Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (4 page)

Walking into the shelter was a shock. I had really built it up in my head as some sort of happy cat utopia, but everything smelled like stale pee and the sawdust janitors put down when someone pukes in school. All the cats looked old and scraggly, like feline versions of my drunk uncle Jay, whom we don’t invite to Christmas anymore because he once rummaged through our drawers for change, threw up in my closet, and half passed out while touching himself in our shower. I couldn’t appreciate at that age how
truly badass this guy was, and now he’s sober, has found Jesus, and works as a magician and balloon animal maker at nursing homes. I knew you when, Uncle Jay.

I stood at the entrance frozen in anxiety until my dad put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in tight, and I was suddenly calm because he always smells like sweat and freshly sanded wood. He walked slowly up and down the aisles of rusty metal cages, stopping every so often to stick his finger through the bars and play with the eager cat batting at him for attention. I finally decided on a small kitten with fluffy orange fur, minimal eye goop, and a smoker’s cough.

Overwhelmed with guilt and homeless cat empathy, my father sent me to wait in the car while he paid, appearing at the passenger door a short time later with a small cardboard box riddled with air holes and the word
Sunshine
scribbled across the front with a Sharpie. What a ridiculous name for a cat. On the car ride home, I used the pen from the glove compartment to cross out Sunshine and rename her Kimberly, which is what I was legally changing my name to the second I turned eighteen. Kimberly and I bonded the whole trip home as I whispered to her through the tiny holes in her container.

We returned home to find my mom and brother waiting on the porch. This is what we did before the Internet, by the way. Sometimes we just sat outside and looked at nothing for hours at a time. My mom was visibly unhappy when she saw the box, but what could you do, I had legally adopted Kimberly; it was official, she was mine. I excitedly ran to the front porch to show my brother the box and let him peer through the holes while my dad went to the garage to get a box and a blanket, a peace offering to my mother to keep the cat outside. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was a cat, so I would make do.

Then it all went pear-shaped. When my dad removed the lid of
Kimberly’s box, she lunged at him, clawing him across the cheek and darting off across the grass, scaling the thirty-foot oak tree in our yard. My dad was furious, vomiting curse words and wiping blood from his face with a rag. I was hysterical, screaming her name and chasing after her to the base of the tree, pleading with her to come down and shaking her food bowl. My mom took my dad inside to clean up his wounds, but I refused to leave the tree, staring up at the orange ball of fur wedged on one of the highest branches. An hour later, my dad came back outside.

“Listen, I don’t think she’s coming down right now,” he said. “Maybe if we leave her alone for a while, she won’t be scared and she’ll climb back down on her own.”

“Don’t you have a ladder you could use?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, running his hands along the wounds on his neck and cheek. “That is much taller than any ladder I have. You’d need a cherry-picker to reach that high.”

“Can’t you get one of those?”

“No, those are really expensive.”

I refused to budge, and defeated, he went back into the house, peeking out the window every so often to find me lying on the ground, croaking “Kimberllyyyy” with what was left of my voice, my hysterical sobs now just dry, snotty hiccups.

Two hours later, he rejoined me at the bottom of the tree.

“I called a buddy with a cherry-picker we can rent; he’ll be here in a bit.”

I hugged my dad for what was probably the third time in my life, and asked him to keep an eye on the cat while I ran inside for water because sacrificing your body for a cause was totally dehydrating.

When the cherry-picker arrived, I watched my dad being slowly lifted into the air as I stood at the bottom of the tree, holding the kitten’s unworn pink collar. When he reached the top, I expected a
heartfelt reunion, but instead, as he reached to pull Kimberly from the branch, she screamed like a human, bit his hand, and then fell to the ground. It was the most horrific animal experience my eyes had ever seen, save for
Howard the Duck,
which was terrifying even before I grasped the basic concept of beastiality.

Kimberly was an orange lump of fur, flipping around on the ground, unable to stand or use her legs. By the time my dad had reached the ground, he told my mom to take me inside and to get his shovel. I insisted I be allowed to tell her good-bye, and my brother followed me over to gawk at her as she hissed.

