Now presenting (the invisible past)

She doesn’t get why the girl who’s been shar­ing the seat gives her a glare when she gets off the bus– at least not until the girl– pretty in a red and pur­ple vin­tage style wrap dress, zaftig though more so than Mad Men’s Christina Hen­dricks– says to the friend who’d been stand­ing next to the pole dur­ing the ride–

“Skinny bitch.  She shrunk over like fat was contagious.”

Oh.  No, see.  Wait. She wants to get up and chase them, explain, but if she does she’ll be late for her doctor’s appoint­ment, the one she’s going to to fig­ure out why she keeps los­ing so much fuck­ing weight.

See, she slid over because she wanted to get her own body out of the way to give her seat­mate some room– her big thighs, her broad shoul­ders, the way she has to stuff her­self into XL jack­ets and sweaters and her arms look sausage-like, legs look like hams.  Porky, pig-like, right down to the way that she blushes bright pink and sweaty in shame at how she can’t lose the weight, how it’s been a fight all her life– bio­log­i­cal des­tiny, even.  In the pic­tures from her brother’s wed­ding, at 225 lbs, she looks like a not-so-young, sad, tired ver­sion of her sad, tired, 65 year old, 300 lb. mother.  Noth­ing sep­a­rated them what­so­ever but thirty years and the two peo­ple stand­ing between them.

That’s the invis­i­ble self she car­ries around in her head, even as she shifts and squirms on her seat on the bus, curls her back in and away from the “cush­ion” and sits on only one hip, because the hard plas­tic jolts against ver­te­brae, ilia, scapu­lae, every time the bus bumps over train track and pot hole, the to-be-expected ups and downs on the jour­ney of life.

She’s for­got­ten (again) that how she looks on the out­side isn’t how she feels on the inside.

Of course, there are reminders, and not just in the baggy size twelves and larges she wears and the scale that dips under 160 if she eats too much gluten and it roils her guts, so that for a week she needs to con­cen­trate on cram­ming food down to pack it back on.  (How ironic, try­ing to keep the weight on when she was a teenage bulimic.)  But the nutri­tion­ist has made good sug­ges­tions and so far, so good, espe­cially now that they’ve fig­ured out it’s her anti-depressant being depres­sant of sys­tems that just weren’t meant to be so affected.  Now that she’s off, she’s sort-of-hungry again.  Of course, her mood sta­bi­lizer still keeps her appetite down, com­pen­sa­tion for how the last one made her bloat like a bal­loon, but at least now she can eat with­out heaving.

The reminders are there in the way the “fat” girls give her a glare as they get off the bus.  It’s there, too, in the way more peo­ple flirt with her at the store, whether or not they’re mar­ried, whether or not she’s mar­ried too, and her rings are right on her hand.  It’s ironic and kind of gross, because she’s always tried to be nice– polite– pleas­ant to peo­ple– but she sells more mem­ber­ships, too, on the days she wears makeup and since she’s lost weight– sells more e-reader gad­gets in skirts than in pants.  And it’s there in how a half hour in the tub requires more shift­ing around because there’s less of her between her and the enam­eled cast iron– just hot water and bone, a thin layer of skin to go with the steam and what­ever book that she’s read­ing, that and how cer­tain tops slip off her shoul­ders, expose upper ribs and clav­i­cle bones in a way that maybe some find attrac­tive but she looks at in the mir­ror and thinks– well, she doesn’t know, the last time she was this weight she was in high school.

She does know one thing.  When peo­ple offer her a bite of dessert and she declines, it’s not because she doesn’t want to get fat.  It’s because it tastes lousy, waxy, like paste, another effect of the meds.  She’d take it and eat it, she would if she could– it’s calo­rie dense and would help keep the weight on, after all.  But what she can do now ver­sus what she’d do in the past– they’re two dif­fer­ent things, and if she stopped to explain how things are, how they were as con­trasted with what peo­ple see every time?

Maybe they don’t deserve that much expla­na­tion.  Maybe they do.  Maybe she does.  But energy, time, they’re all fleet­ing things– shed almost as quickly as calo­ries, at least for her, nowadays.

–

There were two recent arti­cles in the NYT about being “fat” and its con­trast.  The F Word, a thinky piece on fash­ion and fat and whether zaftig’s a good thing or not– it’s very well done, and it makes me want to choke down lots more dessert and but­tered baked pota­toes, what­ever I can man­age to eat, so I can fill out my jeans a lit­tle more fully.

There is also this arti­cle about the small-busted, of whom I have always been a mem­ber, no mat­ter my weight.  It points to a wholly dif­fer­ent chal­lenge of fash­ion, i.e., the refusal until only recently to acknowl­edge– gee, really, women come in all shapes and sizes and dif­fer­ent peo­ple find dif­fer­ent things like that attrac­tive and might want pretty under­wear to com­ple­ment that attrac­tive­ness, too?  (Set­ting aside the friv­o­lity of expen­sive under­wear for the moment, and assum­ing instead that the small busted con­sumer should have the right to blow as much money on lace and sheer nylon as Heidi Sontag.)

It’s an old whinge, but a good one.  Design for us all, god­damnit to hell, and in the mean­time, ladies, learn to live with the bod­ies you have.  Take care of your phys­i­cal self, sure, the best that you can– but nip­ping and tuck­ing and tan­ning and stuff­ing your­self all full of botox and sil­i­cone and syn­thetic shit because Karl Lager­feld and Miuc­cia Prada don’t like the way that you’re shaped?

They don’t know you– don’t see you– don’t know all who you’ve been in the past and are right now as you stand there, try­ing on clothes, try­ing to make some­thing fit in the present, try­ing to make room for all the other girls on the bus whose vin­tage style red-and-purple dresses you really like, the ones who are pretty like Christina Hen­dricks, zaftig, just a lit­tle more so.  And that’s fine with you.  Though not with them, because at present, they have their own pasts in their heads.