Big Summer Read online

  “Why bother?” Drue said. “You would have just said no.”

  “And if you decided to go ahead with it anyhow,” I continued, “you could have made sure that the guy wasn’t an asshole.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’ve got some huge pool to choose from!” Drue shouted. “You think guys are lining up to date…” She shut her mouth. Too late.

  “What?” I asked her. “Fat girls? Girls who don’t have trust funds? Girls whose fathers aren’t on the cover of Forbes?”

  She kept her lips pressed together, saying nothing. “I don’t want your sympathy,” I said. The adrenaline was still whipping through my bloodstream, but I could feel exhaustion and my old friend shame not far behind. “I’m done with you. Just leave me alone.” I turned around and started plodding in the direction of home.

  I’d gotten maybe ten yards away when Drue yelled, “We all just felt sorry for you!”

  The words hit me like a spear between my shoulder blades. There it was, the truth I’d always suspected, finally out in the open. I felt myself cringe, shoulders hunched, but I didn’t let myself turn around.

  “You’re a fat little nobody, and the only reason you were even at Lathrop is because families like mine give the school money so people like you can go there.”

  My cheeks prickled with shame, and my fingers curled into fists, but I couldn’t argue. Not with any of it. I was fat. I had gone to Lathrop on a scholarship. Her family was rich, mine was not, and compared with her, I was a nobody.

  “You’re lucky I ever even talked to you!” Drue screeched.

  Oh, I believe it was a mutually beneficial relationship, I thought. She’d given me her attention—at least some of the time. In return, I’d written her papers, retyped her homework, kept her secrets. I’d listened to her endless discussions of boys and clothes and which boys might prefer her wearing which clothes; I’d covered for her when she’d cut class or shown up too hungover to function.

  I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t answer, or let myself look back. I kept walking. For a few blocks, I thought that she’d try to catch up with me, to tell me that she was sorry, to say that I was her best friend, that she hadn’t meant what she’d said. I kept my ears pricked for the sound of high heels on the sidewalk. But Drue never came.

  I was a few blocks from home when I felt my phone start to buzz in my pocket. I ignored it, feeling sick, imagining the video of me shouting at that guy making its way from text message to text message, from Facebook post to tweet. My face got hot, and the sugar and alcohol lurched in my belly. I felt like my blood was on fire, my body burning with shame and anger, and something else, something different, something it took me almost the entire thirty-minute walk to recognize as pride, maybe even a kind of righteousness. I’d stood up for myself, for once, for better or worse.

  I crept into my parents’ apartment. Instead of going to the kitchen, I went to my bedroom without turning on the lights, moving unerringly through the darkness. When I arrived, I turned on the light and looked at the room, trying to see it like I was looking at it for the first time.

  My craft table, the one I’d trash-picked from the curb, carried upstairs with my father’s help, and stripped and sanded and painted a creamy ivory, stood against one wall. A cobalt-blue pottery vase filled with bright-orange gerbera daisies sat on its center; a wooden chair that I’d painted, with a cushion I’d sewn using a scrap of hot-pink and orange Marimekko print fabric, was pulled up beneath it. I took in the vase, the flowers, the seagrass rug spread over the hardwood floor, the polished brass lamp glowing in the corner, imagining a stranger looking it over and wondering which girl was lucky enough to inhabit such a pretty spot. I’d always hoped that someday I would meet a man who would appreciate that skill; a man who would praise me, telling me how creative I was, what a good eye I had, how comfortable and colorful and cozy I’d made our home, how I made everything beautiful.

  I took off my Spanx, wriggling myself out of the punishing spandex and dropping the shaper in the trash. My underwire bra was the next thing to go. I put on a camisole top, cotton granny panties, and my comfiest pajama bottoms. In the bathroom, I pulled my hair back in a scrunchie, and scrubbed the makeup off my face. Back in my bedroom, I sat myself down in front of my laptop and typed the words “body acceptance” into the search engine.

