13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (20 page)

“That lake goes out to sea, right?” I ask my father.

“To the sea?” he repeats, his eyes on the TV. “I'm sure it does. It has to, doesn't it?”

When my father gets up to leave, he hits his head again on the candelabra and swears.

“Do you ever light this or . . . ?”

“Sometimes.”

“You should light it. If you're going to keep it, you should light it.” My father is currently seeing two different women in the building, both of whom live in Phase One, both on the fifth floor but in different towers. Both are efficient, evening gym users, one slightly more so than the other. When he's finished hanging out with me, he will go back up to see her.

“Good night,” I tell him.

After he leaves, I go to bed, and I dream the recurring dream in which I blow up Bebe, the women's clothing store. When the
smurf salesgirl tells me she doesn't have the peacock blazer I want in a medium, even though I am not a medium, I am a tenuous, hard-won large, I tell her it's fine. And it is, for once. Because I can feel the dynamite strapped to my stomach under my XL Ann Taylor cardigan. When I show her why it's fine, she screams and I scream and then up we all go in smoke. The strappy bodycons. The billowy, asymmetrical blouses. The whole of their rhinestone-studded aerobic line. And even though I die in the great fire, I also get to watch it burn from above. And it's beautiful to behold the mushroom cloud, the bauble ash, to feel the hot wind of the explosion in my hair. But the sirens and alarms that signal Bebe's end are beyond the dream too, they are in my apartment, they are deafening. I open my eyes. Fire alarm. The voice of Carlos, the night security person, telling us, Do not panic, Do not panic, over the PA system that is piped into every unit.

I shrug on a housecoat and stumble out. I stagger toward the emergency exit, passing by Char's apartment as I do. Her door is wide open.

From the doorframe, I watch her pace a flipped-over version of my own floor plan. She's got one cat tucked under her arm, and she's calling out “Toffee!” in a shrill voice. She's still in her workout T-shirt. Jogging pants that hang on her. And over that, an open ratty robe. As I watch her, I think of the one-eyed tiger I saw at a zoo once. How she walked back and forth across the length of her stone enclosure while we all watched. I stood there with my head against the glass, feeling her panic and misery in my bones for I don't know how long, until a child beside me piped up,
Why is she pacing like that?

She's tense,
the zookeeper said.

And I remember hatching a plan to free her then and there. I'd come back at night. Hop the spiked fence. Hurl a garbage can at the hand-thumped glass. Ride the tiger into the night if she didn't eat me first.

As I enter her apartment, my peripheral vision registers the absence of food on the granite kitchen counters, the tall vases of blown glass brimming with fake orchids, the sleek tables and chairs, the amorphous metallic statues. Details I will store to tell Ruth later over Iron Maidens.

Can you believe how she lives?

It's sad.

It is sad.

What a sad existence.

Though she doesn't ask for help and I don't offer, I follow her into her living room. We both crouch down on her eggshell carpet (I see that she too opted for eggshell over taupe). There, under the wicker love seat, right beneath its sagging underbelly, I see a couple of yellow eyes wide open. Toffee.

Char lifts one end of the love seat while I attempt to gather Toffee, hissing and spitting, into my arms. To do this, I have to pry her paws from the carpet claw by claw. I carry her with her legs straight out and her claws unsheathed and aimed at my neck, all the way out of the apartment and down the concrete stairs toward the ground floor emergency exit. We leave the building, walk toward the grassy verge between the parking lot and the Malibu Club, where the sound of the alarm is slightly fainter.

We sit on the overclipped, parched grass, between crop circles of bland landscaping. Flowers planted like sentinels, flowers so boring they have no names. The cats hiss in our arms. We do not
speak or look at one another. Above us, the pink blaze of the morning begins to rim the night. She does not thank me. When I look at her, I see she is looking straight ahead into the aquarium windows of the Malibu Club. She's watching a woman there, on Lifecycle One, pedaling in the dark. I do that sometimes, if I can't sleep. I'll come down early, before the real estate agents and business analysts start arriving for the 5:30 a.m. time slot. I'll keep the lights off until some asshole in a terry cloth headband comes down and flips a switch. Somehow it's easier to pedal in the dark, to put one ridiculous, unbelieving foot in front of the other with just the exit signs and the blinking red lights of the cardio machines to contend with.

I've seen the pedaling woman there before. Apart from the Aquafit diehards, you cannot imagine a creature more stagnant in terms of results. She's like a soap opera that you tune in to after ten years only to find that the plot hasn't moved an inch. All the love triangles and intrigues and scandals are exactly where you last left them. The actors are just a bit older, on their faces more evidence of cosmetic preservation.

“Haven't seen you down there lately,” Char says, jutting her chin toward the dark windows of the club.

“No,” I say.

“Taking a break?”

“Sort of.”

She nods sagely and reaches into the pocket of her robe for a pack of cigarettes. She extends the pack toward me like a question. I shake my head.

“Do you like the zoo much?” she asks me, lighting one.

“The zoo? Yes. Sometimes.”

“I work there, you know. Fund-raising.”

“Do you?” I say, like I don't already know this.

“I could get you a couple free passes,” she says. “You know, for you and a friend.”

