Fat Chance (3 page)

I have to admit that I don't really know him well though, since I have never spoken much with him, other than a generic hello in passing. He used to talk to me sometimes, when I first started here, but I have always been afraid to talk to him. I guess it's possible that he thinks I don't like him; I've been told that my self-consciousness makes me seem more than a little aloof. This, of course, makes me more self conscious.

Still, I can't help watching him; he's really kind and he always gives his best to the people he interacts with. I've seen him buy lunch for people at work on several occasions, and once he anonymously donated a good chunk of money to an old boss' retirement fund. Sometimes he jokes around with his friends on lunch break and he's absolutely hilarious. A few times, I had to leave the breakroom to keep myself from laughing out loud at his jokes and looking like an eavesdropper.

Too bad for me, I'm not sure he's really seen me in a long time. I mean, he sees me, but he sort of looks
through
me, or
beyond
me, and not really
at
me. I think I get resentful; it's too easy to forget how shy I was with him at first, how likely it is that it made me seem standoffish.

Wrong or not, I tend to blame my weight for his disinterest. I've sort of convinced myself that he'd have been in more active pursuit if I were slim and strong, physically fit with high cheekbones and a model figure. After all this time working together, I wonder if he even knows what I look like, if there is anything about me that sticks in his memory, other than my size.

He sure sticks in my memory; I know his cool blue eyes by heart. I can see them in my sleep. If I push my imagination, I can feel his hair in my hands, soft and black, shining and wavy. I just love the image of him. He's beautiful, physically perfect from what I can see, but as I've said, I don't really know him. I know only what he shows at work, because for whatever reason, we’ve never quite made it to the next level.

When I get to work, I get this little thrill in the pit of my stomach because he's already there and he's smiling, laughing at some joke another guy has just told him. They talk often, but I don’t know much about the other guy; I think maybe his name is George.

George catches me walking by; he smiles and says hello to me, but as I answer him politely, all I see is Jackson, which is sadly ironic because all he sees is Claire, the girl who just walked in behind me. She is of course, thin and beautiful, with eyes that are not my muddy brown; they are instead the perfectly delicious color of dark smooth bourbon, under hair that is the shade of red velvet cake swirled into dark chocolate.

I lower my head, embarrassed to be wishing for him to notice me. In my mind, I'm taunting myself with mental images; a clothesline goes by in my mind, old fashioned like a scene from my grandmother's television. On the clothesline, there are panties and I know they are mine. Large as they are, they simply cannot be denied; they are plain cotton in boring colors and probably big enough to fit a St. Bernard dog. Or maybe a walrus.

The clothesline continues, little slingshot panties passing by in bright shades of red and blue and yellow, silk and lace. They would probably give an anorexic Chihuahua a wedgie.

Next, I'm thinking that I should go on a diet; I can hear old insults playing in my head; old taunts from back when it got hard to live in Janet's house with the other foster kid, Rick. After spending my later teen years being told that I’m worthless, useless, it is my typical mental behavior to berate myself, and I'm being pretty harsh today because I'm disappointed. It doesn't help that over the years, I've had one person or another always sort of implying that I am nothing, that I am less of a woman because I am a large woman.

I felt pretty enough leaving the house this morning; I felt attractive, which always takes me mentally down to somewhere around a hundred and twenty luscious and sexy pounds. I was encouraged by the way George looked at me, and thrilled when I received a random compliment in the post office on the way to work. Having Jackson look right through me is like a bucket of ice water on my spirit, though.

I can't help wondering why I do this to myself, why I give so much of my personal power to random strangers I pass in daily life. Until that moment, I had felt wonderful, beautiful, and confident. Suddenly now, in the face of Jackson's inability to see me, I am four hundred pounds, with yellow pointy crooked teeth and hairy moles; I feel sloppy and gross.

Is it right, really, for me to feel this way? I don't know, and I don't know how to change it. I notice the way other people react to me, and I can't deny that it affects the way I react to myself. The family reunion coming up is becoming a real source of dread, and I can't help wondering if I can really handle it. With my confidence in the pits, I go about my day, typical things bothering me much more maybe than usual.

Sitting in my chair, I am ginger and fearful, knowing how humiliated I'd be if this was the day that my weak office chair collapsed under me. I lift the phone to take my first call of the day and I can't help noticing how puffy my fingers look, which leads to me thinking how fortunate I am to not be married; if I had a husband, he would likely be disappointed in a woman who couldn't wear her wedding rings. Irritable thoughts follow me all day, even into the bathroom.

At work, we have floating toilets, the kind that are mounted mercilessly on the wall instead of sitting solid on the floor. Since the second day I've worked here, I've never set foot in this bathroom without my giant purse. No one knows, but inside, I've got a canvas zipper bag and it has a change of wrinkle free clothing in it. If one of those toilets breaks loose from the wall, what dignity I can hold onto will be in my ability to change clothes and pretend it wasn't me.

In the bathroom on my lunch break, I hover to the best of my ability, feeling the toilet give just a little under the backs of my heavy thighs. Short as I am, I don't have much choice about how much of me is touching the toilet; they were mounted for taller women than me, certainly, or maybe for women who can levitate. Being too heavy to levitate, it doesn't matter much to me; and anyway I'm still a little depressed over Jackson, over my damaged history with Rick, over the childhood that set me up with this sense of weak vulnerability.

