13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (6 page)

“He touches me like . . .” I lower my voice. “. . . like he likes my body. Like, actually likes it.”

“So long as you know what you're doing,” Mel says.

I tell her I do. So I keep calling him. So I call him almost every night. Most nights he comes.

He's on his way right now. Probably still on the subway, though maybe, hopefully, already on the bus. I look at my watch. Running late. Sometimes the buses take time. He might have missed his connection, which he often does. Soon he'll be here. Ringing the doorbell. Running his hands down my hips. Telling me he can't believe a girl like me is even interested in a guy like him. And I'll smile like it's all too true.

The phone rings just then. I think it's Archibald so I just say, “Where are you?”

“Is Archibald there?” It's a woman's voice, pointy and full of purpose.

“No, he isn't.”

“Is this
Lizzie
?” the voice asks. She says the word
Lizzie
like it's a loaded thing, a cup she's ready to smash against a wall.

“Yes. Who's this?”

Crackly silence. A dog yipping in the background she attempts to shush. The dog keeps yipping. She shushes him again. This time more violently.

Then: “Are you sleeping with him?”

Now it's my turn not to say anything. The phone feels heavy and slick in my hand. Mel's mouthing at me, Who is it?

“Who is this?” I ask.

“This is Britta,” says the voice, gathering gravity. “His girlfriend.”

Mel raises an eyebrow at me. “Girlfriend,” she repeats.

The woman on the other end of the line acquires flesh, a face, blond hair, tapping nails. I say nothing.

“Is he on his way over there? He's on his way isn't he? Hello? Hello?”

“Helloooo?” Archibald calls from the doorway. “Anybody home? Sorry I'm late. Oh, you're on the phone,” he mouths, then shuffles into my room.

 • • • 

I come into my room to find Archibald lying on my bed playing his harmonica, kicking his feet against my dark blue wall. A grown man in a windbreaker. Hair going gray at the veiny temples. Pants too short for his thin, white legs. I'm wearing a lace slip in which I now I feel naked, fat, stupid. I put my housecoat on over it to gain some dignity. I sit in my desk chair, wait for him to notice that I'm not joining him on the bed.

At last he stops playing and turns to me. “What?”

“A woman named Britta just phoned. She says you're sleeping with her. Are you?”

He doesn't answer.

“I was descending to sleep with you, you know. I was
descending
! And you cheat on me? And you're smiling? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Just you're super hot when you're pissed is all,” he says, biting on his grin.

I start to cry.

Now he's on his knees explaining. He explains for a long time, while I smoke one cigarette after another. Britta isn't really his girlfriend. Not really, he says.

“She's just this crazy woman who lived on the fifth floor of our house for a while. I actually felt sorry for her, you know? All by herself on the fifth floor. She had this little dog she washed
every night. You wouldn't believe it,” he said. I thought of the dog I heard yipping in the background. “When I told her it was over, she started stalking me. Like seriously stalking. Wouldn't leave me alone. I guess she likes what I can do or something. But she was clinging to me. It was embarrassing, you know?”

I think of that pointy voice on the phone, swerving from hysteria to gravitas.

I light another cigarette and notice my hands are shaking.

He takes them in his. I snatch them away from him but he takes them again and this time, I let him.

“But you,” Archibald says. “You are the one I always wanted. I never even thought I could get someone like you, you know? And I hate to think I've ruined my chances here.”

He starts to kiss my hands. Kisses them all over, multiple times. Someone like me. I am the one he has always wanted. Never thought he could get. I feel my eyes well up again. The room becomes warped and swimmy. Then he kisses my thighs, starts to gently pry them apart with his hands. Get out. Get out right now. The words rise in my throat like bile, but they don't come out. Instead, I just sit there limp, letting him.

 • • • 

I promise Mel I'll end it. I promise myself I'll end it. Every time I go over to his place or he comes over to mine, every time I hear the plaintive wail of his approaching harmonica, I think, End it. I tell myself this for weeks. Fucking end it. Speak the words. But what comes out is, Hey. I missed you. How come you're late? For the first few weeks, I even picture myself walking away from him. Chin tilted high. Already lighter for having left him.

