Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

Perhaps that should have made me happy, but I have yet to find the girl who would

swap a twenty-one-inch waist and a good silhouette for sterling merit. Not that I

could hope to be

a raving beauty, but a few wolf whistles never did any harm and are good for the

morale.’

I had just had a chance to test Cliff’s point of view. A girl showed up at

school who was exactly my size; we compared measurements. The point is, on Clarice

it looked good-cursive and bountiful but good. Maureen, I told myself, here is a

chance to get an honest opinion out of Cliff.

I saw to it that he got a good look at her at tennis practice. As we left I

said craftily, “That new girl, Clarice-she has a lovely figure.”

Cliff looked over his shoulder and replied. “Oh, sure-from her ankles down.”

I had my answer and I didn’t like it. Cliff didn’t care for my type of

figure; divorced from my personality it did not appeal to him. I should have felt a

warm glow, knowing it for true love. I didn’t; I felt terrible.

It was when I refused a second helping of potatoes that evening that the

subject of my metabolism came up.

I went to the library next day and looked into this matter of diet. I hadn’t

known there were so many books about it. Finally I found one that made sense:

Eat and Grow Slender. That struck me as an excellent idea.

I took it home to study. I got a few crackers and some cheese and ate them

absent-mindedly while I thumbed through the book. There was a plan for losing ten

pounds in ten days; the menus looked pretty skimpy. There was another for losing ten

pounds in a month. That’s for me, I said; no need to be fanatic.

There was a chapter about calories. They make it so simple: one ice-cream

cone, one hundred and fifty calories; three dates, eighty-four calories.

My eye lit on “soda crackers”; I knew they wouldn’t count much and they

didn’t-only twenty-one calories apiece. Then I looked up “cheese.”

Arithmetic stirred in my brain and I had a chilly feeling. I went into

Daddy’s study and used his postal

scale to weigh the cheese that had not already become Maureen.

I did the arithmetic three times. Including two little bits of fudge I had

eaten six hundred and seventy calories, more than half of a day’s allowance a~ given

in the reducing diet! And I had only meant to stay the pangs until dinnertime.

Maureen, I said, this time you’ve got to be a fanatic; it’s the ten-day

die-trying diet for you.

I planned to keep my affairs to myself, selecting the diet from what was

placed before me, but such a course is impossible in a family that combines the

worst aspects of a Senate investigation with the less brutal methods of a third

degree. I got away with passing up the cream-of-tomato soup by being a little bit

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late, but when I refused the gravy, there was nothing to do but show them the book.

Mother said a growing girl needed her food. I pointed out that I had quit

growing vertically and it was time I quit horizontally. Junior opened his mouth and

I stuffed a roll into it. That gave Daddy a chance to say, “Let’s put it up to Doc

Andrews. If he gives her the green light, she can starve herself gaunt. She’s a free

agent.”

So Daddy and I went to Doctor Andrews’ office next day. Daddy had an

appointment anyhow-he has terrible colds every spring. Doctor Andrews sent Daddy

across the hall to Doctor Grieb who specializes in allergies and things, then he saw

me.

I’ve known Doctor Andrews since my first squawk, so I told him everything,

even about Cliff, and showed him the book. He thumbed through it, then he weighed me

and listened to my heart and took my blood pressure. “Go ahead,” he told me, “but

make it the thirtyday diet. I don’t want you fainting in the classroom.”

I guess I had counted on him to save me from my will power. “How about