Free One Fat Summer by Robert Lipsyte Page A

magazines, dozing, listening to the radio. Usually, I eat a lot on days like that, but for some reason I wasn’t too hungry. My stomach muscles were still sore from all that bending. Ofcourse, I had a few peanut butter sandwiches, and a few dishes of ice cream, but that was more for taste than for hunger. Peanut butter and ice cream are two of my favorite foods, but you’ve got to be careful eating them. They can hurt you. The only thing worse than a peanut butter strangle is an ice cream headache. A few times in my life I’ve had both at the same time, and that’s murder.
    They both come from eating too fast, and I’m a fast eater; you’ve got to get it down quick if you’re afraid of being caught in the act. The peanut butter strangle hits you right away; the instant you take that first swallow and feel a lump the size of a golf ball in your throat, you know you’ve got it. I’ve tried to wash it down with cold milk or soda, even jam it down with bread crust, like you do with a fishbone, but that only makes it worse. There’s nothing to do but suffer, tough it out like a man. You’ve got to keep swallowing, feel that golf ball move slowly down your throat until it enters your chest; it’s as big as a baseball by then, shoving your heart out of the way, pressing against your breastbone, slowly, working down the alimentary canal, leaving a path of agony and destruction; as big as a softball by the time it finally falls into your stomach and lies there, heavy and hard as a cannonball, for hours, until your stomach acids slowly dissolve it.
    An ice cream headache is sneakier; it takes at least a couple minutes after you swallow a too-big mouthful for the message to get back up to your brain. Torture time. Then, blam, a shot between the eyes sending you reeling against the refrigerator door, it spreads across your forehead, a dull ache boring through your skull, you can’t think, you can barely focus your eyes. Wheew. I can’t get too excited about some creep standing on my wrist. I’ve known real pain, self-inflicted.
    Saturday was painless. I could take my time eating. Michelle was down at the beach, watching Pete, and Mom was studying. She wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off. But Dad has radar. No matter how quietly I open the refrigerator door, if he’s somewhere in the house, when that light goes on he senses it and appears in the kitchen. Without him around, I didn’t have to rush.
    Michelle left right after dinner. Mom askedher if she was seeing Pete, and when Michelle said yes, Mom just sighed. She didn’t say anything else. Then she went back to her books.
    I tried to read for a while, but I was so tired the words wiggled on the page. Normally, I have 20-20 vision. Once, when I was in the sixth grade and having a little trouble reading, I wore glasses for about two months. It was my mother’s idea, and she got the eye doctor to go along with her. The glasses were like windowpanes, but I felt better wearing them. My real problem was the teacher, a very skinny woman who used to make fun of my weight. Well, she didn’t actually make fun of me, but she always laughed when some kid in the class made a crack, like “Here come Robert Marks.”
    And she would say, “You must use the singular, here comes Robert Marks.”
    And the kid would say, “When you talk about Robert Marks you’ve got to use the plural. There’s at least two of him.”
    And the teacher would laugh.
    So I had some trouble reading, but the phoney glasses fixed it up. It was all psychological. I found out about it one night when I heard myparents arguing. My father thought it was a waste of money to get glasses when I didn’t need them to help me see. After that I wouldn’t wear them anymore, but my reading got better anyway.
    Sunday was a draggy day. Loafing around wasn’t so much fun when nobody seemed to care whether I did anything or