We Are Fat and We Are Legion

by Benjamin Duffy

  That’s just jaw-droppingly stupid. She was taking care of her body! She stopped sticking her finger down her throat, for crying out loud. Unfortunately, her extra fifteen pounds cost her the contest. The message to London was clear: we liked you better as a bulimic starveling. If you want to make it in the modeling world, you’ll continue to abuse your body.

  Although London’s bulimia was not mentioned on America’s Next Top Model, she ‘fessed up to the problem later on Tyra’s talk show. She also said in an interview that Tyra and the rest of the judges were aware of her history. In other words, they humiliated the poor girl on national television and eliminated her from the competition for being too “fat”, while knowing full well that London’s weight gain was the result of proper eating.

  At the end of the interview, Tyra sprung a surprise on the audience—the show was going to dig deep into its pockets and pay for the treatment that working class London couldn’t afford! You go, girl! Someone should have told Tyra that London wouldn’t need treatment for her disorder if the modeling industry didn’t glorify an image of womanhood that resembles a bony heroin addict. London also admitted that she had thrown up since her elimination from the show. In other words, she had broken free from the disease when she went on the show but regressed after Tyra & Co. singled her out as the fat chick. Go figure.

  On second thought, I’m not at all conflicted as to how I feel about Tyra Banks. She’s a horrible human being. She’s fake. She’s part of the inhuman modeling industry and I hate her for it. Rot in hell, Tyra Banks.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Portuguese Stew and Grandmother Bread

  I’m at home with my mother. The home I grew up in, I mean. I’m back in Ludlow, back in my hometown. My mom cooked some dinner and we sat down to discuss the Denny situation. As soon as she heard that he was gone she invited me down for some home cooking and a chat.

  Mom whips up some cozido à Portuguesa ; that’s Portuguese stew for the uninitiated. People who didn’t grow up with Portuguese stew don’t know what they’re missing. I pity them. It’s pretty much the most delicious combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, clams, salted cod, and chouriço known to mankind. Chouriço is Portuguese sausage. In Ludlow, almost everyone’s mom has her own recipe for Portuguese stew. I think my mom’s is the best, but I guess I’m biased.

  Mom sees me devour one bowl then gets me seconds without asking. She lops off a thick piece of pão de avó —grandmother bread—and places it on the napkin next to my bowl. I use the fluffy bread to soak up the broth and then pile chunks of meat and veggies on top.

  Thankfully, I always had a very supportive mother growing up. I give thanks for her, knowing from years of fat networking that not all fat kids were quite so lucky. Plenty of fatties have parents whose love was anything but unconditional. What basketcases those kids turn out to be in their adult years. They learned from a very young age that nobody loves the fat kid, not even her parents.

  My mother didn’t have that attitude, bless her. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s a fat woman herself, a big Portuguese mama whose warm kitchen apron can hardly contain her substantial breasts. That’s how I always remember her from growing up—puttering around the kitchen, her pear-shaped figure cinched at the middle by apron strings, hard at work cooking something delicious. She was a traditional Portuguese homemaker who met the kids with a snack when they got off the bus. It sounds corny, I know. But that was the mother of my childhood, and I was lucky for it. She spoke with a slight accent, having grown up in Portugal. Her heritage was not at all unusual in the town I grew up in. Everyone’s Portuguese in Ludlow.

  Mom puts her hand on my shoulder. “So, you and Denny…”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “You’re no longer together? That’s what you told me.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I liked that boy,” she says. “Not Portuguese, but I liked him still. I always thought he’d make a good husband for you.”

  I nod and bite off a chunk of grandmother bread, soggy with stew. “Yeah. I thought so too. But not now.”

  “Not now?”

  “Nope. If he’s going to run away every time we have a disagreement, then he’s obviously not husband material.”

  Mom places her hand over mine. “Gabby,” she says. “Tell me again what this fight was about. I want to understand.”

