Fat Girl In Crowded Room by Erica W. Jamieson

I should stand, right?  And just start talking? Okay, then. I’m Emily. I should tell you it’s not my first time in group. I mean I’ve been before, a long time ago, in a group, like this. And, well, now I’m back. What else? 

Oh, just tell you about last weekend? That’s what we talked about, right? On the phone?  

It wasn’t such a big deal, really. About last weekend? You see, I was out with Joseph, my boyfriend, fiancé, sort of, there’s no ring yet, but we’ve been together a while, anyway, we’re sitting at the Congo Coffee House, just north of Santa Monica Blvd, you know the place? We had gone for the reading, the first story was this tortured tale of lost love. It started with a coyote tracking these hikers, it was up in the mountains, the reader kept referring to the brown green hills, like a dozen times. He had one of those monotone voices that make it hard to stay awake, so if it wasn’t for the fat girl… oh, is that okay? Can I say that? 

Well, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the fat girl in the crowded room. That’s how I saw her, like one of those art happenings from the sixties, Fat Girl in Crowded Room by Allan Kaprow or brought to you by Overeaters Anonymous.  She had gotten there too late to grab a chair. She had to stand, leaning against this rack of old albums. Not really a rack, more like a wood bucket on toothpicks, fraying wood and thin, shaky legs. Can you picture that?  

I think the albums were selling two for a dollar. There was a sign attached to the side of the bucket, with blue tape but just at the top. Every time the fat girl moved the sign would fling upwards fanning the people seated at the table next to her.

And she was in constant motion. Shifting her weight from foot to foot leaning forward with a slight bow every few shifts. I could hear her nylons, that scratchy sound, as her thighs rubbed against each other as she moved left foot to right foot, take a little bow, and again left foot and back again, bow.  

She was a spectacle. 

But in hindsight, I have to say there was something about her cadenced movement. Sort of like Joseph in the mornings doing his two hundred sit-ups at six.  “Sex is aerobic,” I told him once. “Discipline,” he said and continued counting. Well, that’s just Joseph.  

 

I should tell you; you should know that Joseph hates fat women. He does this thing when we drive down San Vicente at sunset and the joggers are running their laps from 24th Street to the ocean. He’ll point to the ass of a big girl, that’s what he calls them—hey look at that BIG girl—and with her butt cheeks swaying in colorful stretch pants he’ll say, “Look Emily, two pigs wrestling in a spandex bag,” 

Or maybe he’ll just comment that fat women have no business in spandex. If I say nothing he’ll ask, “Em? Why aren’t you laughing, that was funny.”   

So, like that old joke, you know the one, if I wasn’t laughing, I’d be crying? —I always laugh along with my Joseph.      

You could just imagine, the fat girl had me on high alert. It was only a matter of time before she blundered into Joseph’s view. 

And when the fat girl pulled something from her pocket—it was a Snickers’ bar —I thought, okay, fine, if you’re going to smother yourself in calories right out in public, I mean c’mon, none of us would do that, right? And there she was, shamelessly eating a candy bar of all things. Well, I couldn’t protect her.

But I couldn’t stop watching either. She ate with exacting precision. Exposing just enough of the chocolate for the next bite. She folded the wrapper with tiny creases. She chewed methodically, dabbing the edges of her mouth where bits of chocolate got stuck. Left foot right foot, take a little bow fold crease, bite. And again.

In the midst of all this distraction, a large fleck of hard, delicious, milk coating, fluttered to the ground like a lost wish. I saw where it had fallen. And then I just kept thinking, it’s going to melt. Or she’s going to step on it and have chocolate on the bottom of her shoe, and that when she got home or worse, to someone else’s house, you know, if she were the kind to put her shoes on the furniture, she’d leave this brown spot somewhere and then after she was gone, or later when someone saw the stains, you couldn’t help but wonder, you know, what the hell is that?   

I used to do a lot of eating in the car, and specks of food would stain my blouse, or those same damn flecks of chocolate would fall between my thighs, and later at work or in the library, someone would say, hey you’ve got something on the back of your pants, and there it would be, these chocolate stains.  

It’s just that I could relate, you know, to those embarrassing moments being scrutinized for how you look. Take the fat girl’s feet. She wore these tiny ballet slippers; I could see how thin the leather had worn. Her feet spilled out from the sides of her shoes, I thought of silly putty expanding in heat. And she had no ankles.

  Or secrets. 

 The truth was the fat girl standing there eating her candy bar had no secrets. Unlike me. She swallowed when she chewed. 

See, this is the thing. Late at night, after we’ve gone to bed, I long for the taste of comfort hidden in Tupperware. I swear, in the quiet between Joseph’s steady breathing I can hear raspberry whispers calling me to the kitchen. You hear them, too? Sometimes?  

So maybe you guys can understand, how yesterday’s pumpkin ravioli can sense my flaws? Or that leftover meatloaf can prey on my thin veneer of denial? No?  It’s just food, right? But there by the light of the fridge, it’s like greeting old friends, it’s like coming home, it’s like being unmasked by leftovers. 

Because the truth is that I hide contraband in the freezer the way my mother hid away jewels when she traveled. Cold pizza in a Whole Foods multi grain waffle box, pop-tarts in a bag of frozen broccoli, chocolate cake in a Chinese food container. 

 And alone in the kitchen I drown myself in the infinity bowl of cereal and go alphabetically through the pantry until my fingers taste of raw peanut butter.

