13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

  “Hot Pocket’ll have chips and salsa there,” he tells her now. “Ice cream too. All that fun stuff.” He tries to pat her knee again, but she moves away.

  She readjusts the jicama and fennel batons on her vegetable tray. Who puts jicama batons on a vegetable tray? He can picture some bleach-toothed Food Network chef saying to the camera, “A vegetable tray doesn’t have to be all carrots, celery, and grape tomatoes! Why not raise the wow factor by adding jicama, fennel, spring onions?” He can see Beth curled on the couch, nodding in agreement, jotting it down on her legal pad to try later, along with all the other kumquat-like items he can never identify that his life is suddenly full of, funking up his fridge and making all the bones inside his wife more visible.

  “I can’t eat there,” she says now.

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  The rain’s coming down again, but it’s one of those brief, intense showers they often get in summer.

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “I can’t eat in front of her.”

  By her, she means Brindy, the ex-stripper Hot Pocket’s married to. Ever since that one time Tom let his eyes linger a little too long on her cleavage as she offered him pigs in a blanket from a tray, Beth has had it in for her.

  “Do you think they’ll be okay barbecuing this?” she says suddenly, holding up a soggy Yves veggie burger in a plastic bag.

  Tom winces at the sight of the fake grill marks, the sad little kernels of corn and pea poking out of the damp taupe patty.

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to offend Brindy. Can we listen to something a bit less depressing?”

  “You don’t like this? It’s yours. I found it in your collection.” He’d put on an old Dead Can Dance album she used to listen to on near continuous loop when he first met her. She would lie there while it played, looking up at the ceiling completely still, like she was dead.

  Now she’s looking at the car speaker as though it is a spider she wants dead but is too afraid to kill. He turns off the music. “What do you want to listen to, then?”

  “Whatever you want. Just nothing too amped up. And nothing too depressing.” That’s code for electronica, classical, and pretty much everything else he loves that she used to love too.

  “This isn’t depressing. It’s just sad. Sad is beautiful. Sad makes me happy.”

  “Well, it just makes me sad.”

  He looks at her rearranging her shawl across her thin shoulders. This woman who, on their first visits, used to love nothing more than lying on her back on his hardwood floor, content to let tears drip from her eye corners and pool in her ears for whole Nick Cave albums.

  “Her tits are fake, you know,” she says now. “Brindy’s tits.” She never ceases to remind him of this.

  “So I’ve heard,” he says.

  “Also they leak. She told me herself. She’s had to have, like, a million surgeries to correct it. Because they leak. It’s sad, really.”

  “It is,” he says, eyes on the road. “Very sad.”

  Brindy answers the door in cutoff jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, an outfit that Beth will later tell him she wore on purpose to taunt her.

  “Tom!” Brindy cries, giving him a hug.

  “I hardly recognized you, Elizabeth,” she says, smiling at her. Provoking her, Beth would say. “You look beautiful. You’re always so dressed up, I love it.”

  And can you believe when she made that comment about she loved how dressed up I was? she will say later. I mean, my god. What a vajazzled cunt.

  In Beth’s dark glare, Tom is careful, supremely careful not to let his eye dwell too long on the long supple legs, the firm breasts of his buddy’s wife.

  In the kitchen, Brindy offers them both watermelon daiquiris. “You have to try them. They’re so yummy!” In his peripheral vision, he sees Beth’s face darken, becoming an abacus of sugar and carb counting. Unable to watch, he leaves them there in the kitchen before he can hear her ask, Do you have any dry white?

  Outside, Hot Pocket is flipping T-bones on the barbecue in his Oakleys, a pyramid of marinated beef on a large aluminum platter to his left. Ribs. Tenderloins. More T-bones. He’s wearing Bermuda shorts and one of those T-shirts that says GAME OVER featuring an altar-bound bride and groom standing side by side, the groom with little X’s in his eyes.

  “Tom,” he says, fishing a Fat Tire out of the cooler and tossing it over.

