Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Like I Haven’t Heard
That
Before

"Today on the bus a guy called me a fat bitch.” "I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes while I recount my day’s activities to Fletch. There’s a maple-glazed pork roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate -chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter
¹
before serving the meal.

“That sucks,” he sympathetically replies. “What happened? ”

"Well, I waited on the corner for a cab for, like, twenty minutes, and none came, so I jumped on the Western Avenue bus to take it to the Blue Line.” I stir the potatoes before sampling them. “Hmm. Do these need more horseradish? Taste.” I attempt to walk over to Fletch, but our dogs, Maisy and Loki, attracted by all the delicious smells wafting from the kitchen, have firmly stationed their combined 165 pounds of bulk directly in my path. “Move!” I bark. They back up about an inch and plant themselves again. They know very well that in fifteen minutes I’ll be feeding them bites of pork roast off my fork and thus are going nowhere.

I continue, “A couple of stops after I got on, this hippie girl boards with a stroller, and the first thing I think is, ‘Oh, honey, you
are
a baby; you can’t
have
a baby.’
²
Anyway, instead of standing in the area meant for strollers up front, she moves toward me. I get up—ostensibly so she can take my seat—walk to the very back, and sit down.” I taste the potatoes again. “You know what these need? Wine.”

“Wine?”

“Yes. I mean, in a glass. For me to drink. Pour me some? I can’t get around these idiots.” I gesture at the dogs, and they both leap up to snap at the butter dripping from the wooden spoon. I’d say these are the most lazy, self-indulgent creatures on the planet, but that would discount my rotten cats, who keep hopping onto the counter and trying to grab the spoon with their paws. Listen up, creatures: If anyone’s licking this butter, it’s going to be
me
.

Fletch grabs some of Trader Joe’s finest five-dollar Pinot Grigio for me and a bottle of water for himself. He pauses before selecting a glass from the cabinet over the coffeemaker. Every shelf is packed with flutes, tulips, goblets, martini glasses, and rocks tumblers. We’ve got the proper vessels for ports and sherries and Rhine wines and cognac. You can have a beer in amounts varying from eight to thirty-two ounces in pilsners or pints. Some glasses have obscenely long stems, some have no stems at all, and some have delicate flowers etched in thin crystal.

The thing is, they’re completely unnecessary. We have something like three friends who will brave our dogs’ enthusiastic expressions of affection. Sure, it’s funny to
hear
stories about how our pit bull, Maisy the Love Monster, can leap four feet in an attempt to kiss visitors, only to split lips and blacken eyes, but it’s less charming when it’s
your
head that’s bleeding. Our shepherd, Loki, stands more than five feet tall on his talon-tipped hind legs and has a penchant for salad tossing,
³
so his greetings are less than desirable, too. And, since only two of the three people still willing to enter our home actually drink, our stash of beverage containers is a tad overwhelming. I have no idea where they all came from and am equally dismayed that despite intentional carelessness, none ever seem to break. I can’t bring myself to get rid of perfectly good stemware, so we live with them hogging up an entire set of cabinets.
⁴

Daunted by the lot of them on display, Fletch finally chooses one of our fifteen multipurpose models and pours me a healthy belt of white wine. “Here you go.”

“Thanks!” I take a quick sip to wet my throat. “So, I’m just about to get off at the Armitage stop and I see the hippie chick making her way to the front after shoving her kid’s stroller in the area by the back exit. I keep my eye on said stroller because who the hell walks away from her baby on a crowded bus? I mean, we’re in Chicago; yeah, it’s relatively safe, but not let-a-stranger-watch-your-most-precious-cargo safe. Then this guy comes up and stands next to the stroller, and I get nervous because the mom’s not even looking back at us. I mean, who is this guy? Is he going to abduct the kid? And why the fuck is he wearing a straw fedora, especially with his stupid beard? My first thought when I saw him was,
Hey! It’s Panama Jackass!
”

After being removed from the counter 926 times, my cat Bones hops up for the 927th. I place him back on the ground and continue. “So I freak out because I’m concerned for the baby’s safety, and suddenly I’m the bus’s reluctantly appointed air marshal. Should I throw myself in front of the door if the guy tries to touch the kid? Yell for the driver? Steal his retarded hat? The thing is, if I get involved in an attempted kidnapping, I’m not going to make my one o’clock hair-color appointment with Dante, so what do I do?”

