13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

  “You have to be firm,” Ruth says, pointing her chopsticks at me. It’s the kind of place that gives you chopsticks with your meal even though you’re eating salad. To make it fun. “It’s not as if you can reason with her. She won’t listen to reason.”

  “Where is she getting these pens to write her name down is what I want to know,” I say. “I never see anything but pencils on that Cardio Booking Sheet podium.”

  Ruth hunts through her baby kale for hidden hearts of palm. “Didn’t you know? She brings down her own.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  She nods, sips her Iron Maiden, and makes a face at the taste. It looks like black sludge but supposedly it’s good for the blood—for energy, which we need. “I’ve seen her do it. Tucks it in her bike shorts.”

  “But that’s insane. Why would someone do that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? She’s terrified someone is going to erase her name.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. Those podium pencils don’t even have erasers,” I point out.

  “We’re not exactly dealing with a rational being here,” Ruth says, readjusting her black shrug, worn, on this hot day, presumably to conceal her upper arm flesh.

  “How sad,” I say. “What a sad existence.”

  “Of course it’s sad. It’s terribly sad.” As she digs into her greens with her chopsticks, I watch the flesh near her armpit, the part not covered by the shrug, swing slightly in her zeal.

  “I guess I could just switch to Lifecycle Three,” I say. “Have done with her altogether.”

  “Why should you have to make adjustments?” Ruth says. “Besides,” she adds, “you hate Lifecycle Three. Didn’t you tell me once being on it was like being in a nightmare?”

  “Yeah,” I say. It really is. The handlebars aren’t quite in sync with the pedals. Ruth said she’d try to bring that up at the next condo board member meeting. Ruth’s on the board.

  “So why even consider it? It’s like me with Treadmill Three. I don’t know why but it works for me. You have to go with what works for you, you know?”

  I nod, looking through the glass-top table at Ruth’s stomach, which, despite her unwavering dedication to the Malibu Club and the fact that two of her dinners are delivered to her door each week by Hearthealth, has not diminished in all the time I’ve known her. In fact, Ruth basically looks like a slightly deflated version of the pretty seventeen-year-old fat girl she showed me a picture of when I went to her place once. This picture, displayed on the mantel of her fake fireplace, is meant to bolster her spirits, remind her how far she has come.

  She asks me if I know Christine, from Phase Two.

  “Christine?”

  “She might have been before your time,” Ruth says with a dismissive wave of a hand. “Anyway, Christine had that 7:00 a.m. slot for ages. Had the same problem. With Char. The two of them even had it out in the gym once. Christine was firm with her, though. She told Char in no uncertain terms that she was impinging on her time slot.”

  “What happened?”

  “Char threw a fit. Of course. It was ugly. But she got off in the end. She had no choice. I told you, you have to be firm with her. You have to put her in her place.”

  I picture putting Char in her place. What that would entail. Her frantic pedaling. Me prying her off the handlebars bone by bone.

  “I don’t know. I feel bad about it, though. I do. It all feels so . . . petty.”

  Ruth looks at me for a moment, then sets down her chopsticks.

  “Remember that period you went through a little while ago when you were signing your name up for cardio machines but then not showing up in the morning?”

  I color when Ruth says this. “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Ruth says, leaning in, “she was the one writing NO SHOW beside your name.”

  “She didn’t!”

  “She did.”

  I remember those terrible block letters. Underlined three times. Surrounded by exclamations. That accusing arrow pointing to my scrawled name. I remember thinking, Who in their right mind would do such a thing? I remember now they were in ink.

  “Jesus. Who does that?”

  “Of course,” Ruth says, “she didn’t act alone. She was spurred on by certain parties. After all, she’s got her allies too.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” I say. “How did my not showing up inconvenience her? Or anyone? Anyone can claim the machine after the five-minute default period.” It’s true. That anyone can do so is a well-placarded rule.

