There was flirting and small talk, and before they left to join their friend in his eliminated car, the boy with the dusty brown hair turned around, ripped a chunk of Lauren’s blue cotton candy from its stick, and popped it in his mouth.
“We’re going to the quarry tomorrow.” He smirked, walking backward down the row of bleachers. “Meet us there?”
I had no intention of getting into the water. I was wearing a neon-pink bikini borrowed from Abby’s single and dating mother, and it barely fit. The top was heavily padded and tight around my ribs, and the bottom was cut so high that the roll of my lower stomach sat exposed in the leg opening. I covered it with a pair of linen drawstring shorts and planned to lie on my stomach in the sand and read magazines on the beach.
“Let’s jump off the platform!” Abby squealed.
That was a hard no for me, but she begged and begged, and finally, when the boys got up to buy food at the concession stand, I took the chance to slip out of my shorts and run to the line forming below, without giving them a closer look at my body.
As I made my way up the steps and walked onto the platform alone, I was petrified. This was the highest I had ever been above an endlessly deep pool of jagged rocks and sunken machinery, and yet I was more afraid of not jumping and therefore having to walk back to my towel in the sand in front of three boys I barely knew.
I closed my eyes and jumped straight into the quarry below, shooting down so deep that the bottoms of my feet felt the cold water below the warm safety of where the sunlight hit. Panicked, I climbed back to the surface and swam to the shallow beach to catch my breath. I felt terrified and energized and alive, and that buoyant feeling carried me back to my towel, which I quickly grabbed from the ground and wrapped around my waist in front of our friends.
“Did you see that?” I asked, my chest still heaving and panting with excitement.
Lauren and Abby cheered and high-fived, and I settled back into my spot in the sand and grabbed my Coke, meeting David’s eye and smiling. David had long blond hair that he kept tucked behind his ears, and wore round John Lennon glasses and cutoff denim jean shorts.
As Lauren and Abby started talking about going back to school and where their lockers were, I nodded along and watched out of the corner of my eye as David slowly huddled into his friend Jeff and whispered, “Whoa, she has thunder thighs, you can have her.”
Jeff laughed and shook his head no, playfully punching his friend in the arm.
As my friends continued chatting I slowly slid my shorts on underneath my beach towel, and spent the rest of the afternoon on my stomach in the sand.
Before leaving, the boys asked us to join them later that night to see a movie, but I told them my stomach hurt and stayed home.
My thighs are unwanted.
I used to love science when it was more of an arts-and-craft project and less of a chemistry class. I was really good at painting planets and cracking open homemade geodes, anything beyond that slipped right out of my head. The only reason I wasn’t failing was because I completed every extra-credit assignment available, and pestered the teacher with the flash cards I created before every test. I still didn’t get many of the answers right, but he saw I was obviously trying. Honestly, I think I exhausted him, and he seriously didn’t want to have to put up with me another year if I had to retake his class.
I sat in a quad of four desks. My friend Jordan sat to my right, and sitting directly across from us was a sophomore named Daniel and a senior boy named Beau. Of the four of us, Jordan was the most science-minded, carrying us through the majority of our labs and study guides, and like me, pretending not to be bothered by Daniel’s incessant pestering. Daniel threw balls of paper at our chests, trying to make baskets in the necks of our shirts, and he tried, and failed, to turn words like “inertia” or “fulcrum” into innuendo.
He’s the annoying guy you invite to the party out of a desire to be nice, but then he shows up an hour early and only responds to you using quotes from Jim Carrey movies while you’re trying to finish setting up.
While I was sitting at my desk reading, Daniel tosses his pen at my ankle, leaving a blue streak above the platform black loafers I’d worn that day. He slides out of his seat to grab it, and very obviously tries to look up into the now eye-level black skirt I’d worn that day. I coughed and squeezed my already touching thighs even tighter.
Annoyed, he drops back into his chair.
“Your thighs are like the Berlin wall, nobody can see past them.” Daniel and Beau laugh and whisper more about my legs and other body parts as my face burns. I’d been exasperated by this idiot the entire quarter, but in this moment, I was the one feeling stupid. I was angry at myself, angry that my body was (again) the problem and not the boy trying to see my panties in the middle of class.
A boy, by the way, who was so insecure about his own body that he was rumored to have sex with girls through the zipper hole of his jeans without pulling them down. I let that boy make me feel bad about my body.
My thighs are unwitting obstructionists.
That night, Beau taps on my dark bedroom window. He is sleeping over at the house of his best friend, who lives across the street, but the friend fell asleep and Beau wanted to see me. We work in tandem, knowingly popping the screen out of my window, me lending a hand as he eases his way into my room.
He has been here many times before. Sometimes we kiss for hours. Sometimes I unzip his pants and go down on him while he moans into the pillow he’s placed over his face. Sometimes he talks to me about his girlfriend, and how stuck he feels because his parents love her but he doesn’t know if he does. We always sit with each other in the dark. I never ask why he can’t see me with the lights on.
Tonight he doesn’t talk to me; he only kisses me and pushes me against the wall. We both freeze and listen for a moment to make sure there is no sound coming from my parents’ bedroom next door, and that no dogs are startled or made suspicious by the light thud my head made against the wall.
