Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It

by Brittany Gibbons

  SEPTEMBER 6, 2003

  I can’t decide if my neighbor Greg is a rapist or legitimately a nice guy. I always see him outside walking his black miniature schnauzer, and today he asked me while I was letting Lucy run in the dog park next to our shared carport if I had broken up with my boyfriend. I told him no, that he’d just moved out, and then quickly realized that was not the sort of information you give to potential rapists. He offered to knock on my door each night when he was taking his dog, Bitters, out for the last time, in case I wanted to join him so I wouldn’t be alone out in the dark. I said sure, because I honestly hate standing outside a dark apartment complex by myself, but I’m totally going to need to fashion a weapon to have on me just in case. Maybe I’ll hide a knife in a tampon applicator, or put acetone nail polish remover in a squirt bottle like Mace? I’m still working on it. . .

  Greg was not a rapist; in fact, he was perfectly lovely. Every night for a month he’d knock on my door around 8 P.M. and I’d grab Lucy and a small plastic baggie, and we’d head out for one final potty hurrah. We talked about funny television shows or how annoying the laundry room was, and he never seemed to mention the gradual change in my appearance. The way I’d meet him on the lawn wearing a dirty nightgown and Ugg boots, or when my hair had gone unwashed for five or six days. Walking Lucy outside with Greg was quickly becoming the only interaction I was having with the outside world. Everywhere else was just so loud and crowded with noise and people looking at you. Little by little, my ability to handle social situations began to shut off. Nowhere felt comfortable. I wasn’t going to school, I had no job, I barely showered, and then one day, when Greg knocked on my door at eight, I stopped answering.

  OCTOBER 4, 2003

  I’ve decided to stop going to the grocery store. I had a scary experience while loading my groceries the other day when a man sitting in the van next to me opened his door to stare at me the whole time. So, I’ve talked Mrs. Cho from Panda Inn into letting me order a meal over the phone and her son will walk it out to the curb where Lucy and I are parked so I don’t have to get out of the car. Plus she’ll throw extra napkins in the bag so I don’t need to even buy toilet paper. This is my most brilliant idea ever.

  Due to my one meal of Chinese takeout a day, I was becoming vitamin deficient, my nails were breaking, I had bruises all over my legs, and I’d lost a dramatic amount of weight. I was showering only sporadically. I’ve watched enough Law & Order to know that leaving yourself vulnerable in a shower is no bueno. I also no longer felt safe taking Lucy outside to go to the bathroom, and spent a good portion of my day holding her over the toilet in the hopes she’d eventually just go there instead. When that failed, I hooked on her leash and led her to a black garbage bag I’d spread out on the carpet next to the front door where she’d peer up at me confused before finally giving up and shitting on the plastic. I know it seems like if you were to spend your whole entire day locked in your apartment with piles of dog shit, the days would just drag. But that wasn’t the case at all. There were barely enough hours in the day for me to get through all my paranoid anxieties.

  It was a few days after that when Andy and my parents showed up, courtesy of a call from my unpaid landlord, Rich, and Jemma, my concerned academic counselor, who informed them she had been unable to reach me and I had failed out of every class I had been taking that quarter. They pretended not to be horrified at the state of the once grown-up and fancy apartment now inhabited by a greasy-haired Gollum and her defecating dog. Instead Andy and my father worked quickly to pack up my belongings, and my mom bustled around the apartment with a bucket of cleaners, smiling each time she passed me sitting in shock on the couch, never hinting that I was living in squalor and that she was probably dry-heaving every time she was out of my line of vision.

  In a matter of hours, the trailer behind my dad’s truck had been packed with furniture, computers, and bags of clothing, and I lay against Andy in the backseat as we pulled out of the parking lot.

  “Thank you for helping me stand,” I whispered as he wrapped me tightly in my grandmother’s mangy rabbit fur coat, and with faint applause echoing in my brain, I weakly raised my middle finger to the failed attempt at adult life and the college degree I never earned.

