I thought I would cook elaborate dinners for my many, many friends. In my assumed adult life, I would be an excellent cook—the kind of person who deep-fries things on their kitchen stove and doesn’t follow recipes and owns a blowtorch for crème brûlée. You can’t imagine how many friends I assumed I’d have. I figured I’d be the elegant type, a person who would pen meaningful handwritten notes to friends that they’d keep for years. I would be generous and funny and people would look forward to my yearly New Year’s Eve party (or whatever holiday I decided I was big enough to eclipse). I would have my friends’ children and my children’s friends over to stay with me often, and I would never worry if they spilled orange soda all over an expensive rug. I’d laugh and pour my own glass of wine on the rug, too. “It’s just stuff!” I would say, and they would feel so welcome and loved. “Your aunt/mom/neighbor/ex-wife is so cool,” they’d whisper, awed.
I vacillated on the children in my future. When I did imagine them, I had them with an Italian man and we never spoke English at home. Or I married André 3000 and we had however many children he wanted; I was (and still am) willing to compromise on anything to marry André 3000. Usually, though, in my crystal-ball future, I was alone and childless, a Stevie Nicks replicant sans musical talent and with fewer gloves, no offense to her fashion sense. I felt I was done with the idea of kids after doing so much with my younger siblings. I felt exhausted by the very thought of being asked to play dress-up or to help with science homework. Being a cool aunt seemed more doable, more likely. I fancied myself quite nomadic, when really I just had seen The Lizzie McGuire Movie a few too many times and wanted to go get sexed up by a hot guy in a foreign city.III Honestly, I thought I would be too busy having fun to consider children.
I did not imagine getting married to stay married. I didn’t imagine my wedding much outside of thinking about pigs in a blanket (which are really just a delightful thing to think about) or funny things to do instead of the traditional wedding ceremony. Like getting married in a parking lot or walking down the aisle to the song “All Star” by Smash Mouth as an homage to Shrek. I did not imagine homeownership in the traditional American sense; certainly I never imagined owning a yard. Gag me. I did not think I would ever own a car with more than two seats. Maybe I wouldn’t even need a car at all!
I figured I’d be extraordinary, that everyone would want to be me or fuck me—sometimes both. I thought I would become less of a people pleaser, but more liked. I thought opportunities and friendships and careers would land in my lap.
I have to say, I really, really, really thought I would use weekender bags a whole lot more.
How to Use Your Parents’ Divorce to Get Kicked Out of Gym Class
My parents split up pretty swiftly after I arrived. I have one image that I believe is a memory of us together as a family; however, I once read that when you revisit a memory, you’re actually just revisiting the last time you remembered it, and human memory is decidedly fallible, so I don’t know. Even in that “memory,” my parents are not together in any kind of romantic way—they’re just in the same room, the kitchen of our old house, feeding my sister Lena and me. I remember the tile floor mostly, but I asked my mom about the floor in the old kitchen once, pre-renovation, and it did not corroborate my memory.
Sometimes, as a teenager, when I was home alone, I would go into my mom’s armoire and get down the oldest photo albums I could find and try to find photos of the two of them together. I tried to make their marriage feel real, or at least plausible. Seeing them together felt like how I would imagine it would feel if you came home and Lady Gaga was sitting on your bed. It didn’t compute. I don’t know why, but I always associate my father moving out with the John Denver song “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” I would sit on the floor of my mother’s bedroom and look at photos from when they were still married and just think about the lyrics, “If I had a day that I could give you / I’d give to you the day just like today.” Most of the photos of both of them together—there weren’t many; my father is camera-averse, and why would you keep photos post-divorce?—had my sister in them. A few photos feature one parent as the subject with just pieces of the other. My dad’s hand hovering in the corner of a picture of my mom and the new baby. My mom’s shoulder in a distinct ultra-’90s sweater visible on the couch next to my father. Lena had a lot of baby pictures because she was the first kid and also because they weren’t getting divorced when she was new on the scene. I don’t know of any photos with just me and both of my parents.
