13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (9 page)

In the morning, when I step on the scale, I steel myself for the sight of the needle going up (that chocolate), but to my astonishment, it's tipped down.

At the office, it's the usual midmorning drudgery. I'm doing the seven steps it takes to open the mail while drinking black coffee. Itsy Bitsy is scheduling, while secret-eating a kardemummabullar, a cardamom bun, at her desk. She's pretending to secret-eat for my sake, to make me laugh, like look what a pig she is, she can't even wait until lunch. She over-crackles the paper bag, does shifty eyes before each superbite. She's wearing this sixties minidress with matching white go-go boots like something stitched out of my nightmares. Seeing me watch her, she waves, her cheeks plump with
kardemummabullar. I wave back, and the hate I feel is bottomless. The hate could drown us both. She swallows and mouths, Lunch, at me like it's a question and I nod in spite of myself.

In that photo of my father and me, the one where I'm as small as the girl I hate, the one where he is gazing down at me with such love and incomprehension, the one taken before he left and before I grew up heavy like my mother, I'm looking right into the camera. It might have been the last time I looked right into a lens and smiled with no reservations, with no shame. He showed me this photo recently, when we met for a strained lunch on my last birthday, when I was at my biggest, before I met Tom, before I started losing. He included it in an album of photos that he gave me as part of my birthday gift, one that was presumably meant to show me that I hadn't always been fat. Look. See? Where did I get this idea? Maybe from my mother, he said. Probably it was all from my mother.
She
always struggled. But you? Look. But all I could see was the caption sticker above the photo that read, “Great Time Every Time,” which I could never picture my father purchasing, let alone pasting decoratively into an album. Which is how I knew he hadn't put the album together himself. Probably he'd had one of his secretary-mistresses do it, or maybe it was a temp like me and the girl I hate.

My phone buzzes. She's just texted me: “Pineapple orgy at Kilimanjaro! Om-nom-nom-nom!!!! }8D.”

I've eaten there with her before. It's this sandwich and cake shop that has nothing to do with Africa, despite its name and decor. Under a black-and-white still of Serengeti cranes, I'll watch her eat a monster-size ham and Gruyère panini with pineapple chutney, slurp down a mango, strawberry, and pineapple smoothie,
then scarf a slice of pineapple upside-down cake. By the time the waitress sets that slice in front of her, I'll have finished eating half of my veggie delite wrap, even though I will eat as slowly as possible. By the time she cuts into her cake, my hands will be empty. And with her mouth full of cake, she'll say something about how I've only eaten half the wrap. She might even point. She might even reach across the table and point at it, my sad, uneaten other half. And I'll have to say something awkward about wanting to save this other half for later, which we'll both know is a lie. I might even ask the waitress for a to-go bag, but she won't be fooled. She'll look at me like, Huh, and take another bite of pineapple cake. I text back, ;D, and as I do this, the hate shifts, spreads its wings in me, becomes almost electric, like love.

O
ne of these days I'm probably going to kill Trixie. I have my reasons. I can hear her squawking to another customer just beyond the fitting room door, which isn't actually a door it's a curtain, it's a dark red curtain like a Lynchian portal to hell. On the other side, Trixie is telling some woman how, with some cute boots, that skirt could really be cute. Or a cute shirt! What about a cute shirt? What about a cute shirt
and
cute boots?! So cute.

Something happens inside me whenever Trixie says the word
cute
. My shoulders meet my ears. Heat crackles up my arms. And I grow afraid behind my curtain, bracing myself for the moment when the shrill edge of her voice becomes pointed in my direction. Because it's only a matter of time. The robin's egg spaghetti strap number she chose for me has my tits in a stranglehold and she'll be coming to check on that soon. There's a soft quick click of heels, the papery rustle of overly moussed hair, a long-nailed hand tugging on the curtain.

Then: “How are we doing in here?”

“Fine,” I say.

Anyone else would be daunted, even offended by my tone. It's
awful and I never use it on anyone but Trixie. But she bounces back just fine.

“Okay,” she says. Then: “Can I see?”

Her voice rises to an impossible shrillness on the
see
. I can feel her
see
in my teeth roots.

“
No
,” I say.

Because Trixie never helps. Because of Trixie, I have already made several regrettable purchases.

“No?” she repeats.

