Shrill

by Lindy West

  Grudgingly, I’d come to see Aham’s point a little bit. He fell in love with this person, and in my desperation to hang on to him, I morphed myself into something else entirely. He wanted a partner but I gave him a parasitic twin. Except worse than that. A parasitic twin that cried all the time. Worst X-Files episode ever.

  At the bar, Aham and I ate tater tots and got drunk. We didn’t talk about our relationship and I didn’t cry. I felt detached; my capacity for sadness was maxed out. I had given up on trying to force him to come back to me, and he apologized for trying to force me to be his friend. Somehow, we had fun. Relief poured back and forth between us, quietly electric. Aham had a gleam I hadn’t seen in months. For a minute, we held hands, and something woke, tiny but palpable, in my chest. Outside, it snowed, big, fat, wet flakes. I dropped him at the bus stop and said I’d see him in L.A., feeling something that wasn’t quite despair for the first time in a month. He said we’d talk. Of course, that never happened—he flew back down the day after the tree fell, and I was already gone.

  I took my bereavement juice box to the family lounge and called Aham in L.A.

  “Can you just come?” I sobbed.

  “Of course,” he said.

  We weren’t back together, but we weren’t not together. We weren’t sleeping together, but he slept in the bed with me and held on to me as much as I needed. He ran errands for my mom, made her laugh, cooked eggs Benedict, booked a piano player for the funeral, figured out how to get a banquet license while I cried in the liquor store. My aunt and uncle came up from Arizona and stayed with us; Aham’s girls would come on the weekends; friends and family dropped by nearly every day. We sat around and drank beer and watched football, all piled together in that little white house. It was a beautiful chaos, the same kind my mom grew up in and loved so much, the kind that I never understood growing up alone. It’s weird to look back at the saddest month of my life and see that little vein of joy.

  Aham and I weren’t getting back together—we swore we weren’t, we couldn’t—but when I wasn’t looking, he had become my family anyway.

  The Beginning

  We went back to L.A. and lived in limbo for a few months. Aham went on tour; I started working at Jezebel. We weren’t “together,” but we were happy in a totally unfamiliar way.

  I’m not saying that if your relationship is in trouble you should cross your fingers that your dad dies.* But after my dad’s funeral, I was older. Aham wasn’t the only thing in my world anymore. My pain (and, later, my career) had pushed him aside a little bit, and that space was exactly what he needed. “I am a narcissist,” he jokes, “but I didn’t actually want to date my own reflection.” Aham had come through for me, in that month of emotional triage, with a selflessness that I think surprised us both—not out of some sense of obligation, but because he really wanted to be there, in my mom’s basement, mixing gin and tonics for my auntie Astri.

  It was a horrendous period, but somehow we had fun. We worked so hard to make each other laugh. We were just ourselves again. It was like a reset.

  When Aham got back from tour, we sat down for a two-day feelings marathon. Even for me, a professional leaking sad-bag, it was a nightmare. There were scheduled breaks. We punched in and out like trudging coal miners. We wrote up a contract specifying how much crying was allowed. (My opening offer was “100 percent of the time”; Aham low-balled with a blank stare.) The details are boring, and some of them are just mine, but at the end of it, we were a couple again. I don’t even think of it as “getting back together,” because it didn’t feel like a reconvening of the old relationship—it was a new one.

  “If we’re going to do this,” he told me, giving me his most Intense Face, “we’re really doing it. Don’t change your mind on me.”

  It’s hard to talk about, because the realist in me (i.e., my mom) kind of doesn’t believe that “couples getting back together” is a real thing. It’s something I believed in when I was a child, when I understood a relationship as something that happened to you, not something you built, and I thought The Parent Trap was the ultimate love story. But we really did do it, and the only explanation I can offer is that we weren’t the same people in Relationship: Part Deux as we were in Relationship: The Phantom Menace.

