13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (11 page)

What the hell happened to you? my mother will say when I hand her the stargazers.

Fell, I'll tell her.

“Can I help you?” one of them says to me now.

“Help me?”

“Something you want from out of here?” he says, smacking the glass case with his rubber-gloved fist.

I look from the men back down to the display of splayed
fish. “That one,” I say to him, pointing to it. Bigger than the last one. I smile at the curved teeth in its large open mouth, the gray-white tongue lolling out a little, silvery black scales broken along the sides of its beautifully hideous face.

“What, no four ounces today?”

“That's it. Thanks.”

As I walk away, I realize that even though I was standing there for so long, not one drop of blood has touched me. Not even a bit of pinky water. When I turn away to go back to the restaurant, I don't even smell of fish, despite the package in my purse. I smell of apple and the Angel she dabbed in my neck hollows.

 • • • 

As I approach the table, I reach for my mother's glass of cava and nearly collapse into the oysters on ice, but he catches me with a firm grip.

“Careful there,” Tom mumbles.

“Where did you disappear to?” my mother asks me.

“I told you. Toilet,” I say, falling back into my chair. Even seated, I'm spinning. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I feel the tug of the dark water. I stare at the side of his face, hoping he'll turn toward me, steady me, but he keeps his gaze focused on my mother, the window, some distant point I can't fathom. I paw through my purse for a lighter, while the floor opens up beside me.

“Thought you'd fallen down it, didn't we?” my mother says, looking at Tom, who smiles politely. She reaches across the table and holds a tea light up to my unlit tip.

“We did,” Tom says, taking my hand, not looking at me.

Later, he offers to take a picture of us with my mother's disposable while there's still some light in the sky.

“Could you?” she says.

“Okay, now lean in. A little closer together so I can get you both in.” But no matter how close together he brings us with his hands, my mother and I still don't touch.

 • • • 

“He's a keeper,” my mother says to me while she watches me pack Sunday morning. All the satiny strappy shoes I'll never wear again. Clothes that will ring wrong against my skin in terms of texture, in terms of color, the minute she isn't there to tap her toes and clap for me, like the sight of me is music, is the song she loves best. After we're done, we go to her balcony and have coffee, sit amid the dead stargazers in their stale green water. Through her sliding glass door that looks into the living room, we stare at his sleeping body curled on her sofa bed like we stared at the chimps at the zoo earlier this week. “Hang on to him,” she says.

“I will,” I say. Last night, after she went to bed, I reached for him and he turned away from me. I lay there awake beside him, watching the silent rise and fall of his body, listening to her gasp for breath in the next room. I thought of me in her ideas of sexy pressed up against a wall full of hooks. Making him destroy all the bits of gauze and lace with his hands and his lips until I'm a thing just peeled and blazing. And he either doesn't mind or doesn't see the traces of the girl I was before. Doesn't mind or doesn't see the raised skin and the slack skin. He doesn't see because we're in the dark of the truck or he doesn't care. He says the word
sexy
into the whorl of my ear like it's a live thing, a freshly shucked pearl. A secret I've pulled out of him in spite of himself, like sweet deep water from a well.

“He almost didn't recognize you, I'll bet,” my mother says now, fishing.

What are you wearing anyway? That a new dress?
he asked me later that night, when we were alone on my mother's balcony. I was smoking and he was staring out at the lake, keeping me company.

You don't like it?

I like it. Just I've never seen you in anything like it. It's . . . intense.
He smiled.
It just doesn't really look like you, that's all.

I looked at him looking at the water.
I can change,
I said.

Don't change. Why would you change?

I could feel myself start to cry, so I turned away and looked at the lake too. Tom reached over and took my cigarette from me. He inhaled shallowly, like a nonsmoker, coughing a little, holding it wrong.

When I was a kid,
he said,
my dad would take me to the barber every four weeks and force me to get this buzz cut like he had in the air force. I hated it so much and finally one day, I told him. Dad, I hate this.

What happened?

Tom took another drag of the cigarette.
He called me an asshole.
Right there in front of the barber and all these old men getting their hair cut.

What? But you were just a kid.
I looked at his sandy hair, chin length and unbrushed.

