My stepchildren had commissioned a Pandora doll from my own company. I still have it. In preference to the skinny model, they’d selected the mid-range build, which at headquarters we chose for vics who were distinctly chubby. The doll has short, crazy yellow yarn hair and an expression of optimistic goodwill that seems faintly imbecilic. It’s clad in a Baby Monotonous sweatshirt, with our logo stitched on the breast. I pulled the string at the back, occasioning much raucous laughing and clapping each time:
I’m too humble and meek to drop names, but my dad is
totally
famous.
Joi-oi-nt Custody! Fra-a-ctured family!
Travis is a
cautionary tale
.
It’s in this week’s
Forbes
magazine, but don’t worry—any day now my company’s going to fold.
Oh, no! Not
another
photo shoot!
I’m not rich; I’m just
doing okay
.
My nationally successful product is a silly passing fad.
I love my kids, and that’s why I want them to be absolute nobodies.
I’m an entrepreneur who writes my own ticket, but I expect everyone else to go to community college and sell seed corn.
I may have become a household name, but all I ever
really
wanted is to be ignored.
He ain’t heavy—he’s my bro-o-ther!
When I arrived at that last line, belted out to the tune of the Hollies’ hit, Cody biffed her brother and objected, “You
promised
you’d leave that one out!”
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” said Edison. “I think it’s a riot.”
If Edison could be that good-humored, I could take the ribbing in stride too, and I thought that publicly I managed to seem charmed. I was indeed touched that they’d gone to so much trouble, though privately I was chagrined. What was modesty to me was false modesty to everyone else.
Even my pretense of taking my own medicine with brio was later held up to the cold light of day and found wanting. Fletcher corralled us into a standing group photo, and I still have that picture, too. Edison takes up half the shot, with Cody and Tanner squeezed around me. I’m clutching my new look-alike, but my grip on the doll is anything but fond. I might have been trying to strangle it.
W
henever I encounter a picture of myself, the first thing I assess is my weight. I am attached to particular photographs not because they memorialize a signal occasion, but because they depict me as thin. I could probably arrange my every photo in a precise order of preference that would perfectly correspond to a continuum of my size. The most beloved are those from the Breadbasket years, when I was gaunt, which makes me look sexless and insignificant. I don’t care. Being underweight might not be fetching, but it still strikes me as a badge of nobility—yes, I realize how ludicrous this sounds—and I envy my previous incarnation’s appearance of enjoying a little leeway. I scoffed at Fletcher’s association of physique with vice and virtue, but I bought into the same equivalence myself.
So Tanner and Cody imagined that I was hiding (or failing to hide) my vanity when I shied from photo spreads. But I couldn’t bear to look at pictures of myself from the previous three years precisely out of vanity, and that’s why I didn’t order extra copies of
New York
magazine or even obtain one hard copy of the
Forbes
piece: I looked
fat
.
All right, I’m ashamed of this. I don’t know if this heightened concern for size was done to me or is something I have done to myself. What I do know: (1) I am not the only one who appraises their photographs with exactly the same eye; (2) the folks who also “weigh up” pictures of themselves are not all women.
Confronting a photograph of oneself is always a fraught business, for one’s own image doesn’t merely evoke the trivial fretting of “I had no idea my nose was so big.” This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been
seen
. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body. This is quite a different matter from whatever dissatisfaction I may harbor over the heft of my ass. It is more a matter of having an ass, any ass, that other people can ogle, criticize, or grasp, and being staggered that to others this formation, whatever its shape, has something to do with me. Every once in a while I can connect a droll set of my facial muscles with the real, in-head experience of finding something funny and keeping the source of this amusement to myself. But in the main I fail utterly to recognize myself, the me of me, in my photographs. I do not identify with the cropped, once naturally blond head of hair with a tendency to frizz; when I have again neglected to color the roots for three solid months, the camera chastises, but I know that walking around with gray down the center part feels exactly the same as when the gray is covered. I’m not convinced that my elemental self even
has
hair. I do not identify with my short fingers; my relationship to my hands is to what they do, and digital stubbiness has never impaired their competent folding of buttermilk biscuit dough. I do not feel like someone with a neck lately on the thick side, with its implications of low sophistication and loutishness; I grew up in L.A., for heaven’s sake. About all I truly recognize in my photos is my clothes—and I will greet the image of a quilted jacket from 1989 with the joy of meeting a long-lost friend. The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.
