Cry For the Child If The Tears Will Come/A Christmas Carol/C. Dickens

8. Laurel Flounders But is Saved

When Laurel opened her eyes in the morning and she rolled over onto her side, she could still taste the apple strudel she'd eaten in the darkness of the night. She groaned and her alarm clock chimed. Was this really happening, that she had consumed a large portion of something sweet and rich, then went to sleep? And now she had to get out of bed, get washed, and face the world?

This was a hangover, Laurel had no doubt. She knew a little about alcoholism. She didn't want the apple strudel to become a part of her, did she? So she vowed to not eat anything, to fast until she had to eat; her mother would want her to sit down with the family and have dinner tonight but she could say she had a stomach ache, which was not a lie. She would get rid of the apple strudel by using up its calories.

And so, over the following four years, the cycle swung into motion in which Laurel began to add to her weight while half-starving herself. She didn't understand what was happening to her. Somehow when the President was shot and Jackie exited as First Lady, Laurel lost something. Once, while laying in bed at night and eating a bagel with cream cheese (bought earlier at Bageland) the word came into her head, what she had lost when Jackie left the White House: innocence. The whole world lost its innocence that terrible day.

Her mother lectured her (during these lectures Laurel stared out of the window), punished her, and deprived her of nice clothes but Laurel couldn't stop this behavior of eating in a furtive way when nobody was present. Stuart was merciless for a while, but Laurel was so struck dumb by suffering that she wasn't an enjoyable target anymore. Stuart began to ignore her.

Laurel gained 20 pounds and refused to look in the mirror. She had a private file in which she kept pictures of Jackie while she was First Lady. She knew that Jackie would never do what she, Laurel, had been doing with food. Jackie would never have crept down to the kitchen in the White House to eat ice cream.

This had been a funny nation-wide joke, how JFK and his brother Robert had been doing that; they ate ice cream straight from the huge containers with spoons late at night while the poor kitchen steward stood hovering, saying "Please Mr. President...let me get a dish for you so I can serve you properly." But the President dismissed the steward and told him to get some sleep.

Maybe there isn't a thing called happiness, thought Laurel. Maybe advertising executives thought up the concept to make people buy things to make them happy. It was her senior year of high school and everybody was wound up tight with senioritis. Laurel would be going to Penn State University; she stood alone. Her mother refused to buy Laurel new clothes for college; she said that Laurel didn't deserve new clothes, looking the way she did.

Then something happened.