Marjorie gritted her teeth and yanked again at her pantyhose. It usually took her twenty minutes and several dousings of baby powder to get them on. But without them her clothing looked even worse. These days she even wore them under her slacks. She yanked again and then froze as she felt the familiar loosening that meant she’d put a run in them. She craned around to look at the back of her thigh and saw a large hole had formed with a run, slowly inching towards her knee with every move she made.
Defeated, she collapsed onto the end of the bed and yanked them back down over her knees. Her daughter’s words from yesterday at the spa echoed in her head,
“You could at least wear a bathing suit. You look disgusting.”
She rubbed at her eyes. She knew what she looked like. She knew that even after she put on hose and her nicest clothes and makeup that most people still only saw a fat cow. She saw the looks that skewered away from her just moments after she caught them. Pitying glances. Disgusted glances. Fearful glances. What was it Marie had said to her a few weeks ago?
“God Mom, you should get the gym to pay you to walk up and down in front of that big window that all the Stairmaster machines look out on! Their business would increase tenfold! People would be knocking each other out of the way to sign up with a personal trainer.”
Marjorie pulled the ruined nylons off, dropped them onto the floor and then let herself fall sideways onto the bed.
Marie was right.
She was disgusting.
But she hadn’t always been. When she’d married Marie’s father she’d been pretty and thin. But she’d never been able to get the baby weight off after Marie was born. Oscar, as repulsed by the weight gain then as Marie was now, had stopped having any sexual contact with her.
One night he just moved out of their master suite down the hall to one of the guest bedrooms. He had never said why. He never said anything. He just made up the guest bed one night and gone to sleep in it, but she knew.
She knew that he didn’t want to be seen in public with her.
She knew why when Marie was growing up she never wanted Marjorie to come to her school.
She knew her daughter’s worst fear was to end up looking just like her mother.
She knew that her husband had been sleeping with his thin blond assistant Kimberly for the last two years.
She Knew.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to lose weight. In the last 15 years she’d been on every diet imaginable.
Atkins, Jenny Craig, Nutra System, Weight Watchers, Ultra Slim Fast, Sugar Busters. Sometimes she’d managed to lose as much as 20 or 30 pounds but the moment she cheated in the slightest or started eating like a normal human being again the weight always came back. And then some. But how could anyone have a shake for breakfast and another one for lunch every day? Only eat disgusting frozen food at every meal? Never eat bread again? Be hungry all the time? Oscar, of course, had still expected her to cook him dinner every night no matter what. Who in the world could bake lasagna from scratch and then eat a boiled chicken breast?
Marjorie sat up and wiped her eyes. She usually tried to not let herself wallow like this but some days were so much harder than others. She abandoned her plans to go to the grocery store. Oscar probably wouldn’t be home until late anyway. Naked, she walked to the closet and grabbed one of the many expensive silk caftans she owned. She pulled it over her head and reveled for a moment in the feeling of the loose fabric swirling around her, the silk gliding smoothly over her skin.
She purposefully bypassed the kitchen and headed directly into the living room. She’d tivo’d an A&E Biography on Barbara Steisand and a rerun of Law and Order but she wasn’t in the mood for either of them now. Settling herself comfortably into the overstuffed sofa she reached for the remote and started idly flipping channels. Not that there was ever anything good on at two in the afternoon. “Housewife TV” Oscar called it.
Whoops and screams caught her attention and she looked up at the television. A good-looking young man was sitting next to a young blond woman who was much heavier than Marjorie was. Wearing a pink satin shirt and beige leggings, her huge thighs tapering down to disproportionally tiny feet, the woman looked like a giant melting ice cream cone. My god, Marjorie thought, hasn’t anyone ever told her that fat women should never wear bright colors or shiny fabrics? The topic flashed across the bottom of the screen, Men Who Like Big Beautiful Women.
That woman with the big red glasses was motioning for the crowd to quiet down.
She leaned towards the man, “So Curt, have you always been attracted to large women?”
The man nodded, “For as long as I can remember. My mother was heavy but I always thought she was beautiful. I never really talked about it to anyone though. The few times I tried to talk to my friends about it they acted like I was a complete freak.”
“So what made you decide to come out of the closet, so to speak?”
“I came across the Fat Admirers website on the Internet.”
“Fat Admirers?” the host just let it hang there.
“It’s an organization of men that love big women and are proud of it…and they sponsor dances and events.”
“And that’s how you two met?”
“Yes. The first time I went to a dance I was too nervous to even talk to anyone… But when I went to the second one I saw Betsy and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. So I screwed up my nerve and asked her to dance and she said yes.” Curt smiled at the audience as if he was still amazed such a wonderful thing had happened to him.
The camera and the host both zoomed in on Betsy, “So you went to this dance to meet men who are turned on by fat women?”
Betsy smiled comfortably, her blue eyes twinkling, “I went to find a man who would be turned on by me. I spent most of my life trying to be skinny, trying to diet. My mom put me on my first diet when I was eleven. Three years ago, when I was 24, I almost had a heart attack because my blood pressure was so high from taking diet pills. After that I decided to quit fighting who I was and just accept it. Some people are skinny. Some people are fat. I’m fat. But that doesn’t make me ugly or unworthy. Fat people deserve to be happy and loved too.”
“Amen Sister,” Marjorie said to the television.
