13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (18 page)

This morning, I rise from her plastic-covered couch and look at her view of the desert through her compulsively Windexed windows. I see a lake made of salt. An already too-high sun that's blinding. A parched landscape, so far from the one I grew up in.
Come home,
my father said in a voice mail. He'd tried calling me at the apartment and Tom had told him I'd left.
Just come back. Use your mother's money and put a down payment on a place out here. There's no reason for you to be out there anymore. Just come home.
I think of calling him back now. Instead I look up Mel's contact info on my cell phone, my finger hovering over the call button while I stare at her name. She and I haven't talked much at all since I moved out here, though I did call her a few weeks ago one night when I was first sleeping at Eve's. It was awkward. She was pretty miserable, she said, and when I asked why, she said she and her boyfriend were having problems, that she hated her job, and worst of all, she'd gained weight. She didn't want to talk about it. I said she was being too hard on herself, it happened to everyone, and anyway I was sure she was still beautiful. I meant it. When she said nothing, I told her I was feeling miserable too. I told her about me and Tom. It was hard because so much time had passed and there was so much she didn't know. I told it in fragments that felt insubstantial, that seemed to come apart as I spoke, that didn't appear to add up to anything at all against the scrutiny of her silence. Telling her made it all seem petty, somehow. When I finally trailed off, she said,
That sounds rough. I'm sorry.

I think of Tom down there in the parched valley, behind his office door. Maybe he doesn't even know I'm gone. I think of Cassie and her husband, what adventures they might be up to today. Or perhaps it's a lazy day. They've drawn the curtains, are lolling about on their island of couch, he's kissing the thin white strip of shoulder under her straps that the sun never catches.

 • • • 

When I called Aria the other day, I was told Cassie was booked solid. I was offered Hattie. It was like that one time I went to For
Your Eyes Only and asked for the voluptuous redhead, and what they gave me instead was this thin Caribbean girl with poorly done streaks. These days I go to this Vietnamese place down the road Eve recommended.
It isn't so la-dee-dah,
she warned,
but they get the job done
. There are only two kinds of hand treatments—Basic and Spa—and the only difference is paraffin. There's no food in the waiting area either, just a fishbowl full of what looks like licorice but turned out to be nothing but slippery black stones. The one perk is that the proprietress hammers at your upper back and shoulders with her smooth little fists while you're waiting for your nails to dry. It's a nice touch, Eve says, and I agree. Also, she'll do whatever color you want without comment. She'll paint my nails the black-red I love, which will make them look dipped in vampire blood. And at the end of the treatment, when she offers me the emery board, I shake my head no every time. Because what the hell am I going to do with it anyway? She nods and chucks it in the bin, where it belongs. That's our ritual. I tip her exactly 15 percent.

S
ince I've returned home, I sometimes feel compelled to come back here. The sight of the plus-size mannequins in the shop window still soothes me. The outward undulation of stomach as comforting as an ocean wave. Their outfits look surprisingly current, almost hip. Skirts that nearly fishtail. Polka-dot bustiers. Things with eyelets and things edged with lace—and not weird plus-size lace either. Only when you look more closely, observe the generous cuts, the longer hemlines, three-quarter-length sleeves, do you see how they give themselves away as clothes for those with something to hide.

When I enter the shop, I see the familiar stepped display of boatneck T-shirts, the ones emblazoned with iron-on appliqués of various animals. Mainly varieties of cat. Cheetahs. Tigers. Domestic shorthairs gleefully swiping at balls of yarn. The animals regard me with those sequined eyes that, in former years, when I couldn't shop anywhere else, I used to dream of gouging out. The music they play in here hasn't changed. Instrumental variants of soul
tunes still drip from unseen speakers. Songs with lyrics that always seem to revolve around the word
woman
. You make me feel like a natural woman. When a man loves a woman, etc. As if the idea of being a woman in here requires convincing. I watch the fat female shoppers within pawing through the racks, presumably hunting for The Least of All Evils: a black cardigan without rhinestone jetties or webs of pearl across the front; a stretchy unadorned V- or scoop neck. Back when I had to shop here, I used to do the same. I'd spend hours hunting for something—anything—that would render me moderately fuckable. And if not fuckable, something in which I could grieve over the fact of not being fuckable with unbaubled dignity. I make my way through these racks, among these women, not one of them anymore, and yet one of them still, and it's as though I've never left. I really should stop coming here.