  A hundred different links came cascading across my screen: articles. Blogs. Twitter feeds with handles like @YourFatFriend and @fatnutritionist and @PlusSizeFeminist. Health at Every Size websites. Body positive Instagram accounts. Outfit-of-the-day Snapchats that featured girls with their wobbly thighs and belly rolls on display. All the parts I’d tried to hide, out there in the open. Big girls, some my size, some smaller, some larger, in bathing suits and lingerie, in yoga poses, on cruise ships and beaches and in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue.

  My finger hovered over the keyboard as my heart thumped in my chest. I thought, This is a door. You can close it and stay here, outside, by yourself, or you can walk through it and join them.

  I shut my eyes and stilled my hands. If you had asked me that morning who I was, I might have talked about being a college student, an aspiring artist, a daughter or a friend; a lover of romance novels and needle felting, French bulldogs and Lynda Barry comics. But if I’d been honest, I would have said, I’m a dieter. I woke up in the morning planning what I’d eat and how much I’d exercise to burn it off; I went to bed at night feeling guilty about having done too much of the first and too little of the second and promising that the next day would be different. Right then, at my desk, I decided that I was done with it. I was going to eat to nourish myself, I was going to exercise to feel strong and healthy, I was going to let go of the idea of ever being thin, once and for all, and live my life in the body that I had. And I was going to drop a hundred and seventeen useless pounds right that minute, by vowing to never see Drue Lathrop Cavanaugh ever again.

  * * *

  Things had not been easy in my early days as a Baby Fat.

  Lying in bed the morning after my night at the bar, I remembered a line from one of the Health at Every Size websites I’d read the night before. Ask your body what it wants. Except how was my body supposed to know? It had been so long since I’d eaten something just because it was what I’d wanted.

  “Okay,” I said to myself. I could hear my parents in the kitchen, keeping their voices low. I could smell the coffee that my dad would drink with cream and my mom would take black, and the Ezekiel bread in the toaster. I felt extremely foolish, until I thought about my dad. Sometimes, at night, when we were watching TV, he would speak to his belly as if it were a pet, giving it a little pat and asking, “A little popcorn? Another beer?” That helped. “Okay, body. What do I want for breakfast?”

  For a long moment, there was nothing. I could feel myself start to panic, and I took deep, slow breaths until a thought emerged: banana bread. I wanted a slice of warm banana bread, studded with walnuts and chocolate chips, and a big glass of milk on the side. Right on the heels of that idea came the words “absolutely not.” Banana bread was made with eggs and butter and chocolate chips and walnuts, full-fat yogurt, processed white flour, and a cup and a half of white sugar. Banana bread was dessert. I hadn’t let myself eat banana bread in years… and if I started eating it, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to stop.

  I went back to my laptop and the article I’d skimmed. You might worry about feeling out of control… like, as soon as you start eating a formerly “forbidden” food, you won’t be able to stop. That might even be true, the first few times you introduce a “bad” food back into your diet. We encourage you to eat slowly and mindfully, savoring each bite, listening to your body, eating when that food is what you want, stopping when you’re full.

  I found a recipe. I got myself dressed. In the kitchen, my father was trying to solve the crossword puzzle, and my mom was helping him. As I pulled a shopping bag out of the cupboard, I heard him ask, “What’s a six-letter word for Noah’s
resting place?”

  “I’m going to Whole Foods,” I told them.

  “Too many letters,” said my dad.

  “Ha ha ha.” I thought I sounded normal, but I saw him look at me before exchanging a glance with my mom.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Everything is fine,” I said.

  “We need cumin,” he said, and raised a hand in farewell. My mom said “Be careful,” the way she did when either one of us left the house.

  I walked to the Whole Foods on Ninety-Second and Columbus. I bought my dad his cumin and got eggs, butter, Greek yogurt, chocolate chips, and the ripest bananas I could find. Back in the kitchen, with my parents watching without comment, I melted butter, cracked the eggs, and spooned yogurt into a measuring cup. I smushed bananas in a plastic bag. I browned the walnuts in the toaster oven. I mixed everything together and scraped it into a greased loaf tin.