She knows my no isn't a real no. She knows it's the no of a petulant child refusing to play her part. It's true that when it comes to shopping for clothes, I have a history of having a bad attitude. That's what my mother said to me all the time.
You
have a bad attitude.
You're making this harder than it has to be.
Especially now that I've started losing, she seems to think everything looks good on me and is particularly intolerant of my complaints.

Trixie's cooing at me to come out, come out, so I do, I pull back the curtain and stand before the mirror under the track lighting, Trixie hovering behind me.

She looks me up and down, her head cocked to one side.

“Cute,” she says. But this means nothing. To Trixie, even the apocalypse is cute. Scorched earth. Galloping black horses foaming at the mouth. The shadow of the scythe-wielding dealer of Fate bearing down on her. All super cute.

But the dress isn't. There are huge gaps between the front metal teeth, where my chest is pulling the fabric in opposite directions. When I point this out, Trixie sort of wrinkles her nose, looks troubled, squinty. I've cast clouds over her clear horizon. It's not the first time.

“Can't you see this gap here?” I ask Trixie, pointing to my chest.

“Not really,” Trixie says. Why is Trixie so eager to see when she can't see at all?

“
Here?
Right
here
?” I say, thumping at my own dress-throttled chest. You're telling me you don't
see
that?

She squints hard at my chest, sort of shakes her head, like she's confused. Then her eyes suddenly brighten.

“You know what
I
would do?”

And that's the thing with Trixie. She always has a solution.

“You could just put a cute necklace! With a pendant that covers this part? Or a scarf! What about a scarf and tie it here?” she says, her fingers hovering over the wide space between the teeth. She asks me if she can show me a scarf?

What I want to say to Trixie is, Trixie? Why do I come here? Why do I subject myself to this humiliation? I don't deserve this, Trixie. I ate turkey in hydroponic lettuce wraps for a whole year. I Gazelled. Do you know what a Gazelle is, Trixie? It's a cardiovascular machine that's a hybrid of a treadmill and an elliptical. But then I look at her blinking optimistically at me from behind what have to be false eyelashes and I know she'll have no idea what I'm talking about.

So I say, “Show me the scarf.”

She trots off happily to get the scarf.

Beside me is another woman also being serviced by Trixie. The woman has a big ass and she's wearing jeans that are far too tight for it. It was Trixie who chose these jeans, clearly. Now Trixie has coaxed this woman out from behind her curtain and dragged her under the track lighting, which sheds a light that only Trixie looks good in. And on her way to pick up my scarf, she looks at this woman muffin-topping out of her jeans and says, Cute!! And when the woman says, What about my ass? Trixie says, What about a belt?
Like a big belt! And some cute boots. With a big belt and some cute boots, she'd be saved from her own ass. She'll go grab some belts.

But this woman isn't like me. She's grateful. She believes in Trixie's solutions. She waits patiently for the belts, turning herself this way and that, and I know she's telling herself that her ass doesn't look that big, not that big after all.

But it does is the thing.

 • • • 

Trixie is now fastening the scarf around my neck like a flaccid noose and I feel my chest getting red and patchy and hot underneath her hands. She is uncomfortably close. I can smell all of her smells: hair products and Greek cooking and enthusiasm.

The pattern of the scarf doesn't at all match the pattern of the dress. I'm about to say something about that but Trixie anticipates this and cuts me off.

“This is just to
show
you,” she explains, looping it around my neck. “This is just so you'll
see
.”

As she ties it around my neck, she accidentally scrapes me with a nail.

“Oops. Sorry.”

The scarf covers the gap in the front teeth of the dress but otherwise looks ridiculous. As I knew it would.

But Trixie looks terribly pleased with herself. Like she's a genius or something. Like by tying this mismatching scarf around my neck, a scarf that looks ridiculous with the dress not just in pattern but in principle, she's shown me a solution to the problem of my flesh.

“See?”

“Yeah,” I say, tugging on the scarf like it's choking me. “The thing is? I don't want to have to wear a scarf to wear this dress. Or a necklace. Or anything else. I just want—”

Trixie raises a threaded eyebrow, waiting.

“I just want to, you know,
wear
it. . . .”

“Oh,” she says, furrowing her brow. She gives me a look like perhaps given my size and all, I want too much?

I wrench off her knotted handiwork, revealing the gap in the teeth again. The other woman, the big-assed one in the too-tight jeans who is being placated with belts, looks at me like I'm being mutinous.

“Because it really is too tight, isn't it? I mean, really?”

My eyes say, Say it, Trixie. Say it for both of us.

