David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

The first good idea came the summer after my freshman year in high school. Andy Roman had married my mother six years earlier, and I had been gaining weight steadily ever since. My mother said nothing while her son went from skinny to husky to fat, said nothing while I carted away bags of Oreos and boxes of doughnuts to my room to eat during solitary marathon sessions of Happy Days and Good Times reruns. The apathy, I later learned, originated from the heroic quantities of Valium she took. I thought she was simply inclined to sleepiness and partial to naps. I accepted that some people napped between breakfast and lunch and then after lunch until it was time to start making dinner.

If Andy knew about her little pill fixation- and he must have- he didn’t show much concern. Despite her fogginess, in which my mother sometimes wandered from room to room, clutching a plastic soup ladle or pot holder while searching for something she couldn’t quite recall, she managed to clean the house and make his meals- and that was all Andy required.

On occasion he’d try to interest her in his obsession with my increasing weight, but my mother just shrugged and muttered observations about growing boys. He wasn’t having it, and one day he announced that he would take care of it if she wouldn’t. Taking care of it marked the beginning of a disciplined regimen of derision to help slim me down. But six months of calling me Big Booty and helpful suggestions that I get off my fat butt and go outside and play in the fresh air and sunshine failed to achieve significant results, so in a rare moment of intellectual retrenching, he took on a new approach.

“Time for a serious talk,” he said to me over breakfast one morning. My mother, staring at us through the slits of her eyes, had already announced that she was going to lie down, so it was just me and Andy.

He was then in his mid-fifties, fifteen years older than my mother and looking like a man taking a nosedive into senior citizenship. He was jowly and liver spotted and had heavy bags under his cloudy green eyes. Despite his harsh assessment of me, he was himself a good thirty pounds overweight. Most of his head still had decent coverage, but what he had was gray and thinning and too long for a man of his age. He played golf with the ceaseless intensity of a Florida lawyer, which he was, and constant exposure to the sun gave his skin the look of an overbaked apple. However, he came from a generation that believed you could never be too tan, and pachyderm skin was far preferable to the shame of pallor.

Andy pushed up his black-rimmed bifocals over his nose, which had become noticeably bulbous in the last two years. “I know you want to go away to college when you graduate high school,” he said. “But let’s face it. Everyone wants to go away, and what’s so great about you that anyplace decent should let you in? Am I right?”

Less than a year earlier, I had realized, in a kind of aesthetic epiphany, that I hated Florida. I hated the heat, I hated the white shoes and white belts, I hated the golf and the tennis and the beaches and the run-down art deco buildings that smelled of old people and the palm trees and the rednecks and the loud transplanted northerners and the clueless Canadians who visited during the winter and the unremarkable sadness of the poor, mostly black, people who fished for their dinner in the stagnant canals. I hated the crabgrass and the sandy vacant lots and poisonous snakes and deadly walking catfish and dog-eating alligators, the unavoidable sharp-spored plants and gargantuan palmetto bugs and fist-size spiders and swarming fire ants and the rest of the tropical mutants that daily reminded us that human beings had no business living here. All of which I knew, on some fundamental but unarticulated level, meant that I hated my life and I wanted a new one. I’d been talking ever since about going away to college, going far away, as though the intervening three years were only a mild obstacle.

“You need to think about how you’re going to convince them you’re not just another loser,” Andy said. He had both his elbows on the white oval breakfast table, and he was practically leaning into his microwaved pancake-and-sausage breakfast.

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” he said now, “but what you ought to do is join the track team next year. Your grades have been all right”- I had a 3.9 average, which I personally thought was beyond all right-“and being on the school paper is fine, I guess, but athletics really round out your application. And you want them to think you’re well-rounded, but not in the way you are now.” He inflated his cheeks. “You want them to look at your stuff and think, There’s a real go-getter, not, There’s a big lardo. They probably already have enough of those.”

I understood at once why Andy suggested track, and in a vague way, I was grateful for it. Team sports were not going to get me very far, not after the fifth grade’s disastrous experiment with softball. Track, on the other hand, offered certain advantages. It was essentially a solitary sport played in proximity to others. No one was relying on me not to fuck up, at least not in the same way they would if a pop-up to right field came my way. “And, sure,” Andy said, “it’s not like you’ve ever been good at running or anything, but with a summer’s worth of hard work you could at least be good enough to be the worst guy on the team.”

Our house on Terrapin Way encircled a man-made pond in which nameless fish, brightly colored frogs, lumpy-billed ducks, and the occasional itinerant gator made a home, and Andy announced that he had tracked the circumference of the surrounding road at exactly one-half mile. “So, here’s the deal,” he said, tapping one manicured nail against his fork. “We’re going to practice. Between now and when school starts, I’ll give you a dollar for every mile you can run and ten dollars for every five consecutive miles you can run.”

It had seemed like a nice offer. Hell, if I’m going to be honest, it was a truly generous offer, a rare moment of inspired stepparenting, though I understood it was also about Andy wanting to show just how right he was. Nevertheless, it was a good deal, even though I had never done well with running. In gym class, when the instructor sent us to do laps, I was always the first to surrender into a walk, to hold my cramping side while the other kids whisked passed me, glancing back with contempt. The money might provide motivation for me to improve my prowess, but there was something humiliating in being offered money to do what other kids could do freely and easily.

So I declined. I didn’t want to go out there and sweat while Andy watched me struggle to put a half mile under my belt. I didn’t want to go huffing past the house while Andy shouted an inevitable, “Keep it going, Big Booty!”

The thing was, I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to diet, but I’d been unable to do so because committing to a weight loss program would be like telling Andy that he’d been right, that it was okay that he’d been calling me Fatty and Lard Butt and Butterball all those months.

I knew this track business was a way out. Andy had brought it up only once, which meant going along with it was still more or less uncharged. I could diet while training but pass off the diet as a new way of eating to get in shape. And I could never accept a dime of his money for any of this. I needed to keep Andy out of my slimming.

There was no way I was going to go running around Terrapin Way. Far too many kids from school lived in Hibiscus Gardens, our subdivision, and a few even lived in houses around the pond, and I didn’t want them watching- not until I could run with ease, not until I could do five miles. I needed the shield of success, since they also enjoyed calling me Fatty and Butterball, though they went with Lard Ass instead of Lard Butt, not being restrained by a stepparent’s sense of decorum. Instead of hitting the road right away, I went to my room, put on my sneakers, turned on the radio, and jogged in place. At first I couldn’t do more than ten minutes, then fifteen. Within a week I could do half an hour, and after a week of that I figured I was ready for actual laps.