On the side of a bus, a pair of breasts whizzed by.
I might have needed fresh air, but I also needed clothes. On Sixth Avenue a taxi approached and I flagged it down. A handful of chain stores in Manhattan sold clothes for women of my size, and I directed the driver to the nearest one. Inside the boxy store, most of the fat women looked resigned, having been exiled to this outpost of the fashion world. I didn’t want to let their negative energy suck me in. I steered myself away from the long black dresses, the enveloping shrouds I’d always worn as a cloak of invisibility. I wouldn’t buy much. I had lost weight in the basement but had been eating nonstop since then; I wasn’t sure where I’d end up. Rubí was handy with a sewing machine, but she couldn’t work miracles.
A saleswoman was walking around the store, a chunky woman with hair in a thin layer that barely covered her scalp. She wore yellow-framed glasses and a short avocado-colored dress that revealed her muscular brown legs, the backs of which were lined with stretch marks, as if fingernails had run down her flesh, leaving a trace. She hadn’t tried to hide the marks with tights. Her sandals were decorated with tiny beads. She was comfortable with herself, I could tell.
“Can you help me?” I asked her. “I don’t know where to start.” Having sworn off long black shrouds, I was lost. Until Marlowe and Rubí, I had never had fat friends, no role models for how to dress. The only fat women I had ever known were at Baptist Weight Loss and Waist Watchers, but they were sad and none of them invested in clothes. They didn’t view their fatness as a permanent state, no matter how long they’d been fat. They were just passing through Fat Town on their way to Slim City. I knew how they thought. I had been one of them.
The saleswoman, named Desiree, seemed eager to help. “What have you got at home to work with?”
“Nothing. I’m a blank slate. Tabula rasa.”
Desiree installed me in a dressing room and brought me outfits to try on. The first was a knee-length red-and-white dress, belted at the waist. I would never have noticed such an outfit on my own. I put it on and instantly thought of Janine. I had spent perhaps twenty minutes in Janine’s presence, yet after more than a decade, that brightly dressed outcast from Baptist Weight Loss was seared into my memory, a flame burned into celluloid.
I invited Desiree into the dressing room and she stood next to me, both of us looking at my body in the mirror.
“That dress is amazing,” she said.
I wasn’t so sure. I saw my white legs, my bulbous knees, the slabs of my calves. I never put them on display. The only time they were exposed was when I wore my nightgown, and no one saw me in that. I could wear tights with the dresses, but they wouldn’t make much difference. The legs were still there, enormous and unavoidable. “I’ll think about it,” I told Desiree.
Next she brought me a selection of trousers in different colors. There wasn’t an elastic band in sight. I had never worn fabric that didn’t stretch, and it felt different against my skin. It made me feel that my body had borders. I would have liked to pair the trousers with baggy sweaters that could be pulled down over my stomach, but Desiree brought me fitted blouses, a coral-colored one with wooden buttons and another in turquoise that came with a sash. They were the same bright colors that I had bought for Alicia, only now they were for Plum.
Desiree left me alone and I looked at myself in the three-way mirror, dressed in the khaki trousers and coral blouse, observing my body from every angle. The only time I had ever dressed this way was in those few delirious days during and after the makeover. I tried to decide if I liked the clothes without thinking about what other people would see when they looked at me. Alicia wanted their approval, but Plum didn’t.