13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (5 page)

We both stare at the black-and-white actor's head shot of him in his wheelchair, the one he still sends out to movie and television producers. He had to quit his job as a soap opera actor after the accident, but he still gets work as an extra, sometimes even a line or two in a movie now and then. Though you can see the wheelchair handles poking out above his biker-jacketed shoulders, the pic is mainly a close-up of his face looking daytime-television intense, like when a bomb has just been dropped in a scene and the camera closes up on the actor's expression before fading into black and then commercial. But actually it's the other photo, the one China pulls up now, that I can't bear to look at. The one before the accident, before the night he got super coked up and decided to climb a forty-foot palm tree and jump. In this picture, he's standing smiling and naked beneath a waterfall somewhere in South America, wearing a pair of Reeboks, looking only a few years older than I am now. I don't know why looking at this picture embarrasses me so much. If it's his eighties hair or the Reeboks or just how at ease he seems in his sunburnt skin, an ease I've never known, so at ease he looks almost cocky. That there was a time in his life when he was happy to stand in the bright light of day and bare himself like this, his smile so wide and open, he might be laughing. And that he would send this shot to me now. I much prefer the wheelchair picture, which is more or
less just his face, his expression trying for cinematic but mostly just looking broken and vacant. There's still a lingering pride in the tilt of his chin and shoulders that I don't know how to process, that is foreign to me. When he sent me the pictures, I didn't know what to say. At last I said: I like your eyes.

She stares at his photo so long I want to snatch it from her. I want to explain. Remind her that he's a Lynch fan. Remind her of the Morrissey connection. That he was a pretty big-deal soap opera star in the eighties. He even had sex with Raquel Welch once.

Finally she turns to look at me. “I guess I could go for some Chinese now.”

“Oh,” I say, “are we done?”

“For now,” she says, like I've exhausted her.

When the Chinese arrives, I watch her spend a lot of time opening the little packets of sauce. She spends way more time doing this than eating.

“After this, maybe we should try some other things,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Like some different angles. And some locations. And probably too we should try some with the light on.”

“I don't know about this, Lizzie,” she says.

“What?”

“This whole thing. It just seems weird.”

“What about the guy who was psycho all over you? Vermont? Who burned the photos. He wasn't weird?”

“I really don't think you can compare the two.”

“I guess not. I mean, mine lives far away.”

“Also what is he, like, sixty?”

“Forty-seven.”

“And a paraplegic?”

“Quadriplegic.”

“And are you ever actually going to
meet
this guy? Are you really going to fly to fucking Irvine or wherever he lives? How is he going to pick you up from the airport? Do you even
want
this guy to fuck you?
Can
he even fuck you?”

“I—”

“I just don't see how this is going to work, like, in
reality
. He's way old. And weird. And he's got
Baywatch
-era hair. This pic situation”—she shakes her head at her egg roll—“is honestly the least of your worries.”

We pick at the Chinese in awkward silence.

“I should be getting to Java. I'm meeting this guy Andrew there. He's a friend,” she says. “You've got enough there, don't you? Here,” she says, handing me her dad's camera. “You can hang on to this and develop them. Just bring it with you next time I see you. You're coming to class Monday, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We have that presentation.”

“I know.”

She goes to the bathroom to duct-tape her nipples, and while she's in there, I look at the photos on the camera's LCD monitor. They're the same if not worse than the ones I had before. I look startled in most of them. Overexposed. Pissed. My makeup is terrible. I do look like I've been punched in the eyes.

She comes back into my room with her dress on up to the hips, her top half totally naked but for the duct-tape crosses.

“Do these look like X's or crosses?”

I look at her a long time.

“They look more like plus signs, I guess.”

“I guess that's all right,” she says. “Can you tie me up in back?” She turns to give me her back and holds out the straps of her halter.

I tie her up, gazing at the Asian characters tattooed down her back that supposedly spell out
Steppenwolf
and wonder, what if they don't spell out anything? What if she got tricked?

“You should come tonight,” she says. “I could probably get you in if Alaska's at the door.”

“I better not,” I say. “I'm not feeling that well, actually. And I've got stuff to do later.” And I hate that when I say this, she nods, nods in this way like she knows exactly what I'm going to do later. Can actually see me listening to
Little Earthquakes
on continuous loop while I tear my way through the takeout she left behind.

“Sure,” she says. “If you change your mind about Death, come by. And don't forget about Monday. You can't skip, Lizzie.”

“I said I wouldn't.”