  8

  GIRL ON GIRL INTERRUPTED

  SOMETIMES, WHEN YOU have a mental breakdown in college and people are afraid to leave forks and knives around you, it takes a total environmental shift to realign your brain. At least that is what Tom my therapist told me.

  I only see male therapists with mustaches. There is probably some underlying daddy issue here, but I can’t be sure since I’m not a doctor. Finding shrinks with facial hair was an easier feat in the very early nineties when there was still a yuppie-mustache carryover, but by 1999, everything had gone full soul patch. This limited my choices to either very old men or hipsters. My current therapist, Tom, has a handlebar mustache and brews his own beer at home.

  The first thing I did when I returned home from school was visit Tom. Tom’s office was in a strip mall across from a Taco Bell, which actually worked out pretty perfectly for me, because I do my best emotionally overwhelmed eating in Taco Bell parking lots. There were no windows in Tom’s office and the walls were a deep burgundy and decorated with old-timey framed photos of men playing football in leather helmets and riding on tall bicycles with one giant wheel and one tiny wheel. Tom sat on a brown leather chair and offered me the long green and navy plaid couch across from him. Instinctively, I wanted to lie down, but I always looked awkward coming out of that position, like a turtle that had been flipped on its back, so I just sat quietly, protectively pulling the decorative pillows onto my lap, as fat girls are wont to do.

  Once it was determined that I was in no way suicidal, which I wasn’t—in fact the majority of my day was consumed with the conscious effort of not dying—Tom decided to focus our Tuesday and Thursday sessions on getting me on a workable medication and functioning again in adult society. He gave me menial assignments like making vision boards or writing down my immediate daily goals in journals. Normally, I would roll my eyes at either of those tasks, since I’ve never been much of a bucket-list maker or goal setter, but I had free time on my hands and was watching a lot of Starting Over, a television show about women looking to start their lives over with the help of inspirational life coaches and smoothies made of Oprah’s bone marrow.

  I was also once again living with my parents, though my mother had turned my old room into a temperature-controlled cockatiel breeding room, so my “bedroom” was now a windowless section of the garage that I shared with my pug, Lucy, who was only finally acknowledging me again after the whole we live among our poop thing.

  Much to my surprise, once I got home from college and showered a few times, I woke up the next morning to find Andy lying on my bed beside me. We had a lot of things to work on: me forgiving him for abandoning me in Columbus to live like Edith Beale in Grey Gardens, and him getting comfortable again with me being me and not some crazy person who smelled like human waste. Neither of us was there yet, but almost.

  I showed up at Tom’s office Thursday holding a giant poster board with four small pictures cut out of magazines taped to it: a horse from a cigarette ad, a stack of IHOP pancakes, an old lady from a life insurance company, and a cartoon Harry Potter.

  “Your vision board only has four things on it, and one of those things is Harry Potter?” he asked, furrowing his brows.

  “Honestly, it’s unrealistic for me to take on more than four things right now, Tom,” I answered.

  “Fair enough.” He smiled, leaning back in his seat. “All right, tell me about the pictures.”

  “Well, obviously,” I said, pointing at the first picture, “this is a horse. I used to like riding them, and I’d like to do that again, and also own some.”

  “All right, sounds therapeutic.” He nodded.

  “These are pancakes. They are my favorite food, and I’d like an endless supply of them.”r />
  “Right but . . .” He began to interject, but I was on a roll.

  “And finally, this old lady represents my grandmother who died. I’d like to find a scientist who could bring her back or reanimate her, I haven’t decided which way to go on this, but, you know, whatever they did to Shelley Long in Hello Again,” I explained. “Oh and I’d also like to find the real Hogwarts and go there.”

  “This is a vision board,” he explained, leaning forward. “It’s supposed to be goals you want to achieve, not wishes you’d ask a genie for.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that why you are wearing that brown robe? Is it like a Harry Potter thing?” he asked.

  “Yeah, well, my mom always told me to dress for the job you want. I guess I misunderstood this exercise,” I replied, closing the robe around my body and leaning back into the couch.

