Fat has a purpose.
It cushions and warms, repels and destroys.
It touches. It’s always touching something. It feels and breathes and it suffocates. Pushing, pressing, taking the shape of your jeans, the tiny impressions of your elastic waistband; it makes an impression.
Fat keeps no secrets, tells no lies, but paints the truth on its dimpled canvas.
You see sunrise and sunset in its stretched blue veins, hanging loosely from your tree trunk bones.
It expands, it retracts, it doesn’t ask for forgiveness. It doesn’t ask for much at all, but fat has a voice. It never stays quiet. Try as you might to feign silence, there it is. Its wide gaping mouth folding over itself, but still being louder than you’d like.
Fat tells stories.
Imagine ignoring every mirror you come across, but only in public. Not like at home in that musty attic room, with every light out but the harsh bare bulb sitting on the vanity, burning the invisible feather hairs of your face if you lean too close. I always lean too close, my mouth clenching tight in silent surprise before I notice the pain and lean away. I do this slowly, allowing the heat to gradually diffuse into the dusty air. Then I back up. I let myself fill the empty spaces of the mirror, the mirror cracked from my fist, cracked from the insults I’ve thrown; my voice is that hard. I step back, and in one spider web of glass my arm swallows every space. Pale pink flesh chases away the shadows: a full, sagging breast; a bloated, stretched stomach; greedy thighs, rubbing, rubbing, blocking out the light.
Fat fills the room, steadily, hungry as it covers everything—leaving indentations in the carpet, breaking every chair. Solid wood chairs not prepared for the abuse, for the weight. I feel sorry for the chairs and that’s when I scream and don’t stop screaming. When the fat breaks chairs I break the mirror screaming; fat just can’t shut up. Glass fragments sparkling bright as snow as they fall onto a bed of their perfectly broken brothers, now my fat is on the floor. It’s looking up at me from the stained carpet, it’s dripping down the chipped walls, it’s caving in the already sunken ceiling. Fat chokes me and I clamp a sweating hand over my burning red mouth. I am trapped by fat.
Imagine being trapped by fat. Encased. Embalmed. Imagine avoiding every mirror—that includes other people’s eyes. Don’t let anyone tell you that fat makes you invisible. Have you ever not seen the four-hundred pound woman trying to squeeze her fat ass into a bus seat? It’s not your imagination that needs to be stretched; it’s hers, if she thinks she’ll ever fit in that two-foot wide plastic bowl of a seat. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s not cruel, it’s fat. Fat fact.
Thud. Not for the first time I can’t tell if this is the sound of me falling, or of a hard fist breaking down the door; a set of skinny hands pulling me out of myself, into the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hallway.
***
“Don’t eat too much, hon,” she says with a concerned furrow in her brow. I could kill her, my mother, me staring at my half a grapefruit I could kill her. My fat’s broken another chair and I stare at that grapefruit and relish every hard stab of my fork into its glistening flesh. My mother, the health specialist, is concerned about my weight. Who isn’t concerned about my weight?
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want to get any fatter!”
My brother. Such tact.
I throw the rest of the grapefruit away, its corpse lies among many already in the smooth plastic lining of our trashcan. I see myself reflected there: piggy eyes looking down a piggy nose sitting on a piggy, jiggling, triple-decker chin. I hate my chin. It doesn’t tuck neatly beneath my jaw, like my mother’s, or jut forward in protest like my father’s. It doesn’t add to my sneer or compliment my smile like my damn brother’s. Instead it doubles, triples, under itself and wraps around my face worse than the itchiest wool scarf. And my chin certainly isn’t seasonal.
Fat knows no boundary. Fat knows no season.
Fall around here is the worst. It’s still t-shirt and shorts weather, and of course, I wear neither. It’s supposed to be a time of new beginnings, with school anyway. Fresh packs of crisp lined paper fall instead of leaves and kids spend hours picking out that perfect outfit for the first day of school. They hide it in the back of their closets or in the original bright tissue paper department store wrapping so they’re not tempted to wear it before they can say with a huge grin on their face, “Hi, I’m a Skinny Bitch and can’t wait not to get to know you!” For me fall is as sick and twisted as the fact that as students get older, and bigger, their desks get smaller. It wasn’t so bad in elementary school in those spacious personal desks, their cavernous insides swallowing up my stomach. Then in middle school, with those high glossy lab tables covered in mutilated animals, I guess even then the other kids were too busy dissecting sheep brains and plucking out the eyes of dead frogs to pick me apart. They were too busy to pin me down on those blue silicon mats. But in high school, among the other cruelties of gym class and prom, the tiny twelve-inch desktop connected to that pitiful ten-inch seat is no match for my fifty-six inch hips. My ass droops on either side and kids take the long way to their own desks, around the outside aisles, careful not to brush against my piles of hanging existence.