 • • • 

After she goes, I picture her walking toward the nearby café where Andrew will pick her up, doing it quickly, even on the ice. Her big feet are the only thing big about her and she just turns them into wit.
If they were any smaller, I'd fall over. Any bigger, I'd step on you.

Meanwhile, one of her psycho stalkers will be waiting on her front lawn. Nebraska. Or maybe New York. Looking all pitiful in the snowy rain with his waterlogged copy of
Steppenwolf
. He'll wait there all night. And maybe when she gets home near dawn, she'll let him in but only if he agrees not to speak. He'll agree, of course. He'll agree to anything just to be near her. She'll lie there on her bed, surrounded by her flame-breathing dragons,
arranging and rearranging her long cool limbs while she tells him about her errand. About the pictures. About Blake. She might say it's sad. He probably won't listen anyway. Won't hear China over the fact of China. Her long limbs too loud, too miraculous.

I call Mel. We haven't been hanging out as much the past few weeks. When she picks up, she's distant.

“Just thought I'd say hi,” I say. “What are you up to?” In the background, I hear a swell of somber strings, a voice of immense operatic sadness wailing in the background that I don't recognize.

“Just studying,” she says. Mel only had a semester's worth of credits left when she dropped out, so she's doing two semesters of night school and a summer school stint to finish. “You?”

I tell her I saw China today, and her voice cools even more perceptibly.

“You were right about her,” I say.

“I told you! Honestly, I don't know what you see in her. She's . . .”

I wait for it.

“Just kind of plain, really. Boring. And she has no taste of her own! She just copies other people. She just likes whatever the people she hangs around with like. She's all over the place.”

“Yeah,” I say. This is an accusation that Mel aims at people all the time. I think she thinks it about me sometimes.

“Want to come over? I've got Chinese food.”

She can't, she says. She has a test Monday night and work during the day, so she should probably really focus. Mel works part-time at a doughnut shop. Sometimes, I cut class and go over there, or I go in the afternoon. Mel will join me on her breaks and we'll eat. Never the doughnuts because we agree that a fat girl with
a doughnut is too sad a thing. But we eat everything else. The fake crab salad. The dill pickles. The blueberry muffins. The toasted bagels with salted butter, which we dip into coffees that we take with cream and lots of Equal.

“You sure you can't, just for a little? I just made a new mix.”

“You better not be making that for China.”

“I'm not.”

“She can't just have our music
given
to her, you know.”

“I know.”

“Though I guess she wouldn't even get it anyway,” she sniffs.

On the other end, I hear what sounds like a lute. A Celtic drumbeat gathering force. Layered female vocals breaking into a siren-like wail.

“I mean, it's annoying enough to have to see her at clubs.” I know what she means. It's hard to take, the way China looks under the lights.

After I hang up, I look around my room. At my crackly bed cushions. At my plus-size blouses and skirts rumpled on the bed. At all the old posters of Hollywood sirens my mother once nailed to my walls. I stand up on the bed. I reach out and start ripping them down—first a tiaraed Audrey Hepburn eating breakfast in dark glasses (now with zombies, thanks to me), then Jayne Mansfield sweatered and laughing, then windblown Marilyn in her infamous halter, then Marilyn when she was Norma Jean, pedal pushers and plaid tied over her sucked-in stomach. I hesitate with Bettie, because I'm the one who bought it and taped it up there, but then I reach up on my tiptoes and tear it down too.

I'm still in the midst of ripping, my fists full of crumpled glossy paper and tape, when my Wonder Woman phone starts ringing.
I'm hoping it's Mel, but I know it's him. Wanting to know if I sent them yet. Oh, he can't wait. He really can't. I imagine telling him there's something wrong with my computer. I don't know what happened. Some sort of glitch.

While the phone rings and rings, I lie on the floor, close my eyes. I do what I'm trying not to do, which is dream myself into her clothes buckle by buckle, zip by zip, and then into her skin. Until I am her limbs and her long curving back,
Steppenwolf
branded on my knobby spine. Until I am her lips and her sharply cut cheeks and her eyes clouded in their glittering gray smoke. Until I am her eyebrow arching itself at me from the opposite shore of the room. Sure, I say to this sad girl. I'll show you. The only thing I keep of myself is my hair, which fans out around me like Ophelia drowning. In the corner is a beautiful blue-haired boy whom I've let in out of the rain. I'm letting him watch me sleep. I'm so very kind.

