13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

I nod and watch this woman pedaling in the dark. Was I like her? Surely not. Surely I was getting somewhere. Surely all my work was the work of progress toward attainable goals.

But even though Ruth’s only a hair thinner than I am, she’s way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction

Back when I had to shop here, I used to do the same. I’d spend hours hunting for ­something—­anything—­that would render me moderately fuckable. And if not fuckable, something in which I could grieve over the fact of not being fuckable with unbaubled dignity. I make my way through these racks, among these women, not one of them anymore, and yet one of them still, and it’s as though I’ve never left. I really should stop coming here

In some of them we are both about Cassie’s size. Then it’s just my mother who is about Cassie’s size, and she’s looking at my shrunken frame happily and I’m looking at the camera like I have no idea. Like I’m vacant. And I can see her illness, the diabetes and heart disease she never wanted to discuss, in the sheen on her skin, its flushed color, how her eyes are too bright, how tired she looks, so very tired, I never realized how tired until now. On the end table is a photo of Tom and me on her balcony, from the afternoon when he met her for the first time. He’s wearing a tie because this is the first time he’s meeting my mother. I’m wearing that dress I’ve never worn since.

That if I rolled over at night, I’d accidentally crush him to death. It was a ridiculous ­fear—­I was never that ­big—­but it kept me up nights. That and my own hunger

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

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

Tom had been looking forward to this meal of meat and corn on the cob and chips and mayonnaisey salads all week. But now that it’s all piled before him beautifully on a paper plate, he can’t eat. Instead he feels his blood pressure rise, his fork grip become tighter as he hears his wife say, No, No, No, but thanks, to nearly every dish offered. He relaxes a little when at last she accepts some garden salad to accompany her plate of jicama sticks and a bunless veggie patty. When she begins to stab lamely at the lettuce, he decides he’s not going to let her ruin this for him any longer and tears into his ribs violently but without pleasure

Even though he grew up in the state where they invented this concoction, it grossed him out slightly, watching her greedily whip the red and white gloops together with a matchstick fry until they formed an obscene bloody pink. He even made a face once at the sight. She saw the face and cried. Didn’t eat anything but her draconian fare in front of him for months afterward.

father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel’s zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, prove him wrong.