She smiles, looks both ways like a caged animal before she bores her eyes into me and nods a little. It's a barely perceptible tilt of the head, as if being this honest isn't allowed but she'll make an exception just this once.

Then she adds, aloud: “I don't think so. Not if you wore a scarf. But you don't want to wear a scarf, you said, so . . .”

She shrugs. Like that's the last trick in her bag of tricks.

She turns on her heel and trots off to get more belts for the big-assed woman.

And I feel suddenly deserted. Discarded. Cast off like an ill-fitting dress. Suddenly I want to bathe in the light of Trixie's eyes again. I want her to ask me to turn for her. I want her to fix her eyes, the eyes where everything fits, where it's just a matter of the right accessory, the right attitude, on me. I want my mother's eyes.

As Trixie walks off, she puts a hand on the big-assed woman's shoulder and squeezes and says she won't be a minute with those belts. And the woman glows, basking in Trixie's attention. She says, “No problem at all,” her eyes moony with love as she turns to once more admire her terrible ass in the mirror.

T
onight, she's trussed me up in a one-strap midriff-baring bit of turquoise gauze she bought me just this afternoon at The Rack. Paired it with skintight low-risers and pink strappy heels from Payless that are like a shoe version of a Frederick's of Hollywood thong.

“I don't know about this outfit,” I tell my mother, frowning at the tentacles sprouting from my left shoulder. We're at this seafood place on the wharf because she thinks fish is my secret. A touristy place in the city she recently moved to on the west coast. A table by the window so she can watch for her friends. My wide slash of bared stomach feels like an emergency no one is attending to, my feet like they're doing bad porn under the table. Shoulder and hip still buzzing from where she cut the price tag loops off with a butter knife. Mother, these clothes are ridiculous, I should have said. They mock us both. I can dress myself. I'm a twenty-six-year-old woman. Instead, I say, “You think maybe it's too much?”

My mother sits across from me under a giant net full of plastic
crustaceans, watching me ignore the fact of the bread basket and the crab dip appetizer, my fingers braided over my empty side plate. She eyes me from gauzy tentacles to bare stomach. She says, “What do you mean ‘too much'? How is it
too much
? Trust me.”

She riffles through the bread basket absently. “Those shoes.” She shakes her head. “Shit. Show me again?”

I bring one foot out from under the table and wiggle it at her.

“They're going to flip when they see you, Elizabeth, flllip.”

“They hurt.”

“Humor me.”

I watch her pile her slab of sourdough thickly with crab dip. Her patchy red face. Her preternaturally bright eyes. It's in my throat to ask her if she's checked her blood sugar today. Instead, I look out the window at the mongers throwing fish for show, the Vietnamese women rearranging flowers with delicate hands. I pour a mound of salt onto the table and begin raking it with my fork tines, my latest non-eating way of eating. “So who am I meeting tonight again?”

“Just some people from the office,” she says, dusting crumbs off the front of her dress. She moved out here to take a corporate job, much higher paying than the middle-management hospitality positions she's held most of my life. “Dawn, Pam, Denise. Maybe one or two others.”

“Okay,” I say, giving up on the salt and screwing a cigarette into my mouth, fishing through my purse for a lighter. My mother brings a candle to my unlit tip.

“Don't sit like that, though,” she says.

“Like what?”

“Slouched like that.” She does an impression of me, hunching
her hulking shoulders forward, causing her costume jewelry to jangle. She's wearing the red set today: rings, necklace, bracelets. All but the oversize clip-ons, which she just affixed to my lobes in the restroom because It still needs something.

I look at her from her spiked hair to the hillocks of her arms swathed in Lane Bryant lace. Mutinous words rise in my throat. I swallow them. Straighten.

 • • • 

“This is my daughter,” she announces when they arrive, gesturing toward me like I am a just-turned letter in
Wheel of Fortune
and she is Vanna White. “She's just visiting. Stopping by on her way to her boyfriend's—sorry, fiancé! You guys remember.”

“Quite the ensemble,” one of her friends offers. Five of them, not three. Their smiles thin as Communion wafers. Looking at me in a way that makes me want to snatch my mother's shawl and drape it over my bared shoulders. Or at least wrap my arms around my exposed midriff, but she would never forgive me. Instead, I smile.

“Isn't it?” my mother says, pleased as punch, and I hear the words before they even bloom on her lips: “Show them.”

