the word that would make him feel even a fraction as horrible and furious and ashamed as I did. “You’re small,” I finally said, imbuing that word with every hateful nuance I could muster, so that he’d know I meant small in spirit, and everywhere else, too.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at me. He just turned around and walked away.
Samantha had kept the car running. “Are you okay?” she asked as I slid into the passenger’s seat clutching the box to my chest. I nodded silently. Samantha probably thought I was ridiculous. But this wasn’t a situation I expected her to sympathize with. At five foot ten, with inky black hair, pale skin, and high, sculpted cheekbones, Samantha looks like a young Anjelica Huston. And she’s thin. Effortlessly, endlessly thin. Given a choice of any food in the world, she’d probably pick a perfect fresh peach and Rya crispbreads. If she wasn’t my best friend, I’d hate her, and even though she is my best friend, it’s sometimes hard not to be envious of someone who can take food or leave it, whereas I mostly take it, and then take hers, too, when she doesn’t want any more. The only problem her face and figure had ever caused her was too much male attention. I could never make her feel what it was like to live in a body like mine.
She glanced at me quickly. “So, um, I’m guessing that things with you two are over?”
“Good guess,” I said dully. My mouth tasted ashy, my skin, reflected in the passenger’s side window, looked pale and waxen. I stared into the cardboard box, at my earrings, my books, the tube of MAC lipstick that I thought I’d lost forever.
“You okay?” asked Samantha gently
“I’m fine.”
“Do you want to get a drink? Some dinner, maybe? Want to go see a movie?”
I held the box tighter and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see where we were, so I wouldn’t have to follow the car’s progress back down the roads that used to lead me to him. “I think I just want to go home.”
My answering machine was blinking triple-time when I got back to my apartment. I ignored it. I shucked off my work clothes, pulled on my overalls and a T-shirt, and padded, barefoot, into the kitchen. From the freezer I retrieved a canister of frozen Minute Maid lemonade. From the top shelf of the pantry I pulled down a pint of tequila. I dumped both in a mixing bowl, grabbed a spoon, took a deep breath, a big slurp, settled myself on my blue denim couch, and forced myself to start reading.
Loving a Larger Woman
by Bruce Guberman
I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.
She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder – a palm-sized folio with notations for what she’d eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she’d been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.
I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I’d seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I’d ever dated before.
What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?
I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.
Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.
But being out with her didn’t feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I’d absorbed society’s expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker’s build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team’s roster, C. couldn’t make herself invisible.
But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.
As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.
And I knew it wasn’t paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen- sized woman and you’ll find out how true it is. You’ll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You’ll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine’s Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you’ll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she’ll let herself have, what she’ll let herself have against what she’ll be seen eating in public.
And what she’ll let herself say.
I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who’d been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: “I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you.” And it was that letter – that word – that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true – the “overweight” part – then the “nobody loves you” part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.
Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it’s even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn’t believe that she herself was worthy of anyone’s love.
And now that it’s over, I don’t know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body – no, herself – and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.
I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said “I do.” I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I’d given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I’d deserved. He could have been everything I’d wanted, everything I’d hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it.
And I’d lost him forever. Him and his family – one of the things I’d loved best about Bruce. His parents were what June and Ward would have been if they were Jewish and living in New Jersey in the nineties. His father, who had perpetually whiskered cheeks and eyes as kind as Bruce’s, was a dermatologist. His family was his delight. I don’t know how else to say it, or how much it astonished me. Given my experience with my own dad, watching Bernard Guberman was like looking at an alien from Mars. He actually likes his child! I would marvel. He really wants to be with him! He remembers things about Bruce’s life! That Bernard Guberman seemed to like me, too, might have had less to do with his feelings about me as a person and more to do with my being a), Jewish, and hence a marriage prospect; b), gainfully employed, and thus not an overt gold digger; and c), a source of happiness for his son. But I didn’t care why he was so nice to me. I just basked in his