  “We, uh, brought something for the grill,” Tom says, holding up the soggy packet of veggie patty like it’s the tail of a dead skunk.

  “Jesus.” Hot Pocket raises his Oakleys and holds the package up to the sunlight. “What the hell is this anyway?”

  Tom shrugs. “Some sort of tofu thing. It’s for Beth,” he adds, in a slightly lowered voice.

  Hot Pocket looks over at Beth, who is scowling between two tiki torches, sniffing doubtfully at a blue corn chip. Tom wants Hot Pocket to protest this addition to the barbecue in the holy name of all this meat he’s about to set fire to, but he just slaps him on the back and says, “Can do.”

  Tom stays hunched morosely by the meat smells, getting drunk on Fat Tires until his view of the backyard begins to sway a little. A few more people arrive. Most of the men, he sees, are looking at Beth, who is too busy glaring at Brindy to notice. He grabs another Fat Tire from the cooler.

  “So where’s Dickie anyway?” he mutters aloud. “Thought he was coming to this thing.” All week Dickie had said he’d be coming. He even threatened to bring his new girlfriend.

  “Yes,” Brindy calls from the picnic table, “where is Dickie?” Everyone knows no party really starts until Dickie’s arrived.

  “Probably fucking that fat girl,” Beth says, and by the way she says it, Tom knows she’s at least two drinks past tallying up alcohol units and carbohydrate grams.

  “What fat girl?” Brindy asks.

  “Just this chick Dickie’s dating right now,” Hot Pocket says, giving the steaks another flip.

  “Awww. I think that’s sweet,” Brindy says, grabbing a handful of corn chips.

  “It is not sweet,” Beth spits. “He calls it gastro sex, for God’s sake. And he’s only fucking her ’cause she’ll do anything. How is that sweet?”

  “I think it’s sweet,” Brindy insists quietly, nibbling on a corn chip.

  “Not sure how I’m going to tell when this is done, Elizabeth,” Hot Pocket says, poking at the veggie patty with his tongs. “These, uh, grill marks here are a little confusing.”

  “Just when it starts to get brown, Matt.” She always calls him Matt. Because I’m not calling a grown man Hot Pocket.

  “K,” Hot Pocket says doubtfully. He slaps the patty on the grill. It starts to hiss and pop, like an evil, unending fart.

  • • •

  Tom had been looking forward to this meal of meat and corn on the cob and chips and mayonnaisey salads all week. But now that it’s all piled before him beautifully on a paper plate, he can’t eat. Instead he feels his blood pressure rise, his fork grip become tighter as he hears his wife say, No, No, No, but thanks, to nearly every dish offered. He relaxes a little when at last she accepts some garden salad to accompany her plate of jicama sticks and a bunless veggie patty. When she begins to stab lamely at the lettuce, he decides he’s not going to let her ruin this for him any longer and tears into his ribs violently but without pleasure.

  “How come you’re not having any?” asks Maddy, the seven-year-old daughter of Hot Pocket and Brindy, addressing Beth. Maddy is dressed as a fairy princess and her mouth is covered in barbecue sauce. She’s gazing at Beth intently with her mother’s large hazel eyes.

  Beth looks from Maddy’s paper wings to her plastic tiara and gives her an awkward smile. “Because I don’t eat meat.”

  “Maddy, honey, eat your bu
rger,” Brindy says.

  But Maddy isn’t interested in her burger. She is staring at Beth. Tom winces, hearing the child’s question before the words even form on her barbecue sauce–stained lips.

  “Didn’t you used to be really f—”

  “You know,” Brindy interrupts, “I just love that dress, Elizabeth. Where did you say you got it again?”

  He feels Beth looking at him from across the table, but keeps his gaze fixed on the half-gnawed ribs on his plate.

