That’s because I was.
CHAPTER 2
Living Large
O
ne of the prerequisites for being a fat girl, besides owning at least one pair of pants with an elastic waistband, is that you must have horrible fat stories. If someone has not made you feel small for being so big, you won’t be allowed into the fat-girl clubhouse, even if you can’t fit through the door frame anyway. I sometimes feel as if I didn’t live up to my full discrimination potential because I don’t have as many fat-girl horror stories as some women. I really should have left my room more often.
The earliest fat shaming I can recall occurred in middle school, a time in my life I have worked hard
not
to recall. I prefer to believe that the universe skipped past that time like the lame track on an otherwise stellar CD. In middle school, the student body was corralled like cattle onto the bleachers in the gym until the bell rang ten minutes before classes started. In between weekly brawls, fat girls made for good entertainment.
One morning a boy sidled up to me and tapped me on the shoulder, getting dirty boy germs on my shirt. “Hey, see my friend over there?” he asked, as if to verify I was not blind as well as fat. I turned and looked
at a pack of three boys wearing jeans and shit-eating grins. They were flanked by another guy who held his head in his hands and looked as uncomfortable as I felt. “He really likes you,” my attacker said.
I thought so little of my physical attractiveness that I doubt I would have realized if someone actually did hit on me. However, I could tell I was just the big butt of their joke. I turned back to stare at the fascinating air molecules swirling in front of me, wishing I were as invisible as the oxygen I was inhaling in frustrated breaths. The boy continued to stare at me, waiting for some sort of reaction. I wouldn’t look at him. He didn’t exist. I didn’t exist. This wasn’t happening. Someday I would become thin and beautiful and I would wreak vengeance on all of these boys, even if I didn’t know their names.
Bored with his prey, the boy bounded back up the bleachers. If I could rewrite the story, I would throw in a scene in which I tripped him and then kicked him in the balls.
I was shy, so I didn’t venture outside of school much. Most of my time was spent indoors watching other people’s lives on television rather than living my own. The brick and drywall of our house became a safe zone from the war fought at school. My brothers never made fun of my fat and my parents never nagged me about it.
Outside of the home, insults could happen anytime, anywhere, at the most unexpected moments, like a roadside bomb exploding. KABOOM! I would suddenly be reminded that I was fat and that I should hang my head in shame toward my potbelly. Insults don’t bounce off a jiggly belly as well as the laws of physics and elasticity would have you believe. I’d never talked to the girl across the street who was a year ahead of me at a different high school. Our first verbal exchange didn’t make me regret that. As I walked across the driveway to my parents’ car, I saw her perched in an open window on the second floor with a friend.
“Jelly roll!” one of them yelled.
I stopped in confusion. “What?” I asked, throwing my question across the street.
“Jelly roll!” they now replied in unison as they started giggling. The words stung as if they’d tossed sticks and stones. Why was she doing this? Weren’t there ants that she could burn with a magnifying glass instead? “Jelly roll” wasn’t even a good insult. The boys on the bleachers were far more creative.
The next year they moved out after a kitchen fire. I liked to imagine it happened when she was baking jelly rolls.
Sometimes attacks seemed accidental. As I was walking across the school courtyard thinking about my math homework, one of two boys behind me murmured, “Doesn’t Jennette have the biggest ass you’ve ever seen?” Their snickering hit me like shrapnel. The boys on the bleachers wanted to confirm I wasn’t blind, and the boys behind me seemed to think I was deaf. Did everyone think fat people were disabled? I
did
have a huge ass, so in a twisted way I was just hearing the facts. But high school boys have a way of wielding the truth as a weapon.
And I never fought back.
A
mong your fat-girl stories, there is a mandatory requirement of at least one traumatic shopping experience. If you have never been reduced to tears in a dressing room, please check your waist measurement; you may not actually be fat. Or you’re one of the handful of fat girls who never had body issues and always rocked your fatness. If so, congratulations; you are way more awesome than the rest of us who let our thunder thighs steal our thunder.
