13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (17 page)

“I've never been to Sweet Diva,” I tell Cassie.

“Oh! You should go. With all the baking you do, you'd so appreciate it,” she says. “They do this coconut cream that's out of this world. Probably we had too many. Had to have a nap after.”

As she covers my arms with cold yogurt, I picture her and her non-freak husband napping. On a quilted bedspread. Cassie making a deep dent in the mattress. Maybe he's got his arm around her.

“Then after the nap?” I prompt.

She smiles. “He gave me my presents.”

“What'd he get you?”

“This nail art kit I wanted,” she says, flashing her freshly coiffed nails at me. Each nail is embossed with a badly painted flower.

“Pretty.”

“Also these,” she says, wiggling her feet at me from under the table. I look down and see that her feet are encased in cheap, vaguely oriental-looking sandals stuccoed with small bits of brightly colored plastic. I see her husband kneeling before her, smilingly slipping them onto her small feet. She has disconcertingly tiny feet.

“Nice.”

We're on to the massage portion. I close my eyes for a while.

“Where did he take you to dinner?”

“Oh, just this Italian place in the mall I really like. You know the one with the pretty waterfall?”

Cassie and her husband seated across from each other at a dinner table. He's wearing a smart tie, beaming at her beaming at him over quivering candlelight. He takes her coiffed hand and kisses it. Maybe they're talking about their favorite zoo animals.

“Oh, right. I love that place.” I hate that place. “What did you have?”

“This creamy pasta dish? With the little bowtie pasta. What are those called again?”

They're in the half-dark of their bedroom, on their nap-rumpled bed. Would she want the lights off? Probably lowered. He'd have to be on top. Maybe not.

“Farfalle,” I say.

“Farfalle,” she repeats. “That's it! And then this chocolate lava cake for dessert. So yummy.”

She straddles him under her white skirt, blouse sliding off her shoulders. For a brief moment I inhabit his shuddery skin. Lying on my back on the Cassie-dented mattress, between her broad thighs. Feeling her opening my shirt button by button, my tie being tugged by her primped hands. When she leans in to kiss me, a coil of red hair grazes my cheek and her sleeves slide farther down her shoulders and I feel the full weight of Cassie. She tastes of flavored balm and lava cake and hot day. A tinfoil swan of leftover lava cake sits on the dresser, watching.

I open my eyes.

“Where did you go there?” she laughs.

“Nowhere. Sounds like a perfect day.”

“It was,” she says, beaming at the nothing just past my left ear. Unlike Eve, her beam creates no hollows.

 • • • 

“So what's the occasion?” my husband says, looking worriedly at the waterfall, at the faux frescoes on the ceiling designed to emulate Tuscany.

“I just thought it would be nice to have dinner out together for once.” I try beaming.

He shrugs and cracks open the oversize menu. Then he closes it again.

“I'm surprised you picked this place,” he says, staring at the vast basket of oily breadsticks between us. They're sprinkled with a yellow saltlike substance designed to resemble cheese.

“I thought it would be fun,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow, then shakes his head and opens the menu again.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm going to have the farfalle,” I announce.

“Okay,” from behind his menu.

“And after I thought maybe we could get some cupcakes. At Sweet Diva, that new place that just opened? They supposedly do a great coconut cream.” I try beaming some more but he just looks at me.

“
What?
” I ask him.

“Nothing.” He looks back into the menu. “I just don't want it to go dark is all.”

“Dark? I don't know what you mean
dark
. It's just dinner.”

He lowers the menu and sighs.

“You know how you are. I wish it could just be dinner too. But whenever we go out like this it's never just dinner, it's this downward spiral, this kamikaze of guilt.”

Tears fill my eyes, but I suck them back. I nod at the bread basket.

“I'm sorry. I'm being an ass.” He takes my hands, but the grip is lax. Noticing the nail polish, he says, “Nice.”

“I just got them done today.”

“Didn't you
just
get your nails done, like, a few days ago?”

“Yeah.”

He lets go of my hands.

“What's wrong?”

“I just want you to be happy is all.”

“I know. I am.”

“Good,” he says. “Me too.”

“You are?”

“Of course. Why?”

I think again about the night when I watched that video of the
two fat maids on his desktop. Felt his office door opening behind me. Saw his worried reflection in the window above the screen. Heard him call my name like a question from the doorframe, call with impossible softness, a softness I hadn't heard in so long, like his voice was fingers, stroking the face of my name. I didn't answer or turn around, I just kept watching, my hands curled into fists.

“No reason,” I say now.

“You've been so distant since your mother died. Honestly, Elizabeth, I haven't known how to handle it. I don't know what to do.”

Liz, I think. I told you I go by Liz now. Why can he never get it right?

“This has nothing to do with my mother,” I lie. “At all. I'm fine.”

And I sit there, watching him chomp breadsticks and regard the waterfall sullenly, thinking how there was a time, not too long ago, when with my formerly swollen hands, I could have snapped him in two. A time when I was afraid to lean against him if we were watching TV on the couch because I worried the weight of me was too much. 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.

