It Was Me All Along

by Andie Mitchell

  “Did I fall asleep?” Nicole asked groggily, startling us and breaking our lip-lock.

  She wiggled herself upright in the La-Z-Boy.

  “Well, shall we?” she said. “Bet it’s, like, four o’clock now.”

  “Sure. Yeah, let’s head out.” I looked to Daniel, and his eyes smiled into mine. My heart beat in my throat. I love you, I thought.

  His stare replied with what he didn’t say aloud. I love you, too. And, really, I have all along.

  All through the next year, our sophomore, we dove in deep. A week before summer break, I sat in my dorm room uploading pictures I’d taken on my camera the Friday before. Each photo was funnier than the last. I smiled looking at each one. My whole college experience until that point had met almost all my hopes going in. The intense and meaningful friendships I’d made, the freedom and independence I gained while living away from home, the complete immersion in an environment that fostered and encouraged learning—all of it had exceeded any expectation I’d ever held about college and growing up. I’d even fallen in love, which I hadn’t dared hope for.

  But one very, very fat piece of me remained unhappy. I could see it in the pictures, even if my grinning face said otherwise. I’d gone up two pants sizes, and I could see the extra rolls that had baked on my sides, the way my belly hung over the waistband of my jeans like the downturn of a frown. I hated to see how much bigger I’d gotten, how inflated my whole body had become. I cringed when I saw the balloon that had become my face. In every photo, I was twice—and sometimes thrice—the size of all my friends. The clothing that I spilled out of was shameful to me. Nicole, Jenny, Sabrina—they looked sexy in tank tops and flouncy, low-cut blouses. Their shirts showed cleavage on purpose, whereas mine tore open trying desperately to contain me.

  I never wore the black silk tank top I had on in that photo again. Not after the last time—the night the photo was taken, when the girls and I had gone to a party at SigEp, our favorite frat house and the only one to serve unlimited “jungle juice.” The whole evening had the makings of a great memory: we ordered a takeout “party-size” pizza from Bruno’s; we spent an hour getting ready together in Sabrina’s room while blasting a killer playlist and sipping mojitos; we laughed and danced until exhausted and sweat soaked on the dance floor of SigEp. But then, about ten minutes after leaving the frat and trying tipsily to make our way home, it all turned sour. We’d decided to take a different route back to the dorm and, in doing so, passed by a row of off-campus houses hosting rowdy parties of their own. Inside the house just ahead on our right, people could be seen in every window, and rap music thundered out of the front door. A group of guys stood out front. Feeling friendly, Nicole called out, “Heeeey!” as we slowed our stride. The guys turned around, and the tallest one stepped forward, immediately returning Nicole’s enthusiasm.

  “What are you girls up to?”

  We stopped there on the sidewalk while Nicole explained in her friendly way that we’d just left SigEp and that we were on our way back to the dorms. It was a gift of hers to create a conversation with anyone, and it seemed her charm had found us a new party to rock. That is, until one of the guys on the lawn shouted to us.

  “Hey you!” His eyes were on me. I smiled and started to toss a hello back his way.

  “No fatties allowed!!”

  It was a swift kick to my stomach.

  Paralyzed, I remained locked there on the sidewalk, unable to act on the urgent desire to run. I looked at the group of guys, three of the four bent over laughing hysterically. In an instant, Nicole unleashed a string of expletives, slaying the guy who’d hurt me. I feared she’d punch him when I saw her inching closer. Jenny and Sabrina hooked arms with me, pulling me forward to keep walking toward our dorm. I latched on to Nicole, so grateful to have her armor in that moment when I had none of my own. I dragged her away with the rest of us. “I’ll be all right” was all I could manage.

  I let my hair fall in my face to hide my tears. Nicole wrapped an arm around me, pulling me into her body so that my head nearly rested on her shoulder as we walked. She tucked the loose strands of my hair behind my ears. I loved my friends for the way they tried to change the subject, for the chatter they maintained during the whole agonizing walk home—a valiant effort to distract me.

  Looking at the pictures of that night, the humiliation came rushing back. And with it, an almost suffocating truth: the bigger I grew, the smaller I felt.

