Two Girls Fat and Thin (11 page)

By this time my parents had made friends with the neighbors on both sides of us, the Sissels and the Kopeikins. They had put on their bathing suits and gone to swim in the Sissels’ pool; my mother had many afternoon snacks with bespectacled, limply grinning Mrs. Kopeikin. But for me the friendly presence of these kind people was only a thin layer of civility that could be peeled away to reveal the gangs walking the streets on Devil’s Night, or, on the next layer, my father and me crouched behind the armchair, waiting.

My mother and I
began having story times again, mostly on the weekends. Our favorite thing to do was sit at the kitchen table with paper and crayons, drawing stories for each other. If we couldn’t think of a story, we’d draw heaven. My mother’s heaven was blue and almost empty except for one or two angels with yellow hair, large silver stars, and a rainbow of many colors that she would work on for several minutes, slanting her crayons on their sides for more subtle hues. My heaven was full of grinning winged children, candy bars, cake, ice cream, and toys. When we were finished drawing, we would put our best pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and sit admiring them over dishes of cake and ice cream.

At night on Sunday, she would read me books like
My Father’s Dragon, Little Witch
, and
Peter Pan
. When she read
Peter Pan
, I stopped drawing pictures of heaven and began drawing Never-Never Land. Never-Never Land was pink and blue and green, it had trees with homes inside them, cubby holes and hiding places, tiny women in gauze robes, and flying children with rapiers in their elegant hands. Its very name made me feel a sadness like a big beautiful blanket I could wrap around myself. I tried to believe that Peter Pan might really come one night and fly me away; I was too old to believe this and I knew it, but I forced the bright polka-dotted canopy of this belief over my unhappy knowledge. And I tried to
conform the suburban world around me to the world of Victorian London described in the book—which resulted in a jarring sensation each time I was forced to look at my true surroundings.

My mother’s presence protected me from these moments. Sometimes when we would go out on our drugstore errands—sailing forth in the car with our elbows thrust out the window, the radio playing cheerful music—we would encounter kids my age slouching in a group outside the store, teasing their hair, gnawing their gum, and they would turn to look at me, and I would see myself in their eyes, a fat girl wearing white ankle socks and heart-shaped sunglasses. If my mother hadn’t been there, they would’ve made jokes about me. But she was there and she bustled by them wagging her hips, saying, once we’d reached the store, “Do you know those girls? They look like gun molls!”

My closeness with my mother was physical as well as emotional. She washed my hair and rubbed my feet, and at night she would rub my back as I lay in bed. Occasionally, she would have me bend over her lap and, lifting my cotton nightie, she would spread my hips and check to see if I had worms up my ass. I could’ve questioned why she thought this was possible, but I didn’t. The certainty of her movements made it seem perfectly natural that I’d have worms in my ass and that she’d better check. It was to me as normal as the massages she gave my father almost every night.

I would often say good-night to them as my father lay in his reclining chair with my mother kneeling at his bare feet with a bottle of baby oil. Or he would be lying on his stomach on the floor in his pajama bottom with a sheet spread beneath him while she knelt over him in her nightgown with her bottom facing toward his head, rubbing his back, bending forward so that her long, loose hair brushed his hips.

Sometimes I would be allowed to take part, and we would both sit on Daddy in our gowns, massaging him with oil while he said, “Oh, that feels so good to the old father.” We would change positions often—I’d start at his feet and she at his shoulders, and then we’d switch. His skin would glisten with cheap oil, and he’d give off a hot, glandular smell that mixed with the smell of my mother’s light sweat and perfume. The little gold locket she wore around her neck swung back and forth as she moved, and her
nightgown came away from her body so that I could almost see her breasts. I loved massaging my father with her.

When I started the sixth grade
, our neighborhood was rezoned. Eileen and Darla now had to take a bus to a school half an hour away, and I was transferred to yet another school. The new school was filled with crowds of strangers with ratted nests of bleached hair, makeup, and breasts. The girls wore pointy boots and stood with their legs apart and their hips thrust out; the boys wore cleats and had faces like knives. I once saw two boys standing in the hall by their lockers, one boy passive and expectant, the other gently holding the passive one’s face with his palm, and then, with a sudden movement the touch turned to a slap, leaving the slapped face hot red. This caress/slap was repeated again and again, with varying gradations separating the caress from the slap, on one cheek and then the next. The slapped boy’s expression remained impassive, even insolent.