  Aham still wasn’t sure that he believed in marriage anymore. It was understandable—he’d been divorced twice in the previous six years. I used up some of my tear allotment on that, not because I have any particular attachment to the institution of marriage, but because I just wanted to prove to the world that I was worth marrying. I grew up assuming that I would never get married, because marriage was for thin women, the kind of women who deserved to be collected. How could I be a bride when I was already what men most feared their wives would become? I was the mise en place for a midlife crisis. I was the Ghost of Adultery Future. At least, that’s what I’d been taught. Aham was my shot at vindication. Come on, man. Think of all the fat girls we can inspire with our lifelong legal commitment!

  “Okay, what if we still like each other this much in five years?” I bargained, annoyingly persistent but in a charming way, I’m sure. “Can we talk about getting married then?”

  “In five years, if we still like each other exactly this much, sure, we can talk about getting married,” Aham said, rolling his eyes. “You are the most annoying person on earth.” That was good enough for me. It was basically a proposal.

  We moved back to Seattle a few weeks after that. We rented a house and settled into a routine, our pre-breakup life already distant and foreign, like it happened to someone else. Every day I take his face in my hands and squeeze, because I think he might be a mirage; he declares “Crab Fingers,” his second-favorite game, and pinches me until I fall out of bed. I call him and say gross stuff like, “I want to hug you and kiss you!” and he goes, “Who is this? Jessynthia?” and pretends to have a secret family. We show our love in different ways. But being in love holds its own kind of challenges.

  Once, Aham and I were sitting at a bar, holding hands, and a woman recognized me. She was a fan of my writing, so she came up to introduce herself, and we shambled through a few minutes of pleasant chitchat. Sensing the conversation was running out of steam, she asked me one of the questions that people always ask me in those awkward, floundering moments: “So, what’s it like to work from home? Aren’t you lonely?”

  “Not really,” I said. I gestured to Aham. “He works from home, too. It’s hard to feel alone when there’s a guy constantly playing the trumpet in your face.”

  She laughed and turned to him. “So, you two are roommates?”

  Yes, lady. We are platonic adult roommates who hold hands at bars. This is, clearly, the only logical explanation. Actually, since you asked, I recently sustained a pulsing gash to the palm and he’s just holding the wound closed until paramedics arrive. Also, every night before bed, a rattlesnake bites me on the mouth and he has to suck out the poison. It’s the weirdest thing. We should probably move.

  I wasn’t surprised that this woman took so many willful leaps past “couple” and landed on “roommates” in her split-second sussing-out of our relationship—it happens all the time. But it was a disheartening reminder of an assumption that has circumscribed my life: Couples ought to “match.” Aham and I do not. I am fat and he is not. He is conventionally desirable and I am a “before” picture in an ad for liquefied bee eggs that you spray on your food to “tell cravings to buzz off!” (COPYRIGHTED. SEND ME ALL THE MONEY.) It is considered highly unlikely—borderline inconceivable—that he would choose to be with me in a culture where men are urged to perpetually “upgrade” to the “hottest” woman within reach, not only for their own supposed gratification but also to impress and compete with other men. It is women’s job to be decorative (within a very narrow set of parameters) and it is men’s job to collect them. My relationship throws off both sides of that equation, and a lot of people find it bewildering at best, enraging at worst.

  There are long,
manic message board threads devoted to comparing photos of me with photos of Aham’s thin, conventionally pretty second ex-wife (number one is blessedly absent from the old MySpace page he doesn’t know how to take down; number two is not so lucky), and dissecting what personality disorder could possibly have caused him to downgrade so egregiously. Servers always assume we want separate checks. Women hit on him right in front of me—and the late-night Facebook messages are a constant—as though they could just “have” him and he would say, “Oh, thank god you finally showed up,” and leave me, and some dire cosmic imbalance would be corrected. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that they “match.” They can talk about hot-people problems together—like “too many clothing options” and “haters.” I wouldn’t understand.

  It’s not that I’m not attracted to fat men—I’ve dated men of all sizes—but the assumption that fat people should only be with fat people is dehumanizing. It assumes that we are nothing but bodies. Well, sorry. I am a human and I would like to be with the human I like the best. He happens to not be fat, but if he were, I would love him just the same. Isn’t that the whole point? To be more than just bodies?

