Honestly though, I have to admit a hard truth about my weight. The later memories of my battle with fat, even the worst of the emotional scars from Rick are really only surface injuries. The very worst of my memories involving my weight are rooted deep, straight from the start of my life, right from childhood, when I was innocent. I carry within me a lingering resentment for the way I was trained to eat, right from the beginning, training that left me vulnerable to people like Rick in the first place. This is enmeshed with deep, hot, humiliating memories of being teased by my once gentle and affectionate father simply for being what I'd been taught to be.
I started life as a somewhat privileged child, with a small intimate family, my parents and grandparents all living together in the same town where my parents had grown up. My parents were both only children, and I was their only child. I had a lot of attention as the only child in the family, and I spent a lot of time being spoiled by the grandparents. Obviously, this meant I was destined to be a chubby kid; I was well-loved with cookies and lots of other things that children shouldn't have too much of.
With such a great beginning, it hit me hard in the years after I started school, when my family quite literally began to die out. I was crushed when my mother's parents were killed in a house robbery, and I still miss them terribly. I have a lot of good memories of them.
My father's father died of a heart attack a few years after that, and I started to carry inside of me this deep-seated fear of loss and abandonment. After that, it was my mother, slowly wasting away in front of us as breast cancer ate the life out of her. My father died a little then, too, watching her go, as I watched quietly.
He changed in his grief, withdrew from the world; he got critical of me, though I doubt that was his intention. I still remember the dead sadness in his eyes, even when he was trying actively to interact with me. Now that I'm grown, though, and more mature, I see him differently. I believe he did the best he could with me, suffering as he was from the devastation of our family. Maybe he couldn't handle how much I looked like my mom, before she got sick, what a reminder I was. Maybe it was the simple loss of his support system that ruined him; he must have been terribly lonely.
My father's mother was lost to dementia, and by the time she was gone, my father's zest for life had left him entirely. He was downright mean by then, lost in grief. I think some part of him must have resented me for not dying, too, for living, a constant reminder that life must go on in the face of grief, a reminder that the word does not grind to a halt no matter how deep the pain of life becomes. By the time I was nine, he barely spoke to me at all, and when he did speak, he never spoke my name, instead using a string of nicknames that I grew to hate.
It started with him calling me daddy's little butterball, which I actually liked, until a girl at school told me a butterball was basically just a lump of fat. That was a turning point for me; it changed how I saw my father, how I felt about his nicknames for me, how I felt about myself; my entire perception was changed in that passing moment. Kids are so cruel.
Eventually, he switched to my favorite candy. "Hey, what's shakin', Little Skittles? How was your morning?" he'd ask me as I walked in from school. I hated it because it made me feel as if all he saw when he looked at me was candy. It made me feel like less than a person, less than his child somehow, and sometimes I hated him for making me feel that way. When I stopped eating skittles, he chose a new nickname for me, and then another.
As an adult, I have wondered if those nicknames were really meant in the way that I took them, or if my father was just trying to reach out to me. Would he have called me Little Bookworm, had I been a reader and not a Skittles addict? I'll never know.
When my father was driving home from work and his car was crushed by a delivery truck with no brakes, I lost the last person I'd had left. It surprises me now, to look back on that time and see the grief that I felt at his loss, because I’d often wished for him to die, to leave me without his nicknames and his cold, dead eyes. I think I had a little breakdown; I don't remember much from the first years after my father died, other than a frantic shuffle from one courtroom to another, and my introduction to the foster system.
Turning away from that time, I try to cheer myself up with a bubble bath. I run hot water that steams the bathroom a little, and as it fills the tub, I add sea salt and baking soda to make the water soft. Breathing in the fruity floral scent, I also pour in enough bath foam to ensure that I won't see myself under the water. While the bathtub fills, I undress and choose a magazine to read while the tension of the day dissolves into the bath.
I read a variety of different magazines; I generally choose the ones with decorating tips for the home, but I also choose fashion magazines occasionally, especially if they attend to plus sized women at all. I read crafting magazines, and though I have no children, I do wish for them. Because of this secret desire to be a mother, I also read parenting magazines occasionally, determined to be a good mother when my time comes.
This time, I choose easy reading, a women's magazine, full of articles addressing the different aspects of being a woman. I read an article about dressing according to my body type, wishing, as usual, that I had only one body type. The next article is about self-confidence, and I roll my eyes, skipping over it at first, but it stays with me until I turn back, exasperated, to read it.
The article is written by a woman who came up from the pit of nothingness. She had been abused bitterly as a child, and the article traces her history, through years as a homeless woman and her times as a drug addicted prostitute. By the end of the article, I have such pity and such admiration for the woman in the article that I’ve shed a stream of tears, coursing down my chin and throat, pooling in my collarbones and running between my breasts. She has come so far in the course of her difficult life, and is now rather rich and well-known. I can’t help but wonder if I will ever make that sort of progress. I may not have gone into the pit of drugs, but I know that I am not emotionally healthy. In many ways, I am like her; the major difference is that no one can see my self abuse; it all happens in my mind where no one else can see.