 • • • 

All the way to school on Monday, I picture turning back, shafting her. Just leaving her there alone without the cued DVDs or the Peter Gabriel music or the overhead maps of Haiti we're going to point to. Drowning up there without the necessary visual aids I'm clutching in my hands. I even smoke a cigarette in the stoner washroom past the first bell, staring at my now nearly unmade eyes, my too-dark red lips in the mirror.

In class, I let China do most of the talking. That was our agreement. If I took care of the visual aids, she'd do the talking. I let her explain The Difference Between Charity and Grass Roots Change, let her go on about how in Haiti there is this organization—she can't remember which, but it isn't grassroots. And what they did was just show up and stick a well in the
middle of the town. They just dropped it there, didn't even check to see if there was a water source underneath. Or was it a pump? It might have been a pump, she says.

I realize she has no idea what she's talking about.

“Was it a well or a pump?” she asks, looking at me like I would know, even though this is her story. Today, her smoky eyes don't look globbed on at all. They have that four-tiered effect, a look that takes time and skill. Apart from a shadow of gray dust in the crease of my lids, mine's gone. When I looked in the mirror earlier, I saw the girl I was before she dragged me into the farthest stall from the door and sat me down on the taped-up toilet lid.

“A well or a pump?” she prompts.

All the eyes have left her briefly and are on me, waiting. I let the question hang there in the ugly room. I let her hang there all on her own for a breath, before I open my mouth.

S
o one night, on a dead shift, my coworker Archibald casually tells me there are things he's been picturing doing to me of late and when I say, “Like what?” he hands me a small scrap of paper with the word
cunnilingus
written on it in red ink.

I stare at the jagged letters. All lowercase. The
cunni
written eerily straight, the
lingus
curved and veering downward like a tail. Each letter separated by a space as though they're acronyms for other words.

I look at Archibald sitting in a swivel chair beside me, his thirtysomething face red from the low-grade grain whiskey he keeps in a giant coffee mug under the desk. He's looking at me like I'm not twice his size and wearing a turd-colored shirt that says
MUSIC! BOOKS! VIDEO!
on it and a blue apron over that that says
WE HAVE IT ALL!!!
He's looking at me like I'm donning what Mel wears to go dancing on fetish nights at Savage Garden, which is basically just a few strategically positioned scraps of black lace.

I tell myself, Laugh. It's a joke, obviously. But when I force a one-note laugh like a cough, Archibald doesn't laugh with me.

“I'm good at it, Lizzie,” Archibald says. “Quite good. I play the harmonica semiprofessionally. Chromatic scale.”

I look back down at the note. He's scribbled it on one of those torn bits of scrap paper we keep in a fishbowl at the desk so customers can scribble whatever out-of-print or obscure book they want special-ordered. A dated history of the Ottoman Empire. Herzog's walking diary from Munich to Paris. A photography book featuring extreme close-ups of female genitalia, where they don't look like genitalia at all but like sea plants.

“I'm sure an attractive girl like you has a ton of admirers,” Archibald continues. “Boyfriends.”

He's looking at me sideways, but I say nothing. I just look off to the left like it's too true. After all, Archibald
did
once tell me that Fergie, our obese coworker who walks with a cane due to a childhood case of polio, is deeply in lust with me. When I pointed out that Fergie is old enough to be my grandfather, he said that Roland, the little troll man who works in receiving, has a profound boner for me too. So there's that.

“You can't be serious about this,” I say, shaking my head at the note.

“Why not?” he says, looking right at me. I see his expression is as eerily sober as it is when he talks about harmonica maintenance or extols the virtues of the chromatic over the diatonic scale.

Thankfully, a customer comes up. A man in a worn suit and a trench coat clutching a yellowed slip of paper fervently in his fist. On that paper will surely be a list of about ten out-of-print books on some obscure subject. This man is one of Archibald's regulars. I wait for the man to leave even though my shift has
been over for seven minutes by the time they're finished, and Mel is waiting for me at the apartment to sample some new CDs. When the customer finally does leave, I say to Archibald, “Can I think about it?”

Archibald smiles at me with one side of his mouth.

“It's not a ring, Lizzie. Just consider it an open invitation.”

 • • • 

The next day at work, I'm flirty, casual. I even have a plan, which I thought of last night and then visualized all day in Old English and Renaissance Poetry and then on my way to work. I'll thank him off-the-cuff for the note, then suggest, off-the-cuff, that we go for coffee. Just coffee. I've borrowed Mel's Celtic cross necklace, and put my mother's lace tank under my work shirt, which I've unbuttoned down to the middle of my chest. I'm liberal with the Winter Dew eau de cologne. More careful than usual in my application of Rebel blended with Lady Danger, then topped with Girl About Town gloss. I even hazard a look at myself in the subway car windows on the way to work and I don't immediately look away.