  When I think back on my teenage self, what I really needed to hear wasn’t that someone might love me one day if I lost enough weight to qualify as human—it was that I was worthy of love now, just as I was. Being fat and happy and in love is still a radical act. That’s why a wedding mattered to me. Not because of a dress or a diamond or a cake or a blender. (Okay, maybe a cake.*)

  Aham took me out for dinner on my thirty-second birthday, then suggested a “quick nightcap” at our neighborhood bar. Everyone was there—it was a surprise—our friends, our families, the kids, a cake. I was so happy. Aham took my hand and led me to the back; there was a paper banner that said my name (the bartender made it—we go there a lot); our friends Evan and Sam were playing a duet on cello and bass. I was confused. Why were there somber strings at my birthday party? Why was Aham doing Intense Face? Wait, it’s almost ten p.m. on a school night and we’re at a bar—why ARE the kids here? Then it all happened at once: the knee, the ring, the speech, the question, the tears. All the hits. It was a full-blown grand gesture.

  He tricked me! He said five years. I was ready to wait five years. He only lasted two.

  Later, I asked him why he did it that way—such a big spectacle, such an event, not precisely our style—and I expected something cliché but sweet, like, “I wanted to make sure our community was a part of our marriage,” or, “I wanted everyone to know how much I love you.” Instead, he said, “One time when you were drunk you told me, ‘If you ever propose to me, don’t do it in the bullshit way that dudes usually treat fat girls. Like it’s a secret, or you’re just trying to keep me from leaving you. Thin girls get public proposals, like those dudes are winning a fucking prize. Fat chicks deserve that, too.’”

  It’s not that I’d ever particularly yearned for a grand gesture—the relationship I cherish lives in our tiny private moments—but the older I get and the longer I live in a fat body, the harder it is to depoliticize even simple acts. A public proposal to a publicly valued body might be personally significant, but culturally it shifts nothing. A public proposal to a publicly reviled body is a political statement.

  As soon as you start making wedding plans, you’re bombarded with (among a million other beckoning money pits) a barrage of pre-wedding weight-loss programs. Because you’re supposed to be as thin as possible on your special day. After all, there will be pictures! And what if someone remembers your butt as looking like what your butt looks like!? “I’m only eating grapefruit and steam until my wedding.” “I enrolled my whole wedding party in bridal boot camp.” “I bought my dress in a size 4 even though I’m a size 6.” And that’s totally fine, of course, if that’s your priority. It wasn’t mine.

  I don’t hide anymore in my everyday life, and I definitely wasn’t going to hide at my wedding.

  We got married a year and a half after the proposal, in July, at my parents’ cabin a few hours outside of Seattle. Even though I believe that death is a hard return, I can always feel my dad at the cabin. It was his favorite place. I walked down the aisle to a recording of him playing “Someone to Watch Over Me” on the piano; Aham wore a blue plaid suit; a bald eagle flapped over the ceremony; someone spilled red wine on one of the beds and my mom was in a good enough mood to forgive them; I got my fucking period (will you never leave me be, fell ghoul!?); it poured down rain after a month of uninterrupted sunshine, then abruptly stopped just as we emerged from the tent to dance; Meagan killed everyone with a toast about how Great-Aunt Eleanor died believing Meagan and I were lesbian lovers; a friend of mine, post-late-night-hot-tubbing, got confused about the route to the bathroom and walked into my mom’s bedroom naked. Oh, and Aham’s one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother had a stroke on the way to the wedding, went to the hospital, got better, and still came and partied. It was a gorgeous, chaotic, loving, perfect day.

  We scribbled our vows five minutes before the ceremony.

  Aham’s read:

  You know that thing that I do that you hate? That thing where I talk about how years ago when we were friends and I always wanted to hang out with you and I would always text you, and I would see you and be like, “We should hang out!” and then you’d always cancel on me? I’m never going to stop bringing that thing up, because I like being right. And all those times that I tried so hard to get you to hang out with me, and I just wanted to be around you so much, I’ve never been more right about anything in my life. The only way I can think to say it is that you are better than I thought people could be.

