I suppose that there must have been a time between the moment I was cut out of my mother’s womb and when I neared the four-hundred mark that I fit into these smaller sizes. I just couldn’t remember when. I was so proud of wearing size Large shirts that I posted a picture of myself standing next to my new car on my blog, which had some regular readers now. When I was obese, I probably would have just posted
a picture of the car sans owner. While everyone loved the shiny new addition to my debt, a reader named Susan summed up the consensus well with her comment, “If you had on pants that were the right size, we would have all been even more impressed.”
Evidently my jeans were as baggy as MC Hammer’s balloon pants. I was a tube top away from getting arrested by the fashion police. I rehabilitated myself, ditching the size-26 jeans for the next size down, snapped another photo, and posted it, certain that I would win the approval of my readers. Instead I got this comment from M, “Those pants? Do not fit you either. And your shirt is too big.”
Now my entire outfit was under criticism. I slept on it, wondering if I were in denial about my size. If I went shopping in Chicago, would I be one of those poor saps pulled aside by the
Oprah
makeover crew to do a show on what not to wear? As I moved my laundry basket the next morning, I saw the box of skinny clothes in the closet sitting beneath it. Trying on old jeans and blouses had been one of the best ways for me to determine how fat I was during different times of my life. I pulled open the cardboard lid and looked inside at the old shirts and pants that I’d outgrown but could never bring myself to throw out, always holding out hope I might be thin one day. I sorted through old clothes and memories. That was the brown shirt I wore around campus my freshman year of college. Those were the black, checked shorts I lived in at summer camp in 1997. Why did I ever think cargo pants were appropriate for temp work?
I pulled out the old corduroys that had been my dream pants. When I’d lost weight after high school one of my goals was to be able to wear these pants. I’d bought them when I was sixteen. They’d only just barely fit then and they had never fit again.
I tried them on and they fit. Really fit. I could stand and sit down in them without inhaling half the oxygen in the room. They were a size
22. I
was
in denial about the pants. My blog readers might have been confrontational, but they were right. I couldn’t fit into the corduroys when I weighed 220 in college, but I could when I weighed 229 now. I must have developed muscle after all. I had completely missed the stage in my life when I was a size 24. It was like waking up from a coma and losing one year of my life.
I kept losing weight until I saw the brown bottom of the box of skinny clothes. It hadn’t seen the light of day for more than a decade.
CHAPTER 10
Two Weddings and a Funeral
F
at girls of the world, please forgive me. I fulfilled a fat-girl stereotype at my aunt’s wedding reception. I stole a piece of cake.
That’s a lie. I stole two pieces of cake.
I did not get caught. That would have set back the fat-girl acceptance movement by several years. I was sneaky and avoided capture, so I set us back only by a few weeks, or at most a month or two.
I was somewhat exhausted from attending my second wedding in two weeks and making conversation at a table with a couple of aunts, an uncle, and two first cousins once removed. My aunt had gotten two bites into her apple spice cake before she got up to snatch a slice of the armadillo cake from a passing waiter. It wasn’t made from armadillo, just shaped like one as a tribute to the film
Steel Magnolias
. A couple of cuts with the cake knife revealed red velvet filling inside the pastry mammal, which made it look like a bleeding sacrifice to the marriage gods. Then the DJ started spinning
YMCA
by the Village People and everyone at the table headed to the dance floor, leaving their food unguarded around a woman who’d lost more than a hundred pounds.
It was a huge tactical error.
I was halfway through my own slice of apple spice cake when I had already decided I wanted another. I wished scientists could figure out how to stimulate the proper neurons in my brain to re-create this taste experience. Then I could enjoy it without actually consuming calories. It would be like birth control for food, all the pleasure and none of the possible negative side effects. Sadly the slices were pretty small, only two-thirds the size of a slice of bread, so the pleasure of eating them didn’t last long. As I stared at my aunt’s unguarded piece of cake, I was stuck in a moral quandary.
She must not want that fine culinary creation,
I thought.
She got a different piece instead. It would be a shame to waste a piece of cake. It would make baby Jesus cry.