That was my dad.
He took one more drag, coughed and handed it back.
It's a nice color on you. It really is.

 • • • 

“Almost,” I tell my mother now. She watches me fold the last of my dresses into my suitcase. “What is it?” I ask her.

“Nothing,” she says, watching me snap the suitcase shut. She helps herself to a croissant. “You'll call when you get home?”

“Yes.” I won't. Not for a long time.

I watch her break the croissant in half, pick at each half until it's flakes, then eat it like it's dust. “Mom? Is there anything I should know?”

My mother looks down, begins to gather crumbs by pressing the pads of her fingers into the plate.

“About what?”

How you can't breathe, for a start. How you can't feel your feet. “About you,” I say.

“Me?” My mother shrugs. Shakes her head. Refolds her arms on the table. I notice that underneath her linen coverall, she's wearing the same shapeless black shift dress she's been wearing almost every day since I got here. Stained with the sauce from last night's mussels. Her feet are still encased in the withered Keds. The only thing she's varied from day to day is a bolero of black lace and her costume jewelry. The violet set, made of blown Italian glass, lies in a small heap on the place mat. She looks shorn without it. With her spikes yet to be slicked, her hair looks shaggy around her face and lighter, almost auburn. She licks the rose petal jam quickly off the butter knife, presses the pads of her fingers into her plate to gather more crumbs but there are none.

Years after she dies, when I'm on vacation in a small seaside town, I will think I see her in an outdoor café. A woman in black wearing Jackie O sunglasses. She'll look exactly like my mother except she'll be thin. Seated alone at a table for two. I'll watch the afternoon sun lick her black hair red for I don't know how long, her nose tilted into an open book. Elegant sips of espresso, each one leaving a plummy lipstick imprint on the china. Ignoring a chocolate torte right in front of her. I'll look at her with my mouth open
and tears in my eyes until she'll suddenly get up and leave. I'll follow her from the café to a butcher shop and then to a flower shop and then to a market and that's where I'll lose her. I'll turn circles in the midst of the stalls for what seems like hours before giving up and walking back to my hotel.

“Just you're beautiful,” she says now to the empty plate. “Just I'll miss you.” She reaches out, runs a hand along the side of my face, brushing a lock of hair back from my eyes. She tucks it behind my ear. There.

S
he took the dry cleaning ticket from me and disappeared behind the plastic shrouded coats and yellowed wedding dresses I don't know how long ago. I'm standing by the counter, smoking in her gutted aquarium of an establishment, trying not to breathe in the scent of chemicals and old clothes people should have thrown out, given away, maybe burned a long time ago. I'm feigning interest in the ugly walls, the dubious certificates, waiting for whatever it is my mother brought here a few days ago and never picked up.

I found the dry cleaning stub in her knockoff Gucci purse, which I picked up from the police station. It was in the swampy main pocket along with some loose change, one Chanel lipstick, and a worn leather wallet full of cards. The ticket was carefully folded, its corners nicked here and there with her uncapped plummy lipstick.
Fit4U,
the ticket says.
Pick up after 5:30 Mon to Fri. Pick up 2:30 Sat.
There's an address and a number underneath stamped in red ink.

I found Fit4U in a mini-mall on the outskirts of town, between
a holistic center that looked closed and a Thai massage parlor that looked very open. A narrow storefront of murky glass. A small statue of a fat Buddha leering through the barred windows beside a profusely flowering fake plant. A woman behind the counter with hair and eye shadow out of John Waters, a worn tape measure around her neck. Glasses perched so far down the bridge of her slender nose, I wonder how she can possibly see out of them. She was wearing a sweater patterned with Christmas trees even though it was June. Her palms were pressed hard into the countertop like there could be a shotgun beneath it. There was a man sitting absolutely still on the rust-colored love seat beside the counter with his eyes wide open. Maybe she'd killed him. This is what I sincerely thought until I saw him blink.

Surely my mother did not come here, I thought, for her dry cleaning/alteration needs. Surely there was somewhere nicer she could have gone. I looked at the dry cleaning ticket again and sure enough, this was the address, and when I handed the woman behind the counter the stub, she didn't blink, just turned around and disappeared into the back of the store.