Here comes other people’s bull-shit theory that fat makes you invisible, because to be sure that I don’t get lost, my teachers put me right up front, blocking everyone’s view.
“Mrs. Rosenthal, I can’t see the board,” says one Skinny Bitch. “Can I find another seat?”
So much for being lost.
“Mr. Montgomery, I just can’t sit here anymore,” says another—this time a Skinny Man-Bitch, his disgusted sneer not even trying to hide. “Can’t you do something?”
This continues in every class until I am alone, a castaway on my own island of fat, distantly surrounded by the tiny clusters of my classmates—little buoys of average body mass index perfection floating contentedly out of my reach.
I see my parents’ heads nearly touching, their lips moving quickly; whispering. They stop when I look up, abruptly standing and moving away from each other like I haven’t already heard, like I haven’t been listening. No, I couldn’t possibly have heard, they must think, not with my ass hanging out of the fridge like that. I would be way too absorbed in picking out my latest pile of calories to notice.
“We have to do something, Carl. This is getting out of control,” she, my mother, says.
“She’s fine, Audrey. It’s just a little weight problem. Kids go through it at this age,” my father says, that protesting chin doing what it does best.
I look up. They stop. They stare. They stare at the 2000 calories sitting on my plate stacked higher than their expectations. And they blush, turn away from each other, and leave.
No, I’m not lost. As I park my enormous self in front of the refrigerator door, left open partly in case I need to reach for the mayonnaise and partly because it’s so hot in all this fat, I’m not lost. They know exactly where to find me.
To my surprise as much as anyone’s, it wasn’t from in front of that open fridge that they—my parents, my brother, my teachers—bound me up and took me away. It wasn’t from in front of the microwave; its muted light wasn’t darkened as they closed in. I didn’t see their reflections approaching in any plastic easy-to-assemble kitchen appliance or the broken attic mirror. And for once, it wasn’t the sound of my own constant chewing that blocked the sound of their voices as they drew near.
The roaring that filled my ears started in the bright, too new locker room of my least favorite place to be. The glare coming off of the spin dial locks from the sun pouring through the gym’s open windows was enough to make me sit down, burying my head in my hands. It was spring and so hot that even I was happy to be forced into a pair of breathable school-issued shorts. A searing flash of self-consciousness forced my eyes open in time to see a myriad of girls’ faces whip behind compact mirrors, mouths snapped shut in time with their locker doors, trapping their judgments inside. Of course, I couldn’t blame them. How often do you see a four-hundred pound fatty parading around in breathable school-issued shorts? It was unheard of, unseen, unfathomable. Usually dressed in layers that could never be too loose, I must have rocked their world, what with my kneecaps having as many rolls as my chin. Huge sweat stains already formed underneath my arms; I couldn’t help it—it was too hot.
As we walked outside, our straggling line of girls merged with the slightly larger clump of boys coming from the opposite end of the artificially lit gymnasium. With their keen interest in fitness they gave their eyes quite a work out; they scanned the tan stretching bodies of both sexes—the girls as potential conquests, the boys as competition. My groundhog-calls-for-6-more-weeks-of-winter white skin must have shocked them, along with the sweat, which by then had drenched my hair, pooled in the folds at the small of my back, and dripped persistently into my mouth; I remember it felt like I was drowning in sweat.
Only the sadistic asshole Physical Coordinators of my high school would make us run in that kind of weather.
“You,” said one of them, his beefy hand waved me to the front of the group. “I want to keep my eye on you.”
It was called an Indian Run, what we were supposed to do. Teams of ten lined up and started to jog, keeping a steady pace as the last person in line sprinted to the front, then the second, and so on. This was supposed to get our minds off the larger task of running a mile and instead focus us on the shorter, more manageable, sprints. It was effective; as we trudged along and I moved further back in the line, this time not because of my fat, jiggling thighs but because of the nature of the exercise, I thought of how we must look from above. A disjointed yo-yo as it spun and rewound. A baby whale breaking from its mother, tasting freedom, then scurrying back to her side. Or just a bunch of skinny kids and one fat ass struggling to keep up.