My parents don’t talk. They didn’t talk when I was little and they don’t talk now. When they jointly walked Lena down the aisle for her wedding last year I kept thinking, It’s weird that they know each other. My mom and dad weren’t ever like the modern divorced parents who try to do birthdays and holidays together for the sake of the children. My father likes moving on from certain things and never looking back, probably because he got too into stoic philosophers in grad school. Honestly, everyone in my family is too sensitive for post-divorce chill togetherness to have worked, so I’m mostly glad we didn’t try.
Their lack of communication meant that Lena and I were often operating with limited or confusing instructions, a complicator of our living-out-of-bags life. It was difficult to know what to pack for when we spent weekends with my dad. Most things weren’t planned or communicated well, and we didn’t keep clothes there. Lena and I had a shared room and, much to my deep embarrassment, a shared bed until she left for college. I don’t know why that’s so embarrassing to say; it shouldn’t be—lots of people around the world share rooms and beds with siblings. But it felt shameful to me.I Anyway, we didn’t have a closet or a dresser at my dad’s, really, which meant we didn’t keep separate clothing or shoes there. The only items that were ever at my dad’s house were weird gifts that relatives had given us from Christmases long, long ago or things we’d forgotten from the last weekend.
We stayed with my dad every other weekend and every Tuesday night. Everything we wore each weekend and on Wednesdays had to come over to his house in a bag. The problem with packing and the living-out-of-bags lifestyle is that you often forget things. You think you put gym clothes in the bag last time but you really didn’t. You forgot to bring socks. You didn’t pack a bra. Your shirt actually has a stain on it.
I often ended up going to school wearing ugly, mismatched, incomplete outfits. It made me feel horrible. Mortified. It wasn’t just school, either. Sometimes my stepmom’s family would come over for a family get-together and I’d have nothing to wear. Or we’d have people at the house and everyone was swimming and I didn’t have a suit. Or I had a suit that was either way too big or way too small. Or we went to a school carnival on a Saturday afternoon and I was in trouble for not having the right kind of shoes, but who the fuck told me to pack for a carnival?
When this would happen, when I was stuck wearing a big T-shirt from my dad or sandals to an event that required tennis shoes, I would often get a feeling that at the time I couldn’t label; in my mind I referred to it as The Nothing Feeling. I could never tell when The Nothing Feeling was going to happen; it was hard to predict. But it often happened around clothes and changing. As I grew up, I realized that the feeling was shame, akin to the body dysmorphia I would later feel. A shame so deep it felt disorienting. A shame so deep it became impossible to perceive myself as anything other than BAD. It felt like arriving at school naked times eight hundred.
You know when you’re talking on the phone and it starts to play back what you’re saying and you can’t keep talking because it’s so distracting? That’s how The Nothing Feeling felt. I felt like everyone was looking at me and could see too much of my body and they knew it was all wrong and they hated it. It also felt like somehow I couldn’t see my body, that I couldn’t even get a glimpse of what they were so disgusted with in order to fix it. I got that feeling a lot living out of bags between parents’ houses.
Perhaps part of my deep discomfort in not having the right c
lothes was because of how much I loved “fashion.” Look, I do not think it’s fair to you or to myself to call what I wore in eighth grade fashion without quotation marks around it. I liked getting dressed; I loved shopping—or at least I loved buying things.II This might seem unusual for a fat person, but every time I went shopping I felt that I was going to somehow purchase just the thing to make me look entirely different. I read article after article about what was flattering, as if you can somehow hide two hundred pounds under vertical stripes, or as if hiding two hundred pounds is a good thing to do.
I loved clothes, shoes, and purses. If anyone would have taught me about makeup, I would have loved that. I couldn’t dress like other kids who wore short skirts and jean shorts and basic white T-shirts. All of those things, I had been told, looked “bad” on fat people. They don’t, of course, but I also didn’t know how to find versions of them that made me feel good about myself, so I avoided them.