Beau pulls the nightgown over my head and kisses my soft stomach as he rolls my underwear down my legs. He pushes his hand inside of me so hard I begin to gasp, but he kisses me quickly and smiles into my teeth.
He moves his hand so fast and so deep, I feel something pop inside me and warm my thighs. I am as sturdy as Jell-O. He reaches his free arm around my back and lays me on the bed and kisses me for one hundred more years before crawling back out of my window.
This was his apology for the cruel way he’d spoken to me.
I quietly made my way to the bathroom, carefully shutting the adjoining door to my parents’ bedroom, and I surveyed my body. My lips were pink and swollen, and as I lifted up my cotton nightgown, my legs were streaked with blood, further smeared around and sticky from the rubbing together of my thighs as I walked.
Not period blood, but from the pop I felt as if a wall inside me had been knocked down. I didn’t wash it from my legs, and I grabbed a dark brown towel from the linen closet and laid it on my sheets before climbing into bed and going to sleep thinking of Beau.
My thighs do not hold grudges as long as they should.
I am not a seamstress, but I am the Betsy Ross of denim. I do most of my needlework naked, standing over the counter in my bathroom, mentally calculating how many more swishes of the thigh the now paper-thin material of the jeans can withstand.
My thighs do not know Urban Outfitters, they have never entertained 7 For All Mankind, and they do not speak the language of the thigh gap. What my thighs do know is temporary. From jeans to the soft layer of flesh that lines them, both things are rubbed away far too easily between my legs.
In the summer I wear dresses, and jack my legs onto the counter in my bathroom and lube my inner thighs with scentless deodorant, or chafing gel, or powder. A carousel of things, really, all with the purpose of trying to protect me from the chafing and rashes that come with the heat and movement.
The summer before I left for college, a group of friends
and I went to Cedar Point for the day, a theme park full of some of the world’s tallest and fastest roller coasters. I wore a tank top and denim shorts I’d accidentally cut too short from a pair of jeans. I walked carefully all day, spending my time in lines leaning against the chains that separated the rows of people, my legs apart and not touching.
Andy begged me to ride Thunder Canyon, a water ride that sent you and a group of riders through a canyon-like river full of rapids and waterfalls. As a rule, I don’t take water rides. The recycled water grosses me out, and I’m terrified of skin-eating bacteria. Also, my hair doesn’t look great after it air-dries, and I don’t have the type of body that does well walking long distances while wet. But against my better judgment I joined him, and at the end of the ride, I was soaked.
By the time I got home that night, the denim of my wet shorts had chafed my thighs bloody. My mom coated the open bumps with Neosporin and laid ice packs on each leg as I stretched beside her on the couch.
In the winter I try to keep my heavy body light on its feet, careful not to walk too forcefully or squat too quickly. I live in one perfect pair of jeans, fully aware that all my time inside of them is borrowed.
But then one afternoon I’m sitting in my car in the drive-through of a Sonic waiting for tots and a large cherry limeade, and I look down to see pink skin bubbling. I’ve buried more jeans than there are Batman movies.
Before I dispose of the cloth corpse, I rip off the button above the zipper and toss it in a bowl in my top drawer the same way my roommate in college used to steal a sock, just one, from the men who slept over in our dorm room. Trophies of things we’ve devoured.
My thighs are cannibals.
I will never be the woman who can have sex in a shower stall or the front seat of a car. Those small spaces can’t accommodate the wingspan necessary for my legs.
Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man wasn’t art, it was an instruction manual for how to access my vagina.
Andy and I bought a king-size bed. I told him we needed it because he sleeps too close to me on a smaller mattress, and that sometimes he sleeps facing the same way I do, so his breath is touching my breath. I take it I don’t need to explain anything further, jury of my peers.
What I love the most about the mattress is how much it dwarfs me. How small I feel lying on it, even when Andy is there beside me. And when he puts his hand on my hip because it’s Friday night, or he likes the new dress I wore that day, or because our kids are at my mom’s and we’re living our lives as horny rabbits now, I don’t get self-conscious, not then and not when he slides his hand between my legs after I turn to him on my side.
I don’t make excuses, or adjust my body so that he doesn’t have to push his hand through thick, weighted flesh to get to the center of me.
I spread across the large mattress and wait for Andy to climb into me. He is half my size, and when I wrap my legs around him, he disappears.
My thighs are Sirens.
“What are those lines, Mom?” Gigi asked, tracing the purple veins along my left thigh with her finger.
We stretched our legs out straight in front of us under the only tree at the playground. The boys played football in the field next to us, but Gigi was the only girl, and like me, she gets bored quickly playing by herself.
“They are varicose veins,” I told her. “They are genetic, which means Oma also has them, and you might one day, too.”
“I hope so.” She sighed.
I only recently started wearing shorts. We were visiting Andy’s parents in Florida, and this sweaty body can only take so much humidity before it starts to act irrationally. A couple margaritas later and I was either slaughtering a pair of jeans or shaving my head, and Andy didn’t have his electric razor with him because he was growing a “vacation beard.” I remember walking out of the bedroom in my newly cutoff shorts and Wyatt looking up from his game of Uno at the table with his grandmother to say, “Wait, they make shorts for moms, too?”
