“It’s fine,” she assured me quickly. “Let’s just get to the climax stuff so we can go to bed.”
“Great idea,” I answered, totally unconvincing to even myself.
“Have you ever been eaten out?” she asked, her breath hitching in her throat.
“I have, listen, is that the plan here, because I’ve been riding horses all day and—”
“Good point,” she interrupted. “Let’s go freshen up with the hose outside.” She grabbed my hand and dragged me pantsless down the platform steps to the rusty faucet outside our tent. Taking turns, we washed our bodies with the freezing water and between blacked-out moments of drunken confusion, I found myself positioned between her naked open legs on the floor of our tent. I lay on my stomach, propping myself up with my elbows. This was an important life moment. This was no longer going to be, Oh sure, I’ve kissed girls in bars because I’m flirty and adorable; this was going to be, Oh yeah, I had my mouth on an actual vagina. I leaned forward, holding my breath.
“Yeah, I can’t do this.” I exhaled. “It looks funny.”
“Wait, funny like something’s wrong?” Sprinkle sat up alarmed.
“No!” I assured her. “I just never saw it from this angle before, and I can’t touch it with my mouth. I mean, I barely eat scallops without gagging, and this definitely looks like it has the same feeling as a scallop.”
“My vagina looks like a scallop?” she asked sadly.
“It’s a texture thing. I probably have a scallop vagina, too,” I assured her. “I’m sorry, I’m a terrible lesbian.”
“It’s fine.” She sighed. “I’m going to go see if Scooter and Tank are done jerking each other off in the boys’ restroom. Maybe one of them can play it straight for a couple of minutes.”
Failing at female oral sex was yet another freeing realization I had that summer. Unlike the real world, where my failures left me weak and powerless on the floor of a filthy apartment, the fumbles and missteps I made at camp opened me up to amazing opportunities. As long as no kids died and my bunkmate still talked to me the morning after I called her vagina a mollusk, I was fine. Incidentally, Sprinkle and I remain friends to this day, and I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. I assume her husband is way better at oral sex than I was. The point of this all is that it taught me that when I fucked up, I could get back up and I could either try again or face the consequences, which were completely manageable. I left at the end of the summer with photos I can never show my children and a backpack full of camp lessons that have gone on to be surprisingly applicable to this very day:
1 Bug Juice has zero nutritional value and makes for a horrible mixer for alcohol.
2 You are never too old for friendship bracelets.
3 If you sleep in your bathing suit, you will get a yeast infection.
4 Your pee is way less hot and gross than other people’s pee, especially when it’s on the bedding you’re stripping from the bunk of a sobbing seven-year-old.
5 Camp gay is like prison gay. What happens in the woods stays in the woods.
6 Counselors are the craziest and biggest drunks you will ever meet in your whole entire life.
7 I am never ever sending my kids to camp.
A week after camp ended, I returned to Tom’s office for my weekly therapy appointment with tan skin and callouses on my hands, carrying a poster board with pictures of wedding dresses and Ron Weasley.
“Welcome back.” Tom smiled, leaning back into his leather chair and stroking the goatee he’d grown in my absence. “Now, tell me about the pictures.”
9
GOING TO THE CHAPEL
ANDY ASKED ME to marry him on a freezing November night, in a crumbling stone chapel filled with candles, in the middle of a goddamn cemetery. No YouTube videos or flash mobs, just me, him, a groundskeeper named Gary, and a bunch of corpses. That’s just how every little girl envisions it, right? I obviously said yes, because I’ve seen how the “Thriller” video ends, I’m not a fast runner, and being chased by the undead wouldn’t pan out well for me.
“I can’t believe you asked me to marry you in a cemetery,” I said as his shaky hands slipped the beautiful pavé diamond ring on my finger.
“You said it was beautiful here.” He looked up confused.
“It is beautiful here,” I assured him. “On a Tuesday afternoon, when I’m bringing flowers to my grandma’s grave and other people with pulses are here.”
