13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

  “I can’t get it for just me. I’m not that much of a pig. I hope.”

  “I’ll have a bite,” I offer.

  Mel says she shouldn’t get it anyway. She should, you know, be good. “Like you.” She gives me a half smile.

  I tell her I’m honestly not that good. Really, I’m—

  “You are,” she says. “I wish I had your discipline.”

  “You did there for a while,” I say, looking away.

  For a while, Mel was pretty committed, using her mother’s old Exercycle, living on Diet Coke and Michelina’s Light. In fact, for a while there, Mel began to look like the unstoppable force of nature she was when she was seventeen, the girl who wore black bras you could see through her white Catholic school blouse and who blew all the boys I ever professed to love in her bedroom postered with obscure Goth bands, while I sat in the downstairs den with her mother, who taught me how to cheat at solitaire.

  That was a couple of years ago, when we were living together. I was still more or less an agoraphobic whale, switching my major every quarter—from English to French Literature to Art History to Medieval Studies to Film—going to the random lecture when I could bring myself to leave my bedroom, adding and dropping electives like Gaelic, collecting syllabi-like travel brochures for destinations I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to. When Mel started losing, I tried to be supportive. I’d say things like, “You look great, but you don’t want to go too far.” You know, things a friend would say to a friend. But Mel would just sip her Diet Coke, sort of smug, like she had a secret, leaving half her salad for the waitress to clear away. She lost steam after a few months though. Couldn’t keep it off. Gained it back plus, plus.

  “I guess I kind of went too far,” Mel says now.

  “I did tell you not to go too far,” I remind her. “You still look beautiful,” I add. I search for something about her to compliment. She is beautiful, of course, but since she gained all that weight back, she’s let herself go a little, grooming-wise. Usually she’ll wear at least lipstick for me because she knows it depresses me to see her without it, but today her lips are all bare and crackly.

  “I love your top,” I say at last. It’s hideous. One of those tentlike horrors from the plus-size store. There are some iridescent baubles along the neckline, some frothy bits of lace trailing from the cap sleeves, presumably to lessen its resemblance to a shroud.

  “I love the sleeve detail.”

  Mel looks down at the froth, frowning. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “I think it’s nice. It’s weird how they seem to have way nicer things at that store than they did back when I had to shop there.”

  “It’s still the same crap,” she spits. “They just have more selection is all.”

  We stab at our ice.

  “I love your top, though,” she says, eyeing my corseted tank. “Siren?”

  “Hell’s Belles.”

  “I thought that place closed.”

  “Nope. Still open. New owner, though.”

  “Huh. I guess I never really go downtown anymore.” Mel moved out of our apartment when she decided to go back to college—she couldn’t afford tuition and rent on a music store clerk’s salary—and now she lives with her mother back in Misery Saga.

  “I used to love shopping there,” she says now.

  “I remember.”

  Waiting outside the fitting room while she tried on PVC corsets and velvet empire-waist dresses. The former owner, a corpselike woman named Gruvella, regarding me with eyes the color of skim milk as though I were about to steal something. Not that anything she had would’ve fit me then, not even the fingerless gloves. Mel finally coming out from behind the white-and-black-striped curtain, twirling for me while I sat in the chair with the clawed armrests, saying, “Great, that looks great.”

  “I still remember that black bell-sleeved dress you got there. The one you wore to the prom with the spider tights.”

  “The Bella. I forgot about that dress. God, good memory.”

  The waitress brings our food. She’s forgotten to put my poppy seed dressing on the side, which often happens with this waitress and sometimes? Honestly? I think maybe she does it on purpose just to fuck with me. I tell her about it and she says, “Oh, well, she could change it for me,” and I say, “Could you?” And I tell Mel to go ahead and start without me.

  “She sounds pretty annoying,” Mel says. “Sadistic, even.”

  “Itsy Bitsy? She is.” I tell Mel that I’m starting to think she befriended me to make herself feel good. To feel extra bitsy. That I think she actually gets off on it, eating copiously in front of me while I eat nothing, and pointing out how I’m eating nothing while she’s eating copiously.

  “I guess that’s possible,” Mel says. She picks up her fork and knife, then lowers them. “I feel bad about starting without you. You sure you don’t want at least some fries while you wait?”

  I tell her I better not. I’ve been on such a slippery slope lately.

  Mel bites into her scroll. “You look the shame to me,” she says. “Shkinnier, even.”

  “I wish. I’m pretty sure I’ve plateaued. And I’m flying out to see Tom soon.”

  “I don’t know if I support you doing this for Tom.”

  “I’m not. It’s just useful to have a date in mind. To work toward. You know?”

  Mel keeps eating her scroll.

  “This is for me,” I add.

  “Good. Because he should love you the way you are.”

  “He does.”

  “Good.” Mel nods, and takes a bite of scroll. “I’m glad that one of these Internet things finally worked out for you. I was worried he’d be another creep. Like that soap opera guy in the wheelchair. God, what was his name? Something awful. Blair or something.”

  “Blake.”

  “Or that one from before from Colorado who kept claiming he’d dated international models. What a liar. And a loser.”

  “Yeah,” I say, cutting into an artichoke heart. “How are things with Henry?”

