13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2 page)

“What?” she hisses.

“Let's do the Fate Papers real quick,” I hiss back.

Mel sighs and sits down with me back at our booth.

I watch as she lamely shuffles the crumpled bits of napkin. I close my eyes tight and ask the universe as hard as I can in my mind.

When the paper drops, I pick it up off the table and unfold it.

Yes
, written with purple ink in Mel's loopy hand.

I make her do two out of three.

“Now what?” she says, as we both stare the crumpled
Yes
of the universe in the face for the second time.

By then the businessmen are getting up, clearing their trays. The horny one, though, he takes his time about it, smiling at me on the way out in a manner that I can only describe as trying for fatherly but coming off more like creepy uncle. Mel and I look at each other and make a face and fake a shudder and laugh.

Later on, Mel will climb into cars and taxis with men she barely knows while I watch from the sidewalk. She'll agree to blow a guy in the stall of a men's bathroom near Union Station for fifty dollars. She'll wear her Catholic school uniform long after she has dropped out of high school for a man from Sudbury who looks exactly like Sloth from
The Goonies
. After she drops out, I'll see her at a coffee shop on her way to a fetish bar or to meet a guy, her earphones full of increasingly obscure music, her shoulders and arms covered in welts and bruises, full of stories involving men who I'll call The Icks because their names always seem to end in ick. Rick. Vick. There will be two Nicks. She'll tell me the stories while I stare at the welts, the purply blue swirls of bruise edged with yellow like little inverted galaxies.

Much later on, in the back of a parked van, my wrists will get tied together with a pair of dirty gym socks and I'll get terrible head from a political science major who will tell me my inability to come is psychological. I'll go to a park with a man ten years older than I am, an Indian physicist. After explaining resonance to me with violent hand gestures, he'll dry-hump me between the rocks bordering the man-made creek. Years before that, in a hotel room in the next suburb, I'll go down on a man old enough to be my father—a friend of my mother's—every day after school for a
week or so until this man feels so guilty he'll tell my mother and I'll never see him again. All that week, this man will pay for my taxi ride from school to the hotel. And I'll ride in it, lipstick matching my nail polish, bra matching my underwear, feeling like a girl in a movie until I get there and then when I get there, see him waving at me by the entrance, ready to pay the driver, I will not feel like that anymore. You look nice, he'll say in the elevator on the way up, if we are alone. Nice, not beautiful. Never will this man or any man call me beautiful, not for a long, long time.

 • • • 

“They would have totally gone for it. You know they would have,” Mel says, handing me an earbud as we both rise from the booth. “Especially that one guy.”

“Yeah,” I say, putting the bud in my right ear.

“And the Fate Papers said
Yes
,” she adds, putting the bud's twin in her left ear and pushing a button on the Discman, “Some Velvet Morning” swelling in our respective ears.

“You know what that
means
?” she says. “That means the universe
wanted
us to blow those guys.”

“So what happens when you go against the universe?” I ask her, as we leave behind the golden arches and enter the suddenly ominous maw of a Misery Saga night.

“I don't know,” she says, thoughtful. “I've never done it before. I guess we'll see.”

As we walk to her house under black-bellied clouds we consider the question, careful to walk the same measured steps side by side so the cord won't pull too far in either direction.

Y
ou've just polished off a mickey of vodka, seven kamikazes, and six dirty mothers. It's getting to be around that time of night, that hour when you feel you ought to call your biggest fan. . . . Christ, what's the fat girl's name again? Liz? Liza? Eliza? Something -iza, maybe. The point is even though it's Friday night and very, very late, you know she'll be home. The fat girl is always home. Alphabetizing her fairy tale and mythology collection. Giving herself a rune reading by candlelight. Lying on her celestial bedspread, listening to a subgenre of her vampire music with closed eyes. In other words: waiting for your call. And you are right. She is ridiculously happy to hear from you, as usual—another undeniable plus about the fat girl. In this regard, she is so unlike Some People, who often hang up upon hearing your voice, or let the phone ring and ring when you know damn well they're home. Not the fat girl—she actually gasps when she learns it's you. You can even hear how her plump little mouth forms into a quivering dark red O of surprise.

“Oh my god, Rob?!” gushes the fat girl. Because she is just so excited! Because she just can't believe you called!

“Hey . . .” Is it Ellen? Elise? Something -ise. Better not risk it. “Hey,
You
!”

You say you hope you aren't calling her too late, even though you know you are not. You could never call the fat girl too late.

“Not too late, not too late!” she cries. She is just so glad to hear from you. “I was getting a little worried, actually,” she admits.

It's sweet how the fat girl worries. She really cares, unlike Some People, who have told you point-blank, just tonight, that it doesn't matter to them whether you live or die.

Well, you've had a hell of a day, you tell the fat girl. A hell of a day. “Hey, mind if I come over?” you ask her, even though you already know she never minds and that, in fact, she was sort of hoping you might.

“Of course!” she says. One thing, though: Her mom's asleep, so you'll probably want to come in around the side. “Last time you forgot and woke her up, remember?”

