I waited for a week before I put on my sweatpants, sports bra, and T-shirt to go for a walk. I checked that my apartment key was in my pocket and pulled the door closed behind me. I turned and ran smack into a pack of thin girls leaving the apartment two doors down. Given the choice between running into a pack of thin girls and a pack of wolves, I hesitated a bit longer than any rational human being should. How big were the wolves? Had they eaten recently? How about the thin girls?
I had been feeling so good about myself lately that I imagined a groovy theme song playing in the background as I strode confidently down the street. But if I encountered a pack of thinner, prettier girls, my theme song came to a screeching halt. Don’t be intimidated, I told myself. They are not better than you just because they have 15 percent body fat and skin as smooth as goat’s milk. Yak’s milk is what it’s all about this year.
I waved hello to them as I rushed down the stairs, chiding myself for being ridiculous. The pack consisted of friends of the neighbor who had been the nicest to me. She’d said hello every time I’d seen her and offered to help me carry empty boxes to the dumpster. The only person she was competing with in the Nice Neighbor Pageant was Bill from downstairs. I didn’t see him often, which was probably for the best since he would have been killed if he’d walked out his door when my two-liter of Sprite Zero rolled off the balcony. Everyone else in the complex had been aloof. If I was still morbidly obese, I would have attributed it to fat discrimination. Now I just knew they were rude.
I had no reason to fear this girl or her friends. So what if they liked to lie around the pool and display their gorgeous bodies for the whole complex? I wondered if female rivalry were hard-coded into our genes as a way for us to get the best mates. It was the early Darwin alert system, “Warning! Rival, rival! Endangering chances of procreation!” I hoped it was genetics because I hated to think I was a shallow, jealous person. Blaming the inescapable forces of nature was better than acknowledging possible character flaws.
I had lots of reasons to lose weight. One of them was to become more attractive to men, but I also wanted to stop feeling inferior around other women. Men weren’t as picky as they pretended to be. My mom’s bridal store sold dresses all the way up to size 26, so fat girls were definitely getting married and getting laid, even if they were harder to carry over the threshold. Being thin was often a competition between women in which the losers were awarded the parting gifts of envy and an inferiority complex. I had a couple of thin, hot female friends who were on the receiving end of this type of jealousy and I knew they didn’t deserve it. Just because you could post a picture of yourself on your blog and get thirty “OMG, u r so hot!” comments in an hour didn’t mean you weren’t also intelligent and thoughtful. You could have big boobs and a big brain. Fat or thin, pretty or homely, was there ever a winning team?
After escaping the thin girls, I made it to the gate leading to the trail. I took three steps across the gravel and landed on the path. It was the middle of summer, so the trail was as crowded as an electronics store on Black Friday. I chose a direction and started walking.
“On your left!” someone called out behind me. I turned around and nearly underwent a rhinoplasty when a man in Lycra bike shorts and a sports jersey whizzed past me hunched over a bicycle. “On your left” must be secret trail talk for “Move your ass to the right, slowpoke!” I was glad I had stuck emergency contact information in my pocket along with my key. It was rush hour out here. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had found a body on the side of the trail with a skid mark up its back. A girl in jean shorts and a tank top skated past me, keys held out like a weapon in one hand while she gabbed on the cell phone in her other. I hoped she wouldn’t collide with the father pushing a stroller and puncture her lung on her keys. At least they’d be able to call 911 right away.
During the next few days I saw an amazing array of contraptions traveling on the trail. It felt like an exhibition at the World’s Fair. A woman rode a bike with a small tent-like trailer attached to the back and a toddler inside. A middle-aged man wearing a sweatband was making good time on a huge tricycle that he reclined in like a lounge chair. I had not yet seen anyone on a unicycle, but there had been Segways and a man on a penny-farthing bicycle, a contraption with a front wheel as large as a tractor’s and a back wheel the size of a skateboard’s.