Fletch nods sagely. “That’s quite the moral dilemma. Save a child or get your roots done. I hear Mother Teresa struggled with similar issues.”

I wave him off. She wore that towel on her head all the time. No one even cared about her hair. “Turns out everything was fine. The mother started having a conversation with him, and I realized they were together.” I pause to take another sip of my wine. Mmm; cool, crisp, and five dollars’ worth of delicious!

“Crisis averted?” He absently scratches Loki under the chin and is rewarded with a handful of dog drool.

“Yes, or so I thought. When we got to Armitage, I had to get off, and the dad and his kid were in my way, so I’m all,
‘Excuse me; this is my stop.’
Dad turns to me, and I see he’s really young, too. I didn’t realize it at first because I was so focused on his extraneous facial accessories. Looking closer, I saw he was all disheveled and his eyes were sunken and hollow. Total newborn-sleep-deprivation syndrome. Then he says,
‘Why don’t
you
exit up front?’ ”

Fletch gives his hands a quick predinner scrub and dries them on a dish towel. “Yeah, why didn’t you?”

“Couldn’t—the aisle was too crowded.” I desperately hate having to squeeze through. Makes me feel like I’m stepping on people and sticking my butt in their faces as I try to ease out, and really? No one wants that. “So I’m looking at the dad, taking in how tired he seems. It was raining out, and I felt bad that these parents had to take their baby wherever they were going on a bus. They were visibly exhausted, and if they had their child out in this weather, it was probably because he was sick and they were going to the doctor. Plus it was cold and neither of the parents had on coats, so I was sympathetic.” I’ve already drained my glass, so I shake it at Fletch in a
more, please
gesture, and he dutifully complies. He’s like my sous chef, only for liquor. “And yet this hair”—I point to my newly streaked locks—“is not going to blond itself, so I had to get off, right? As I tried to exit again, the dad scowled at me, not moving an inch, and that made me mad.”

“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” Fletch says in his best David Banner impression. “Is that when you turned green and exploded out of your clothes?”

I throw my hands up in the air. “Listen, did I
not
just save his baby from being kidnapped? I mean, can I get a little credit here for having an entire plan of attack mapped out? I was about to be a goddamned
hero.
”

I see a smirk playing at the sides of Fletch’s mouth. “Your
plan of attack
entailed what? Filing your nails? Yelling for the bus driver? Eating a candy bar?”

“
No
. First, I’d snatch the kid back with a bunch of lightning-fast Sydney Bristow roundhouse kicks to his head—which would really hurt with my pointy boots, by the way—and once the baby was safe, I’d chase him down and go all MacGyver on his ass, handcuffing him with only my purse straps and knockoff Chanel sunglasses.”

Fletch looks dubious. “Considering you’d rather watch infomercials for an hour than cross the room to get the remote, I have a hard time reconciling your action-packed
Alias
fight scene with reality.”

I wave a potato-covered wooden spoon at him. “Oh, please. With the adrenaline in my system, I could have totally done it. People can lift cars off their kids when they need to.”

“Not lazy people,” he counters.

Aarrggh. I’m not lazy. I’m simply judicious about excess movement.

“You’re missing my point!” I exclaim. “The point is, I almost got
involved
, and I hate that, so how about a little fucking gratitude on his part?”

“You’re mad at the guy for not reading your mind?” he asks.

“Do you want to argue with me or do you want to hear my story?”

“Have I got a choice?”

