Judith Moore - Fat Girl: A True Story

I am fat. I am not so fat that I cant fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am. I wanted to write about what it was and is like for me, being fat.

This will not be a book about how I had an eating disorder and how I conquered this disorder through therapies or group process or antidepressants or religion or twelve-step programs or a personal trainer or white-knuckling it or the love of a good man (or woman). This will be the last time in this book you will see the words eating disorder.

I am not a fat activist. This is not about the need for acceptance of fat people, although I would prefer that thinner people not find me disgusting.

I know, from being thin and listening to thin people talk about fat people, that thin people often denigrate fat people. At best, they feel sorry for them. I know too that when a thin person looks at a fat person, the thin person considers the fat person less virtuous than he. The fat person lacks willpower, pride, this wretched attitude, self-esteem, and does not care about friends or family because if he or she did care about friends or family, he or she would not wander the earth looking like a repulsive sow, rhinoceros, hippo, elephant, general wide-mawed flesh-flopping flabby monster.

I will not write here about fat people I have known and I will not interview fat people. All I will do here is tell my story. I will not supply windbag notions about whats wrong with me. You will figure that out. I will tell you only what I know about myself, which is not all that much.

I will tell the story of my family and the food we ate. We were an unhappy family. With the exception of my fathers maternal grandparents and a woman who worked for them and my adorable and generous gay uncle, nobody much loved anybody. Everybody was pretty much in it for themselves. We were hard American isolatos. We were solitaries. Unhappy families, though, still have to eat. For my father and for me, who are this storys primary fatsos, food was the source of some of our greatest pleasure and most terrible pain.

Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I wont. I will not endear myself. I wont put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am.

I mistrust real-life stories that conclude on a triumphant note. Rockettes will not arrive on the final page and kick up their high heels and show petticoats. This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy.

But I havent always been fat. I had days when I was almost thin.

Youre too fat to fuck.

I was eating dinner in a caf with a fellow I liked. I shouldnt have liked him but I did. The caf had been around for years and was popular and noisy. We were seated across from each other in a red Naugahyde booth.

I was eating a cheeseburger, holding the assemblage in both hands. Crisp around the edges, the bun was warm and squishy, squeezed between fingers and thumbs. It had been fried on the griddle, had soaked up meat grease, and my hands were getting greasy.

I was glad that the meat and bun and cheese and lettuce and dill pickle and mustard and mayonnaise and chopped onion were inside my mouth. I was glad that I was chewing and that my mouth was full. The chewing and the taste of the cheeseburger mush that I pushed against the roof of my mouth with my tongue made me dreamy and forgetful.

I wanted to forget. I wanted to forget what the fellow sitting across from me had just said. He was drunk when he said it, but still, he said it and he meant it.

That was the last cheeseburger I ate. Now, fifteen years later, when I cant sleep, I conjure cheeseburgers. I summon the moist and porous bun, melted cheddar, a beef patty cooked rare, cool serrated dill pickle slices, chopped crisp lettuce, sharp grainy mustard and slicks of mayonnaise. I make and remake the cheeseburger; I pile on more pickle, add Spanish onion rings, add paper-thin tomato, and turn the bun greasier. The warm edge of slightly scratchy toasted bun, dense meat, melted cheese and the lettuce rest on my tongue. I sink back into my heaped pillows and fill a red plastic basket with onion rings. Not the trashy frozen onion rings coated in cornmeal. These onion rings are cloaked in tempura batter and plunged into roiling fat and pulled out when the batter turns gold. I dip the rings in tartar sauce, the cheap kind that comes in a jar.

Eventually, I fall off to sleep.

I am on a diet. I am almost always on a diet. I am trying to get rid of pounds of my waddling self. I am always trying to get rid of pounds of myself.

I am a short, squat toad of a woman. My curly auburn hair is fading. Curls form a clowns ruff about my round face. My shoulders are wide. My upper arms are as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers ceilings. My belly juts out. The skin on my thighs is pocked, not unlike worn foam rubber. When I walk my buttocks grind like the turbines I once saw move water over the top of Grand Coulee Dam.