  I slump down over my bowl and consume even more Portuguese stew. “Okay,” I say. “It had to do with dieting. He wanted to lose weight.”

  “Go on,” she responds.

  “And dieting is not healthy. It’s a great scam for making money but it doesn’t do the dieter any good.”

  “And Denny decided not to take your advice?”

  “Yup. I could point him in the direction of tons of scientific research that says that dieting does more harm than good, but it would only go in one ear and out the other. He’s made up his mind.”

  “I never diet,” she says.

  “I know, ma! And look at you! You’re like sixty-five years old and the picture of health.”

  Mom smiles to herself. “Well, thank you, Gabby. You know when I was a girl in Portugal, I’d never heard of a diet. I just ate the same food as my mother ate when she was a girl, and what her mother ate, and her mother too. We passed the recipes down from mother to daughter. We made our own bread and sausages and our own bacalhau with all the same love as we always had. Most of the girls I knew were so pretty.”

  She’s annoying me here a little bit because I know that she means ‘thin’ when she says ‘pretty’. “Mom…”

  “They didn’t watch their weight at all because they didn’t have to. Then, when a girl got married, had a few children, it was normal for her to get rounder. It was okay, because she looked much like her own mother. No problem.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Besides, her husband might decide he likes a bigger woman. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “You’re right,” I nod.

  “You know when I came here? Which year?”

  I should know the answer to this question. I’m sure she’s told me before. It had to be before 1974, because that was the year I was born. “Uh…the seventies?”

  “I came in 1967,” she said. “I couldn’t live in Portugal anymore because of the government and all the wars. They were drafting the boys into the army to go fight in Africa. The army came and took my brother to fight in Mozambique. My mother just cried and cried, it was so awful. It was a dictatorship, the Estado Novo. I loved my country, but I never wanted to hear about Américo Tomás or António de Oliviera Salazar ever again. So I came to America and settled with some of my cousins who were already living in Ludlow.”

  I nod along with her. I don’t know much about Portuguese history other than the fact that some very bad people used to be in power. Those people were run out of town around the time I was born. My mother mentioned a few times that my uncle fought in the Portuguese army but I never met him. He died in Portugal when I was a little kid.

  “I found that Americans had a whole different way of eating,” she explains. “They didn’t put the same time and love into their food. Sometimes they didn’t even sit down at the table to eat. They ate in the car, they ate in front of the television, they ate straight out of the refrigerator! They bought Wonderbread at the store instead of making their own bread at home. They drank Coca-Cola and ate fried chicken from a bucket! I had never seen such a thing before.”

  I laugh. “That’s the American way.”

  “And the whole time, these women, these American women, were always looking for a new way to lose weight. They ate margarine instead of real butter, they put fake sugar in their coffee. They were always taking pills to make themselves thinner, and none of it worked.”

  I smile. I always knew my mom was a smart woman. “That’s right. It’s all rubbish. None of it ever works. That’s the message I’ve been trying to get out.”

  “I wanted to give these American w
omen some advice, but I didn’t think they would listen. I just wanted to tell them to sit at a table and eat a proper meal with proper ingredients, prepared the old-fashioned way. That would solve most of their problems. And if they were still bigger than they were when they were twenty years old…so be it! Don’t lose sleep over it!”

  Mom understands. I scoop a piece of sausage into my mouth. “If only everyone knew that,” I say.

  “It’s not a sin to eat good food and enjoy life,” she continues.

  “I know.”

  “But Gabby,” she says. I cringe a little. I don’t like the word ‘but’. But what? “You have to get that man back. He was good for you.”

  “Mom!”

  “It’s true. You can’t always push a man to do what you want him to do. Sometimes you have to let him do things his way so that he can learn that you were right all along.”

  I avert my eyes. She doesn’t understand. “But mom…”

  “Are you afraid?” she asks.

  “Afraid? What would I be afraid of?”

  “Afraid that if he loses too much weight, he will leave you.”

