We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  “Liar! Liar!” I yelled as I pointed at Meg and her “I had a baby basically yesterday but am going to the Oscars tonight in a dress made from Cling Wrap” figure. “Who are you, Sarah Jessica Parker? Come on, you said you were FAT, and I gorged on pretzels and Pepsi the whole way down here thinking that for once our butts were going to be in the same BMI category! This is so not fair! If you don’t show me a stretch mark right now, I’m grabbing a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and a six-pack and I’m getting back on that plane!”

  “I can do better than a stretch mark,” Meg said as she laughed at me. “I had a nine-pound baby and got forty-four stitches as a reward!”

  “Ewwww,” I said with a gasp. “That’s what you get for being Miss Healthy! See, this is where a slothlike lifestyle packed with sugar, processed foods, and caffeine would have really paid off for you and given you a baby with a small little softball head!”

  “Oh my God, look at how fat I am!” Meg cried, outstretching her arms. “I now have two fat rolls!”

  “Oh, Meg,” I said, putting my arms around her. “Poor, sweet, skinny Meg. Those aren’t fat rolls, my friend; those are your boobies.”

  So not only was Meg still Depression-era thin, she now had cleavage to boot, which up until then had been the one and only area between the two of us where I reigned supreme, even if I had it on my back, too.

  As if the fact that Meg was now buxom weren’t enough to drive me mad, once we went shopping the next day, things quickly began falling apart more quickly than a Twinkie dipped in hot chocolate. There, in front of me, were rows and rows of the kind of clothes I struggle to find, all laid out before me simply for the taking. Overwhelmed by excitement and the possible damage these incredible finds were going to have on my Visa bill next month, I made fashion sparks fly from my fingertips as I flipped through the items on the rack like they were a deck of cards. Again and again, I caught my breath and gasped, “Oh!” with desire to a brown velvet waistcoat with antique jet buttons—but it was a size six. Not gonna work with my 38C torpedoes unless the whole thing was made out of very forgiving spandex and a Seal-a-Meal machine. “Oh!” to a striped pair of corduroy bell-bottoms à la Janis Joplin in her heyday (which I guess translates to “alive”), but alas, that size four wasn’t going to fit unless I was able to clone the original pair and sew the two of them together. “Oh!” to the most darling fifties-style aqua poplin day dress, but then the size-two tag squashed my hopes like a potato bug beneath the sole of a strappy, three-inch, skinny-heeled sandal. Not compatible with this user, unless the dress came with a hidden expansion panel the size of a movie screen.

  This happened again and again and again. Size six. Size four. Two. Zero. And then, when I saw that a slovenly size-eight skirt on the clearance rack was the fat lady in this circus, I knew I was in the wrong freak show.

  I was in a Skinny Store, where double-digit girls were not allowed, mainly because in this single-digit world, they plainly didn’t exist.

  I was dully reminded of an experience several months previous when I wandered through SoHo during a short trip to New York City. I had decided that during my trip, I would allow myself one extravagance, and I had decided I was going to buy a dress—maybe even a “not on sale” dress—in the one of the funnest parts of the coolest city in the world. That was going to be my gift to myself. A great, wonderful, expensive dress. I was dying to throw my money away, I was dying to simply give someone my money, I tell you, but alas, no one would take it. Nanette Lepore didn’t want it, and neither did Anna Sui or Cynthia Rowley. I might as well have been on a scavenger hunt with no clues, because that’s the kind of luck I was having trying to find a size L dress in New York City. Fat money was apparently no good there. Salespeople looked at me as if I were a mythical beast, something only whispered about in the safety of a shadowy stockroom. Even size eights didn’t belong in this world, because the only clothes displayed were the zeroes, twos, fours, and sixes. I felt like the biggest girl in the universe—as if I had been exposed to Chernobyl-like amounts of radiation and had just flattened entire Japanese villages simply with the crumbs that had fallen from my mouth.

  After being submerged in the Land of Protruding Ribs for so long I had a craving for barbecue, I finally lost it when a salesgirl asked if she could help me.