It was as if I’d entered the lobby of a casting agency without traveling to L.A. A young woman Rollerbladed by holding a fluffy white poodle in her arms. An elderly couple enjoying the fresh air were the only people walking more slowly than me. A woman ran past me with a severe wobble in her walk. I didn’t know if she were practicing a cutting-edge exercise technique or if she were disabled. I later learned she was a competitive walker. Some teenage girls passed me in the other direction in dresses and heels, probably headed to the village district’s shops and restaurants. A muscular man jogged by in the other direction. My eyes lingered. I did love studying all the natural specimens out here among nature.
I picked up my pace and became breathless. I was worried my downstairs neighbor would complain if I used my treadmill too much, so I wanted to run outside more often. Running outside was harder than running on the treadmill. I had no idea how fast I was going or how far I had run. The stone markers appeared only every half mile. Had I become less fit during my travels and moving adventures? When I checked the time on my watch, I realized I was running much faster than I had been inside. Of course I was winded. This might have been why I had never run an entire mile nonstop as a kid; I wasn’t pacing myself correctly. The jogger in front of me slowed down to a walk. I trundled past him as fast as my chubby legs would take me. Twenty seconds later he passed me on the left. That was a rather short break. Maybe he didn’t like being lapped by the fat girl.
I took a “look, but don’t speak” approach to the trail. I made brief eye contact with others to be polite and to ward off possible assailants, but I never talked to anyone. On my fourth day, one of the other runners stopped acting like a cardboard cutout and actually spoke to me. I was stopped at the crosswalk on my way home, wondering how many hours of my life had been wasted waiting at red lights, when a thirtysomething man with sweaty hair crossed against the light. “It’s kind of a hot day for it, but you’re doing well!” he commented. I looked behind me expecting to see someone more athletic standing behind me. There was no one there. I half-nodded at the man as he jogged off. Conversations on the trail seemed to be hit-and-runs. People shouted something out quickly and then ran in the other direction, like a game of tag with words.
The light changed and I started to think about what he’d said. Someone was commending me for the effort I put forth exercising and seemed inspired by it. Why was that so inspiring? I hadn’t heard him complimenting everyone he ran past, only me. Just because I was fat didn’t mean I needed to be coddled. It wasn’t even that hot, maybe seventy-five degrees on the mostly shaded path. If we lived in Texas this would be a chilly summer afternoon. I shook my head as I breathed the humid air deeply. I was overanalyzing. I should just take it as a compliment and be grateful he didn’t say, “Move over, fatty!”
After a fifty-year-old man ran by me wearing nothing but a pair of tiny gym shorts from the eighties and a sweaty chest full of hair, I decided it was okay to wear a tank top.
I had a dark blue tank top embroidered with Eeyore, the donkey from Winnie the Pooh. “Thanks for noticing me” was a good motto for the invisible girl. It was a size medium. I’d bought it when I was at my lowest weight at the beginning of college and even then it had been too tight to wear without outlining my nipples. Now it fit snugly but comfortably. More important, it made me feel cuter than kittens in a bathroom sink.
I felt a surge of energy and decided to sprint down the trail. I stopped at the crosswalk and noticed a guy on a bike in his late thirties with a scraggly beard, no shirt, and a bit of a belly. We made eye contact.
“That looks like a lot of fun,” he said jokingly, referrin
g to the heat and humidity.
“Oh, yeah,” I faked laughter and pulled a sarcastic face.
“I wish I could do that. I just ride a bike,” he replied.
I just nodded, my talent as the world’s second-worst conversationalist behind a blind, mute boy in a coma revealed. The traffic stopped and I continued jogging. The biker guy passed me.
“Don’t have too much fun!” he said as he rode past.
“Ha, I’ll try not to!” I replied. Then he turned his head around and yelled, “And don’t tell your boyfriend about me.”
I imagine I paused in midstride, floating above the ground like Wile E. Coyote does before he realizes he’s stepped off a cliff and plummets to the ground. Had a shirtless hippie just hit on me? I think he did. I nearly stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, but regained my senses and continued on. Otherwise the headline in tomorrow’s papers would have read, “Girl is hit on and then hit by car.”