  She makes a face. “The same. I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course. Well. Anyone you hate these days?”

  Mel cuts a large piece of scroll. Then she says there are people who annoy her. Who seriously, seriously annoy her. But no, no one worthy of hate. Hating requires a lot of energy; she’s so tired these days.

  “I know what you mean,” I say. “I’m tired too.”

  Speaking of which, Mel says, she has an early class tomorrow.

  I ask her if she’d like me to drive her home after dinner, but she says it’s fine. Really.

  I tell her I’m happy to at least drive her to the bus station closer to her house, that I’d really hate for her to have to take two buses at night. It’s such a long ride to Misery Saga, and besides, I feel like I never see her anymore. Like she’s disappeared.

  “I haven’t disappeared,” she says. “But I know what you mean. I feel like I never see you anymore either.”

  On the ride to the bus station, to make her laugh, I tell Mel about Aggressively Naked, this woman who works out at my gym who does all of her post-workout grooming naked. She brushes her hair naked. She uses her straightening iron naked. Eyelash curler and mascara naked. Rings, necklace, and even bracelets naked. Only after she’s got herself totally primped will she put on her clothes.

  “Isn’t that annoying?”

  “It is,” Mel agrees.

  “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you earlier. Also, she’s got this body you wouldn’t believe. Like, I knew just by her body she didn’t speak English. I knew that when she opened her mouth, something like Danish would come out.”

  “Oh my god, stop,” she says, mock-covering her ears. “Just stop.”

  Once we get to the bus station, I insist on holding Mel in the car
until the bus comes. She takes her bus pass out of her little change purse to be at the ready. I tell her I love her change purse, even though there is really nothing distinctive about it. It’s just a change purse. Black leather with a little zip.

  I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want me to take her home, the bus sucks. She says she actually doesn’t mind it, that ever since she moved back in with her mother, she uses the bus for Me Time. Me Time for Mel has always been a dark fantasy novel and some ethereal dark wave on her iPod. It comforts me that this has never changed.

  I know she wouldn’t care for most of the things I listen to now but I have a mix I keep in the car of songs we used to listen to together, and I put this on for the ride. The track playing now is “Annwyn, Beneath the Waves” by Faith and the Muse. I haven’t listened to them in a while but now I turn it up.

  “I love this song,” I say, turning to look at her.

  She says nothing.

  “Remember the first time we saw these guys?”

  She smiles now at the windshield. “Yeah.”

  “How we lined up at the door at like three in the afternoon because we figured everyone would want to see them, that there’d be this huge line, but it was just us? For like hours on the sidewalk waiting? No one else showed up until like seven.”

  “We got there early to get a table. We always did that for shows.”

  I thought of how we’d just sit there all afternoon, melting in the sun, listening to the album we were about to hear live on continuous loop on our respective Discmans. Me sweating profusely in the most Gothic ensemble I could patch together at my size, which was usually fishnet tights worn as a top under one of my mother’s black night slips, Mel fully decked out in one of her Siren ensembles, lipstick black, eye makeup red and three times more elaborate than mine.

  “We were cute,” she says now, meaning it.

  I want to talk to her more, but she’s spotted the bus in the distance, so I say okay, good-bye, and tell her I’ll text her later, but she’s already out of the car, running toward the stop.

  • • •

  Tonight, as I do my assessment in front of the mirror, it seems there are more truths to come to grips with. Sometimes this happens. How many there are often depends on lighting. Not on how much, but on how it’s hitting me, on how it’s hitting certain parts. Three weeks and three days left until I fly there. He says he loves me right now. He claims he already loved me the moment he first saw me at Underworld. When I first saw him I remember thinking I must have been at least three times his size; he was so thin and pale, he looked like he was barely there, like a ghost, like I’d dreamed him. I remember thinking he was beautiful, but I didn’t look at him very much. In fact, I looked at him so little that first time that when I was away from him, I couldn’t exactly recall his face. In my memory, his features were slippery, vague. His eyes kept changing color, like in the song by New Order. But he claims that he loved me then and that he fell in love with me before that night even, before he even saw me, that he loved me from that night 103 days ago when we switched from online chats about music to phone conversations about music and I would sit here in my studio apartment, my phone crooked in my sweating neck, enumerating the many reasons why I loved this or that band or book or film and then he would enumerate his. From even before that when all I was was a small, snarky post he saw on the Dirty List at three a.m. to which he felt compelled to respond. That was nearly a year ago, and nearly a year ago, I was much further from my goal indeed. Probably I was Mel’s size then. Now I’m almost half that.

  After noting my progress, I lie in bed in my studio, thinking of Mel while I eat a bar of 72 percent dark chocolate square by square. I picture her in her mother’s Misery Saga house filled with all those strange breeds of orchid. I picture her walking up the creaking steps toward her blood-colored childhood bedroom, surrounded by walls of obscure fantasy novels and towers of even more obscure dark wave CDs whose precise configuration I used to know by heart. With a hand on my stomach, I imagine her lying on her back in the too-small bed, a bed we slept on together so many nights in my teens, the twin mattress sagging beneath her, a moon through the window silhouetting her, the gentle rise and fall of her immense stomach, her slight snore, until my eyes close.

  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.

  I Want Too Much

  One 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.