13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (7 page)

I stumble my way toward the door, but it isn't easy with the drugs, my heart thumping in my chest, the air around me like invisible water, like I'm at the bottom of a lake, feet sinking in tangly weeds, pawing my way forward.

I fall twice on my way up the basement stairs and then stumble out the front door. Now I'm outside in the gently falling snow walking toward where I think, hope, the bus stop is. He's calling my name but I keep walking, trying to quicken my pace without slipping.

I just need to keep that song in my head about boots being made for walking and that's just what they'll do and I'll be safe. The road is sheer ice and I slip a little as I walk.

I can hear his voice getting closer, but I keep walking, slipping, until I feel him touch my shoulder. I turn around and he is in the snow on his knees. He looks up at me.

He is going to make a speech. He is opening his mouth to say God knows what. More about how he can't let me go, but he'll understand if I never want to see him again. More about how unworthy he is of me. More about how insane Britta is. More about how I am the one he really wants.

“Lizzie,” he says, hugging my knees, and I am trying to pry myself loose.

“Asshole!” Britta screams.

I turn and see her charging toward us in the not-too-distant distance, waving a harmonica in the air like a gun. She hurls it and her aim is remarkable. It hits him right in the face. In the mouth.

For what feels like minutes, we both just stand there. Watch the blood gush beautifully, hideously out of his mouth while he burbles, presumably in shock. Eyes blinking. Then she runs over to him. Takes off her terrible cardigan. Underneath, she's wearing one of those basic scoop-neck tops I have a dozen of at home. She stoppers his mouth with the sweater. Wraps him in her ridiculous scarf. Now she's saying sorry, I'm so sorry. I'm watching the scene like it's a still. Then I realize she's looking at me. “Can you call a taxi?” she says, handing me her phone.

 • • • 

In the hospital waiting room we sit side by side with one empty chair between us for our purses. Archibald is semi–passed out on a gurney nearby. Every now and then we hear him mumble for his harmonica through a mouthful of gauze. From the look of the emergency room, lots of people have been shot and stabbed tonight. Lots of deep cuts and chest pains. Lots of sick babies. Getting hit in the mouth with a harmonica—even a chromatic one—is way down on the list of the doctor's priorities. The nurse told us it would be a while.

Britta is pretending to flip through dated magazines. I'm staring at the TV.

“You can go, you know,” she says. “Really. I'm the one that hit him. Besides, I think it'll be a while.”

“No, it's okay,” I say, like my staying is some sort of sacrifice, like we're in this together. But actually in my haste to go, I left my wallet in his apartment. Not to mention my keys, my clothes. I'm
wearing nothing but the unlaced boots I wedged my feet in when I staggered out the door, my mother's red night slip stained with Chinese food, and a cardigan splattered with Archibald's mouth blood. I can't bring myself to borrow money from Britta and I'm at least an hour's walk from our apartment. I called Mel a couple of times on the hospital courtesy phone. No answer, no call back, even though I left messages. Maybe she's out dancing. Or maybe she feels these are my just deserts.

I watch the silent TV on the wall above the sick people and the ugly leather chairs. On the screen, two fat girls in stretch pants are screaming and strangling each other on a stage strewn with overturned chairs. They're going to kill each other, from the look of it, until two big bald men in black polo shirts suddenly appear to separate them. Along the bottom of the screen is a caption that reads, “I Cheated on You with Your Best Friend!”

I turn to Britta but she's pointedly flipping through an old copy of
Woman's World
. Feigning interest in yarn art. The scarf she used to mop up Archibald's blood is sticking out of her large purse. It's a nice purse. The sort my mother would buy. I remind myself that Britta is another country, another sort of terrain, strange and distant from me. That she is bigger than I am. Older. Sadder. More beyond saving. That body-wise, spirit-wise, I'm just a room compared to her sad house.

“Did Archibald ever play you that Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?'” I ask her.

For a while she says nothing, just frowns into her magazine at a photo of a wreath made out of dark green pipe cleaners.

“Archibald played a lot of songs,” she says at last.

I look back at the TV.