That was at least an hour ago now. Since then, I've taken a hungover tour of the mini-mall. Smoked five and a half cigarettes in my mother's Taurus with the window rolled down slightly, staring at the barred storefront through her streaked windshield, the scratched-off letters in the shirts/laundry/alterations sign, trying to think about nothing. Not the funeral director's message on my voice mail, his tone striving for grandfatherly. Telling me it's ready for me to pick up anytime.
It
meaning my mother.

Then I go back inside the shop, but she's still nowhere to be seen.

I stand at the counter, tapping my foot, my eyes fixed on a dusty bell beside the ancient cash register. An almost irresistible urge to ring that bell creeps into my fingers. “Hello?” I call out.

My cell phone starts ringing. Maybe my husband wondering where I am, or else the funeral director again. Yesterday, I sat across from this man at a highly polished table, staring at the gold rings on each of his swollen pinkies as he explained the cremation procedure, his voice that time attempting to emulate an ocean wave, the serenity that is eternal slumber. I focused my eyes on his rings so I wouldn't be blown apart by his words. I even felt myself nodding. Like yes, yes, I was interested, scientifically, in the combustion process, in how my mother would blow up in a box. How some of the ashes gathered might not be my mother's. But all of the ashes gathered would be mine to keep, of course. In a receptacle of my choosing.
We have several models to choose from, all quite tasteful,
I think you'll find
.
Here.
And he slid a glossy catalog full of eyesores across the table for me to peruse. My task now to retrieve the least offensive of the ill-fitting options. I was used to hunting for that. So was my mother.

I let my phone ring.

“Hello?” I call again into the bowels of the shop.

No answer, no movement from inside the fortress of hanging clothes, not even a blink from the love seat man.

I ring the bell by the cash register. Nothing. I ring it again, harder.

“Jesus,” the woman says, at last emerging from the back, and I realize I've been pounding on the bell for some time. I stop mid-bang, my palm still raised over the bell like it could strike again anytime.

“You her daughter?”

“Yes.”

She gives me an appraising look but I'm in a black hole of a dress today, one in which you can't discern tit from waist from hip.

I see she's toting a dark dress shrouded in plastic by her finger crook. She's holding it at a distance, at arm's length, like I once saw a Mormon receptionist carry a cup of black coffee to her boss at an office I temped at. She hangs it up now on the chrome rack between us. Even before she does this, I recognize the dress. Deep blue like the hour between the dog and the wolf. An attractively scooped neckline. Sleeves and hemline a length and cut you would call kind. Buttons in back like discreetly sealed lips. Good give in the fabric. Double lined. The sort of dress that looks like nothing but a sad dark sack on the hanger, but on the body it's a different story. Takes extremely well to accessories. My mother loved this sort of dress. At whatever weight she was—thin, fat, middling—she owned an iteration. I saw her wear it to work, lunch with friends, on dates, to movies, parties, funerals. I saw her wear it alone in her apartment for days on end. Scratch at a stain on the boob.
Shit.
The hemline begin to unravel.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Do you have a safety pin?
Holes begin to appear in the armpits.
Jesus.
The sleeves fray.
Well. That's that, isn't it?
She wore it so much she'd wear it out and then she'd have to hunt for another, whip through the plus-size racks for something that fit just as impossibly well, that was just as dignified, just as forgiving in its plain dark elegance.

I look at it now hanging in plastic on the rack. Whatever desire I have to cry dies when I see a note on a yellow square of paper safety-pinned to the neckline with some red loopy handwriting on it. I've seen that yellow paper safety-pinned on this
dress or one of its sisters before. Suddenly I'm business. My mother's hands pointing to the note, wanting answers, please.

“What's this?”

She sighs. Takes the dress off the hanger and spreads it on the counter between us. The smell of her perfume, her old sweat rises up ripe between us. There is my mother. Barefoot in her apartment, playing solitaire on her deck, splayed knees stretching the skirt, toes twiddling under the table. Lying on the sagging boat of her brass bed after a long workday, flipping channels, too tired to change. Asleep with her mouth open, her troubled breathing, the hemline hitched up and tangled around her legs.

She smooths down the fabric now, lifts up the hemline, exposing the myriad holes in the slip.

