“If you don’t eat lunch you’re going to be hungry later. Why do you always do this?” At the next table, a young man was speaking to a skinny young woman, maybe his girlfriend. “I know you’re hungry.”
“I’m not.” The girl, who had a beakish face, turned toward me. I returned to my laptop.
Dear Kitty, Last summer in Palm Beach I met this guy Ryan. See, Ryan knows my cousin Becky and well, this is a long story, so let me start at the begin—
Delete.
Dear Kitty, My friend Kelsie has a thigh gap and I was wondering how I can also get—
Delete.
Dear Kitty, I’m sending a photograph of me in a bikini. Do I look—
“. . . fat?” A slim teenage girl two tables away stood up and turned around before the gaze of her mother. “Mom, pay attention. Do I look fat in these shorts?”
“You look fine,” the mother reassured her. The mother was as fat as I was. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away.
In college, my roommates, four thin girls, all friends of mine, were fond of saying “Do I look fat?” just like that girl had said. Sometimes they would pose the question to me, not seeing or caring that when they said “Do I look fat?” they were really saying “Do I look like you?” It was assumed that no one wanted to look like me, not even me.
I turned again to steal a glance at the girl’s mother, who was looking down at her hands, as if ashamed. If I were really going to confront someone, as Verena wanted, then I would confront that girl. I’d capture her and put her inside my laptop where she’d be trapped with thousands of Kitty’s girls in a kind of hell and I’d force her to twirl around in her shorts forever saying, “Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat? Do I look fat?”
I was already fat. I was the worst that could happen.
I didn’t return to the café again. Despite my initial fears, I didn’t think Kitty would find out that I wasn’t doing my work. She barely noticed me. Perhaps I could go on collecting paychecks for weeks or months, even years.
Instead of answering Kitty’s email, I watched television. Stanley Austen appeared on The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report to discuss what continued to unfold in London, but he refused to acknowledge that he had been threatened. “Even if I were threatened, I wouldn’t worry in the slightest,” he said, his sleek silver hair contrasting unpleasantly with his suntanned skin. “I’m used to crazy, bitter women making threats. They complain incessantly that my fashion magazines exploit women, then on the other hand they complain that the alleged exploitation isn’t spread around equally among the fat ones and the ethnic ones. I gave up listening to them years ago.”
“But what about all the metal detectors and barricades that have suddenly appeared outside the Austen Tower?” asked Cheryl Crane-Murphy.
“That was in the works well before all this Jennifer nonsense,” he said. “Jennifer” was media shorthand for the violent events occurring on two continents and the group assumed to be committing them; even if Jennifer was a real person, she couldn’t have been acting alone.
Cheryl Crane-Murphy moved on to discuss American HipHop, a cable channel that was headquartered near the Austen Tower in Times Square. Earlier in the week, the CEO admitted he had been threatened, but he wouldn’t say how. In response to the threats, he announced that the twenty-four-hour music channel would no longer show videos that degraded women. Commentators wondered what the channel was going to show instead, since all day long it was bitch this, bitch that and there was an endless supply of booty moving through space like smooth brown planets. Cheryl Crane-Murphy and her roundtable of experts wondered if the station would go bankrupt. I turned the channel to American HipHop and saw they were broadcasting a test pattern with a message on the screen reading WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS INTERRUPTION TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.