The saleslady, seeing me hold up a zebra-patterned A-line dress, asks if she can help me. She doesn't recognize me, of course. How could she? It's been years since I've shopped here and I've lost God knows how much in that time, maybe a full-grown woman. Also, I went by a different name. Also, I never used to come in here alone, but with my mother.

Though my mother also had to shop here, make do with Addition Elle slacks and sweaters, she, like this saleswoman, always wore a necklace that matched her earrings that matched her bag that matched her shoes. She called this “jazzing it up.” My mother and this saleswoman got along famously.

The saleswoman doesn't remember me, but I remember her. Her jewelry is still aggressively cheerful, still screams, I'm trying to make the best of things. But whereas once she spoke to me kindly via my mother, her tone with me now is suspicious, her
eyes dipping down my body to size me up. I'm not within the 14-to-24 range. What the hell am I doing here?

Just looking, thanks, I tell her.

She glances sideways at her colleague, who is folding monster bras under a
FUNCTIONAL CAN BE SEXY
sign. I smile at them both warmly, like I'm spreading my arms open wide, like these are my sisters. They smile back doubtfully. What, am I mocking them?

I feel her following me as I weave my way through the boleros and heavy chain-mail dresses that make up Evening Wear, so I grab a couple of dresses off the rack at random. A striped caftan. Something gold and shoulder padded for old times' sake. I'm about to head for the fitting room when I spot a calf-length midnight blue velvet dress with puffed sleeves cinched with rhinestone buckles hanging on a rack close by. I pull it off the rack and replace the others, turn toward the saleswoman, who has indeed been trailing me this whole time.

She looks at me, uncertain. Do I want a fitting room? Really? I really do?

I nod. Yes. I do.

She leads me back with palpable reluctance.

The fitting room is exactly as I remember it.

All mirrors and merciful lighting. The door, thick and bolted, made of reinforced steel that goes right to the floor. No terrible smurf I can't see on the other side of this wall, squawking for a size 0 or an extra-extra small. Apart from the heavy rustle of thick thighs straining against slacks, everyone's silent. Through the wall, I hear a woman tell another woman that the pants look fine, no, no, they look just fine. Inside, there's a wide padded bench so you can see if something embarrassing happens when you sit
down. The bench I used to sit on with folded arms in a monster bra the color of gunmetal. All the sweater sacks and stirrup pants I was supposed to be trying on lying at my feet like kicked cats. Shaking my head. Being difficult. My mother and the saleswoman knocking on the door.
Let's see!
Or sometimes my mother would come in with me and sit there, watch me change into and out of things. It looks fine, she'd say. She said that every time except once, when she turned away, attempting to mask her disgust at the sight of the fresh mess of red stretch marks across my stomach. Even though she had the same marks on her own stomach, she couldn't bear seeing them on me. Hadn't she tried, in her way, to spare me from inheriting her fate? I can still see them now in the mirror, faded.

I hang the dress on a hook on the back of the door, run my hands over the fuzzy velvet. Give or take a few details, this is more or less the dress. An updated version bearing the brunt of the latest trends. The same midnight blue shade my mother said was “black enough, Jesus,” knowing no dress sold in this store was ever black enough for me. The same buckles, affixed lamely to the puffed sleeves, that I remember trying so hard to rip off. I even got Mel's aunt, who was a seamstress, to try to remove them legitimately. She stood there under my armpit for nearly a half hour, a frowning Slovenian elf, a cigarette dangling from her hairy lip, pulling and pulling on the buckle, then shaking her head like a doctor at a lost cause.
No,
she said at last,
I cannot remove without damaging sleeves.