  “You know what? It’s fine.” He smiled warmly. “Forget the vision board, let’s talk about what you see yourself doing in the next month or so. That way we can start giving you the tools to make some changes. Nothing big; we don’t want to get overwhelmed with details and anxiety.”

  “Honestly,” I said, exhaling, “I’d like to not live with my parents anymore, but I’m a college dropout with no job or money and everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

  Again it’s worth noting here that I was legally an adult and hoping to legitimately find Hogwarts.

  Months with Tom, and a consistent medication schedule, yielded many positive steps forward. It was decided I wouldn’t go back to school, not only for my own safety, but because I really didn’t want to graduate from college; everyone was just going to have to learn to accept that about me. (Also, if someone could please explain that to the collections lady for my student loans, that’d be great.) We worked on techniques to get my panic attacks under control, and Tom listened to each of my irrational fears with a calm demeanor and an accepting nod.

  My time in Columbus was the perfect storm of mental events. I had gone from being a child caretaker of my parents to putting my self-reliance on cruise control with Andy, who was awesome at managing my security and life decisions. When Andy left and that was suddenly gone, I panicked and was unable to refocus and take care of myself. None of it was healthy, but all of it was fixable. I just needed to learn how to be a grown-up.

  I could watch the change of seasons unfold by the change of Tom’s mustache, and by spring, when his handlebar had morphed into a more generic Borat, I told Tom that I’d applied to work at an all-girls summer camp based on my love of the movies Meatballs and Wet Hot American Summer. I then asked him if it was okay to make all my future life decisions based on movies I enjoyed. I honestly don’t remember his answer. Something like, “I like Paul Rudd. Is nice.”

  CAMP LESBIAN

  I got a job working at an all-girls summer camp located in northwest Ohio, along the Maumee River. During the summer it functioned as a sleepaway camp and in the off season could be rented out by school groups. Having spent many summers there myself as a kid, being back at camp as an adult was a surreal experience. Tom also felt this was a great way for me to practice being a human in society again within a controlled environment; plus it meant I was no longer living with my parents. I had responsibilities, coworkers, social interaction, and duties that required problem-solving, but no Internet or germ-free shower facilities. Camp functioned as a rudimentary microsociety within a society, with its own schedules and dramas unrelated to anything going on in the outside world. It was like being on Survivor but with running water and decent food.

  At orientation, I sat on a wooden log next to a twenty-something girl with shoulder-length curly hair and knee-high compression socks, the same socks you’d see on elderly women seated in pharmacies waiting for their prescriptions. Of the maybe forty of us counselors, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-eight, only four were boys, and three of them were gay. We were dressed the same in long khaki shorts, tennis shoes and deep purple uniform shirts with “Camp” embossed across the front. It was the nicest and cleanest any of us would look all summer. As we sat around the unlit campfire that afternoon, a series of directors and executive staff welcomed us to camp, stressed our roles as mentors to the incoming kids, and went over various camp lifesaving scenarios; choking, drowning, sunburn, EpiPens, bears, tornados. Two things they didn’t prepare us for? Raging UTIs and what to do when you find your tween campers in a tent huffing bug spray.

  We then filled out legal releases and emergency medical forms, and picked a camp nickname the campers would use when addressing us. I am not 100 percent sure why this was a thing, but it’s either to make the whole experience that much more magical for the kids, or to dehumanize us to the point that the camp director didn’t feel bad asking us to scrub human shit from the beds and nightgowns of crying girls. We were also able to select our top program choices. My camp name was Blue (like the old guy from Old School, duh) and I wanted to work with the six-to-eight-year-olds because small children are adorable and teenagers frighten me. I was so excited; I was in the woods being paid to play with children all day. How did I ever get so lucky?

  One week into camp, I sat across the table in the dining hall at lunch, beads of sweat rolling down my neck and onto the butt-shaped cleavage created by my sports bra, and watched a seven-year-old girl drink a soup bowl of ranch dressing the way you finish off the last of your milk in cereal. Turns out, I am not built for working with small kids after all. Between the homesickness and the bedwetting and the shoe tying and the fact kids are sometimes the most disgusting humans on earth, my ovaries separated themselves and fell out of my vagina. A week later I was transferred to the horse barn.

