Express flare jeans were peak 1999, and I could not fit into them. Undeterred, I had purchased the largest size they offered, washed them cold, and then worn them to bed soaking wet in the hope that by the time I woke up, they’d be stretched out and fit. They weren’t and they didn’t. When I woke they were still damp, smelled like mildew, and I was rocking a raging yeast infection.
But the Gap men’s boot-cut jean gave me that lower-leg flare with a waist size that could accommodate my body. Granted, the crotch hung a little low on account of me not having a penis or testicles, but all of that was easily remedied by pulling the jeans up over my stomach, just below my bra. And thus, high-waist Brittany was born.
I began slowly introducing the men’s jeans to the women in the dressing rooms; the ones I heard huffing and whimpering and weeping.
“Trust me,” I whispered as I slid the jeans over the door.
Brad, our resident denim specialist, was horrified, and every time I’d jog out to the wall for armfuls of boot-cut jeans, he’d roll his eyes.
“These jeans are not cut for the womens, Brittany,” he’d singsong to me.
“Very few are, Brad,” I’d sing back as I walked away.
Soon, my curvy customers would send their friends and daughters in to find me, and I’d unlock their doors with a knowing nod. We became a secret society, and I their leader, bestowing flared pants on those who had not previously had the option.
Yes, fat sisters, you are welcome here. Come. Graze. Try on your man pants and rejoice. Also, while you’re here, may I interest you in a nice oversized men’s logo sweatshirt or some Dream perfume?
When I went away to college, I transferred to a Gap down in Columbus, near my dorm at The Ohio State University, and eventually moved from the floor to the early-morning and overnight shift of people in charge of doing markdowns and rearranging the store. After four years in Gap servitude, I realized I was burned out on retail and customer service. Plus, in Gap years, four years is actually twenty-four years, and after twenty-four years, you just can’t get excited about khaki pants anymore. But I had done a small service to my fellow woman.
This was my very first experience with body advocacy. Drawing attention to myself as a plus-size person who knew something about plus-size clothes was admitting to other people, in no uncertain terms, that I was fat. It was a big, important step.
While I might know I’m fat, have known I was fat, it was certainly not something I wanted the world to know out loud about me. I just assumed that when I talked with someone we both knew that when we spoke about gaining weight or being heavy, we weren’t talking about me, we were talking about the other fat people. And yet there I was, standing in the witness protection area of a Gap fitting room waving my fat-girl flag.
Wearing those men’s jeans was the first time my brain was willing to break up with the asinine idea that the only way to look beautiful lived and died on the tag of the pants I was trying to fit into.
A tag, might I add, that nobody could see but me.
CHAPTER 2
I Blame Cher Horowitz For Everything
“Oof, Brittany, what happened to you, I can see your twinkle!”
Not quite the reveal I had expected. I was just returning to Swanton Junior High School after what my parents referred to as “my educational sabbatical.”
I was not “transitioning well.”
I was experiencing a “crisis of identity.”
Everyone around me spoke in air quotes and soft voices and tilted their heads to the side in concern when they talked to and about me. Prior to my eighth-grade English teacher announcing to the class that she could see my vagina, I flew relatively under the radar in school. As a new kid the year before, I worked my way through the social ranks from loner to nerd, and was just settling into “stoner” when everything went pear-shaped.
The stoners were a relatively welcoming crew made up of kids across multiple cliques; some of them heavy-metal folk, some of them popular jocks, some of them random one-offs that didn’t quite fit into any of the groups but could superficially participate because they were good at rolling joints or always had access to beer. I was a one-off. At least I was until I was dumped by my very first boyfriend (a stoner), and all of my friends began to shun me like the Amish. Like really stoned Amish, but instead of beards, they had that weird preteen lip hair. Naturally, since I was newer to the group than my boyfriend, he took ownership of our mutual friends. The girls I felt I had bonded with also chose to stay close to the group. They began ignoring my calls, glaring at me in the halls, and eventually three-way prank-calling me at home.
