Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (2 page)

FIRST THINGS FIRST
, I’m going to tell you why I’m fat, because I actually get this question a lot, much in the way people are asked how they got into live-action role playing or funeral home cosmetology. The answer I’d like to give to people who ask me that question is that God made us all different, and she made some people round-shaped, like me, and some people asshole-shaped, like you. Too direct? Fine, here’s the deal.

Most kids inherit their best qualities from their parents. I inherited mental illness and fat thighs. Oh, and astigmatism and coarse body hair.

I have a friend whose brother makes millions harvesting deer semen from giant bucks that he then sells to other rich people so they can grow their own giant deer to then shoot and hang their heads on the wall. It’s all very
Island of Dr. Moreau.
The point is, if my parents were deer, nobody would jerk them off. I mean, they’re lovely people, but in terms of genetic sperm value, you might as
well just put them out of their misery. Nobody likes chubby deer hooked on extended-release Xanax.

My father had been a state-ranked wrestler in high school. He still has the trophies on the dresser in his bedroom, and cauliflower ear on each side. A remnant left behind from the days of having his head smashed into mats and the sweaty body parts of other boys in spandex singlets. Despite being called what the authorities referred to back then as a longhair, a hippie pot head identified by his shaggy long locks, my dad was also built like an athlete. He stood six feet tall with thick muscular thighs and calves. It was the type of body that could go a decade or so with little upkeep and still be seen as in shape, then kinda in shape, and then just plain dense and heavy.

My mom was short like her Irish mother, but with the dark features of her Spanish father. She had all the makings of a slender woman, long fingers and small hips, but due to severe bouts of depression spent most of her youth and adulthood at varying degrees of obesity. When she was stressed or upset, we ate more. When she was happy and upbeat, we ate more expensive food. I walked away from this combination with the pale porcelain skin of an Irish woman, a mental state that self-medicated with food, and the thighs of Hulk Hogan. I was fat because it was really easy for me to be fat.

Being an overweight child in the 1980s is nothing like it is now. We weren’t tagged like animals and targeted on billboards or news stories about GMOs and high-fructose corn syrup. We flew under the radar with no real concern about athleticism or portion size. Sure, we weren’t exactly desirable for things like dodgeball teams in gym class or the sexy covers of car magazines, but we weren’t hurting anyone. Fat was a normal body shape for me, and after seeing my parents in their underwear, I knew thin was just not going to be in the cards.

I have been skinny only three times in my life.

         
1    At four months gestation.

         
2    After getting my stomach pumped as a toddler following the accidental ingestion of an industrial carpet cleaner my dad absentmindedly stored in a baby bottle.

         
3    Following a marginally successful run as a bulimic.

I remember there was a period of time when I assumed I was, like everyone else, normal looking. You don’t exactly go into kindergarten expecting to build an entourage of attractive rich friends. You glob together with a shared interest in the alphabet, sandboxes, and head lice. And so life went on like that, friendships formed based on logistics and the year in which we all collectively fell from our mother’s vaginas. We were friends not because of how pretty we were, but because of 1981.

All of that changed when my parents decided to become small business owners, or a period of time I like to call “When We
Became Poor.” Prior to this moment, we bounced in and out of the lower middle class regularly. My father worked in maintenance for the Ohio Turnpike, my mother did the bookkeeping for my grandmother’s bridal salon, and we lived in a three-bedroom ranch on three wooded acres gifted to us by my grandparents. Incapable of saving money, my dad drove a leased BMW and my mom ordered preppy duck boots from fancy magazines even though we often didn’t have enough for groceries or utility bills. After receiving a windfall settlement from the airport after the airplanes on the flight path of a cargo company began flying so low that the plane vibrations cracked the walls and windows of our house and filled our bedrooms with the stench of jet fuel, my parents decided to forgo typical investment opportunities and instead put the money into what my father repeatedly assured us was the “flourishing entertainment sector.” When he would say that around the dinner table or at family gatherings, his eyes would light up and he’d reflexively rub his hands together like Scrooge McDuck counting gold coins. I feel the need to add a disclaimer here to mention that my parents are really amazing people; they just make terrible financial decisions.

Video Exchange was housed in a tiny strip mall between a dingy bar and a cowboy supply store. In an Ohio town of three thousand people, this was the third video rental store to open. There were officially more video stores than gas stations. Video Exchange felt millions of miles away from the flourishing entertainment sector my dad promised. It was a depressing establishment, dark wood-paneled walls, cheap black shelves lined with empty laminated movie boxes, and a rusty carnival-themed popcorn machine on the counter.

The back room housed the actual videotapes on bookcases jammed with rows and rows of numbered plastic cases. Even though
I was seven and had absolutely no involvement in the purchase of an eight-hundred-square-foot VHS rental store, every day after school and on weekends the back room became my life. This is actually a pretty normal situation when your family owns a business, sinks all their savings into it, and therefore can’t afford to hire employees. Providing child labor can sometimes mean the difference between having electricity in your house or not.

