13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (15 page)

I
t's my guilty pleasure, seeing Cammie over at Aria Lifestyle Salon during lunch hour for the Caribbean Hand Treatment. The salon's out of my way, south of the city center, and I can't really afford the treatment on my temp salary. Also, I don't know why but after Cammie's done with me, the skin around my nails peels and bleeds for days. Then there's the shoddy polish job that I further destroy, sometimes within minutes of walking out of there. Still. Every week, like clockwork, I'm compelled to call behind a closed door, like I'm calling for a sex worker.

“Hi,” I whisper. I try to make the whisper easy breezy. “I'd like to make an appointment with Cammie.”

“Cassie,” the receptionist corrects.

“Cassie, right. I'd like to make an appointment with Cassie.”

“What service?” Is there accusation in her voice? I can't tell.

When I tell the receptionist it's for the Caribbean Hand Treatment, there's silence, then a lot of typing. Too much typing. Heat creeps up the back of my neck. I grow nervous when
she puts me on hold, when I'm forced to listen to the sound of Zen-like chimes encouraging patience. I am not patient. I begin to chew on my nails, which still bear traces of Bastille My Heart, from my last tryst with Cassie.

When at last she comes back on the line, she tells me there's a time issue. The thing is I like to schedule the Caribbean during lunch hour. I request noon in a tone that implies I have the full and important schedule of an executive and I'm squeezing it in between meetings, like it's my moment of Zen on a busy day in the financial or some such district. I'm told this is a busy time for Cassie. I'm reminded that Hattie, the other esthetician, is usually pretty open at this hour. Do I want Hattie? I remember Hattie, a pointy-faced young woman with bangs like Frankenstein's creature who looks like she's composed entirely of tendons, whose chest, under her smock, is almost completely concave. I tell them, No, I don't want Hattie, I want
Cammie
—Cassie, right.

Hunger yawns in me as I enter the salon on the appointed day. I am on nothing but oats and anger consumed over the sink at six a.m. But this is good, I think. I will not have lunch today. I will have Cammie. Cassie. Where is she? Panic seizes me, briefly, by the throat when I do not see her among the billowy-bloused, asymmetrically haired spa workers. Then I remember it's early. I am seventeen minutes early by my watch.

I tell myself I'm early not because I'm eager to see her but in order to enjoy the spa's many amenities. I sit in the waiting area and contemplate the crystalized ginger in its bowl. The toasted almonds and dried apricots in their respective glass jars. I watch other female clients partake of it all with tiny wooden tongs. Many of these women are in mid-treatment, some with their heads
covered in tinfoil, from which tufts of colorless hair sprout. They leaf through magazines like
Shape
and
Prevention
, sipping complimentary licorice root–sweetened tea from handleless, dirt-colored cups. I flip through
Self
without really seeing, and feel as if I'm drowning—What if Cassie has forgotten me? What if she couldn't make it in today?—until I hear my name called like a question and I look up and there she is. Spilling out of a zebra-print maxi dress. Grinning crookedly at me between red corkscrew curls. My eye runs worriedly over her frame for any signs of weight loss. Seeing there are none, I breathe out. That Cassie is even fatter than I remember sates me in ways I cannot explain.

“Hi!” she says. “Elizabeth?”

“Liz.”

“Liz, right. Follow me. They've got us all set up!”

I follow her broad back as she waddles over to the nail station.

“So what are we doing today?” she asks me. “Chocoholic? The Crème Brûlée?”

“The Caribbean.”

“Ooh. That's my favorite.”

At the station, the implements of the treatment lie at the ready: the edible ingredients in receptacles made to resemble cleaved coconut shells; the pointy silver instruments that she will employ clumsily, causing the aforementioned peeling and bleeding of my cuticle area; the stone bowl of hot salt water in which she will soak my hands—long and thin like Bela Lugosi's—one by one; Cassie herself, her bra straps digging into her shoulder flesh. An Olga? Freya, maybe? One of those brands with a Nordic-sounding name, which thank God I don't have to wear anymore. I can tell just by looking that Cassie bought hers too small.

“So is there an occasion we're getting ready for or . . . ?” Cassie asks me, leaving the question hanging.

