“I know it smells like sin and atheism in here to you,” I told the young men in white shirts and black ties who were looking to recapture my ex-Mormon husband in an LDS trap. “But aside from that, can you rate its pungency on a scale from one to ten?”
After three weeks, the smell had subsided somewhat but was still very much living with us. The sponges never arrived, and I was encouraged by friends to call my insurance company to report the damage and have the house blasted with oxygen, but the thought of cleaning up so that strangers could come in was just exhausting. As was listening to my State Farm guy say that it was nice to hear from me, but no, I could not collect damages after hoboes had broken off branches in my backyard so they could make a den in my bushes in which to sleep, and no, we couldn’t collect damages after my husband got sprayed in the eye by a dented can of Canada Dry when it fell out of my car and no, I couldn’t collect damages from someone breaking into my car if all they did was rifle through the maxi pads in my glove compartment, and that maybe I should learn exactly how the F my oven turned off.
So what option did I have?
I trudged down to the basement and rooted around until I found the cans of paint I had purchased ten years before when we bought the house and I had visions of painting all of its rooms, which well exceeded my level of vigor. I had succeeded in painting one room before I got bored, and it still bears an inch-long scar at the top of the wall that shouts the original color and just how lazy one woman is that she couldn’t go the extra inch. As a result, various shades of fermenting gallons of Restoration Hardware paint had become rusted shut with antiquity and abandonment. With a hammer and a screwdriver, I cracked open the lid of one can, like an Egyptian tomb, and took my punishment.
For the next eight days, I attempted to paint the dining room, which had gotten the biggest deposit of pollution. My walls became silver sage, eliminating the diabetic-urine yellow that I had made myself live with for a decade, and then I decided to paint the century-old crown molding black, adding years to my sentence for bad behavior. It was going to look and smell great, I assured myself.
If I have any advice to impart, it’s that you should never paint anything black unless you already have black walls, and a black floor, and a black ceiling, because you will spend the rest of your life scraping tiny black dots off of everything with your splintered, calcium-deficient nails.
You will also spend the next week attempting to get the dark, stubborn paint off of your hands, and will finally give up, happy to let it reabsorb into your body. Although when your new doctor asks you what you do for a living and you answer that you’re a writer, she may very well inquire if that’s why your hands are all black.
And because the last writer to have ink-stained hands was Charles Dickens, you should immediately put your quill down and find a new doctor, because the one you have is a little behind the times and might attempt to leech you.
I finally finished the dining room the morning that my sister and her family were due to arrive for a visit. I pulled the masking tape off, put the ladder away, and reassembled the room, hoping that I had finally conquered the enemy and that the stink was finally gone.
When I met her at the airport, she greeted me with something of a dirty look.
“I suppose the dry chem sponges that came to my house were for you,” she said. “They weigh about five pounds apiece and pushed me over my luggage weight limit! You’re the only one weird enough to buy something like that. I saw two episodes of Breaking Bad and your hands are black. You’re not making meth, are you?”
I had ordered the sponges on my sister’s Amazon account (why pay for Prime?!), and they had mistakenly been sent to her address.
“There was an incident, but thank you for bringing the sponges,” I explained, not wanting to tell her about the smoke so that she could be my perfect guinea pig. She would be the one to tell me exactly how fresh and paint-y my house now smelled because of all of my effort.
Once home, I swung the door wide open and eagerly waited for the verdict.
“God,” she said as she wrinkled up her nose the minute she stepped into my house, and then she looked at me with her Level One face. “Why does your house smell like the permed heads of ten Nanas?”
“All righty,” my doctor said as he entered the examination room. “How are you, Miss Ontaro?”
I hate going to the doctor. It takes a lot to get me to go, like a scissor sticking up out of my foot, a kidney stone that threatens to shoot out of a major organ and right through the skin, or something the size of a tennis ball attempting to colonize my neck.
“Oh, you know,” I said, obviously. “Could be better.”
“I see, I see,” he nodded, and honestly, I hate that. Because this particular doctor has never cured me of anything. Never. I’m usually better on my own in the dim light of my filthy bathroom, dousing whatever ailing part of me with my version of first aid, which consists of hydrogen peroxide, three Benadryls, and a Valium. Covers all bases, and I’m usually good to go in forty-eight hours, depending on how expired the Benadryl is.
But this time, I couldn’t treat myself. I had tried and failed, and, at my husband’s insistence, finally made an appointment with my primary care physician, whom I have no faith in whatsoever. As I’ve reported before, his first questions are a) how my poop was that morning; b) do I jog; and c) has he ever given me the recipe for his bran muffins.
Seriously. This is all he knows about medicine, and there are times when I am more likely to trust the primitive advice of some of my distant relatives to put a poultice of toothpaste and Vaseline on every ailment. It has cured cancer and arthritis, but is sadly ineffective on alcoholism and drug manufacturing in one’s trailer. This guy’s no better. I believe he holds about as much curative power in his hands as the girl at Taco Bell who just made my burrito and had a tattoo of Hello Kitty sprawled across her neck, and one of those people only charges me eighty-nine cents.
This utter lack of faith was confirmed one day when I was driving to Safeway and I saw a skinny man jogging, wearing tiny blue satin shorts riding so far up his ass it looked like a set of flappy butt boobs. In my rearview mirror I recognized him as the man who had recently told me that bran muffins would benefit my suspected toe fungus.
So now I was in his office by force, and he looked at me and said, “Whatcha got going on there, huh?” referring to the brace on my left hand.
“Oh, no,” I replied. “I’m not here for that. I have a sinus infection from a leftover cold and my ears are clogged up. And now I’m having a bit of vertigo.”
“Well, what’s wrong with your hand?” he asked.
