Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1959)

“The Mail Order Shopper” Once It Was My Betrayer-but NOW MY BODY is my PROUDEST POSSESSION! p 76 the door slammed behind Marty, and slowly I crumpled Ito the floor. The sobs tore forth— deep and convulsive. “Marty . . . Marty ...” I whispered, brokenly, and then his words came back and I shuddered and I shook my head violently from side to side, trying to fling what he had said away from me — trying not to hear him again. But his words hung in the room — toneless, cold, but searing my heart like dry ice pressed close against flesh. This had been Marty talking, I realized, numbly — my Marty — with whom I had planned our tomorrow —who would grin and tousle my hair when I insisted that the very first furniture we’d buy after the wedding would be that big, comfortable man’s chair we’d seen at O’Rourke’s downtown. The Marty whom I’d suddenly surprise looking at me with the special softness no one else ever saw. The Marty, whose wife I thought I was going to be — until a half-hour ago. “I’m leaving, Maggie,” he’d said. Unbelieving, I’d heard the words, but it was the deadness of his voice that made me understand what he was saying. “I’m leaving, Maggie — for good. I’m not coming around any more. And I’m sorry for you, for both of us ” “Sorry? Sorry for me?” I had flared, wildly. My voice rose in a scream. “Well, why not? Why not you? Everyone else is. The fat girl! Revolting Maggie Holland, once petite, demure Margaret and now offending the esthetic senses of her friends, her family — everybody! So why not you Marty?” His words had been flat, quiet. “You’ve let yourself go, you’ve given up on yourself, Maggie. Oh, I know there was a time when you really tried. I know you’ve taken pills, and gone on diets — even tried reducing salons. But the brutal truth is that you’ve stopped trying. You were my girl and I fell in love with you and I’d still be in love with the Maggie who could take it and still come back and win. But the Maggie I fell in love with wouldn’t feel sorry for herself, wouldn’t feel she was the only girl who’d ever been cursed by overweight, wouldn’t snap at her friends, quarrel with her family, permit the love affair with the man she was going to marry to deteriorate into irritable days and nasty evenings In a simple word the Maggie I knew was the one 1 wanted for my wife, not the girl I’m looking at now.” I couldn’t talk. Fury was choking me. At last the words had come in a strangled gasp. “Get out!!” And. then, as I felt the tears beginning to burn my eyes 1 quickly turned my back. Just before he closed the door behind him, a pale shaft of sunlight came into the room, and then he was gone, and only greyness was left and that was the way it would be forever, I felt. I didn’t hear the door open minutes later, and • turned, startled, when I heard Ray’s voice at my side Ray is Doctor Raymond Holland and my cousin, and, at 32, one of the most respected and best-liked practitioners in town. His sympathetic eyes took in my disheveled hair and tear-stained face but all he said was: “I was on my way over and ran into Marty as he was leaving. We had a talk.” “I hope he was less beastly then when he left here. Ray grinned. “He was quite civilized.” Then he leaned down and lifted my chin with his fingers. “But he was suffering, Maggie. It isnt easy for a guy like Marty to walk out on something so important.” My laugh was as unpleasant as before. “Suffering, indeed. I’ll bet he was — worrying whether my fingers have gotten too pudgy for me to get his ring off to return to him. Or wondering how many people have been laughing at him all the time he’s been going around with fat Maggie Holland — or suffering over — ” Suddenly the bitterness ran out of me, wretchedness thickened my throat, and burying my face in my arms, I cried and Ray let me. After a while he dried my eyes with his handkerchief Very quietly, he asked me: “Did you really understand what Marty was trying to say?”