Until then, there is always Juliana Hatfield and ice cream.
4
SECRET GIRLFRIEND
THERE IS A stereotype that many overweight girls who play with Barbies into their teen years may be somewhat stunted or immature in their view of sexuality, and I am here to say . . . okay, actually I can’t say anything because I have a penis in my mouth right now and am way too busy to dispute ridiculous fat person stereotypes. If anything, I always found myself to be more interested in sex than other girls my age. I hit puberty sooner, I had boobs sooner, and I even started my period sooner. I had more hormones coursing through my veins than I knew what to do with. In college I even made the ballsy decision to answer the ad in the school paper for phone sex operators because it sounded daring and exciting—also I was broke and my fridge was empty.
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During the phone interview with a southern woman named Pam, she asked me to pretend she was a man and describe myself in my most erotic voice.
“I’m very pale with chin-length kinky blond hair and brown eyes,” I awkwardly purred into the phone. I took her silence as a cue to continue. “I’m wearing black underwear—I mean panties—and I’m not wearing a bra because my boobies are so big.”
“Is that your sexiest voice, hun?” she asked.
“Well, I sound more mysterious when I have a respiratory infection.”
“Okay,” she sighed into the receiver. “Can ya think of another word for boobies?”
“Bosoms?”
“What about the male genitalia?”
“Like nuts?”
“Nuts?”
“Or wieners?”
Spoiler alert: I did not get the job, and saying those words out loud was a lot harder than pointing at them in person and then putting them inside you, which is how I handle both the majority of my foreplay and ordering things in foreign-speaking restaurants. But what I lacked in actual sex vocabulary, I made up for in absolute obsession, because let’s face it, sex is one of the most interesting topics in the world. It’s the basis for human life, entire channels are dedicated to it, and wars are started because of it. The problem was that the foundation of my sex obsession was built on very little factual information. I blame the Catholics.
CATHOLICS HATE VAGINAS
At the start of fourth grade I hit puberty, which is an elementary school game changer. I was what my family doctor called an “early bloomer.” Nothing says, Hey let’s be friends like having to ask your mother for a tampon in the middle of the puppet show at your birthday party. Judy Blume had made puberty sound awesome, but Judy Blume, at least in my view, was a liar. Having boobs and hormones didn’t make me mysterious and worldly; it made me lumpy and awkward in an era when the last thing I needed was more lumpy and awkward.
The classrooms of my Catholic elementary school were constructed of cement block walls and long rectangular windows, with no air-conditioning; you know, just like Jesus times. This made for summers so hot that by noon in the middle of September reaching for my hand during the Lord’s Prayer in church was often met with a “Gross, why are you always so sweaty all the time?” I don’t know, maybe it’s because the nuns kept it hot as Nazareth in there, or that my body was racing with freaked-out hormones that made all my parts sweat and my boobs pop out awkward and pointy. I had no idea what was happening to my body, only that I was suddenly very aware of it, both because it was getting larger and because it felt different when I touched it. Puberty and sex weren’t exactly topics thoroughly explained by the Catholic faith, and I certainly wasn’t getting any information from my parents. In fact, the only time my father had ever spoken to me about anything related to womanhood was when I foolishly knocked on his office door to ask him what periods were after an episode of Head of the Class. He handed me the book Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret and a container of Mace, and told me my mother kept pads on the top shelf of the bathroom closet. He said menstruation was completely natural, but if I could hold off until college, that’d be great. I’m thirty now and still barely understand how periods work.
As an aside, I actually had a super-traumatic menstruation false alarm later that year after waking up in the middle of the night violently vomiting due to some questionable room-temperature ranch dressing at dinner, only to find myself also covered in blood from the waist down. Terrified, I woke my mom, who took me in the bathroom to clean me up and have a lovely conversation about how to use maxi-pads, in which I wanted to stab myself in the face. But by morning, it had become clear that our cocker spaniel, Mia, had gone into heat, and since she slept with me at night, while the puke was mine, the blood was not. I kept the pad on for the whole day anyways, just in case my person cycle aligned with Mia’s dog cycle. But it didn’t and my parents had Mia spayed a month later. Because waking up in the middle of the night to find a little girl with big boobs standing next to your bed covered in spoiled ranch dressing and dog period is something you never want to experience twice.
The mystery surrounding puberty and sex did nothing to stifle my curiosity; in fact, much like the overprotective moms who make you spell the words G-U-N-S and S-U-G-A-R in front of their impressionable Mensa babies only to end up raising Second Amendment–obsessed hyperglycemics, keeping it a secret terrified and excited me to the point I’d become consumed with the idea. My health teacher was increasingly uncooperative and furrowed her brown in concern each time she shook off my requests for detailed diagrams and answers about when hair would grow on my you know what, how many holes we had down there, and which ones did we put things inside of? The general takeaway from reading ahead in my health textbook was that our private parts were sacred, blood will eventually come out of them, and sex was something we weren’t supposed to think about having with others or ourselves.
