As we were doing K-treads to the lively medley of Patti LaBelle’s greatest up-tempo hits, a lady waddled in, and I caught some weird looks being exchanged among the other women. She had a house towel, too, so I just assumed these elitist snobs were giving her a hard time for it; I made a mental note to later ask someone in better shape than I am where to procure appropriate beach accessories. The new lady didn’t say anything, just slid on her floaties and asked one of the too-hot-to-be-working-this-shift lifeguards to help lower her into the pool next to where I was sweating with the other oldies. One of the Bitter Bettys in front of me (I think they were all named Martha or Lucille or Janice) turned to sneer before rejoining the group in their uniform leg kicking. I couldn’t stop looking back and forth between them; it was the real-life sequel to Mean Girls.
During the otter roll (please kill me) there was more vicious whispering aimed in our general direction, which I almost didn’t notice because I was having a bitch of a time struggling to keep my breasts secured inside my top. All of that “gentle, low-impact movement” was doing a really efficient job of gently removing my tits from where I’d strapped them down, and shoving one back in once it has escaped is the worst. That class was hard as hell. Next time you’re at the pool, no more snickering behind your hands when you see lumps of curdled cottage cheese bicep-curling water weights and bunny-kicking in the shallow end. I have a newfound respect for active seniors. After that brutality all I wanted was to go to the day care room and find my sleeping cot and take a nap.
In the locker room after class, a bottle of amlodipine I’d dropped rolled over to where the outcast was changing back into her pleated pants. She picked it up, and when she returned it to me, I couldn’t help but ask why the other women hated her so much. Turns out they all live in the same assisted-living facility, and Outcast had recently taken up with one of the few eligible bachelors who could still eat solid foods and drive a car at dusk. The other women didn’t like her, and they liked her even less when they found out that old Levitra was sticking his mothballs in her. I sat on the bench wrapped in my house towel, mouth agape, through the entire story. When she finished I was like, “You are the coolest,” and started pulling my hoodie on over my bathing suit. Outcast smiled at the compliment and told me she looked forward to getting splashed in the face by my uncoordinated arm movements next time. “And you’re going to get a yeast infection if you wear that bathing suit home. You young girls think you know everything.” I never went back.
Whole Wheat Ricotta Crepes
So I tried Nutrisystem. I’m not even sure where I got the idea, but I went online, gave them all my money, checked off a bunch of delicious-sounding food items, and waited for them to be delivered to my job. Because that’s where I am between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Every day. As soon as the first boxes arrived, I knew I’d made a huge mistake. I try not to be a conspicuous person, because I don’t like talking to people about anything I’m doing, But especially not about something as ridiculous as needing to pay hundreds of dollars for portion-controlled meals. I know there are people who can spend hours talking about diets, and maybe if I were one of them I could actually find one that sticks, but I am too easily embarrassed to get into the minutiae of what I eat, and when and how often, to ever have a conversation about it. That’s why I won’t go into debt trying to see a therapist—I’m so humiliated all the time that it forces me to be dishonest, and what is the point of therapy if you can’t come clean about what your problems are without wanting to pull a hat down over your eyes or jab yourself with a pair of scissors?
I burned with shame as I filled the communal freezer with a month’s worth of tiny meat loaf sandwiches and single-serving desserts, hoping no one would catch me and demand a detailed explanation of my path toward health and wellness. Online, the white cheddar mac and cheese had looked plump and inviting, the tortilla soup spicy and delicious. In real life, the tiny cans and dehydrated cups look like something you’d make for a baby. They were kind of delicious, though? But in a hot-lunch-program kind of way. Like, if you are the kind of person who would never lower yourself to eat a McNugget, you are most certainly not going to be able to handle Nutrisystem. That vacuum-sealed goodness is not for people who insist on doing shit like soaking their own beans and making bread from scratch. Thank God I grew up living that peel-and-eat life.
