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

A call from Beth is making his cell vibrate on the passenger seat for the fourth time. He ignores it. When he gets home he'll tell her the phone fell between the seats.

 • • • 

When he gets back, she's curled on the couch, flipping through a cookbook called
Roast Chicken and Other Stories
, watching
America's Next Top Model
. The only thing more disturbing than when she does this is when she watches the Food Network with a legal pad on her lap, taking notes for decadent meals he knows she'll never make.

“Went for Wendy's, did we?” she says, not looking up from the screen.

“Course not.” It isn't a lie.

He sits beside her on the couch. She's watching the final episode of cycle ten. He knows this because this is the one cycle she has on iTunes, the one she watches the most often, where a plus-size model wins. The first time they watched the fat girl win—he didn't so much watch as look up every now and then from playing
World of Warcraft
on his laptop—even he was moved. He thought, Good for her. Good for
society
. He turned to look at Beth thinking she would be ecstatic, and was surprised to see a punched-in look of abject pain on her face.

“Jesus, Beth. What is it?”

“I just think that Somalian girl should have won. She had prettier features. Overall.”

Despite this stance, she still watches this episode every so often, always with a shameful fascination. When it's over, she turns off the TV, closes
Roast Chicken and Other Stories
, and looks at him.

“Are you coming to bed?”

“In a bit. Think I'll just fuck around on the computer for a while first.”

 • • • 

Dickie won't shut up about the fat girl. Tom figured after a few weeks, Dickie would have moved on to other pastures. That once more, he'd start telling tales about a hot receptionist's subpar blowing technique or how he got one of the Goldman Sachs girls who work nearby drunk enough on Tito's to dress up as a furry. But no, every time Dickie opens his mouth it's to tell them about this chick. How it's the best sex he's ever had. He can't even quite put it into words, it's so good. It's like they've reached a higher sexual plane or something. Really, it's enough to drive anyone crazy. He talks about it over Fireballs at Dead Goat. Pizza benders at the Italian Village. The free lunch buffet at the nearby strip bar, Southern X-posure, where Dickie's eyes don't even graze the firm curves of the glaring dancers whom he describes as hot but dead inside. Over cigarettes in the office parking lot, the exhaust from the nearby interstate blowing in their faces like an end-of-the-world wind, Dickie tells them it's getting serious. In fact, he thinks he might be in love. Last night, he's pretty sure they broke some records. After, they got high and made butter tartlets. He brings in a Tupperware container full of them and offers some to the fat secretaries, all of whom snatch greedy handfuls and say they're just scrumptious. “Aren't they, though?” Dickie winks.

He offers one to Tom, who coldly refuses.

 • • • 

Saturday. Fourth of July. He and Beth are driving toward Hot Pocket's house for the staff barbecue. She's sulking in the passenger's seat, hunched over a veggie platter with a ramekin of
fat-free hummus in the center. Hunched as much as she can be, given that she is wearing yet another far-too-tight dress. New. Black, like she's in mourning. Patterned with small, prim flesh-colored flowers. Fishnets. Heels. To a barbecue.

“Is it too much?” she asked him on their way out the door.

My god, yes.

“You look great.”

Now she isn't talking to him, just staring fixedly at the windshield. When he asks her what she wants to listen to, she says, “Whatever you'd like.” He pats her knee and she pats his hand but she's still staring at the windshield.

“Seriously, you choose,” she says to the glass. Probably she's upset because she's missing what she calls her “treat day.” Every other Saturday night, she permits herself two double margaritas and enchiladas verdes at the Blue Iguana, followed by a Brownie Bonanza at Ben & Jerry's. Though it scares and saddens him a little to see her hunger let loose upon a small complimentary basket of tortilla chips, he too looks forward to these Saturday nights. It's the only night when her smirk goes slack, the noose of restraint loosened enough for her features to soften, her beauty at last unbuckling its belt. She is never more expansive and easygoing in conversation than when she's snatching chips from the basket with quick fingers. He's learned not to look at the fingers. If he does, she'll stop. On those nights, they discuss what they used to discuss on those long phone chats and during her first visits: movies and books and their mutual music loves and hates. It's good for a while. What he does not relish is seeing the naked disappointment splayed across her face when the last chip has been eaten, the final spoon of ice cream swallowed, the knowledge that there is another two weeks of sprouts ahead dimming her features like a pre-storm sky. And then of
course, on the way home, she'll begin to feel sick.
I'm so full. I shouldn't have done it. I didn't even enjoy it. Do we have any Perrier at home?
She'll spend the rest of the evening scowling and sucking back Perriers from the bottle, too full and sick for sex.