Given that most people presumably contend with just this rattling disconnect between who they are to themselves and
what
they are to others, it’s perplexing why we’re still roundly obsessed with appearance. Having verified on our own accounts the feeble link between the
who
and the
what
, you’d think that from the age of three we’d have learned to look straight through the avatar as we do through a pane of glass. On the other hand, I sometimes suspected that my female employees who were lavishing fifty dollars per week from their modest salaries on makeup had mastered a secret that eluded me most of the time and only intruded when I looked at snapshots: like it or not, you are a
what
to other people. You may not recognize your heavy thighs, your cornflower eyes, but they do, and competent interface with the rest of the world involves manipulating that irrelevant, arbitrary, not-you image to the maximum extent. Ergo, if the makeup’s application was skillful, that fifty bucks could not have been better spent.
Which brings us back to weight. Ever since Edison gave me cause to, I’ve made a study of this: the hierarchy of apprehensions when laying eyes on another person. Once a form emerges from the distance that is clearly a human and not a lamppost, we now log (1) gender, (2) size. This order of recognitions may be universal in my part of the world, though I do not believe “size” has always been number two. Yet these days I am apt to register that a figure is slight or fat even before I pick up a nanosecond later that they are white, Hispanic, or black. Especially when the subject in question is on the large side, many of us probably detect “on the large side” even before determining large person of which sex. Accordingly, in eyewitness testimonies to the police, “slim,” “average-build,” “heavyset,” or some more refined variation thereof features without fail. In fiction, authors who do not immediately identify roughly how much a character weighs are not doing their jobs, and walk-on thumbnails in short stories invariably begin something like, “Allison, a tall, skinny girl with freckles” or, “Bob was an affable, gregarious man whose enjoyment of imported British ales was beginning to announce itself in his waistline . . .”
This is important if only because each of those three weight categories we used at Baby Monotonous attaches to a constellation of character traits—a set of stock qualities that, with no other information to go on, we impute to size. Mind, there is no neutrality in this game. As in countries like Australia, where participation in elections is a legal obligation, being one weight or another is a kind of voting that doesn’t allow for abstentions. You are three-dimensional, and you have to weigh something.
Begin with “average”—like most middle positions, considered the dullest and least worthy of comment. Yet even “average” in this morass of preconceptions has grown complicated. Here in Iowa, anyway, we are no longer in accord on what dimensions qualify as standard. Granted, lofty health authorities have sought to impose the “body-mass index,” thus providing a numerical definition of the normal—although I’m stymied by how the formula of “weight divided by height squared” invented by some Belgian in the early 1800s has suddenly become so fashionable two centuries later.
In Westdale Mall in Cedar Rapids, the norm is another story. My fellow citizens are so consistently broad of backside, round of shoulder, stout of leg, and plump of bicep that we might all be trooping across a canvas by Fernando Botero. Like cubism, futurism, or art deco, giantism has become a recognizable style in which the bulk of the population is drafted. Strolling public promenades, I am often struck by a powerful collusion, one in which during the years leading up to Edison’s arrival I had participated to the hilt. I would think: these people are nearly all heavier than I am, so I’m not overweight. Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no one is fat.
Despite the Midwest’s sneaky, steady expansion of what constitutes average contours, we still blithely assume that every one of these so-called normal people would desperately like to be thinner. It’s taken as a given that Mr. and Ms. Average are dissatisfied with their weights, avoidant of mirrors, inclined to take their dress or jean size as a personal indictment, and sufficiently anxious about getting on a scale in the presence of others to put off doctors’ appointments for months on end. It stands to reason, then, that these days even mid-range mass in America’s heartland conveys a disposition to shame, frustration, and disappointment—if also a constitutional inclination to cut other people slack.
But what, or rather who, is the skinny? By conceit, the rail-thin are harsh, joyless, and critical. They suffer from the same chronic dissatisfaction as average-size people, but on top of applying a ruthless ruler to themselves they are reliably dissatisfied with
you
. Their proclivity for self-control inexorably bleeds into controlling everyone else as well. They don’t know how to have a good time, and don’t hesitate to poop your party, too. Scrawnies are superior, haughty, and elitist. Vain, self-centered, and cold. Picky. Stingy and withholding. Aloof. Uptight. Judgmental and condescending. Brittle, not only in appearance but in demeanor and bearing. Dishonest (likely to decline the offer of dessert because of feeling “far too full”), and insincere (“You look terrific!”). Nasty, although usually behind your back. Fearful, not only of food but also of people who eat it, as if libertinism might be contagious—thus prone to an unconscious apartheid, instinctively partial to the company of their own withered kind. Rigid—God forbid you should invite one of these paragons for a drink when
it’s time to go running
.