My worst fat-girl shopping experience came near the end of high school, a time when senioritis should have kept me from caring about
anything. At graduation the boys and girls wore robes in our school colors, red and white. They arranged our seating so we spelled out the first initial of my school’s name. Snap, click, a picture was taken for the guidance counselor’s wall to celebrate that he was finally rid of us. The white gowns weren’t a solid white, just a cheap, sheer nylon, so the girls had to wear white or pastel dresses under their robes. Comply or risk not participating in the ceremony.
My high school made a 250-pound teenage girl buy a white dress. I should have sued it for child abuse.
I may as well have been searching for a six-toed, purple, hairless yeti since they are far more common than a flattering white dress on a fat girl. After my first unfruitful day of shopping, I wanted to cry all the way home like the little piggy I felt like. Instead, my mother and I rode home in silence. I rolled down the window so the glass wouldn’t reflect the image of my fat face. The car pulled into the driveway and I got out as quickly as I could, heading straight for the stairs and my bedroom. I didn’t bother turning the lights on. The three hundred-thread-count pillowcase muffled my sobs and absorbed my tears. Shame and self-loathing are best savored in private.
But I still didn’t have a dress. The next day my mother and I descended upon the last fat-girl clothing store in the area. If we failed to find something, I was going to march to the department store next door and buy a white bed sheet to wear as a toga.
I shoved metal hangers across metal racks to make nerve-racking screeching sounds. It provided the perfect background sound to accompany the horror I experienced when I turned around. It couldn’t be. No. Not now. Not here.
It was my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Warren, with the long black hair that descended her short, squat frame past her butt.
“Jennette, fancy seeing you here!” she bubbled.
I stood paralyzed, as if caught in the glare of her shiny, silver, square earrings. I hated seeing teachers outside of school walking around pretending they were normal people with actual lives. Once I had spotted my math teacher at the grocery store and ducked behind a row of diet pills to avoid her. It was the best use for Fen-phen I’d ever found.
“Uh ...” I mumbled. Then my mother swooped to my rescue.
“Hi! I’m Jennette’s mom. We met at open house night,” she said as she offered her hand to Mrs. Warren. “We’re just here shopping for a graduation dress,” she continued, as her personality filled the room and I blended into the background.
As they kept gabbing, I started wandering to the dressing rooms with two dresses that might not make me look like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’s chubby little sister. As I turned the corner, I nearly dropped the clothes hangers in shock.
There, exiting the dressing rooms, was Mrs. Fielding, my current senior English teacher, who taught from her chair because standing all day hurt her feet. I was shopping at the same store as not one, but two, of my English teachers. If they had been math teachers instead, they’d have known the odds against this happening. Mrs. Fielding stepped back in surprise as we locked eyes.
“Jennette, fancy seeing you here!” she said. Then she noticed my entourage and greetings were exchanged. All of us. Together. At the fat-girl store. At the exact same time.
There must have been one killer sale going on.
“Why don’t you go and try on those dresses?” my mother said.
“Yeah, we can have a little fashion show and tell you what we think,” seconded Mrs. Warren.
At this point my memory goes blank. I can’t recall the ordeal of trying on several white dresses for half of the English faculty at Everett
High School. I’ve read that the mind blocks out traumatic memories for its own protection. I figure it’s for the best.
I did finally find a dress that wasn’t completely atrocious. I sold it online after eBay was invented. I’ve never run into my former English teachers while shopping again either, but only because I moved to another state.
N
ear the end of high school I became friends with Felicity. I liked that she got free movie rentals. She liked that I was fatter than she was.
One easy way to make yourself feel thin is to hang out with someone who is fatter than you. I didn’t do this much because not many people could make me feel thin. When I was still only moderately fat in middle school, a girl who was fatter than me moved into a rental house down the street. I can’t remember her name. I
can
remember sitting at our out-of-tune piano when what’s-her-name appeared next to me. For the first time in my life, I felt small, like a cotton T-shirt that had shrunk three sizes in the dryer. If I’d known how to, I would have played a dramatic minor seventh chord to accompany my shock. Did people feel this tiny when they stood next to me?