 

It was only by some insane spit of luck that Joseph still hadn’t seen the fat girl. Left foot right foot, take a little bow fold crease, bite. And again. Well, wait, luck had nothing to do with it. He was distracted. There was a lull in the performance, one reader finished, another reader was taking center stage, Joseph had ordered a refill of carbonated water, he slipped his hand into mine, but all the while he kept his gaze on this dragon woman sitting just off to the side of the stage. Cocked with curiosity, he licked his lips and sighed. She was wearing one of those dresses that get painted on—no underwear there, right? She had shoulder blades like dragon’s daggers, her arms were swords of twisted muscle and her nails, of course, were painted blood red. 

When I saw the way Joseph longed for her, I immediately pictured her naked in bed with him—two angular bodies doing ab work as they fucked. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Joseph likes to rub his fingers over the cuticle of my thumb where I tend to pick and pull, sometimes until I draw blood. He did that, while we were sitting there, while he was looking at that woman. But this time, sitting there, he turned my hand over in his and looked at my fingernails. 

I should have had a manicure after work.  

The fat girl’s nails were painted orange.  

I could not imagine Joseph naked with her.

Joseph once said that he could only love a girl who was into yoga. I have downward dogged with him and planked until my arms swayed like Gumby dolls.  We go to the M Café for dinner on Thursdays, the one in Culver City? We go after our Bikram class. Joseph eats cracked whole wheat and macrobiotic flowers and salmon humanely fished and broiled without added fats and I say I’m not that hungry.  

Joseph is the lean long night that powers up through the cracks among the smog and fast food. But I am only a weed growing in his imagined garden. I am processed sugar, and raw red meat. I am worse. I am jealous and fickle.

Can you guess the ending? You know what I’m going to say, right? I mean, it’s why I’m here. I never allow those midnight visitors, those old friends to stay until morning. I deposit them smelling, sinking, swiftly down the swirling water of the porcelain basin with its handle still jiggling as I wipe my mouth with a wet cloth and silently cry from exhaustion and disgust. 

But I give nothing away, you know? Joseph never detects oddly sour smells emanating off the bathroom walls. At least, he never says a word.

And remember that record rack, the one that the fat girl was leaning against?  It creaked. Not loud, but loud enough that I heard. It was just old wood and loosened screws; her weight was too much for it to bear. It let out a low wailing moan and the fat girl paused. She stood with a straight back, stepped away from the rack, all her fidgeting came to a total standstill, the sign finally rested flat against the bucket. I could tell by the way she glanced at the tables on either side of her that the taste of her heartbeat was bitter as she waited to see who else had heard. 

Joseph squeezed my hand. I pressed into his fingers, coercing him towards me, pulling his gaze, willing him to look at me. I was afraid for the fat girl.

At last, she folded the wrapper back over the final bites of her Snickers. She crumpled closed the empty paper and returned it to her jacket pocket. She had this head of dark curls, with the candy out of her hand she reached up to right a renegade curl that had fallen across her forehead dipping ever so slight into her left eye. Her checks were full of color, probably from the strain of standing so long and all that motion. Or maybe she came by it naturally? She looked like a china doll, alabaster skin with cheeks full of roses, her nose was small and gently curved upward. Her lips were peony pink without lipstick.  

That’s when I noticed. She was lovely.  

I wish I could have seen the color of her eyes. They must have been blue. Blue like mine. How could they have been anything but blue? 

The couple at the table in front of us started gathering their things. The fat girl looked my way. Of course, our eyes met. I understood the question—could I save the chair for her? She maneuvered with extreme dexterity around the scattered chairs, through the crowd. Oh, she was deft in settling without a sound in front of us.  

It didn’t matter. As she came into Joseph’s line of vision, he nudged me. He was already pulling his eyelids back and forcing the edges of his lips to turn downward. He tapped his thumb against the table, a tapping away at his tolerance.  There is a fat girl in this crowded room and now she was front and center of Joseph, my Joseph. With a nod of his chin, he tried to pull me into his conspiracy, look, he gestured, look at this whale in front of me, the words, oh, his words were bursting out through his pores, like pheromones giving notice to a bitch in heat.  

But.  

As the fat girl adjusted to the well-worn seat of the chair, she turned to me.  “Thank you,” she said.  

And she smiled.  

It was only my foot, really. I had placed it on the lower rung of the chair, an indication to those still standing that this seat was taken. Who would do any less?

Her smile. It warmed this unfamiliar yearning to be full. I wanted to taste something rich and sweet and feel weight in my stomach. So, I thought of all I could do to savor this moment: if I pull my hand from Joseph’s and touch the fat girl on the shoulder, if I cloak her in a whisper, you are so beautiful, she might be safe. If I put my fingers on Joseph’s lips, if I stop him before he speaks would that change our future?  If I stand as a human barrier, could I deflect his words?  

It was Joseph who whispered not me. Before I had so much as pulled a finger from his grasp and loud enough for her to hear, he said something sardonic and noxious and awful about the size of this woman in front of us.  

I don’t want to repeat it, not here, does it matter? He spit out words that lacerate and wound and what did I do?

Maybe it was because she smiled at me. Maybe it was just those old coping skills, you know? The ones that never die. It doesn’t really matter why, I guess. Just that you should know, you should know that I laughed. I laughed at the fat girl.  

 Sitting next to Joseph, my beautiful Joseph. 

What could I do? It was either me or her, right? So, I laughed. I laughed along with Joseph at the fat girl in the crowded room. 

May I sit now?

Erica W. Jamieson’s fiction has appeared in Lilith Magazine, RKVRY Quarterly Literary, and Switchback. Her personal essays have appeared in Self Magazine, Lilith, Spittoon, and will be published in Passengers Journal Fall, 2021. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a Whoodle named Cleo.