I didn’t even know having sex with yourself was on the table until a damning revelation during my brief friendship with my atheist friend Drea, whose mother worked part-time for my parents. To Drea, I was exotic and mysterious, conducting play versions of Mass in my living room, wearing my mother’s off-white silk robe, carefully placing a shortbread cookie on Drea’s tongue and blessing her as she chewed. In return for saving her from hell and relieving her of sin, Drea invited me to a sleepover with all of her public school friends. We watched PG-13 movies and drank Pepsi from two-liter bottles, until she dismissed us all to our sleeping bags, turned off the lights, and quietly instructed us on how to touch ourselves like she’d seen in the Asian pornographic movies her father collected. I didn’t climax or anything, I was ten with sausage fingers and hangnails, but it felt amazing, which would go on to be a Catholic red flag. The only things Catholics are allowed to enjoy are fried cod, beer, and the movie Sister Act.
Later that year, before even reaching the much-anticipated section on human development and reproduction, my poor health teacher suffered an aneurysm, totally unrelated to my genital interrogations, and went to live with her sister in Florida. Health was then taken over by our priest. Father took his no-nonsense approach to crucifixion and applied it to all areas of our studies, including sex education. He split our class into a boys group and a girls group, and whichever group wasn’t actively learning about sex organs got to sit in the gym and watch Mary Poppins.
I don’t know how the boys group went, but from the time Father walked into the room, it was like we were already in trouble for something. He looked angry and impatiently tapped his foot as we took turns reading aloud about fallopian tubes and menstruation. It was like learning about the human body from the Hulk. He took no questions, and when we’d finished the chapter, he stood in front of his desk, tossed the book down, and gave it to us straight. According to the Fath
er intercourse was a utilitarian act between a married man and woman, with the intention to make enough babies to fill a conversion van. Anything that occurred outside those specific perimeters was deemed damnable. This point was then further driven home by a ten-minute slide show of sexually transmitted diseases, followed by threats of teenage pregnancy, fiery pits of hell, and photographs of our parents and Jesus making a series of disappointed faces. None of this had been in the book.
After school that day, I went home, lay on my back against the plush pink carpet of my bedroom floor, looking up at the ceiling fan covered in dust and dog hair, and taped my vagina shut with Scotch tape.
Now, I want to say taping my vagina shut was part of a bold religious statement of empowerment, in the vein of Joan of Arc being burnt at the stake or St. Lucy of Syracuse having her eyes gouged out before execution, but the truth is that I sealed it shut out of sheer terror. The warm, electric feeling and curiosity that existed between my legs in my sleeping bag that night were replaced by shame and anxiety, and if I taped it shut, I wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally touching it, or even worse yet, liking the feeling.
There were two problems with my plan, the first being that when I sat down to go to the bathroom, pee shot out of me like a clogged showerhead. The second was the ensuing rash from layers and layers of slightly urine-damp plastic tape on my labia. Three days in and I was basically dragging my crotch across the carpet like a dog until my mom grew suspicious and took me to an emergency appointment at her lady doctor. I will never forget their horrified faces as I climbed up onto the table and put my feet into the stirrups, giving them a front-row view of my swollen vagina mummified in clear sticky plastic.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I explained to Dr. Sim and my mother what I’d learned in health class, as Dr. Sim quietly removed strip after strip of tape with long metal tweezers. I think this was the first time my mother was seeing the real-time effects of religious education, and it freaked her the fuck out. Here she thought she was getting polite, well-educated children who read at or above grade level, but the reality was that it came with a price, and that price was a daughter who put tape on her privates. Not that this should be surprising, because in general, the Catholic Church is a weird institution. Half-naked people on crosses, teen moms, Copperfield-level magic all over the place. Normal people don’t emerge from that environment.
I left that office with my very first scheduled therapy appointment, instructions to apply the steroid cream until the redness and swelling subsided, and an inflatable hemorrhoid pillow to use until the skin grew back.
In case you ever catch yourself wondering just how judgmental small children can be, ask the girl in fourth grade who had to sit on a hemorrhoid pillow because her labia was full of scabs.
“My mom said that putting stuff on your private parts gets you on sex offender lists.”
“You’re not a sex offender if you put tape on your own privates, Tara,” I shot back.
Just when I thought they’d never let me live that shit down, two weeks later a boy in my class went up to the chalkboard to answer a math problem with an erection. Nobody really remembered I taped my vagina shut after that. Thank God for erections, am I right?
SHE GIVES IT ALL AWAY
An issue many overweight women face is that it’s very easy to have a great deal of your womanhood and femininity robbed from you. You aren’t a possible mate because you aren’t pretty; instead you’re just “like a sister” or “one of the guys” or Madonna’s wingman in A League of Their Own. Once I had enough distance between myself and Catholic school, and the scars on my vagina had healed, I began to search out a point of connection between the girlishness and attractiveness I wasn’t feeling, and that connection became messing around with boys. Or in bitter high school girl terms, I became a huge whore, which was actually somewhat of a challenge because I looked like a fat Dutch Boy with boobs.
As it should come to the surprise of no one, I had very little experience with boys. My first French kiss was with my neighbor named Grant while playing spin the bottle with him and my brother in his parents’ basement. Honestly, there were very few good outcomes in that game.
