Half-Assed

by Jennette Fulda

  To prove that I wasn’t crazy, I bought an indoor-outdoor thermometer and took it into the office. Then I said some naughty words and stopped at the drugstore the next day to buy one AAA battery. I popped it into the thermometer and waited to see if my working conditions were horrible enough to warrant a lawsuit.

  It was 72.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

  I was wearing a lightweight sweater, a blazer, and a blouse, and I still felt as if I’d been locked in a freezer. I guessed my body was either missing the warm insulation of my fat or reacting to my weight loss by lowering my metabolism. There wasn’t much I could do about it besides investing in wool socks.

  I wasn’t just looking better, I was feeling healthier too. When I later got down to 225 pounds, I stopped at the blood-pressure machine at the pharmacy. I stuck my hand through the cuff so it could be squeezed like a fresh melon. I was surprised that my arm fit somewhat comfortably and the machine didn’t completely cut off my circulation when it choked my arm. The last time I’d used the machine I thought I’d have to gnaw my arm off at my elbow to exit the store. The cuff deflated and released my arm. I checked the numbers with anticipation as if I were hoping for a high score on Tetris. The display read: 122/71. Woo-hoo! I wanted to take a victory lap around the feminine hygiene aisle, throwing tampons in the air like confetti. My family had a history of hypertension, but that reading was perfectly normal. I was glad to break from family tradition.

  I checked the clock on my computer and saw that it was after five o’clock. I gathered up my things to leave and said goodbye to my boss. As I walked down the hallway I started to think about what to make for dinner that night and what exercises I needed to do before I started cooking. I was now eating like a thin person and exercising like a thin person, but I was still fat. If I ended a smoking habit, as soon as I took the last puff of smoke I could say I had quit. But after I’d started acting like a thin person, it was still going to take a long time to quit being fat.

  Some people might say I had a skinny girl inside just waiting to get out. I hated that expression. It made sense only if I’d swallowed a Lilliputian for lunch who was fighting her way back up my esophagus. It sounded like something to say if you wanted to escape the moral judgments that came along with being fat. I translated it to, “I’m not really a fat person. I’m just a skinny person in disguise! I’m not a glutton who is worthy of your scorn. I’m a virtuous, little girl who just happens to have a slow metabolism.”

  I didn’t believe I could split my personality in half like that. Splitting occurred when you tried to break an idea into binary oppositions. Someone was good or bad. She was a fat person or a thin person. Splitting occurred when a concept was too emotionally complex for you to handle. The skinny girl and the fat girl weren’t different girls. Neither one was necessarily good or bad. They were both just girls; same great taste, one with less fat. Their differing sizes didn’t change my underlying personality. I was depleting fat cells, not brain cells. I could be a lot of things, thin and fat among them, but neither one was any more my “true” identity. I could be a mouthy bitch if someone provoked me, but when I met a cute guy I would frequently be rendered mute. I wasn’t a thin girl who had been temporarily possessed by a fat person. My size was just a reflection of the environment I was currently living in. I was simply whoever I was today; size may vary.

  People seemed more comfortable categorizing me as just one thing, like a one-dimensional character in a bad horror movie. They liked to cast me in that role according to how I looked, as if I could weave my personality into flesh and wear it over my skeleton like a dress. I could control the image I projected to some extent. I had a sassy flip in my curly hair and I enjoyed the irony of my pink argyle socks speckled with skulls and crossbones, but those clothes were still just a costume. No one could ever know exactly who I was just by looking at me. Even if my smaller-size ass highlighted by my boot-cut jeans was a more accurate reflection of who I considered myself to be, it was still just a costume I was wearing over my bones. Yet we all still seemed to be kids playing dress-up out of the costume box in the classroom corner.

