Deep Water Read Online Free

until
she finally escaped at seventeen when she started to win pageants.
    “Look at me, I haven’t let myself turn
into a cow like that, and she only had one man screwing her.” Her manicured
nail would point at the sad person wearing a tent dress on the TV while the ice
clinked in her glass. These things would only come out when she had a bit too
much to drink, and Dad and I would avert our eyes in embarrassment, not really
knowing where to look.
    Being fat was the ultimate sin in my
mother’s book. She worked out every day at the local gym and weighed her food
so it met the strict requirements of her diet. Once a year, when I was a child,
we had to visit her mother during our vacation. We wouldn’t stay with her of course;
we would stay in a hotel in a better part of town. We’d drive out to a
depressed part of the city where shops were boarded up and graffiti stained the
walls. My grandmother’s apartment smelled like bacon fat and cigarettes. I was
forced to kiss the powdery cheek of a woman who, I later realized, couldn’t
have been much more than forty-five, but she seemed so much older. She was
huge, each breast sagged out sideways in the bright colored dresses she wore,
and the skirts always seemed to ride up to reveal dimpled thighs as she sat
with her legs spread in a way that my mother said ladies never sat.
    The woman seemed nice, she would offer
cookies or cake to me which I would take and sit quietly in the corner to eat,
ever conscious of my mother’s frown. This food was forbidden. My mother would
always be quiet at first with her brightly colored mouth giving forced little
smiles as she feigned happiness. Then, as the visit continued, she would start
to make little digs.
    “Really, mother. Couldn’t you clean up a
little? You knew we were coming.” Her manicured nails would flick around at the
piles of magazines and the dust that littered the bookshelves.
    Her mother would say, “It’s hard, Mandy.
My arthritis has been playing up, and I’m alone now, you know…”
    It wasn’t until later that I found out
she was alone because my mother had managed to have her last boyfriend
prosecuted for the things he did to her as a teenager. I didn’t know this at
the time, and once I confessed to my Dad that I felt sorry for the sad, fat old
lady. He had looked at me sadly and said, “You shouldn’t.”
    The trauma of her childhood gave my
mother a lot of excuses. It meant she didn’t have to work; it meant she was
allowed to throw more tantrums than I ever was allowed and disappear for days
on end. I didn’t know why those overweight, traumatized people on TV weren’t
allowed the same liberty in her book.
    When it was finished, neither of my
parents had come home, so I switched off the lights and went to bed. I didn’t
bother to stack the dishwasher just in case my mother came home because that
would be another thing to piss her off. She hated her pristine kitchen to be
filled with clutter; even childhood artwork had never been allowed on the
refrigerator.
    The next day was a proper summer’s day
complete with sunshine and heat. So of course, we went out to the lake. The
water was like glass; the only noise was the jet boats from further around the
lake where the wealthy had estates that reached right to the water’s edge. My
Dad’s boss owned one, and we had been there for a Christmas party once. The
place was amazing. Mom and I had stood on the stone balcony and marveled at the
manicured garden that led down to the water.
    Eve was drinking beer again, but I had
pilfered my mother’s vodka to mix with diet coke. I had a buzz going on that
made it easy to forget about my parents, Joseph, and everything else. Not many
people were out because it was a weekday and most people had summer jobs. I was
reading a magazine and inspecting celebrities’ boob jobs. I didn’t want breasts
so big that they’d be trashy; I just wanted more than the barely B-cup I had
been cursed with.
    “You know, big