Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It (5 page)

“Oh hun, is your mama not here yet?” she purred sympathetically.

“I’m not sure. I was actually wondering if you had picked anyone to be the school mascot yet?” I asked, pushing the thick wire glasses back up my still-sweaty face. “I was a cheerleader at my last school, and I’d be really good at it.” I was apparently so desperate for inclusion that I was willing to dress up like a dog and fumble through techno music mash-ups at basketball games.

“Sweetie, that costume is a size medium and smells like urine. I just don’t think it’s going to work out for you tonight.” Mrs. Rose turned off the light and ushered me out of the room with her long pink fingernails.

I waited for my mom in the dark outside the school doors, and instead of asking me how it went, she opened up the door, turned up her Carole King tape, and handed me a vanilla milk shake. We drove around in the dark, neither of us wanting to go home or talk, just like we had all my life. When my dad was screaming and out of control or she walked into our rooms crying for no good reason, she piled my brother and me in the car with ice cream and chick music and we just drove. This was her favorite coping mechanism, a tradition I proudly carry on to this day, thank you very much, Juliana Hatfield.

I entered high school at 170 pounds. As an adult I realize that I’m five foot eight and that really, in terms of proportion, 170 isn’t that bad. But as a teenager, anything over 110 was basically the size of those twin fat guys on motorcycles from the
Guinness Book of World Records
. I actually shared jeans with my mother, and I’m not kidding you, guys, there are very few things as bad as that. Mariah Carey in
Glitter
. Maybe.

Supermodels were a really big thing in the nineties. I remember watching MTV one day and seeing an interview with a slew of gorgeous models, and one of the questions from the audience was what life was like for the models as kids. Pushing back tears, Tyra and Nikki and Christy justified their inhuman beauty now by explaining that as young girls, they had been absolute trolls with skinny legs and bony arms, shunned for their big teeth, towering height, and tiny waists. Then one day a switch flipped and that gap between their teeth was quirky and endearing and the gap between their legs was coveted. And I sat there in men’s sweatpants thinking,
Shut the fuck up
. Tiny legs and big foreheads? That was nothing some cute bangs and flare jeans from Delia*s couldn’t fix; I’d have loved to have those problems; I could work with those problems.

Much like my sisters Tyra, Nikki, and Christy, I was often teased about my looks in high school. My wavy hair was cut short and close to the scalp after an at-home blond dye job fried the ends, and I was pretty heavily into a funny T-shirt and denim overall phase. If I lingered too long at my locker or sat too close to more popular kids in class or had too much food on my tray at lunch it was as if they were obligated to keep my self-esteem in check and maintain the otherwise Stepford ecosystem of high school.

Ashley, who sat directly behind me in math class, whispered in my ear that she’d heard I’d had AIDS. I never asked who she’d heard that from. I don’t even know anybody with AIDS. If by AIDS she meant IBS, then, yes, I had that.

Shane in art pretended the ground was shaking when I entered the classroom. I don’t know for sure what he did after high school, but I’m going to assume he became the world’s most skillful mime, because his moves were on point.

Hannah, whom I knew from an ill-advised go on the track team, found my home number and called to tell me I was a fat whore and suggested I commit suicide after I had to give a statement to the
principal about a fight she’d had with another team’s shot-putter.

I became an expert at feigning illness. Colds, migraines, period cramps, diarrhea. Life lesson here, folks: nobody argues with diarrhea. Want to skip school or get out of work? Tell them you have diarrhea and can’t stay out of the bathroom, and then groan a few times for effect.

By the middle of my freshman year, I had accumulated seventy-two tardies and absences, and I had begun to beg my parents to homeschool me. This was still when the only people being homeschooled were religious zealots and people with immunity problems who lived in bubbles, so the fact that I was willing to take on that societal pariah status spoke volumes. But they refused.

“You need to be in school, you need to have social interaction and friends,” my mom would say.

“But you don’t even see any of your friends from high school anymore,” I argued.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends. I was busy dating your father,” she countered. “But I still see him every day, don’t I?”