I don’t think three-way calling is a thing anymore, but in the nineties it was a form of terrorism.
I became a girl without a lunch table. And eventually, when nobody wants to talk to you, you just stop talking. And that is what I did, for six months.
I didn’t talk to kids at school, I didn’t talk to my mom and dad, and I didn’t talk to my brother. I came home every day, locked myself in my room, and watched VHS tapes. Naturally, this freaked my parents out, but they both worked long hours, so while they were confused that I wasn’t speaking, they really didn’t have the free time to properly look into it.
My mom would reach out to my ex-girlfriends looking for answers, unaware they didn’t like me anymore. She sent a few notes to teachers and my guidance counselor, but everyone just assumed it was a weird side effect of teenage hormones. And then I stopped going to school.
Every morning my dad would try to drop me off at the door and I’d just melt down, sobbing and pleading for him to let me stay home just one more day. And he always did, mostly because putting up any sort of fight would have made him late for work.
To this day, I don’t know the specifics of why I was allowed to remain home for almost two months, or what conversations there were between my parents and the school administrators. All I know is that my parents came home from work one day, told me I was finished going to school for a while, and walked out of my room. I didn’t feel happy or a sense of victory about the announcement; I felt safe. And a week later, I started to talk again.
Movies are my love language. I grew up in the back room of my parents’ video rental store, eating my dinner each night alongside Bill Murray, Steve Guttenberg, and Phoebe Cates. In fact, I’ve passed my cinema-obsessed vampire spirit onto my kids, and we spend their summer vacations in dark movie theaters with buttered popcorn and smuggled-in candy.
As expected, communication in my family was also often done through movies. When I won my first essay contest through our local library system, I came home to find the latest New Kids on the Block concert VHS tape on my bed as a reward. And when my parents saw that I was finally starting to speak to them again, my mom excitedly pushed a new movie into the VCR and snuggled onto the couch between me and my younger brother, Adam.
Clueless, a film starring the young Alicia Silverstone, was about a Beverly Hills High student who “selflessly” played matchmaker to her peers, advocated to save the environment, and eventually dated her stepbrother.
“This movie is ridiculous,” Adam groaned, burying his face into a couch pillow in annoyance. “This is the stupidest movie you’ve ever made me watch.”
This movie changed my life.
Cher Horowitz was everything I was not. She was rich, she had a beautiful house, the perfect body, and amazing clothes she pulled out of a robot closet.
I was decidedly not rich. In fact, at the time of that viewing, my family was getting our water out of a large metal tank in the backyard because our well point had died and we couldn’t afford to replace it. So that ruled out the whole robot-walk-in-closet thing as well. But the preppy clothes and cute shoes were fantastic, and coming from Catholic school meant I had a whole closet full of ignored plaid skirts.
One of the hardest aspects of transferring into a new and bigger school was learning how to fit in and look like the other kids in my class, and girls had it especially tough. All th
e boys needed were baggy jeans and bowl cuts. For us girls, it was a delicate balance of showing up each day looking like the right kind of Bratz doll. The parameters were very specific. I had to try to look effortlessly hot, but not like a slut. I had to look like I was probably really good at blow jobs, but not like I’d given too many of them. I had to balance looking good enough for the boys to like me, but not so cute that the girls turned on me and hated me. This was a particularly delicate balance to achieve with big boobs, which, by default, had me carrying around a bit of a skanky scarlet letter. In short, Mean Girls wasn’t a movie yet, but it was, so to speak, a documentary.
Nobody at my school was dressing like Cher Horowitz, and for some reason, I saw her as the key to my reentry into the general population. My debutante coming-out, if you will. Only instead of wearing white and making my entrance into southern society, I’d wear short skirts and hope no one carved KILL YOURSELF into my locker. I crafted a four-step plan.