  I am happier than I thought people could be.

  Slaying the Troll

  One ordinary midsummer afternoon in 2013, I got a message from my dead dad. I don’t remember what it said, exactly, and I didn’t keep a copy for my scrapbook, but it was mean. My dad was never mean. It couldn’t really be from him. Also, he was dead—just eighteen months earlier, I’d watched him turn gray and drown in his own magnificent lungs, so I was like 80 percent sure—and I don’t believe in heaven, and even if I did I’d hope to nonexistent-god they don’t have fucking Twitter there. It’s heaven! Go play chocolate badminton on a cloud with Jerry Orbach and your childhood cat.

  But there it was. This message.

  It was well into the Rape Joke Summer and my armor was thick. I was eating thirty rape threats for breakfast at that point (or, more accurately, “you’re fatter than the girls I usually rape” threats), and I felt fortified and righteous. No one could touch me anymore. There was nothing remarkable about this particular tweet—oh, some white dude thinks I’m ugly/fat/stupid/humorless/boring? Does the Pope fart in Latin?—and by all conceivable logic it shouldn’t have even registered. It certainly shouldn’t have hurt.

  The account was called “Paw West Donezo” (Paw West because his name was Paul West, and donezo because he was done being alive, done making up funny songs, done doing crossword puzzles, done not being able to get the printer to work, done getting annoyingly obsessed with certain kinds of Popsicles, done being so strong, done being my dad).

  “Embarrassed father of an idiot,” the bio read. “Other two kids are fine though.”

  His location: “Dirt hole in Seattle.”

  The profile photo was a familiar picture of him. He’s sitting at his piano, smiling, in the living room of the house where I grew up. Some of the keys on that piano still have gray smudges worked into the grain, the ghost of old graphite where he’d penciled in the names of the notes for me when I was small. I never practiced enough; he always pretended not to be disappointed. The day they sold that house, when I was twenty-five, I sat on the stairs and sobbed harder than I ever had, because a place is kind of like a person, you know? It felt like a death, I thought. My family was broken, I thought. I wouldn’t cry that hard again until December 12, 2011, when I learned that a place is not like a person at all. Only a person is a person. Only a death is really a
death.

  Watching someone die in real life isn’t like in the movies, because you can’t make a movie that’s four days long where the entire “plot” is just three women crying and eating candy while a brusque nurse absentmindedly adjusts a catheter bag and tries to comfort them with cups of room-temperature water.

  Saturday afternoon, when we could feel his lucidity slipping, we called my brother in Boston. My dad’s firstborn. “You were such a special little boy,” he said. “I love you very much.” He didn’t say very many things after that.

  I would give anything for one more sentence. I would give anything for 140 more characters.

  The person who made the “Paw West Donezo” account clearly put some time into it. He researched my father and my family. He found out his name, and then he figured out which Paul West he was among all the thousands of Paul Wests on the Internet. He must have read the obituary, which I wrote two days after my dad’s lungs finally gave out. He knew that Dad died of prostate cancer and that he was treated at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. He knew that I have a brother and a sister. And if he knew all that, he must have known how recently we lost him.

  My armor wasn’t strong enough for that.

  What was my recourse? What could I do? This was before Twitter had a “report” function (which, as far as I can tell, is just a pretty placebo anyway), and it’s not illegal to reach elbow-deep into someone’s safest, sweetest memories and touch them and twist them and weaponize them to impress the ghost of Lenny Bruce or what-the-fuck-ever. Hell, not only is it not illegal, I’m told it’s a victory for free speech and liberty. It’s just how the Internet works. It’s natural. It’s inevitable. Grow a thicker skin, piggy.

  “Location: Dirt hole in Seattle.”

  All I could do was ignore it. Hit “block” and move on, knowing that that account was still out there, hidden behind a few gossamer lines of code. “Paw West Donezo” was still putting words in my dead father’s mouth, still touching his memory, still parading his corpse around like a puppet to punish me for… something. I didn’t even know what.