For purely religious reasons, I leapt up, snatched the plate, devoured the cake, and shoved the empty plate onto my uncle’s place setting. Fat girl’s first rule of stealing food: Always get rid of the evidence. Second rule: If necessary, frame someone else.
Baby Jesus must have been really happy that I didn’t make him cry because my younger brother, Jim, came over from the adjoining table with another slice of apple spice cake. Jesus was multiplying the cake like loaves of bread and fish. Jim had grabbed the icy wedge from my diabetic cousin who couldn’t eat cake. I felt so horrible for her that I scarfed down the entire slice and licked all the crumbs so there was nothing left to tempt her.
As the DJ kept spinning hokey tunes people liked dancing to only at weddings, the servers swooped in and completely cleared our table before anyone sprained his or her back doing the bunny hop. They took all the plates, even the ones full of food. All evidence of my stolen cake was removed from the scene of the crime, and I hadn’t even needed to bribe anyone. My grand theft pastry was completed flawlessly. I didn’t even feel bad about eating it. I didn’t want to be a woman who never took pleasure in food without feeling guilty. I didn’t feel bad about
stealing it either, but that was because I had questionable ethics. Cake that good was hard to regret. I could get hit by a bus any day. It was best to enjoy life and good food while I could. My weight loss was a cross-country trip, not a race across town. I had to stop and check out the world’s largest ball of twine and the giant dinosaur statue on the way. Who wanted to stay cooped up in the car the whole time?
Besides, I had been brave enough to attend both weddings in sleeveless dresses that brazenly displayed my batwings of underarm flab. I deserved a reward, especially for not swinging my arms too wide and accidentally smacking a kid in the eye by doing the Macarena. I’d decided to buy two formal dresses for the weddings, because even though I was wearing a size-14 dress, I felt great about myself. The last time I’d been to a wedding, I had been a bridesmaid in a size-26 gown. I was paired with a groomsman whose posture was so good I was tempted to refer him to a proctologist who could check for a flagpole up his ass. I felt like a blob rolling down the aisle next to him.
I’d started dress hunting when my mother brought home the spring catalog from the bridal store where she worked. That was when I realized a frightening truth—most formal dresses were sleeveless. There were literally only two dresses with sleeves featured in thirty-six pages of designs. At first I thought this was because the store was targeting skinny girls. The designers obviously didn’t realize that fat girls hated their flabby upper arms. As I continued my search for plus-size dresses online, I discovered this was not just skinny-girl couture. Sleeves were out. Some dresses came with a wrap to drape around the wearer’s arms, but I knew I would fidget with it all night long or accidentally dip the end in the toilet. I pitied anyone who had a scar on her shoulder or a mutant mole on her arm that she didn’t want to display.
I visited a local plus-size thrift store in hopes of finding something beautiful and cheap. I discovered a silver dress with sparkly straps and
took it into the makeshift dressing room that doubled as a bathroom. I pulled it on over my purple panties and mismatched bra, twisting my arm like I was trying to get myself to say “uncle” as I zipped it up the back. I turned to look in the mirror.
Sleeves were overrated. This was the dress. No one cared as much about my underarm flab as I did anyway.
It was only a couple of weeks later that I had to shop for a funeral.
My father’s sister in New Jersey had terminal cancer. My life was just beginning again, but hers was near the end. I walked into my favorite clothing store and started circling the racks like a vulture, searching for something black. It felt wrong to be shopping for the funeral of a woman who wasn’t even dead yet. The beeping of the register at the moment the cashier rung up my black polyester pants felt like the final death knell, as if the act of buying the clothes might kill her from a thousand miles away. I had the pants, so I had better have a funeral to wear them to.
By the next Wednesday I was driving out to New Jersey from Indiana with my younger brother. I had planned on packing boxes that day in preparation for the move out of my mother’s house and into my new apartment, but I had no grounds to complain about rescheduling my U-Haul reservations. My mother was still alive, after all, even if I felt half dead from all the cake stealing and small talking I’d done earlier in the month.