“Up, though. Stand up.” Using her hands like she's a preacher raising the dead, her bracelets of blown glass clacking against her wrists. “Turn so they can see the back?”

I turn with my hands out to my sides, staggering slightly. The turquoise shoulder tentacles swell and float around me. I turn until I hear the word
beautiful
erupt from her friend Dawn like a belch.

“Isn't she?” says my mother.

Isn't she
is my cue. I fall back into my chair, the tentacles
billowing then settling, the women and I exchanging embarrassed smiles. I take a long sip of Diet Coke, my mother in my eye corner, her face twisted by pride, her features all tied in little bows of glee.

“Show them your bicep,” she says.

“Mom. No.” Like I'm above such a request, but actually the first thing I did when I got off the plane was show my mother my biceps.

Look!

I see, I see!

“Works out all the time now,” my mother continues. “Had to get a trial membership at the gym across the street just so she'd agree to visit me.”

“
Mom
. That isn't tr—”

“Walks too. Two, three times a day. All along the lake,” she says, marching her index and middle finger across the air like they're my legs. “Fast. I've gone with her a couple of times but I can't keep up.”

“You can keep up,” I say, even as I recall marching forward, trying to be oblivious to my mother breathless behind me, my eyes fixed straight ahead, until I felt guilty and turned back. She was standing several yards away, her broad back heaving. Pretending to examine shells on the beach.

“It's those legs,” she says, looking down at my new spiked heels. “Those legs, I can't compete.”

I pretend to look out the window but it's too dark now to see anything but my own slumped, shoulder-tentacled silhouette, my mother's wild gesticulations, the indulgent nods of her acquaintances. I excuse myself to go to the restroom, aware of all their eyes on me as I teeter away from the table.

 • • • 

“You were great, just great,” my mother says as we stroll through the market, arm in arm, later. She walks me along the stalls like she's leading me down the aisle, loving how I'm immune to the plenty. How I wrinkle my nose, shake my head at everything but a Fuji and some fish for later, while she helps herself to fistfuls of whatever samples are there for the taking. We go to the monger's, where I buy my four ounces of whatever's fresh. She waits, watching me, and I feel the blaze of her eyes on my profile.

“When you went to the bathroom? They couldn't stop talking about how beautiful you were. Couldn't stop.”

“That's nice.”

“Not just
nice
,” my mother says, steering me toward the flower stalls, where she treats me to a bouquet of stargazers. For my daughter, she tells the woman behind the tin pails brimming with blossoms. I smile. Me, I'm the daughter, yes. We watch her gather the stems while my mother rubs my exposed husk of shoulder like it's a genie lamp.

 • • • 

“So tomorrow night? You'll meet me at my work. Then we'll go to the mussel place.”

She's turned toward me to see how I'm taking this, but I keep staring straight ahead at the windshield. We're in the car going home and the highway wind is whipping my hair into my eyes, making them tear. I'm trying to light a cigarette but keep lighting my split ends instead. “Careful,” my mother says. She rented a red Sebring convertible especially for my visit. “I want the wind in my hair,” she explained, tugging her black pomaded spikes, immovable even in a gale.

“Why can't I just meet you at the mussel place?” I ask her now.

She closes her eyes, sighs like I've just made her very tired. “Just meet me at my work first. Okay? Indulge me. Can you just do that?”

 • • • 

A bandage dress the color of Pepto-Bismol. She must have laid it out for me on her bed before she left for work in the morning. I stare at it from the doorframe in the French cuts she bought me the other day at Target, a cigarette turning to ash between my lips, my morning Fuji in my fist. All afternoon, I dare Mick Jagger, her obese Abyssinian, to walk all over the dress, but he doesn't, even when I pick him up and place him on top of it. She took photos of me in it the other day with her cheap yellow disposable. Some with me leaning against her stove surrounded on all sides by her chef-themed kitchen accessories. Some on her balcony surrounded by her pots of dying purple flowers, the lake blazing behind me. In all of them, I look like the smug but uncertain solution to a stomach problem. I see she's placed a pair of discounted strappy slingbacks the color of iridescent vomit on the floor close by.

“Jesus,” my mother says, shaking her head as, later that afternoon, I lurch toward her in the vomit heels. In her cubicle, she takes a lighter to the plastic price tag loop because I forgot to take care of this detail at home (I always forget these details
why
, exactly? her eyes ask me). Makes me switch lips at the last minute from Rebel to Craving. “Better,” she says, “But blot. Little more?
Yes
.”

