Half-Assed

Table of Contents

 

 

 

To Mom, Jim, and Tom.
You guys are the half of myself that
I hope I never lose.

CHAPTER 1

A History of Fatness

Y
ellow noodles of fat spilled out of Ms. Ribbit’s gut. It wasn’t what I was expecting. The textbook featured a precisely drawn diagram of internal organs, clearly defined and colored in neatly between the lines. There wasn’t supposed to be any fat. Ms. Ribbit either needed liposuction or someone had stuffed her with Ramen noodles before a shipping error diverted her from the nearest French restaurant to Mrs. Anderson’s biology class.

“Ew! That is disgusting!” the boy standing next to me said. Then he started chuckling. The boy’s name is forgotten like the names of dozens of boys from my youth, though their words are far more memorable.

“We have the fattest frog ever!” He smacked the table in laughter and pointed out our frog’s flayed guts to another nameless boy at the next table. “I guess she took too many trips to the IHOP!”

I looked down at Ms. Ribbit. Metal pins speared her four legs, crucifying her to the dissection tray and displaying her white belly in the most vulnerable of positions. Naked and dead, her guts spilling into the sky, she made it hard to imagine we could devise a way to insult her further, but grade school boys were creative.

I looked down at the flab around my tummy and the thickness of my thighs. I noticed the slight chubbiness of my fingers that held the scalpel. Then I looked back into Ms. Ribbit’s glassy, black eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I know exactly how you feel.”

Then I continued to cut.

 

 

I
don’t remember when I first realized I was fat. I just always was. I do remember the first time someone called me fat. Unsurprisingly, it happened at the beach.

I was about eight years old, a number as round and curvy as I eventually became, when a girl my age and my size stopped me as I was frolicking among the waves in my hot pink bathing suit. She asked me to play, so we started building sand castles using cracked plastic buckets. I got up to retrieve some wet sand near the waterline to add a turret to the east tower. My kneeling playmate pushed herself up against the shifting sand and stumbled behind me.

“Hey, where are you going?” she asked, slightly panicked.

“I just needed to get some more sand,” I replied.

“Oh, okay,” she said, staring at me for a moment. “We fat girls need to stick together.”

Oh my God. Had she just called me fat? I gave her a look up and down. Was I as chubby as she was? Looking back at photos from that trip, I have to admit I resembled a morbidly obese flamingo. Regardless, I couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. How could she call me fat? Shouldn’t she realize how much that hurt?

“Uh, I gotta go,” I said and dashed back to the safety of my parents’ beach towel, leaving my fat friend alone and our sand castle sinking into the growing floodplain.

I hadn’t been a fat baby. I’d entered this world at eight pounds, five ounces, although I eventually came close to leaving it at 372 pounds.
By fifth grade I was clearly aware of my growing problem. When I was ten, I filled out a questionnaire for school that went like this:

Too bad my answers to the next questions were as follows:

I
t’d be nice if I had a good scapegoat for my obesity. I did come from a family of fat people. I could blame their second-rate DNA, except my older brother was thin. He was the errant piece of data screwing up the bell curve of blame. When my mother, father, younger brother, and I were in an elevator, we’d do quick math upon seeing the warning sign, DO NOT EXCEED 2,000 POUNDS. But my older brother was no threat to the system of pulleys and cables. I don’t know how he managed it. I should have checked his closet for a secret minifridge stocked with baby carrots and celery.

Sadly, I didn’t have a strange disorder to be documented in medical textbooks. I was never sexually abused and driven to build a fat suit of armor for protection. My mother never once nagged me about my weight or put me on a diet, saving me thousands of dollars on therapy. This was great and all, but it left me without any good fall guys. If you’re fat, you definitely need a scapegoat or a glandular problem.

The truth is, I was a big, fat cliché. I ate too much and most of my exercise involved walking from the couch to the refrigerator between commercial breaks. I stole the last piece of pie. I went back for a third slice of cake. I ate all the Girl Scout cookies and I probably would have eaten the Girl Scout too if she had been covered in chocolate, caramel, and coconut flakes.

In fourth grade we experimented on a pair of white rats. One rat drank from a bottle of sugar water while the other was given plain H
₂
0. One of the rats got fat and the other didn’t. Obviously I was supposed to learn something about health and nutrition from this lesson, but I just learned that rats like to poop in your hand when you try to weigh them. I never thought about those mice and I never thought about what I ate. When I was hungry I munched on whatever I wanted to, be it half a loaf of Italian bread or a bunch of grapes in the bottom of the crisper drawer.

