13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (14 page)

 • • • 

Tom and Hot Pocket are in the side yard, smoking a joint in the glare of a Japanese foot lantern. He can hear the drunken squawk of Brindy and Beth discussing flaxseed oil and inner thigh exercises. He sees she has even accepted a tiny glass of Brindy's watermelon daiquiri, her resentment having taken a reluctant backseat to her gratitude at being saved from a seven-year-old's bluntness.

“You're a lucky man, Tom,” Hot Pocket tells him, slapping him on the back.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. People keep telling him this. They look at Beth, Elizabeth, whatever the hell her name is now, at her long black hair and her smooth, fair skin and how what's left of her flesh is packaged so daintily into a neat, hot little dress and tell him this. But what Tom sees is the stooped-over way she carries herself like her thinness was a punch in the gut, the air of heaviness around her that will never leave. How her heels are scuffed and her stockings full of rips because she spends all her money on dresses that she cannot afford and that are not fit for any occasion. He has fantasies about burning the little short-sleeved black cardigan she feels compelled to wear even in the dead of summer, over this dress, over every dress regardless of its color and cut because she buys them all too tight. He's seen the deodorant stains in the armpits, smelled the stink of its sweat and trying and perfume. And he doesn't feel like a lucky man. He doesn't feel lucky at all.

For one thing, he got lucky a hell of a lot more when she was fat. Now she's either too hungry or angry or distracted for sex. Or she says she still feels “like a stranger in my own body.” When she first told him this, he said it was ridiculous. But actually he understands what she means. He feels shy and awkward when he hugs the half of her that's left, when his hands graze the now pronounced bones in her back and shoulders. And she is just as uncomfortable being naked, obsessed with what she calls “the evidence.” Embarrassed about her shrunken breasts, the slack skin around her middle. She still comes to bed more or less fully clothed and covering parts of herself with her hands, just like she did when she was fat.

The fat girl comes back to him like a remembered dream.

“Where the hell's Dickie, anyway?”

“Don't know.”

“Can you believe he actually offered that girl to us?”

Hot Pocket laughs and takes a toke. “That's Dickie. He's a sicko.”

He forgets if he's the first to suggest it or if it's Hot Pocket. How they ought to just drive over there. To Dickie's house. Not to . . . you know . . . obviously, but just to get a look at her. This fat chick. This girl who'll do anything. Just, you know, for curiosity's sake. Hot Pocket checks his watch. It's early still. He probably shouldn't leave the party.

“You said we need more beers,” Tom says. “We could get more beers on the way.”

“I guess we could.” They do need more beers.

They tell the girls they're going out to get more beers and the next thing he knows he's driving across the tracks in Hot Pocket's
SUV, zigzagging past the rancid Mexican eateries and gang war gas stations in the no-man's-land between Hot Pocket's neighborhood and Dickie's. He is expecting Dickie to live in a glass cube or a giant dildo or something, but it's just a regular old bungalow. Sad and squat and flesh colored, just like all the other ones on the block.

The house looks dark. Though Tom's already charging across the lawn, Hot Pocket hangs back. “Wait,” he calls. “It's getting pretty late, isn't it?”

“This is Dickie we're talking about,” Tom replies. “His evening of hydro and samurai movies is probably just getting under way.”

Despite Hot Pocket's protests, Tom staggers up the walk, rings the doorbell and gathers his hands together in front of him, rocks on his heels. His hands feel very moist and hot. No answer.

He pounds and pounds on the door until his knuckles are raw, ignoring Hot Pocket's
Let's just go
s, thinking he will never leave, not until he gets a look. At last Dickie appears bleary-eyed in the doorway. He's wearing one of those shirts patterned with dancing hula girls, unbuttoned down to the navel. There is a sedate, rumpled look to him, a sheen to his face that suggests he's just been masturbating.

“Hey, guys. What the fuck? Little late for a house call, isn't it?”

Over Hot Pocket's drunken apology Tom says, “Just were going for more beers and wanted to check up on you. Thought you and your date were coming to the party tonight.”

“Oh.” Dickie blinks. “That was tonight? Guess we got kind of caught up.”

