I was immediately mortified to see the entire Kiki line right there next to my stuff. The Kiki Buttmaster, a carton of Kiki-Eats, the dozen new FlyKiki videos and inspirational tapes, plus a few more boxes of vitamins and fitness wear with my mother’s smiling face plastered across them.