Cassie likes there to be an occasion. There never is, but I pick one out of the air anyway.

“Museum opening,” I say.

“Museum opening! That's exciting.”

She seats herself across from me, making the stool underneath her creak. Nothing between us now but the narrow little station table. Underneath it, our kneecaps touch. And then comes the moment I pay the sixty-odd dollars for, the moment when she reaches across the table and slips my wedding ring off and takes my hands.

As usual, I apologize for how cold they are.

“Actually, it feels sort of nice.” Cassie says. She always says something like that. A friend told me once that a stripper will tell every man she gives a lap dance to that he smells really good and what cologne is he wearing anyway? And she won't just say it. She'll breathe him in like his rank skin fumes are mountain air, like her lungs, let alone her little bunny slope nose, can't get enough.

“It's always so hot in here,” Cassie says, blowing a lock of red hair off her face as if to prove it. Cassie's hands always feel warm and swollen, like they've been injected with some sort of hot gel. With her fingers, she traces my cracked nail beds, my peeling cuticles, the red, rough skin.

As usual, my hands make Cassie frown. But it's a tender frown, her sincere concern causing a small furrow to appear between her fawn-colored brows. She is concerned, rightly, that despite many Caribbean Therapy sessions, my hands are still in hideous shape. Am I not using that cuticle oil she gave me a sample of last time? I
am not, but I don't tell her this. I pretend like I'm confused. Like I don't know what's going on either.

“Could it be the winter, maybe?” I offer. “It was pretty dry.”

She says it could be—it
was
a dry one. She brings my hands closer to her face. But it's more that they look picked at, she says. Dry and cracked like I've been running them under hard, hot water all day.

“Huh,” I say. “Weird.”

“Well, don't worry,” she smiles. “We'll get you into shape.”

“Thanks,” I say, and she squeezes my hands a little, running her thumb pads over my index knuckles, causing me to sort of sink into my seat.

We're still holding hands over the table. And it's always awkward, that moment when she lets go, lowers one wrist into the coconut shell of too-hot salt water.

“Temperature okay?”

“Great.”

“So,” she says, “Amuse Bouche? Hearts and Tarts?”

I pretend to weigh the options but honestly, these are Cassie's colors. I can't stand either of them. On my hands, so humorless, they look laughably pink. But I know Cassie hates the blood and earth tones to which I'm naturally partial.

“How about Amuse Bouche? We'll do Hearts and Tarts next time.”

“I do love that one,” she says.

“Me too.”

She picks up a bottle of hot pink polish and shakes it, causing her copious, freckled cleavage to ripple. I try not to look since looking lights little parts of me on fire. Instead, I keep my gaze focused on how her upper arm flesh bleeds out of her cap sleeves.
Not attractive, I tell myself, even though her flesh is young and firm. It won't always be firm, though. It'll grow old, I tell myself, just like Cassie. Whenever I'm hungry, which is often, I picture Cassie old. Her bloated body beneath a hospital bedsheet.

 • • • 

While she starts buffing and filing, we talk about what we've both been baking recently, even though I've baked nothing recently. But Cassie has always been baking something. Usually some white trash cake with a whorish-sounding name. Today, she tells me about one she made recently called Better Than Sex. “So yummy,” she says.

“Sounds yummy,” I say. When I'm around Cassie, I start using words like
yummy
, even though such words feel misshapen on my lips. I ask her how you make it, knowing I'll never make it, and she says, “Oh, easy peasy. First, you make devil's food cake. Like, from a box? Then you take a fork and just stab the hot cake all over. Then you pour caramel sauce and a thingy of condensed milk into the stab holes so the cake soaks it all up? Then you put it in the fridge for, like, three hours. Oh! And once it's chilled? You put whipped cream on top of
that
. So yummy.”

“I'll have to try it.” I'll never try it. “I did try your slutty brownies,” I add.

“You did?!”

I didn't, of course. But I tell her all about how I brought them to work and how everyone loved them and begged for the recipe. So I gave it to them. I really hope that's okay with her.

“Of course!”