So do it anyway, I wanted to say. But all I said was,
Oh.

Meanwhile Mel stood nearby like an innocent bystander, corseted in brocade and fishtailed in velvet, switching from a concerned expression to sneak pleased peeks at herself in the full-length mirror. In three hours from that moment, I knew I'd
be watching her wrapped around some mangy Goth boy on the dance floor, her front laces undone, her skirt hitched up high, while I leaned against a nearby wall watching and counting the minutes to pizza on the sidewalk.

I take the dress off the hanger now, hold it up against me.

I ended up getting some action in it, if you can believe it. Fetish night at Savage Garden. A silver-shirted boy with sea urchin hair. Mel had dragged me there against my will, then spent the whole night making out with some man who resembled a melancholy pirate. I was wearing this velvet atrocity, feeling hideous, leaning against a wall, German industrial music deafening my ears, watching a half-naked woman affixed to a wooden cross get lashed repeatedly in the middle of the dance floor. And he came up to me. First he downed a pitcher of beer, then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then he came up to me. I thought surely he'd go for the emaciated girl in the black halter to my left, but no, it was me he was walking toward, me he took outside and pushed against a brick wall, my face he cupped between his hands to the point where I nearly couldn't breathe. But what was most beautiful? Was how he put his hands up that terrible dress, ripping it on the side, it was so tight.
Oops,
he said, but I didn't mind, in fact, it gave me an idea. And when I asked him to he tore at the buckles. Tore them off both sides with one swift movement, while my hands clutched his hair. The sound of those rips. The
clink clink
sound of the rhinestones hitting the dirty, spit-strewn pavement was the single most erotic experience of my life, until Mel tore me out from under him.

It looked like he was assaulting you,
she told me later on the streetcar home.

Well, he wasn't,
I said.

Well, it looked like he was.
She was irritated. The pirate had had to leave early. She'd been stuck watching me for once.

What the hell happened to you?
my mother asked me when I came home.

Fell,
I told her.

Knock knock from outside the fitting room. Her voice trying for easy breezy: “Are we okay in there?”

We. Why always
we
? What am I?

“We're fine, thanks,” I tell her.

Later, years later, when I'd shrunk, I saw him standing on the corner of Queen and Spadina, waiting for a streetcar. No more blond spikes or metallic shirts. He had brown thinning hair now. Just a man waiting for a streetcar in tan corduroy. I was in my car, waiting for the light to change. There was no way I could've got out then, but it felt like I had to say something. But then the light changed, and even though I searched for him in my rearview mirror I didn't see him.

The saleslady's voice is shrill when she calls to me again.

“Okay, well? We're about to close?”

“Yeah,” I say, fingering the rhinestone buckles. Just a minute.

I'd forgotten how heavy the material was. All the lining underneath.

Slipping it over my head, I'm temporarily blinded. And when I come out of the wide neckhole, I'm still blinded. The track lights, I realize, have gone off above my head. The muzak has abruptly ceased, cutting off Michael Bolton in mid-croon. They're getting serious.

They knock and knock and the dress hangs heavy on me in
the dark. They call, ma'am, ma'am, and I'd say something, but I'm voiceless. Because I thought for sure I'd be swimming in it. Drowning in it, even. That the space between where I ended and the dress began would be miles and miles and miles. But even in the dark, I feel how it's closer than I thought. Dangerously close. And if I wait until my eyes adjust, I'll be able to maybe make out my silhouette in the mirror, I'll be able to measure how much.

L
iving in the South Tower of Phase One in the Beyond the Sea complex, my bedroom window overlooks the Malibu Club Spa and Fitness Centre, which means the first thing I see when I wake up each morning is my neighbor Char's triumph over the ineptitudes of the flesh. Depending on how many times I hit snooze, I'll see her doing leg lifts or thigh abductions or this weird hip jiggle move where she'll stand in front of the mirror, put her hands on her protruding hip bones, and wiggle from side to side in a way that, even though I'm barely awake, profoundly embarrasses me. Most of the time, though, my eyes will open to the sight of her hunched over Lifecycle One, literally all of her bones from the waist up draped over the handlebars in submission to The Task, which, I can only assume, from this vantage point, is the obliteration of the Body Mass Index.