Every Sunday my parents would buy chocolate-covered, creamfilled éclairs, a reward for attending church without faking rapture to break up the boredom. On my birthday I was sure to get the corner piece of cake, coated in frosting on three sides and topped with a gigantic sugar rose. In my early teens I learned to make fudge off the side of a cocoa powder box and made more batches than the local bakeries. Candy making could be a tricky exercise. Wait too long to pour the bubbling concoction and you’d spend the evening scrubbing hardened sugar crystals out of a pan instead of snuggling up with a square of creamy walnut fudge. I learned exactly when to pour the fudge, just when the surface started to lose its gloss, right when I could no longer see the faint reflection of my double chin in the batter.

That was how we ate at my house. There was rarely anything to contrast against my experience. I got a small inkling of the differences when I visited my friend Justine’s house, where they didn’t wear shoes
on the immaculately clean carpets and they didn’t keep soda in their refrigerator. What did they drink? Water? When they offered me a beverage, I had to make do with juice that lacked any carbonated bubbles. When I ate dinner at my friend Cristy’s house, I was confused when her mother offered me dark brown bread. I didn’t know bread came in colors other than white. The “normalness” of my diet could only be judged by comparing it to someone else’s, and I didn’t do much comparing. Even if I had noticed that I was eating far too many donuts, realizing the problem doesn’t instantly fix it. Diagnosing yourself with a cold doesn’t clear your nasal passages.

I didn’t sit around all day licking beaters and waiting for my skin to graft to the polyester couch either. I never held my birthday party at McDonald’s, nor did I get the Easy-Bake Oven and the snow cone maker I wanted for Christmas. We ate cookies, but we also ate cauliflower. My mom always served a vegetable with every meal, and I got a lot of exercise roller-skating around the basement to Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul songs one summer while I tried not to sail into load-bearing walls. I bonded with my mother by mixing batches of brownie dough in the kitchen but also by riding down to the beach with her in my Big Wheel, sweating and pedaling fast enough to make the fluorescent flag behind me flap wildly in the wind.

Our bathroom featured aquamarine porcelain speckled with paint flakes from the ceiling, but no scale. I discovered how much I weighed only on the occasional trips to the doctor’s office. By middle school, that number was 160 pounds.

“Don’t worry,” the man in the white coat wearing a stethoscope for a necklace told me. “You’ll grow into it.”

I was unconvinced.

By high school, I found myself exhaling when the nurse slid the heavy iron weight up the white markers on the analog scale, hoping
that the rush of air out of my lungs would drop at least an ounce or two off the number. She pushed the lead weight past the 100 mark, then the 150, and finally the dreaded 200 marker. She moved it slowly out of courtesy. It was more polite than slamming it to the far right immediately, which would have saved us time but not embarrassment.

I was one of the fattest people in my class. I’d stopped wearing hot pink bathing suits, fearing bright colors might draw unwanted attention to my size. Instead I spent my senior year of high school wearing baggy, flannel shirts, as though plaid were a form of fat camouflage, the vertical and horizontal lines making onlookers dizzy enough to distract them from my size.

I feared school bus emergency drills. Twice a year we’d have to jump out the back of the bus from three terrifying feet above the ground. Two boys were usually recruited to help students off. When I thought of the terror I would see in their eyes when they had to help me off, my heart rate would rise as if there really were a fire on the bus. What if I stumbled and tackled one of them onto the black pavement? Then we really would need an ambulance.

As I aged, my weight was like the stock market—it had its ups and downs, but on average it trended upward. My first recession came during marching band camp, which drained some fat cells, but unfortunately also drained my patience. I threw up after the first day of practice while waiting at a red light, upchucking rescrambled eggs into a barf bag that my mother had stolen from our last airplane trip (just in case). Later I suffered a spontaneous nosebleed on the field. Then I rubbed a patch of flesh off my heel by wearing ill-fitting marching shoes. Near the end of the season, I had to drag my sorry ass to the shade of the conductor’s podium after nearly collapsing from heat stroke.

All this and I still didn’t get a PE credit.

I lasted only a year before I turned in my brocade jacket and feathered hat. Thus ended my only youthful flirtation with anything resembling organized exercise. I suspected the band leaders wanted me to leave, though I might have just been suffering from fat girl paranoia: the secret belief that everything that went wrong could be blamed on my fat. I was too breathless to play during the second half of the routine. Several times the camp leaders mentioned that we would drop out of the AAA division and into the less competitive AA division if just one person quit. I held out for the whole season, blood in my shoes be damned.