One small subsection of the skeletal manages to get credit for an intellectual absorption in higher things than lunch or a scatterbrained tendency to skip meals out of forgetfulness, but they are
all men
. There lives not a slender Western woman about whom it is presumed at first meeting that she is too involved in her work to remember to eat.
Stick figures imagine they inspire envy, when in fact they excite dislike. Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they’ve sacrificed. So get this: despite the correlation of emaciation with smugness, they seem always to wish they were
even thinner
.
Lastly, the well and truly fat. I think we long ago put to rest their reputation for jollity. Misery, more like it. Melancholy, perhaps. Helplessness. Self-indulgence and self-deceit. Defensiveness. Resignation to the present; fatalism about the future. Self-hatred and self-reproach. Shyness. Self-pity, albeit richly deserved; a persecution complex, although ought it be called a “complex” when you’re genuinely persecuted? A self-deprecating sense of humor. Humility. As a consequence of having all too often been on the pointy end of malice, kindness. An enfolding warmth. Generosity. Born of self-evident frailty, cheerful acceptance of whatever might also be wrong with you. A longing to be left in peace, and a preference for staying home. Gentleness. Harmlessness. Languor. Frankness. Ribaldry. A down-to-earth nature, and a lack of pretension.
Now, these are stereotypes, and exceptions amid real people of every size are legion. Moreover, I’ve been as brainwashed as the next woman into accepting the prescribed dimensions of a fetching figure. Nevertheless, when I look at the lists of attributes we instinctively ascribe to the very thin and the very fat, I would rather be fat.
M
y disquisition on photographs may have seemed a departure from our story. It wasn’t.
In the few days leading up to Edison’s flight back east, I’d been pressing him to decide how he wanted to mark his departure. Cody, I emphasized, would be heartbroken, and I would miss him terribly, too. On this last point, I was sincere.
Admittedly, for weeks I had been impatient to see the back of my brother, indulging in frequent fantasies about a return to regular life. I had repeatedly rehearsed arising at my leisure to switch on a kitchen radio that was already tuned to WSUI—as opposed to KCCK, the only station in Iowa that plays nothing but contemporary
jazz
. I would catch the beginning of
Morning Edition
with no concern for waking anyone with sleep apnea in an armchair. Gloriously, I would drizzle my coffee with two tablespoons of half-and-half from a nearly full pint container that would last through the rest of the month. I cherished the vision of coming home from Baby Monotonous and saying absolutely nothing. I pictured dinners with my family when alternating chefs weren’t at war, and we weren’t faced with either a nauseously mammoth feast or savagely drab, ascetic fare as penance for the night before; in short, I pictured Fletcher preparing his signature polenta, but remembering the Parmesan cheese. I looked forward to having frequent sex with my husband again, after which I would drop blissfully to sleep, rather than staring at the ceiling for an hour after yet another terse, furious wrangle over whatever Edison had most recently broken.
For I may have been torn over whether Edison’s overeating was a sign of depression, but there was no question that his overeating was depressing
me
. I couldn’t wait to escape the nagging sense that I should be doing something about my brother’s weight, while at once feeling at a loss as to what that might be. Removed from his bad influence, I would lose what was now
at least
twenty pounds. I would drag out my bicycle, Fletcher’s condescension be damned. I would send Edison newsy emails while he was on the road in Europe—updates on Cody’s progress through Simon and Garfunkel’s catalogue, or Tanner’s blessed reconsideration (well, I said this was fantasy) of a foolhardy career path. I yearned for the halcyon day when Edison Appaloosa would not be my problem.
Yet I knew full well beforehand that the moment I waved goodbye at security—washing my hands of my brother and returning smartly to what passed in America for a happy family and a pile of new orders at Baby Monotonous—I would feel hollow and morose. Tortured by that sagging, empty maroon recliner. Sheepish about having resumed our eclectic musical diet of R.E.M., Coldplay, Shawn Colvin, and Pearl Jam, only to find that these previously beloved pop classics now sounded facile. Perplexed over why I had not consciously enjoyed what I had mostly dismissed as background noise, when I was obviously developing a taste for jazz despite myself. Saddened that despite a rare, sustained exposure to my brother’s expertise I still couldn’t distinguish John Coltrane from Sonny Rollins. Self-flagellating about the fact that, though I’d sometimes put on one of Edison’s own CDs while he was here in a theater of interest, I had never listened attentively to a single one. Mortified that I had failed to get my brother to talk about his broken marriage or his estranged son. Dismayed that I had never come to any understanding of what had driven him to get so big. Crestfallen that I’d had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to truly get to know my only brother as an adult, and I’d squandered most of his visit on waiting for him to leave.