 • • • 

In my effort to show them the back, my hip bumps against the table, making the mussels clack in their bowls. Unlike the group yesterday, these are mostly men. I nearly lose my balance turning, but one of them catches me with a firm grip.

“Whoa,” he says with a laugh. “Careful there. Elizabeth, isn't it? Your mother's told us so much about you.”

I flop back down in my chair, screwing a cigarette between my lips, smile boozily at her semicircle of bosses. “Has she?” He pours me another glass of white, his eyes doing a downward graze along the bandages, while my mother pats my knee under the table.

“She's gotten into dancing now,” she's telling her bosses. She has so many bosses these days, she told me earlier, I wouldn't believe it. Can't keep them straight, she confided in the bathroom as she marched me into and then out of a cloud of Angel. “Belly dancing, of all things. Belly, isn't it, Elizabeth?”

My mother looks at me, her eyes a shin kick.

“Belly,” I affirm, the cigarette dangling unlit from my lips. One of her bosses pours me another drink, even though I'm reeling from the first two.

“How exotic,” the one female in the group offers, slightly sourly. “Maybe you could teach us some moves sometime.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh! Show them!” my mother says. “She showed me last night.” She does an awkward impression of snake arms, causing the sleeves of her lace coverall to rise up her forearms. She smooths them down, then goes back to prying open mussels. “Didn't you?”

“Yeah.”

I don't know what possessed me to undulate in front of my mother last night while she sat on her flower-patterned couch and watched, her palm pressed firmly on the armrest, Mick Jagger meowing in her large lap.

“I'd love to see,” a boss says.

“Room right here,” another one says, waving a hand at the space beside him.

“Little shy,” my mother says, rubbing my back vigorously, then patting it gently.

The boss who'd love to see gives me a smile like a flickering light. “Shouldn't be.”

 • • • 

After a while, they forget I'm here, thank heaven. Hairy hands braided over mountains of glossy disemboweled black shells. Lost in drunken shoptalk. Stopped refilling my glass. I look out the window for the water but all I see is my own swaying reflection. Who are you and what have you done with my daughter? she said to me in the market earlier, as I ordered my four ounces from the monger. The package is still in my purse, along with an apple for later. Seriously who are you?

In the window's reflection, I see my mother is no longer part of the shoptalk. She's nodding and murmuring
Yeah
every now and then, but out of the corner of her eye, she's watching me light a match with one hand.

“I'll have one of those,” she says to me now from across the table, eyeing my cigarette pack.

I look up at her. Her freshly shorn black spiked hair like Liz Taylor meets sea urchin. Each spike slicked crisp with pomade. Snow White skin I was always jealous of. Mouth the color of black plum flesh and full like a fish's. Eyes brimming with odd gold flecks, the left one slightly lazy. The weird slope of her slender nose, broken by a baseball when she was young because she used to play catcher without a mask. My mother's face has always been something she just shrugs off. Whenever anyone calls her beautiful, she shakes her head, bats her hand, her fish
lips curling to one side. Like, Whatever. Fuck you. On to something else, please.

I shake the pack at her now in offering, though I know she shouldn't. Her heart, the water in her lungs, and I know she's not telling me the half of it. How she gripped the balcony railing last night. Breathing like she was drowning.

Are you okay? I called from the couch.

Fine, fine.

You sure?

Trust me.

“You can afford to lose one?” she asks me now, withdrawing a cigarette.

I can't, really. I've only got a couple left. And what's even more annoying is how she doesn't inhale, just puffs. But I say, “Sure.”

I light it for her with my one-handed trick. She flinches slightly at this.

“Thanks,” she says, puffing on it like it's a cigar. She returns to nodding at her head buyer, Rich, who is asking if she and I have ever been sailing.

“Never,” my mother lies, still watching me out of the corner of her eye.

“Never?!” Rich says. Oh well, we need to fix that. Only way to see the city. And he has a boat. If we're interested?

We are.

 • • • 

On the way home, she takes an off-ramp, gets herself a large Frosty from a Wendy's drive-through. “You want anything?”

“Diet Coke, lots of ice, make sure lots of ice.”

“MAKE SURE LOTS OF ICE!” she roars into the drive-through window. Then, turning to me, “Rich loved you, you know.
And he's a tough customer, trust me. My boss for a year and I still don't know what he thinks of me.”