“Hot Pocket'll have chips and salsa there,” he tells her now. “Ice cream too. All that fun stuff.” He tries to pat her knee again, but she moves away.

She readjusts the jicama and fennel batons on her vegetable tray. Who puts jicama batons on a vegetable tray? He can picture some bleach-toothed Food Network chef saying to the camera, “A vegetable tray doesn't have to be
all
carrots, celery, and grape tomatoes! Why not raise the
wow factor
by adding jicama, fennel, spring onions?” He can see Beth curled on the couch, nodding in agreement, jotting it down on her legal pad to try later, along with all the other kumquat-like items he can never identify that his life is suddenly full of, funking up his fridge and making all the bones inside his wife more visible.

“I can't eat there,” she says now.

“Why not?”

“You
know
why not.”

The rain's coming down again, but it's one of those brief, intense showers they often get in summer.

“No, I really don't.”

“I can't eat in front of
her
.”

By
her
, she means Brindy, the ex-stripper Hot Pocket's married to. Ever since that one time Tom let his eyes linger a little too long on her cleavage as she offered him pigs in a blanket from a tray, Beth has had it in for her.

“Do you think they'll be okay barbecuing this?” she says suddenly, holding up a soggy Yves veggie burger in a plastic bag.

Tom winces at the sight of the fake grill marks, the sad little kernels of corn and pea poking out of the damp taupe patty.

“Don't see why not.”

“Well, I wouldn't want to offend Brindy. Can we listen to something a bit less depressing?”

“You don't like this? It's yours. I found it in your collection.” He'd put on an old Dead Can Dance album she used to listen to on near continuous loop when he first met her. She would lie there while it played, looking up at the ceiling completely still, like she was dead.

Now she's looking at the car speaker as though it is a spider she wants dead but is too afraid to kill. He turns off the music. “What do you want to listen to, then?”

“Whatever you want. Just nothing
too
amped up. And nothing too depressing.” That's code for electronica, classical, and pretty much everything else he loves that she used to love too.

“This isn't depressing. It's just sad. Sad is beautiful. Sad makes me happy.”

“Well, it just makes me sad.”

He looks at her rearranging her shawl across her thin shoulders. This woman who, on their first visits, used to love nothing more than lying on her back on his hardwood floor, content to let tears drip from her eye corners and pool in her ears for whole Nick Cave albums.

“Her tits are fake, you know,” she says now. “Brindy's tits.” She never ceases to remind him of this.

“So I've heard,” he says.

“Also they leak. She told me herself. She's had to have, like, a million surgeries to correct it. Because they leak. It's sad, really.”

“It is,” he says, eyes on the road. “Very sad.”

Brindy answers the door in cutoff jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, an outfit that Beth will later tell him she wore on purpose to taunt her.

“Tom!” Brindy cries, giving him a hug.

“I hardly recognized you, Elizabeth,” she says, smiling at her. Provoking her, Beth would say. “You look beautiful. You're always so dressed up, I love it.”

And can you believe when she made that comment about she loved how dressed up
I was?
she will say later.
I mean, my god. What a vajazzled cunt
.

In Beth's dark glare, Tom is careful, supremely careful not to let his eye dwell too long on the long supple legs, the firm breasts of his buddy's wife.

In the kitchen, Brindy offers them both watermelon daiquiris. “You have to try them. They're
so
yummy!” In his peripheral vision, he sees Beth's face darken, becoming an abacus of sugar and carb counting. Unable to watch, he leaves them there in the kitchen before he can hear her ask, Do you have any dry white?