Since I couldn’t dress like my peers, I veered wildly, recklessly, embarrassingly, into: dressing like an adult. I’m sure this is common for kids with body types that are not traditionally childlike, but it was heightened for me because I read a lot of fashion magazines and I wanted desperately to emulate what I saw. It’s hard enough for a size 0 adult in the suburbs of St. Louis to copy what she sees in Vogue without looking like a clown; it’s downright discomfiting to see a fat twelve-year-old try to do it. I strong-armed my mom into letting me buy these chunky mule heels that would probably be cool now because everything that is ugly as sin is cool now. I would clop down the tiled halls of my elementary school—where technically heels were not allowed—feeling like I was in Glamour and looking like an anamorph of Danny DeVito turning into a Clydesdale. I didn’t yet understand the power of flying under the radar as a fat kid. Luckily for me, very few photos of me at this age survive. I, like many middle schoolers, occasionally thought I looked really cool; now it makes me want to hurl myself off the roof of a Ross Dress for Less to think about what I wore back then.
Another key component of the nightmare of being overweight was, of course, gym class. I’m not entirely sure they should be teaching gym as a required class at school. First of all, not everyone is able-bodied, so it seems exclusionary at best, and the fact that you can get graded and scored on what your body can do is… dicey.III Everyone who has ever had a body that did not cooperate with what they wanted it to do in gym class: I see you. This book is for you. I know I said it was for my parents in the dedication, but that’s so they don’t get sensitive about it.
In elementary school we had two gym teachers: Ms. Williams and Mr. B. I can’t remember Mr. B’s full last name, but I do remember all the girls had crushes on him. He was very Midwest-teacher attractive. He was the kind of blond-buzz-cut white guy who thinks that putting on khakis is dressing up. But everyone loved him because he was the “fun” gym teacher. Poor Ms. Williams was a much more serious gym teacher, probably because she had to be. She was also the single mom of a student who was in my class, which was always a weird dynamic to watch. That poor kid.
Anyway, Mr. B and Ms. Williams did not seem to get along, despite being the only two teachers in their department. The one thing they could agree on was me. I was a gym-class villian for them. Not only was I overweight (a sin) and gaining more weight (double sin), but I often forgot and sometimes “forgot” to bring gym clothes to school. Part of it, of course, was because of going back and forth between houses; I frequently reminded them that I had divorced parents, something rare enough at my school to earn me a pass semi-regularly. However, you can only cast yourself as a child of divorce so many times before the institution of physical education comes for you. Ms. Williams and Mr. B eventually caught on that I was trying to avoid run-walking a mile at half the pace of my classmates and they started sending notes home with me that I could not wear heels to gym class. That I had to wear actual gym clothes and participate. They made me—and none of the other kids—bring a bag of gym clothes to school and keep it on my little hook in my classroom so that I had no excuse for evading the pull-up bar.IV
There’s no way to avoid shame as a fat kid. I’m sure there is no easy way to avoid shame as a kid altogether, but in my experience shame usually centered around my body. What my body couldn’t do, what my body did that I didn’t want it to do, what my body looked like, what my body told other people. I think adults forget sometimes how much shame young kids can feel. I think it’s very easy to imagine children as resilient because it’s somewhat horrific to operate otherwise. It’s a bit horrific to imagine all the ways children can get hurt by little things like running a mile slower than everyone else and having to wear an ugly sweater and forgetting to pack a bra for their dad’s house. Here’s what I know: I know that my parents not being married didn’t have nearly the lasting effects on me that wearing weird clothes and sucking at the PACER test did. At least my parents’ divorce occasionally got me out of gym.
“I’m Difficult.” —Sally Albright (but Really Nora Ephron)I
For my fifth birthday I got the best gift that anyone can ever give another human being: the Grease soundtrack on CD. I was in a California Pizza Kitchen—my restaurant of choice in kindergarten—and I got the gift from my stepmom’s parents. Grease was my absolute favorite movie at that age, much to the chagrin of my mother, who did not think that it was age-appropriate to watch a movie that included assault, a condom breaking, teenage pregnancy scares, and the raw hotness of a young John Travolta. I’m kidding about the last part; no one is immune to young Travolta’s charms.
My father let us watch somewhat risqué movies on occasion when we were really young because young kids are idiots. For example, I watched the (problematic, transphobic) movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective as a young child and there’s a scene where Jim Carrey gets sucked off in return for bringing a woman’s dog back to her. He’s holding on to the top of a doorframe making funny (orgasm) faces. As a child, I thought he was doing the monkey bars. I did not get why he was doing the monkey bars inside someone’s house in this scene, but I was little and I only understood about 24 percent of any movie I was watching anyway. As we grew to be more impressionable and more likely to understand what a blow job is, we would suspiciously stop watching certain movies at my dad’s. Grease stopped at some point—maybe because of appropriateness, maybe because I’d forced everyone to watch it 742 times and if anyone in my family heard “Summer Nights” one more time, they’d die.