First, I had to talk my parents into letting me trade in my gold-wired glasses for contacts. This was a tough sell to my mother, who had a lifelong belief that everyone was just one human touch away from sepsis. She’d shove my brother and me outside from morning until night during the summer to entertain ourselves doing God knows what, but the second I tried to walk into a petting zoo, she had me scrubbing up to my elbows like Meredith Grey.
“Do you know how much fecal matter is on the human finger?” she whisper-yelled to me in the dark exam room of my ophthalmologist’s office when he left the room to grab my contact samples.
Next, I asked my dentist to fill the gap between my two front teeth with bonding. I want to break in here and say, if I could take anything in my life back, it would be this act. More on it later.
Third, one of my hair-stylist aunts scooped up my coarse, frizzy hair and gave me my first real hairstyle that wasn’t just a vague geometric shape like “triangle.”
And lastly, I had my mom cut off and hem all my plaid Catholic school skirts.
“Shorter.” I stood beside her sewing machine.
For as little interest as I’ve watched my mother take in fashion and beauty, she never told me no. The issues that I have with my body and feeling bad about it never came from her. She always treated hers with such indifference. She wore what was comfortable, she shopped in whatever section she felt like, and she was never on a diet. My insecurities came from other people telling me I should have them.
The decision to return to school was a hard one, and my parents briefly toyed with the idea of transferring me to a school in a different district altogether, but in the end decided that sending me back to face my fears was the best course of action. At the time, I did not agree with this decision, but here I am writing a book about it, so thanks for the emotional material, Mom and Dad.
I walked into my eighth-grade English class with my silky flat-ironed “Rachel” haircut, and a plaid skirt hemmed so short that when I sat down my esophagus touched the seat of the chair. I paired it with a white cropped baby tee, and white thigh-highs that I’d purchased from the pharmacy out of one of those panty-hose eggs. On Cher, white thigh-highs looked adorable and adolescent. On my thick dimpled thighs, they looked pornographic, or at least they would have if they hadn’t rolled down to my ankles like some kind of doughnut with every step.
I walked into English and immediately made eye contact with Mike Miller, a senior boy who helped grade papers in the class for extra credit. Mike had long hair, quoted Romeo and Juliet, and always looked duly troubled and charmingly angsty. He had been my favorite part of English class, and in a completely nonstalker move, I’d figured out that he worked as a delivery boy for a local pizza shop. I’d made my mom order pizza every Friday she was paid, hoping to see him at our door.
As I made my way to a desk in the back, I bent over to reroll the white nylons up my legs, and just then, the teacher walked in behind me.
“Oof, Brittany, what happened to you, I can see your twinkle!” she declared, resting her right hand against her chest.
To save face, I’d like to interject right here that the Friday after this happened, Pizza Mike asked me out. He wrote his number on the box of the thick-crust pineapple-and-green-pepper pizza he delivered; total rom-com move. The date, however, wasn’t. This was because he brought along his friend Lance and they spent the whole night getting high, listening to Bob Marley, and watching old episodes of Felix the Cat with the sound off.
But before I knew all of that, having my “twinkle” called out by my teacher was absolutely humiliating. Today that teacher probably would have been fired after my mom created a viral social media post about her singling out my vagina for comment. But it was the nineties and parents weren’t super indignant about the coddling of their kids yet. So I excused myself from class early and called my parents from the office to pick me up. The secretary was very understanding, nodding softly and clucking with her tongue that I might just have to “ease my way back in.”
Have you ever been so determined to fit in with people that you show up at school dressed as the adult-fetish-film version of a popular teen icon? My chubby Cher Horowitz phase was short-lived, but it became the first of many times I tried to become someone else in an attempt to avoid just being me.
A professor in college once told me that if you wanted to know about a woman’s love history, look in her closet. It’s overflowing with the ghosts of relationships past hung on hangers and sorted by season. This analogy can best describe my life in high school: desperate and unoriginal.