“Good-bye, Kimberly; these six hours we had together were the best and most disturbing hours of my life. I love you so much. Please say hi to great-grandma for me when you get to heaven; her name is Margaret and she has a lazy eye. But, if you go to separate animal heaven, then totally don’t worry about it,” I tearfully whispered beside her.

“Hey, look, she has balls; she’s not even a girl!” my brother exclaimed.

“Shut up, Adam,” my dad warned as my mother ushered us into the house so he could finish the deed, burying her in a shallow grave in the field behind our house. The next morning, just at dawn, he woke me up to collect flowers from our garden and showed me her tiny grave. He stood there while I cried into his jacket. It was one of his kindest and most human moments, and it happened after he murdered my transsexual cat with a shovel.

Our high school employed what is known as block scheduling. It split our year into halves, meaning we took fewer classes for longer periods of time. For example, we had a set of only three
classes each day, but then those classes would end midway through the year, and we’d get a new set of three. We had fewer subjects to juggle, which was great. On the flip side, if you hated a class, you were stuck in it for hours.

I walked into my second week of Anatomy & Physiology much like I always did, head down with my thighs rubbing together, but also with a tummy full of butterflies. Anat & Phys was my favorite class, not because of science—in fact, I was horrible and pretty sure I was failing—but because of a senior named Steve, whom I’d had a crush on. He was a giant redheaded football player who sat beside me in class, making me feel small in comparison. A feat I relished. We spent most of the three hour class chatting about the tests and computer assignments the teacher, Mrs. Pierson, a chill long-haired bohemian woman who took a very laissez-faire approach to teaching, would toss our way to complete as we saw fit. Again, this might explain why I failed science, but I should add here that Steve went on to play NFL football and now works for NASCAR, which only serves to make this entire ordeal that much more embarrassing.

I walked into class one day and set my books down at our table of four.

“Yeah, you can’t sit with us anymore,” Steve announced.

“Why?” I asked, panicking.

“Gosh, I don’t know, because your psycho dad just tried to fight me in the parking lot?”

He coninuted to speak as the blood in my body rushed to my feet. I felt heavy and lumbering as I slowly nodded my head and backed away to Mrs. Pierson’s desk.

“My stomach hurts,” I explained as she nodded and thoughtlessly handed me a hall pass to the office.

I called my mother and frantically explained I was ill, and waited
in the office to be picked up as I replayed the events Steve had spat at me in my head. He and my father had both arrived at a four-way stop intersection, and my dad felt Steve didn’t stop enough. So he followed Steve in his station wagon, screaming at him to pull over, which was actually a normal form of communication for my dad, who was fluent in road rage. When Steve parked in the student parking lot, my dad burst out of his car, screaming at him to learn to drive and challenging him to fight. The details are also a bit murky on whether or not he had actual pants on; again, not wearing pants is a normal thing for my dad. He only went through drive-throughs, so pants and shoes were generally unnecessary.

I was hysterical the entire ride home, screaming the story to my mother, who interjected calmly that it probably wasn’t as dramatic as I was making it sound and that everyone would probably forget about it by tomorrow. She obviously didn’t remember how high school worked.

I burst through the front door to find my dad asleep facedown in bed. I furiously climbed on top of him, pulling his hair, sobbing into his back, begging him to please just wake up and be a normal dad and stop ruining my life. He woke up and looked at me, my thick black eyeliner running down my face and dripping off my chin onto his white T-shirt. It was as if he were a lost sandy-haired four-year-old with a mustache. He looked confused and wounded and I immediately felt guilty. My mom was right; in that moment he didn’t know better.

It’s not that he didn’t care that high school was already horrible for me and he was making it worse; it’s that he had no idea he was doing it in the first place.

People like me grow up promising to leave their hometowns and never come back, and also hide the fact that we flinch at the first hint of public humiliation. The thickness of our therapy file makes us
members of an elite club of millions from adorably dysfunctional families. You can spot us by the special notes written and pinned to our shirts.

