Autobiography of a Fat Bride (11 page)

Burning the Bra

I
had never been to the outlet mall before.

I had heard about its wonders and the majesty that was held within it; I had listened to others describe the magic of its stores, and how they obtained their dreams almost for free. You could buy, I was told, Wonderbras for three bucks.

Looking at my own bras (a sad collection that predated New Wave), I knew I needed to be a part of it. It called to me.

So then I called my sister, still on maternity leave, and talked her into driving me out to Casa Grande, a literal Mecca of outlet shopping.

Visions of all sorts popped into my head during the drive down there. I was going to get shoes. I was going to buy sheets. I was going to find some great dresses. Casa Grande is a dusty, grimy little colony of waddling diabetics. I was gonna get new bras.

There is something about getting new bras that men will never understand. Never. There’s just a quality about wearing a bra in which the underwire is still in its rightful place and hasn’t yet caused any bloodshed. There’s just something about a clean, unstretched-out strap that lays perfectly flat and isn’t covered with nubbies. There’s something pristine about a new, flawless cup in which none of the nipple is visible through a tear or hole.

I had even gone up a size, I suspected, although this was due more to an increase in back fat than anything else. This also makes getting bras exciting. It makes you feel like you have more to offer. When we reached the mall, I made my sister head straight for the bra store. She, on the other hand, wasn’t as excited as I was. Since she had given birth, things had, well, changed for her.

“There’s
nothing
in this store that could give me enough support. I’m going to have to start tying them up with ropes,” she mentioned as we passed through the doors.

It was true. I had never experienced true-life grisly horror before the day she called me a week after she had given birth and insisted that I rush over to her house. I found her sitting on the couch, topless, with a massive suction cup affixed to each breast and tears streaming down her face as she sobbed heavily. She looked like a hybrid of Barbarella and a Holstein in the middle of a shift. It was the stuff of pure science fiction, a bad
Star Trek
episode/commercial from the Dairy Council. My brother-in-law just stood there, shaking his head as he continually shrugged, until I finally took control of the situation, flipped off the switch to the pump, and said to my sister, “Let me introduce you to your new best friend, Infamil.

“We are a bottle-fed breed, my dear,” I told her. “How could you not know that? We’re Catholic! Boobs stay covered! Do you think Mary flashed around her bazongas every time her baby cried? Even Jesus was raised on a bottle and a mix! Look at you, trying to be all modern!”

At the bra outlet, I dug through the $2.99 bins, but I only found sizes that I wore when I began to blossom in fourth grade. I was going to have to graduate to the $5.99 racks, which I saw were bursting with bright silks, satins, and knits in all colors of the rainbow. I finally decided on two, plopped down my thirteen bucks, and I had the bras that would see me through my thirties and possibly to menopause. I doubted that a better deal could have been found.

I wanted to put them on right away, though I managed to resist my urges in the car and waited until I got home.

Although I knew that in the bras I was going to more closely resemble Rosie O’Donnell’s Secret than Victoria’s, they still made me feel good. My right boob didn’t pop out of its cup all the time like it did with my other bra, and all of the back hooks were still intact.

I wore one the next day to work, feeling pert, perky, and maybe even a little bit thinner. I felt clean. I also felt a little ticklish.

By noon the little tickle had turned into something of an itch, and by midafternoon, I couldn’t keep my hand out from underneath my shirt. My boobs were driving me crazy, and I couldn’t get the itching to stop. I would scratch for a second, it would be fine, and then the sensation of a million ants running across what made me a woman was nearly forcing me to scream. It was intolerable.

By the time I ran to my car, the evil apparatus was unhooked and being threaded through my sleeve. I threw the bra in the passenger seat, relieved but still itching. When I got home, I saw the damage: two bright red smiles underneath each boob and two bright red frowns on each. Complete with hives.

My husband was mortified. “What did you do?” he asked in a panic. “Did you try to wax up there?”

“No,” I said, wincing. “It’s one of the new bras. It gave me bra burn.”

Bra burn on a girl with back fat is the furthest thing from attractive, so I decided to go to my mother’s to retrieve some aloe vera from her backyard. The minute she saw me, she looked at me funny and exclaimed, “What in the hell is wrong with you? Why are you touching yourself like that? That’s a sin, you know.”

“I bought a bad bra,” I explained. “It burned me.”

“There’s no such thing as a bad bra,” she informed me. “You’re probably allergic to something on it. Where did you buy it?”

“The outlet mall.” I sighed. “It was five ninety-nine.”