  When the banana bread was in the oven, I got comfortable on the couch, then opened my texts. Darshini, one of my other high school friends, was first. Saw this last night, she’d written. You okay? I felt unease settle into the pit of my belly. My chest felt tight, my knees felt quivery, and my heart was thumping so hard I could feel my chest shake. The link was to YouTube. I clicked, and there I was, in all my black-clad, wobbly, triple-chinned, furious glory. “Fat Girl Goes OFF” read the headline.

  I wanted to scream and to drop the phone like it had stung me, and I must have made some kind of noise, because when I looked up, both of my parents were staring at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Everything’s fine.” I saw them exchange another glance, communicating in their private marital Morse code. My mother pressed her lips together as my father reached for his phone. I held my breath and turned my attention back to my own screen, to my own face. There were already thirteen thousand views. And—I stared, feeling my jaw drop, feeling terrified—eight thousand green thumbs-ups.

  Don’t do it, I thought, but I couldn’t help myself. With my heart in my throat, I scrolled down to see the comments.

  Landwhale, read the first one. Well, I’d been expecting it. And I liked whales! They were graceful and majestic!

  I’d do her, the next commenter had written.

  Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot, a wit beneath that comment had advised. I winced, feeling sick as I kept scrolling.

  You GO girl, another commenter had written. Wish I was brave enough to tell off a guy like that.

  Me too, the woman underneath her had written.

  Me three.

  The oven timer dinged. I looked up and saw that my father was still working at the crossword; my mom had moved on to the real estate section. “One point two million dollars for a studio!” she said, shaking her head. So the world hadn’t spun off its axis; the house hadn’t fallen down around me. The sun had come up in the morning, and it would still set that night.

  I put on a pair of silicone oven mitts, bent down, and grasped the sheet pan that I’d put underneath the banana bread, in case of drips. The sheet pan had mostly been used to oven-roast zucchinis and onions, peppers and tomatoes, and, as a treat, the occasional thinly sliced potato. I wondered what it made of its new circumstances as I set the banana bread on top of the stove. My phone dinged. I looked to see if it was Darshi again, or if it was Ron, or Drue, who, so far, had not reached out. The screen said DAD, and the text said Proud of you. I felt my eyes prickle as I lifted my head long enough to give him a thumbs-up.

  I thought about googling for articles about how to survive online humiliation and public shaming—it had happened to enough people by now; surely someone had written a guide for getting through it. Instead, I made myself do one of the relaxation exercises a long-ago yoga teacher had taught me. Name five things you can see. My mother. My father. The dining room table. The newspaper. The banana bread. Name four things you can touch. The skin of my arm. The fabric of the dining room chair cover. The wood of the kitchen table, the floor beneath my feet. The three things I could hear were the sound of cars on Riverside Drive, the scratch of my father’s pen on the page, and my own heartbeat, still thundering in my ears. I could smell banana bread and my own acrid, anxious sweat.

  I’d been on the Internet long enough to know that these things never lasted, that the outrage being poured onto, say, a New York Times columnist who’d overreacted to a mild insult could instantly be redirected toward a makeup company whose “skin tone” foundations only came in white-lady shades, before turning on a professional athlete who’d sent a tweet using the n-word when he was fifteen. The swarm was eternally in search of the next problematic artist or actor or fast-food brand, and nobody stayed notorious, or canceled, forever.

  It won’t last, I told myself. It isn’t real. Real was what I could see, and touch, and smell. This was just pixels, moving invisibly through space, mostly bots and strangers who’d never know me in real life.

  I went back to YouTube, where another eighty-three comments had been posted during my absence. Ignoring them, I copied the video and moved it to my own channel. I’d been using the same image as my social-media avatar for the last three years, a picture of two knitting needles stuck in a skein of magenta yarn. I deleted that shot and replaced it with a screen grab from the video that showed me with my mouth open, one hand extended, finger pointing at the cringing bro, the universal pose of Angry Lady. My first thought was You can see my chins. My next thought, hard on its heels, was But I look brave. And at least my hair looked nice.