“So . . . ?” Tom says, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the dark hallway behind Dickie.

“So what?” Dickie says, narrowing the gap in the doorway so only he is visible. Tom notices a darting, ferret-like quality in his eyes.

“Can we come in?” Tom asks, ignoring Hot Pocket's backward tug on his arm.

“
Now?
” Dickie says.

Tom shrugs. “Didn't know the Fourth of July was a school night. Anyway, we just wanted to see . . . to say hello.”

Dickie looks hard at Tom, who looks hard back. He shakes his head. “Night, assholes,” he says. He is about to close the door on them when Tom quickly slips his foot in the crack.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Tom?”

Tom doesn't answer. Keeps his foot in the door, his eyes sifting the dark hall beyond Dickie's shoulder.

“Fuck off!”

That's when he hears a woman's voice from within: “Everything okay?”

“Everything's fine,” Dickie calls, glaring at Tom.

Tom's gaze grasps for her shape in the dark but as far as he can see there's nothing. Her voice sounds nothing like Beth's. He looks back at Dickie, who's still scowling in his hula girl shirt. He feels Hot Pocket tugging his shoulder while offering mumbled entreaties that they should probably head home. Sighing, Tom removes his foot from the doorframe. The door slams in his face.

 • • • 

When they get back to the party, Brindy tells him Beth has already left. Not only didn't she stay for the fireworks, but also? “She seemed upset.”

Driving home alone in Hot Pocket's SUV, Tom feels the
mountain ranges on either side of him, visible only as a darker blackness in the black.

Reeling through the apartment door, he calls her name a couple of times. No answer. But the living room pillar's there and she's lit it up. He walks toward it like it's a beacon, sees on the mantel of the fireplace all these photos of the new her—of her and him, her and her mother, some just of her, of Elizabeth—not his Beth but Elizabeth. Looking pared down and stiff, clad in tight-fitting, sharply cut dresses of every shade, her lips a hard red line that is only half-smiling on one side. In the center, the urn filled with her mother's ashes, which she refuses to scatter. As he turns and makes his way to the bedroom, he passes the workout gizmo she ordered off the Home Shopping Network, something between a NordicTrack and a treadmill, called the Gazelle. The Gazelle is for days, she said, when she doesn't feel like “facing” the fitness center, whatever that means. There are so many things he no longer understands.

There, between the display for calories burned and miles Gazelled, she's taped a photo of herself taken at the staff barbecue a couple of years ago, which she attended during one of her visits, when still in the process of losing. She's folded the picture in half so it's just her, but when he unfolds it, he sees himself, red faced and grinning noncommittally at the camera, one thin arm dangling around her shoulder. Beth is leaning into him, smiling broadly into his armpit, a big S of dark shiny hair obscuring one of her eyes. She's wearing a long black oversize sweater, a long dark skirt. My fat dress, she calls it now. That night, some asshole coworker's skeletal wife apparently took a cheap shot at her weight and he didn't defend her. At least this is what she claimed when they got
home. He doesn't remember not defending her. He guesses she Gazelles about five miles a day now while looking at this half of the picture, in which she is smiling but also looking a little scared, like the camera could give her a clip to the jaw anytime. This was the girl he fell in love with. The girl who loved sad music, the girl who wanted nothing more than to lie with him in the dark and let wave upon wave of lush, dark electronic sound wash over her. This might be the only photo of her left. Maybe she keeps the others hidden in a box somewhere, but probably she just got rid of them.

I did this for you, you know, she always tells him.

Did you? he wants to say.

Because he doesn't remember ever asking for kumquats or hybrid cardio machines, but who knows? Maybe all this time, all the little ways he looked at her and didn't look at her, all the things he said or didn't say or didn't say enough added up to this awful request without his knowledge or consent, like those ransom notes made from letters cut from different magazines.

He takes the picture of Beth off the Gazelle, scratches the tape off the corners, and holds it up to the blinking purple lights. As he gazes at it, swaying a little from the beers and pot, his fingers itch to do something with it—set fire to it, put it in a frame. He's about to tear it up when he hears sex sounds, forced, violent, and oddly familiar, from down the hall.