  These costumes affected how I lived my life, just as if I’d tried squeezing into a corset and found I couldn’t breathe. When I wore my fat-girl body, people avoided looking at me. I became an extra in the background of a movie. Now that I had a thinner body, I was being cast as a supporting actor, if not the lead. As I walked down the hall at work, a tall man with brown hair made eye contact with me and said, “Good evening.” I waved good night to him in return. That was odd. It was happening more and more often. People were making eye contact. They were saying hello even if I didn’t know them. They were being friendly for no apparent reason. Was this normal?

  It definitely wasn’t normal that I started being friendly and outgoing in return. When I bought a pair of tights at a store, the cashier started to make small talk with me about how cute they were. I wondered if she’d have bothered to chat with the morbidly obese version of myself. Most checkout clerks I’d encountered seemed to be suffering from posttraumatic retail stress and hated all customers. Usually when I bumped into sales associates while shopping I would cower in fear when they asked the dreaded question, “Can I help you?” No matter how unenthusiastically they delivered the query, I didn’t want their help. I wanted to get in and out with as little human contact as necessary. I’d usually mumble something and slink away. Now I found myself able to flash a perfect smile and say in a chipper voice, “No, thanks,” before I resumed browsing.

  When I went shopping for a used car, my mother and I went to a dealership where I waited for five minutes until a balding man finally sat down to help me. He began pushing me into a five-year loan at a high interest rate, trying to sell it as a deal even though I’d be paying more money than I had budgeted. I stayed firm and said I wasn’t interested. As I got up to leave, he tried to get me to test-drive another car on the lot. I could smell the desperation on him. He mentioned that he’d just been transferred from the online sales department, and I wondered if his bosses were setting him up to fail and be fired. I felt sorry for him, but he didn’t have anything I wanted to buy.

  The salesman scrambled after me as I crossed the sidewalk to the car. I turned and said, “Thanks, but I’m just going to go now,” in a polite and friendly tone. As I looked back at him I felt a surge of power that I’d rarely ever felt in my life. I was standing my ground, not bowing to the pressure another person was putting on me. It had been my habit to bend like a twist tie. I didn’t know how to say no. It was such a simple syllable: No. I hadn’t undergone speech therapy, but I was finding it easier and easier to say that short, simple word. I had lost a tremendous amount of weight. I had the power to change my world if I wanted to, and I didn’t want my world to include an uncomfortable test-drive with a barely competent car salesman. I felt a high, despite the headache I’d developed from car-shopping dehydration. This was thrilling.

  The fat girl hadn’t done those things. She had flailed hopelessly for a forgotten line all alone on stage. The not-as-fat girl was being fed lines by her costars, who held out pieces of themselves that she could cling to. The world was more supportive now. In Picasso’s painting, the girl stood alone with her reflection, but my reality was being shaped in many ways by other people. I was like the mirror, reflecting back their goodwill.

  I was getting a new body, so did I need to get a new personality too? If you’ve got the dress, you need the shoes. None of my old clothes fit anymore. I’d sold my fat jeans on eBay, but my sense of style hadn’t changed. I was still the same person. I was just starting to share myself with the world. The smiles and friendly glances were coaxing me to come out of my protective shell. The world seemed to resent my presence far less. It was sad I had to lose weight to get that. I was boiling off the fat cells until all that remained was my undiluted self, 100 percent pure.

  I walked to the parking lot and drove home to change into my workout clothes. I took a jog on the treadmill. I
had been walking regularly for more than a year now. I was learning more about nutrition and training all the time. I was living such a healthy life, but people who looked at my flabby body probably had no idea. At what point did an activity become part of my identity? How many lumpy sweaters did I have to knit before people started thinking of me as a knitter? How many CD mixes did I have to burn before friends thought of me as a girl with good taste in music? How long would I have to eat well and exercise before I was no longer pretending to be a healthy, thin person and was actually considered one by myself and others?