I never became good friends with the nameless girl from down the street, but Felicity started calling me a lot our senior year. She was one of only two people who asked me to do stuff in high school to coax me out of my room.
Felicity was pushy and I was a pushover, and so our dysfunctional friendship began. I didn’t think she was fat, but like many teenage girls she thought she really needed to lose fifteen pounds. Superman may have x-ray vision, but Felicity could spot a six-ounce weight loss or gain on anyone’s body. She would frequently mention who she thought had lost weight. I found this fascinating and disturbing. I wanted to
be thinner, but I wasn’t betting on the prom queen’s dress size. Felicity even joined Weight Watchers for a while. I’m sure all the truly fat girls at her meetings must have wondered what a thin girl like Felicity was doing in their cult.
Felicity and I eventually “broke up” during our first year of college. She was high maintenance and I had gotten to a point where I was afraid to answer the phone. My family was too cheap to get caller ID. I had started avoiding her when I went home for visits and would tell people not to mention that I’d been in town. I was hoping our friendship could just fade out like many high school relationships. I hated conflict and didn’t know how to dump her gracefully.
It was also hard because Felicity and I had good times. We weren’t friends just because I was fatter than her. She was brave when I was cowardly, passionate when I was hesitant. She was living out loud while I had the volume turned down so I wouldn’t disturb my neighbors. She’s still the only person I’ve sung “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with badly and boldly while driving along the interstate with the windows down.
I eventually sent Felicity an email telling her I thought our friendship had run its course. This still ranks in the top ten shittiest things I have ever done in my life. She at least deserved a phone call, but I knew I’d just break down and start crying over the conflict. In Felicity’s life story, I don’t doubt that I am credited as “Mean Girl #3.”
I fear a high school reunion because Felicity’s the kind of person who would slap me. And then throw a drink in my face. And then stab me with a toothpick. We’d sometimes go for walks on the perfectly trimmed grass of the park near my house and talk about how thin we’d be by our high school reunion. I wonder how she’d feel about the fact that I actually did it. She might have done it too. I wonder if it made her feel less miserable about her body, or if after all that walking she ultimately ended up in the same place she started?
B
eing fat was traumatic, but the food was
amazing
.
I ate like most people would dare to only if an asteroid were scheduled to demolish the planet tomorrow afternoon. I’ve never been on the set of an XXX video, but I’ve seen food porn up close and personal. Culinary voyeurism, just like shocking tales of sexual exploits, will make you sit back in stunned silence thinking, “She put a
what
in her mouth?” I didn’t get fat because I had mad broccoli cravings. I ate frozen orange juice concentrate straight out of the can. I sucked on spoonfuls of Tang crystals. At restaurants I would grab packets of jellies and jams from the center of the table, peel back the silver covers, and lick the gooey insides off my fingers.
My daily lunch during sophomore year of high school was a box of Everlasting Gobstoppers I bought from the librarians as soon as the bell rang. My breakfast was four slices of whole-wheat bread.
I slathered slices of white bread with butter and ate them raw. If I had thought to sprinkle sugar on top, I would have tried that too. I bought bags of mini-marshmallows and popped the cylindrical puffs into my mouth one by one, counting how many I could dissolve into a gigantic, high-fructose blob without suffocating.
When my family was away for a week, I made a no-bake Oreo cake so I could eat it all myself. I snacked on rocks of brown sugar. I drank maple syrup straight out of the jar until the sugar burned the back of my throat.
And it was
good
.
As freaky as these tawdry excerpts from my childhood food diary are, I didn’t eat like this all the time. Incidents involving a collectible Care Bears glass from McDonald’s containing equal parts of chocolate syrup and milk are memorable
because
they didn’t happen every day. You don’t get to be five feet and nine inches tall without having some nutrients in your diet.