One of the fat girls has now broken loose from security and has the other girl in a headlock. Behind them, between their abandoned, overturned chairs, a thin, ferrety-looking man sits serenely. This man watches as security separates the fat girls once more. He watches them claw and kick the air helplessly. He watches and he smiles, like such violence and misery are the stuff of life. When he suddenly smiles wide, maybe at something one of the fat girls screams, he reveals a missing incisor. I think of the way Archibald looked after he got hit. How after the shock wore off, he started laughing. Laughed in the taxi all the way to the hospital, the bandage that Britta had loosely shoved in his mouth already soaked through with blood, his laughter making the blood drip hotly down his chin.

“He never played you that song and talked to you about it? About his philosophy?” I ask Britta again. I'm looking at her, but she won't look at me.

“I really don't want to talk about this with you. If that's okay.”

“Okay.” I look at her. I see her chins are tilted upward, quivering. “Your book came in, by the way.”

“What book?” she snaps.

“
How to Care for Your Dachshund
. You ordered it from me.”

“Oh,” she says, as if she only distantly remembers. “Right.”

“It's ready for you at the desk. Whenever you want it.”

 • • • 

I watch these laughably obese girls lunge for each other and get pulled apart once more. Their fat arms still reaching out to throttle each other.

Britta stands up suddenly.

“I'm going to get myself something from the cafeteria.” She hesitates, then looks down at me. “You want anything?”

Food. I forgot all about it even though I haven't eaten in hours. The minute she offers, I feel how my stomach is empty, that I'm starving.

“No thanks,” I say, shaking my head. “I'm not hungry right now. Maybe later.”

I watch her hunched, doomed shape turn away and lumber all the way down to the end of the hospital corridor, then disappear through the swinging doors.

S
o I'm eating scones with the girl I hate. The scones are her idea. She says eating one of them is like getting fucked. Not vanilla-style either, the kind with whips. She's eating the scones and I'm watching, sipping black tea with milk but no sugar. Actually, she hasn't quite started yet. She's still spreading clotted cream on each half of the split scone, then homemade jam on top of that. As she does this, she warns me she might make groaning noises. Just so, you know, I know. That's fine, I shrug, feeling little bits of me catch fire. I've got the teacup in my hand, my finger crooked in the little handle that's too small for it, so the circulation's getting cut off. I watch her bite into the scone with her little bunny teeth. I watch gobs of clotted cream catch in either corner of her lips. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes, starts to make what must be the groaning noises. I pour myself more tea and cup it in both hands like it's warming them even though it's gone cold. Then I pretend to look out the window at the dismal view of the street. I say, “Busy in the office this morning,” and try not to think
Cunt
.

She is, after all, a friend and colleague.

“What?” she says, her mouth full of scone. She hasn't heard me because of her groans.

I repeat that it was busy in the office this morning, loudly, over-enunciating, then I do think
Cunt
.

“Mm,” she says. But she's too high on scone to really carry on a conversation. She's so high, she's swinging her stick legs back and forth underneath her seat like a child and doing this side-to-side dance with her head like the one she did when she ate the fried pork chop in front of me at Typhoon a few weeks ago.

There's her groaning and there's her stick legs and there's her aggressively jutting clavicles. There's the Cookie Monster impression she does after she describes food she loves (
Om
-Nom-Nom!). There's how the largeness of the scone seems only to emphasize her impossible smallness. Mainly, there's the fact that she exists at all.

There's also her outfits, which she buys from vintage shops, and which are usually a cross between quirky and whorish. Today, she's wearing this spandex playsuit like something out of a Goldfrapp video, which she's paired with sheer tights that have a back seam of little black hearts. Over that she's wearing a red bell coat like the ones little girls wear when they ice skate in picture books. I had a coat like this when I was five but in pink. There's a picture of me in the coat, holding my father's hand in a frozen-over parking lot somewhere in Misery Saga. This was just before he left. In the picture, he's looking down at this small thing holding his hand as if he can't believe how small this thing—me—is. In the picture, I'm about the same size as the girl I hate is now.

She catches me looking at her and she says, “What?” and I say, “Nothing.”

She looks at my cup of cold tea and at my lack of scone. “How come you didn't get one? Aren't you hungry?”