As a compromise, my mom told the school that we were visiting a relative out of town and pulled me out for a week. She made appointments with optometrists, dentists, and her beauty salon. I don’t know if she knew the criticalness of the situation, or how badly I needed it, but it was one of the most maternal experiences I’d ever shared with my mom. Trendy clothes and cute hair might not have been important to her, but she finally sensed that they mattered to me, and she didn’t protest or grimace at the cost.

I was relaunched into high school with contact lenses, the gap between my front teeth expertly filled with enamel colored bonding, and the Rachel haircut. It was life changing. Boys began respecting me and girls wanted to hang out with me. I wasn’t mooed while at my locker anymore; instead I walked down the hallway confident, high-fiving my peers and laughing at all of our
inside jokes. I’m just kidding; that’s the plot of
She’s All That,
starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook. School still blew, but something did change: I got angry. Have you ever met someone who was bullied in high school and thought,
Well yeah, it sucks they are being bullied, but they’re kinda a dick
? Oh, we’re dicks, all right. We’re dicks because we’re tired of having horrible things said to us all day, of our parents not understanding, of the school not caring, and tired of having to lie down and take it until we’re of legal age to move the hell away and never come back.

Until then, misery loves company, so I decided to do what all angry fat almost-feminists do: I joined the school newspaper. Maybe this would be my tribe? I’d been keeping journals for years, and in fifth grade had won an essay contest at our local library with a piece titled “My Last Six Days with Grandpa.” It was a touching story about a young girl who travels to Florida to visit her grandfather, only to have him die unexpectedly. It featured a bunch of heartfelt monologues as she stood over him, reminiscing of their time together. It wasn’t based on real life or anything: my grandfathers were both alive at the time, I was terrified to fly, and I have no knowledge of how to dispose of a dead human body, but nevertheless, it made the librarian cry and I was awarded first place with a laminated certificate and a pink fanny pack with Velcro. Clearly, I had the chops. Unfortunately, the only “news” the
Swanton Paw Prints
covered were random sports stories intermixed with lunch menus and gossip. My job was basically going up to groups of popular upperclassmen asking for their reactions to such hard-hitting stories as:

HEADLINE: OFFICIAL CLASS SONG POLL: “ALL I WANNA DO” BY SHERYL CROW OR “COTTON EYE JOE” BY REDNEX

(POPULAR ANSWER: THE NINE INCH NAILS SONG ABOUT DOING IT.)

HEADLINE: RANDO GUY IN 3RD PERIOD CIVICS CLASS: FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT, UNDERCOVER COP, OR CONFUSED HOMELESS MAN?

(POPULAR ANSWER: CONFUSED HOBO. ACTUAL ANSWER: IT WAS DANIEL, A STUDENT FROM BRAZIL WHO HAD A FULL ADULT MALE MUSTACHE.)

HEADLINE: WHY DOES THE NACHO CHEESE TASTE WEIRD FROM THE SNACK BAR?

(POPULAR ANSWER: BLACK MOLD.)

Working for the school paper wasn’t the fulfilling endeavor I’d imagined it to be. We weren’t a band of intellectuals speaking up against high school injustices, and most of my ideas for controversial articles such as “Fighting Back Against Misogynist Bullies” (alternatively titled “Everyone Here Is a Bag of Dicks”) were repeatedly shot down. This wasn’t so much a tribe as a group of people looking to get out of English class once a week to mess around in the computer lab. After staying after class one day to resize the front-page layout to accommodate another crowdsourced fluff piece called “Smile Even Though . . .” wherein panels of my peers shared their attempts at happiness despite such first-world problems as “Smile even though . . . my parents keep picking up the phone and disconnecting the dial up modem,” or “Smile even though my ex–best friends secretly three-way called me,” I noticed an ad from our school choir teacher, Mrs. Zedlitz, looking to recruit chorus members for the spring musical,
The Wizard of Oz.