Both boys and girls covered their notebooks with drawings in hot Magic Marker and decals. Their drawings were of monsters with dripping fangs, long, roiling tongues, bugged-out veiny eyes, and short hairs all over them. The monsters were surrounded by Magic Marker words in huge ornate Gothic letters—“Cool,” “Eat Me,” and “Suck.” Almost everyone drew, with the same ornamental flourish and precision, a huge swastika or Maltese cross in some central place on his or her notebook.

It was pretty much the same situation as the last school except this one had more audiovisual aids, and instead of the teacher giving the usual talk during science period, she’d have one of the boys wheel in a television, and we’d watch a program called
Adventures in Science
. It was awful, and during the first week, a girl behind me said “I’d rather fart than watch
Adventures in Science
.”

I asked my mother what “fart” meant, and she said it was “a vulgar word sailors use when they mean to say ‘poot.’”

Sometimes on my way home, I’d see the fart girl walking a block or so ahead of me. She was big, with adult hips brutishly packed into a tight skirt, large knees with raw bumps on them, and eyes that wandered blankly as she gnawed her gum. Her name was Barbara Van Bent, and I was surprised when one day she waited for me
to catch up to her on the sidewalk and said “Hi.” She was the kind of girl I was naturally afraid of, the kind of girl who pushed me out of the lunch line. But she said “Hi,” her eyes avoiding mine in the guarded, deferential way some children have of making friends.

She lived in my neighborhood, and the next day she waited for me to walk with her. I went to her house, and she showed me her autographed pictures of pouting boy rock stars and television personalities. She showed me her collection of naked bug-eyed rubber dolls with stand-up hair, and she shared a bag of orange and pink candy with me. Her mother, a big woman with stiff hips in stretch pants, gave us sloppy Joes on paper plates. She came to my house, and my mother made us hot chocolate and gave us paper and crayons. Barbara seemed surprised by this, but she took her paper and made drawings of girls with breasts wearing white go-go boots and boys with big eyes in Nehru jackets. I drew a picture of Never-Never Land and explained it to Barbara, as she had never heard of Peter Pan. I think she said “Cool,” but I don’t remember.

I can barely remember her face, just her mouth, full, dark-colored, and often slightly open, her fingers pulling and pinching it together. Her mouth could slide sideways in an expression of such sudden disdain that it would frighten me—then I’d silence my discomfort, and she’d be my friend again. I told her I never wanted to grow up. She said she did. I asked her why, and she said because then you could wear lipstick and sexy pants. Once I heard a boy say, “I’d like to make Van Bent strip,” and I imagined her naked. Later I saw him trying to pull up her dress on the playground. She tilted her hips and defiantly posed.

The last time she came to my house, we went into the backyard. Wretched pocked hunks of leftover snow sat near the house. Barb wore tight stretch pants and a blue ski cap with a big pom-pom. She wanted to throw snowballs at a target on the fence. I didn’t want to because I wasn’t any good at aiming or throwing, but I did it to please her. Her snowballs almost always hit; mine fell apart in the air. She got bored and didn’t want to play, and I felt it was because I wasn’t good enough. We stood talking in the damp yard, shifting our weight from leg to leg. She told me about the Nasty Club. She said it was she and three other girls who got together and showed each other pictures of naked people, or whatever else they
could find that was dirty. Becky Pickren had once brought a rubber cock she’d found in her mother’s drawer, and Marsha Donnelly brought a used condom. To get into the Nasty Club you had to strip from the waist down in front of everybody, and according to Barb, Denise Biddle had hair between her legs.

Hearing about the Nasty Club shocked me and made me uncomfortable. My mother would hate it if she knew I was listening to such things. Why did they want to see these things? It seemed violent and humiliating to me. I tried to ignore these feelings. I tried to make Barb think I liked the Nasty Club.

For a while I didn’t see Barb after school; I’d wait for her in our usual place, but she didn’t come. Then I saw her walking a few blocks ahead with Sharon Ringle, a girl with a pushed-in face who I didn’t like. I quietly settled into my disappointment. I didn’t look at her in class, she didn’t look at me. “I didn’t think she was a nice girl anyway,” said my mother. “She just didn’t seem like a very high type.”

