Two Girls Fat and Thin (16 page)

Yet I knew that these were nice girls. I sensed that if their mundane words covered cruelty and aggression,
the cruelty and aggression covered other qualities. Vulnerability, tenderness, curiosity, kindness—I sensed these qualities in the child harridans around me, yet I could not experience them. Even more bewildering, it seemed that they did not experience them either. Perhaps this was because these softer feelings were so immature, so frail, and, if allowed their full measure of expression, so potentially unbearable that the girls instinctively protected their gentleness with impenetrable harshness, unconsciously fearing it would otherwise not survive. If this were true then the rigid and complex social structure they adhered to, with its confusing rules of dress and conduct, must be a code for the deeper reserves that lay beneath, and thus, if this code were cracked, it would allow access to that friendliness and compassion I saw them sporadically express. So I listened desperately and tried to understand the code. But I could not do it, and on the rare occasion that someone spoke to me, I was struck dumb by trying too hard to discover the correct response. Either that or, having stood within earshot of a conversation on the cuteness of a particular TV show or the sluttiness of a heavily madeup twelve-year-old, I would blurt out a comment that seemed to me very like everyone else’s comments and be met with stares of incomprehension.

Thus the mythology.

There was a delicate underweight girl named Emma Contrell with round gray eyes painted stormily black and blue, and a curly bunch of short peroxide hair that made her small head heavy on her slight neck. She sighed and walked with her shoulders hunched and her arms held inward. She belonged to an elite band of girls who wore too much makeup and short skirts. They drank and smoked cigarettes and went to parties with seventeen-year-olds. They were gossiped about, envied, and feared. Emma was the frailest and dreamiest of these girls; even her vicious taunting of the wretched lone “special education” student was giddy and whimsical. She had a bad reputation with the other girls for being a “nympho” and she would’ve been outcast if she hadn’t been protected by her formidable friends. I saw her lingering in the halls or in the parking lot with one large lumbering lad after the next; their big bodies and limbs seemed to menace Emma merely by close proximity to her. Emma always appeared to be under some terrible stress; she carried a large bottle of aspirin with her, her hands trembled,
she had urgent whispered conversations with her friends in the toilet stalls. I sat behind her in math, and I once heard her whisper to the lewd, snide child next to her, “Don’t you think Mr. Johnson has a fab bod?” Her voice was tiny and sharp, like an especially foolish bird. I decided from that moment on that Emma was in love with the cheaply suave math teacher and that she was involved with her apish series of boyfriends simply to kill her miserable passion under their stampeding bodies. But no matter how ardently they felt her up in the parking lot, her arched neck and open lips were not for them. Their fumbling paws only provoked her bitter longing for the math teacher until one day after school she put her hand on his thigh and gazed at him sorrowfully with her huge smudged eyes. He gloatingly took her hand and led her out to his car. He took advantage of the romantic child, enflaming her love and driving her to acquiesce even more frantically to her parking lot swains in an effort to divert public attention from her real love, in order not to destroy his family life and position, which he had warned her could happen. She was promiscuous also because he loved to hear her talk about her adventures in his overheated car.

I felt a throb of admiration every time I saw little Emma in the bathroom, her hands trembling as she applied pink lipstick to her plump lips. I pictured her clinging to the rutting math teacher in the back seat of his car, her face abandoned to love and despair, and I forgave her everything, even her cruelty, even the time she tripped my polio-crippled friend, poor dull defenseless Donna Doe.

I was astonished to hear one day, while sitting quietly on a toilet, a whispered conversation about the scandal at Bev Pawler’s pajama party, when Emma was found kissing Mona Prescott. I was taken aback only for a moment; then my loyalty and devotion swelled like an infected gland. I imagined Emma and Mona Prescott (a coarse girl with pockmarked skin and blank, intent brown eyes, who once remarked, as Miss Vanderlust, the bowlegged gym teacher, relegated me to an unwilling volleyball team, “Oh no, not that fat weirdo”) gazing passionately into each other’s eyes. I imagined Emma, scorned by the boys who had used her, rejected by the math teacher, tormented by rude phone calls in the night. I imagined Emma crouched in her underwear, sobbing on the floor of the deserted gym class locker room. Mona’s concerned face would
appear from behind a row of lockers. “Hi. Wanna go for a swim?” They swam in the deserted pool, moving under the water in slow rippling bands of light. Mona, the stronger one, led the way. In my mythology, she had a large red flower tattooed on her inner thigh, exposed like a betrayed secret. Emma watched the flower through the rippling water and wondered how she could’ve overlooked it before.