In the article, the woman credited her success to therapy, saying that working through her emotional issues straightened her way of thinking, literally saving her life.
Laying my head back against the edge of the tub, I close the magazine and allow it to fall to the floor. I slip down further under the bubbles of my bath, thinking about the things I have been through, aligning them with the woman in the article I’ve just read.
In so many ways, I relate to her exactly! The differences in our problems seem insignificant to me; we still managed to grow up so alike. The emotions expressed in the article are so like mine, that sense of being filled with self-loathing, and then loathing myself for feeling as I do, a vicious circle of self-flagellation and bitterness.
The article said that a low sense of self-confidence is like a cancerous disease, and that it shortens your life because it shortens your basic ability to really care for yourself. I’m not sure I agree with all that, but I can attest personally to the long-term effects of not seeing personal value in myself.
Still, coming to terms with my feelings on the subject doesn't do much to change those feelings. With the bath water cooled, I pull the plug and stand carefully, turning on the shower to rinse away the bubbles. As I wash my hair, I force myself to relive some of my more bitter memories, hoping that I can somehow scrub them away with the suds of my shampoo, disappointed to realize that I can not.
My memories are like stubborn mold, the stubborn kind that starts slow and then takes over a residence when no one is looking. I can’t scrub them away; I can’t exfoliate them and wash them down the drain. They hold fast to me, a part of me, always with me. Remembering how I felt earlier at work that day, I have to fully admit how bitter and how emotionally low I have become.
Faced with the reality of the humiliating, worthless view that I hold of myself, I know now that I have to do someth
ing. I need desperately to change my outlook. This alone is progress; from this point, it’s only a matter of figuring out exactly what I need to do to change my life.
Chapter Five
"I just don't want to," I whined.
"I know Cass," Renee said, laughing. "But you'll love it, and you know how mom misses you."
We'd been on the phone all afternoon, my favorite kind of phone call. Renee, Chelsea and I had a bad habit of sitting around all day on conference calls when we couldn't get together in person. They lived close to their mom, sharing a small apartment a few blocks away from where we'd all graduated high school together.
They were the only people who knew how down I was, and how much I really dreaded going to the family reunion Janet was trying to put together. I don't know how much they were aware of when we were growing up, or if they knew how much trouble I'd had with Rick, but I've always suspected they knew more than they'd let on. Certainly, they knew that Rick was the reason I didn't want to attend the reunion.
"You can do this. Rick really has changed a lot, just like mom said. We've all grown up, and he's gotten much more mature over the years. And really, it's not like we're little girls anymore," Chelsea said, prepping for her usual pep talk.
"I don't know if you remember, Chels," I butted in. "But I have never been a little girl. Not even as a child. I may have been small at birth, just maybe, but I don't have any pictures to prove that."
"Oh, jeez, this again," Chelsea said. She hated when I made jokes about my weight. She and Renee were identical twins, thin as sticks. They had some minor curves, but they were small breasted and narrow hipped, chronically slender even though they ate like wild animals. Renee had never been bothered with doubts about her body, but while I'd been wishing to be thin, Chelsea had been wishing to be round. She'd always envied my curvy body and couldn't stand when I was unkind to myself.
Renee laughed. "You two are amazing, always on this kick about your bodies. It's just a body, and you're going to be stuck living in it as long as you live. So you may as well get used to it. You look the way you look. I, for one, think both of you are really beautiful, in your own ways."
"If only you could see it," Chelsea and I chimed in together, mocking Renee's typical happy talk.
"Anyway," Renee went on, ignoring us. "Cassaundra, if you really hate your body so much, you should come try some gentle exercise. I mean, I know you've done the whole weights thing, and you've done time on machines and stuff, but what you need to do is come to yoga with me. It's a lot easier on the body, it works in a totally different way to remake your form and your posture, and it's good for the soul, too."
"Oh, yeah," I said, dropping to the couch in my apartment. "Because when a fat girl wants to feel better about herself, she really ought to hang out in a room full of skinny people wearing spandex. Especially if they are so incredibly fit, and so incredibly flexible, that they can have sex in ninety-five different positions without suffocating under their own boobs."
Chelsea burst into helpless giggles and laughed until she ran out of air. She struggled for a while to speak through her laughter before giving up, and soon, they were laughing helplessly together. For a while, the only sound coming through the line was the ragged gasp of breath as each woman tried to contain her amusement.
"Ninety-five positions," Renee muttered, finally sobering. "I haven't even tried ninety-five yoga positions, let alone sex positions."
"Oh my God, you two!" Chelsea shrieked, laughing again. "Thank goodness no one can hear us but us! Imagine what mom would say!"