  I went to my biography. Underneath Daphne Berg, Vanderbilt U, NYC native, happy crafter, I added fierce fat girl, along with the hashtags #sorrynotsorry and #justasIam. I changed the name of my blog from Daphne’s Crafty Corner to Big Time.

  The banana bread was cool when I touched it. I cut a thick slice and put it on my favorite plate, which was white with a pattern of blue flowers. I pulled a fork out of the silverware drawer, folded a cloth napkin, and set it on the table. I took a seat. Unfolded the napkin and spread it over my lap. Used the fork to remove a generous wedge from the slice. Popped it in my mouth and closed my eyes, humming with pleasure as I chewed, tasting the richness, feeling the textures, the hot, slippery melted chocolate, the crunch of the nuts, the yielding softness of bananas and butter. I ate every morsel and used the side of the fork to scrape the plate clean.

  Chapter Three

  After I’d finished my video, I slung the garment bag securely over my arm and walked away from the bar without looking back. At Eighty-Sixth Street I caught the crosstown bus to Madison Avenue. Five minutes later, I arrived at the sidewalk in front of Saint David’s School just as the crowd of nannies and mommies (with the very occasional daddy) was reaching its peak. With five minutes to kill, I opened Instagram. Already, my video had thousands of views, hundreds of likes, and dozens of comments. So pretty, typed curvyconfident. I double-tapped to like what she’d said. Where’s your shirt from? asked Joelle1983. I typed in Macys but it’s like four years old. I think Old Navy has something similar—will check later! “Feeding the beast” was how I thought of it. Not that my followers were animals, but it could get exhausting, the way I had to be extremely online all the time, clicking and liking and answering back, engaging so that the algorithms would notice my engagement and make my feed one of the first things people saw when they opened the app, so that I’d get more followers, so that I’d be able to charge more for my posts.

  Like, like, comment; comment, comment, like. I worked my way through the replies, until one of them stopped me: I am a teenage girl. How can I be brave like you?

  I paused, with the phone in my hand and my eyes on the sky, reminding myself that this so-called teenage girl could be a sixty-eight-year-old man living in his mom’s basement, trolling me. I told myself that, no matter who’d asked the question, my reply wouldn’t really be for her (or him)—it would be for everyone else who’d read it. And one of those people could very well be a fat teenager, a girl like the one I’d once been, wondering how she
could be brave, the way she thought I was.

  I resisted the impulse to type out a fast, glib Fake it ’til you make it!, which was more or less the truth. I wasn’t brave every minute or every day, or even most minutes of most days… but I could act as if I were, almost all the time. Which meant that most of the world believed it. But did this theoretical girl need to hear that someone she respected was only pretending?

  I cut and pasted the message and put it in my drafts file for later consideration, just as the final bell rang and dozens of boys in khaki pants and blue blazers came racing toward their caregivers. I put my side hustle in my pocket, and my real job began.

  Three years ago, the Snitzers—Dr. Elise and Dr. Mark—had hired me to take care of their kids, Isabel and Ian, for four hours after school let out. I would pick the kids up, feed them snacks, supervise homework, and ferry them to their various engagements. Izzie had ice-hockey practice, playdates, and birthday parties; Ian had his therapist. Izzie was part of a running club and sang in a choir. Ian had his allergist. Izzie was a sweet, outgoing girl, but Ian was my favorite. He reminded me of me.

  That afternoon, as usual, Ian was one of the last boys out the door. Ian, his mother had told me, had been born two weeks early, barely weighing five pounds, and he’d been a tiny, colicky scrap of a thing. He’d grown up to be a boy with a narrow, pale face, a reddened nose thanks to constant dripping, wiping, and blowing, and pale-blue eyes that were frequently watery and red-rimmed. When he was a baby, his mother had doctored his mashed peas and carrots and sweet potatoes with olive oil and butter, cramming calories into him to help him grow. He’d gotten shots and exposure therapy; he even had a mantra to recite before eating wheat or dairy. All of it had helped, but Ian was still wheezy and rashy and small for his age. Today, like most days, he was stooped under the weight of a backpack that probably weighed more than he did.