13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (10 page)

“Probably just being polite,” I say.

“You don't just say the things they said to say them. You say a lot of things but not the things they said. Not the way they said them,” she insists.

She parks in the Wendy's lot, eats the Frosty guiltily beside me while I sway in the passenger seat, swimmy from the wine, gripping the Diet Coke like it's a buoy. I don't mention diabetes. I don't ask about blood sugar. Instead, I let her eat, the mouth of the giant cup close to her lips.

She sighs into her cup, waggles it at me. “This is okay, right? Just milk and ice?”

“Right,” I say. I stare at the road ahead.

When she pulls out of the parking lot, I notice she's driving very slowly, squinting hard at the road.

“How come you're driving so slow?”

She's quiet for a while, then, “I can't feel my feet,” she says to the windshield. “Right now.”

“That's still happening?” I turn to look at her but her profile gives nothing away. “Mom? That's still happening? Are you going to a doctor for it?”

She's shaking her head at the windshield. “I'll be fine. Still be able to go dancing tomorrow night.”

“Dancing? I think we should take it easy.”

“It's your last night here before Tom comes. We can have a quiet day on Friday. Just you and me. How does that sound?”

 • • • 

A banana yellow minidress she hasn't worn since the Stones came out with “Satisfaction.” Thigh-high white boots.
Fifteen, sixteen I
was then, damn I looked good you have no idea.
Matching headband sits on the counter, but I won't put that on unless she forces me. “Paint It Black” skipping on the small stereo on her night table because
We need music for this.
You're a grown woman, you have a choice in this, I remind myself in the mirror.
Show me!
she's calling from the other side of the bathroom door. I'm staring at her crown dentures in the zombie glass full of food-flecked water she keeps by the sink, my hands gripping the bathroom counter. The used pumice stone in the soap dish, which she rubs hard against her heels each night. I hear the sound through the wall but try to convince myself it's something else. How long has it been since you can't feel your feet? is a question I can't bring myself to ask her. Dusty baskets of untouched bath salts, gels, and crystals that smell like too-sweet sick positioned around the unwashed sink for show. The air in here is thick with masked illness and the Fendi she sprays too heavily on her neck in the morning. The smell of it smothers me now, but after she dies, if I catch what I think is even a whiff of it in the street, I'll follow it.

Show me!

I stare at the soiled nightgowns hanging from a silver hook on the back of her bathroom door. Feel the fact of her on the other side, lying belly down on her brass bed, chin on her fists, waiting. The same bed she lay across when I first started losing, watching me turn in her vintage Yves Saint Laurent, then her vintage Dior, neither of which she'd worn since she'd had her jaw wired after giving birth to me. She did it to shed her baby weight. For a few weeks she was a sickly, smiling husk of herself, then back up forever. But she keeps them in the back of her closet still, these monochromatic suits heavy as chain mail, each smelling of a variation of the same sweat, a different discontinued perfume. Turn, she said
then, watching me model them when I was fourteen. Chin on her fists then too, shaking her head then too, as I turned and turned for her, seeing the prints of Marilyn and Audrey she had bought and framed and nailed to my bedroom walls. It was years before I'd replace them all with a map of Ireland and a poster of Tori Amos holding a shotgun on a patio full of snakes.

“Show me?” My mother's still calling and calling from the bed.

 • • • 

After, she sits with me on the balcony, as I eat my four ounces of scrod and sip at the pre-dancing cocktail she made especially for me, a French 75 she shook and strained into an ornate crystal flute from the back of her glass hutch. It's topped with a lemon peel she knifed into an elegant twist. “Am I a good bartender or what?”

“You're not having one?” I ask her.

“I'm good,” she says, waggling her club soda at me, which she also poured into a champagne flute to make it festive. She's watching me eat and sip, among the vases of stargazers we keep forgetting to water, like I'm on-the-edge-of-your-seat television.

“What?” I ask her, keeping my eyes on the dusk. The sky is the color of a busted peach over the shimmer of lake.

“Nothing. How is it?”

I shrug. “Good.”

