I’d stopped wearing jeans after high school because I couldn’t find them in my size. I’d resorted to slacks made out of a spandex/ polyester blend. I couldn’t wear denim without being mistaken for a gold miner’s tent. A girl in one of my college classes wore jeans that appeared to be big enough for me. I was tempted to ask her where she bought them, but I couldn’t do it because it would bring attention to the fact that she was fat. It was okay if I called myself fat, but it was forbidden to use the f-word about another girl. Evil high school boys called women fat, not other fat girls. If she brought it up first, then it would be okay, but otherwise it would be a hostile assault on a neighboring country. I would occasionally look over my shoulder at her during the boring parts of a lecture, trying to think of ways to bring the topic up, but I never did find out the location of the fat-girl denim store.
I usually shopped alone because my thinner friends and I couldn’t find clothes at the same stores. This segregation seemed unfair, but it was probably for the best. If I’d had to sort through the 3X selections while a teenybopper at the next rack moaned about how huge she felt in size 4 jeans, I probably would have beaten her to death with a wooden clothes hanger. I was glad that the saleswomen at plus-size stores were fat girls. They were probably just there for the employee discount, but at least I knew they had no right to judge me or act superior.
While I was grateful for stores like Lane Bryant that kept me from wearing the latest in garbage bag couture, shopping at the fat-girl store always reminded me of how different I was.
Until now.
Sure, my pear shape mandated that I still wear size-26 jeans, but I could buy shirts at the “normal” stores. I felt as if I’d moved up a level while playing Grand Theft Auto. I could now access a whole new section of the game, only without all the stealing and shooting and whoring, although that would certainly have made the shopping experience more interesting. I went to Old Navy just so I could say I’d bought something there. I started getting more and more into fashion now that I actually had options.
Before I lost a lot of weight, I thought fashion was somewhat ridiculous. I didn’t understand why a guy in my high school English class asked to read a copy of Seventeen after a classmate was through with it. I was a girl and even I didn’t read those magazines. (This boycott probably saved me several knockout blows to my self-esteem.) I didn’t watch daytime television either, but my mother had Oprah on her TiVo season pass, so I would catch snippets of episodes while walking around the house. One day the show did makeovers that made women look twenty pounds thinner just by changing their clothes. I bought the book it was promoting the very next day.
When I started reading about fashion, I discovered there were sensible rules about how to use color and shape to emphasize and deemphasize your figure in all the right ways. I was a web designer with some graphic design classes in my past, so many of the ideas resonated with concepts I’d learned in college. I wanted to use this knowledge to show off my new body, like polishing a brand-new car for all the neighbors to see.
What I hadn’t consciously realized about fashion was that what you wear affects how you feel. As a child I understood this instinctively when I raided our box of dress-up clothes. In the box were karate outfits my mother had bought in Japan on the long way home around the world after her stint in the Peace Corps. Instantly they would transform me from a wimpy grade-schooler into a stealthy ninja. An old peach nightgown became an elegant dress I’d wear to a cocktail party. My favorite item was the sparkly silver cape with metallic threads fraying around the edges. It was made of material popular only among beauty pageant contestants, but it turned me into a princess. I doubt any real princess would be caught wearing something so tacky, but it didn’t matter. The clothes made me feel like a princess even if I looked like a pretender to the throne.
Fat-girl clothes never made me feel pretty. I would wear clothes that were too big for me, thinking they’d hide the fat when in reality they only made me look larger than I was. I couldn’t find clothes that made me feel half as good as that cheap cape had. It might sound trivial to be complaining about not being allowed to shop at regular clothing stores, but being shut out from buying clothes at trendy shops was like being told, “You don’t deserve to feel pretty. You can’t be sexy. You don’t get to be human.”