“If lost, return to Ohio. Don’t mind the guy who answers the door to claim me, he’s not supposed to have pants on, anyway.”

IT WAS MY
twelfth birthday, and I was standing on a chair wearing a bedazzled sombrero as a crowd of waiters circled me, singing in unison. My mom looked up from her seat laughing and mouthing the words, “Isn’t this fun?”

Honestly, it had never been fun. Any situation that included putting a disco ball on the heads of children and having them stand on chairs and be cheered at like small fat piñatas was panic attack inducing. I looked around the restaurant at the faces of people drawn over by the spectacle. At some tables parents with small kids and elderly couples clapped along. A couple on a date in the corner looked annoyed by the noise. And a six top of girls just a bit younger than me watched giggling and pointing, not in disgust, but in anticipation. Later that evening, the birthday brigade would make its way to their table, singing their chant to a group of happy and ecstatic friends, excited to be there together and celebrating.

I was there with my mom, my brother, and my best friend, Laura
Burress. Laura and I had met in kindergarten, and every year since she remained my closest friend. Laura was the only girl from my grade whom I’d let come over to my house, because she wasn’t weirded out by my dad, she didn’t care that sometimes we had to walk next door to pee because our water had been shut off, and she still liked to play Barbies, even though most of the girls in our grade had started to grow out of them.

“Happy happy happy birthday. Happy happy happy birthday. Happy happy happy birthday to you. To you. To you. Ole!” The staff cheered before immediately dispersing back to their previous tasks.

“Look here,” Our server waved, and as my eyes met hers she aimed her camera up at me and snapped a Polaroid from the ground. Shaking it with one hand, she helped me down, tossed the photo on the table, and took the sombrero from my head. It has to be the single worst photo ever taken of me in my life.

Chi-Chi’s was the Olive Garden of Mexican restaurants. The buildings were covered in brightly colored stucco and stuffed full of overzealous stereotypes and tacky décor. It was like eating inside a pair of Skidz pants. Although the chain would later close in the United States due to a massive outbreak of food poisoning and hepatitis A, Chi-Chi’s was a staple for almost all of my childhood birthdays. I’d also go on to have my very first legal alcoholic beverage there, a frozen peach margarita with a sword of maraschino cherries and a large pink umbrella. A drink so girly, I started menstruating after two sips.

When we returned home that evening, my mom sat on the couch with a photo album and carefully taped the Polaroid to the page. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six Chi-Chi’s birthday Polaroids. Photographic evidence that at least once a year, my childhood was exciting. The reality was it’s hard to have birthday parties at your house when it’s full of barking dogs and it’s a lot easier to
pretend you have a lot of friends when you’re in a busy Mexican restaurant surrounded by people paid to clap for you.

“Mom, I don’t want to go to Chi-Chi’s for my birthday anymore,” I announced. Laura, who came from a quiet family that rarely exhibited any form of confrontation or speaking above library level, shifted uncomfortably on the love seat next to me.

“What are you talking about?! You love having your birthday at Chi-Chi’s.” She looked genuinely hurt and surprised.

“No, I like baskets of salty chips and fried ice cream. I don’t like standing on chairs and being sung to like a baby. It’s stupid; you’re making me look stupid and either you don’t realize it or you don’t care,” I spat. It came out meaner than I had intended, but the fact is that twelve was a really hard birthday for me. It was my first year in a new school without any friends. Prior to seventh grade, due to what I can only assume was a desperate act of penance on the part of my mother, my brother and I spent our elementary years in Catholic school. This was an unexpected move, as we were the types of Catholics who rarely went to church outside of school mass, but when we did, my dad would have to go out and buy a new suit and my mom would cry in the pew the whole time as she recited the rosary. I would have been embarrassed had it not been for Mara Riley’s family, who came to church so seldom, her dad wore his wedding tuxedo and black tennis shoes to Mass on Christmas.