Renee laughed, raising her voice an octave in her effort to mimic the sound of their mother in lecture mode. "In my day, they didn't even have ninety-five positions, and we didn't talk about things like that. Now if you three could just behave like ladies please!"
"Ugh," I grumbled. "I just can't believe she thinks I can just get together with Rick and we'll all have a peaceful little shindig. Even at the funeral when your dad passed on, he was just awful to me. That wasn't that long ago; am I supposed to believe he could really be that different from what he was before?"
"He really has grown, Cass," Renee said. "Losing dad softened him some, I guess. It kind of took the cruel out of him, a little bit."
"Hmmph," I snorted. I was having trouble imagining Rick as anything other than the self-assured, cocky jackass that he'd always been.
"How about I take you shopping?" Chelsea said. "I can't have a curvy, sexy body like yours, but let me help you find something great to wear. Something made for women who have boobs. And hips. We'll find you something in one of those stores for soft, luscious women who look like, you know, women."
"I resent that!" Renee cut in. "I look like a woman, skinny or not!"
"Yeah, yeah," Chelsea continued, ignoring Renee's protest. "As I was saying, I want to help. Let's go out and find you something flattering."
"I don't know," I hedged. I despised shopping for clothes. They always seemed to look just perfect on a hanger, or even a mannequin. On me, however, the greatest clothes seemed to shrivel up and settle in all the wrong places. It didn't matter if Chelsea threw flattering words at me like luscious, voluptuous, or curvaceous, I knew what I really was, and that was fat.
Still, Chelsea really did love my curves; she loved my look. And she loved me. I knew she'd never steer me wrong.
"You know you're going to agree," Renee said in a singsong voice. "You always agree to go with her, and she always finds you some great new something. You know it's true." Forced to concede, I accepted Chelsea's offer, heading for my kitchen as we made plans to go reunion shopping later in the week.
I have a serious addiction to tea, so while I chatted with my sisters, I set my teapot to heat some water. Measuring scoops of fragrant tea leaves into a basket screen, I defended against Chelsea's determination to make me dress like some kind of sex-crazed curvy bombshell.
"I can't wear that kind of stuff!" I exclaimed. "I'm just not made for that kind of look, I can't do it. Besides," I added, before she could cut in a protest, "it's a family reunion. It's just us, and Janet. And Rick." Stupid, lousy, crappy, jerk-faced Rick.
"Ok, I'll keep it simple," Chelsea promised.
"Well I already know what I'm wearing," Renee said smugly. "The same thing I wear every time mom makes me come home and there's food. I'm wearing yoga pants, and a giant, comfy, sloppy, dinner-bloated-belly-hiding t-shirt."
I finished making my tea while Chelsea lectured Renee on the horrors of simple, "lazy" clothing. Listening quietly, I tried to hide my envy. If I wore that same outfit, I'd likely look like a stuffed sausage on the lower half, and someone too undisciplined to care how I looked on the top half. I'd look like a slob. Not Renee; she wouldn't look like a slob in the outfit she'd described. She'd look fit and lovely and cute.
Hating my body, I wrapped my hands around the ceramic mug I liked to drink my tea from, and inhaled the fruity berry scent of the tea. Risking a small sip, I burned the tip of my tongue, exactly like I always do. Smirking to myself as the twins chattered on, I cleaned up the mess I'd made, grabbed my tea and headed for the dining room.
It was a small room, rather plain compared to the rest of my apartment. I had been slowly working my way through the apartment, decorating one room at a time; I hadn't done anything to the dining room yet. There was pretty much nothing in it, other than the same small, worn table that I'd bought when I'd moved in years ago. It was a closeout special, though there was nothing at all special about it, and I'd been wishing for an excuse to buy a new dining set for ages.
"Oh please," Renee was saying, as I set my tea down on the table and pulled my Sudoku book closer to my seat.
"What?" Chelsea asked, and I tuned in again, having lost track of what they were talking about.
I never did get back into the conversation. As I turned to get a pen out of my purse, I hit my tea with my elbow and the mug rolled over, spilling a river of pink liquid over the edge and onto my foot. Jerking back from the
splash of still-hot tea, I lost my balance, slipping in the growing puddle of tea on the hard wood floor.
I probably should have leaned to fall over the table, or maybe I should have just bit the dust and let myself hit the floor. But when you're on the way down, logic sort of runs out on you. Mine did; I sat hard in the chair I'd just pulled out, and suddenly it gave way beneath me.
"What the heck?" Chelsea and Renee spoke together, dropping their conversation as they heard the crash and the inevitable stream of violent swearing.
"It's nothing, guys; I’m ok. I just made a freaking cup of tea, and I hit the stupid mug and knocked it everywhere." I struggled to keep my voice from catching, as an embarrassed lump built up in my throat and humiliation burned a hot trail into the pit of my stomach.
"I have to go; I need to clean all this up." I said goodbye to my sisters, and hung up as hot tears welled in my eyes and flooded over.
Fat Chance Page 3