Men didn’t hit on me. This was something that happened to other women. Some fat girls could take control of a room like an expert politician, exuding charm and confidence and have men eating out of their chubby fingers. I was not one of them. I was the type who thought, “Do I need to make eye contact with these people or is my dress pattern similar enough to the wallpaper that I can blend into the wall?” New people scared me. I avoided them. Because I was a fat person, they avoided me in return.
A couple of years earlier I had been at a deli, buying a submarine sandwich drenched in far too much mayonnaise, when a man at the table near the counter tried to make conversation with me. I answered his remarks as briefly and politely as possible. It was only months later that I realized he had been hitting on me. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that a guy might be interested in someone as fat as I was. I’d never had a serious boyfriend and I’d never made an effort to find one. This probably meant I had intimacy issues or “trouble making friends,” as my kindergarten teacher had put it, as though I were one bad childhood away from moving to a shack in Montana that I would leave only to mail letter bombs. I preferred to think it made me an independent woman who could survive on her own in the world and didn’t mind going to the movies alone. Who wanted to share the popcorn anyway?
The guy who hit on me at the deli had been thin, which further confused me because I assumed I’d have to date a fat guy. I would have preferred to date a thin guy because I was a big fat hypocrite who did not find obese men attractive, but thin guys didn’t usually go for fat girls, or if they did they were too ashamed to admit it. Some of my prettier, thinner friends would complain about the burden of their looks. They fended off unwanted advances by men at clubs and rolled their eyes at honking horns and hollering when they walked past busy streets. I sympathized with them and admitted that this must be a problem, but it was a problem in the same way that filing taxes must be a pain for a millionaire who has to keep track of dividends and real estate deals and yacht purchases. It seemed like a damned good problem to have.
It might soon be my problem as well. I had just weighed in at below one hundred kilograms, which would have been a huge milestone if I lived in a country that used the metric system. In America this just meant I weighed about 220 pounds. My rate of loss had slowed down from the exciting ten pounds a month of the first year to a more reasonable five pounds a month. I was looking forward to hitting 202 pounds. Then I would cross the line between being obese and being overweight, according to the body mass index gurus. I knew this was just an arbitrary line created when you plugged my height and weight into an equation, but I wanted to be officially overweight instead of obese anyway. No doubt I would fluctuate up and down depending on how much I had to drink that day and when my last trip to the bathroom was. It would be like jumping back and forth over a state line.
But obese or overweight, it was now official. I was a sex object.
I heard the grocery store was a good place to pick up guys, but I decided it was a better place to pick up weird ingredients. The trail ran conveniently close to a grocery store, the post office, and the library. I was used to living in areas where I needed a car to complete errands, but now I could walk to places to accomplish the tasks of daily living without fear of being embedded in the grill of a passing Hummer. One evening I was bored with my standard recipes, so I browsed my healthy cookbooks for a new entrée. I picked out a tuna melt casserole that required something called milled flaxseed. I had no idea what flaxseed was and I didn’t have a mill anyway, so I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked a mile to the store. I was more thrilled than anyone shopping for flaxseed had a right to be. A year earlier I would never have been able to walk to the store without a dozen rest stops. I was achieving something other than just exercising my heart and lungs. I was on a quest for tuna casserole. When I pulled it out of the oven that evening, it tasted extra good, for reasons that had nothing to do with the seasonings.
That fall, when I needed to pick up some books on hold at the library, I calculated how far the walk was and figured I was fit enough to make the 5.25-mile round-trip. On the way back I recalled a blogger mentioning that she read books while walking home. I didn’t know that was possible, just as I had been amazed by my friend who could knit while watching a movie with subtitles. I decided to take a page out of the blogger’s book and started reading on my way back. It was surprisingly easy. I kept the red line down the middle of the concrete in my peripheral vision and watched out for doggy doo-doo.