  Ruth picks at the dregs of her Warrior Bowl and says nothing. I remember that people signing up for machines and then not showing up is a serious pet peeve of hers too. It’s awkward, this moment. Despite having known each other for two years, we’re not that close.

  “I’m angry now,” I say.

  “You should be. I would be.”

  “That’s just so . . . sick. She’s sick.”

  We discuss how sick she is, a favorite topic. How her bones have grown more visible lately. How her T-shirts hang on her like oversize sacks with armholes.

  “What does she even eat, do you think?”

  “Tea fungus,” Ruth says. “Unsweetened. From an eyedropper. Is what I picture. Either that or some sort of sea vegetable.”

  “Sad,” I say.

  “It is,” Ruth muses.

  We decide to order two skim milk cappuccinos and split a gluten-free carrot cake cupcake.

  “Do you think that scale in the Malibu Club is accurate?” I ask, watching Ruth saw the cupcake in two with a chopstick.

  “I think so. I don’t know. It might be a bit wonky. Why?”

  “Oh, just lately I’ve been weighing myself every day on it and that number just won’t budge. It’s, like, stuck. Or something. Do you find that too? That it’s stuck?”

  Ruth assesses the cupcake halves to make certain they’re even, then hands me my half. I stare at it, think of the treat dinners I used to have with Tom. We’d go for ice cream and he would always eat his very slowly, so that after I’d inhaled mine and was sad that it was gone, he could pass me his unfinished bowl. I can’t eat all that, I’d say. Sure you can, he’d say without looking at me because he knew that if he looked at me I wouldn’t take it. Take it. You deserve it. It’s your night off. Anyway, you know I don’t care about this stuff. I took it, feeling bad about myself because I couldn’t resist it. I hated feeling like even after all the positive changes I’d made, I wasn’t above this need and he was. I resented him for it, even though I knew that all there was behind his gesture was kindness. Love for me that made him look away while I ate.

  We still send each other songs sometimes. Mostly he’ll send them to me. New songs by old bands we loved. New songs by new bands he thinks I might love now. Most of the time, I can’t listen to them. Sometimes I’ll listen to them and a wave in me will break briefly and then I’ll have to turn it off.

  “I used to weigh myself every day but these days I’m trying to get away from the scale,” Ruth says. “I’m through attaching myself to a certain number, you know? I find I’m healthier that way, mentally speaking.”

  “Right,” I say.

  I watch her take tiny bites of her cupcake half to make it last. After each bite, she raises her eyebrows and nods like she is receiving surprising but not unwelcome news. She does look healthy. Her skin glows and her hair shines and she seems genuinely content.

  “You know when you’re on Treadmill Three? Do you ever feel like a gerbil?”

  Ruth frowns, licks a bit of icing from the corner of her mouth. “A gerbil?”

  “Any rodent, really. You know, on a wheel? You know,” I continue. “Sort of like the joke’s on us?”

  She sits back in her chair, making it squeak. She stares at me for a moment. “The joke’s on us? What do you mean?”

  “Well, you kn
ow how some people? They go to the gym regularly and they don’t look any different? Like, at all?” When I say this, I feel her gaze flit over my frame.

  “And it’s like, all that time, all that energy, you know? When we could have been . . .”

  “When we could have been . . .” Ruth prompts me, impatient.

  I have an image of something like Paris. Some woman walking for the sake of walking. With actual friends. She’s happy.

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  She shrugs.

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at, exactly, but I will say this: On the days that I don’t work out? I, for one, definitely feel a difference. Yes. Without a doubt.”

  She takes a sip of her stevia-sweetened skim milk cappuccino as if to seal this statement. Then consults her watch. She says speaking of which, she’s only ten hours away from her next time slot. We’d better get the check.

