13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

  “I feel like we have this connection, you know? . . . Like, this deep, deep connection.”

  And I agree. We do. And he tells me how I’m going to be his miracle. How the sight of me will make him walk again, will make him so hard he’ll cream his pants, and I let him go on and on like this, describing how we fuck on the Ganges River, which he says is a holy place of transformation, with the whole of the Hindu pantheon of gods watching. And I look up at the dark ceiling above me and blow smoke rings at where I know Bettie is, tied up in her PVC. I remember my eyes are all smoky. I think of China in her room surrounded by the dragons she told me she painted on the walls, being watched by boys dripping rain like Zen fountains.

  “Can’t you just send me a picture now?” he asks me.

  I’m just about to tell him that I’m tired right now, when the door to my room opens. “Elizabeth, who are you talking to in here?”

  I stare at my mother’s robed silhouette in the open doorway. “No one,” I say, hanging up.

  “Not one of those guys from the Internet?”

  I say nothing. Stare at her sex-rumpled Liz Taylor hair. Her large body robed in black silk and emanating Fendi, which she can’t afford but buys anyway. There is a lot we can’t afford that she buys anyway: abstract paintings, African masks that aren’t even real masks.

  “Who were you talking to just now?” she says.

  “Rosemary,” I lie.

  “Rosemary,” she repeats.

  Even though she only met her once and very briefly when she picked me up from school, my mother likes China, who she calls by her proper name, Rosemary. Unlike Mel, who she thinks is a bad influence, and who she holds responsible for what she calls my “downward spiral.” Rosemary, on the other hand, has style.

  She flicks on my bedroom light. I wince and cover my eyes, wonder when she’ll go back to her boyfriend, who I know is waiting for her in the bedroom, but she just stands there. Folds her arms over her chest.

  “How was school?”

  “Fine,” I say, lowering my hand from my eyes.

  “Did you go?”

  “Yes.” She looks right at me and I look right back without flinching or blinking. Her boyfriend took pictures of me once. For the Internet guy I was seeing before this one. Black-and-whites. Close-ups. In woodlots. In my bedroom. In parks. I never ended up sending those and I never look at them. Just go back, I tell my mother in my mind, but she stays standing there.

  “This ‘school’ is your last shot, Elizabeth. You know that, right?”

  She’s looking away now. It’s fine that she took him back after the photos. I don’t think she knows the whole story. Also she’s lonely, I see how lonely. I see how she hasn’t been with anyone since my father left when I was five. I see she’s a fat, middle-aged woman with a heart condition, so how many men does she really have to choose from? Though I never told her, she knows I see, sort of. But I thought we had an unspoken agreement that in exchange for my seeing, my silence, she would not pry into my affairs.

  “I know you’ve been depressed,” she says now to the print of Audrey Hepburn that she herself nailed to my wall and which I’ve since covered with zombie stickers. “I’m just worried. You’re not helping yourself at all. Look at you. It’s like you love being miserable.” Seeing me eye her huge stomach, she crosses her arms over her black silk robe.

  I fold my arms and look down past my thighs at the bedspread beneath me. I never look at my body if I can help it. It’s bigger, I can feel it, but I haven’t stepped on the scale or looked in a full-length mirror in months.

  “I don’t love it,” I mutter.

  “What was that?”

  “I said I don’t love it.”

  “What the hell happened to your eyes?”

  “It’s just makeup.”

  My mother stares at me a long time before flicking off my light.

  “It looks like you got punched.”

  • • •

  Saturday arrives and she’s late. But I don’t let it worry me. I’ve already done most of the work—scouted various locations, laid out potential wardrobe choices on the bed. I figure she’ll help me choose. Once she helps me choose and does my eyes it’ll all work out. China will know what to do, I’m sure of it. She shows up at around seven, wearing a tank top and a Scottish kilt and a dog collar with spikes that match her spiked hair. She’s got a roll of duct tape in her hand.

  I’m very excited when I see the duct tape. She’s taking this so seriously.

  “You brought tape!”

  She looks at the roll in her fist like she’s surprised to see it there.

  “Oh yeah. That’s for me. I’m going to Death later and I have to tape my nipples ’cause this dress I’m going to wear tonight totally slides around when I dance. You know the way I dance.”

  I do know the way she dances. It’s crazy. She just closes her eyes and spins under the mirror ball, and people have to steer clear. “Oh, yeah, for sure,” I say, disappointed. “Tape is a great idea.”

  “So are you ready?” And she holds up the camera like she’s actually about to start clicking.

  “Ready?” I repeat, and I’m thinking, What about my makeup? What about wardrobe choices? Location? Light? But all I say is, “Not yet. I haven’t even really decided what I’m wearing.”

