“He must be proud of you.”
My father has always felt that being fat was a choice. When I was in college I would sometimes meet him for lunch or coffee, and he would stare at my extra flesh like it was some weird piece of clothing I was wearing just to annoy him. Like my fat was an elaborate turban or Mel’s zombie tiara or some anarchy flag that, in my impetuous youth, I was choosing to hold up and wave in his face. Not really part of me, just something I was doing to rebel, prove him wrong. I started seeing him even less. Now, I wouldn’t say he’s proud of me. As far as he is concerned, things have just become as they should be. I’ve finally put down the flag. Taken off the turban. Case closed. Good for me.
“I guess he is.”
“He never really notices. But he notices. We should do lunch. Or brunch. Someplace by the water. Depending on what your beau would like. What are you going to wear?”
The last time Tom picked me up from the airport, I was wearing a black twinset and a red fishtail skirt I drown in now. Three-hole Docs with thick rubber soles that deeply depress my mother. Don’t they depress you? A satchel with a skull Liquid-Papered on the front flap slapping against my broad thigh.
“Not sure yet.”
“You’re really going to move out there, huh?”
“Eventually. We can’t do the long-distance thing forever. And because of his job he can’t move to where I am.”
“What about your job?”
“I can temp anywhere. Or there are bookstores. Cafés.”
“Cafés? But didn’t you get a degree in . . . what was it? Medieval something, right?”
French literature, though it was art history in the end. And I didn’t finish, exactly.
“Something like that. Don’t worry, I can get another job.”
“Still. All the way out there.”
I look at the lake, thinking of the broad expanse of red desert where he lives in the Southwest, of strange yellow sky, a body of salt water upon which even a plane could float. The way he looks at me, his gaze serene and unflinching.
“I like it out there,” I tell my mother.
“But how are you going to survive in the desert when all you eat is fish?” She looks at my scrod. “What kind’s that one?”
Just four ounces, I told the monger from across the icy trays of splayed fish, tentacles, and live crustaceans. As he was wrapping it up in brown paper, he threw in a butterflied fillet of another slim fish I didn’t recognize, its head still on. I looked at its milky eye, its open mouth full of tiny little teeth like claws, then at him grinning.
Trust me, he said.
“Well,” my mother says to me, “should we get ready?”
? ? ?
In the bedroom, later that night, she flips channels until we find an old Hepburn I haven’t seen. “You haven’t seen this?”
Though she claims it’s her favorite, she isn’t watching the screen. She’s watching my face to see if I’m catching all the lovely bits, all the lines she’s memorized. I keep my features immobile as I sit by the sliding glass balcony door, her crystal ashtray between my splayed legs, blowing smoke rings into the crack between the door and the frame. I pretend I don’t feel her watching me. “This is so nice,” says my mother, breathless on the bed. “I like this. Taking it easy.”
You sure you’re okay just sitting here? I asked her tonight at the salsa club, sweat dripping from my chin into her cranberry and soda with lime.
I’m having a ball, she said, twiddling her toes and taking a sip of her drink as if to show me what a ball it was. You go back out there, she said. Go back, go back! All night, she watched from a table while on the dance floor, I got passed from one partner to the next. Turns they didn’t cover in the free salsa lesson tripped me up, but I did my best to follow, just follow, it’s easy, or so all the panther-footed men told me. Don’t try so hard, said a man in a black guayabera patterned with red flames when I lost my footing on a spin. You’re trying too hard, he said. To be all sexy. With your hips. Just listen to the music. Just follow the beat. Annoyed with him, I went back to my mother.
Can we go home now, please?
But she wouldn’t leave until the floor had emptied of men and the band had begun to pack up. I thought for sure she would want to go home after that, but when I mentioned it, she said, Are you kidding? The night’s young! Go where you would go if I wasn’t here, if you were with friends. The truth is I’d go home. Instead, she retrieved a city weekly from a trash can on the corner, made me hunt for a Goth night in Capitol Hill.