Turns out Mavis hadn’t put the chair together correctly, but tell that to the bruises spreading like wildfire across my tender ego. I spent the rest of the brunch standing awkwardly in various places in the dining room until enough time had passed to usher everyone out without it seeming chair-related. I took a handful of aspirin and started cleaning up the leftovers, picking at what was left on the trays and serving dishes we’d eventually have to drive around delivering to their rightful owners. The doughnuts tormented me, nestled so sweetly in their box, but, bitch, I just had a chair collapse underneath me so please pass the fucking watermelon balls. We bought new chairs the next goddamned day. METAL ONES.
My friend Anna once got up in this kid’s face during gym class because he kept asking how much I weighed. The truth was that I didn’t actually know, because my mom was too broke and too much of a wreck to take me to the doctor. But what I did know was that it was the very first time I had to change clothes in front of people, and as humiliating as it might have been to try to hide my bulging, discolored body from girls who were at the ideal height and weight for their ages, I also had to ride the shame wave of having a mother who couldn’t pay for both the school-issued shorts and the T-shirt, so the dingy white shirt with a red lion on the front that didn’t get washed enough was paired with Women’s shorts (capital W, to distinguish them from the slender Misses and the dainty Petites) found in the two-dollar bin at ESCCA, the place where your well-off classmates’ parents donated the family’s old clothes. So yes, Rebecca, I actually am wearing your dad’s old sweatshirt today. Anyway, these ESCCA shorts were more of a tomato red (let’s say a Pantone 032) than the official deep red (Pantone 1807) of the Nichols Middle School Lions, and they stood out in stark contrast to the ones my peers were dressed in, whose names were written in permanent marker on the white strip of material on the right thigh that my home shorts noticeably did not have. I don’t know enough about sociopolitical stuff to write intelligently about classism in this country, but purchasing and maintaining a $50 short set required for twenty minutes of halfhearted daily physical activity is a big deal to people who can’t keep a phone on, and it’s thoroughly humiliating for the person singled out at the start of every period for not being “dressed correctly for class.” Would it have killed that leather-faced monster to cut me a break, just once?
I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early. Fat babies are adorable, while fat children are a little less so. Fat teenagers are chided into either end of the eating-disorder spectrum, and fat adults are either admonished for not figuring out how to get new bodies during adolescence or straight up dismissed altogether. I wish that I was an emotionally healthy human without years of accumulated trauma, one who just decided to be a fat caricature of a person perched gleefully atop a mountain of doughnuts, shoving candy bar after candy bar between my teeth while cackling demonically over how much money my eventual care will cost taxpayers or whatever it is comments-section trolls always accuse fat people of doing. And I don’t need sympathy or special consideration because, ultimately, who even cares? You hate me, and I hate me, too. We are on the same team. I guess what I’m saying is that maybe we could all just mind our own fucking business for once, and that when you can actually see a person’s scars, maybe be a pal and don’t pick at them.
Do you think that fat people don’t know? Because we definitely do! We’re repulsive to look at, and undeserving of both love and easily accessible, relatively inexpensive yet well-made clothing. We get it! We have seen the messages in movies and magazines, on the Internet and TV, and we understand. If we wear something formfitting, we’re delusional pigs who have the audacity to think we look attractive, but if we wear shapeless sacks that hide all our offensive, stretched-out flesh, we’re sloppy dirtbags who need to get our shit together. It’s a lose-lose, unless you lose weight, but good luck keeping it off without reconstructing your entire brain and DNA. I’m sure people get skinny and stay that way, and if they want to invite me over for little cups of green tea and a handful of unsalted pretzels to split between us so they can tell me how they did it, man, I’m down with that. Especially if they know the secret to making a radish feel as good on your tongue as a salty-sweet piece of smoked pork belly that’s all caramelized on the outside but soft and fatty on the— Wait, what was I even talking about?
A couple of years ago, some woman thought I was someone else she’d been beefing with online and tweeted a slew of things that I assume were intended to be hurtful at me, including such darling missives as “You’re a shitty writer and you should die” and “You look like you’re one hot dog away from a heart attack.” I don’t know how you say something like that to a person you’ve never met, a person who has never done anything wrong to you, with the entire Internet watching, but yeah, okay. I probably am. My heart is enlarged and in the early to middle stages of failure because for a long time I couldn’t afford this medicine I was supposed to take. Now that I can, the damage is irreversible so I’m just gonna do what I can until it suddenly stops beating and hope that when it quits on me I am wearing something flattering and not behind the wheel of a car. And when it does happen, despite all these years of trying, despite all these fits and starts, I will still be dead, and maybe you and that faceless Twitter person will think I deserve it. And that’s okay. I am fat and I am mentally ill, and those two things have been intertwined since before I even knew what those words mean. If this is how I’m going to die, then why not just let me. Maybe there is a way to solve those problems, but maybe I’m tired of trying. Maybe I stopped going to swimming because I was afraid of what would happen if, after months of treading water, it still didn’t work. Maybe I quit yoga because I was afraid of what would happen if I lost a ton of weight and that still didn’t fix my insides. I can’t afford therapy, but I can buy a sandwich.
Nashville Hot Chicken
By this point in our nascent relationship, Mavis and I had figured out how to mash our moist and sweaty sex parts together with marginally enjoyable results, suffered through awkward introductory meals with each other’s closest friends/families (including a surprise birthday party I totally almost ruined by being a pouty asshole), and gone in on a family cell phone plan: IT WAS TIME FOR US TO PLAN OUR FIRST JOINT VACATION.