  • • •

  Tom and Hot Pocket are in the side yard, smoking a joint in the glare of a Japanese foot lantern. He can hear the drunken squawk of Brindy and Beth discussing flaxseed oil and inner thigh exercises. He sees she has even accepted a tiny glass of Brindy’s watermelon daiquiri, her resentment having taken a reluctant backseat to her gratitude at being saved from a seven-year-old’s bluntness.

  “You’re a lucky man, Tom,” Hot Pocket tells him, slapping him on the back.

  “Yeah,” he mumbles. People keep telling him this. They look at Beth, Elizabeth, whatever the hell her name is now, at her long black hair and her smooth, fair skin and how what’s left of her flesh is packaged so daintily into a neat, hot little dress and tell him this. But what Tom sees is the stooped-over way she carries herself like her thinness was a punch in the gut, the air of heaviness around her that will never leave. How her heels are scuffed and her stockings full of rips because she spends all her money on dresses that she cannot afford and that are not fit for any occasion. He has fantasies about burning the little short-sleeved black cardigan she feels compelled to wear even in the dead of summer, over this dress, over every dress regardless of its color and cut because she buys them all too tight. He’s seen the deodorant stains in the armpits, smelled the stink of its sweat and trying and perfume. And he doesn’t feel like a lucky man. He doesn’t feel lucky at all.

  For one thing, he got lucky a hell of a lot more when she was fat. Now she’s either too hungry or angry or distracted for sex. Or she says she still feels “like a stranger in my own body.” When she first told him this, he said it was ridiculous. But actually he understands what she means. He feels shy and awkward when he hugs the half of her that’s left, when his hands graze the now pronounced bones in her back and shoulders. And she is just as uncomfortable being naked, obsessed with what she calls “the evidence.” Embarrassed about her shrunken breasts, the slack skin around her middle. She still comes to bed more or less fully clothed and covering parts of herself with her hands, just like she did when she was fat.

  The fat girl comes back to him like a remembered dream.

  “Where the hell’s Dickie, anyway?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Can you believe he actually offered that girl to us?”

  Hot Pocket laughs and takes a toke. “That’s Dickie. He’s a sicko.”

  He forgets if he’s the first to suggest it or if it’s Hot Pocket. How they ought to just drive over there. To Dickie’s house. Not to . . . you know . . . obviously, but just to get a look at her. This fat chick. This girl who’ll do anything. Just, you know, for curiosity’s sake. Hot Pocket checks his watch. It’s early still. He probably shouldn’t leave the party.

  “You said we need more beers,” Tom says. “We could get more beers on the way.”

  “I guess we could.” They do need more beers.

  They tell the girls they’re going out to get more beers and the next thing he knows he’s driving across the tracks in Hot Pocket’s SUV, zigzagging past the rancid Mexican eateries and gang war gas stations in the no-man’s-land between Hot Pocket’s neighborhood and Dickie’s. He is expecting Dickie to live in a glass cube or a giant dildo or something, but it’s just a regular old bungalow. Sad and squat and flesh colored, just like all the other ones on the block.

  The house looks dark. Though Tom’s already charging across the lawn, Hot Pocket hangs back. “Wait,” he calls. “It’s getting pretty late, isn’t it?”

  “This is Dickie we’re talking about,” Tom replies. “His evening of hydro and samurai movies is probably just getting under way.”

  Despite Hot Pocket’s protests, Tom staggers up the walk, rings the doorbell and gathers his hands together in front of him, rocks on his heels. His hands feel very moist and hot. No answer.

  He pounds and pounds on the door until his knuckles are raw, ignoring Hot Pocket’s Let’s just gos, thinking he will never leave, not until he gets a look. At last Dickie appears bleary-eyed in the doorway. He’s wearing one of those shirts patterned with dancing hula girls, unbuttoned down to the navel. There is a sedate, rumpled look to him, a sheen to his face that suggests he’s just been masturbating.

  “Hey, guys. What the fuck? Little late for a house call, isn’t it?”

  Over Hot Pocket’s drunken apology Tom says, “Just were going for more beers and wanted to check up on you. Thought you and your date were coming to the party tonight.”

