The words “fat girl” burn in the mouth like cussing. Mom will frown at her swollen ankles, she will say she’s got the legs of a fat person. My older sister Tanya will be a failed ballerina, a laxative binger, an anorexic with too many curves. At the bar her maestro will pinch her flat belly, her plumb line; she will shake her head, and move on to the next fifteen-year-old dancer. Aunt Carolyn will eat and eat and eat and stop eating until she gets a new boyfriend. “My extra weight is a defense mechanism,” she’ll say. I once saw her cry over a burrito. I felt worried. We were on vacation.
Lately my roommates and I will watch episodes, old seasons of our favorite shows, between work shifts and classes. The women are funny and have tiny little waists, of course; we all have our favorite female character. Not an episode goes by without one of the girls sitting next to me on the couch saying, “She is so thin.” Sometimes I’ll say, “Yeah,” or sometimes I’ll say nothing and stare ahead and wonder if that’s really what they’re thinking. Once I replied, “She is a small person.” “Yeah, but she is so thin!” they’ll say again. The female characters are all thin; unbelievably beautiful I defend them, I yearn to become them, at least between showering and filtering coffee in the morning.
Inheriting my mother’s legs, my father’s jowly Italian face, my aunt’s full bust, I will look through pictures of my sixteen-year-old self and pout and wish I could rewind to when I was young and thin and danced salsa, unembarrassed, when I didn’t despise food and when I was as pretty as my tan, brunette, big-eyed sister, legs like a goddess. When I was sixteen I worried I was afraid no one would ever want to have sex with me. So of course I tried to have sex as soon as possible, which I did.
“Women are in their prime between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one,” my friend Theresa said knowingly, at age nineteen. I was eighteen. Theresa was fat. She was pretty too. “I need to start my diet but, like, I’ve still got time, my goal is to be one hundred and thirty by next Christmas. Men are in their prime later, when they’re twenty-five, when they’ve got that full man face, you know? I’m going to marry an older man anyway, and I’m young.” Thank goodness I still have time too, I thought to myself, fearful for both of us that we would never lose the weight.
Lacking the control to stop eating for a couple days straight, abandoning the 6am gym regime with the last rays of summer, I instead focus my energy on prayers for skinniness. I yearn to see the topography of my hands, to wear my shirt tight over my ribs. I want to be monkey-face skinny. I want the legs of a normal person. I want to feel like a woman. I want someone to want to have sex with me. I want to not want food. I want my mother to tell me I look good. I want to inspire my sister and impress Theresa. I want to feel happy. I don’t want to be a fat girl anymore.
June day, sitting at the shore of the Sandy River, the day so beautiful it could have been plastic, or a painting. Feet in the water, my roommate and I talk about relationships. “I guess I don’t believe that any man would ever be attracted to me,” my friend says, swinging her legs. I look up at her: a beautiful girl, she has huge blue eyes and a huge full gut. She does not wear makeup and she does not worry about what to wear. I could have cried. She shrugged.
University of Maine Farmington RIPPLE Magazine
© Kate Chianese 2010
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