But since I’ve been thin, dressing myself in the morning has gotten harder. The night before, I lie in bed and imagine myself in various combinations of skirt and sweater, and then in the various poses I might be seen in wearing them—leaning over the drinking fountain in the hall at school, slurping that water the temperature of body fluids, a tepid stream of something human and nauseating in my mouth. Or sitting behind my desk in Great Books, legs crossed at the ankles while Mr. Norman drones on and on about Paradise Lost.
Mr. Norman wears horn-rimmed glasses and weighs only about a hundred pounds, but his lectures make Satan seem sexy and slick, like someone Mr. Norman himself might secretly admire.
Listening, I imagine Satan and Detective Scieziesciez waiting for me in a silver Thunderbird in the high school parking lot, smoking cigarettes, waiting to see what I’m wearing that afternoon.
God knows there’s no one else at my high school to dress up for, no one who matters, no one who would look at me twice even if I walked down that gray corridor stark naked. Phil wouldn’t notice, and my closest friends, Mickey and Beth, aren’t exactly fashion plates themselves. At Theophilus Reese High, by twelfth grade, you are whoever you’ve been until then. Your lot’s cast early. Your lot. Your caste.
And, back when it mattered, back when the beautiful kids had been sorted from the homely, I’d been fat. Now, no matter what I weigh, until graduation day, I will be Fat.
But lately I’ve noticed men—some of them older than my father—watching me walk in and out of restaurants, watching me walk from my mother’s station wagon, which is mine now, into McDonald’s, or the library, or the mall. “Is this yours?” a man in an expensive black suit asked me one afternoon last week as I stood in line at the drugstore with a package of tampons. He was out of breath and holding a limp red mitten in his hand. I shook my head, looking at it. That bloody hand, extended.
“Oh,” he seemed disappointed, and then chagrined. “Well, then, would you like me to buy you a sandwich somewhere?”
It was pathetic, and we both laughed. I handed the cashier my tampons, and even she looked shy. “I can’t,” I said.
He looked at me for a few seconds before he said, “You’re an awfully attractive woman,” and then he left, winking over his shoulder as the automatic doors jolted open nervously for him, and the cashier stuffed my package into a plastic sack. “Some men . . .” she said, but she wouldn’t look me in the eyes.
He’d only been gone a moment before I’d forgotten what he looked like, or why I hadn’t wanted the sandwich he wanted to buy.
Being noticed is new, and every day I have to prove to myself it can be done again to believe it ever has. In my imagination every night, I pan around the room I will be in the next day like a little Tinkerbell, viewing myself from every angle, appraising myself from the front, the back, above, below—a whirring electric eye.
Of course, by morning I’m afraid to wear anything at all, and it takes hours to get ready for school. By the time I’m done, there’s a stripped heap of clothing on the bedroom or bathroom floors, as if the girls who’d been wearing those outfits had dissolved, sweaters and skirts dropping out of the air where they’d been.
A lot of trouble. For what?
But in the morning, at our lockers, outside the vinegar glare of the gym, Beth says, “You look great, Kat. I like your sweater.” Of course, it wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, or how I looked in it, Beth would say that: It is Beth’s role. Like an usher in an auditorium, handing out programs, saying, “Enjoy the show,” Beth is there for me. Even when I am bitter, or premenstrual—cramped, depressed, snapping at Beth—she will tell me I look good, smell good, did the right thing.
Still, I can tell when she really means it, and lately she really means it. Lately, everything I wear looks right. The janitor calls me, “Hey, kitty-cat,” purring as he moves his mop around and around on the floor.
“He’s got the hots for you,” Beth says, gesturing at the janitor, who has a limp, who has the name, or the word, “Dick,” embroidered above his heart.
I’ve known Beth since third grade, since she and I were fat girls together standing in the snow at recess, watching the other girls jump rope. We were both too fat to be invited to join them, so after a while we had to talk to each other. Those girls would jump faster and faster in a blur of limbs and clothesline while we waited in our big rubber boots for the bell to ring and call us back into the warmth of Mrs. Mulder’s classroom.
Finally, out of sheer boredom, we invented a game of our own, which had to do with the teeter-totter. We’d go up and down, up and down, chatting amiably, but then one of us, the one who was down, would casually slip off the end and let the other one, the one who was up, crash back to earth.
The object of this game was to slide off your end of the teeter-totter when the other least expected you to—perhaps in midsentence, smiling—in order to heighten the terror and thrill of suddenly plummeting through air, pure gravity, a fat girl with wings shot out of the sky.
The first time Phil and I had sex, I remembered that game with Beth. The jovial anticipation of danger and pain, looking all the time into her inscrutable face as she looked into mine.
Although I’ve lost thirty pounds, Beth stubbornly remains sixty pounds overweight. She has become a bit of a celebrity at school—admired, but not liked: an object of envious pity. Beth’s claim to fame is the steel trap of her brain. She’s won every math award the state of Ohio has to offer, and her bedroom walls are papered with certificates and plaques and letters of congratulation signed by one of the governor’s aides. Even when she’s simply eating a fruit pie in the cafeteria, that brain is chewing up the computable world and its reams of ticker tape.
“Kat,” she said to me once when I told her how many pounds I’d lost, “that’s 489 ounces. 32.7 milligrams. 457 liters of fat,” or something like that.
“Jesus Christ, Beth,” I said, “shut up. I don’t want to know that. What makes you think people want to know stuff like that?”
I sounded like my mother as I said it.
Beth looked sad, with her bland face, her light brown hair. It is the same face she wore long ago, back on the teeter-totter. Little girl pudginess. A bit desperate, painfully clever, and stuffed up with secret rage.
The third of us is Mickey.
“The weird sisters,” my mother used to call us, or “the three blind mice.”
Like me, Mickey’s lost weight, left the fat-faced girl we met in seventh grade behind her like a bad date, ditched. She’s a cheerleader now, having snagged one of those coveted positions with all its myth and pomp and prestige despite being unpopular and acne-scarred.
Though they must not have wanted to give it to a girl like Mickey, the selection committee simply could not have denied her a place on that squad. Even Miss Beck, the cheerleading coach, with her perky smile and high cheekbones, all cream and peaches, must have had to admit that Mickey is cheer, pep, the fighting spirit of pride—the personification of it.
“The Savages” our teams are called. Mickey’s job is to urge them on.
But, according to Mickey, the other girls on the squad won’t even sit next to her on the bus as it lurches and wallows its way across Ohio for our team’s away games. That bus, Mickey says, smells like panties.
FDS. Scent: Spring Rain.
As if a cool May afternoon were clamped between those cheerleaders’ legs, its sweet mist rising from their crotches, condensing on the windows of the bus.
Those pretty things will not, apparently, accept Mickey as one of them. Instead, they huddle together, swapping a hairbrush that grows more and more beautiful with silk and gold as it passes.