I did in reality see them in the locker room together, padding around in their underwear, whispering and giggling. I did see them swimming together once, and perhaps, in some dim way, recognized two familiar prototypes as Emma, like my mother, paddled nervously behind while Mona, like Edwina Barney, cut through the water with brisk strokes. The rest of the class gamboled about them, their playful screams rising in the echoing air while I sat in my chair and watched with the silent group of girls who always had their period when a swimming class was scheduled.

There were many others about whom I formed such beautiful and elaborate fantasies. There were the D’Arcy twins, tall and bony-legged girls with curly black hair and prominent ribs. Their strident athleticism, their barking voices, in which they talked of “really creaming” somebody made me envision them in white leather, armed with bows and arrows, smiling as they entered a field of battle and carnage, perhaps looking for souvenirs of teeth or buttons.

There was Jana Morgan, close friend of Emma Contrell and even more of a slut, a dumb-eyed girl with a big oval face, big lips, and a graceful, acquiescent neck. She was loud, foul, and kind, she wanted more than anything to attract the attention of everyone around her. She sat straddling her chair in her short skirt and badly run pantyhose, twisting her torso coquettishly as she whispered to a boy or passed a note to a girl; she popped big bubbles of gum and flirted with teachers. She often had to report to the principal’s office, and she went with defiance in the swing of her hips, turning when she reached the door to whisper dramatically, “I’ll never tell!” in imitation of those handsome and noble TV prisoners of the Gestapo who always escape over the barbed wire on their motorcycles. In the frequent wars of my dreams, she appeared as the most valuable prisoner in the enemy’s detention system; she and I were
among the unbreakable cadre that our captors had so far failed to brainwash. Although they led her away daily to be savagely interrogated, Jana still gallantly cried out, “I’ll never tell!” and she looked at me with eyes of such understanding and connection that I awoke feeling deeply and tragically moved, as though someone I loved had died in my arms.

I attached these bright phantasms and others like them to the people around me, like exuberant billowing shadows more real than the flesh they shadowed, phantoms living full lives that I was excluded from, even though I had created them.

When I arrived home from school, my mother would be in the kitchen, preparing dinner. She employed the same energy with which she had once cleaned the house of her girlhood, stirring the pot, prodding the meat, peeling the potatoes with concentration and zeal. I hated the careful, exacting way she watched the food. I hated it when she patted my lower back or squeezed my shoulder and said, “Hi, honey” as I lumbered through the kitchen. My mother didn’t care if I was fat and ugly. She seemed to like it in fact. In my diary I wrote, “I fear my father’s anger, but I fear my mother’s love.” This phrase was destined to sink slowly and heavily to the bottom of my memory and to sit there, undulating like a baleful underwater plant.

For, in creating the imaginary world inside me, I had abandoned the world that had existed between my parents and me, leaving them alone with their chipmunks and their triumphant heroes. It was a silent defection but they felt it, my father especially felt it. He would watch me as I moved through the rooms of his house as if trying to decide if I were his friend or enemy. Step by step I moved further away, and he registered each internal retreat with growing outrage and fear.

Sometimes when I came downstairs for dinner, my father would be resting in his black leather armchair; he would raise his eyebrows in greeting as I stumped down the stairs. I would set the table and talk with my mother. Dinner would be accompanied by television voices and the sound of my father gnawing his steak-bone. During warm weather, we would sit at the table long after we’d finished eating, with our chairs pushed out and our legs comfortably extended, drinking iced tea and watching television. I
stirred so much sugar into my tea that it went to the bottom of my glass in a grainy swirl and sat there; I fished it out with a spoon and ate it when I had finished drinking. Newscasters would talk to us, and my father would translate, commenting on the bastards who were trying to undermine the United States in its fight to protect Vietnam from communism. Sometimes he would ask my opinion on what the newscaster said; I would give it and he would say, “Good comprehension. You’re following it pretty well,” and lean back in his chair, his mouth a satisfied line. Eventually, my mother and I would clear the table, scrape the food from the plates and load the dishwasher. My parents would move into the living room to concentrate on the TV, and I would go back upstairs to read. The evening would grade easily into night.