She applies the brown sugar exfoliant to my forearms, which will be followed by a yogurt moisture massage. The brown sugar chafes, the yogurt cools. It's an exhilarating combination. I close my eyes.

“So what have you been up to in the kitchen?” she asks me.

I think about the boneless skinless chicken breast I pounded into a thin white strip with a tenderizer last night, adding a squeeze of lime when I took it out of the oven to make it tropical tasting.

“Oh, just experimenting, mostly. Though I did make this bourbon bundt cake that turned out pretty good.”

That wasn't me but my sadist coworker Eve. I bake and give everything away, Eve tells everyone, like it's a baking tip she's offering, like how you should add salt to chocolate. Eve always comes to work bearing a tin of some thickly iced treat, her wrist tendons visibly straining under the weight of her confection. She'll leave whatever she's made in the back room for all the fat and middling women we work with to cut thick slices out of.

“Oh, Eve, so delicious!”

“Oh, good!” Eve beams. When Eve beams, the corners of her mouth turn downward, her eyes crinkle almost closed, and the hollow in her throat gets disconcertingly deeper.

By the end of the shift, the tin's more or less empty except for crumbs. And Eve's over the sink, rinsing it with steaming hot water, smug. Often, she forgets to rinse the tin and I have to do it. Even though I've told her time and time again she can't leave leftovers on the counter like that overnight. Because of ants.

We're on to the elbow-to-fingertip yogurt massage. When Cassie kneads my bony palm like it's a ball of dough, grabbing hold of each long finger and pulling it gently between her plump ones, I never know where to look. She never knows where to look either. What we both end up doing is looking at the space just past our respective left ears.

“A bourbon bundt,” Cassie repeats, calling me back. And I
watch her try to picture it with the hungry eye of her mind. “Sounds yum. I'll have to make it for my husband. He loves that Southern rustic stuff.”

Cassie got married recently. I couldn't believe it when she first told me. At first, I thought it might have to do with the fact that she's part of a very small religious community, people who see each other with the eyes of Jesus first. Then I found out Cassie isn't really part of this community anymore, at least not hard-core, and that the guy just happened to be a friend of her brother's who thought she was cute. And the thing is
he's
cute. At least according to the picture Cassie showed me once on her iPhone.

She shows me another picture of him now.

I take the phone and stare at the picture like it's a pot of water I'm trying to boil, waiting for any latent sign of his freakdom to surface. A yellowish tinge to the skin, maybe? Some pervert shading under the eyes? A weird nose kink, but no. As far as I can see, he's the stuff of the earth. Its handsome salt. I'm still looking when at last she takes the phone from my hands and says, “He's pretty cute, huh?”

“He is. How did—well, congratulations.”

I ask if they're still in their honeymoon period and she blushes.

Yes, yes they are. It's sort of wonderful.

“That's great,” I say. “Really, great.” It is.

“It is,” she says. She's very lucky. “How are things with your husband?”

I look at her, eyes wide at her innocent question, and that's when a video clip of two fat girls in ill-fitting bondage gear flogging one another on the floor of a fake-looking dungeon, the one I found in my husband's recent web history last year, comes back to
me in full graphic detail. I found others that night: fat girls dressed as French maids, Ukrainian lesbians, hopeful cheerleaders. Fat girls who always seem to be smirking or looking surprised that their clothes are too tight. Fat girls who, along with a few sites about trance music and conspiracy theories, had been worming their way into his web history for several months.

I say things are great, and feel the corner of my mouth do one of those spastic quivers.

“That's so great,” she says. “How long have you guys been married again?”

“Going on three years in July.”

“Ooh, so big anniversary coming up.”

“Yeah.”

“We could do a shimmery color for that. Maybe something peach.”

By then she's painting Amuse Bouche on my fingernails and she's all hunched over me, frowning in her effort to be precise. But she isn't precise. She makes all these mistakes, which she has to keep fixing with a sharp little wooden stick she keeps dipping into acetone. It's at this moment that I want to wrench my fingers back from her hot hands. For I cannot bear the weight of her any longer. Her warm, fat touch becomes the opposite of comfort, it becomes oppressive. I need to be free of her. Now.