  That’s a low blow. I can’t believe that’s where she thinks I’m coming from. “Certainly not,” I say. “I’m not afraid of that.”

  “Oh. Well that’s the way it seems. In any case, that’s what happened. If you were trying to keep him, you failed.”

  “It’s not that way,” I snap. “That was the furthest thing from my mind. It’s just that he was bringing home these frozen meals, only five hundred calories each, and I was worried about him. No good can come of dieting. Trust me, I’ve read dozens of books on this. All experts in the field agree with me, except for the ones who are on the payroll of the diet industry.”

  “And then?”

  I sigh. I hadn’t mentioned our knock-down drag-out fight to her before. “And then I threw his meals out. I just chucked them in the trash.”

  “Gabby, you can’t do that.”

  I knew she wouldn’t see it my way. “Why not, mom? I had to put a stop to it. If I found out he was smoking, I’d toss his cigarettes out too.”

  “Not the same thing,” mom replies.

  “But it is! Dieting will kill you, just like smoking.”

  Mom leans closer and wraps her meaty, maternal arms around my shoulders. She looks me in the eye. “I hope it’s not too late for you and Denny. Do you think?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to try?”

  That’s not an easy ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. “Sort of.”

  “Get him back,” mom suggests. “Do what you have to do. If it means you will have to accept his frozen meals, do it. Just don’t let Denny go.”

  “I don’t want to let him go, but—”

  “But you’re too proud to do what it takes. And stubborn. You’ve always been stubborn, even when you were a small child. But trust your momma on this one, Gabby. She knows. Denny was a nice young man. You two were happy together. Go get him back.”

  I frown. “I see your point.”

  “Have you called him?”

  “No,” I reply.

  “Well, why not?

  “I don’t know where he is,” I say. “He didn’t say where he was going. He didn’t leave a number where I could reach him.”

  “He doesn’t have a cell phone? I thought all young people had cell phones these days.”

  “No,” I say. “But I know where I can find him.”

  * * *

  Thankfully, I always had a very supportive mother growing up. Years of fat networking have taught me that not all fat kids are quite so lucky. Plenty of fatties have parents whose love was anything but unconditional. What basketcases those kids turn out to be in their adult years. They learn from a very young age that nobody loves the fat kid, not even her parents.

  My mother didn’t have that attitude, bless her. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she’s a fat woman herself, a big Portuguese mama whose warm kitchen apron can hardly contain her substantial breasts. That’s how I always remember her anyway—puttering around the kitchen, her pear-shaped figure cinched at the middle by apron strings, hard at work cooking something delicious. She was a traditional Portuguese homemaker who met the kids with a snack when they got off the bus. It sounds corny, I know, but that was the mother of my childhood, and I am lucky for it.

  She spoke with a slight accent, having grown up in Portugal. Her heritage was not at all unusual in the town I grew up in. Everyone’s Portuguese in Ludlow.

  I keenly remember one day fleeing in tears from the school bus into her arms. It must have been second grade. A couple of jackasses on the bus had ganged up on me and started in with the fat jokes. They were like a pack of hyenas the way they surrounded me and took their shots. They hurled hurtful stuff at me that made me feel shame deeper than I had ever thought possible. I couldn’t wait to get away from those boys, to flee to the safety of mom’s apron, the smells of her kitchen, the warmth of her Old World immigrant voice. She sat me on her lap and explained to me that kids tease other kids because of their own insecurities. She told me not to worry about it. She also had a little chat with the bus driver the next morning, just to give him a head’s up as to what was happening on bus five.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother’s solution to the teasing problem was not what most mothers do. My mom passed one of motherhood’s most important tests, and she did it with flying colors. Parents of fat children should not respond to bullying by forcing their children to diet. It’s not the fat kid’s job to make the bullies stop. It’s bully’s job to quit being an asshole. Period. If the kid can’t or won’t reform his behavior, the bully’s parents should take some action.