“Oh. Well, there you have it. You bought a bad bra. What do you expect for six dollars, a bra that won’t make you break out in hives? Who the hell knows who owned that bra before you? Could you not do that in front of me, please?”

For the rest of the night, I had to lie on my bed, with yellow, smelly, sticky, runny aloe vera stuff smeared all over me, topless. Nothing could touch me, otherwise it would itch so bad I would have to scratch it, and I had already begun to make myself bleed. I had scabs. I had hives. I had back fat.

Oh well, I thought as I lay there, the yellow stuff dripping onto my sheets. It could have been worse.

I could have bought underwear, too.

The Lonely, Brown House

T
hey say it’s a natural progression. It’s an obvious thing, an occurrence that happens to everyone who’s recently gotten married.

In fact, I believe legislation has passed in several states that freshly married couples have up to one full year to either A) buy a house or B) have a baby.

If you negligently pass on either obligation, every citizen within the continental United States is fully within their rights to consistently and repeatedly harass and interrogate you about when you will meet your deadline on choice B.

There was no way my husband and I were going to have a baby. We have a dog that I forget to feed at least three times a week, and that doesn’t even require unbuttoning my shirt.

What choice did we have? Instead of finding an obstetrician, I called a Realtor and embarked on a trail that would have made Lewis and Clark cringe.

I knew what kind of house I wanted; growing up in the stuccoed, Mexican-tiled, saguaro-landscaped suburbs of Phoenix, I wanted something different. I wanted brick, I wanted a fireplace, and I wanted wood floors. I wanted something interesting with character, history, and a claw-foot bathtub.

I wanted something old.

I was up for a challenge, and determined to find the right house in the right price range. We could commit some elbow grease and sweat equity as long as my potential new neighbors weren’t constructing a crystal meth lab in their rompus room or housing eighty illegals. I scanned the newspaper every Sunday, collected real estate magazines, and drove up and down prospective streets with such frequency that parents began to keep their kids inside.

Prospect #1 was a beautiful wood-shingled Tudor Revival with a sweeping lawn and three bedrooms. The minute I stepped in the door, a Leggo whizzed by my head and another struck me in the neck. “Get out! Get out!” screamed the resident children, who were crouched behind the sofa. “You can’t have our house! You can’t have it!” Their parents, who were outside washing their car, just looked in and grinned. I was puzzled until our Realtor discovered that the house was entering foreclosure, and we quickly left before the children armed themselves with kiddie stun guns or Chinese stars.

Prospect #2 led us to believe that it was an English-style cottage from the exterior. Once inside, however, we knew better. Steeped in that pitiful gold-shag decade we knew as the seventies, the house had not survived a remodeling attempt that included slump block, an overzealous amount of corkboard, and, the coup de grâce, gold-veined mirrors. It looked like Huggy Bear had left only the day before, leaving the water stains from his waterbed permanently soaked into the floor.

Prospect #3 was snatched out from underneath us by an investor with cold, hard cash who planned to gut the Craftsman-style bungalow and “make it modern, you know, with a conversation pit, Berber carpet, and track lighting.” Prospects #4, #5, and #6 also fell to the same end, and Prospect #7 inadvertently caught on fire.

After four months of searching, I was beginning to question our luck. Where was the house of our dreams? We had been patient, diligent, giving up our weekends in an effort to homestead. We didn’t have large amounts of capital to wage war with investors who proudly exhibited the traits of hyenas, and fixer-uppers were the only homes that fell within our price range. Worse yet, the search was taking a toll on our newborn marriage. Being confined to a car while staking out the downtown neighborhoods in hopes of spotting a “For Sale” sign had spurred such arguments as “The Smell of Your Deodorant Makes Me Nauseous,” “Don’t Drive Like That With Me in the Car,” and the tightrope walker, “If You Would Get a Better Job, We Could Afford It.”

We were thrashing in the throes of “That Is Not What I Said to Your Mother” when we drove by it.

“STOP!” I said, throwing my hands up into the air after I spotted the sign in the corner of the yard. “BACK UP! Look . . .”

It was lonely.

It was empty.

It was brown.

“Let’s look at it,” I said quietly.

It was a little brick bungalow with large windows, a porch, and a big dirt yard.

“Wow,” my husband said as he got out of the car. “I like it.”

Peeking in the wavy glass of the windows, we saw a fireplace. Wood floors. High, coved ceilings. We strolled along to the back of the house, peeking in every window on the way.

It was my husband who summoned me over, peeking in the bathroom window.