The drawback was that everything I ate made me have the kind of farts that make you check your underpants for burn holes afterward, the kind of farts that sear your asshole as they exit, the kind of farts that have teeth. Even with the IBD, I’ve managed to jury-rig a pretty predictable poop schedule, but those coconut almond bars and arroz con pollo and bean Bolognese had me cutting people off midsentence to run to the bathroom. I would have to meticulously plan what trains to take to avoid being stuck on one with a meal-replacement bar racing through my lower intestine at max speed. I would fart without even realizing it was happening; I couldn’t walk down the street to get a coffee without people crossing to the other side to avoid the gassy cloud following me around. And when I wasn’t burning calories from breaking a continuous stream of putrid wind, I was sweating on the toilet as three ounces of food karate-chopped its way through my intestinal tract.
After two months I went to see Dr. Jackson for a skin problem and she was like, “Your face looks so slim! Wanna hop on the scale just for fun?”
First of all, no. The words “scale” and “fun” do not go together in my mind, especially since she insists on using the old-timey triple-beam scale where you have to stand, trembling, for the 229 interminable seconds it takes for her to slide the rider back and forth (a little to the left, no back to the right, wait a little bit more left, oh no waaaaaay over to the right) while you pretend you can actually hold your thighs together for as long as it takes for her to come up with “STILL TOO FAT.” But that day I’d lost some weight, and she clapped her hands excitedly while I wondered if maybe my right foot hadn’t been all the way on. She asked what I’d been doing, and I told her I was trying Nutrisystem, but truth be told I didn’t know whether I’d actually lost weight, or if the colonic effect of those protein shakes had just flushed out the seven pounds of undigested food hanging out in my colon. My stomach churned and gurgled, then she listened to it with a stethoscope, her eyebrows raised in alarm. “You might not be the best candidate for a program like this.” She sighed, pointing at my midsection. “It sounds like a soccer match is going on in there.”
“But I still have three weeks’ worth of meals!” I protested, delicately fingering my newly svelte jawline.
“Fine, eat them.” Dr. Jackson tucked her notes in her armpit and shook my hand, as she does after every session, and started for the door. “I’ll e-mail the pharmacy your prescriptions. And maybe you should buy some diapers.”
Cow Pose.
I recently started yoga. And by “started” I mean “I’ve gone to two classes in the last few weeks.” Between my real job and my freelance jobs and the hours I’ve set aside to watch television, I don’t have any time. So finding activities that fit into the narrow window I have not dedicated to making money for someone else is rare. I hated the physical therapy I was doing for my broken foot that never healed, so my podiatrist suggested yoga. Gross, right? The only class I could find that’s (1) cheap, (2) near the train, (3) at a time I could actually make, and (4) not taught by a person I know in real life was for pregnant women. And I signed right up. The flyer at Metropolis coffee shop advertised the class as “incredibly easy, laid-back, no pressure.” I guzzled my scalding coffee—I hadn’t put enough sugar in because a handsome stranger had been standing next to me and I didn’t want him to know I’m a child—and studied the faded pink sheet of paper. I figured it would be my kind of party because the word “easy” was underlined five times with a thick black Sharpie. Who the fuck wrote that? I mean, nothing says “easy” more than “a pregnant lady could do this,” I guess? If I saw a pregnant woman skydiving or bungee jumping
or performing open-heart surgery, I would think smugly, “Hey, I probably could do that.”
I didn’t hesitate or think twice until I walked into the room in my comfiest outside pajamas and found myself surrounded on all sides by gestating bellies and nervous preclass chatter about back pain and morning sickness. Oh, right, these women are actually pregnant. I was so busy thinking about how no one would ask me to touch my toes that I kind of ignored the whole carrying-another-human-being aspect of this physical and spiritual practice. In general, I’ve got enough stomach jibs to pass for early second trimester if anyone decided to really get up close and inspect me, but I decided to keep a low profile and chill in the back, not saying a word. If there’s any place where staying mute with your eyes on the floor is appropriate, a yoga studio has got to be it.