This had a cyclical effect on my size because when I felt bad about myself, I would eat, which would make me fatter, which would make me feel bad about myself again. It was the fat-girl cycle of life. I once read an opinion article claiming it was bad that new plus-size retailers were offering better clothing than had been previously available, arguing that if fat people could find nice clothes, they wouldn’t try to get thin. I found this logic flawed. Frequently people who want to lose weight will bash themselves, but it’s only when you think you are worth the effort of self-improvement that you have a chance of succeeding. Wearing pretty clothes helped me feel better about myself. It made me feel as if I were a person worthy of losing weight. When I felt ugly in my baggy 4X pants, I wanted to devour ice cream sandwiches. If anything, fat people deserved good-looking clothes more than anyone else because we needed them more. Did skinny people want us to be fat and poorly dressed? Or should we just go around naked?
Now that I was shopping at new stores, I had to figure out the terrain. I had usually just headed for the fat clothes and kept my head down. A couple of months earlier, a department store had been having a 40-percent-off sale (also known as the “we’ve been bought by our competitor and need to dump this merchandise quick” sale). It was a typical department store and as with any typical department store, I didn’t shop there. My salary was not fat enough to justify spending $80 on a sweater. I had spent most of my life fat enough not to fit into most of the clothes it sold. But it was 40 percent off already marked-down items! I decided to go to show off the fact that I could now walk around the mall from the far end of the parking lot without requiring CPR.
I had a lot of goals in life, but the one that seemed to come up the most frequently was “Don’t look stupid!” I was reminded of this when I ventured into the store. Whenever entering unknown retail territory, I first surreptitiously assessed the layout of the store without giving away the fact that I had no clue where I was going. Even if I were wandering through the petites’ section, I tried to walk confidently as if to say, “Why, yes, I am a big, tall, fat girl, but I am walking through the petite section on purpose. So there!” I sometimes prepared an excuse in case anyone stopped me to help, usually that I was shopping for my tiny, imaginary sister, the same one I baked cakes for.
I also didn’t want to appear low class by shopping in a section that I clearly didn’t belong in. When I had vacationed in New York (my college graduation present), somewhere along the walk between my hotel and Central Park I stumbled into a Bloomingdale’s to pee. After using the restroom, I sat down on a black, padded couch in the misses’ section to rest. I gazed up at the slender white mannequins with empty faces wearing tank tops that would barely fit around my thighs. I felt so out of place that I feared security might actually kick me out, if they were strong enough to haul my huge body out the door. I clearly didn’t belong there among the thin and glamorous women of New York. I was a pauper stopping by to use the king’s gold-plated bathroom. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were richer than God. I felt out of my class.
When I was wandering around department stores, I’d usually end up in the right section by chance. I used to get very confused because I didn’t understand the differences between women’s, misses’, juniors’, and petite sizes. If something was a size Large I didn’t know how large that was until I was alone in a dressing room. This led to paranoia as I was browsing the racks. I didn’t want to be seen clearly browsing the wrong section, causing people to wonder, What is she doing shopping in that section? I don’t know why I thought anyone was interested in what part of the store I was shopping in. I didn’t care what racks other people were browsing.
&n
bsp; I was amazed at the sheer quantity of clothing that department stores stocked. It was enough to clothe all of Luxembourg. I was used to being restricted to the little corner marked off for plus-sizes. There were so many clothes to sort through, so many stores to explore. I had to start putting thought into what I would buy instead of just buying whatever looked best at Lane Bryant. For the first time in my adult life, clothes were making me happy. I bought a pink pajama top decorated with hearts and cutesy skulls and crossbones that made me smile every time I wore it while brushing my teeth. Good clothing injected tiny moments of joy into my life at the most unexpected times.
But I was also disappointed to discover that not every piece of clothing I touched would magically fit me. The misses’ section had looked like the land of milk and honey when I hadn’t been drinking skim milk. I thought if I got small enough to shop over there, I’d never have trouble finding clothes again. Too bad this wasn’t true. While my hunting grounds were greatly expanded, some items rode up over my belly button or hung off my shoulders. I discovered that clothes that were labeled the same size could be differently sized and cut, especially if they were from different clothing lines.