You have a dim recollection of a very large woman in a kimono glaring at you from the open front door, while the fat girl waved at you from behind her boulder-like shoulder. “Oh, right, mother,” you mumble. You look at your watch. Shouldn't she have moved out by now?

 • • • 

It's been a while since you paid a visit to the fat girl. It's been a while since you fishtailed your way through a dark night of the soul toward her small, split-level bungalow only to crash and burn against one of her mother's Tuscan urn planters. It's been a while since you staggered up those steps, collapsed onto the
WIPE
YOUR
PAWS
! welcome mat, made that upside-down hanging of birch twigs rattle by banging and banging your head on her front door. You haven't been to see her, in fact, since your last artistic crisis, wherein you lay on her
couch all night, drinking all her mother's Cointreau and then some, while she nodded sympathetically and made you fudge.

Tonight, as you careen down her daffodil-flanked walkway, you are pleased to find things as you left them. There is the swaying yellow square of light that is her front window. There are the carefully clipped rosebushes you once retched in. There are her mother's window boxes full of fussy little purple flowers you can't help but finger, giggling. There is the fat girl filling the side doorframe, waving you away from the front entrance. She's so happy to see you that she is waving at you with both arms high above her head, cooing, “Not the front door, remember! Here! This way! Shhh!”

“Sssshhhh,” you tell the fat girl, hitting your lips with two fingers.

She looks bigger than you remember, lacier than you remember, younger than you remember too, which is alarming. Are we moving backward in time or forward, you wonder, as you follow her ample crushed-velvet frame down the Escher staircase toward the living room, which is deep beneath the earth's surface yet somehow still on the ground floor. No matter. Because look, Some People can't even be bothered to throw an extra Pop-Tart into the toaster when you come over. The fat girl, on the other hand, has lit all of her vanilla-fig scented candles in anticipation of your arrival. She is burning sage and nag champa in little copper holders. She has refilled her mother's potpourri bowls with Holiday Spice. She is bent over the oven right now, hands swathed in chef-hat-shaped mittens, praying aloud that you like Banana-Rama bread.

“Luvit,” you tell the fat girl, and collapse onto the rose-patterned couch, making all the Indian print cushions crackle and hiss.

How it warms your heart to watch her race to and from the kitchen, bearing plates piled with things she knows you love:
rocky road fudge bars; peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich triangles without the crusts—you hate the crusts, the fat girl knows and remembers, unlike Some People, who do not care to know or remember.

“I would have made more,” she says, “if I'd known you were coming.” Next time maybe let her know just a little bit earlier? Just so she can be better prepared?

“Sure,” you assure the fat girl. “Hey, you got anything to drink?” After the day you've had, you sure could use something stiff. “Hell of a day,” you tell her.

“Tell me, tell me,” entreats the fat girl, pouring you the last of her mother's rosé, which is the only booze of hers you didn't polish off the last time you were here.

“It's just . . . no one listens, you know?” you tell her. No one
really
listens. Especially not Some People, you say, as you take the chilled goblet from her plump, pink hand.

Now, the fat girl knows very well whom you mean by Some People. She hates Some People. In fact, even the mention of Some People makes her Betty Boop eyes go black and flinty.

“
I
listen,” says the fat girl.

“You listen,” you tell her. “Love how you listen,” you say, giving her a wobbly smile and a wink that makes red blotches bloom all over her neck and chest.

“S'matteroffact,” you tell her, reaching over and fiddling with the little red bow nestled in the black webby lace above her breasts, “s'one of the reasons I came over.” You have a new set of songs you composed, and you would like the fat girl to be the first to hear them. “Furst,” you assure her, holding up two fingers.

“Really?” she breathes. Oh! Oh! How you have made her night no her week no her month no her year!

How different her reaction from the reaction of Some People, who only rolled their eyes and muttered,
Here we go,
when you offered to play your new collection (tentatively titled
Novembral Musings
). Who filed their nails and frowned through whole tracks into which you had squeezed out every last bit of your soul like drips from a well-wrung rag. Your biggest fan, the fat girl—she listens. She
gets
it. She bites her lower lip in order to keep, you must assume, from crying. She lies on her back on the floor (“so I can really listen”), closes her eyes, and nods gravely along to the loops of feedback and fuzzy distortion.

“Wow,” is her first word. Spoken in a fervent whisper, with eyes still closed. Wow, wow,
wow
, breathes the fat girl, pressing a hand to her red-blotched chest. And when you ask if she'd like to hear more, she does not roll her eyes and say,
Christ, there's more?
like Some People. “I'd
love
to,” says the fat girl, like you even had to ask.

Epic. Primordial. Gritty. Incandescent. These are just a few of the adjectives the fat girl feeds you along with her Banana-Rama bread, her peanut butter and raspberry triangles, her rocky road. She says it's like you have Leonard Cohen's touch with lyrics coupled with Daniel Johnston's sincerity coupled with a Rimbaudian aura of tragedy yet with Nick Cave teeth. She doesn't tell you not to quit your day job, like Some People. Instead, she counsels never to give up, her gaze wet, dark, and adoring as a dog's.

