Rebecca Tiger
As I type this, my belly spills onto my thighs. When I am conscious of the creep of this mottled flesh, like mishappen Play-Doh, I contract my muscles, suck my gut in so I don’t feel so grotesque. That hold lasts for seconds before I let go. It doesn’t work anyway. It’s as if my fat has disconnected itself from the muscle. No amount of will can call it back home. When I was young, my cronies and I would roam our suburban neighborhood returning to our identical colonials only when we heard our mothers screaming out our names and “Dinner!” We listened. My fat doesn’t. It’s an unwanted guest who has trashed my house, ignored my pleas to leave.
There is flab, fat accumulation in places that you didn’t think could be the scaffold for more than skin, which I just read has seven layers. The third and fourth are where the curtains part and fat takes the stage. The fourth is the subcutaneous layer and the descriptions of it sound so wonderful. It protects us from injury, keeps us warm. It’s like a nurturing parent. Mine are both dead. My subcutaneous layer feels disconnected from my body. Then there’s visceral fat, the type that surrounds and coats our organs, suffocates them. I can’t even begin to talk about this without having a panic attack though it’s probably just a hot flash.
When my nieces and I went to get matching Tiger tattoos a few years ago, we discussed where on our bodies we would put them. They have the gorgeous litheness of youth, these two, figures tailor-made for showing off. My niece Eva decided on her right upper ribcage. “A place I’ll never get fat,” she said. She’s heard the adult women around her complain about their bodies enough to know that they change in ways they don’t like but she can’t fathom that it will happen to her. When I told my Greek friend Eleni what my niece said, we laughed and laughed. “She’ll see!” Eleni said. But the joke is on us. My vagina is even flabby now. My lover says he likes its warmth.
I live next to Seward Park, a leafy bustling spot in lower Manhattan. When I’m there, I feel connected and anonymous. I walk among the Siberian Elm and Sycamore trees, pass benches of people young and old, take time to think. Recently, as I was walking through a spot that reeked of weed, a man’s face emerged in a cloud of smoke: “Hey,” he said. “HEY!” His voice was getting urgent. I looked at him. “You’d be perfect if you were younger.” This high man with red swollen eyes was pointing at me. I should have said “fuck you.” Instead, my surprised laugh was tinged with bitterness. I’m looking forward to that true invisibility my feminist theory professor in college told us was coming. A gaggle of 19-year-olds with taut breasts and tight cunts gathered around her for wisdom, looking forward to becoming crones because we didn’t quite believe we’d actually be old one day.
We did end up old. But the promise of obscurity slips away with every reel about intermittent fasting and kettle bell workouts that comes across my iPhone. I read reddit threads that are full of women in shock at the changes their bodies have made without their permission. “FUCK THIS!” one person writes. “NOT COOL.” There is the occasional message of empowerment. “This is our time to shine. Wear flowy comfy dresses and start speaking in riddles. If not now, when?” A few upvotes and the conversation regresses to the mean: we all hate our bodies. We are mad at our bodies. “Get used to hunger,” one woman writes but I don’t want to; I want to eat the world up. “Haven’t I earned my right to this unruly flesh?” I cry with half-hearted conviction as I grab the gelatinous sprawl that was my once slender-ish stomach.
The other day after seeing a funny and brilliant play with my lover, I got angry at him as we tried to get a cab from Times Square to my favorite Italian restaurant in the Lower East Side, my joy inexplicably twisted itself into something bilious. “I don’t understand you,” my lover said. I don’t understand me either. My body and emotions are out of control: I am a monster. A hungry monster.
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Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. She writes on the long train ride between here and there. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, JMWW, MER, Peastsmoke, Roi Faineant, Tiny Molecules, trampset and elsewhere.