So, I depended heavily on my friends to help me wade through the waters of boys and relationships. Typically, there were two ways to ask out a guy. If you were confident he was going to say yes, you did it yourself at his locker or between classes. If the potential outcome was fuzzy, you sent your friend in to do it like a shady used car salesman.
“Sure she looks a little rough around the edges, but under that ear zit and faint mustache, she really purrs.”
That approach panned out for me only one time, with my very first boyfriend, Vince. Vince was a quiet boy with curly hair that fell into his eyes, and a complete stoner. My cousin Parris asked him out for me while we were at a party. He was sitting at the dining room table lighting napkins on fire with his Zippo lighter, when she whispered in his ear and pointed at me from across the room. He shrugged, said yes, and we spent the next hour kissing in the woods next to a rusted-out VW bus. Having never had a boyfriend before, I relished all the intricacies of our relationship. Like the way he fingered me in the movie theater during Natural Born Killers. Or wrote me poems about death, but in a really romantic way like, won’t it be awesome when we’re both dead and we can be two rotting corpses in the same grave hole for all of eternity or until they bulldoze out our remains to build a Walmart?
It’s a cliché to say I was in love, but I truly thought I was. Until three months later when Vince dumped me on my birthday for a girl in Georgia who was technically his third or fourth cousin. I can’t be sure if those crazy kids ever made it, but if they did, you can bet there’s a handful of gorgeous curly-haired inbred children running around somewhere with two different-colored eyes and an anus coming out of their foreheads.
Outside of Vince, which I think we can all agree was a major bullet dodged, the remainder of my time as an underclassman was spent being a secret girlfriend. Secret girlfriends were not the same as pretend girlfriends. We weren’t made-up girls you never see because we lived in Canada or only proved our existence through naked pictures shared in AOL chat rooms. Secret girlfriends were girls who had legitimate relationships with boys, even though nobody else was around to verify it was actually happening. The males in my school, who so often never gave me a passing sexual thought, soon realized that with soft stomachs and thick thighs come large boobs. Suddenly I was spending a lot of time with boys who were too ashamed to be seen with me in public, either because of what I looked like, or the fact that they already had other more attractive nonsecret girlfriends who were often busy every weekend at track meets or volleyball games. They’d pick me up on Friday nights and we’d drive to empty parking lots or back to their homes if their parents were gone. We’d start out watching movies on the couch, but would always end up making out for a few hours before they’d realized how late it had gotten, usher me back to the car, and drive me back home stone-faced and stoic. Now that the sexual urge had been filled, all that was left for them was regret. If there was one constant in this part of my life, it was that they never kissed me goodbye, not once.
And yet, it wasn’t until the light of day, or at least by the light of the fluorescent bulbs that lined the aging school hallways from 8 A.M. and 2:20 P.M., as those same boys who breathed my name into my neck as they fumbled with the hooks of my bra walked past me not meeting my eyes, that I remembered these weren’t real relationships.
I know, I know, it’s really easy for me to look back at this from my self-esteem high horse and cringe. But this was a different time. Clinton was president. We were still eating gluten. The 9/11 attacks hadn’t happened yet. I didn’t know I was doing a disservice to chubby girls everywhere; I was more focused on the fact that when I was making out with a boy in a car in the woods I felt like a girl for the very first time. Being heavy and wanted was a completely new concept; it never dawned on me that I had a say in al
l this, or that I had the right to be picky about who I allowed access to my body. I was just thankful someone, anyone, had wanted it.
And they could have it, as much of it as they’d like, except for sex. It might sound arbitrary considering, but sex was something I held tight to. Not for religious reasons, or even fear, though being terrified of your first time was completely normal, but more out of self-preservation and control. I may not have been able to change the way I looked, or my station in life at that moment, but I could control who got my virginity. I would give it away when it felt right, and so far, being left standing in my driveway as upperclassman boys pulled away popping gum in their mouths and covering my scent with Calvin Klein’s Obsession before they met up with their real girlfriends didn’t feel right.
My journals in high school read like the playbook of a plus-size Donna Martin from 90210. Like Donna, I was not only saving myself, but was self-conscious about my nose and had two different-sized breasts.
NOVEMBER 1996
I gave Grant a blowjob in his car after school, again. Yes, that Grant. The Grant who took me on one date before leaving me at the restaurant while I was in the bathroom, and his friend Tom had to drive me home. I have no idea what my problem is, he barely acknowledges me in school or at play practice. I swear to God he looks like he fell out of the show Felicity with his puka shell necklaces, layers of sweaters and flannel shirts, and worn looking Dr. Martens. It’s like he walks around to a perpetual soundtrack of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” I saw him talking to Emily at her locker, which makes absolutely no sense, because Emily is incredibly boring and has a haircut like Frasier, but when we talked on the phone last night he promised he doesn’t even like Emily, his mom wanted him to date her, but he totally isn’t going to. He also asked me to come over this weekend when his parents are gone to watch movies and said to be sure to wear a skirt. He probably wants me to dress up for when he asks me to Homecoming.
Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It Page 5