  “Honestly, it’s useless, because you don’t have my size, I need a fourteen, and I am a giant in your world,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Apparently everyone who shops here is the size of a Keebler elf or a first-grader.”

  The salesgirl actually laughed, putting me a little at ease. “We do have other sizes,” she said nicely. “Is that the dress you like? I can pull it from the back, where we keep our plus sizes.”

  Now, I didn’t know whether to run or shove a Suzy-Q in her face in protest. The plus sizes? An eight was a plus size? Okay, sure, my size dress requires more material than say, a dress for an Olsen twin, but come on, it’s not the size of a car! I suppose you can never be too careful, though; put a size-fourteen dress on a rack, and who would really be surprised if the whole fixture was just ripped right out of the wall and took an entire building down with it?

  I left before the salesperson returned with the dress, even though I’m sure she had to hire several men right off the street and maybe a forklift to help her carry it. Even if that dress fit me perfectly, my Fat Money was not going to be burned there.

  I learned a lesson that day, and that lesson was that if a store is too embarrassed to have me as a customer, if a store is too skinny to carry my size and display it out in public with the thinner, cuter sizes, then I’m too proud to give them my money. And I felt the same way in the store in Seattle.

  Before I could say, “Meg! Let’s get out of here, the only people who could fit into this stuff are junkies!” I turned around just in time to see her pluck a familiar aqua poplin day dress off the rack and head to the dressing room with it in one hand and Carmen in the other.

  “I’m going to try this on,” Meg giggled.

  I nodded and smiled, trying to hide my dismay and encourage my friend to have fun at the same time. “I’ll watch the baby while you’re in the dressing room,” I said.

  The next boutique was the same—dresses that could only fit a pretzel stick (unsalted) or Meg—so I watched the baby after scouring the racks and finding many adorable things but none in my size. Finally, in subsequent stores that we visited, I didn’t even bother with the clothes section of the store and headed straight for the “non-size” items, like body lotion and candles, and then just sat in front of the dressing room with Carmen until Meg was done. I should have brought some change to jingle in my pocket, I thought; I have officially slipped into the role of The Guy on shopping expeditions, except for the part when other customers in the store would assume the adorable infant was mine. Then I’d have to explain, “No, she’s my friend’s baby,” at which Meg would pop out of the dressing room and the other customer would gasp, “Oh! Yours? But you look so great!”

  “You’re not having any fun,” Meg said sadly as we added another bag to her growing mountain of great, cool clothes finds. “You haven’t bought one thing! We should just go home.”

  I realized then that Meg didn’t know that we were visiting skinny-only stores, because Meg had been only one of two things in her life: skinny or pregnant. I mean, the girl thought that she was FAT simply because she finally filled something out, even if it was just her nursing bra.

  “No, absolutely not,” I replied. “We are not going home. You’ve been dying to go shopping for months! We’re going to hit every store you want and you’re going to buy fabulous things. I just haven’t found . . . the perfect fit yet, that’s all.”

  At the next store, I exploded with manufactured enthusiasm over a fig-scented candle, asked the salesgirl some pertinent and pointed questions about acne cream, and then held up a pair of underwear the size of a cocktail napkin and bellowed to Meg, “I have been driven MAD trying to find these!”

 
However, the angry little miss inside my head was having a field day all her own: You know, in California every restaurant has to post its health-inspection grade in the front window so the customers know exactly what they’re getting into. If you’d like to go home with your intestines intact, you pick an A joint; if you have a decent co-pay and want some paid time off from work, choose option B; and if you’re angling for long-term disability or an alternative to gastric bypass surgery, C is your way to go. The same should go for boutiques. I say, don’t waste my time, just say what you are. Let me know right off if I have a better chance of fitting into something at Baby Gap than I do in your store. I want to see it posted in your front window: “Sizes Six and Under: For Paris Hilton, women with tapeworms, and young boys”; “Super Small Sizes: For Lara Flynn Boyle, political prisoners on hunger strikes, and everyone else 180 calories away from death”; and “Teeny-Weeny Sizes: For skeletons that hang in doctors’ offices, mummies, and Prada models.”