Finally I was the last person in line and I could feel my fat slowing me down. The distance between me and the other runners grew farther apart. As I tried to sprint to the front I became acutely aware of my flesh touching my own flesh, rubbing itself raw in the merciless heat. The roaring sound in my ears and the glare of the locker room rushed back and closed my throat. I couldn’t breathe, my chest was heavy, heaving. I fell; each layer of fat lost its ability to protect me as the asphalt track tore it from my body. Before I passed out, I saw the expressionless backs of my classmates slowly replace the horizon of trees, and then, nothing.
They say I have a problem with multiplication. No surprise there; I failed algebra. They, the officials of The Cedar Mountain Rehabilitation Facility, say I have a problem with multiplication. My parents are horrified at this, but I’m stuck on the name. The Cedar Mountain Rehabilitation Facility? We don’t have mountains in Florida. We don’t have hills, or even worthwhile sand dunes. I don’t think we even have cedars in the swampy humid stew of what people call “conservation areas.” But don’t quote me on that. Apparently, you can’t quote me on anything because I have a problem with multiplication.
I’d like to think settling into this routine of white sheets, white walls, white uniforms, and white skin isn’t as hard as they make it seem. Their detailed sixty-day recovery plan is glistening fresh black ink on blinding white paper and intimidating at first because they wave it in front of my face, to make me see. To shake my nerves I say to them, the nutritionist and the psychologist and my parents, I say I hope the fat runs off of me as fast as the ink off of that paper. I say this because I’ve noticed that the words are running, making thin, skinny, beautiful stripes down the page and blurring the details of my weight. They don’t seem to find this image as inspirational as I do because the Head Resident crumples the paper out of sight and prints a new copy for my parents to sign, and quick.
They watch me every god damned second of the day, hovering. Worse than my parents, I hear them whispering, see them standing huddled together—only these people don’t blush when I catch them. They mock me to my face. They slowly shake their heads and bring their hands to their mouths, motioning for me to eat, eat.
“We’ve got to fill her up,” they say. They say this as if I’m not already full of their bullshit. As if I’m not already full of fat. I raise a short, stocky middle finger to their pantomime and wonder what the fuck they’re on.
To this they handle me gently and insist that I look at my chart, but without those skinny little lines I’m afraid to see my weight in black and white. With the four hundred pounds already weighing on my sluggish heart I can’t bear to see it staining wide the starchy paper. And they say I have a problem with multiplication.
These people, these doctors and nurses, my parents, they’ve actually lost me. Me, with my fat ass and hanging skin, I know they’ve lost me because here I am, standing alone in the muted egg yolk yellow light of the bathroom on the main floor. And I’m counting. I’m reviewing my basic arithmetic, trying to add things up. Shaking, my hands blurred caricatures of real life, I count and multiply. My chart is on the floor next to me, next to glass shards, next to another mirror I’ve destroyed. I hear them searching for me in the hall, scampering rubber soled shoes holding up feet, holding up beating hearts, hearts looking to save me. And I’m counting, still trying to figure out how this could possibly be true.
“Mrs. Whitman, if your daughter doesn’t start to eat, we’ll loose her.”
My chart says eighty-three pounds. I stand in front of this number and my last broken mirror, and I see what can’t be myself. I fill barely a quarter of the frame and hard bones, somehow my hard bones, look better prepared to cut through my taut skin than the shattered glass at my feet. I’m counting in my head, multiplying eighty-three times five equals four hundred and fifteen and as I count I see the pounds wrap my bones and cover me. They circle and settle around my neck—my itchy scarf of fat. Empty calories I’ve imagined on empty plates fill the hollows of my cheeks, take the sharp points from my hips, and I’m trying to see the point of this. My shaking hands plump before my eyes and I count ten fat fingers groping for an explanation.
“If she doesn’t eat, we’ll loose her.”
Tearing at my skin and bones, at my lack of fat—I’m at a loss.
And as I hear a well-nourished hand turn the door handle I think of my serving of grapefruit and multiply seventy-four times twenty-seven equals two-thousand twenty-five calories I never ate.