 • • • 

After we get home from dinner that night, I go to the couch and he goes to his office, shutting the door behind him. I lie awake on the couch, staring at the silhouette of my mother's urn on the mantel. I keep the pictures of her in an ornamental box marked
Paris
. 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. We're standing side by side, but looking off in different directions—him at the camera, me at something off in the corner. I'm in open-toed heels, the toes freshly painted by my mother the night before. She didn't just paint them, she clipped them, scrubbed the calluses off my heels. We were sitting on the balcony, and I said I wanted a pedicure and bitched that I couldn't afford one and she said,
Jesus Christ,
and got up and left. I thought I had just pissed her off by complaining. But a few minutes later, she returned, panting a little, a towel over her broad shoulder, some old bottles of polish in one hand and a well-worn pumice stone in the other. She draped the towel over one thigh, then patted her thigh with her palm.
Here,
she said. Leaning back in her cast iron chair, I propped my foot on her thigh like it was an ottoman, and then for several minutes, there was my mother's heavy frame bent over me, clipping and scraping and painting in silence, concentrating so hard her tongue slid out between her lips, because she really had no idea how to paint toenails, while I looked past her at the sun setting behind her over the lake. It was awkward because we never really touched, and yet here was all my mother's flesh hunched over one foot. We did a blood red, which
was the only color she had besides clear. It was one of the last times that she and I would be alone.

There,
she said, slightly breathless, when she was done.
How's that?

Good, thanks,
I said, my eyes to the right of her, fixed on the lake, the sun setting over it, not able to take her in just then.

 • • • 

She's holding my hands up to the light to see if she should cut the cuticles. I'm staring at her breasts caged in flesh-colored lace. The sight makes my eyes sting. A tear, unbidden and hot, slides down my cheek. With the crook of an elbow, I brush it hastily away.

“You okay?” The furrow of concern deepens between her brows but today I am not moved, today I hate her for it.

“Fine.”

“You sure?”

She's wearing a long, light blue sundress with thin, slippy straps. I remind myself of the store she had to buy it in. I look at how the straps sliding from her shoulders expose the thick bra straps beneath, which are a sad flesh tone. How heavy her burden, I tell myself. How hot she must feel in the sun. I even do the hospital visualization. But it's no good. All I see is how the blue shade of the dress matches her eyes and the bright sky in the windows behind her. How she's gotten even more of a tan over the past few days. Her red hair looks lighter, is grazing the sun-freckled flesh of her shoulder, now more brown than peach.

“Just tired,” I tell her. “I haven't been sleeping much.”

“Oh, right. I'm sorry.”

“Me too.”

She still has my hands in hers.

“I bet you sleep well, though,” I say. “I bet most nights you're out like a light.”

“Yeah,” she says, dropping my hands into the salt water bowls. “I don't have too much trouble there.”

“You're lucky. I've never been able to just drop off like that. Water's a bit hot.”

“Sorry! I always try to get it on the hot side just 'cause it cools down so quickly? But I can—”

“It's all right. It'll cool down soon enough.”

“Well”—scooping brown sugar into her palms—“hopefully this'll relax you a bit. Feel free to close your—”

“Cassie, are you happy?”

She looks up. Her brow's still furrowed, probably from concentrating.

“Am I happy?” She blinks.

“In your life. With your husband?”

She lowers her eyes so her lashes cuddle each cheek. They're so long and thick and perfectly curled, I asked her once if they were fakes. They aren't. I still don't believe it.

“Pretty much. I mean, for the most part yes. Why?”

“No reason.”

We're silent for a bit.

She starts rubbing my forearm with what feels like a new force. I watch the sugar crystals dig into and chafe my skin.

“I mean,” she adds, staring at my arm, “sure, we have
some
problems. Who doesn't?”

“Right. Of course.”

I look at her and smile until her gaze goes sideways and lowers to my sugar-ravaged hands.

“Why?” she says. “Why are you asking?”

“No reason. Look, do you mind if we do another color today? Sort of had my fill of Amuse Bouche.”

We go back to contemplating the space just past our respective left ears.

She continues to rub the brown sugar into my already raw arms with excruciating vigor, making her breast flesh ripple way more than it really needs to, I think. After she rinses it off roughly with a scalding hot cloth, she scoops cold white yogurt from the coconut shell. I watch her slather it onto my scaly forearm, work it between my slender fingers with her warm, plump hands. Even when my hands were plump like Cassie's, they never gave off such warmth.

“I just don't get it,” I say.

“What don't you get?” There's a new coolness in her voice. The shock of it makes my heart skip. For a second I'm speechless.

I look at the red coil of hair that has slipped from her messy bun onto her broad freckled shoulder, her thin sky blue strap and the thick flesh-colored bra strap beneath. I feel the tightness of my own dress buttons down my back.

“What don't you get?” she prompts.

“Why they call this the Caribbean. Because there's nothing really ‘Caribbean' about it, is there? I mean, ingredient-wise?” It's true. The yogurt's not even Greek.

Cassie says nothing.

“Must make you hungry, though, this combination,” I say. “Does it?”

She looks at me until I lower my eyes.

“At first it did,” she says. “Yeah. Although,” she adds,
“rubbing it on people's hands and feet enough times can make you pretty sick of it after a while.”

She puts the polish and topcoat on quickly. She's sloppy administering the serum from the eyedropper, so the clear liquid bleeds out of my nail beds in rivulets. She doesn't enlist me to stay and wait those ten minutes that she always says would make all the difference in the world. She just takes the bowl and dumps the cooled salt water into the sink.

“You want this?” She asks as an afterthought, dangling the emery board over the trash bin, holding it between her thumb and index finger like it's the tail of roadkill.

“I'm good.”

She doesn't carry my purse to the register, so that I pretty much destroy my nails fishing out my keys and wallet. But I still leave her an absurd cash tip. I write “For Cammie” on the little gratuity envelope. Then I cross it out and write “Cassie.”

 • • • 

These days I wake to the smell of whatever she's been baking since before dawn—that is, if I'm really sleeping. Seven-layer coconut cakes. Lattice-crust pies full of cherries she hand pits. Often I'll have a slice or two while she watches from the other end of the dining room table. Just until I find my own place, I tell Eve each morning when I join her in the kitchen. Stay as long as you like, she says, watching me fork into her dessert, pouring us both more coffee. Not like I don't have the room.