  “Oh.” Dickie blinks. “That was tonight? Guess we got kind of caught up.”

  “So . . . ?” Tom says, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the dark hallway behind Dickie.

  “So what?” Dickie says, narrowing the gap in the doorway so only he is visible. Tom notices a darting, ferret-like quality in his eyes.

  “Can we come in?” Tom asks, ignoring Hot Pocket’s backward tug on his arm.

  “Now?” Dickie says.

  Tom shrugs. “Didn’t know the Fourth of July was a school night. Anyway, we just wanted to see . . . to say hello.”

  Dickie looks hard at Tom, who looks hard back. He shakes his head. “Night, assholes,” he says. He is about to close the door on them when Tom quickly slips his foot in the crack.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Tom?”

  Tom doesn’t answer. Keeps his foot in the door, his eyes sifting the dark hall beyond Dickie’s shoulder.

  “Fuck off!”

  That’s when he hears a woman’s voice from within: “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Dickie calls, glaring at Tom.

  Tom’s gaze grasps for her shape in the dark but as far as he can see there’s nothing. Her voice sounds nothing like Beth’s. He looks back at Dickie, who’s still scowling in his hula girl shirt. He feels Hot Pocket tugging his shoulder while offering mumbled entreaties that they should probably head home. Sighing, Tom removes his foot from the doorframe. The door slams in his face.

  • • •

  When they get back to the party, Brindy tells him Beth has already left. Not only didn’t she stay for the fireworks, but also? “She seemed upset.”

  Driving home alone in Hot Pocket’s SUV, Tom feels the mountain ranges on either side of him, visible only as a darker blackness in the black.

  Reeling through the apartment door, he calls her name a couple of times. No answer. But the living room pillar’s there and she’s lit it up. He walks toward it like it’s a beacon, sees on the mantel of the fireplace all these photos of the new her—of her and him, her and her mother, some just of her, of Elizabeth—not his Beth but Elizabeth. Looking pared down and stiff, clad in tight-fitting, sharply cut dresses of every shade, her lips a hard red line that is only half-smiling on one side. In the center, the urn filled with her mother’s ashes, which she refuses to scatter. As he turns and makes his way to the bedroom, he passes the workout gizmo she ordered off the Home Shopping Network, something between a NordicTrack and a treadmill, called the Gazelle. The Gazelle is for days, she said, when she doesn’t feel like “facing” the fitness center, whatever that means. There are so many things he no longer understands.

  There, between the display for calories burned and miles Gazelled, she’s taped a photo of herself taken at the staff barbecue a couple of years ago, which she attended during one of her visits, when still in the process of losing. She’s folded the picture in half so it’s just her, but when he
unfolds it, he sees himself, red faced and grinning noncommittally at the camera, one thin arm dangling around her shoulder. Beth is leaning into him, smiling broadly into his armpit, a big S of dark shiny hair obscuring one of her eyes. She’s wearing a long black oversize sweater, a long dark skirt. My fat dress, she calls it now. That night, some asshole coworker’s skeletal wife apparently took a cheap shot at her weight and he didn’t defend her. At least this is what she claimed when they got home. He doesn’t remember not defending her. He guesses she Gazelles about five miles a day now while looking at this half of the picture, in which she is smiling but also looking a little scared, like the camera could give her a clip to the jaw anytime. This was the girl he fell in love with. The girl who loved sad music, the girl who wanted nothing more than to lie with him in the dark and let wave upon wave of lush, dark electronic sound wash over her. This might be the only photo of her left. Maybe she keeps the others hidden in a box somewhere, but probably she just got rid of them.

  I did this for you, you know, she always tells him.

  Did you? he wants to say.

  Because he doesn’t remember ever asking for kumquats or hybrid cardio machines, but who knows? Maybe all this time, all the little ways he looked at her and didn’t look at her, all the things he said or didn’t say or didn’t say enough added up to this awful request without his knowledge or consent, like those ransom notes made from letters cut from different magazines.