I wonder if when the industrial revolution enabled the proliferation of ready-to-wear clothing, the inventors of standardized sizing had any inkling of the psychological horrors they were unleashing upon women. Mass-produced clothing may save time spent over a sewing machine, but the true price is found on that number inside the garment, not on the price tag. Clothing is cut for an imaginary hypothetical woman, yet every woman has an unordinary feature. We are left trying to squeeze our atypical butts or boobs into a standardized package.
Like your age, size may be nothing more than a number. But like any symbol, numbers have as much power as we give them. A size 10 seems so much worse than a size 8 because it requires two digits instead of one. It’s the same mind manipulation that makes the $19.99 shoes seem such a better bargain than a $20 pair. My mother worked as a seamstress in a bridal store, where she witnessed radical emotional changes induced by numbers. Tears of defeat or exclamations of joy, all because of a digit or two. She has suggested there would be a good niche market for an entrepreneur who replaced the sizing tags in dresses with smaller numbers.
The most frustrating thing about women’s sizing is that it doesn’t mean anything. When you buy a pair of size 28-jeans, shouldn’t they measure 28 of something? They’re not 28 inches or 28 centimeters, not a measure of circumference or length, not the number of tears you’ll shed when learning your size. It’s just a 28. And one clothing line’s 28 may not even be the same size as another’s.
The National Bureau of Standards conducted a sizing survey of women between 1949 and 1952, taking fifty-seven different body measurements of thousands of American women.2 In 1958 the standards were published after being accepted by the industry, but eventually the average woman’s shape changed as obesity proliferated. Some manufacturers started labeling their larger sizes with smaller numbers, a technique called vanity sizing. A common factoid of hope passed around by fat girls is that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14. Sadly, this was a size 14 from my mother’s day, not mine, which means I would never have bumped into Norma Jean at Lane Bryant.
These standardized sizes are used today only for clothes patterns available at sewing stores. When I watched far too much Project Runway and decided I too could sew, I was in for a surprise that had nothing to do with how much suede costs. I pulled out a pattern for a wrap top from the neatly organized metal drawer at my local sewing supply shop to discover I was a 20. I’d lost almost 200 pounds by that point and I was a 20? By that time I was down to medium or a 12 in most stores. Maybe this was why more women didn’t sew.
I suppose that there must have been a time between the moment I was cut out of my mother’s womb and when I neared the four-hundred mark that I fit into these smaller sizes. I just couldn’t remember when. I was so proud of wearing size Large shirts that I posted a picture of myself standing next to my new car on my blog, which had some regular readers now. When I was obese, I probably would have just posted a picture of the car sans owner. While everyone loved the shiny new addition to my debt, a reader named Susan summed up the consensus well with her comment, “If you had on pants that were the right size, we would have all been even more impressed.”
Evidently my jeans were as baggy as MC Hammer’s balloon pants. I was a tube top away from getting arrested by the fashion police. I rehabilitated myself, ditching the size-26 jeans for the next size down, snapped another photo, and posted it, certain that I would win the approval of my readers. Instead I got this comment from M, “Those pants? Do not fit you either. And your shirt is too big.”
Now my entire outfit was under criticism. I slept on it, wondering if I were in denial about my size. If I went shopping in Chicago, would I be one of those poor saps pulled aside by the Oprah makeover crew to do a show on what not to wear? As I moved my laundry basket the next morning, I saw the box of skinny clothes in the closet sitting beneath it. Trying on old jeans and blouses had been one of the best ways for me to determine how fat I was during different times of my life. I pulled open the cardboard lid and looked inside at the old shirts and pants that I’d outgrown but could never bring myself to throw out, always holding out hope I might be thin one day. I sorted through old clothes and memories. That was the brown shirt I wore around campus my freshman year of college. Those were the black, checked shorts I lived in at summer camp in 1997. Why did I ever think cargo pants were appropriate for temp work?