I find Archibald in the break room, sitting in the far corner on a lopsided futon by a moldering tower of Harlequins with ripped-off covers, scarfing banana bread out of a Tupperware container, looking seriously stoned.

He doesn't acknowledge me when I come in. Even when I clear my throat, he's still scarfing his bread as though in a kind of dream.

“Hey,” I say. Flirty, casual.

He raises his eyebrows in vague recognition, grunts, and then keeps eating the bread.

I sit down beside him on the futon, half-facing him, and braid my hands together on my lap. It's not flirty. I feel as though we're in
court or I'm his therapist. I unbraid my fingers and run a hand through my hair. Cards, you have all the cards, remember.

“So I've been thinking about your offer.”

“Offer?”

I feel myself go red in patches the way I hate.

“What you wrote. On that scrap of paper yesterday?”

“Oh, right, my offer.” He smiles as if recalling the lovable antics of an old friend. “And?”

“I was thinking how it was really rude of me to just brush you off like that.”

“No worries.”

“Anyway, I was thinking that maybe . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Well . . . you know . . .” I trail off. Janice comes in just then, this obscenely depressed woman who works in Kids. She's eyeing us now from where she sits on the broken rocking chair, frowning over her mug of cheap fennel tea.

“Maybe we could . . .” I say, lowering my voice.

“Could what?”

“You know,
meet
.”

“Really?” He looks pleased. Too pleased.

“Not the note. I mean go for coffee.”

Behind me, Janice snorts into her tea.

“Coffee,” he repeats.

He gives me the same look he gave me last time, the long, lingering one like I'm not wearing my bookstore uniform, but something sexy, even obscure.

“How about tonight?” he says.

“Tonight?” In my head I was picturing a date in the future. At
least a week to prepare. Prepare for what? I should be spur-of-the-moment. That's how you live life, isn't it? Carefree.

“I finish later than you do tonight,” I say at last.

“I'll wait.”

“It'll be late. I mean for coffee, though.”

“So we'll have tea,” Archibald says.

 • • • 

The cabdriver's name, according to the lit-up license on the back of the seat, is Jesus. A scentless pine tree dangles from the smudged rearview mirror, in which I can see one of Jesus's eyes, mud colored and narrowed, the brow over it thick and severely furrowed.

“He doesn't care,” Archibald said in a low voice when we first got into the cab and he tried to take off my shirt. “He sees this kind of stuff all the time, trust me.”

I shook my head.

“You're holding out on me, Lizzie. But that's okay. I consider myself lucky just to be here with you. Just keep driving, Jesus,” he called. “We want to see more.”

“Where I go?”

“Just drive us around. Turn some circles, you know? Give us the grand tour of downtown.”

A few minutes later, I'm smiling pleasantly at Jesus's eye in the rearview mirror, trying to act like Archibald's head is not under my maxi skirt, between my legs, where it has been for some time now. I'm moaning quietly. Moaning so as not to be rude to Archibald, but trying to do it quietly so that I'm not being rude to the driver. The moans come out of me like hiccups. The truth is I'm too aware of Jesus, of the passing cars, the human traffic on the whooshing streets, the brightness of the city lights, to fully register what's
happening between my widely parted thighs. Mostly it's as though the bottom half of me has been cut off from the top half and the top half is observing the happenings of the bottom from a curious, empirical height. This bland man is licking the crotch of my underwear, how nice. Now he has removed them. Now he is biting my thighs. Moaning quietly into my leg flesh. There are a couple of moments when the bottom and the top half fuse, when he bites one of my legs hard or I feel his moans hum against my skin, and I gasp. Then I become a whole body of actual flesh that he is actually touching, then I feel the brush of his tongue as an actual brush of an actual tongue between my actual thighs. That's when I say, I love you, the words just flying out of my mouth like brassy butterflies.

Jesus looks at me. He heard it, but maybe, hopefully, Archibald didn't.

When the meter gets to twenty dollars, I make my moaning more broken sounding, full of breaths and catches the way Mel's is when I hear her having sex with her boyfriend through the wall, and then I pretend to orgasm. It's been seven minutes or so. Mel knew a guy who could make her come in seven minutes.

Archibald lifts his head up from under my skirt, still between my legs.

“You came?”