Catholic school really suited me. Not because I was deeply religious or passionate about the faith; when my classmates would put their heads down in prayer for the sick and the dying, I’d clench my eyes shut and pray that my hair would go straight and my boobs would shrink. But a certain part of me was excited at the thought of having every facet of my life become a potentially terrifying experience, because almost everything in the Catholic faith was a terrifying experience. Spontaneous pregnancy, murder, people’s
heads falling off, some guy circumcised himself, it was bananas.

Catholic school was a safe place for me. The classes were small and we all wore uniforms. That really leveled the societal playing field because, let’s face it, nobody looks any better than anyone else in pleated khaki pants, and in general, it’s easier to deal with body insecurities in a class of eight, three of whom you are related to.

Unfortunately, twelve years of Catholic school tuition was not in our budget, so once I hit junior high, I was pulled from the safety and comfort of my cushy private elementary school and placed in the local public school. I went from a class of eight to a class of 120. The uniforms that had so easily disguised my body insecurities and discomfort were now stripped away, leaving me suddenly responsible for expressing my personal style through fashionable clothing and trendy hairstyles. That is easier to do if the only other female influence in your house doesn’t dry her hair with those men’s hair dryers with the brush already attached.

Laura was still attending the private Catholic school my parents could no longer afford, and seeing her on the weekends and birthdays wasn’t enough to stop me from being lonely and homesick for my old life.

Swanton Junior High was a large three-story building attached to the high school in the center of town. It was the first newly renovated school building in Swanton, though, like Chi-Chi’s, it would later be closed down and condemned, in this case due to exposed wires and asbestos. Apropos, I’m probably dying of asbestosis right now.

While a few of my Catholic school classmates made the jump to public school with me, they had somehow landed into piles of existing friends, and aside from their smiling at me in the lunch line or making an inside joke about elementary school while awkwardly stuck as my partner in science lab, our past ties had been severed and forgotten. That hurt. When you grow up in a class of twelve people, and three or four of you are put into a completely
new environment, you expect a sense of camaraderie. There was none. They showed up for seventh grade suddenly sexually mature and years ahead of me in mainstream fashion and emotional cutting. These were things we were supposed to figure out together in the backs of school buses and during all-girl sleepovers. My parents understood none of that.

Long after the evening’s awkwardness had subsided and Laura had gone home, my mom came to my room for one of her many pep talks.

“It’s only April and it’s still new.” She rubbed my leg as she sat down next to me on my bed. We weren’t affectionate people, so even as she tried to be endearing, it came off as awkward and forced. “New takes time. You’ll make friends; you just have to find your tribe.”

“Finding your tribe” has recently made its return as a buzz phrase. It’s used at social media conferences to refer to the group of people who find connectivity and solidarity among their online communities. Maybe they all knit or breastfeed in public or have open marriages.

When you are a kid, you don’t really have any defining qualities outside of what your parents pass down, which basically meant I was fucked, as previously noted. Unless, perhaps, there were other preteens whose fathers handwrote hate mail to PepsiCo when they discontinued Crystal Pepsi?

I went into seventh grade slightly overweight, with large wire glasses, a gap between my front teeth, and an extraordinarily large collection of vests. Oh, and a perm. This was during the era when hairdressers still convinced you that curly hair was more controllable if you permed it. We should be rounding them up the same way we round up war criminals and Nazi sympathizers.

My mom called seventh grade a transition year, and told me to be more proactive. I called it hell, but was willing to give it a try.

Right off the bat, there were four glaringly obvious differences between private and public school.

         
1    My chair in homeroom looked like somebody had had an abortion on it.

         
2    None of my teachers wanted to exchange phone numbers over spring break.

         
3    Ninety percent of my day was no longer spent highlighting stuff in Bibles.

         
4    We had pep rallies for everything.

In Catholic school, we never had pep rallies. We had crucifixion reenactments and Oxfam days where we pretended to live in third-world countries and ate bowls of rice on the floor, but no pep rallies. Our athletics were offered through CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) and consisted of same-sex teams globbed together from surrounding parishes. There wasn’t a lot of skill or talent necessary; all were accepted and every game began with a blessing and ended in a convenient tie. In fourth grade, the girls were allowed to participate in a form of cheerleading. We showed up in our plaid uniform skirts and white T-shirts to shout excitedly along the sidelines at our struggling players. It was a less pornographic version of that Britney Spears video. We didn’t do any jumps or choreographed dances, and the only formal indication of our existence was the inclusion of a black-and-white team photo in the back of our school yearbook. Nevertheless, it was official enough that we called ourselves cheerleaders.