  In classes, no matter how strong my opinions, no matter how innovative my ideas, I now couldn’t bring myself to raise my hand, fearing the attention it could draw. I stayed silent and unassuming in the back of the classroom, in a desk that hardly fit me. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, if I found myself running late to the lecture hall, even by just five minutes, I was compelled to skip the class altogether, knowing that few things were as anxiety-inducing as trying to squeeze through tight rows of fellow students to find the lone open seat.

  I thought that my relationship with Daniel, my first experience of true and pure romantic love, would fulfill me in a new kind of way. I thought that it would solve something, would satisfy some inner craving I’d had for love, and I’d finally start to lose weight. Instead, in growing closer to him, I got fatter. And at first I wondered if it was the security of having found love that kept me fat and made me feel comfortable enough to grow fatter. I questioned if it was the satisfaction of acceptance or the fact that my partner enjoyed overeating as much as I did. We had a similar relationship with food, after all. Every dinner out involved everything from appetizers through desserts. We’d split a large buffalo chicken pizza and an order of onion rings before heading into the darkness of the movie theater, my purse packed with enough chocolate to stock a convenience store. And though we had never discussed it, he seemed to share my desire to eat so extremely.

  With Sabrina, too, I ate.

  On one of the last nights of the semester, before summer break, she and I were driving around Amherst in her Jeep. It was our late-night routine—talking, singing with the windows down, drinking iced coffees with milk and sugar. And now we were in the process of collecting a very ordinary midnight meal. We’d already swung through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through, where I’d ordered a sausage, egg, and cheese on an everything bagel and a vanilla cream-filled doughnut along with my coffee. Sabrina had ordered the same bagel sandwich without the egg. Our next stop was McDonald’s, where I heard Sabrina yell into the little speaker box for “two large fries, please!” as I sat in the passenger seat and debated a McFlurry.

  We drove away, a bevy of paper bags in my lap, and we ate, still singing at the top of our lungs in between bites of fry and bagel. And somehow, in the middle of our conversation or our song or our laughter, all the food was eaten. I looked down to see my last fry, picked it up, brought it to my mouth, and chewed it slower than I had the rest. When I swallowed, I turned to Sabrina. “You know, I don’t think I like McDonald’s fries at all,” I said. She laughed. I laughed. It was an interesting realization, considering the fact that I had ordered those fries upwards of seven hundred thousand times in my life. I ate them regardless. When the next song started to play—a slower melody than the ones before—we got quiet, and I thought about what I’d just told her. About the fry revelation. I wondered how many other foods I ate that I didn’t even like. Then I wondered, however briefly, if my eating was even about liking the food at all.

  What I really enjoyed was the time with Sabrina—bonding over our favorite music, having long and sometimes profound conversations, and growing to know and love her more deeply. Eating recklessly was simply one more thing that brought us together. I liked the ease of eating with her and the fact that she ate similarly, though admittedly less. We looked alike, too, with jet-black hair and olive skin, even though she stood nearly a foot below me. But four feet eleven suited her. And while she was slightly overweight, she was fully Italian in her voluptuous butt and big chest. I only looked fat. I had no pronounced butt, no hips, no
perky chest, just evenly distributed mass.

  In our group of friends, none of us was thin—except for Jenny, and we were able to quarantine her as an anomaly. Jen ate what I imagined a high school guy eats while playing football and running track six days a week. Then she’d take a nap. And yet she was able to wear midriff-baring shirts that exposed a taut, flat stomach.

  Nicole, the second thinnest, was a modest fifteen pounds overweight, which by my standards seemed ideal. She ate as much as she wanted—cheesy breakfast sandwiches and bagels with an inch-thick schmear of cream cheese—and still looked great.

  My three closest girlfriends and I, though we varied in thickness, appeared to eat roughly the same. Our routines aligned in similar patterns. Sleep, eat, class, eat, class, sleep, eat, bathe and beautify, party, eat, sleep. Repeat.

  With them all, it was never strange, never embarrassing, when I called Bruno’s takeout line twice weekly for a ten-inch pizza and a large side of onion rings, or when I tipped the delivery man for a two-person box of boneless fried chicken wings with extra blue cheese. Or even when I ate brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts on the ten-minute walk to the dining commons where we would get breakfast. All of us seemed to eat so massively, so excessively. If I was eating, they were, too—though perhaps not the same foods, in the same quantities. I can hardly remember an instance of feeling bashful when suggesting that we drop by KFC for a light snack of biscuits with butter and honey. In all of my life, the friends I’d kept had always been eaters just like me. We were second-serving-grabbing, lick-your-plate-clean, can-I-get-an-extra-scoop-of-that eaters. We wore our affection for food as a badge of honor, as though eating wildly indicated fearlessness. As though eating big meant living big.