  Plenty of moms fail miserably. Too many mothers of fat children believe that the best way to end the teasing is to put the kid on a diet. The message the child receives is that the tormenters are essentially correct. The pack of hyenas on the bus thinks that you’re fat and mommy does too, so from now on you won’t be eating anything that tastes good. Lots of mothers respond to this situation by piling on the guilt: “You aren’t really going to eat that, are you?”, “Put that cupcake down, you’re fat enough already”. And in the end, all of mom’s efforts to reform the child are always “for her own good”.

  This sort of guilt trip often evolves into assurances that weight loss is the key to social acceptance. Some very terrible mothers incentivize their offspring to lose weight by insisting that skinny people are liked, loved, accepted, embraced and sought after. Simply by joining the ranks of the slender, a fatty can have all of those things. As if the child deserves none of them until she meets a certain goal weight and then only as long as she maintains it. Years of being bombarded with these messages necessarily leaves the impression that mother’s love comes with strings attached.

  If you want to bask in the warmth of maternal approval, you’ll watch that figure, young lady.

  My mother never did that to me, thank goodness. I’ve gathered these horror stories from other fat women, most scarred for life by the shame of not measuring up to expectations. For my part, I never thought for a moment that I was anything less than radiant in my mother’s eyes. Up until my adolescent years, that was good enough for me.

  In middle school, everything changed and it would never be the same again. As my painful teen years dragged on, I found less and less comfort in the idea that my mother found me beautiful. I didn’t care at all what she thought. When you’re sixteen and you feel like the only girl in school who isn’t dating, mom’s opinion carries little weight. It’s the boys’ opinions that mattered, and they were all too busy posting “Wide Load” signs on my back when I wasn’t looking to even consider asking me out. Even the fat ones got in on it, so long as they were just a little less fat than I was.

  Those were desperate times. When I hear people get sappy and nostalgic about high school, I just want to smack them because I know they were probably thin. No one misses their
fat childhood, least of all me. I hadn’t yet discovered fat acceptance, which meant that I took the insults personally. Jerkwad kids wouldn’t accept me and I couldn’t accept myself.

  I really believed that everything would turn up sunshine and rainbows if I could just lose a little weight. I daydreamed of what slenderness would be like—how my dating life would take off like a rocket ship, how clothing would look good on me, and how many parties I would be invited to. I really beat myself up for failing to reach the ideal image of what a young woman is supposed to be. I considered myself a failure.

  But mom always believed in me. She never put me down and always stuck up for me. I know that my mother is the autumn of her life. One day soon, she won’t be there for me any longer. I want her to know just what a great mom she’s been through the years. She needs to know that before she dies.

  Chapter Fifteen:

  Ambush at the Bus Garage

  This is the most childish thing I’ve done in a long time. Since I was a child, actually. But still, I have to do it.

  I called out of work sick today. Not because I couldn’t get out of bed; not this time. I called out because I needed to be here, at the South Hadley bus garage, early in the morning.

  I crouch by Denny’s car, an old, green Plymouth Neon. I haven’t crouched in a long time. My calves burn. I plant one hand in the gravel to keep my balance. I want to blindside him, to make sure he never sees this one coming.

  It’s about eight thirty in the morning and the buses are coming back from their morning routes. Soon they will park the buses, sweep them out, and head back to their cars in the parking lot.

  Footsteps approach. Not sure if it’s Denny. A moment later, a middle aged woman walks past me, probably another bus driver, glaring at me in the most quizzical way. I smile at her but she doesn’t smile back. She gives me a deer in the headlights look instead. I must be an odd sight to behold—a fat lady crouching beside a car. Apparently, she thinks it’s best to mind her own business and continues on her way.

  I wait another minute. Then another. I hear Denny’s breathing before I see him. He approaches the car, fumbling with his keys. I feel myself getting nervous, but it’s too late to back out now.