“I'm going to have a salad later,” I tell her.

I'm already picturing it: me in the blissfully empty break room, my Tupperware forest of spring greens, the dated copy of
Hello!
I'll pretend to read if anyone comes in. I won't turn on the lights.

She shrugs, takes another bite of scone. Then she sort of squints at me.

“You're very salady,” she says.

“Am I?”

After she's done, she sinks back in her chair, pats her nonexistent stomach through her playsuit, and says she's feeling sleepy. She sighs, faux-pouts.

“Wish we didn't have to go back to work.”

“Yeah,” I say, signaling for the check and grabbing my purse from the back of the chair. She reaches over and pats the fuzzy leopard-print purse like it's a pet of hers.

“Pretty,” she says.

On the walk back to the office, we discuss our worst temp jobs. Like me, she also left college with a useless degree in the humanities about a year ago, and since then she's had a string of them. Her worst one, she says, was the one before this one. The boss kept trying to fuck her. Also they had this photocopier she's pretty sure was possessed by Satan. Also it wasn't near any good lunch places.

“What about you?”

“The one before this one,” I tell her. Actually, it's this one.

“Satanic photocopier?” she offers.

“Fax,” I say, looking at the long white line of her neck, offset by a cheap black choker.

“Ooh,” she says. “Worse.”

When we reach the office, before we head to our respective cubicles, she turns to me, her lips and cheeks still flushed from scone, and says, “Text me later, okay?”

“Okay,” I say. Then she trots off, and I see how her little heart seams are perfectly aligned down both calves.

All afternoon I have the waking dream where she gets so fat on scones, she explodes.

 • • • 

At home, I eat the other half of my salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn't used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking the oil off them one by one. It used to be he would say hello when I walked past him in the street. Now he looks at me like he's familiar with the details of my most unfortunate pair of underwear. Has fingered the fraying scalloped edge. Waggled the limp pink bow. Held the
MADE
IN
CAMBODIA
tag between his teeth.

Post-salad, I try on the French Connection bodycon, followed by the Bettie Page pencil skirt and the Stop Staring! halter. In all cases, I'm no closer to my goal but I'm also no further from it, which is no news at all. Twenty-five days. That's how long I have left before I fly out to visit Tom, my boyfriend of sorts. Two weeks ago, when he pushed me to pick a date for a visit, I picked one in what I thought at the time was the distant future so that I
could be closer, much closer than I was when he saw me last time. But then I remind myself that it's been fifty-seven days since he last saw me, since I waved good-bye to him from the departure gate, wearing my father's old jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt in men's XXL. Fifty-seven days ago, I was further according to not only the pencil skirt, bodycon, and halter, but the scale and the measuring tape and those fat-pinching pincers they use at the gym. There is a considerable difference between the girl he saw fifty-seven days ago and this one. Could you even compare the two? You couldn't. You really couldn't. That is a consolation, I think, as I stand in front of the mirror now in my bra and my French cuts and attempt, as I do each evening, to come to grips with certain irrevocable truths. Then I eat several handfuls of flax cereal and fifteen raw, unsalted almonds.

After noting my progress and calculating my daily intake, I decide to phone Tom and see if he's actually booked the plane ticket.

“I did,” he says. “Earlier today.”

“Oh, great,” I say. “That's great.”

“You don't sound very excited.”

“Of course I am. How could I not be? It's been so long.” When he says nothing, I add, “Fifty-seven days.” To show him that I've been counting. It matters, this absence.

“You wanted to wait,” he says.

I met Tom nearly a year ago on the Dirty List, this online music forum dedicated to fans of Underworld, and we've been in this long-distance thing ever since. I told everyone, including the girl I hate, that Tom and I met at Underworld's last live show in New York before they stopped touring, which is where we
actually did meet in person for the first time. Even though I was at my fattest then, he just looked at me, took my hand, and said we should probably line up. Since then, I've seen him every few months. I use most of what I make from my temp jobs after rent to pay for flights, which he splits with me. My mother thinks it's absurd to spend so much money going to see a guy I barely know—or who she thinks I barely know—but since I started losing weight she hasn't said anything. Obviously seeing Tom is good for me. Still, I don't want to see him again until I've broken this, whatever this is. I'm hesitant to call it a plateau.