Unfortunately for my parents, the new business owner euphoria had a shelf life of about six months, and then it became painfully clear why my dad had gotten such a great deal on a roomful of video tapes: nobody wanted them. Despite numerous renovations, new paint, and flashy Hollywood movie signs, the business continued to struggle, and my little brother and I became unintended victims of its downward spiral. Money became so tight we traded in our BMW for a used station wagon. We stopped opening our pool each summer because the upkeep was too expensive. The depression and stress in our home were palpable. I remember my friend Laura and I walking in after school one day to find my dad crying in the kitchen. Seeing your parent cry is a very uncomfortable experience that makes you also, reflexively, cry. It’s Pavlovian.

Within a year, our lives had changed completely. I wasn’t seeing my friends as much; between maintaining their full-time jobs and the business, my parents no longer had time to take us to soccer practice; and dinner became my brother and I schlepping half a mile down a busy highway to McDonald’s and eating in the back room of the video store while watching sports-themed kids movies.
Rookie of the Year, Angels in the Outfield, Little Giants, The Big Green, Ladybugs, The Mighty Ducks
. . . the nineties was a decade made for preteen athletic underdogs with little to no parental supervision.

Now, before you get all riled up, I’m not blaming McDonald’s for my obesity; it’s just that when you are a kid who is suddenly inactive and living close to the poverty line in the back of a video store, fresh veggies are expensive and chicken nuggets take a toll. You would think my parents would have been concerned about my growing waistline, but they said nothing. Although I come from a household that struggled with weight, I didn’t grow up on diets. My mom was never overly feminine, opting instead for short hair and sensible jeans and sweatshirts, so vanity and fad diets were never really her thing. I remember asking her once if she would join the local Jazzercise studio like my friend Audrey’s mom, because Audrey said that while the parents worked out, the kids got to hang out in the playroom and play free arcade games. My mom brushed it off as too expensive and said if she wanted to work out, she had a perfectly good Jane Fonda vinyl record at home she could stretch to. This was true, my mother did own that record, but she never stretched out to it. Instead I’d pull it off the shelf and stare at skinny, feather-haired Jane and wonder where she hid her pubic hair in all those high-waisted leotards. The point is, if my parents didn’t recognize I was overweight, how was I supposed to?

The summer I was eight, my parents took my brother and me on vacation to an antiquated mobile home park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in a borrowed RV. The majority of the inhabitants of this park were retirees who spent their days driving around in golf carts and walking the early morning beach with metal detectors. I was able to befriend two girls around my age, Mischa and Marlena, who were there visiting their Russian grandmother in the campsite behind ours.

Mischa was younger than me, with thin tanned arms and a short blond bowl cut. Marlena was slightly older, with dark curly hair that fell to her shoulders and summer freckles across her cheeks. I loved going over to their camper at night. Their grandma would braid my hair while we ate powdery spiced cookies and she talked about all the men she slept with during the war. I don’t even know what war she was talking about. I just assumed there always was one back then. If there wasn’t, old people would basically have nothing to talk about besides “Oh hey, I got polio again.”

After dinner the three of us would walk the paved loop around the beachside community, talking about makeup and our favorite New Kid on the Block, mine of course being Danny, an early foreshadowing of my preference for men with mouths built for cunnilingus. One night two boys on bikes stopped in front of us and asked our names. Talking to boys was only mildly exciting to me at this point, even though I only had four of them in my class, and they were about as appealing as my brother. We chatted about the ocean and the warm weather, and then one of the boys asked Marlena if she had a boyfriend, and after she answered no, I added that I didn’t have one, either.

Then he looked at me and said, “Well yeah, because you’re fat.”

In that moment, every part of my body felt different. I became acutely aware that the shorts I was wearing had ridden up between my thighs and that the waistband was leaving indentations on my hips. That the fat that had started to accumulate in my breasts wasn’t perky, but rather made them sag horizontally across my chest into my armpits. My tummy was not just pale and soft, but bulbous and unattractive.

Suddenly, something had been put out into the universe, and there was no takes-backsies. Like that quote by Alice Hoffman, “Once you know some things, you can’t unknow them.”

That’s totally what happened when I found out that ducks pee, poop, and have sex all in one hole. They are also massive rapists. It was a traumatizing realization, and I can never like ducks again. It’s also exactly what being told I was fat felt like. My days went from thinking about normal kid stuff to obsessing over my body and what people were saying about it.

Was I the one blamed for passing gas during silent reading time in school because fat people are grosser and fart more than skinny people?

Did the boys in gym fight to not be my square-dancing partner, you know, the equivalent of child marriage, because I was chunkier than the other girls?

Anxiety over my looks consumed me, and suddenly being fat went from a private issue I struggled with to a medical one as
I stood on the scale in gym class during the annual fitness test and was officially crowned the first kid in third grade to reach 100 pounds. A century ago, my weight would have meant I was wealthy and fertile, with access to actual doctors and nondiseased meats. Now it meant there was something wrong with me, as the kids behind me audibly gasped while my gym teacher fumbled with the metal slider on the scale before squinting at the numbers a final time and recording them onto his clipboard. I thought that his record keeping meant the whole embarrassing experience was over with, but by the end of the day a sealed envelope was sent home in my folder explaining the perils of childhood obesity to my parents with a list of helpful tips to aid in my fun journey to a new, healthy lifestyle.