I debate with myself for a while, thinking through the merits of the various diet plans I've been on during my adulthood. Each has its good points, things that I liked, but each has its own set of faults too, ways that the plan just didn't work for me. Finished, I stand in front of the mirror to check my makeup and be sure that my dress is still looking as it should be; As I stare into my own eyes, I realize with shock what my motive is in the dieting thought process.

I want to diet successfully; I want to watch the pounds fall away, I want to buy new clothes over and over. Ordinarily, this would be a healthy thing for an overweight woman to crave, but I've just realized how wrong my personal motives are. Better health is nice, but that isn't the motive here. I want to be thin enough to wipe the inevitable self-satisfied smirk from Rick's face at the reunion. I want to slowly become visible to Jackson, pound by pound and inch by inch. I want to be thin enough to wear backless dresses, sleeveless tops, skirts that stop before my knees instead of after. And then, I want to look through him as he has done to me, whether his physical preferences are wrong or not. I am fully aware that we all have a certain look we are attracted to; I myself have certain preferences.

Still, how shallow is it that all men seem to want big perfect breasts floating over a slender waist and round hips shaking as they get carried around on long silken legs? In that moment, I've forgotten that some men really do like a larger woman; I've forgotten that some men are actually more attracted to a woman whose bones are softened by flesh, whose body is rounder and more voluptuous. In that moment, I hate all men, each for his own part in making me feel invisible and unworthy because of the number on my scale or the number on my clothing tags.

In that moment, when I realize fully where my thoughts have gone, I hate myself too. I'm not just fat, I'm weak. I'm giving the power of my own self-esteem to others, expecting everyone around me to define me, to make me worthy. This simply cannot go on, and I know it, but for now, I have several hours left in the work day. Determined to get a better grip on myself, I take a deep breath, staring into my face in the mirror. I plaster on a moderately content look, and I go back to work.

My forced good cheer only lasted through the work day; by the time I got home I was feeling a little hopeless and a lot bitter. As I chose and cooked food for my dinner, I berated myself for everything that led to my current life and body, including the simple human need to eat.

Mmmhmm,
my inner voice chanted.
That's what you need, chubby. You need mayo on your sandwich.

Like the noise of a broken record, I kept hearing a running commentary in my mind, a sound track of hurtful things from the past. Interlaced with memories of things Rick had said, there were other memories; a boy I'd liked who'd teased me for having breasts in third grade, a girl I'd been friends with in middle school who had suddenly turned on me and called me a whale when she'd joined the in-crowd.

Even in the medical profession, I'd been ridiculed and made to feel somewhat inhuman because of my body. Once, when I was young and maybe a little naive about how society saw me, I went to a doctor asking for help with my weight; he had looked at my chart in his elegant hands, a quiet smile threatening as he suggested that I should go on a diet.

I don't suppose it was very nice to flip him the bird and sarcastically thank him for giving me such a great idea. Not my proudest moment, but right then, I had only two choices: lash out, or break down.

"Why thank you doctor," I had raged, choosing to go on the attack, rather than trying to explain all the diets I’d tried. "I can't believe all this time, all I had to do was stop eating entire boxes of snack cakes and washing them down with can after can of soda. Because I clearly could not possibly have tried dieting or even exercising before; obviously I am here to see you because I'm so lazy I just expect you to lose all this weight for me, and I don't intend to make any effort at all, not at all. Clearly I would not have made any personal effort of my own before humiliating myself by coming to you."

Taking in the shocked look he wore, I had stood there with a hot face and watery eyes, shaking with embarrassment and anger. "I'm so glad I came here," I had said to him. "Thank you for stereotyping me so well and having such a humble and compassionate view as a doctor. Let’s not try and see if there might be something medical going on, you know, this being a doctor’s office and all. Gosh, I can't wait to tell all my friends and family about this life changing encounter we've had."

Finished speaking, I'd walked out of the office and never looked back. I may be pretty down on myself, but even I know that I deserve much better than that.

Thinking back to that moment, I stood up from the table, my dinner mostly untouched as the pain of that particular memory rose up and slaughtered my appetite. I chose the same sort of dinner that other people chose; I ate the same types of foods, and in the same average amounts. Why, then, did my food settle on me in such an undignified way, a history of meals wobbling around my hips and giving others the impression that I am without basic self-control?

Well, honestly, if I look around me, that question answers itself. In a country of excess, fat is normal even while we see it as ugly. We drive through fast food restaurants, too lazy to even get out and go order our food, and then we eat far too much of it, judging others who are doing the exact same thing. I guess fat explains itself, to some degree, regardless of health.

Honestly though, I have to admit a hard truth about my weight. The later memories of my battle with fat, even the worst of the emotional scars from Rick are really only surface injuries. The very worst of my memories involving my weight are rooted deep, straight from the start of my life, right from childhood, when I was innocent. I carry within me a lingering resentment for the way I was trained to eat, right from the beginning, training that left me vulnerable to people like Rick in the first place. This is enmeshed with deep, hot, humiliating memories of being teased by my once gentle and affectionate father simply for being what I'd been taught to be.

I started life as a somewhat privileged child, with a small intimate family, my parents and grandparents all living together in the same town where my parents had grown up. My parents were both only children, and I was their only child. I had a lot of attention as the only child in the family, and I spent a lot of time being spoiled by the grandparents. Obviously, this meant I was destined to be a chubby kid; I was well-loved with cookies and lots of other things that children shouldn't have too much of.