I can think of no greater reflection of our relationship than being proposed to in a cemetery. It’s weird, off-putting, defies logic, and gets funnier every time we retell the story. I had been waiting for that moment for eight years. We’d survived high school, college, some mental breakdowns, and a bout of lesbianism of which Andy asks me to recount with the same magical glint in his eye as children gathering around to hear “The Night Before Christmas.”
What I didn’t expect was that the moment in the cemetery when he slipped that ring on my finger was the moment the wedding process would peak.
THE ENGAGEMENT
Point blank, I did not want a large wedding. My parents couldn’t afford it and I’d parlayed my limited event-planning experience from college into working as the wedding coordinator at the Toledo Country Club. This job gave me a front-row seat to absolutely every horrible aspect of weddings . . . the largest being the bride. In my opinion, brides are horrible, horrible people. They are erratic, indecisive, and will come down on you with the wrath of God should you cross them. And they don’t mean it; outside of getting married, brides are typically normal and even enjoyable humans to be around. It’s just that something inside them takes over and they turn into domestic terrorists.
I once watched a Discovery documentary about these ants in South Carolina that ate a fungus that essentially killed them and then went on to control their dead bodies like reanimated zombies. I find that to be a similar process to brides planning their weddings, and I wanted to avoid that. My plan was to elope in Vegas with some close friends and a corny Elvis.
Andy wanted a large wedding, or at least he claimed his parents did. I don’t know that they wanted a large wedding so much as no wedding. After he proposed in the cemetery, Andy and I had dinner in a dimly lit Lebanese restaurant in South Toledo called Byblos. It was an old-school sort of place that was almost always empty save for quiet couples sitting on the same side of a four-person booth or expensively dressed mobsters passing envelopes of money beneath white silk napkins. They also have the best lamb in town.
Andy sat across from me at a small round table dressed with billowing white silk linens, squeezed my newly baubled hand, smiled, and then quietly asked me to not tell anyone we were engaged.
“Why wouldn’t I tell anyone?” I asked, confused.
“Isn’t it more fun when it’s a secret only you and I know?” he pushed.
“No, it feels like you’re embarrassed or afraid to tell people you asked me to marry you,” I countered. The magic of our evening dimmed slightly as I considered his request and its contribution to my already prominent insecurities. This was a happy moment for me, and I wanted people to be excited for and with us. That is what weddings were, public declarations of love. If it was a secret, people would get married in their homes on a Tuesday through the mail with the same pomp and circumstance as absentee voting.
“Let’s just enjoy the weekend, okay?” he pleaded. “We can tell people next week, but right now, it’s just ours.”
I conceded to secrecy for the weekend, but that Monday we sat in his parents’ kitchen, our arms resting on the shiny white marble as his mother leaned against the counter flipping through the Sunday paper.
“We have news,” Andy started by saying. His voice was weaker than normal.
His mom looked up and smiled, thoughtlessly flipping the pages as if she were still reading.
“I proposed and we’re getting married,” he announced with the same enthusiasm he’d showed that morning when he asked me to smell the milk to see if it was sti
ll good.
“Are you serious?” she asked, her eyes darting side to side between us before finally tearing up. They weren’t happy tears, as evidenced by the way she shook her head no and clawed at her neck as if someone had struck her with a poisonous dart and she wasn’t sure from which direction it had come.
“We’re really excited,” I said assertively, holding my hand with the ring up and waving my fingers, hoping to match the happiness that moments like these have on mall jewelry store commercials.
An eerie smile spread across his mother’s face as she nodded politely and backed out of the room, leaving us once again alone. Andy looked at me and smiled weakly. He had known all along that this would happen, and perhaps I did, too. Yes, I wanted to tell his parents we were engaged because it’s exciting and magical, but part of me also wanted them to have absolutely no choice but to accept me, legally.