The bedroom closet at my parents’ house is the only part of my old room they maintained after I moved out, turning the rest into what my mom affectionately calls her “pug room,” which is just a room with a couch and television where she sits with all her pugs and watches HGTV. Yes, I would have liked to one day have it serve as a museum of my childhood, but in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot ranch, that kind of empty space is prime real estate for dog-show trophies and flea-market paintings of pugs playing poker and smoking cigars.
In the wall-length closet, hidden behind the dust-and-dog-hair-covered louver doors, you’ll find all the clothes from all the styles and hobbies I’d picked up and dropped based on the boys I dated, or wish I could have dated, in high school.
I know what this looks like. Brittany: Single White Female. But I was totally harmless and my therapist tells me all the time that it’s totally normal for teenage girls to chameleon around a bit as they figure out who they are. Also, I don’t have the face shape for a Bridget Fonda pixie cut, I just don’t.
There was the skater, Elton. He and his friends spent every free moment skateboarding at the underused parking lot of a local grocery store. Prior to “talking” to him, which is this thing teens do when one of you totally wants to date, but the other one is afraid to tell you no, I dressed the way many insecure chubby junior high girls dressed in the nineties: part Blossom, part Avril Lavigne, part The Craft, because a flannel around the waist hides everything. Hanging out with Elton presented a new set of style influences, all of them cringe-worthy and mostly unwashed.
Elton had chin-length brown hair and wore saggy jeans and old skater tennis shoes. Each day that I sat watching him grind and alley-oop, my clothing and vocabulary evolved, until eventually I was beside him, flipping off the police who demanded we leave the private property, with my obnoxious JNCO wide-leg jeans, white tank top, and brightly colored bra. It was as if I was aiming for skater, but got lost somewhere between No Doubt and Seth Green in Can’t Hardly Wait. I carried a skateboard catalog in my back pocket for weeks, always under the guise of trying to decide on a board and finally learning to skate.
Thankfully, Elton started dating someone else before I did something really ridiculous, like buy Airwalks or break my neck. But still, the jeans hang untouched in my old closet.
Vince was also a metal head, and he and his buddies were known throughout school as the Black T-shirt Gang. Every day it was black heavy-metal T-shirts and bla
ck jeans. If you were ever curious as to why men’s black classic-cut jeans existed, I can assure you, it was because of Vince and his crew.
Dating Vince for six months came with a whole host of wardrobe accommodations. It started off small with black jeans and a couple of mildly violent Slayer shirts, and eventually steamrolled into the single most expensive piece of clothing I’d ever owned, a genuine black leather jacket from a store in the mall called Leather Unlimited.
This jacket was a big deal. Think Pink Ladies–level membership; only, you know, not pink or formfitting or flattering in any way. When I initially asked my mom to buy me this jacket, because I was in seventh grade and had no disposable leather jacket income, she laughed in my face and went back to shaving the hair off the back of the cocker spaniel she’d been grooming for our neighbor. It took weeks of coaxing and begging, eventually striking the deal that I could get the jacket as my one and only Christmas gift. In hindsight, a girl should never sacrifice all her Christmas gifts for a black leather stoner jacket, but Vince was my first French kiss and we’d planned to get matching Grim Reaper tattoos when we were eighteen, so naturally, it felt worth it at the time.
I got the jacket in December and Vince dumped me on my birthday in April. The jacket hadn’t even been broken in yet. It was still stiff, creaked when I walked, and smelled like a new car. While it pained me to think of how much money my parents had scraped together to buy me that jacket, I was instantly relieved not to have to wear it and pretend to understand Pantera lyrics anymore.
And then there was Josh the pagan. I come from a hyper-Catholic family. I attended Catholic school, we went to church on Sundays, we didn’t eat meat during Lent, and I could assemble a rosary in my sleep. My middle name is Marie, which means Mary, and you don’t get more Catholic than the mother of Christ.
The Clothes Make the Girl Page 4