Eventually, though, when I was about sixteen, I watched Grease again and hoooolllly hell. There’s a lot in that film that needs to be examined. I don’t have time to fix classic cinema, so let me just address one thing: the lesson of the movie Grease is ostensibly that you should change—and start smoking!—for the person you love.
I feel that I should hate the ending of Grease. Sandy is like, “You almost killed yourself racing. I’m going to change everything about myself so that I finally have some power in this relationship outside of withholding sex.” This is, on its face, a terrible ending both narratively and, of course, morally. However, who can deny the raw power of Sandy Olsson showing up to the school fair sewn into that black outfit with heels on? And then Danny’s voice cracks and he’s like, “Sandy?” in the most horny, desperate way. And she then says the best line of all time with the best delivery of all time as she puts out her cigarette,II “Tell me about it, stud.”
Just thinking about it gives me chills!
He just says her name and she’s like, “Tell me about it!” kjas;lkdfjalsakdjf;akjd! The power! Yes, she’s changed for the male gaze. Yes, she has basically adopted the same aesthetic as the Pink Ladies! Yes, she’s going to get lung cancer! But by fuck she’s cool. And she’s finally in control. You can give Sandy shit for trying to be something she’s “not,” but it should be noted that Danny also tries to show up to the end-of-year carnival with a letterman sweater on—a half-assed attempt to be more of the jock that he thinks she wants him to be. After a recent rewatch, in fact, I
would argue that a woman becoming even more cool and bad and then singing a song that insists “You better shape up” is not as bad a moral-of-the-story as it’s made out to be. She gets power! She stops being a Goody Two-shoes! She gets what she wants! And she looks fucking hot on the last day of school! I wish I would have followed more closely in Sandy Olsson’s red-stilettoed footsteps.
I took a long, hard look at some of the rom-coms that shaped my childhood, or at least rom-coms that I watched over and over again.III I left many out. Frankly, I can’t believe that The Wedding Planner, The Proposal, and 13 Going on 30 didn’t end up making the final cut, but I wanted to talk about the protagonists who really stood out to me, who had a lesson to teach, potentially. And then I wanted to see if that lesson was good, because rom-coms get a lot of shit for “setting unrealistic expectations” for women, as if anything that happens in the Transformers franchise is somehow more likely to happen than dating a less-shitty-than-the-last-guy guy. Some rom-com leads, like Sandy Olsson, helped shape my idea of what a grown-up woman was and, more important, could be. Some… not so much. I rated each protagonist based on whether I thought their character was a helpful or harmful depiction of adult womanhood.
Mary Hatch Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life. The earliest memory I have of any movie is the “Buffalo Gals” scene in It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s one of the most romantic scenes of all time, and if you just take the scene itself, it’s a perfect miniature replication of the themes of the movie—George (Jimmy Stewart) almost getting what he wants, and then being called away by duty. Anyway! The real star of that movie, I have to say, is Mary Bailey, née Hatch (Donna Reed), would-be spinster librarian in the alternate universe where her husband was never born. Mary is, ever so coolly, the driving force of the romance of this movie. She makes every move. In 1946! She’s the seducer! In fact, she drives most of the non-romance action of the movie, too. She’s the one who initially likes George, who wants to dance with him, who wants to marry him, who suggests giving up their honeymoon money to save the Building & Loan, who (spoiler) gets everyone in town to come help her husband raise enough money to avoid prison. She also has some of the best lines of the movie, including when she whispers in George’s deaf ear when they’re both kids, “George Bailey, I’ll love you till the day I die.” And boy oh boy does she! Clarence’s dedication to George should have read, “Remember, no man is a failure who has a bomb-ass wife like Mary.” VERDICT: Helpful depiction, although some have suggested that she was better off in the alternate universe where she was a spinster librarian. I reject that; her ultimate life goal is marrying George and having children, and that’s valid. However, I do think George could have been a better spouse.
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