The summer after our senior year of high school, Andy’s mother took him and me on a weekend vacation to Virginia Beach, and as I was changing in the hotel room she walked in and saw the large monarch butterfly I’d had tattooed on my left hip. I had gotten that tattoo on my fifteenth birthday from a friend’s dad without my parent’s permission. Up until that moment, I had successfully hidden it from both of our parents. She frowned, inquired if it was real, and then walked out. I’d felt so ashamed and embarrassed that when I got home, I showed my parents the poorly drawn tattoo and begged them to help me pay to get it removed.
That December, while most college freshmen were at home enjoying their first school break, the plastic surgeon who’d handled many of my great-uncle Frank’s facelifts was carefully cutting the tattoo from my stomach and stitching the large butterfly-shaped hole back together. I told everyone back at campus my dad made me remove it, and they nodded their heads in agreement: “Fathers are the worst.” But the reality was, I’d done it for Andy’s mother. I never wanted her to look at me that way again.
My mom had a saying: “Never date a man who drives a van.” Also, that you don’t marry a person, you marry his whole family. Andy had long since been accepted into mine, present at every family holiday gathering and smiling in every family photo. I sat on the stool in his parents’ kitchen and put my hand on the scar on my left hip. If going under the knife wasn’t enough to win her heart, maybe a family wedding would. We were having a big wedding.
JUST SAY YES TO EVERYTHING I SAY, OKAY?
Planning a wedding should be easy. I mean, I did it for a living; weddings were my jam. Right off the bat, I made a few nonnegotiable demands. I wanted to get married in the winter, in a church, and I wanted to look like Grace Kelly. I mean, if we were going to do this, we were going to do it big.
All of this would have been infinitely easier and cheaper had I not foolishly joined an online wedding forum of brides-to-be, you know, to get tips. The plan was to keep things simple and affordable since we were paying for this ourselves. I wasn’t going to fall into the pricey trap I’ve seen so many brides in my office tumble down, demanding monogrammed chair covers and color-specific candy buffets. No, no, no, that wasn’t us at all.
But one evening Andy walked into the bedroom to find me pacing the floor, holding my laptop, piles of bridal magazines at my feet.
“Did you know that the napkin fold you have at your wedding is a direct reflection of your life together as a couple?” I asked, my right eye twitching slightly.
“Okay?” he agreed nervously.
“So what fold are we?” I pressed. “Are we a pyramid fold or a French fold? And don’t say a fanfold because everyone agrees fanfolds end in divorce.”
It was like some sort of mob mentality had taken over. I was no longer making decisions on my own; I was posting them to the forum to be voted up or down by legions of anonymous women who shared my distaste for Jordan almonds and cash bars.
“Babe, do you want to start looking at DJs?” Andy asked over dinner.
“The girls and I agree that DJs are for bat mitzvahs and raves; we should really be interviewing bands,” I answered matter-of-factly.
When it came time to book the ceremony location, a whole new persona had taken over: I was suddenly the most religious person in the world. I hadn’t actually set foot in a church in years, yet the moment the white gold encircled my ring finger, it was like I was the pope.
We met with the priest of my home parish in his small residence next to the church. He was tall, dressed in simple jeans and a white button-down shirt, and resembled an old Andy Griffith. We discussed our goals for the wedding and talked a bit about our relationship. He offered us glasses of whiskey and spent an hour explaining the importance of a strong Catholic foundation for marriage. By the second glass he began to repeat himself, and I was growing impatient.
“If I give you a list of facts about our lives, will you pretend to know us, make inside jokes during the ceremony, and act like we’re really good friends, like on The Sopranos or something?” I asked.
“That’s an odd request.” He suddenly sobered and squinted at me in confusion.
“I’ll make an additional donation?” I offered.
“Well, amen.” He conceded.
I don’t know who I was trying to impress, since I’ve never looked at someone who was on a first-name basis with their priest and thought, Man, how cool is that motherfucker right there? But I needed this experience to happen. I had no idea who I was anymore.