  My mother finally decided to sell the house. I needed to find an apartment or get really friendly, really fast, with our home’s new owners. I took my mom apartment hunting with me since she always remembered to ask sensible questions like, “Is water included in the rental fee?” while I only made insightful comments such as, “The carpet sure is soft.” We got out of the car at the first complex, and I was halfway to the rental office before I noticed I was suddenly alone. I turned around to see my mom lagging two or three yards behind me. Then I realized the shocking truth. I had become that which I used to hate—a fast walker.

  People always walked faster than me and it really pissed me off. Whenever I had walked with my older brother, he would zip past me effortlessly, frequently stopping at corners waiting for me to catch up. I blamed it on his long legs. This theory was disproved when I walked with a shorter coworker to her farewell lunch the year before. I felt as if I were running down the sidewalk just to match her casual pace. She slowed down as we neared a crosswalk, like the hare waiting for the tortoise to catch up. I was embarrassed that she was breaking her regular stride to accommodate my slowness.

  My mother weighed a bit more than me and was thirty years older, so it wasn’t as though I were outpacing a roadrunner on crack, but when we’d visited New York City two years earlier we had trundled past street vendors at the same pace. I’d lightened my load since then.

  It was hard to think that anyone was changing as much as I was. When I checked my email and blogs online, there was a new journal post by a friend from high school, who had been to a bar the night before and run into another high school friend. I assumed I would take the prize for most changed at our high school reunion, but I think Daniel might beat me, now that he was going by the name of Danielle.

  I had known Daniel fairly well, but I knew the back of his head better. I had been positioned directly behind him in the opening box formation of our marching band halftime show. Clean scalp, no lice. I was disappointed I hadn’t run into him at the bar myself, though it probably would have taken several minutes before we recognized each other. I imagine our conversation would have gone like this:

  “Hey, didn’t you used to be really fat?” she would say as she batted her curled eyelashes.

  “Hey, didn’t you used to have a penis?” I would reply while sipping a Diet Pepsi.

  I never knew Daniel was unhappy with his gender, but I was happy to hear about his decision, even if it made pronoun usage particularly tricky. We had more in common than I’d thought. I certainly had experienced disliking my external appearance. I was also discovering what it was like to undergo a dramatic physical change. Danielle would surely know what it was like to meet old friends and see their jaws drop open in shock. I wasn’t the only one becoming more myself. It was nice to be reminded that there was more than one way to do that.

  I had flipped through a community education course catalog recently, contemplating taking one of its fitness classes since I was still too cheap to join a gym. On my way to the blurbs about cardio kickboxing and aerobic belly dancing, I kept stopping to read course descriptions for glassblowing, woodworking, and blacksmithing. I could make my own dumbbells or cast finger cymbals for the bellydancing class. I could learn to paint like a Dutch master. There were so many possibilities contained between the cheap newspaper pages of the booklet. So many things that I could do or be. I had started losing weight so I could find myself, whoever I was hidden beneath the padding that kept me safe from the sharp corners of the world. But as Danielle probably already knew, I didn’t need to find myself; I needed to create myself instead.

  CHAPTER 9

  Too Small for My Britches

  In April I needed to buy new spring clothes yet again, because last year’s T-shirts were falling off my 225-pound frame. This was fun at first, buying cute new clothes and feeling pretty. I hadn’t felt pretty that often in my life, not since I’d worn pink patent leather shoes as a little girl. When I could finally fit into jeans at Lane Bryant again, I held a mini fashion show for the mirror in our front hallway. I pretended the trampled carpeting was a Paris runway and the clumps of cat hair were limelights. I proudly showed off my newly purchased size 28 jeans to the spider hiding in the moulding cracks. I imagined him applauding with four pairs of legs.

  Now my cute new clothes no longer fit. It wasn’t fair. All my clothes had expiration dates, like milk gallons, only they weren’t stamped on the labels. I felt particularly bad if I wore something only a couple of times before it became too big. It was such a waste of money. The most expensive thing I’d bought was a new winter coat, because I didn’t want to drop more than a hundred dollars on a garment that wouldn’t fit next year. The only one benefiting from this was my mom, who was walking around the house in my old clothes, enjoying my free service as her personal shopper.