  I want to grab her by her shrug lapels and confess that I’m an unbeliever. That being on that machine makes me feel like I’m running in some sucking substance worse than mud. I can find no foothold, no traction. That I feel out of control, inches from the lip of the abyss. That while we’ve been sitting here, there’s this angry, hungry maw in me that is fathoms deep. But even though Ruth’s only a hair thinner than I am, she’s way on the other side of the fat girl spectrum, looking at me from the safe, slightly smug distance of her own control and conviction.

  So I say, “I know what you mean. Me too. Absolutely.”

  As we leave Zen, making our way to our respective Phases, I call out to her, “Hey. So whatever happened to Christine? The woman with the 7:00 a.m. time slot? She move?”

  “No, she’s still here. Moved to Phase Three now, I think. But she doesn’t come to the Club anymore. Sort of fell off the wagon. See you tomorrow?” she calls out to me, with her key fob already out.

  “I’ll be there with bells on,” I say.

  On the elevator ride back up to my apartment, I can already feel the cupcake half doing its worst and I think of how many Lifecycle minutes it will take to atone. More minutes than she will ever be willing to part with.

  When the elevator door opens on my floor, I see a striped British shorthair, one of Char’s, dart past me. She’ll do this. Let them roam the corridors in the evening. She calls it “airing” them.

  I’ve learned a bit about her cats via clipped conversations in the elevator, though we’ll always avoid a ride together if we can help it. I know one is asthmatic and one is prone to seizures, but I forget which requires needles and which needs a pill that Char has to crush and mix in with its food. I’m sympathetic, having recently parted with an injection-dependent cat of my own, Mr. Benchley. When I adopted him, shortly after I left Tom, he was already sick and old.

  In the corridor, I crouch down beside the cat, hold out my hand for her to sniff. She sniffs but keeps her distance. Behind me I feel the door to Char’s apartment open. I know she’s standing in the doorframe watching me but I don’t look at her. Instead, I ask the cat, “What’s your name?”

  “Toffee,” Char says behind me. “After her coat.”

  “Well, Toffee,” I say. “You’re beautiful. You are. You are you are you are.”

  Then I get up, swaying a bit before I catch my balance, and stagger toward my front door without once looking back, without saying good night.

  When I stumble into my own apartment, I am stabbed in the thigh by the sharp edge of my mother’s glass credenza, which, after she died, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.

  • • •

  I do not like to think, as I lie here, already dreading tomorrow morning’s rigors, feeling myself swell from Zen and hating Ruth for it, about how Char and I share a bedroom wall. I lean against the eggshell primer I know she is likely leaning on the other side of. Is she consuming fermented sea kelp from an eyedropper? Gloating over the protrusion of her spine nodules? Tallying up her visible ribs with an abacus? Sometimes I’ll lean there and listen in for evidence of a secret life. How I would love for her to have a secret life. What I hear is disappointing. What I hear is silence. A sitcom with a laugh track. Could be Frasier. The opening and closing of a closet door.

  • • •

  The next morning, I finally have it out with her. I feel it in the air all the way to the Malibu Club that today will be the day of our inevitable confrontation. Finding her still bone-flogging the Lifecycle when I come into the gym at 7:00:00, I stride right up to her and I ahem. And when she turns her awful sweaty visage toward me, I do not clam up, I do not cower. I tell her point-blank that I am on this machine next, as she well knows. And when she says, “Just give me a few minutes,” like I’m a fly that just needs to be swatted, I remind her, loudly, within earshot of every ineffectually working-out woman, that she cut into my time yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, and that’s when she cuts me off and shouts, “Fine! Fine! Fine! Relax!” And though a red fog burns the back of my neck, I do not waver. I remain standing there, my arms folded over my faded JUST DO IT T-shirt, silently supervising her cleaning of the seat and handlebars. I even point out the splotches of skull sweat she missed on the pedal straps. When I do this, I think she’s going to smack me, but she just turns away and wipes those down too. When she’s finished, she runs toward the stretching mats, swearing, and I hear, under her breath, her name for me. It is worse than mine for her. It is worse than any name I have ever hurled at myself in the mirror like a rock. It is worse than anything I could have ever imagined.