  She looks at me dressed in my long black velvet skirt and black tee. Her look’s like, I thought you were dressed.

  “This? No, no.” And I point to my bed, upon which I have laid out all of these possible outfits complete with shoe options. “I wanted to see which you thought first,” I tell her.

  She looks at them awhile. Most of them are other loose black tops and long black skirts.

  “What I thought?”

  “Which you liked. Best.”

  She gives them a cursory glance, shrugs. “Whatever you think.”

  She sits down on my bed lightly, like she should get up anytime. She begins to pick at the fringe on one of my mother’s Pier 1 cushions that I took from the couch, hoping we’d be able to use it as a prop. I wish she’d look at me.

  “If you want,” I say, “we could hang out a bit first—maybe get Chinese?” I watch her, still fingering the cushion fringe.

  “I’d rather just get started. I brought this too,” she says and out of one of her army coat pockets, she pulls an eye shadow kit.

  I’m overcome by this kindness. I’m about to say, Yes! Thank you, but she looks up at my eyes. “Wait, is that . . . Are you still wearing what I put on your eyes, like, a week ago?”

  “No,” I say, even though it is. “This is just my stuff,” I tell her now. “I was just experimenting. Before you came.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well it looks good like that. You should just leave it. Unless you want me to touch it up?”

  Now it feels like too much to ask.

  “Oh, no, that’s okay. I mean, if you think it looks good like this . . .”

  She’s staring at me, blinking. I realize she’s waiting for me to get going. I go get changed without her help, without her consultation. It all feels like drowning.

  “So where do you think I should stand?” I ask her when I come back.

  “Wherever.”

  “I was thinking here?” I say, gesturing toward the space between my bookcases and my CD towers, beneath my print of The Scream.

  After she gives me a very slight nod of her head, I arrange myself in my chair and crane my neck as far forward as possible while letting my hair fall in front of my face.

  “How do I look?” I say, without moving my lips.

  “Like Cousin Itt in mourning. Might try moving your hair out of the way. Also, smiling.”

  I can’t tell her I don’t want to broaden my cheek circumference. She wouldn’t understand. Also, with the camera on me, my face stiffens. Feels paralyzed. I force my
lips to curl on one side.

  “How about now?”

  She lowers the camera and looks at the pomegranate-scented tea light I’ve lit and placed on the nightstand.

  “Think we’re going to need more light.”

  “What if I lean into it more?” I crane my neck forward toward the candle flame.

  “Yeah, that won’t work.”

  “I thought you said your dad had a special camera. One that can see in the dark.”

  “There are no cameras like that, Lizzie.” She flips a switch on the camera and then starts clicking again. This time a flash goes off. Blinding. I reel from it.

  “I thought you said you wouldn’t need flash,” I say.

  But she keeps clicking and clicking. “What?”

  “I said, ‘How do I look?’”

  “Like I just murdered your gerbil. Relax a little.” She clicks some more. Clicks and clicks. Too fast. I want to tell her to slow down. Tell me how it looks. Give me a chance to change outfits, lighting, location. Angles. We need to try different angles.

  My Wonder Woman phone rings and rings.

  “That him?” she asks me, jutting her chin at the phone.

  “Yeah,” I say out of the corner of my mouth.

  “Answer if you want,” she says.

  “It’s fine,” I say. I don’t really want her to hear us talk. Also, I’m afraid if she stops now she won’t take any more.

  “Answer,” she says. “I could use a break anyway.” She puts down the camera and picks up my pack of cigarettes.

  When I pick my phone up and say hello, I’m aware of how my voice changes. I become the oversexed nymph who will wander the hinterlands of Calcutta with him. The one who is all sinew and braceleted bone. I hear the wistful notes, the breathy affectation I can’t help. I turn away from her while I talk.

  “Are you taking the pictures?” he says.

  I look over at China. She’s at my desk surfing the net, smoking.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, okay. I didn’t mean to bother you. It’s just I can’t wait to see them. I’m honestly getting hard just thinking about it, I swear. I’m in the middle of creaming my pants right now.”

  “That’s nice,” I whisper into the receiver.

  “What did you say? How come you’re talking so softly?”

  “No reason. I just said, ‘That’s nice.’”

  “You keep saying that! And I keep telling you it isn’t nice. It really isn’t.”

  “I should go.”

  “Wait! When will you send them to me?”

  “Later today, probably. Like, tonight, I guess.”

  I hang up and turn around to find China still sitting at my computer. She’s found one of the pics Blake sent me in my drawer.

  “This is him?”

  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.”