THE DRESS
If you are over a size 10, wedding dress shopping can be a really awful experience. Never mind that formal wear in general has a standard of sizing equivalent to a small Asian girl; the sample dresses kept by most bridal salons do not go above a size 8.
I had asked Andy’s mother to join us as we shopped for dresses. Because she only has two boys, I assumed this was a special experience she’d otherwise miss out on. I immediately regretted this decision when I came out of the fitting room in a gown attached to my size-18 body with a series of industrial-strength chip clips.
“The front is pretty,” she said, touching her fingertips to her chin in thought. “It’s just hard to tell what the back will look like since it won’t close.”
My mom smiled at me warmly as she and the fitting room attendant pulled at the back of the white satin dress.
“You can order this dress in any size,” the attendant assured me, winking.
I tried on three more dresses, one of them so slim I was unable to put it on, and instead came out of the dressing room with it attached to the front of my body with a giant human hair tie, before finally falling in love with a strapless champagne-colored lace ball gown with a small satin bow around the waist. It looked as if it had fallen out of an old movie, and I cried when I saw my reflection standing up on that carpeted pedestal. The attendant smiled in agreement and began jotting down my measurements on her clipboard, and I twirled around as the fabric swung around me, picturing myself wearing it on the big day, or absolutely any other scenario that had me sashaying around in a dress that zipped, and not one spread open in the back displaying my flimsy strapless bra and mounds of back fat. It would take ten to twelve weeks for that experience, but the thin brides got to have it right away.
THE INVITATIONS
Despite my intense micromanaging of the event so far, I actually had very few concerns about what the wedding invitations looked like. I tried to care, I even looked at a few catalogs, but as long as they were cute, went out on time, and were not whatever size the U.S. Postal Service charges a hundred dollars each to mail, I was cool with them. What pissed me off about the invitations was that I had to buy them . . . twice.
It snowed early that year. We usually don’t see snow in Ohio until right around Christmas, but that year it came a whole month ahead of schedule and I was absolutely giddy about it. I am a cold-weather girl, and prefer jeans and sweaters to sticky skin and shorts.
I curled up at the dining room table with a cup of tea and a Dean Martin Christmas CD in the player and began to address the mountain of
wedding invitations. I had taken an introductory calligraphy class at my library, and my handwriting sat somewhere between bubbly high school girl and Shakespeare.
Andy was out at a friend’s bachelor party for the evening, so the knock at the door before 10 P.M. startled me. I opened the front door of the split-level home we were renting in town to find Andy laughing and tipsy against his friend Mark.
“What happened?” I asked, helping Andy through the door and up the steps to our living room.
“Your boy can’t hold his liquor,” Mark said with a laugh. He was right; Andy rarely drank. I selfishly enjoyed that aspect of him since it meant I’d always have a designated driver.
Mark helped me get Andy situated on the couch and pulled off his shoes before heading back out to the party.
“Can I bring you anything?” I asked Andy. He looked uncharacteristically pitiful.
“C’mere,” he slurred. “I hafta tell you something.”
“Baby, I’m trying to get these invitations addressed and in the mail by morning.”
“No, really. C’mere.” He looked suddenly serious, sitting up and putting his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong?” I sat down beside him and put my hand against his back. I could feel his breath speed up a little and soon realized he was crying. “Andy, you’re scaring me, what happened?”
He looked at me suddenly, his eyes red and teary. “I kissed someone.”
I’m not sure what I had expected to hear. Maybe that he’d lost too much money gambling at the casino where they’d eaten dinner or that they’d hit someone with their car on the way home and didn’t call the police. I literally expected any form of murder before I expected to hear that he’d kissed someone else.
“I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, searching my face for reaction.
I closed my eyes, bile churning in my stomach. I didn’t want to scream or cry, I wanted to throw up. I breathed in deeper as the nausea worsened.
Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It Page 10