  And though I would have sworn I was on par, I undoubtedly had to have been eating more than anyone for the pounds to pack on me as they did. I look back now and wonder what sort of denial must have obscured my vision.

  When the four of us went shopping at Holyoke Mall after classes let out on Fridays to find cute outfits for the coming weekend, envy was all that fit me. I browsed the racks at Forever 21, tugging at each stretchy top I came across—independent of whether I liked the cut or the style—to see how much the fabric would give, if it would drape over my rolls well once I managed to shimmy it down past my shoulders. It was just like in high school—only my options were really narrowing at this point. In the end, I was relegated to the plus-size section of Old Navy, which was not only more expensive, but frumpier, as well. Nothing that I ever left the mall with was what I’d have chosen if my size hadn’t been a factor.

  A few weeks before I left Amherst for the year, Mom drove from Medfield to take me out to lunch. I hadn’t seen her in three months. She pulled up to the front of my dorm and waited there, at the curb, for me to come out and meet her. I pushed open the double doors and saw her tan Camry, instantly feeling the comfort of that squeaky-braked familiarity. Her face was just as I’d remembered it, un-made-up except for a thick lacquer of plum lipstick. A potent mix of Shower to Shower body powder and Clinique Happy wafted out from her open window to greet me.

  As I reached down to tug on my stretchy camisole, the one that loved nothing but to ride up my sides, our eyes met. I smiled widely before realizing she wasn’t smiling back. Something unfamiliar clouded her eyes, something uncomfortably different than what I’d expected to find in our first reunion. Her lips parted, and her jaw dropped slowly, like a cherry sliding from the summit of a melting ice cream scoop. Just before the cherry dropped completely, she snatched it up, her mouth closing into a thin smile.

  Her gaze was fixed on my belly. I swallowed hard, almost unable to get down the growing knot of self-consciousness. Last time I saw Mom, I wore a size eighteen, and now, a twenty-two. As I moved closer to the car, she smiled purposefully to let me know how happy she was to see me. I smiled, too, but faltered when I noticed her eyes scanning me up and down, pausing as they reached the widest part of my abdomen, just above the tight perimeter of my jeans. I knew as she stared there that she saw what I did when I’d looked at those photos. My body was like a mushroom, with a stem of legs much too small to hold such an overbearing cap. The more I thought about it, the tighter I contracted every muscle, every fiber in my belly. I sucked air and held it, as if being a fraction of an inch slimmer could vindicate me.

  I was stunned by the foreignness of what I saw in Mom’s eyes. She, for the very first time, revealed the shock, the panic she felt about my size. It was the first time she hadn’t been alongside me as I grew, so the change was more blatant. And maybe for much of my life, she’d accepted that I’d always been fat going on fatter, but now—wearing a size I bought secretly so no one would know—I was the fattest. And it scared her.

  Until that day, that moment when I felt like a stranger in her eyes, she had been my sole source of comfort. She was the one who loved me unconditionally, who saw me as beautiful regardless. In the past when she noticed my weight, her worry seemed entirely empathetic, a way of loving me in my struggle. Now, it seemed grave.

  She never said a word about it. Not at lunch, not on the phone later that evening. But I knew. She knew. Seeing her so shocked, so full of despair at how fat I’d gotten, knocked the wind out of me.

  I LEFT SCHOOL THAT MAY praying that this time would be different. That this would be the summer my weight would finally pack its bags and leave for good. That I’d never again see that look in Mom’s eyes. I desperately wanted to feel ready for change, to be empowered and resolved and committed, but mostly I was terribly scared.