“Not because I didn't want to see you sooner, though,” I tell Tom now. “I just couldn't get away. Because of work.” I think of how I Liquid-Papered
bitch
across my stapler in that long stretch before lunch. The paper-clip porn I make in the afternoons. How I killed yesterday looking up Bettie Page screen savers just to torture myself.

“I know,” he says. “Well I'm looking forward to it.”

I've turned out the light so I can't see the mirror, but it's there, and so is my shape in it, dark and vague in the glass.

“Me too,” I say.

Later, after I've hung up and I'm lying awake in bed, I think of the perfect comeback to the salady remark. I put us both back in the bakery and I make her say that I'm salady with clotted cream in each corner of her lips. But instead of replying, Am I? I lean in and in a low voice I say, Listen, you little skank! Not all of us can eat scones and have it turn into more taut littleness! Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel
so carelessly, so dancingly into your smug little mouth. And the way I say it, leaning in like that, with all this edge and darkness in my voice garnered from months of restraint, makes her bow her head in genuine remorse.

 • • • 

On my walk to work the next day, I make a promise to myself. I promise that when the girl I hate asks me out to lunch I'll say No, I'll say No, I'll say No. Then, at around eleven, when she sends me a text that says, Weird Swedish Pizza!! Omnomnom!! I text back,
. We go to the Scandinavian café she loves. She orders a sausage-lavender-thyme pizza square the size of her head plus a kanelbulle, a cinnamon bun, for later, for what she calls Secret Eating. I get the fennel-pomegranate-dill salad, which comes undressed in a diamond-shaped bowl. While she's eating the pizza, she watches me forage through limp dill fronds for fennel quarter moons. I try to distract her by making a comment about the weather, how I thought it was supposed to rain today, something to make her look skyward, but her eyes are on me, my fork, the bowl.

“That salad's small,” she says.

“Not really,” I say, bringing the bowl closer to me. “It only looks small.”

But she won't let it be. She lifts her heart-shaped sunglasses, leans forward, peers down into the bowl, and sort of wrinkles her nose like she's just smelled something awful.

“It looks small because it is small,” she says, sitting back. She cocks her head to one side, like I'm curious. “How come you got that?”

I say something about how I just like pomegranate seeds, how they're pretty, like rubies.

She stares at me until I feel heat creep up the back of my neck. Then she shrugs. She's wearing this strappy tank that exposes how her shoulders are all bone. She opens her mouth wide and takes a pointedly large bite of pizza, then leans back, chewing, and tilts her tiny face toward the sun.

“I love shun,” she says.

 • • • 

That night, while I'm having dinner with Mel at the bistro with the fun salads, I bitch to her about Itsy Bitsy, which is what I call the girl I hate when I'm being funny about how I hate her. I don't even wait until we've gotten our drinks, I just start in while we still have the oversize menus in front of us. I tell Mel about the scones and the Swedish pizza. I tell her about the salady remark. I tell her what I wished I could have told Itsy Bitsy, about scones turning into more taut littleness for some, while others are forced to grow fat on salad. I figure Mel, who's fat now, heavier even than I was at my heaviest, will appreciate how hate-worthy she is. It's what I love most about Mel.

She says, “Itsy Bitsy. I think you've told me about her before. She's the girl who kept eating the lemon slices off your vodka sevens, right?”

“That was Soy Foam. The anorexic from my old work. This is another one, from my new work. And I don't hate her so much anymore.”

“Itsy Bitsy?”

“Soy Foam.”

Soy Foam was annoying, really annoying, but at least I
got
her. I didn't at first. At first all I saw was this terribly small woman from Accounts who, whenever we'd go to lunch, would order an Americano with steamed soy milk on the side, then eat the foam
with a spoon, like soup. Then one night, during happy hour, after devouring all my cocktail garnish, she drunkenly confessed she hadn't had her period in two years and that as a result of premature menopause, she'd had to start shaving her face. After that, I hated her less. But it's different with Itsy Bitsy.