  To work out in the wake of her all, the humid wake of her all, is always a disorienting experience. Today, it is like working out in the aftermath of a war, like treading bone- and blood- and skull-strewn earth. The handlebars are still poker hot from where she gripped them, seemingly for dear life. The monitor is still damp from her hasty wipe down. Her sweat splotches still ghost the pedal straps. And from the corner I feel the pointed blade of her anger aimed at the back of my neck as she matrix-lunges, as she farmer-walks and hip-wiggles and abducts. One angry, pared-down leg, then the other. As I mount the still-smoking machine, I feel the truth of what her outraged eyes are etching into my back, that these minutes will make no difference to what Harold delicately refers to as my problem areas. Then I see Ruth mouth, Good for you, and nod from where she is doing isometric shoulder holds in the mirror. And I propel one ludicrous foot in front of the other, even though it’s like that nightmare where I’m running on terribly soft earth, running even as the ground gives way beneath me.

  To distract myself, I watch the Aquafit women, who, I observe, once more have no teacher. One of the class members is leading them now. I watch them go through the motions of their absurd water dance, knowing they are doomed to inhabit their masses of hanging flesh forever.

  And it’s too much. I get off. I get off three minutes earlier than my time. I expect Char to chide me for this with her eyes but when I turn to look at the mats, I see she’s gone. No trace of her but a dent in the mat, speckled with a few of her sweat driblets. I wipe the machine down for the hungry-looking flight attendant, who has been behind me all this time, circling inside my field of vision, pointedly stretching. Seeing me get off early, she gives me a skull-like grin in gratitude. What a boon, these extra minutes, her eyes say. I can feel her patting herself on her shoulder tendons for all those days when she came in earlier, in the name of You never know. Maybe the fat girl will finally throw in the towel, give up. Well, that day has come. All yours, I tell her. And watching her gleefully tether the ropes of herself to the machine makes me so exhausted, I do not even do my post-cardio cobra. Or plank. Or those leg lifts and scissor kicks and thigh abductions that I’m fairly certain do not work anyway. It is all, I am convinced now, a terrible trick.

  • • •

  I do not go to the gym the next morning. Or the next. Or the next. In short, I relinquish my precarious grip on the 7:00 a.m. ti
me slot. I give in to the abyss. There follows another bout of darkness, in which nothing is measured or counted or weighed, in which I dress before the mirror not seeing myself. A period during which the Malibu Club, observed from six floors up, becomes a strange and distant aquarium full of curious fish and Char its saddest specimen. I watch her each morning from above, glutted on my abdicated minutes, and under my breath, I say, You win. Happy? But she does not look happy. She looks as angry as ever.

  Evenings, I eat large quantities of the Foods I Should Avoid with my father. We have an unspoken agreement that if he doesn’t mention Tom, my divorce, my mother, or how I currently live, then he can come over from time to time and we can sit on opposite ends of my mother’s white couch with the pale blue flowers on it and watch Absolutely Fabulous. In this way, we’ve gradually grown closer in the years since I moved back home.

  “Friday night,” my father says, turning to me. “No plans?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you have a friend who lives nearby? The old one. What’s her name? Mal?”

  “Mel.” Mel lives in a condo complex just east and north of here. It has a name too. Eden. East of Eden. Something like that.

  “So?”

  “We see each other sometimes.” That used to be true, but now we haven’t in more than a year. For a while after I moved back, we’d meet up every few months or so for coffee or a drink in the afternoon. Have a stilted conversation about her boyfriend, whether I was dating anyone, her work, my work, for about two hours, then one of us, usually Mel, would bring up all the things we had to do the next day. Better be heading off. But it was good to see you. It was good to see you too. We should do it more often. We should. We’ve grown apart, I guess. Some friends do.