Instead I stay in bed, ignoring the nearly constant ringing
telephone from an unknown number, waiting for him to come over. Get dizzy spells whenever I leave the apartment. Start skipping class. Calling in sick to work. Panic attacks, the doctor says, and prescribes pills which Archibald and I take together, lying in my bedroom or his, the lights dimmed.

“I'm dying,” I tell him quietly on our six-month anniversary.

“Oh, Dizzy Lizzy,” he says, grabbing my breast.

“I love you.” I say it more often, more fervently than before, the words slipping from my mouth before I can catch them, reel them back in.

“And I love you,” he says, stroking my thigh. When he touches me now, I feel revulsion and gratitude at the same time.

We have sex and I cry through the whole thing.

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

“I'm hungry,” I say.

Chinese food in bed, Take Out Dinner 2B with extra spring rolls. Pizza with wings. Sometimes I'll stumble into the kitchen and make us something obscene, which we'll devour, stoned, while watching one of his freak movies, for which I've now developed a newfound fascination:
The Elephant Man
or
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
or this carnival documentary he loves that takes a cold hard look at the mutant humanity behind sideshow acts. Or we listen to jazz, also my suggestion. I'll lie there in my slip, let him go on and on about dissonance. It isn't charming or funny anymore. It just is.

I no longer look at myself in the mirror on the way to the bathroom or the kitchen. I lie in my slip, never naked in front of him now, and I watch him, oblivious to my existence, playing the harmonica, for which I have now acquired a dull loathing, filling my room with its terrible, earsplitting whine. I watch him smoke
my cigarettes, his thin freckled chest with its odd hair tufts, exhaling and inhaling.
It's over
forever on the tip of my tongue, but when he sits up from my bed to say, Well, I should probably get going, I stare at his severely stooped knobby back, his shoulders hunched up around his ears, and when I open my mouth what I say is, Can I come with you?

 • • • 

From where I lie on his bed, I watch Archibald stumble, half-naked, toward the record player on the opposite end of his basement apartment, a single low-ceilinged room lit by chili pepper lights he told me he stole from a Mexican restaurant. I don't know how long I've been in his basement, lying on his shitty green bed, stoned and naked and full of salt. Days? A week, maybe? There are Chinese takeout boxes all over the bed and table. Schoolbooks I brought with me but haven't opened. I have no idea what time it is and I haven't been to class or work in days. We're playing the Peggy Lee album, the song “Is That All There Is?” by my own request for the ninth or ninetieth time. From a great distance, I hear Archibald ask me, “Are you okay?”

“I see why you love this song. It's great.”

And I do see. In fact, when I hear Peggy Lee's voice fill his dark, ugly, low-ceilinged room festooned with its blinking red lights, the fog clears. I well up, float, am buoyed by the circus sounds, the trumpets.

Like every time I came over, I came over intending to end it. Twice I opened my mouth to say it. Twice what came out was, Let's order Chinese.

Now I'm just lying here spinning, my mouth open and parched from MSG, too stoned to move, watching two of him walk back toward me.

I don't know when the knocking starts. Is it distinct from the music? Or maybe the music has a door? The song has a door someone is pounding on with their first? Weird I didn't hear that before.

“Is that someone knocking on your door?” I ask.

“Ling can get it.” Ling is one of his five million housemates.

But the knocking keeps going.

“I don't see why I have to answer,” Archibald says, talking to the air around him like it's accusing him. “It's one in the morning.”

The knocking continues, acquires bass.

“You sure you shouldn't get that?” I slur.

Archibald stands up and makes his way toward the sliding doors. I hear him trudge slowly up the stairs. “Is That All There Is?” is still playing on repeat. Over and over again, Peggy Lee getting existential about the circus, about a fire, about love and then death. How many times have I heard this song? I continue my upward drift to the cracked popcorn ceiling, in a swaying motion, hearing voices, hushed and hissing, then louder, closer. In the song? No. Upstairs, it sounds like. I should get up, see, but my limbs are lead.