I look at his face framed between my knees. Floating there weirdly in the dark. His lips are glossy, his thinning red hair in disarray. He takes his glasses off and his eyes are a different color—darker, greener, with bits of yellow in them, which are probably reflections from the lights outside.

I nod.

“You're lying.”

“No, I really did.”

“It's okay.” He pats my knee and sits back up on the seat beside me. “I'll make you next time. Oh, hey, turn this up! Jesus, turn it up. Way up!” He thumps the back of the cabbie's seat until the man obliges.

“I love this song,” Archibald says to me, leaning his head against the backseat. “Peggy Lee. ‘Is That All There Is.' You heard it before?”

“No. I like it though,” I say. I don't. It sounds too old-timey. That cheesy swell of strings. The elephantine trumpets. The woman's world-weary voice sounding deep and dark as a well, but with one eyebrow raised, one side of her painted lips curled in a perverse smirk.

“It sounds like the circus,” I say.

“If that's all there is, break out the booze and have a ball,” Archibald says; he's looking at me intently but blearily. He's got a big bottle of L'Ambiance he just took a swig from. He holds it out to me, but I shake my head. “I can't believe you let me do that to you just now.”

“It was fun. I mean, I don't see how it was fun for you.”

“Oh it was. It's all I've wanted to do to you since I first saw you.”

“Really?”

“I have other fantasies too. Lots of them.”

“You do?”

“Sure. I'm grateful, you know. I'm grateful to you. Look at you. Look at me. I'm unworthy. It's okay. I
know
I am. I've accepted it. The fact that you let me do this?” He shakes his head. “I'm shocked, honestly. But I'm not going to question it. I'll take what I can get. It's like this song. If that's all there is, break out the booze and have a ball, you know?” He takes a sip of his wine jug.
“Sorry we had to do it here, though. In front of Jesus. Guess I couldn't wait. I was excited.”

“That's okay. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

“Anytime. Anytime you want, you just call. I hope you do.” He takes my hand, smiles at me a little sadly. “Do you mind if I bum one of your cigarettes?”

 • • • 

When I come home and tell Mel what happened she says, “Sounds like it was a bust.”

“Totally,” I say.

But then I call him the next night and he comes over.

He starts coming over regularly. Nights we work together. Nights we don't. After a few weeks, I start calling him my boyfriend sort of, adding the
sort of
only when I'm talking to Mel. We have sex that I tell myself is good, it is good surely, certainly it is okay, it is definitely not terrible, and then afterward he tries to educate me about the jazz harmonica, which he says is the most underappreciated of instruments. He'll be deeply stoned on the generous joint he rolled himself from the bag of pot I keep for him in my freezer, drunk on the alcohol he toted over here in a worn plastic bag. I'll watch him pace my bedroom, going on about dissonance and scales, his head too big for his body, his glasses too big for his face. I remind myself that these lectures, delivered in his underwear with an earnestness that I tell myself is charming, are better than watching him laugh through a very sad and disturbing film, his second-favorite post-sex activity. I remind myself that I didn't need to call him tonight, though I just did. Just like I called him on Wednesday. And Sunday and Monday. For fun.

After eight or so weeks of dating him, I still can't explain his appeal to Mel, who often ushers me into the kitchen to have short
hissing conversations about how he's lame. It's a descent to sleep with him. A Descent. When I tell her casually that Archibald's coming over tonight, she says, “He is?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Nothing. You've just been seeing him a lot.”

“Just for fun, though. He likes me,” I say, sort of wanton. When she says nothing, I ask, “Do you think he likes me?”

“Do you like
him
?”

“I like the way he touches me a lot,” I say, thinking of how on the subway the other day, he grabbed my boob through my shirt and how it was actually pretty embarrassing and I told him repeatedly, People are watching, because they were and he said, Let them. But this is not a good example. I think of how I can wear a bra and underwear around him and I don't have to hide my middle with my hands the way I did with Kurt, a friend I lost my technical virginity to a summer ago. He was a virgin too. What we did in the half dark of his dad's truck was a platonic arrangement, so that we would no longer be freaks to ourselves or the world. The next day, he took me to see
Rent
and we had a seafood dinner on King Street. Archibald doesn't take me to dinner, but I can be naked in front of him. Under bright lights. In full daylight. Actually naked. Breasts. Thighs. Stomach laid bare. This is a sight that excites him. And when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the half dark of the hallway on the way to the bathroom or kitchen, I don't look away. I stay there. I look at my body and I am fascinated by what I now see to be its appeal. But I could never explain that, even to her.