Outside, Hot Pocket is flipping T-bones on the barbecue in his Oakleys, a pyramid of marinated beef on a large aluminum platter to his left. Ribs. Tenderloins. More T-bones. He's wearing Bermuda shorts and one of those T-shirts that says
GAME OVER
featuring an altar-bound bride and groom standing side by side, the groom with little X's in his eyes.

“Tom,” he says, fishing a Fat Tire out of the cooler and tossing it over.

“We, uh, brought something for the grill,” Tom says, holding up the soggy packet of veggie patty like it's the tail of a dead skunk.

“Jesus.” Hot Pocket raises his Oakleys and holds the package up to the sunlight. “What the hell is this anyway?”

Tom shrugs. “Some sort of tofu thing. It's for Beth,” he adds, in a slightly lowered voice.

Hot Pocket looks over at Beth, who is scowling between two tiki torches, sniffing doubtfully at a blue corn chip. Tom wants Hot Pocket to protest this addition to the barbecue in the holy name of all this meat he's about to set fire to, but he just slaps him on the back and says, “Can do.”

Tom stays hunched morosely by the meat smells, getting drunk on Fat Tires until his view of the backyard begins to sway a little. A few more people arrive. Most of the men, he sees, are looking at Beth, who is too busy glaring at Brindy to notice. He grabs another Fat Tire from the cooler.

“So where's Dickie anyway?” he mutters aloud. “Thought he was coming to this thing.” All week Dickie had said he'd be coming. He even threatened to bring his new girlfriend.

“Yes,” Brindy calls from the picnic table, “where is Dickie?” Everyone knows no party really starts until Dickie's arrived.

“Probably fucking that fat girl,” Beth says, and by the way she says it, Tom knows she's at least two drinks past tallying up alcohol units and carbohydrate grams.

“What fat girl?” Brindy asks.

“Just this chick Dickie's dating right now,” Hot Pocket says, giving the steaks another flip.

“Awww. I think that's sweet,” Brindy says, grabbing a handful of corn chips.

“It is not
sweet
,” Beth spits. “He calls it
gastro sex
, for God's sake. And he's only fucking her 'cause she'll do anything. How is that
sweet
?”

“
I
think it's sweet,” Brindy insists quietly, nibbling on a corn chip.

“Not sure how I'm going to tell when this is done, Elizabeth,” Hot Pocket says, poking at the veggie patty with his tongs. “These, uh, grill marks here are a little confusing.”

“Just when it starts to get brown, Matt.” She always calls him Matt.
Because I'm not calling a grown man Hot Pocket.

“K,” Hot Pocket says doubtfully. He slaps the patty on the grill. It starts to hiss and pop, like an evil, unending fart.

 • • • 

Tom had been looking forward to this meal of meat and corn on the cob and chips and mayonnaisey salads all week. But now that it's all piled before him beautifully on a paper plate, he can't eat. Instead he feels his blood pressure rise, his fork grip become tighter as he hears his wife say, No, No, No, but thanks, to nearly every dish offered. He relaxes a little when at last she accepts some garden salad to accompany her plate of jicama sticks and a bunless veggie patty. When she begins to stab lamely at the lettuce, he decides he's not going to let her ruin this for him any longer and tears into his ribs violently but without pleasure.

“How come you're not having any?” asks Maddy, the seven-year-old daughter of Hot Pocket and Brindy, addressing Beth. Maddy is dressed as a fairy princess and her mouth is covered in barbecue sauce. She's gazing at Beth intently with her mother's large hazel eyes.

Beth looks from Maddy's paper wings to her plastic tiara and gives her an awkward smile. “Because I don't eat meat.”

“Maddy, honey, eat your burger,” Brindy says.

But Maddy isn't interested in her burger. She is staring at Beth. Tom winces, hearing the child's question before the words even form on her barbecue sauce–stained lips.

“Didn't you used to be really f—”

“You know,” Brindy interrupts, “I just love that dress, Elizabeth. Where did you say you got it again?”

He feels Beth looking at him from across the table, but keeps his gaze fixed on the half-gnawed ribs on his plate.