“It’s this salad that has heart everything,” I say. “Artichoke hearts. Romaine hearts. Hearts of palm. I love it.”
Mel orders the roast beef and Havarti scroll with the sweet potato fries. She suggests sharing the baked Camembert appetizer but when I refuse, she doesn’t push like she used to. Maybe she’s starting to understand that I can’t afford to lose what is at best a tenuous, hard-won momentum. I tell her she should get it, though. For herself. It sounds good.
“I can’t get it for just me. I’m not that much of a pig. I hope.”
“I’ll have a bite,” I offer.
Mel says she shouldn’t get it anyway. She should, you know, be good. “Like you.” She gives me a half smile.
I tell her I’m honestly not that good. Really, I’m—
“You are,” she says. “I wish I had your discipline.”
“You did there for a while,” I say, looking away.
For a while, Mel was pretty committed, using her mother’s old Exercycle, living on Diet Coke and Michelina’s Light. In fact, for a while there, Mel began to look like the unstoppable force of nature she was when she was seventeen, the girl who wore black bras you could see through her white Catholic school blouse and who blew all the boys I ever professed to love in her bedroom postered with obscure Goth bands, while I sat in the downstairs den with her mother, who taught me how to cheat at solitaire.
That was a couple of years ago, when we were living together. I was still more or less an agoraphobic whale, switching my major every quarter—from English to French Literature to Art History to Medieval Studies to Film—going to the random lecture when I could bring myself to leave my bedroom, adding and dropping electives like Gaelic, collecting syllabi-like travel brochures for destinations I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to. When Mel started losing, I tried to be supportive. I’d say things like, “You look great, but you don’t want to go too far.” You know, things a friend would say to a friend. But Mel would just sip her Diet Coke, sort of smug, like she had a secret, leaving half her salad for the waitress to clear away. She lost steam after a few months though. Couldn’t keep it off. Gained it back plus, plus.
“I guess I kind of went too far,” Mel says now.
“I did tell you not to go too far,” I remind her. “You still look beautiful,” I add. I search for something about her to compliment. She is beautiful, of course, but since she gained all that weight back, she’s let herself go a little, grooming-wise. Usually she’ll wear at least lipstick for me because she knows it depresses me to see her without it, but today her lips are all bare and crackly.
“I love your top,” I say at last. It’s hideous. One of those tentlike horrors from the plus-size store. There are some iridescent baubles along the neckline, some frothy bits of lace trailing from the cap sleeves, presumably to lessen its resemblance to a shroud.
“I love the sleeve detail.”
Mel looks down at the froth, frowning. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“I think it’s nice. It’s weird how they seem to have way nicer things at that store than they did back when I had to shop there.”
“It’s still the same crap,” she spits. “They just have more selection is all.”
We stab at our ice.
“I love your top, though,” she says, eyeing my corseted tank. “Siren?”
“Hell’s Belles.”
“I thought that place closed.”
“Nope. Still open. New owner, though.”
“Huh. I guess I never really go downtown anymore.” Mel moved out of our apartment when she decided to go back to college—she couldn’t afford tuition and rent on a music store clerk’s salary—and now she lives with her mother back in Misery Saga.
“I used to love shopping there,” she says now.
“I remember.”
Waiting outside the fitting room while she tried on PVC corsets and velvet empire-waist dresses. The former owner, a corpselike woman named Gruvella, regarding me with eyes the color of skim milk as though I were about to steal something. Not that anything she had would’ve fit me then, not even the fingerless gloves. Mel finally coming out from behind the white-and-black-striped curtain, twirling for me while I sat in the chair with the clawed armrests, saying, “Great, that looks great.”
“I still remember that black bell-sleeved dress you got there. The one you wore to the prom with the spider tights.”
“The Bella. I forgot about that dress. God, good memory.”
The waitress brings our food. She’s forgotten to put my poppy seed dressing on the side, which often happens with this waitress and sometimes? Honestly? I think maybe she does it on purpose just to fuck with me. I tell her about it and she says, “Oh, well, she could change it for me,” and I say, “Could you?” And I tell Mel to go ahead and start without me.