  The days at the barn were long, smelly, and excruciatingly hot, but they were quiet and drama-free, which I loved. It was also an excuse to get out of the standard counselor uniform of shorts and a loose T-shirt, as the barn required long pants and boots. It was miserable in the afternoon sun, but as any girl with a decent amount of thigh rub can attest, jeans in the summer was a welcome break from picking ridden-up shorts out of your crotch.

  I cleaned stalls, organized tack, fed, groomed, and spent hours shoving spazzy girls on and off western saddles. I related to the fifteen horses in our care. They were brought into camps for small children because they were old, tired, and had generally stopped giving a fuck. I felt the same way most days. I worked side by side with another counselor named Sprinkle, who shared an equal amount of disdain for loud children and as an act of protest to the war in Iraq, refused to say the pledge of allegiance during the flag raising each morning. She was easily one of my favorite people at camp. Second only to Mary, the cook in the kitchen who gave me extra tater tots.

  Sprinkle was tiny, maybe five feet tall, with long black hair, freckles, and a uniform of skinny jeans and tall yellow mud boots. We were roommates in a platform tent, and at night we’d lie in bed and share stories about our lives and the boyfriends we were missing. Her boyfriend Jakob was studying photography and was making a coffee-table book out of photos taken in filthy gas station bathrooms. Andy and I were keeping our recovering relationship open and relaxed while I was at camp and he was finishing up his degree in computer engineering.

  What the weeklong sessions lacked in mental stimulation, the weekends made up for in absolute depravity. By the time the last camper had been loaded into their parents’ minivan to head home Friday afternoon, my fellow counselors and I were already two beer bongs in. In my entire life, I had never witnessed such drunken degeneracy, and we were in charge of your children. Cases of beer and bags of pot, we stumbled around intoxicated like every weekend was Fleet Week. After hours of doing shots, playing beer pong, and singing off-tune Oasis songs around the fire, we’d stumble back to our tents to rest before doing it all again the next day. I was living the carefree young adult life I missed out on in high school because nobody liked me and in college when I passed on parties to see foreign films with my boyfriend. I was sewing my fat-girl oats. It was bliss.
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  “Hey,” Sprinkle whispered.

  “Hey,” I whispered back, my eyes heavy with exhaustion and cheap beer.

  “If I don’t have sex soon my vagina is going to fall off.”

  “I know, right?” I answered. “I leaned into a canter today for twenty solid minutes.”

  “We should just have sex with each other and get it over with,” she sighed.

  “Absolutely,” I said with a laugh, falling back into my sleeping bag.

  She climbed out of bed and padded over to my cot; leaning over my face she lightly kissed me on the lips. She smelled like alcohol and vanilla shampoo and it was intoxicating. She kissed me again slower and slipped her tongue into my mouth.

  I pulled my head back confused. “It’s just that, I’ve never been a lesbian before outside of watching The L Word?”

  “My sister is a gay,” Sprinkle explained. “She said it was way easier than sex with guys. We already know how all the parts work.”

  I sat up in my cot and slowly removed my shirt, revealing the double sports bras I’d been wearing so my boobs didn’t bounce so much during trail rides. We both stood up to take off our jeans and looked each other over. Unlike with boys, I wasn’t self-conscious or ashamed of my body in front of Sprinkle. Camp wasn’t full of supermodels or celebrities; it was full of nature lovers and social rejects, all desperate to escape the real world for a while. Sprinkle was athletic with a short torso and abs. I was tall with a roll of belly fat sitting above my underwear. To the outsider, we might look ridiculous, but between the beer and the mutual level of unshaved leg and armpit hair, we called it a draw.

  I reached my hand out to touch her breasts, but it was as if I had transformed into a thirteen-year-old boy fumbling around boobies with the romance of a breast self-exam.

  “I’m sorry,” I explained. “I don’t know what to do with my hands.”