I would also get to see my father for the first time since the day we’d stood in the Johnson County courthouse and witnessed the official dissolution of my parents’ marriage. Two weddings and a funeral all in one month. If I crashed two more weddings would Hugh Grant show up to seduce me?
I hadn’t made any long-distance trips since I’d starting eating right. I stocked a cooler full of celery sticks, apples, and oranges as a defense against fast food. If we careened off a cliff and became trapped in the
twisted metal of our wrecked car, we’d have survival food for a week. I ate a salad at each rest break (though eating a burger and fries would have been much more convenient) because salads were preferable to grilling chicken breasts on the engine block.
After twelve hours on the road, we stumbled past two rabbits and a cat into my aunt and uncle’s back kitchen door in Wilmington, Delaware. After depositing our bags in the guest rooms, I wandered back to the kitchen, where a wall of casseroles and baked goods lined the counter like the Great Wall of Carbohydrates.
“Are you hungry? Do you want something to drink?” my aunt Beth asked.
“Oh, we just ate a couple of hours ago. I’m not that hungry,” I replied, hovering at the counter. I really wasn’t hungry. I hoped she didn’t think I was secretly starving but lying about it. When I had been fat I didn’t want people to think all I did was eat, but now that I was managing my weight I didn’t want people to think all I did was not eat.
“Are you sure?” Beth asked as she leaned over to open the oven and pull out ... a fruit salad. “The church ladies have been ringing the doorbell all day. We’ve got brownies, pies, turkey ...”
“Is that a baked fruit salad or something?” I replied. The water in Wilmington was polluted by all the chemical plants nearby, but did they have to cook every food they washed?
Beth laughed. “Oh, no! When I’m not using the oven to cook I sometimes use it for storage. Do you want some?” She set the salad on the kitchen table.
“No, that’s okay.” Beth seemed worried that they’d never be able to eat all this food before it went bad. I doubted it would all fit in their fridge. It did seem strange that the price of admission to a house of mourning was baked goods. Didn’t people usually
lose
their appetites when they were in bereavement? Did visitors leave brownies
lying around in the hopes that the scent of chocolate would tempt mourners to eat?
The next day my aunt and uncle, two cousins, my brother, and I drove to the viewing in their van. When I entered the long lobby that stretched the length of the building, I saw a bearded man in a black suit at the end of the hallway who resembled my father—if he had lost ninety pounds. I waved halfheartedly at the man, unsure if he were my dad, not wanting to commit too hard to the gesture in case I’d made a mistake. I could always claim I’d been swatting a mosquito.
The man bounded forward down the hall and his face came into focus. It
was
my father. “Hello!” he said warmly, smiling, glad to see me after so many years. I was surprised by how different he looked. I bet this was how old friends felt when they saw me again. I wondered what he thought of my own transformation.
“Hi,” I said awkwardly. We stared at each other. The eye contact made me uncomfortable. We hadn’t talked much since he’d left three years ago, and I didn’t know where to start. Someone said something eventually and we ventured into the viewing room. Between the first and second viewing the family decided to go to an Italian restaurant. I stood in the faux fresco lobby next to my dad waiting for the servers to push enough tables together to seat us all.
“So, you’ve been dieting, eh?” he asked me.
“Yeah, sort of,” I replied. “Eating more fruits, veggies, and lean meats. Stuff like that.”
“Do you count calories?” he asked. “I try to keep it under 1,600 calories a day,” he said pulling out a small notebook to show me his food diary.
“Not really,” I said. “I keep track of what I’ve eaten in my head and sort of guesstimate.” It was far too uncomfortable to talk about why he’d left, but we could talk about calories. That was ... nice?
“I found your blog, by the way,” he said.
I paused in fear. “Oh, which one?” I asked. I irregularly posted to a personal journal, but I’d been writing in the fat blog three or four times a week lately.
Only the solemnity of the occasion kept me from slapping my hands to my cheeks and imitating the Edvard Munch painting,
The Scream
. There should be a word for the feeling of fear and horror when you realize a family member has discovered your blog. Emblogessment, perhaps? I suddenly tried to remember the content of every one of my two hundred entries in the span of two seconds.
Had I said anything about him?