Seeing my face, she says, “Those she didn't even ask me to touch. You can't even see those. But I did raise the lining hem for her again, see?”

Fuck fuck fuck. Safety pin, do you have one?

“This, though.” She points to a jagged hole on the hip.

Jesus.

“I couldn't fix this because it's not on the seam, see?” Then she pokes her finger through the hole and wags it back and forth, shaking her head.

Stop that!
My mother's anger rising in my throat. Her hands itching through mine to take a swipe at this woman's wagging finger. “I see.”

I watch her run her fingers along the frayed sleeves, the sagging neckline, the holes in the armpits, all lost causes according to her.

“Nothing you can do about that,” she says each time she points
to a rip, a fray, a hole, raising her chin to look at me through her narrow little frames. “I told her.”

I nod, a heady mix of rage and shame spreading through my chest like fire.

“Now, here.” She turns the dress around and shows me the back.

I look at the new black buttons she's sewn down the spine. There are only two of the original buttons left at the base, small, dainty iridescent bulbs like pearls. “I told her I might not have something like these,” she says, waggling the two pearly ones like they were dubious anyway, fanciful.

“Don't touch those.” The words come out of my mouth like a cough, my mother's low growl suffusing my own hiss.

“Excuse me?”

I stare at the buttonholes, worn from all the give and tug they've endured. I see the expanse of my mother's back, the red imprints of zippers and too-tight buttons on her skin along the spine.

Can you button this for me?

Giving me her back and putting her hands up in the air like she was being arrested.

You can't do it,
she'd say after a while, her raised arms beginning to sag downward, her spine going slack.

Hang on,
I'd say.

Okay I'll stop breathing. Here. Try now.

“But here's the real problem,” the woman continues. She points to a small cluster of holes by the hip that look like the dress was gored on one side by Freddy Krueger. “I mean, what even happened here?” There's accusation in her voice.

The rage in me dies abruptly, momentarily.

“I don't know.”

“Well.” she says, pushing the dress across the counter toward me, “Nothing I can do about it.”

“What do you mean
nothing
?” I push the dress across the counter toward the woman. “Surely something?” I add in a quieter voice, one that sounds like my own.

“Nothing,” she says, shoving the dress back at me.

“Nothing.” The word falls from my lips like a stone.

And that's when it comes back to me in stereo: mothers of various sizes, mothers of varying hairstyles—permed in the eighties, waved and wispy-banged in the nineties, choppy in her final years—but always the same plummy mouth twisted, the same face contorted by outrage and shame, storming out of glass doors with the same broken, balled-up dark dress in her fist. Tossing it into the backseat of the car and slamming the door with a violence that always made me jump. Screeching out of the parking lot while the seamstress behind the counter within, always with the same tape measure around her neck, the same glasses on the far end of her nose, either watched through the window or didn't. My mother driving without a seat belt all the way home, the car making a little dinging noise she ignored.

Nothing,
all these versions of my mother told me when I asked what happened, shaking their heads, their fingers frantically turning the radio dial for a song, any song, to fill the car.

My cell phone starts ringing again. Or maybe it's been ringing this whole time.

“Go try another place,” the woman's saying now. “They'll tell you the same thing I'm telling you.” She's looking at me as if daring me to accuse her again.

I could snatch the dress the off the counter and head to the door like I actually have another place to go. Can see my mother looking at her, poised for more fighting, or maybe at this point she'd be ready to give it up.

Well. That's that, isn't it?

I nod. Suddenly I feel very tired. Like I could sleep for a hundred years.

“Look, I won't charge you for the hemline repair, just the cleaning, okay?” She says it more softly now.

“Okay.” But we both know the dress is beyond cleaning. Even before this woman removed the plastic, it smelled pungently of my mother. I watch her put the plastic covering back on.

“Tell her I tried, okay? But maybe not to bring this one back in again.”

Good choice,
the funeral director said when at last I pointed to one of the vessels at random.
Elegant. Tasteful. And who doesn't love blue?

She takes it off the rack and into her arms, gently now, like it's a maiden, Snow White fresh from her glass coffin. There is such great care in the gesture that it brings another mother back to me briefly. One I didn't see very much. Happy. At ease in her flesh. “I'll tell her,” I say.