It was not an easy transition. There was chafing and insecurity and perfecting the “fat-girl sidestep.” (You know that thing where you try to discreetly toss one of your legs off to the side midstride, hoping to create enough of an opening to allow for the bunched-up fabric to fall free of its own accord, self-correcting the shorts’ ride-up predicament.)
I had been hiding my legs from the people who would have judged me the least. My kids see my thighs as part of the legs of their mother, the woman who cares for them and loves them and teaches them how to be in this world.
My husband sees them as soft flesh to consume whole or rest his hand on, unwavering in his love for me. You know, there is no box to check on a divorce form for dimpled thighs or stretch marks. The only love that threatens to end over cellulite is the love you offer to yourself.
I’ve decided to indulge these thighs. I let them walk around like banging thunder, and I feed them denim like gremlins after midnight.
I don’t turn the lights off anymore. I don’t hide them under maxis or jeans in 100 percent humidity. I’m no longer embarrassed about their dimples, veins, or stubble.
My thighs are shameless.
CHAPTER 12
Everything I Want to Say to My Daughter
When I look at her I’m envious. Envious that she figured out how to use the same body I was given but squandered for so long. I’m envious when she stands at the edge of the gymnastics mat, sucks all the air in the room into her lungs, and then charges toward the vault; her thick thighs are amazing muscular machines. I am envious that at age eight she is the most seen person in every room, and that she walks into a store and agrees to buy girls’ size-10-plus shorts because they fit her legs better and that’s that. No overanalyzing. No self-hate. No stages of body grief.
And that gap. Oh, the gap in her teeth brings me to my knees.
If I could take anything back in my life, it would be getting the gap between my two front teeth filled in.
“The bonding will last between five and ten years,” the doctor told my mom as he gently filed smooth the new slim space between my teeth.
My friend Kristen had her teeth bonded in eighth grade, too, and I watched in horror as her bonding popped out whenever she bit into an apple or during a game of softball. And yet mine persisted.
My sophomore year of college, I went to see Almost Famous and I remember falling in love with Anna Paquin’s character, Polexia Aphrodisia. Polexia had pouty lips, and pink heart-shaped sunglasses, and the most perfect gap between her two front teeth, just as I once had.
I made the decision that when this bonding finally fell out, I would not replace it. It’s been twenty-three years, I’ve eaten hundreds of apples, and I’m still waiting.
Gigi will fill her gap in over my cold dead corpse.
“How do I help my daughter not hate her body?”
This is, hands down, the most frequent question women ask me. And I always know when it’s about to happen, because a hand shoots up or a woman in line at a bookstore gets to the table, and I see the look on her face and I know exactly what she’s about to say.
You know that moment right before you cry, the moment when you are afraid to blink because you know that if you close your eyes, the tears will rise up behind your eyelids, and when you open them again, the tears will splash down your face and they won’t stop? That’s the look.
I still see that look in the mirror sometimes, and I don’t expect it ever to go away, because children are hard and the world can be terrible.
I have the honor of speaking in junior highs and high schools about bullying, body image, and female empowerment. It always goes about the same way. I start off talking, telling the girls my story, showing them a couple of hideous school pictures from my youth, and then we break up into smaller groups to talk about ourselves. In one group, we talk about the things in our lives that make us feel strong and happy. In others, we talk about the people we look up to, and how we can emulate what we like in them. And then we talk about the crappy stuff.
The times we hurt, the times we feel alone, all the things that take a little bit of our shine away from us. At the end of the day, everyone is raw and happy and hopeful. And I am, too.
But then I get into my car and I cry.
I cry because I know that at least half of those girls will go home, and every single step forward we took today will be undone by their parents.
It’s hard to feel good about yourself when your mom makes you be her diet buddy. It’s hard to like yourself when your father tells you he wishes you were more active. And it’s almost impossible to raise kids who like themselves when you don’t even like yourself.
My daughter, Gigi, is eight and has always been a bit eccentric in her fashion choices. She loves pairing colorful tights with patterned skirts, or shorts with tall boots. She throws her hair up into a messy bun and tops it with a bow. And the girl can apply glitter eyeliner like a pro, while I walk out of the bathroom looking like a panda after trying to tackle a winged cat eye for an hour.
My sons, Wyatt and Jude, are ten and eleven, respectively, and I still pick out their outfits, which I am fine with, because at least I know they’re wearing underwear and applying deodorant. I do the same for their father.
Whenever we go out, the boys rush through their pile of clothes, and then right before we are set to leave, I call for Gigi, who comes bounding down the stairway in something colorful and whimsical and ready for the world.
And then one day that stopped.
“Does this look okay?” she asked, leaning against the door of my bathroom, watching me do my makeup.
“You look awesome,” I told her, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
And then she walked away, but not the way she usually walked, bouncing and confident and defiant. She looked suddenly very small and unsure of herself.
The Clothes Make the Girl Page 14