“Good.” She's not eating or drinking, just watching. Arms folded. Refolded. Opening and closing her mouth with me. Take your time.
Enjoy
it. “So. Tom, huh?”

“Yup.”

“When will he be here, again?”

“Friday night.”

“Friday night. Tomorrow,” she says. “Has your father met him yet?”

“No.”

She looks pleased about this.

“How is your father?”

“Fine.”

“He must be proud of you.”

My father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel's zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, prove him wrong. I started seeing him even less. Now, I wouldn't say he's proud of me. As far as he is concerned, things have just become as they should be. I've finally put down the flag. Taken off the turban. Case closed. Good for me.

“I guess he is.”

“He never really notices. But he notices. We should do lunch. Or brunch. Someplace by the water. Depending on what your beau would like. What are you going to wear?”

The last time Tom picked me up from the airport, I was wearing a black twinset and a red fishtail skirt I drown in now. Three-hole Docs with thick rubber soles that deeply depress my mother.
Don't they depress you?
A satchel with a skull Liquid-Papered on the front flap slapping against my broad thigh.

“Not sure yet.”

“You're really going to move out there, huh?”

“Eventually. We can't do the long-distance thing forever. And because of his job he can't move to where I am.”

“What about your job?”

“I can temp anywhere. Or there are bookstores. Cafés.”

“Cafés? But didn't you get a degree in . . . what was it? Medieval something, right?”

French literature, though it was art history in the end. And I didn't finish, exactly.

“Something like that. Don't worry, I can get another job.”

“Still. All the way out there.”

I look at the lake, thinking of the broad expanse of red desert where he lives in the Southwest, of strange yellow sky, a body of salt water upon which even a plane could float. The way he looks at me, his gaze serene and unflinching.

“I like it out there,” I tell my mother.

“But how are you going to survive in the desert when all you eat is fish?” She looks at my scrod. “What kind's that one?”

Just four ounces, I told the monger from across the icy trays of splayed fish, tentacles, and live crustaceans. As he was wrapping it up in brown paper, he threw in a butterflied fillet of another slim fish I didn't recognize, its head still on. I looked at its milky eye, its open mouth full of tiny little teeth like claws, then at him grinning.

Trust me, he said.

“Well,” my mother says to me, “should we get ready?”

 • • • 

In the bedroom, later that night, she flips channels until we find an old Hepburn I haven't seen. “You haven't
seen
this?”

Though she claims it's her favorite, she isn't watching the screen. She's watching my face to see if I'm catching all the lovely
bits, all the lines she's memorized. I keep my features immobile as I sit by the sliding glass balcony door, her crystal ashtray between my splayed legs, blowing smoke rings into the crack between the door and the frame. I pretend I don't feel her watching me. “This is so nice,” says my mother, breathless on the bed. “I like this. Taking it easy.”

You sure you're okay just sitting here? I asked her tonight at the salsa club, sweat dripping from my chin into her cranberry and soda with lime.

I'm having a ball, she said, twiddling her toes and taking a sip of her drink as if to show me what a ball it was. You go back out there, she said. Go back, go back! All night, she watched from a table while on the dance floor, I got passed from one partner to the next. Turns they didn't cover in the free salsa lesson tripped me up, but I did my best to follow, just follow, it's easy, or so all the panther-footed men told me. Don't
try
so hard, said a man in a black guayabera patterned with red flames when I lost my footing on a spin. You're trying too hard, he said. To be all sexy. With your hips. Just listen to the music. Just follow the beat. Annoyed with him, I went back to my mother.

Can we go home now, please?

But she wouldn't leave until the floor had emptied of men and the band had begun to pack up. I thought for sure she would want to go home after that, but when I mentioned it, she said, Are you kidding? The night's young! Go where you would go if I wasn't here, if you were with friends. The truth is I'd go home. Instead, she retrieved a city weekly from a trash can on the corner, made me hunt for a Goth night in Capitol Hill.

You sure about this? I asked her as she handed two fivers to a man in bondage gear who stamped black snakes on our hands.