Theater was something I’d secretly always wanted to try. In my elementary school’s production of
Robin Hood,
I’d been cast as the understudy for the lead role . . . of Robin Hood. We actually only had four boys in our class, and Mrs. Page assured me boys played
girls and girls played boys in Shakespeare all the time. The day of the play, the real Robin Hood was out with chicken pox, so I stepped into the role in a pleated dress, floral leggings, and a full beard Laura had hurriedly drawn on my face in the bathroom with a Sharpie. The beard didn’t come off for a week, and Robin Hood with puberty boobs and a pleated dress was a disturbing visual, but I’d been bitten by the bug. I’d told Mrs. Page I wanted to be an actress on
Saturday Night Live
or perform on Broadway, and she shook her head and told me I’d make a great hairstylist, because I had pretty hair. That is a common chubby-girl compliment, by the way. Pretty hair and pretty faces: it’s what skinny people feel safe complimenting us on when we ask if our jeans make us look fat.

“Hey, do these jeans look too tight in the leg?”

“Oh my God, Brittany, you have the best hair.”

Not wanting a repeat of Cheerleading Weiner-Gate, I showed up to auditions and signed up for the chorus, because the chorus took everyone. To my surprise, I was assigned the role of an “Ozian Beautician.” I wore a short green dress and sang a cute little verse about stuffing the scarecrow with new straw.

Rehearsals were going great, and I began hitting it off with other cast members. We’d laugh and joke between scenes, and meet after school to rehearse lines and gossip. As per tradition, the cast met for a group meal before the opening night, and I found myself back at our very table in Chi-Chi’s eating fried ice cream and baskets of chips surrounded not by my little brother and mom, but a whole table full of friends. Everything felt full circle. Toward the end of each of the evening’s performances, I stood behind the curtain backstage and watched as two skinny teenage stagehands dressed in black lowered Glenda down on a shaky white sparkly platform.

Glenda: You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.

Dorothy: I have?

Scarecrow: Then why didn’t you tell her before?

Glenda: Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.

Dammit, Glenda, she was right. When I thought about what made me happy, it wasn’t being liked by everyone in my class, it was being there, singing and dancing and entertaining alongside other overly dramatic people in caked-on stage makeup. Things I’d always had it in me to do, just never the confidence to try. For the first time, backstage in the auditorium at Swanton High School felt like home; it had become my tribe. I was able to channel all the angst and self-deprecation I’d spent years cultivating into something of value besides Sylvia Plath–esque journals under my bed. I began writing plays and sitcoms and telling people I wanted to be the next Carol Burnett, and they shook their heads, believing me.

By my sophomore year, I began landing lead roles. And by lead roles I mean the funny supporting lead to the much more attractive and less visually jarring main character. I often had more lines and even a few great songs, but there was always some kind of hook. Like, I had a wooden leg or a prosthetic nose or I talked like Jodie Foster in the movie
Nell,
but I had a heart of gold and a great personality. I was Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn in
The Music Man
. I was Queen Aggravain in
Once Upon a Mattress
. I auditioned and made show choir and performed dinner theater and entered state singing competitions. My confidence was sky-high.

My senior year I decided to try out for the lead in
Oklahoma!
Not the tragically slutty hillbilly cousin or the matronly old aunt, but the big one. The Shirley Jones. I had taken three months of voice lessons to beef up my soprano, and showed up to the audition wearing a maternity-cut prairie dress I’d bought at a Mennonite craft fair the next town over. To be fair, they are a surprisingly petite people, and almost all Mennonite dresses are maternity dresses.

My gay friend Casey agreed to be my audition partner, and we choreographed our scene to perfection, including the romantic kiss at the end. That was actually the hardest part; getting Casey to kiss me like I was one of the singers from Savage Garden and not like I asked him to eat bull scrotums on
Fear Factor
. We walked onstage like a totally normal heterosexual pioneer couple that had found love in windy Oklahoma and sang our hearts out. How could I not get this part? It was my moment; everything had finally come together. I was Kelly Clarkson with matte lip liner on my face, confetti raining down, winning
American Idol
.