I choose to ignore his snarky commentary. “
Anyway
, I
did
give up my seat for the mom, even if she chose not to take it, so it seemed like the guy should have been polite when I tried to exit. Again, I said, ‘
Excuse me. This is my stop,’
to which he replied,
‘Hey, man. There’s a baby here. Why don’t you think about someone other than yourself?’ ”

After twelve years, Fletch is well aware of what will turn me into the Jencredible Hulk. He shakes his head and simply says, “That poor bastard,” and then removes his glasses to wipe off the potato specks that hit him when I gestured a bit too hard with the wooden spoon.
⁵

“Listen, I was sorry he and his little lady didn’t have access to a car to take their kid to the doctor. And I felt bad I was all bundled up in a toasty warm trench coat and sweater, while they both shivered in thin shirts and stupid vests. But the bottom line is, a baby doesn’t give you license to do whatever you want. Newborn or not, you cannot block my exit. I took all these factors into account, and then I smiled at him, and in the most compassionate voice I could muster, I leaned in close and said,
‘Bite me.’
Dumbfounded, he stepped back and let me pass.” I bang my glass down on the counter for emphasis, and it weathers the impact heroically, damn it.

“Let me guess—this is when he called you a fat bitch?”

“Exactly! But that’s not the end of the story.”

“You called me out of a lunch meeting at work last week when Bob Barker announced his retirement,
⁶
so I assume the guy didn’t punch you or I’d have seen you both on the news.”

“Nope. But as soon as he called me a fat bitch, I snickered and replied, ‘
Yeah. Like I haven’t heard
that
before.
’ Then I stuck my tongue out at him and climbed down the stairs.” I open the oven and remove the world’s most gorgeous pork roast. The maple syrup will make it delectably sweet, while the Dijon mustard in the glaze will give it a savory bite. According to the meat thermometer, it’s now exactly 170 degrees. I turn off the oven and tent the roasting pan with aluminum foil so the juices redistribute themselves. “Dinner in ten. And I’ll need a refill.” I pass my glass over the head of two slobbery dogs.

“What’s the magic word?”

“Um . . . now?”

“Nice try.”

“Pretty please with pork roast on top?”

“Better. Somewhat.” He fills the glass again and comes over to put his arm around me, causing the dogs to temporarily scramble before reassembling themselves right next to me. “Listen, Jen; I’m sorry if he hurt your feelings. You know you’re fine just the way you are, even if you are deeply, profoundly bossy.” Fletch then kisses me on the forehead before opening the cabinet under the coffeemaker to grab placemats and napkins.
⁷

I unload plain white crockery plates from the dishwasher and use them to set the table. “Sweetie, that’s the problem! He
didn’t
hurt my feelings. The issue here is that I’ve been called ‘fat bitch’ so many times that I’m totally desensitized to it. I
should
have been bothered. I
should
have wanted to kick a lung out of that guy. Instead, I was simply amused, and that feels wrong somehow. I suspect it’s a self-esteem thing.”

Fletch snorts. “Right. You’re a raging narcissist. Sometimes I hear you saying ‘
I look pretty’
in the mirror when you think I’m downstairs. Your self-image? Hardly a problem.”

“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? My self-esteem is so out of proportion, I’m no longer in touch with reality. I mean, I’m a size twenty-four. I’m the poster child for rampant you-have-such-a-pretty-face-isms. No matter how you slice it, I’m fat. Not husky, not Rubenesque, not big boned, but fat. Porcine. Beefy.
C-h-u-n-k-y
. Shoot, I’m about two sizes away from not being able to shop in the big-girls section of the department store,
⁸
and yet I’m like an anorexic. ”

“If you’re anorexic, you’re doing it wrong.”

I swat him with a dish towel. “No, no, I mean anorexics look in the mirror, and even if they’re eighty pounds, their organs are failing, and they’re on life support, they still see a fat girl. I’m a hundred pounds heavier than I was in high school, my veins are full of crème fraîche, and yet I look in the mirror, take in the hair and makeup, and think,
Damn baby, you fiiine.”

Fletch nods, saying nothing.

“Seriously, check out my face. I have almost no wrinkles, even though I routinely tan myself into shoe leather. The fat totally fills them out. That’s why I don’t have those gross neck cords yet, either.”

“If you’re
fiiine
, then what’s the problem?”