  I have been a frequent visitor to sales racks in almost every major department and clothing store, and guess what’s on them? XS’s and S’s. Size zeroes, twos, fours, and sixes. Rarely at Banana Republic will you spot a hallowed L on the sales rack, and ditto for J. Crew. The large sizes are always the first ones to get picked (for a change). Which tells me one thing: There’s way more of us out here than there are of them, and they’d better watch it. Should we decide to declare war on them, well, my Fat Money is on the Fat Girls. We don’t need bullets; all we need is to pass around a box of See’s chocolates for some extra energy and then huff and then puff and then blow their bones down.

  I mean, can it get any worse than this? Any worse than stores that house the larger-than-chic sizes away where no one can see them, or shops that simply just don’t carry them at all? Will they become like the airlines and start weighing people at the door before they’re allowed access? “Oh—a size fourteen? Hmmmm. Well, you, with your waterbed-like ass, take up as much room as two Lilliputian size zeroes. You’ll have to wait until those attractive thin girls over there leave before you can come in. But don’t you dare handle any of our stock too much. We don’t want you passing the fat gene to our clothes, you size LARGE!!”

  “Jeans?” Meg cried delightedly, and I suddenly realized that the little angry voice inside my head hadn’t been completely contained there after all. “Did you find jeans? Did you find something cool to get? I knew you would find something here! This is my favorite store, you know!”

  “Not yet, but I’m on a mission!” I assured her. “I’m sure this is the place.”

  While Meg met her match in the dressing room, I strolled around the shop with Carmen, desperate to find anything so Meg wouldn’t feel so bad about me not being able to fit into a tank top the size of a panty liner. I finally sighed with relief when I spotted a lightweight butt body shaper with some pretty lace around each leg in the lingerie section. I flipped to the tag and nearly gasped. What I saw there nearly took my breath away and almost made me drop the baby: L. I saw an L. What on earth a girdle was doing in this shop I didn’t know and I didn’t care—it had probably been misordered and had sat there for years, been used as a dust rag, to stuff a couple bras, kill some bugs, who knew—but finally I was going to buy something and walk out with a bag of my own.

  I raced up to the counter with the girdle and pulled out my credit card. The owner of the shop—a pretty, young, skinny-minnie girl with collarbones so prominent they could be used for rock climbing—picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and with a little laugh said, “Oh! This is NOT the right size for you!”

  I smiled, excited, pleased, and humbled that she had mistaken me for a medium, since all she had really seen for such a long time were miniature-size people that she had absolutely forgotten what a real human looked like. “Oh,” I said. “It’s OK. That’s a good size for me.”

  “No, really,” the woman said, nodding vigorously. “You need an extra-large, and that’s not a size we carry in the store regularly, but I can order it for you. I can have it here next week.”

  And then she tilted her skinny little head.

  And then she smiled at me.

  Even the girdle I wanted to buy was too small. The woman, that awful, awful woman, wouldn’t even let me buy that stupid LARGE girdle. I WAS TOO FAT FOR THAT.

  My face started burning around the edges and I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned and embarrassed and mortified and I was FAT and I felt like I was in the seventh grade again and a cheerleader had just told me my pants were too tight and I had also just had my period in them.

  “Should I order it?” the owner said.

  “I don’t think so,” I finally said, looking right at her. “My fat ass doesn’t live here.”

  Feeling as big as a Kodiak bear, I then sat down on the Skinny Store couch, mumbling something aloud about hoping that it could support my weight. I thought very, very hard about farting on it for a simple yet effective form of revenge, but then remembered I had an innocent baby in my presence and gracefully, though reluctantly, refrained (although I did not refrain from leaving a tiny wad of now flavor-depleted Bubble Yum underneath it).

  But wait.

  There are such things as happy endings, even for a size fourteen wandering the streets looking for a fabulous dress to take home. On my next trip to New York, I found Jill Anderson, a small boutique in the East Village that sells fantastic clothes in XS, S, and M, and then dares to put an L on a tag, too, and mean it. Not only was there a size fourteen dress right out there on the sales rack next to a six, a four, and a two, but there in that dress was room for my boobs, my butt, and my hips. I no longer felt like a Chernobyl monster. I felt like a girl and I felt pretty and I felt good. When Jill was named Best Women’s Designer in New York by a prominent media outlet this year, my heart swelled with joy, not only for her, but for all of the L’s out there who had finally found her at last.