He finds her sitting at the desk with his laptop open before her. Her back is to him, her bony shoulder blades pointed at him like arrows of accusation, the moans of all of his uncleared history boomeranging through the small, thin-walled room. It looks to him like the one he watched the other night about the two fat maids, specifically the scene in which they demonstrate their versatility to
their employers. Only he doesn't remember it being this loud. In the window's reflection, he can see her hand covering her mouth, her expression frozen in horror and disgust and fascination.

“Beth,” he calls like a question, but it's no good. He can see she is far too transfixed by the fat girls, by the spectacle of flesh which she Gazelled countless miles to shed, by the ecstasy which she is now too hungry and tired and angry to summon. And he knows that she must see him there in the window's reflection, standing in the dark doorway, softly calling her name.

D
espite my better judgment, I'm in the fitting room wrestling with the von Furstenberg again. I've thrown it over my head and I'm attempting to wedge my arms through the armholes even though it's got my shoulders and rib cage in a vise grip. The fabric's stretched tight over my face so I can't see and it's blocking my air supply but I'm doing my best to breathe through twill. This is the moment of deepest despair. This is the moment she always chooses to knock on the door.

I can hear the slow-approaching clicks of her heels. Three light raps on the door with her opal-encrusted knuckles. I brace myself for the sound of her voice, all of my nerve endings like cats ready to pounce. When she speaks, I hear her disdain, bright as a bell.

“How are we doing in here?”

We. She means me and the von Furstenberg. The von Furstenberg and I. She saw me out of the corner of her exquisitely lined eye going to the back of the store to retrieve it between the frigid Eileen Fishers and the smug Max Azrias and she disapproves. She knows
the von Furstenberg is a separate entity, that it and I will never be one.

“Fine,” I say. I remain absolutely still, try not to sound breathless. Like all is well. Just a regular shopping trip.

“Oh good,” she says. “You let me know if you need anything.” But in her voice I hear:
Give it up, fat girl.

She knows I've been coveting the von Furstenberg ever since I first stood on the other side of her shop window, watching her slip it over a white, nippleless mannequin, looping some ropes of fake pearls around its headless neck. I didn't know it was a von Furstenberg then. I only knew it was precisely the sort of dress I dreamed of wearing when I used to eat muffins in the dark and watch Audrey Hepburn movies. Before I knew brands, I'd make lists of the perfect dresses—and when I saw this dress it was like someone, perhaps even God, had found the list and spun it into existence. Cobalt, formfitting, with a V in the front and one in the back. Cute little bows all down the butt crack, like your ass is a present. The sort of dress I'd wish to wear to attend the funeral of my former self, to scatter the ashes of who I was over a cliff's edge.

“Can I try this on?” I asked her.

Her eyes opened a little wider. Small glimmers of incredulity like slicks of oil.

“What? The von Furstenberg?”

“Yes.”

She looked from the von Furstenberg to me, then back to the von Furstenberg, sizing both of us up. We two? Never we two.

Sighing, she led me to a fitting room, rearranging items as she went—insect hair clips, Baggallinis, peacock scarves—so it wasn't a totally wasted trip.

The whole time I was in there being asphyxiated by the von Furstenberg, I felt the fact of her clicking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to admit defeat, to come to my senses. Come on.

 • • • 

Today, though, I'm determined to prove her wrong. Today, I won't come out of the fitting room, let her snatch the mangled von Furstenberg from me, ask me, How did we do? as if she did not know how we did. As if she didn't already have the steamer turned on and ready to smooth out the creases of my failed struggle, a task she always undertakes with overdone tenderness. Then after I've left the store, through the shop window, I'll watch her pointedly press a damp rag all over the von Furstenberg, presumably to get rid of the slashes of Secret I leave behind. But those stains are always there when I come back. That's how I know it's all for show. Like, Look what you do, fat girl. Can't you take no for an answer? The von Furstenberg doesn't want you.

Well maybe I don't want the von Furstenberg. Has she ever thought of that? That maybe I despise it? That maybe I'm trapped in this dance with the von Furstenberg against my will?

Knock knock.

“Still all right in there?”