“Come look at this,” he said, moving the cobwebs aside.

And there, I saw it. A big, white, cast-iron bathtub with claw feet.

“I want this house,” I said as I turned to him. “I want it bad.”

“Me, too,” he said, and we smiled.

We had found our home.

When we told our Realtor, she arranged for us to take a peek inside the house the next day, and with heels echoing off the wood floors, we toured each room and decided that it was the one.

“It sure has charm,” she said with a smile. “Sure is a lot of room here.”

We nodded.

“For when that new baby comes,” she added with a sly grin.

Erica’s Moving Adventure

I
had lived in that house for ten years, a third of my life.

When the moving van pulled into my driveway on a Saturday morning, I suddenly realized that I was moving. Although we had bought our new house in September, spent four months restoring it, and had packed a hundred boxes, I was so busy with details I hadn’t actually considered that I was leaving. I was too wrapped up with the Disasters of the Week that struck the new house on a regular basis—the faucet of the kitchen sink flying off the wall the moment the water was turned on, the termites that were eating their way through the trees in the front yard, and the lead paint that was flaking off doorjambs and windows in chunks the size of potato chips.

I turned around and the rooms of the old house were empty, save for a mountain of dog hair in one corner, a crumpled piece of newspaper in another. The archaeological layers of my bedroom were unearthed, exposing forgotten Laurie eras. Remnants and pieces of the Lonely, Dramatic, and Drunk Phase were evident in the empty Tylenol PM and whiskey bottles, accented with a million ground-out cigarette butts; the I’ll Eat My Way to Happiness Phase revealed bags of Funyons, licorice, and Hershey’s chocolate chips, coupled with a vagrant’s fortune in empty Pepsi cans; and the Bad Boyfriend Phase dug up torn photographs, charred letters, and a lock or two of hair, used strictly for black magic purposes.

What was even more frightening than that was the refrigerator. With the recycling gods frowning on me, I threw away a household’s worth of Tupperware and unidentifiable containers, along with their mysterious contents. Although I had several tubs of Stroganoff, fajitas, and Chinese food that had most likely grown into cures for most of the world’s deadly diseases, I tossed them into the trash, where their destiny would now be in the hands of a city garbage collector.

My husband was busy shoveling all of the crap I had accumulated over the last decade into the U-Haul, which had apparently seen some scary things itself. One side of the van had been swiped clean of paint on its back half, leaving the company’s motto of “America’s Moving Adventure” into the crippled “erica’s Moving Adventure,” and a decapitated saguaro cactus. The sight had caused several neighbors to cross the street and investigate, asking plainly if I had been indicted for something and was therefore leaving the country. When we answered that we were only moving, their next response was to ask us if it would be okay to take all of the wrought-iron security bars off of
my
house and put it on
their
houses.

Now, the fridge was almost empty except for the containers that had grown teeth, the sedimentary layers had been cleaned up, and the trash taken out. I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and served as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I’d rather forget.

The day I had moved into the house, my head had swelled up the night before in an allergic reaction to black hair dye that was slowly poisoning my blood. My head was so big that my glasses wouldn’t fit around it, and it hurt to hold it up. After I returned to the new house from the hospital, where I received a massive shot of steroids in the rear end, I got a phone call from my then-boyfriend, who informed me that not only had he gotten into a car accident with the U-Haul, but he was in jail. Again. When an officer of the law came to make a report on the accident, an outstanding warrant had been discovered, and the then-boyfriend asked me if I could borrow $10,000 from my parents to pay his bond.

I was just completing this sentimental memory when my husband came into the house, his hands on his hips and a very stern look on his face.

“We can’t fit everything in the truck,” he said sharply. “You have to decide what stays. We can’t take everything. You are definitely going to have to change your lifestyle in the new house.”

I hate it when people tell me I have too much stuff.

“We’re not on the Oregon Trail, Captain Donner,” I snapped back. “It’s not like we’re going to have to start dumping china closets and beds on the side of the Squaw Peak Parkway because the oxen are too tired to pull the wagon. Fit what you can and we’ll come back for the rest.”

“THAT’S NOT THE POINT,” he said excitedly. “YOU HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF. HOW CAN ONE PERSON HAVE THIS MUCH STUFF? My great-grandparents pushed a handcart across America when they moved. They didn’t need this much stuff!”

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” I asked quickly.

“Yes, I am!” he answered back.

“Well, because you’ve done such a good job,” I said sweetly, “I’ve left some really good leftovers in the refrigerator for you.”