After I wake, I'll stand there looking down at her from the window a long time, even though it exhausts me—physically, spiritually—to watch her. Oddly, from this distance, I find I feel no
hatred even though she is my sworn enemy, even though I know a showdown regarding the time slot issue is inevitable. Sometimes a pity will even bloom in my heart for that small, hunched, pedaling figure. But not for long. Looking down upon her from six floors up, I enjoy a moment of something close to clarity before I shrug on my gym clothes and prepare to dethrone her.

As I make my way to the Malibu Club, which sits between Phase One and Phase Two of Beyond the Sea, a gated community that has nothing to do with California (we are nowhere near California), I brace myself for the inevitable confrontation. I enter the gym, which smells, as it always does, of stale sweat and rancid mop fronds, and eye the Cardio Equipment Booking Sheet, where I've purposefully printed my name for the 7:00 to 7:30 slot for Lifecycle One in big block letters, pressing deep into the page. I see her name sitting above mine in cursive for the 6:30 to 7:00 slot. Mine in unsharpened pencil. Hers in irrefutable ink. Though her handwriting seems easy breezy, I'm not fooled by those lackadaisical loops. I know from experience that she will not go gently into the time slot change.

I'm right. Though it's seven a.m. on the dot by the gym clock and 7:02 by my own watch, which has been set according to the world clock, she's still on the Lifecycle, pedaling like she isn't cooling down anytime soon. Thus far, I have chosen to be the bigger person. First, I do some passive-aggressive calf stretching within her peripheral vision. When she still grips those handlebars like she'll never relinquish them, I stand closer beside her, doing shoulder circles while burning holes into the side of her face with my eyes. When still she proves impervious, I ahem.

She turns to look at me and it is terrifying, this moment
when I am forced to take in the whole of her cardiovascular effort from up close. The sweat rivulets dribbling down the hollows of her haphazardly made-up face. Those blotches of coral blush she burns into each cheek. On her pursed mouth, a slash of lipstick the color of blanched tangerines. The way she looks at me, eyes wide and full of a cardio-induced fury, makes me feel the pouchiness of my lower abdomen, the cumbersome fact of my thigh flesh sticking together, the batwings that Harold told me would take time, to be patient (he once had a client on whom they just suddenly disappeared one day like magic, he says). She's taking it all in, my whole fat-to-muscle ratio, and I know it's making me less credible in her eyes, which say she has named me. Probably something like Inconsistent Gym User. Or Fat Ass.

“Are you on here next?” she asks me. As if she didn't already know that in her soy milk–fed soul.

“Yes,” I say, like it's news to both of us. Unfortunate news that I'm sorry to be the bearer of. Like it's going to rain frogs today, I'm afraid. Storm them. So sorry.

She looks from me to the clock and shakes her head like we are both her enemy. Like the clock and I are in cahoots. According to Ruth, she's written notes to management about that clock on the Comment Sheet, complaining that it is three minutes fast.

Seeing that time is against her, she returns her gaze to the swimming pool, where the Aquafit women are bobbing up and down in unison to the sound of “Kokomo,” their fleshy bodies making the green water waggle. Though her nod, barely perceptible, tells me she has registered this terrible knowledge about her time being up, she doesn't get off. In fact, for a few minutes, she actually grips the handlebars tighter and pedals faster, forcing me
to contemplate her long, fibrous mass of back and recall how many minutes she's stolen from me over the past two years. They add up. Like anything else. Those sticks of Trident I don't chew. Those tamari toasted almonds and crystalized ginger hunks I try not to steal from the Bulk Barn. That handful of microwaved Orville I do my best to refuse from my father on a Friday night during a
Fawlty Towers
marathon, a regular occurrence now that I have moved back east. I draw in breath to ahem once more but she beats me to it, getting off the machine in a sudden huff. Tugs hard on the paper towel dispenser. Sprays the machine with disinfectant. Wipes it down improperly. Then storms off toward the stretching mats to begin her long and complex toning routine. Making me feel, you know, like
I'm
the small, petty one.