I loved that first class. It was air-conditioned and the yogini used the word “gentle” about eighty times, which is music to my joints. My foot felt good, my self-esteem wasn’t shattered into a million pieces, and everyone appeared to be having as hard a time as I was getting up off the floor. I went back a couple of times, but nobody likes an outsider. Seriously, skinny people want your fat ass out of their clothing stores. Straight people want your gay ass out of their bars. And white people want your black ass out of their presidency. So my empty womb and I were scared to admit that we weren’t packing no embryo. I really liked the teacher and I hope Diana’s baby isn’t breach and I would love to know what names Maureen decides on for the twins, but I don’t want to look like a weirdo with a pregnancy fetish or some other Dateline-type shit. Nor do I want to be the douchebag who couldn’t cut it in regular yoga. (Because, yeah, I couldn’t, and let’s not even talk about that two-hundred-degree sauna yoga, are you kidding me?) But I’m not savvy enough to keep a good lie going. I can’t keep rolling into class and not talking. OR GROWING. Plus, I don’t trust myself. One of these days I’m going to forget where I am and ask one of these girls for an emergency tampon and the whole lot of them will realize what I’ve done and line up to beat the crap out of me.
Living Is a Mistake.
Mavis wanted to host a brunch for me to meet all of her close momfriends. I wasn’t nervous about it, because I’m charming and do well with moms. I couldn’t decide what to wear, because I’m at a time in my life when nothing I put on feels good and even fewer things look good, and the T-shirt and jeans I would like to spend my days wearing aren’t always appropriate. Nor is the hoodie. And, if we’re being honest, the jeans don’t always fit right. Jeans and bras, man: ARE THEY EVER 100 PERCENT COOL? So while homegirl was downstairs baking the quiche and cutting fruit into appetizing shapes, I was trying on and taking off the three hideous shirts I leave in the half a drawer designated as mine. I knew before I even got my clothes on that the day was going to be a toilet. Sometimes you just know.
It’s hard not to feel like an animal on display when someone throws a party for people to meet you, even though I am always 100 percent flattered when someone wants me to stammer awkwardly through an introduction and try to come up with a sincere response to “I’ve heard a lot about you!” that isn’t “Oh my god, am I not satisfying her sexually?!” Women started to arrive, wearing their nicest smiles and loaded down with church doughnuts and breakfast casseroles, and I felt better than I’d expected. My clammy nerves had settled down, I was picking at my breakfast in a convincing way (I hate eating in front of strangers), and I had just begun to relax when I felt a weird hitch in my wobbly chair. Three seconds later, I went CRASHING TO THE FUCKING GROUND, taking a platter of French toast bites with me.
The five stages of Holy Shit I Just Broke a Chair in Front of People:
1. Denial. “I’m not on the floor, you’re on the floor!!”
2. Anger. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BUY CHAIRS AT A RESALE SHOP, BITCH.
3. Bargaining. “Please, God, if you kill everyone in this dining room right now, I promise I will try to recycle all of the SlimFast cans I swear I’m going to start buying.”
4. Depression. “I am fat enough to kill chairs. I don’t deserve oxygen.”
5. Acceptance. “Welp, since I’m already fat, fuck these toast points; let’s get a pizza.”
Turns out Mavis hadn’t put the chair together correctly, but tell that to the bruises spreading like wildfire across my tender ego. I spent the rest of the brunch standing awkwardly in various places in the dining room until enough time had passed to usher everyone out without it seeming chair-related. I took a handful of aspirin and started cleaning up the leftovers, picking at what was left on the trays and serving dishes we’d eventually have to drive around delivering to their rightful owners. The doughnuts tormented me, nestled so sweetly in their box, but, bitch, I just had a chair collapse underneath me so please pass the fucking watermelon balls. We bought new chairs the next goddamned day. METAL ONES.