You lay your head in the crushed-velvet lap of the fat girl. You tell her how it's difficult not to give up . . . when there are Some People who don't appreciate you.

“But I appreciate you,” she chimes, running plump fingers softly through your thinning brown hair.

“Well, Some People don't,” you tell the fat girl; she gasps, all shock and indignation.

“Well, Some People have terrible taste,” she sniffs, which is what you've thought all along. It's amazing how you and the fat girl always seem to think the same thoughts at the same time. Like you share two halves of the same brain or something, you tell her. And she agrees.

“Like we're kindred spirits or something,” she whispers, lowering her eyes. And then, after a moment, she looks at you again. “I wrote something,” she says shyly. “For you.”

She wasn't going to read it before, but she feels it might go with the creative intent of track eight. She wonders if you'd like to hear it.

“Sure,” you tell her.

You do not hear the elegy of the fat girl, which she reads in a quavering voice from a journal patterned with Celtic faeries. You are too busy watching her, being transfixed. How her hands tremble, how the red blotches on her cheeks and chest bloom bigger and brighter (you make her so nervous!), how she peers shyly up at you from time to time through a curtain of dark hair, her eyes moony and bright. And you don't know what it is, if it's the dirty mothers or the vodka or the rosé or some sort of black magic, but you can't take your eyes off the fat girl; she has transformed, as she always seems to do around this time of night, into something you could almost love for an hour.

“S'great,” you tell the fat girl, before she is even finished, but it shuts her up. “Yurr great,” you tell her, as you brush a lock of black hair away from her flushed cheek.

Delicious, how she shivers at your touch.

“Oh,” she whispers, and only hopes you won't forget her when you're famous.

“Won't,” you assure her. How could you ever forget the fat
girl? She is, after all, your biggest fan by far. And no one ever forgets their biggest fan. It's just bad manners. Bad, bad, bad, you breathe into the hot, crimson ear of the shuddering fat girl.

Now all of the vanilla-fig candles have burned down to their wicks. And all the sandwich triangles and fudge bars and Banana-Rama bread slices have been eaten, washed down with the last of her love potion. And you are dancing with all three of the fat girl to the best of your B sides. You weren't going to play them at first, but she begged you to let her hear them; she pressed the fleshy palms of her hands together and begged. Well, all right, fat girl.

Your hands, possessed by the wine, or so you tell yourself, run up and down her squishy sides, from her astonishingly firm breasts to the monstrous curves of her many flanks and thighs.

“Wrotethissongbout you,” you tell her, even though you are so far gone now you do not even know which song is playing, and whichever it is, you probably wrote it about Some People, their red lips and white limbs and their wiles.

Ah, but Some People, or so you feel now, do not deserve you or your music. In fact, you tell the fat girl, you are thinking of ending it with Some People.

“Really, really?” she whispers, like you have just told her this is one bow-strung puppy she can keep.

“Yup,” you breathe into her warm, doughy neck, marveling at how, with one mere breath, you can make a whole fat girl tremble like a leaf.

 • • • 

Was it you who lowered the lights? Was it you who dragged her up the stairs and down the hall to the overly postered, Christmas-light-lit cave of her bedroom? All you know is the hammering of
your own heart in the morning, the laughter of God ringing in your ears, when you wake up naked under her celestial patterned bedspread, your mouth still full of her long, dark hair.

On a sheet of her Edward Gorey stationery, you tell her you've made a terrible mistake. You don't know what you were thinking. Probably you have a drinking problem or maybe it's something to do with self-esteem—anyway, you hope she understands. Though it's a fine note, it doesn't feel like enough. So you leave her an autographed copy of
Novembral Musings
(tentatively titled), which you hastily sign, “To My Biggest Fan.”

It is only as you drive home, still drunk, through the dishwater-colored dawn that you realize it was a poor choice of words. “Number One Fan,” you should have put. Of course, it's too late now.

Some People is waiting at your doorstep, tapping her witch-toed boot, drumming her fingers on her narrow white hips, frowning at you through feathers of layered red hair. She takes one look at the cat hair on your clothes, breathes your Banana-Rama-and-flesh scent, and knows where you have been and what you have done.

“Pathetic,” she says. “Disgusting. With her? That
child
? What is she, like, seventeen?”

Child?

She closes her eyes, shakes her head, sighs the way she does whenever you pull your guitar from its lovingly stickered case. “I can't believe you,” she says at last. “I really can't.”

And if your mouth weren't so full of cotton, if your throat weren't so parched from all that fat-girl wine, you would say, Neither can I. Neither can I.

A week later, the fat girl still won't take your calls. You sit alone
in your basement apartment, leaving message after message—mainly drunken, but sometimes sober—waiting for her to call you right back, can't believe that she doesn't. Mistake. Surely there must've been. It's only when you see her front window abruptly darken as you tipsily turn in to her driveway one night that you understand there has been no mistake.

Three weeks after that, you're paying your first non-drunk visit to the fat girl. You don't know why. You only know you need to see her.