By the time she gets off the Lifecycle and I get on, I've only got twenty-four minutes left, by the gym clock, before the anorexic flight attendant shows up with her sinew and her Spanish fashion magazines and begins anxiously shifting her birdlike weight from right to left behind me. I do my best to make these minutes count but it isn't easy. I can't help but feel like this time slot, so hard-won, isn't making much of a dent. Harold says I ought to Trust the Process, Love the Journey. He's here at Malibu now, standing over one of his oldest clients, Margo, whose body, as long as I have known her, has resembled a potato perched on two toothpicks. He's got Margo balanced on a BOSU ball and, though she's teetering violently, he's encouraging her to do one-legged squats. Margo's a fighter, though. She's flailing, chin up. I catch Harold's eye in the mirror and he mouths, Monday, at me over Margo's shaking limbs. Then he punches the air a little and winks.

On either side of me, I feel how the other 7:00 a.m. time slot
people are already minutes into their rowing and treading and cycling and ellipticaling. Mainly women of a certain age. I try not to look at them. If I look at their temple sweat, at their mouths half-open and panting, at their faces contorted with focus or thought annihilation or dreams of impossible future selves, at their eyes skimming pulp fiction or fashion magazines, at their leg cellulite, which is just as discernible through their gym shorts as it was when I first moved here two years ago, I'll begin to feel like we're all a bunch of sad, fat Rodentia upon whom a terrible, sick joke is being played. Like somewhere up there in the cheap stucco ceiling is a hidden camera and an audience laughing uproariously at our useless sweat beads, our mottled flesh, which these hours have done nothing to excise.

Instead, I keep my gaze fixed straight ahead into the floor-to-ceiling windows, which look right into the swimming pool, and I watch the arm flapping of the Aquafit women. They remind me of this bird I once saw in a nature film who was trying to escape an oil spill. It was awful to watch those wings flap uselessly, to witness the inevitable triumph of the dark oil. Yet I couldn't help but bear witness, then and now. There is something about their department store swimwear, their grim sloshing, which is as hypnotic to me as undulating jellyfish. Some young unfortunate woman in denim shorts stands at the pool's edge, doing the motions in the air that their iceberg-like bodies are all meant to parrot underwater. She must be their new teacher. In my many, albeit intermittent, sessions in the 7:00 a.m. time slot, I have witnessed the Aquafit women terrorize their way through three. No one looks especially pleased to be following this new girl either, except for one man, a Russian eccentric whom I often see in the
evenings, sifting through the recycling bins looking for I'm not sure what. Because of his big enthusiastic splashes, the women give him a wide berth. I think they suspect him of mocking them and would try to have him banned, except that they also fear him slightly.

 • • • 

“It's
your
time and you have to make that clear,” Ruth tells me later that night over Iron Maidens and Warrior Bowls at Zen, an eatery conveniently located within the Beyond the Sea complex. Ruth's a divorce lawyer and Treadmill Three enthusiast who lives on the top floor in Phase Two. She didn't handle my divorce, but she did give me lots of free advice. Being a treadmill user, she doesn't have to deal with Char, though as a Malibu Club veteran, she's well aware of her and is sympathetic to the time slot issue.

“You have to be firm,” Ruth says, pointing her chopsticks at me. It's the kind of place that gives you chopsticks with your meal even though you're eating salad. To make it fun. “It's not as if you can reason with her. She won't listen to reason.”

“Where is she getting these pens to write her name down is what I want to know,” I say. “I never see anything but pencils on that Cardio Booking Sheet podium.”