My knees had been achy lately, probably permanently damaged from my years of obesity. I had intended to give them a break by walking the entire path instead of running. It continued to get darker. The path was much less crowded than usual. While it was nice that my chances of being run over by a biker were reduced, it also left a significant lack of witnesses if anyone decided to increase this summer’s crime rate. I decided to jog the last half mile. There was nothing like the threat of rape and murder to push my exercise routine further. Fear elevated my heart rate in more ways than one.
When I wasn’t checking over my shoulder for muggers hiding in the bushes, the trail was a calming place. I’d go there to let my thoughts wander like the leashed dogs I ran past. The disappearing sun was cutting into my meditation time. I ran in the evenings, and the lengthening fall days were shrinking my window of daylight. I wanted to write the sun a letter telling it to stop distancing itself and spending so much time with Australia. I wanted to make the most of our time together while the weather was still above freezing.
In an act of desperation, I tried running in the mornings. I was usually awake around dawn anyway, when my cat performed the Hokey Pokey on my face. He would put his left foot in (my eye), put his left foot out (on my neck), put his left foot in (my ear), and shake his tail in my face. It was surprisingly cold in the morning. The earth cooled off overnight and in the morning was still preheating to whatever the high temperature would be for that day. This did not stop some trail denizens from dressing like they were in Miami Beach. I was shivering in my pullover jacket and these people were jogging in shorts and sleeveless shirts. I heard running heated you up, but would it hurt to put on a pair of pants?
By lunchtime I felt as if I’d forgotten to fill up my gas tank before a cross-country trip. I’d walked four miles and I hadn’t eaten enough afterward to compensate. The raspberry vodka my brother brought over the night before as an apology for eating my last piece of salmon might have had something to do with it too. I was exhausted, just like in the old days when I ate poorly and got the afternoon munchies. I did some stretches in my office to get my blood going. After a week, I decided morning running was not for me. The early bird may get the worm but the early worm deserved the bird.
I went for a run in the afternoon that weekend, a time much preferable to the crack of dawn. I was passing a water fountain when a blonde woman in a T-shirt stopped me.
“I was looking for a running partner,” she said. “Is that something you would be interested in?” she asked.
> Wow. Two years ago I could hardly walk around the mall without getting winded and now I was being solicited for my exercise prowess.
“I’m a slow runner too,” she continued.
Oh. I was being solicited for my exercise inability. Still, it was an improvement. I was rather proud of my twelve-minute mile. It beat my fifteen-minute mile from high school. I thought about taking her up on her offer, but I looked at the changing leaves and felt the cool breeze and decided to turn her down. The seasons were changing, and I wouldn’t be out here much until next spring. I felt bad since she had showed such courage in asking a stranger to be her partner.
“Sorry,” I said and continued down the path slowly, but faster than I’d ever gone before.
On one of my last jogs down the trail I saw a 400-pound man in a motorized scooter on the dirt path that led to the riverbank. He was just sitting there as the joggers and bikers and in-line skaters whizzed by. I could probably attribute the crunching sound I heard to the breaking of twigs I was trampling over, but it might have been the sound of my heart breaking. Here was a man literally watching the world pass him by.
He was so large that I didn’t doubt that he needed that vehicle to get around. He wasn’t some hoodlum taking a grocery store scooter for a joy ride. I doubted he would have been able to walk a half mile without getting winded. I knew because I used to be almost as large as him. Back then, walking from a concert on the lawn at White River State Park to the zoo parking lot only half a mile away was my version of the Iron Man.
I didn’t get a good look at him because I was actively attempting not to stare like he was a rare white tiger on exhibit at the zoo, but I was as drenched in pity as if I’d fallen off the bridge into the water. He looked so isolated even though he was surrounded by people. I wondered why he had come to the trail. Did he just want to be outside on a nice day like most of the people there? Had his battery died? I doubt he wanted my pity, but when I saw him I could only see my old fat self. I knew there wasn’t anything I could do for the man. So I just kept running by, grateful that these days I was part of the world and not the one watching it pass by.
Half-Assed Page 13