  By the time I’d arrived home late on Friday afternoon, I’d already planned to start trying to lose weight on Monday. And just as I’d done in the past, I launched a massive “farewell to fat” binge. That weekend, as I unpacked in my bedroom for the summer, I ate all I loved, taking care to fit in all my favorite foods before I’d start trying to lose weight on Monday. Entire rows of Double Stuf Oreos, twin packs of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls, a Roche Bros. chocolate cake, a ten-inch Meat Lover’s pizza. I ordered a half-dozen Dunkin’ Donuts—two French crullers, a Boston cream, a Bavarian cream, a chocolate glazed, and a coconut—pretending casually and coolly to the cashier that I was bringing the box home to a hungry family of four. I cracked open can upon can of Sprite. I rang the Taco Bell.

  On Monday I walked into the women’s locker room of the YMCA with Kate. I was relieved she’d decided to join me. She took our bags to an open locker while I headed to the corner that housed the scale. Dread settled over me as I stepped on it.

  I never thought the needle would stop winding around that center dial. My eyes had taken to the polish—fuchsia and fiercely proud of it—neatly laquered on my toes. I should repaint those. Some shade of coral, though, this time.

  Standing on the metal platform, so white and sterile, I braced myself. I had no hopeful number in mind, no fingers crossed. And even as a bigger than big girl for two decades, I felt unprepared when the needle slowed near three hundred pounds. Really? No, I mean, let’s just be clear about this. Really?

  I stepped off the scale, waited a beat, then repositioned myself back on, just to be sure of the number.

  Two hundred sixty-eight.

  The metal under my feet dampened. My heart picked up tempo. I breathed in too shallowly to steady me.

  Two hundred plus sixty plus eight.

  I don’t like that number, I thought.

  It wasn’t the two hundred that scared me so; I had seen those numbers before. It was that I sided with three hundred now.

  How did … How could I … When?

  Hang on a sec …

  What?

  I held my breath and wondered if closing my eyes might help to slow a now-spinning room.

  I had known big. In fact, I had only known big. But this number—those three earned digits—was sobering. Seeing it there, black bold on the starkest of white, tangible and true, I wanted to cry.

  Standing there on the scale, I couldn’t ignore it all. Each
pound was real and, worse, inescapable.

  I thought back to the look on Mom’s face when she visited me at school. I remembered the terror in her eyes as she saw my declining health. Now, being confronted with the reality of the scale, I shared her concern. I saw myself with the same scared eyes.

  The whole of me was terrified, a complete and uncondensed definition of overwhelmed.

  I stepped back, lowered myself from that brutally honest scale, and looked to Kate, who stood behind me. I could tell that she hadn’t seen the number, but she’d gauged from my expression that it was bad. Her eyes expressed compassion. There was nothing to say. I managed a halfhearted smile, and in an earnest attempt at perky, I asked her, “Well? Shall we?”

  We walked from the locker room to the main floor of the gym. Treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes lined the far wall. Free weights and Nautilus equipment formed an obstacle course before us. Each of the machines I passed appeared more foreign than the last. Bodies bared before me, none resembled mine. Even the most out-of-shape gym attendees strode confidently on an Arc Trainer, seeming to me a reasonable forty pounds from fit.

  I was out of place.

  I scanned the cardio options, eyeing each in a way to ask, Which of you will make me feel least hopeless? Or better yet, Which of you promises not to tell everyone here that I have no idea what I’m doing?

  The elliptical seemed best. For thirty minutes, I moved; my arms pushed and pulled in sync with the gliding of my legs. And even though I’d set my machine on very little resistance, I felt beat by the time it kicked into a two-minute cooldown. Thank you, I thought. Sweat dripped, hot yet quickly cool, down the line of my spine. I felt the wet beads that were collecting on my scalp steam my naturally curly hair into a frizz of spirals. Blood rushed to flush my cheeks and tingled down my legs, unused to such rigor.

  There was a moment where, in between relieved gasps of air, I felt trapped on that machine. Is this what it’s like to get, to be, to stay, thin? I wondered. I was sure I never wanted to relive those thirty sweaty minutes. I glanced around me at the others. Sweat suited them. Their faces, so focused and willful, expressed they were as tired as I felt, and yet their determination was intact. Grunting as she finished her final seconds of sprinting, the woman on the nearest treadmill smiled in a relieved, proud way. What’s different about her and me? How does she finish, looking strong and confident, while I, the one who needs to be here as badly as bad can be, finish thirty minutes feeling exhausted of spirit?