I pulled out the old corduroys that had been my dream pants. When I’d lost weight after high school one of my goals was to be able to wear these pants. I’d bought them when I was sixteen. They’d only just barely fit then and they had never fit again.
I tried them on and they fit. Really fit. I could stand and sit down in them without inhaling half the oxygen in the room. They were a size 22. I was in denial about the pants. My blog readers might have been confrontational, but they were right. I couldn’t fit into the corduroys when I weighed 220 in college, but I could when I weighed 229 now. I must have developed muscle after all. I had completely missed the stage in my life when I was a size 24. It was like waking up from a coma and losing one year of my life.
I kept losing weight until I saw the brown bottom of the box of skinny clothes. It hadn’t seen the light of day for more than a decade.
CHAPTER 10
Two Weddings and a Funeral
Fat girls of the world, please forgive me. I fulfilled a fat-girl stereotype at my aunt’s wedding reception. I stole a piece of cake.
That’s a lie. I stole two pieces of cake.
I did not get caught. That would have set back the fat-girl acceptance movement by several years. I was sneaky and avoided capture, so I set us back only by a few weeks, or at most a month or two.
I was somewhat exhausted from attending my second wedding in two weeks and making conversation at a table with a couple of aunts, an uncle, and two first cousins once removed. My aunt had gotten two bites into her apple spice cake before she got up to snatch a slice of the armadillo cake from a passing waiter. It wasn’t made from armadillo, just shaped like one as a tribute to the film Steel Magnolias. A couple of cuts with the cake knife revealed red velvet filling inside the pastry mammal, which made it look like a bleeding sacrifice to the marriage gods. Then the DJ started spinning YMCA by the Village People and everyone at the table headed to the dance floor, leaving their food unguarded around a woman who’d lost more than a hundred pounds.
It was a huge tactical error.
I was halfway through my own slice of apple spice cake when I had already decided I wanted another. I wished scientists could figure out how to stimulate the proper neurons in my brain to re-create this taste experience. Then I could enjoy it without actually consuming calories. It would be like birth control for food, all the pleasure and none of the possible negative side effects. Sadly the slices were pretty small, onl
y two-thirds the size of a slice of bread, so the pleasure of eating them didn’t last long. As I stared at my aunt’s unguarded piece of cake, I was stuck in a moral quandary. She must not want that fine culinary creation, I thought. She got a different piece instead. It would be a shame to waste a piece of cake. It would make baby Jesus cry. For purely religious reasons, I leapt up, snatched the plate, devoured the cake, and shoved the empty plate onto my uncle’s place setting. Fat girl’s first rule of stealing food: Always get rid of the evidence. Second rule: If necessary, frame someone else.
Baby Jesus must have been really happy that I didn’t make him cry because my younger brother, Jim, came over from the adjoining table with another slice of apple spice cake. Jesus was multiplying the cake like loaves of bread and fish. Jim had grabbed the icy wedge from my diabetic cousin who couldn’t eat cake. I felt so horrible for her that I scarfed down the entire slice and licked all the crumbs so there was nothing left to tempt her.
As the DJ kept spinning hokey tunes people liked dancing to only at weddings, the servers swooped in and completely cleared our table before anyone sprained his or her back doing the bunny hop. They took all the plates, even the ones full of food. All evidence of my stolen cake was removed from the scene of the crime, and I hadn’t even needed to bribe anyone. My grand theft pastry was completed flawlessly. I didn’t even feel bad about eating it. I didn’t want to be a woman who never took pleasure in food without feeling guilty. I didn’t feel bad about stealing it either, but that was because I had questionable ethics. Cake that good was hard to regret. I could get hit by a bus any day. It was best to enjoy life and good food while I could. My weight loss was a cross-country trip, not a race across town. I had to stop and check out the world’s largest ball of twine and the giant dinosaur statue on the way. Who wanted to stay cooped up in the car the whole time?
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