Go on, my mother said over the blare of German industrial, giving me a small push into the swishing columns of dust-ridden light. She watched me turn under the mirror ball through the smoke from a table just off the dance floor, chin on her fists. I spun though my limbs ached, counting the songs off in my head, until I felt I'd made it if not worth her while, then at least worth the price of two covers.

 • • • 

She scoops up her meowing cat and puts him on the bed beside her. “Where's his collar?”

I tore the hideous rhinestone monstrosity from his neck and threw it over the balcony railing while she was at work the other day. Watched it disappear between the tall pines, then fall with a plop into the dark water. The bell made a pleasant tinkling sound all the way down.

“Don't know,” I say now. “Must have taken it off.”

“He can't do that. Not by himself. Not the way I put it on.”

“Well maybe it came loose or something. How are your feet?” I ask her, looking at them still encased in the Keds.

Her eyes flit from my neck to the television, where Audrey's ice-cream cone has just fallen into the Seine.

“Fine,” she says, not looking back at me.

 • • • 

I don't know how long I've been standing here dangerously close to the ice beds full of bleeding fish and live crustaceans, watching them gut and clean slabs of salmon and pike, daring them to spill something on me. Afternoon. I'm alone. Above me, the gray sky is spinning but I ignore that and the fact of the terribly soft asphalt under my feet.

Just need to use the restroom, I told my mother and Tom, who are waiting for me now at a table by the window, by the water.

So you have a view, she told him. You need to have a view.

Be back in a minute, I told them.

Now I rock back on my heels, not the heels she laid out for me this morning. Not the dress she laid out for me either. This one's a white and black Max Azria that looks like the dress Grace Kelly wears in
Rear Window
. When I came out of the fitting room in it, my mother said nothing for a full minute, then she said, You're going to get raped. I have to keep my back straight if I want to keep the sweetheart neckline from sliding down, which it did twice in the fitting room. Tricky, my mother said, standing in the slit between the curtains. But if you can pull it off? Shit. I wanted to wear a cardigan with it, but my mother said, That'll ruin it—just keep your back straight and your arms close to your sides like this. Like this. Exactly. Five-inch red patent leather Guess heels. Just remember to take the price stickers off, she said. I didn't. They're still on the soles, black Sharpie slashes over the original price, the half-off price in red ink.

I teeter closer to the stall, evaluating the different men behind the glass case, their biceps flexing as they throw and sing, throw and sing.

I pick the one with the Hellraiser hair and the missing incisor and the eyes the no-color of oceans. We'll do it in the dark of the truck full of ice and fresh-caught fish. And he'll kiss my neck with a hot mouth and tug on my hair with his fish-gut hands. They'll streak watery blood all over the dress and the sweetheart neckline that has fallen down to my navel, and I'll grip his spikes tight in my fists. He'll fuck me so hard, I'll lose one of my mother's clip-ons and underneath me a red heel will snap. And I'll stagger from the truck, earring-less and one heeled, to where my mother and Tom are waiting for me at an elegant oyster bar down the way.
Clutching the blood-strewn bag she bought me by its rhinestone handle. Fish guts in my hair. Blood and ice running in pink rivulets down my biceps, but I'll be grinning from ear to ear. I'll be grinning so hard its hurts my face.

I'll make a pit stop at the flower stall to watch them arrange stargazers. To the Vietnamese woman, I'll say, A bouquet, please. For my mother. I'll hold the stems in dangerously loose fingers, dragging their heads along the sidewalk. At the pier's edge, where she's watched me eat how many apples, where the homeless sleep curled on benches and the corporate men eat their gourmet grilled cheeses with their ties blowing backward in the breeze of the sound, I'll lie on the wet grass, the flowers across my lap, the yellow pollen spilling onto the white and black taffeta. Such gorgeous detail—look at the details, said my mother, taking the hem between her thumb and forefinger. Eating my apple, I'll smile at my own bruised legs splayed out in front of me, letting the juice run out of my mouth corners, and I'll look neither to the right nor to the left, but only at the light dancing on the gray water. And the taste of the apple, cold and sweet, will be like roses, will blend with the blood and salt and fish in my mouth, into something heavenly.