In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,12

the lunch buffet that day, Susan Van Doren was so conscious of people staring at her daughter that she almost confronted them head-on. Had none of them ever been fat? Had a fat friend? Watched the scales go up up up regardless of what they ate?

Get over it, Susan, said the Mother Bitch. Face it; your daughter’s fat because she eats like a horse. And she eats like a horse because you’re neurotic about your weight. You drink diet everything. You weigh yourself every-morning. For seventeen years, you’ve communicated your own obsession to her, and now look: two hundred and fifty pounds of maternal fault.

Susan watched her daughter lumber away from the lunch table with nothing but a slice of turkey rolled up in a lettuce leaf. It broke her heart to see Amy making an effort, on this first day, to set some dietary standards for herself. Susan wished for all the world that the Mother Bitch would go into hibernation and allow her to feel like any other well-adjusted forty-three-year-old woman with a lot to be thankful for: a good job, a nice house, a sweetheart of a daughter. But the Mother Bitch was always there, yap yap yap, making her feel self-conscious about Amy. If she could, she would crush the Mother Bitch to a pulp.

On her personal information form, Susan had written that her goal for the trip was to learn something new about herself. Amy, she’d noted before mailing off the packet, had written that her goal was “to meet people who share a passion for the wilderness and anything out-doorsy and to see the Grand Canyon and above all to have fun .”

Who could find fault with a girl like that?

Susan carried her sandwich across the beach to join Amy, who had already finished eating. What an awkward situation this must be for her, Susan thought, and a sudden pang of remorse tore through her. Why had she planned this vacation? What kind of mother brought an overweight teenage girl on a trip where you lived in a bathing suit?

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” she said cheerfully.

“It’s hot.”

“Dunk your shirt in the water, like the guides.”

Amy stared cruelly at her, then trudged back to the lunch table and took a stack of cookies and headed off to the opposite end of the beach, where the old couple was sitting.

She’s really a caring, sensitive, thoughtful person, Susan wanted to tell the others. And really, what were a few cookies, in the grand scheme of things? Nevertheless, she worried that the others might not only judge her for the excess calories, but think she was eating more than her fair share. And Susan thought bitterly, once again, how unfair it was, the way people prejudged overweight people. This time she didn’t give the Mother Bitch any chance whatsoever to come back with her snide, fault-finding remarks, but rather stuffed the old hag back into her sack and tied it shut with a double knot.

Ruth Frankel smiled up at the girl and thanked her for the cookies.

“Look what she brought us, Lloyd,” she said.

“Who?”

“Amy! Amy, right? Amy brought us some cookies, Lloyd. Thank you, dear,” she told Amy. “Now you go sit down and enjoy yourself and stop waiting on us old folks.”

“Where did she come from?” Lloyd asked as Amy walked off.

“She’s on the trip with us,” Ruth reminded him.

“Well, she better lose a little weight or she’ll become diabetic. Oreos!” he exclaimed. “My goodness. Did you pack these?”

Ruth sighed inwardly. Even though she’d cleared it back in March with Lloyd’s doctor, she still wondered if it was a good idea for them to squeeze in this one last float trip. They’d been making this trip every year since they were a young couple, first running the river back in the 1950s, before the dam was built, when Lloyd was a young doctor working off his medical school debt by volunteering on the Navajo reservation. Ruth had just started painting at the time, and she brought along her watercolors and dabbed splashes of color into her notebook—salmon, mauve, and eggplant, colors she would later reproduce all winter long, wherever she was. Later, they moved to Evanston, Illinois, where they raised their two children, but they returned year after year for two weeks in the canyon. They brought friends. They passed up ski vacations and trips to Mexico to save their money for this particular trip; one year, when both children were in college, they traded Ruth’s paintings in