Then one day in the hall, someone said to me, “Hey, Footie. Van Bent says you’re a sweathog. She says you believe in Peter Pan.”

“Hey,” said a girl on the playground, “do you believe in Peter Pan?” I knew what had happened and I could see how the Peter Pan stuff sounded. I wanted to explain that I didn’t believe in it exactly, it was more that I wanted to believe it. But I didn’t know how so I just said “No.” That didn’t make any difference. The next week I was followed home from school by three big girls who walked right at my heels saying things like “Sweathog,” “Retard,” and “Hey, where’s Peter?” Barb was one of them. I didn’t turn to look at her or speak. I couldn’t even separate her voice from the others.

The next day there were five or six girls walking a foot behind me yelling “Footie is a sweathog!” over and over again. I tried to leave school ahead of them; I walked so fast my forehead sweated in the dry winter cold. Most of the time I escaped them, sometimes not. Sometimes I would see them blocks behind me, festively waving their Monkees or Barbie lunch boxes, confident as buffalo, and I would feel, for all my bulk, empty.

I told my mother what was happening. “Hoodlums!” she said. “Ignore them, honey, just pretend like you don’t even see them.” What she said was stupid, but I could hear that she was angry and
hurt for me, and this caused me pain. She called Barb Van Bent’s mother and talked to her about her daughter “picking on” me. She called the school and tried to get them to protect me. My father said, “You’ve got to fight dirty with thugs,” and told me to smash their insteps and kick their shins.

The crowd continued to follow me down the street. My mother began walking to meet me after school. She would come marching up the block with a tight, upcurving smile that wrinkled her face and made naked the expression in her small gray eyes, twinkling with succor and cheer. There was nothing in her expression that acknowledged what the other children were saying to me—and continued saying, in her presence. She would bring me home for cookies and tea and put on a recording of a Broadway musical about a tropical romance, where soldiers and grass-skirted girls sang and danced in formation under coconut trees.

Part of me accepted my mother’s comfort, shutting out, with a huge effort, the rest of the world. But another part of me saw that the world created by my parents and me was useless. It was not translatable into the language of the tough, gum-popping kids around me, and it failed to protect me from them. I dimly recognized this world as pathetic, functional only in my parent’s house, but as there was no bridge between it and the outside, I had nowhere else to go.

One day when I was being followed by a group of five or so, one of them pushed me. This was too much and I turned, terrified but unable to stop myself. I faced startled Nona Delgado, a strong athletic Cuban girl with a soft mole on her cheek who, because of her beauty, style, and quick mouth had a place among the coolest in spite of the dark skin that relegated the few other Latinos to social obscurity. I had never looked at her up close; I had a second to register her sleek brows, the tiny white fleck caught on an eyelash, the parting of her dark colored lips, the glimpse of wonder and vulnerability that flared in her large eyes, momentarily stripped of their tough kid sheen. She was beautiful, and I felt a second of bitterness that this beautiful face was my enemy, then I punched her nose. She opened her mouth and stared. Convinced that I was about to be beaten by them all, I hit her again and again—about five times before she dropped her books and fought me. Surprise one: she did
not know how to fight at all. Surprise two: her friends did not jump on me. They stood around us and yelled “Get her Nona!” while I, a fat girl, pounded her. After I recovered from my fear and anger, the fight became a squalid embarrassment I couldn’t find a way out of. We rolled and sweated on the ground, my Sears coat torn, her nose and tender mouth ribboned with blood. Finally a housewife came out and told us to stop fighting in her yard. As I walked away, my enemies stood around the angrily weeping Nona. One of them shouted after me “You fight like an animal, Footie!” My mother and father praised me for fighting, and I was glad I had. But I was only glad in the abstract; I was sorry I’d hit Nona, who I’d always secretly admired. I felt she couldn’t really be my enemy; she had simply been drawn into a bad crowd. I remembered the feeling of my fists on her face with a strange mix of disbelief, repulsion, and pride. Her tears and blood I remembered with tenderness. When I thought of her, I didn’t feel contempt or anger or triumph; I felt warmth and unhappiness. One or two times after our fight, I saw her face in the hall in school and saw in its sudden stiffness that I had affected her. It made me feel excited and troubled.