  I had started experimenting with sewing so I could alter some of my favorite clothes. This worked for a few size decreases, but after a certain point the cut and shape of a garment was too different for me to remake it in a smaller size. Tank tops were pretty easy; I could just take in the sides, but eventually the arm straps would slide off my shoulders because they were set too far apart. Then I’d have to send them to Goodwill, knowing that I was playing an evil trick on the size-24 consumer, who would be horrified when she couldn’t fit into the blue tank top I’d sized down to an 18.

  I had wanted to knit a sweater during the past winter. My problem, besides the fact that I couldn’t knit, was that I didn’t know how big to make the sweater. Not only was I losing weight, but I didn’t know how fast I could knit. The faster I lost weight, the smaller I would need to make it. But the faster I knit, the bigger I should make it. It was a calculus problem. I started to have flashbacks—eleventh-grade math, Mrs. Stewart, a word problem involving a lighthouse and a woman walking a dog on the beach. It was all coming back to me except how to actually do any of the math. I decided to just buy a sweater.

  But then spring came, and it was time to start shopping again. I wandered out of the plus-size clothing department into the misses’ section on a lark. I grabbed an extra-large T-shirt and walked to the dressing room. I pulled it on over my head, looked in the mirror, and saw that the shirt was baggy. I nearly fainted and hit my head on the doorknob. All my perfect attendance T-shirts from middle school had been XL. I couldn’t remember ever buying a smaller size. I returned to the sales floor, grabbed a size large and returned to the dressing room. It fit well, hugging all the right spots.

  It completely blew my mind.

  I could now shop in the “normal” stores. I’d been banished for most of my life to the special plus-size retailers and the women’s sections of department stores stowed far away from the misses’ section, as if cellulite were contagious. The clothes for fat girls were not like the clothes for “average” girls. You had to pay twice as much for a product that was only half as stylish. The extra fabric didn’t cost that much.

  Fat-girl clothes were lousy with sequins. I suspected in lieu of daycare that many full-figured clothing stores allowed employees’ children to run around with a bedazzler, applying shiny plastic beads to every tank top or blouse in sight. Designers probably thought fat women wanted to distract onlookers with shiny objects so no one would notice we were fat. Soon they’d be adding bells and rattles for further distractions.

  There were a couple retailers that catered just to the plus-size market, bu
t my options were limited to whatever they decided to stock that season. The year peasant skirts were in I would have joined a nudist colony if I hadn’t been ashamed to be seen naked. In some ways the lack of selection made shopping very easy. I’d go to Lane Bryant, pick out the least ugly clothes in the store, and go home. Not much thinking required.

  A lot of fat girls liked to bitch about Lane Bryant’s clothes, I among them, but I also knew it wasn’t Lane Bryant’s fault that I didn’t love everything in its windows. No single store could possibly serve the needs of all fat people. If you made all thin people shop at The Gap, there’d be a lot of unsatisfied customers complaining about its khakis. I couldn’t understand why there weren’t more plus-size stores. My local news station made it seem as if we were a nation of headless fat people.We were supposedly the first generation that would have shorter lifespans than our parents because of increasing obesity rates.1 Shouldn’t the plus-size clothing industry be a boomtown, with a Casual Male XL popping up next to every Taco Bell?

  A few new plus-size retailers had set up shop in the past decade, but not as many as you’d think. Lots of them did most of their business online and didn’t have many retail outlets. Even if I did order something online, I’d have to buy several sizes to be sure I found something that fit my shape. I’d also have to pay extra shipping to send back the unwanted items. I’d resorted to buying slacks online only after I realized I no longer fit into the biggest size at Lane Bryant, a 28. I had stretched out my last pair in that size until they were a thirty-something. Then I wore out the inner thighs. I had my mother patch them because it was too depressing to hunt for another pair.