  Although there will never be world peace, I do find much comfort in that there is a place out there where size doesn’t matter, where all that matters is that you’re a girl (and sometimes that doesn’t even matter so much because on one occasion, I was trying on the same dress that a man was, and it may be up for debate, but I will still argue to this day that I looked better in it than he did). Despite the shame of the “plus sizes” hidden away in stockrooms or the XL’s that are only available by special order in other places in the universe, there is one place in the East Village where a size two and a size fourteen accidentally touched butts in a dressing room and war didn’t break out. No one screamed and no one called the Fat HazMat team. They both laughed, the size fourteen was lacerated by the jutting hip bone of the size two, but after a little hydrogen peroxide and a Band-Aid, all was dandy and then the fourteen and the two told each other just how great they looked in their dresses. The cut scabbed over, but I’ll always have that dress.

  In the East Village at Jill’s, we’ll just wait until the rest of the world catches on.

  That’s Not Pudding

  As much as I didn’t want to think about it, I was getting mad.

  Standing in the checkout line at the bargain/closeout store, I was starting to seriously consider if ninety-nine-cent blank videotapes were worth this kind of hassle.

  Let me say right now that when I initially entered the store, it seemed completely empty. There wasn’t a soul around loading five-cent dented cans of fruit, expired dog food, or flammable toys that doubled as choking hazards in their shopping carts.

  However, as soon as I grabbed the videotapes and headed for the cashier, I saw the beginnings of Swarm the Cashier Syndrome. The minute I approach the cash registers, people start to bum-rush the checkout lanes. It’s almost as if the customers were bees and once they caught the scent of panic in the air, the fear that someone might get in line ahead of them, every single customer—even those who don’t have anything in their baskets yet—will converge on the checkout lanes like pimps on a bus station.

  It was instant bed
lam, and though I risked being bowled over by a stroller pushed by a teen mom wearing a tank top that said in glitter letters, YOUR BOYFRIEND THINKS I’M HOT, I ducked into a line in behind a blond lady.

  I started feeling lucky that I had secured the second-in-line position until I looked ahead of me and saw the bounty that nested inside the blond lady’s cart. Then again, I should have known.

  When faced with the choice of lingering behind A) a lady who has enough stuff in her cart to identify her as either a Mormon, a Catholic, or a concession-stand owner, or B) a guy holding a six-pack, I’ll make the obvious choice. Without a doubt, I’ll still be standing there ten minutes later as the mother of twelve is loading her bagged groceries into her SUV and the guy with the six-pack is being wrestled to the floor and cuffed by store security.

  Getting behind the blond lady was a colossal mistake. As I peered into her cart, I realized I hadn’t seen that much crap since my work-related bridal shower, when everyone who came hated me and really only stayed for the cake. In that cart, there were a bunch of green candles shaped like a clover leaf, generic batteries, a bunch of pencils with little cats on them, and what looked like a breast pump. But the cashier hadn’t even gotten to any of that crap yet. Instead, she was busy waiting for a price check on an ugly comforter that was also in the crap lady’s cart.

  To find a price, the cashier took the comforter from its plastic bag and held one side of it over her head, and as it unfolded, a round of disgusted gasps escaped from everyone in line.

  There, on the stretched-out comforter, for everyone to see, was a massive poop stain the size of my arm that looked remarkably like the shape of Italy.

  “Ewwwww!” I heard myself say. “That’s not pudding.”

  Just then, another cashier announced that her line was open. Before I could even take a step, a lady four places behind me scurried over and threw her hoard of crap—including countless packages of fake nails, a rusted tube of Vagisil, and several mousetraps—on the counter. She had cut! I glared at the cutter lady as I walked over and stood behind her. The cashier rang up the nails and the traps and then looked for a price tag on a thermos set.