That false sense of superiority is the only reason I can offer for voluntarily signing up for seventh-grade cheerleading tryouts. That or I suffered some kind of stroke that temporarily impaired
my judgment. Seventh-grade cheerleading in a public school was not the same thing as CYO cheerleading. These girls were half gymnast, half Kardashian. I, on the other hand, had the flexibility and stamina of Jonah Hill.

As part of the requirements, you had to show up with your hair in a high ponytail, know how to do two signature kicks, and prepare a unique cheer to perform in front of the judges. I was pretty confident about that last part, because I was really good at rhyming, on account of my impeccable timing. Get it? This was going to be amazing. On the night of the tryout, my mom eased our van to a stop in front of the gym doors, looked me dead in the eyes, and said, “Hey, it’s fine if you don’t make it, okay?” I now realize that was her maternal way of saying,
There’s no way this shit is happening.

Our school mascot was the Fighting Bulldog, and our colors were purple and white, which I’d tried to incorporate in the white cotton shorts I’d stolen from my mom’s cruise-wear drawer and my dad’s long purple polo that hung off my shoulders and was loosely knotted at the bottom right side. Was I the only girl there wearing her parents’ clothing? Yes I was.

When it was finally my turn, I gently patted the five thousand bobby pins holding the stubby ponytail atop my head, smiled brightly, and excitedly bounced onto the auditorium stage. Two adult coaches, Mrs. Dominique and Mrs. Rose, who both had daughters auditioning that night and had been themselves cheerleaders, made up the panel of judges. The current high school cheerleading captain also joined them, though she looked mostly irritated to be there. I introduced myself, did a high kick and a very loose interpretation of a Russian toe touch, and then began my cheer.

“Take your shot! It won’t go in! You better get on your bus, again! Or we’re gonna kick you in your D-O-G-S . . . what does that spell? SUCCESS!”

Panting and glistening with sweat, I clapped spiritedly as the three judges stared at me blankly.

“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Rose finally broke the silence. “Did you say you were going to kick them in their dogs? Like their wieners?”

Prior to that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d made up a cheer about wieners. I smiled brightly and did one final halfhearted toe touch before stepping out of the glaring spotlight and quietly returned to the holding area backstage. Some girls were practicing complicated jumps and cheers in front of a wall-length mirror. A small group who had witnessed my tryout stood laughing and whispering in the corner. I sat on a folding chair and began obsessively picking at an invisible spot on my white shorts, closing my eyes every so often to mentally whisper a prayer to God, asking him to please just let me make the squad. I had no pop culture reference for this at the time, but I can now confidently say that what I did onstage that evening was the equivalent of absolutely any humorous musical montage of dorky fat girls trying out for the squad of all seventeen
Bring It On
movies.

About an hour later, Mrs. Dominque clacked across the wood floors with her snakeskin heels, smiling and winking as she made her way to the chalkboard, pressing the white paper onto it with masking tape. The girls rushed the sign, squealing and yelling across the room to their friends. I slowly made my way to the chalkboard, running my finger down the list of girls. My name wasn’t on the team roster, not even as an alternate, not even as the girl in charge of lining up the pom-poms on the sidelines when the real cheerleaders weren’t using them.

“What’s the matter, Brittany, someone kick you in your
wiener
?” one varsity girl laughed as she walked out surrounded by her fellow freshly minted cheerleaders.

I sat back down on the edge of my folding chair in the now-emptying choir room until Mrs. Rose came in to turn off the lights.