My friend Anna once got up in this kid’s face during gym class because he kept asking how much I weighed. The truth was that I didn’t actually know, because my mom was too broke and too much of a wreck to take me to the doctor. But what I did know was that it was the very first time I had to change clothes in front of people, and as humiliating as it might have been to try to hide my bulging, discolored body from girls who were at the ideal height and weight for their ages, I also had to ride the shame wave of having a mother who couldn’t pay for both the school-issued shorts and the T-shirt, so the dingy white shirt with a red lion on the front that didn’t get washed enough was paired with Women’s shorts (capital W, to distinguish them from the slender Misses and the dainty Petites) found in the two-dollar bin at ESCCA, the place where your well-off classmates’ parents donated the family’s old clothes. So yes, Rebecca, I actually am wearing your dad’s old sweatshirt today. Anyway, these ESCCA shorts were more of a tomato red (let’s say a Pantone 032) than the official deep red (Pantone 1807) of the Nichols Middle School Lions, and they stood out in stark contrast to the ones my peers were dressed in, whose names were written in permanent marker on the white strip of material on the right thigh that my home shorts noticeably did not have. I don’t know enough about sociopolitical stuff to write intelligently about classism in this country, but purchasing and maintaining a $50 short set required for twenty minutes of halfhearted daily physical activity is a big deal to people who can’t keep a phone on, and it’s thoroughly humiliating for the person singled out at the start of every period for not being “dressed correctly for class.” Would it have killed that leather-faced monster to cut me a break, just once?
I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early. Fat babies are adorable, while fat children are a little less so. Fat teenagers are chided into either end of the eating-disorder spectrum, and fat adults are either admonished for not figuring out how to get new bodies during adolescence or straight up dismissed altogether. I wish that I was an emotionally healthy human without years of accumulated trauma, one who just decided to be a fat caricature of a person perched gleefully atop a mountain of doughnuts, shoving candy bar after candy bar between my teeth while cackling demonically over how much money my eventual care will cost taxpayers or whatever it is comments-section trolls always accuse fat people of doing. And I don’t need sympathy or special consideration because, ultimately, who even cares? You hate me, and I hate me, too. We are on the same team. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe we could all just mind our own fucking business for once, and that when you can actually see a person’s scars, maybe be a pal and don’t pick at them.
Do you think that fat people don’t know? Because we definitely do! We’re repulsive to look at, and undeserving of both love and easily accessible, relatively inexpensive yet well-made clothing. We get it! We have seen the messages in movies and magazines, on the Internet and TV, and we understand. If we wear something formfitting, we’re delusional pigs who have the audacity to think we look attractive, but if we wear shapeless sacks that hide all our offensive, stretched-out flesh, we
’re sloppy dirtbags who need to get our shit together. It’s a lose-lose, unless you lose weight, but good luck keeping it off without reconstructing your entire brain and DNA. I’m sure people get skinny and stay that way, and if they want to invite me over for little cups of green tea and a handful of unsalted pretzels to split between us so they can tell me how they did it, man, I’m down with that. Especially if they know the secret to making a radish feel as good on your tongue as a salty-sweet piece of smoked pork belly that’s all caramelized on the outside but soft and fatty on the— Wait, what was I even talking about?
A couple of years ago, some woman thought I was someone else she’d been beefing with online and tweeted a slew of things that I assume were intended to be hurtful at me, including such darling missives as “You’re a shitty writer and you should die” and “You look like you’re one hot dog away from a heart attack.” I don’t know how you say something like that to a person you’ve never met, a person who has never done anything wrong to you, with the entire Internet watching, but yeah, okay. I probably am. My heart is enlarged and in the early to middle stages of failure because for a long time I couldn’t afford this medicine I was supposed to take. Now that I can, the damage is irreversible so I’m just gonna do what I can until it suddenly stops beating and hope that when it quits on me I am wearing something flattering and not behind the wheel of a car. And when it does happen, despite all these years of trying, despite all these fits and starts, I will still be dead, and maybe you and that faceless Twitter person will think I deserve it. And that’s okay. I am fat and I am mentally ill, and those two things have been intertwined since before I even knew what those words mean. If this is how I’m going to die, then why not just let me. Maybe there is a way to solve those problems, but maybe I’m tired of trying. Maybe I stopped going to swimming because I was afraid of what would happen if, after months of treading water, it still didn’t work. Maybe I quit yoga because I was afraid of what would happen if I lost a ton of weight and that still didn’t fix my insides. I can’t afford therapy, but I can buy a sandwich.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 15