“Great,” I say, and I'm tugging so hard on the back zipper, my tongue is lolling out of my mouth like I'm dead in a cartoon. But I feel it going up. Higher than it ever has before. And it's not a mirage, it fits. It's on. It's miraculous. And even though I'm panting, my hair in disarray from the struggle, I see we look immortal.

 • • • 

I'm just thinking how I'll wear it out of the store. Picturing how I'll pull back the curtain in the von Furstenberg, turn my
zippered, von Furstenberged back to her and say, all casual, over my shoulder, Cut the tag, please? Maybe I'll even ask for a bag for my old dress—would she mind terribly putting my old dress in a bag? Mm? And that's when I see the jagged rip down the side seam. Maybe I couldn't hear the ripping over the sound of my own grunts. That happened once before, with the flesh-colored Tara Jarmon. It was impossibly tight when I bought it and then I was out one day walking, insisting, and it suddenly wasn't. It suddenly felt easy breezy, beautifully loose. I didn't understand. Until I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflective glass of an office building and saw the slashes on either hip.

Knock knock.

“We sure we're still doing okay in there?” Her voice says, A rat who insists on hitting its head again and again against the maze wall gets taken out of the maze. It gets escorted out, politely but firmly, by mall security.

“Yeah,” I say, my hands fiddling with the zipper in a panic. But they're so slippery from all the exertion, I have to wipe them on the von Furstenberg just to get a grip. And the zipper still won't go down. I Gazelle. Five miles every morning with a photo of me in a no-name shroud taped to the little window that counts you down. Five miles, only to be told by the von Furstenberg in no uncertain terms that it counts for nothing.

“Do you need another size?” she asks. By “another” she of course means larger, which we both know isn't in stock.

I asked her once for a larger size and she said,
Let me check.
And then I loved her. Very briefly I loved her. Loved her hands clasped over her tweed-clad crotch. Loved the thin curl of her lips, a smirking red line. Loved all the bones in her ostrich throat,
the arrowheads of her décolletage, her ash blond hair gathered in a glittery comb shaped like a praying mantis. Then, as she picked up the receiver, presumably to place the order, she said in a low voice, That will be five hundred dollars, please.

And I said, What?!

And she said, Well. Obviously you'll have to pay for it in advance. Or you could order it online on our website?

And I said, But I don't even know if it'll f—

And that's when I saw it, the smile on her face. The flicker of triumph. Like, Ha! You know and I know even the next size up wouldn't fit you, fat girl.

“I'm fine,” I tell her now through my teeth, tugging with all my might.

 • • • 

I don't know how long I've been sitting here, half in and half out of the von Furstenberg, the pull tab of the zipper in the damp cave of my fist. My old dress, the one I thought I'd never have to wear again, lies like a jilted lover in the corner. I hear her clicking not too far off, rearranging the perfectly arranged merchandise—sequined hair clips shaped like butterflies, purses shaped like swans, perfumes that smell like very specific desserts and rains. I could just put my old dress over it. Go to the cash register. Explain. Offer to pay for the von Furstenberg. But the truth, as she well knows, is that even if it did fit, I cannot afford the von Furstenberg.

 • • • 

I have this terrible image of her coming in here with the jaws of life tucked under her arm. Ash blond tendrils escaping from her chignon as she attempts to wrench me out of the von Furstenberg. How the give of my flesh will be abhorrent to her hands,
but not half as abhorrent as her bone white hands will be to my flesh. Other customers will look on as they pass by the open door like I'm a car crash in the opposite lane.

Or.

Or maybe I could learn to live like this.

As I sit here, I can already feel myself oozing out of the von Furstenberg. Oozing from the V in front and the V in the back, the volume of my ass threatening to crack the little bows along the fault line. And I begin to think maybe this is it. Maybe this is the only way out. Maybe, if I wait long enough, if I'm patient, I'll just ooze out. First the fat, then maybe we'll find a way to coax out the organs. Some organs I won't even need, like my appendix. Of course, even if we leave some things like my appendix behind, it'll be a slow process. Slow in terms of biological time, but not if you think say, geologically, like, in ages.

I'm patient.