Suddenly a woman is marching toward me. Archibald pulls her back but she shakes him off, she won't be stopped. She is a giant woman out of the circus, out of my nightmares of the circus. But she's familiar. One of our customers, in fact. One of Archibald's. She came into the store recently and asked me for a book about dachshund care. Didn't have the title. Insisted I search by subject. Nodded absently while I read off listings. A huge woman with bubble-flipped dirty blond hair. She had with her then, as she does now, a little yipping dachshund on an absurdly short leash. The
moment I see her I know she is the woman who called me. This is the dog that was barking in the background.

I lie there, still unable to move, while she seats herself in Archibald's chair beside the bed, the one with the huge burn stain on the seat, with the overflowing ashtray on the armrest—full of all my ash and cigarette butts imprinted with Girl About Town gloss. She takes the dog in her arms and he wriggles there like a demon-possessed sausage, yipping like mad. He's wearing a little tweed coat that looks like a cape.

I look around for Archibald but he is now nowhere to be seen.

“You're Lizzie.” When she says my name, it isn't a cup anymore. It's shards on the floor.

“Yes. You're Britta.”

“I just want you to know,” she says, “he's been sleeping with me this whole time. After he sees you, he comes and sees me. He was supposed to see me tonight. Then he canceled on me last minute.” Her voice is grave but full of dangerous swerves and wavers, like it's a car about to veer off the road.

I look at her. Her tight black slacks covered in little dog hairs. One of those awful Addition Elle sweaters my mother and I would never buy. The ones they sell at the back of the store with all the lame bells and whistles that no self-respecting fat woman would ever purchase. Sweaters for the women who have given up on style. Sweaters for the women who just want their flesh to be covered.

“Okay,” I say. My limbs are lead. My heart feels like it's going to burst out of my chest, grow feet, and run out of the room.

“Ladies. Whoa. Look, everyone just be cool, okay? We'll sit down and we'll work this out,” Archibald says. He's standing in a corner of the room, attempting to look grave, but I can tell that once more he's trying not to smile. The perverse grin that appeared when
I first confronted him about Britta is once again sliding around underneath his concerned expression, just under his twitching lips.

“Oh, I'm very cool,” Britta says, rocking a little in his burned chair. The whites of her eyes are all pink. She's been crying, that's obvious. I think of the squidgy banana bread I saw him scarf in the break room. The Tupperware containers I've sometimes seen on his fridge shelf beside his staple industrial-size jar of Jif peanut butter, full of mayonnaisey-looking slaw, broccoli salad. When I first saw them on his shelf, I thought, How strange. I could never in a million years picture this man finely slicing broccoli florets, chopping bacon into bits, then mixing them carefully with Craisins and grated cheddar and mayonnaise. Could never in a million years picture him removing a loaf of bread from the oven. That was all the handiwork of this tenuously dry-eyed woman, who's clearly been crying over Archibald all day and will no doubt cry again. When his pager was buzzing earlier, that was her, wondering where in the hell he was. Probably she made him dinner. I picture a table for two set carefully, a sad flower in a lame vase between the gleaming plates. Some terrible bottle of wine he'd drink in two swallows. Maybe she was wearing something nice. Or maybe
this
is her something nice. Maybe she lit candles for him. Maybe they're still burning. Maybe her whole living room is on fire now.

“I don't owe this woman anything anyway,” she's saying now, presumably in response to something Archibald just said. “I don't owe her a damn thing. In fact, if anything she should thank me. She should be fucking thanking me.”

“She's right,” I say. “I should be. Thank you.”

I manage to rise up from the bed while they continue a discussion that falls in and out of my hearing.

My boots. I just need to find my boots. There's that song about boots and walking that my mother loves, that I used to sing. Sung by another woman. Not Peggy but of that era. She was poised. She was thin. She was freedom dancing in high-heeled white boots. Stomp stomp stomp. That's all I have to do through the white snow. Stomp stomp stomp. And not look back.

I get up and get into my combat boots, which I don't lace. I pull my cardigan on over my mother's slip.