“Kat,” he said, “would you want—you know—to go to that dance?”
Winter Formal.
It had never even crossed my mind that anyone would ask, and certainly not anyone with Phil’s good looks and calm cool. He wasn’t one of the most popular boys. He wasn’t on any teams, but more than one girl was rumored to have a crush on him, to be going somewhere with him. And the popular guys seemed to have respect for Phil. He was tall, and looked strong. I would occasionally overhear those guys talking about the weekend parties that had taken place at someone’s house while their parents were out of town—and Phil had been there, he’d brought beer, and had drunk it, and acted crazy. He was not obscure. The cool kids knew who he was, which, in a way, created him.
If every soul is just a thought in the mind of God, then every student at Theophilus Reese High School is just a thought in the minds of the cool kids. Without that, you are nothing but a gray shade, indistinguishable from the cinder block, blending into the dull shine of the lockers, something with a shadow but without substance.
Our high school was named for a farmer whose cow got loose in what was once woods and is now the football field. He chased it all day. He got thirsty, and hot, and then there was a thunderstorm, and Theophilus hid, stupidly, under a tree, which was struck by lightning. Out of the lightning, God spoke, or so the story goes, telling Theophilus to chop down all the trees and build a church.
He did, and found his cow.
Now, there are twelve hundred teenagers who go to school where that church once stood, and some of them are rich, and beautiful, and poised, and witty, and well-dressed, and always have been. When they walk down the hall together, it is like a wall of power, all ecstatic laughter and glamour.
They are like gods among the rest of us, walking faster, looking better.
And those kids knew who Phil was, but I was invisible, and fat. Why would he ask me? When he asked, I shrugged, half thinking that this was a joke, a prank his buddies had put him up to. “Sure,” I said, as if I were doing him a favor—no skin off my nose—and he looked a bit deflated: one of those fireworks on the Fourth of July that fizzles out halfway into the sky.
That night, the night of the winter formal, I was 140 pounds of myself in a long pink dress, but Phil didn’t seem to care. He walked from his house next door to get me in a rented tuxedo with big sixties lapels—brand-new but out of fashion—and he looked good in it, like a mock-up of the perfect first date. Teenage heartthrob. Lean but muscled.
My mother had taken me to buy the dress, and everything I tried on displeased her. “Your coloring is good,” she often told me, by which she meant the pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes that mirrored hers, “but you’re forty pounds overweight.” I would step out of a dressing room with something long and ruffled on, and she’d shake her head and sigh.
Finally, the pink one was the last straw.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’ll have to suffice.”
And I was painfully aware of the fat as I danced: its folds, its white cream, its fluid pressure like a rain-swollen creek beneath the dress, which made noises like a thousand little girls whispering viciously against my flesh.
Garden Heights, Ohio, is not a place to be plump, to be homely, or malodorous, or scarred, or shy. There were girls from my high school at that dance in strapless black sheaths and four-inch heels. Girls as flawless as mannequins, their feet preformed to fit into their mother’s expensive shoes. They didn’t seem to have been born with the nuisances of blood or skin or shame.
Next to them, at this winter formal, I looked like a feminine whale, paddling the air with my thick fins, stuck between a couple of icebergs, going nowhere fast—a sympathetic character, perhaps, but not lovely at all. If, to anyone, I appeared sexual, it would have been the way in which the inside of a cat’s ears are sexual. As nude as scrubbed fruit. A glimpse of something vaguely obscene—obscene because you hadn’t wanted to see it, because you don’t want to think of something as vulnerable, as personal, as a fat girl’s sexuality exposed.
And Phil, in his long-limbed blue tux, seemed to be perpetually dancing the funky chicken—arms jerking around his shoulders as if someone were yanking at him with strings from the sky. He thought he could dance—believed in his abilities on the dance floor with the same kind of stubborn confidence with which he believed he was handsome—and, after I got over my initial embarrassment for him, all that energy let loose like a flightless bird beneath the snuffed gym lights, I started to believe that he could dance, too. Watching him flail in front of me as I shuffled in front of him, I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying—dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body—if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you’d crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church.
Phil didn’t stop to think. He just danced.
We both danced, all night. Couldn’t stop. Out of breath within half an hour, but we danced nonstop for three more hours.
A few years ago, about a hundred miles into the country from our suburb, there was a farm plagued by stray voltage. An electric current under the pasture was surging up from Toledo Edison, shocking the cows, turning their hooves to walkie-talkies. There was a lawsuit, and for months on the news we heard the details over and over: The farmer’s wife lost weight, her teeth fell out, his daughter started pulling out her eyelashes lash by lash, biting the backs of her hands to get at the static under her skin. When that daughter closed her eyes, she said she saw sparks. And the barn cats sang terribly in the barn before they died.
But the cows danced the whole time.
Perhaps they’d been driven mad, but they danced, and there had to have been some joy in that. I had never been happier in my life than I was as I danced with Phil that night. It was as if, with Phil—dancing, or fucking, or just driving around and around in the sedan his father left him when he left—I’d finally found something to do with all the nervous tension of that suburb, which surged through the power lines between our houses and street corners like a small girl’s braids pulled too tight, sending an invisible current into the air, a wave of nervous energy rising, falling, rising.
That tension—I would lie in bed some nights and imagine I heard its volts and sparks swell an invisible river above our roofs, singing a high whine in my ears, boring into my brain like a wiry nail, the whole subdivision ringing in my ears, until my head and neck would ache from the weight of so much strident silence.
Like that stray voltage, there was something raucous straining under all the politeness, all the quiet—and, finally with Phil, I found a way to move to it, or sleep through it. I bought a pair of running shoes and a green sweat suit, and when I jogged around the neighborhood—which had seemed so stiff, a stage set of a place, all edges and blades—it melted into a liquid blur, a soft backdrop of flaccid facades and sleepy trees. I let myself get thin, running in circles around Garden Heights. I no longer needed the padding. I had sex.
“ANY WORD?” HE ASKS.
“Not one.” I shake my head and shut the front door behind him. Snow’s coming down now in fat, gray, dirty-washcloth flakes, and they drape the lawns and trees with sluggish infant blankets. Who could blame my mother for leaving this place? The sky is falling.