I think of Mel. How when we were in high school, we used to go to the zoo and she'd bring me into the monkey room just because she knew I was terrified of them, and then, feeling guilty, she'd lead me away toward the turtles. Looking back, it still doesn't add up how we went from lying in the grass and listening to the same set of headphones to where we are now. Nowhere. I really need to e-mail her.

“I might even be able to arrange a behind-the-scenes tour. Not of every animal, obviously. But one, maybe. Your favorite.”

Silence.

“So what's your favorite?”

“I don't know. Turtle?” I tell her.

“Turtle,” she repeats. I can tell my choice disappoints her. I should have chosen some breed of big cat. A cheetah. A lynx.

“Shouldn't be too difficult. Just give me notice. I'll need notice,” she says. “To make arrangements.”

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.

“Sad,” Char pipes up beside me. I see she's looking at the woman too.

“Yes,” I agree. “Very sad.”

The cat's grip on my arm relinquishes a little.

“If she would just do interval training. That's her problem. No interval training.”

Smoke darts out of her mouth like little tongues.

“Your body needs to be surprised. Attacked. Always. You've
got to shock your system constantly. Otherwise, you're nowhere.”

“Yeah,” I say, looking at the woman. “Do you know if this lake goes out to the sea?”

“The sea? I don't think so.”

I nod.

“Maybe eventually it does,” she says. “I think it goes into a river first. I'm not sure.”

I wonder where it all goes,
Mel asked me once.

What?

Our fat. After we lose it. I know we sweat but that can't be all it is. It can't just turn into water and salt. It can't just disappear. We don't just melt, do we?

She looked at me, smiling, bouncing a little in her chair. She was in a good mood because she'd been on a diet for a while, was losing. Feeling philosophical in her slinky velvet dress, stirring a peppermint tea she'd doctored with a million Twins.

I think we do melt, actually,
I told her.
I read an article about it once in a science magazine. I can't remember exactly what it said, though. I think it even comes out in our breath.

Mel wasn't listening. She was looking at her reflection in the window, pleased.

Maybe it's all around us,
she said at last, waving a hand at the dusty café air, making her voice spooky, her eyes big and wide like we were teenagers and she was trying to scare me.
Maybe we're all around us. Maybe the universe is made up of it. Our old fat.
She smiled.
Wouldn't that be so funny?

 • • • 

The red fire of the morning is ablaze over our faces and over the water. The glass towers of the city, which will return to a
dismal gray the moment the sun is done rising, shimmer and flame in the distance. From here the lake looks beautiful, but I know for a fact, have seen with my own eyes during the walks I sometimes take to mix it up, that nothing lives under there but the junk of the world and eyeless, acid-ridden fish. I suppose I could switch to a different machine. Vary the incline level at two-minute intervals. Change the fitness course constantly so that I'm always going from Random to Fat Burning to Rolling Hills, so that it always feels like I'm getting somewhere. The sound of the sirens draws close, causing Char's cat to tense in my arms. Even though I know that woman must hear the sirens through the glass enclosure of the Malibu Club, she keeps pedaling. As I watch her through the glass, breathing in Char's smoke, I feel dangerously close to a knowledge that is probably already ours for the taking, a knowledge that I know could change everything.

T
hank you to my parents, Nina Milosevic and James Awad, for their love and faith in me.

Thank you to Alexandra Dimou, Ken Calhoun, Jessica Riley, Jennifer Long-Pratt, Erica Mena-Landry, Dawn Promislow, Mairead Case, and Emily Cullitone for their friendship, immense support, kindness, and thoughtful feedback during the writing of this book.

Thank you to Jessica Riley, an intelligent and beyond generous reader whose friendship and endless encouragement saved me more times than I can say, for my sanity.

Thank you to my inspiring teacher Brian Evenson for his perceptive and encouraging feedback, and for the invaluable guidance provided by Joanna Howard, Carole Maso, Thalia Field, Joanna Ruocco, and Kate Bernheimer as well as my fantastic cohort at Brown (2012–2014) who patiently read various incarnations of this book.

Thank you to the generous editors who read and supported
my writing: Nick Mount, Jordan Bass, Derek Webster, Matthew Fox, Carmine Starnino, Jaime Clarke, and Mary Cotton at Newtonville Books, Libby Hodges, Mikhail Iossel, Mike Spry, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Emily M. Keeler, Lauren Spohrer, Quinn Emmett, and Elizabeth Blachman. Thank you to Christine Vines.

Thank you to my amazing, hardworking agent Julia Kenny, whose enthusiasm is a bright light in my moments of doubt and to my editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, for her always intelligent and insightful feedback and her tireless dedication to this book. Her commitment to authenticity and voice was yet more proof that I couldn't have had a better editor. And many thanks too to my Canadian editor Nicole Winstanley, for her thoughtful notes, her deep commitment to this book, and for bringing it to my home and native land.

Thank you to Debka Colson and the Writers' Room of Boston for providing space in which to work.

Thank you to Betsy Burton for opening her home and giving me space and time to write and to everyone at The King's English bookshop for their friendship and community and for giving me a job when I needed one.

Lastly, my deepest thanks to Rex Baker, to whom this book is dedicated, and whose belief and love saw me through everything. I could not have written this without you.

Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!