“But what made you decide to go to a dance sponsored by Fat Admirers?”
Betsy looked at her quizzically, “Because I wanted to meet a man who would think I was beautiful. And that is a really hard thing do to in this society. Most men would rather be single and alone than be with a fat girl. And even the ones who are attracted to fat women are ashamed to admit it to anyone else. In our society it is considered deviant behavior to find fat attractive I admit that in a perfect world I wouldn’t have to go to a dance especially for fat women, but this is not a perfect world.”
Marjorie could feel herself nodding.
“I couldn’t bring myself to start running a, ‘Fat woman seeks…’ personal ad so I contacted the local chapter of NAAFA…”
“NAAFA?”
“The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and I just flat out asked them if there were any programs in place for fat women such as myself to meet men. And they told me about the dances that Fat Admirers sponsor. I went to three or four and really enjoyed them. For the first time in my life I felt like I was sexy and beautiful. And then I met Curt.”
Betsy and Curt’s eyes met and you could just tell how happy and in love they were. Marjorie almost felt like crying. She was so happy for them and she was also so jealous. It had been so long since Oscar had looked at her like that. These days he hardly ever looked at her at all.
“Eight months later we got married.” Betsy held up her pudgy hand, a shiny wedding band glinting under the studio lights.
Wedding pictures of Betsy, huge and glowing in a big white satin gown, and Curt, grinning in a tuxedo, flashed up on the screen. The kiss. The first dance. Feeding each other cake.
The camera panned back to the host. “When we come back we’re going to talk with Gwen Sullivan, the president of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, to talk about discrimination against fat people and SouthWest Airlines’ new policy that people over a certain weight must now purchase two seats.”
Marjorie hurried into the kitchen, grabbed a pen and paper and then rushed back to the television. Across the top of the page she wrote “Fat Admirers”, and under that “National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance”.
…
Marjorie sat in her car in the parking lot trying to screw up her courage. She’d had her upper lip waxed, had her hair and makeup done. She’d even gotten a pedicure. She’d sworn after the last time she’d never go back to that spa, but she had amended that to never going back when her daughter was there. And the staff had made her look beautiful. She checked her reflection for the tenth time in the mirror under the visor. She’d purchased a new dress and the burgundy silk really did set off her coloring nicely. True, she still looked like the overweight mother of a grown woman but she looked like a darn pretty overweight mother of a grown woman. For once she was glad that she hadn’t been able to get her wedding ring on for years. Having to take it off would have meant admitting more to herself than she was ready to yet. A symbolic act she wasn’t ready to commit.
Yet.
“You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it,” she told herself. “If you’re uncomfortable or you don’t like the atmosphere you can just turn right around and go home and no one ever has to know you were here.”
“And if anyone laughs at me and this is all a cruel joke to make me feel even worse about myself well then I’ll just go home and kill myself and God will just have to give me a free pass.”
She checked her lipstick one last time, took a deep breath and opened the car door. She followed the sounds of laughter and conversation to the entrance of the Veterans Hall where the Fat Admirers dance was being held. She paid a handsome young man in his 30’s $25 for her ticket and then walked into the hall. And stared. There had to be at least 200 people there. Fat women laughing and dancing and talking with men. Some of the men were overweight too, but most of them just looked like, well, men. A few of them were even exceedingly good looking. And the women. At least half of them were as heavy as Marjorie, and some of them were a LOT heavier. My God she felt positively svelte in comparison.
Marjorie looked around, impressed. Instead of the folding chairs and lunchroom tables she’d expected, the all four walls of the room were lined with large comfortable chairs and ottomans with little cocktail tables scattered around them. In one corner several women who were obviously too heavy to dance sat laughing together, surrounded by a bevy of male admirers. As she stood there a woman rolled by in some kind of modified electric wheelchair, her enormous stomach resting on her legs. She smiled at Marjorie as she motored slowly past. For one fleeting moment Marjorie worried that maybe she wasn’t fat enough and then the humor of the idea struck her and smiled at her own silliness, relaxing just the tiniest bit.
She made her way over to the refreshment table and helped herself to a glass of punch. Sitting down at an empty table she looked around in amazement. Why had no one told her about this before? Why had she let her husband and daughter convince her that she was too fat to be loved? Why had she let herself believe it? She had been a good wife and a good mother. She deserved to be loved. She deserved to…
“Excuse me, Ma’am?”
Marjorie snapped out of her reverie and looked up. There was a nice looking Italian man about her own age standing next to her table.
“Yes?” she had no idea what to say to him.
“I was wondering if you would like to dance?”
Marjorie looked at him blankly for a second. She realized that until this moment she hadn’t really believed in any of it. That some men found fat women attractive, even preferred them to skinny women. She looked up into his face again and saw the dejection beginning to form there. He thought she didn’t want to dance with him and HE was disappointed. He really wanted to dance with her.
“I’m sorry. This is my first time at one of these events and I’m a little nervous.” A nervous giggle slipped out and she added, “Yes. Yes I would very much like to dance.”
His face brightened and he held his hand out to her, “I thought this might be your first time. You seemed a bit nervous. And I would have noticed you if you’d been here before. My name is Antonio.”
Marjorie felt her pulse quicken as he led her onto the dance floor. She placed her hand on his shoulder and smiled up at him, “I’m Marjorie. Nice to meet you.”
And it was. It was very nice indeed.
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