There were other evenings, though, when I lay upstairs trying to read while my parents’ voices floated up through the floor. I would visualize a part of my mind separating from my body like a cartoon character, tiptoeing away from the rest of me to listen at the door with cupped ear and then hurrying back to tap the complacent corporeal reader on the shoulder, gesticulating wildly. They were talking about me. My mother was telling my father how rudely I had greeted her that afternoon, or how I had told her to shut up that morning. The cartoon character reported sentences in scraps; “. . . it’s got to stop . . .” “What are we going to do?” “I just don’t know.” Soon my father would be pacing the living room to the martial bagpipes of the Coldstream Guards, ranting about “little shits” who deliberately rejected everything good and decent in favor of ugliness, who selfishly disregarded the feelings of those who’d sacrificed for them. In between declarations, he stamped up the stairs and into the bathroom, slamming the door so hard that my door trembled. His close presence came through my wall in a heavy wave, and I unconsciously padded the air for yards around me with numbness. When my mother called me for dinner, the table would already be set, and my father would be sitting at its head, watching me as I entered the room. His face was bitterly red, his eyes glassy, his hair stood away from his head in an oily halo gone askew. “There she is,” he might say. “The one who doesn’t want to be a part of her family. The one who ignores her mother and tells her to shut up.” We would eat silently, my mother consuming tiny forkfuls,
my father noiselessly but violently chewing, squeezing his napkin into a shredded ball with his free hand. Slowly, starting first with veiled attacks on “selfish turds” and “fat slobs,” he began to tell me how awful I was. Soon he would be leaning towards me on his elbows, his mouth forming his words so vehemently that he showed his teeth. “You sit there on your fat butt night after night wearing the clothes I bought you, stuffing yourself with my food, stupid and ugly, contributing nothing.” He paused to study me as I chewed. Tears ran down my face and over my lips as I ate, mixing in my mouth with my hamburger. My mother ate her salad and traced a little design on the table with her finger. “Not only do you contribute nothing, but you attack. You attack a woman who’s never done anything but give you attention and affection.” He retreated back to his plate to seize another mouthful of hamburger. I stared at my plate and wept.

Those dinner tribunals occurred with such frequency that I developed the ability to divide myself while they occurred; the external person who sat and cried while her father reviled her and the internal person who helped herself to more salad as he ranted, and noticed that the scalloped potatoes were particularly succulent tonight. With bitter pride I hugged the inner me to myself at night and thought how I had enjoyed dinner, no matter what. But my pride was marred by the dim awareness that it sometimes felt as though it was the external person who ate her dinner in dignified silence while the internal person hurt. “If you ever tell your mother to shut up again within my hearing, I’m going to knock you flat on your back. And if you get up, I’ll knock you down again. Every time you get up, I’ll just keep knocking you down.” I rose to clear the table. “I’ll help you, honey,” said my mother, gently patting my elbow.

After the table was cleared, I went upstairs to lie in bed. I would lie in the dark, sensing my body sprawled out before my head like a country I had seen only on maps. My thoughts formed a grid of checkered squares clicking off and on in an industrial pattern of light and dark. Once this grid was in place, what had happened at the dinner table became a tiny scene observed from far away, and I would turn on the light and get my book and read, eating from a bag of orange corn curls I kept under my bed.

It seemed that part of my father wanted to destroy me for leaving him, and that another part of him, which I could sense only at certain moments, wanted to follow me into my retreat, to wrap his arms around me and never let me go.

Sometimes after I had put on my nightgown and gotten under the blankets to sleep, my father would come into my room. I would wake to find him standing beside my bed in the dark in his pajamas, looking at me with an invisible face, rubbing his fingers together. I would pretend to be asleep, feeling his presence and wondering if he was thinking about how innocent I looked in sleep. He would stay in the room for several minutes and then leave, nervously wiping his mouth with his hands before turning to go. I would lie there feeling a vague sense of vindication and satisfaction from this silent nocturnal contact. I thought he was trying to apologize.