Ruth hunts through her baby kale for hidden hearts of palm. “Didn't you know? She brings down her own.”

“You're not serious.”

She nods, sips her Iron Maiden, and makes a face at the taste. It looks like black sludge but supposedly it's good for the blood—for energy, which we need. “I've seen her do it. Tucks it in her bike shorts.”

“But that's insane. Why would someone do that?”

“Isn't it obvious? She's terrified someone is going to erase her name.”

“But that's ridiculous. Those podium pencils don't even have erasers,” I point out.

“We're not exactly dealing with a rational being here,” Ruth says, readjusting her black shrug, worn, on this hot day, presumably to conceal her upper arm flesh.

“How sad,” I say. “What a sad existence.”

“Of course it's sad. It's terribly sad.” As she digs into her greens with her chopsticks, I watch the flesh near her armpit, the part not covered by the shrug, swing slightly in her zeal.

“I guess I could just switch to Lifecycle Three,” I say. “Have done with her altogether.”

“Why should
you
have to make adjustments?” Ruth says. “Besides,” she adds, “you hate Lifecycle Three. Didn't you tell me once being on it was like being in a nightmare?”

“Yeah,” I say. It really is. The handlebars aren't quite in sync with the pedals. Ruth said she'd try to bring that up at the next condo board member meeting. Ruth's on the board.

“So why even consider it? It's like me with Treadmill Three. I don't know why but it works for me. You have to go with what
works
for you, you know?”

I nod, looking through the glass-top table at Ruth's stomach, which, despite her unwavering dedication to the Malibu Club and the fact that two of her dinners are delivered to her door each week by Hearthealth, has not diminished in all the time I've known her. In fact, Ruth basically looks like a slightly deflated version of the pretty seventeen-year-old fat girl she showed me a picture of when I went to her place once. This
picture, displayed on the mantel of her fake fireplace, is meant to bolster her spirits, remind her how far she has come.

She asks me if I know Christine, from Phase Two.

“Christine?”

“She might have been before your time,” Ruth says with a dismissive wave of a hand. “Anyway, Christine had that 7:00 a.m. slot for ages. Had the same problem. With Char. The two of them even had it out in the gym once. Christine was firm with her, though. She told Char in no uncertain terms that she was impinging on her time slot.”

“What happened?”

“Char threw a fit. Of course. It was ugly. But she got off in the end. She had no choice. I told you, you have to be firm with her. You have to put her in her place.”

I picture putting Char in her place. What that would entail. Her frantic pedaling. Me prying her off the handlebars bone by bone.

“I don't know. I feel bad about it, though. I do. It all feels so . . . petty.”

Ruth looks at me for a moment, then sets down her chopsticks.

“Remember that period you went through a little while ago when you were signing your name up for cardio machines but then not showing up in the morning?”

I color when Ruth says this. “Yeah.”

“Well,” Ruth says, leaning in, “
she
was the one writing NO SHOW beside your name.”

“She didn't!”

“She did.”

I remember those terrible block letters. Underlined three times. Surrounded by exclamations. That accusing arrow pointing to my scrawled name. I remember thinking, Who in their right mind would do such a thing? I remember now they were in ink.

“Jesus. Who does that?”

“Of course,” Ruth says, “she didn't act alone. She
was
spurred on by certain parties. After all, she's got her allies too.”

“But that's ridiculous,” I say. “How did my not showing up inconvenience her? Or anyone? Anyone can claim the machine after the five-minute default period.” It's true. That anyone can do so is a well-placarded rule.

Ruth picks at the dregs of her Warrior Bowl and says nothing. I remember that people signing up for machines and then not showing up is a serious pet peeve of hers too. It's awkward, this moment. Despite having known each other for two years, we're not that close.

“I'm angry now,” I say.

“You should be. I would be.”

“That's just so . . . sick. She's
sick
.”

We discuss how sick she is, a favorite topic. How her bones have grown more visible lately. How her T-shirts hang on her like oversize sacks with armholes.