“Nothing really,” I said. “But if I could get something to clear up this sinus infection, that would be great.”
“Sure, sure,” he answered. “How long have you had it in a brace?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. A week, week and a half.”
“And it’s not getting better?”
“Well,” I said hesitantly. “I keep hurting it. It’s nothing. I don’t mind the brace. But right now, the room is spinning as if it was ladies’ night, and I was the only lady at the bar.”
“How do you keep injuring it?” he asked, and I finally realized that I wasn’t going to get him to address my real problem unless I shook him off the trail of my perceived problem.
“It’s just a repetitive motion injury,” I finally said.
“Play videogames?” he said. “I see lots of that.”
I sighed. “No,” I replied. “It’s Spanx Thumb.”
He looked at me and paused.
“How often are you spanking your children?” he queried warily.
“I don’t have children,” I said impatiently. “Spanx. Bodywear.”
He looked at me blankly.
“It’s a shaper,” I tried to explain. “You know, like a spandex shorts kind of thing, it squeezes you in and smooths you out….”
He still kept looking at me.
“It
’s a girdle,” I simply said. “I have Girdle Thumb.”
“Is that slang for shooting up drugs?” he asked.
“No it is not,” I responded flatly. “I have injured my thumb by repeatedly pulling up my girdle. As you can see, I’m chunky. Sometimes I have to really struggle a bit to get it on. I’ve had to take breaks before. It’s…a process. But if I could get a Z-Pak for my sinuses, that would be awesome.”
“Yep,” he said, and then slapped his knees. “I’m going to have Debbie come in next.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, Who is Debbie? Will she give me the prescription? He didn’t even examine me, but I am completely fine with that. So he walked out, and I waited for Debbie.
For a long time.
I was about to get up, go home, and pour alcohol in my ears when the door opened and Debbie finally came in. Wearing perky medical office scrubs with cupcakes all over them. I was ready for her to hand over the prescription so I could be on my way, but instead, she sat down at the computer, looked at me, and said (and I quote): “Are you familiar with My Fitness Pal?”
“I don’t know,” I said, stumped. “Do you jog with the doctor?”
“No,” she said. “The website. My Fitness Pal, the website.”
“Um, yeah,” I replied, now very puzzled. “It’s the place where you log everything you eat.”
“It’s not only that,” she informed me. “It can keep track of your exercise, and help you to be informed to make responsible choices.”
I was really hoping that the responsible choices she was talking about were to not pay one credit card with another, or call the IRS back when they asked me to, or not honk at a hobo who has Charlie Manson eyes and who stops in front of my car to have a conversation with a piece of smashed gum on the ground.
Those kinds of responsible choices.
“See, if you use My Fitness Pal, and that’s ‘W, W, W, dot My Fitness Pal dot com,’ ” she said, spelling it out as if I were in preschool, “you can trend and track your calories every day, and you can rein in your daily consumption.”
“That is awesome,” I said, trying to rein in the compulsion to kill her, all 112 pounds, size four of her. “But what does that have to do with my sinus infection?”
She looked at me as if I had just reached into my purse, brought out an Italian sub, and tore a chunk out of it with my gnashing teeth. And grunted.
“The doctor suggested I show you this tool for weight management since I have just lost a significant amount of weight by using ‘W, W, W, dot My Fitness Pal dot com,’ ” she said. “Since I’ve made the journey myself, he felt it might help you reach some goals.”
“Aha,” I said, and then I just stared at her.
So. The Fat Talk. We were having the Fat Talk. But since my doctor was too chickenshit to call me fat to my face, he sent in his formerly fat nurse to break the news to me that I was chubby, maybe to soften the blow a little, maybe to rub it in that someone else had more willpower than I did.
This man, with floppy blue satin tits for an ass, saw fit that I should be informed, as if I didn’t know. My Girdle Thumb was enough of an indication to me that I had bought a ticket on the Fat Bus, but I also know it’s never too late to get off.
As I sat there, looking at Debbie as she showed me her own account on www.myfitnesspal.com and what she ate yesterday, I was wrapped in the unbearable heat of humiliation, and if I could have gotten up and run out of there, I would have. But I had already been charged for the co-pay, and I’d be damned if I was going to leave that place without a prescription for something in my hand.
Guess what? I know what I look like. I know it. I knew it when I went through TSA security in Mesa, Arizona, and, as always, I set off the body scanner.
“Do you have metal in this leg, ma’am?” they always ask me. “Do you have a metal hip? Female assist!”
This happens to me every single time at the airport. I get the patdown. But on one particular day, the female agent who was conducting it was very concerned about my abdomen and kept returning there, as well as swiping her hands in between my legs.
“What is in there?” she asked me. “What do you have there?”
“Nothing,” I insisted, and I was telling the truth. My pockets were empty. I had no bomb putty strapped to my waist. There were no firecrackers in my cookie. But when she insisted I did and went back in for another round, I snapped.
It’s completely fair to say I lost my shit.
“It’s fat,” I told her. “You are touching my fat.”
“What’s this?” she said, running her hands over my belly again.
“I AM FAT,” I said louder. “THAT IS FAT.”
Her hands went again to my inner thighs.
“CAN YOU NOT TELL I AM FAT?” I said, almost yelling at this point. But it wasn’t almost. I was yelling, and people were turning their heads.
“I am telling you it is fat,” I said, now in a rage. “And no matter how much you touch me, it is never going to stop being FAT.”
She finally stopped assaulting me and let me go, and it took everything I had not to turn around and hiss, “But I have a pipe bomb up my ass!”
The last time I went through TSA just a couple of months ago, I set off the body scanner again, and the conversation went like this:
TSA LADY: I have to touch your upper inner left thigh. It will be a light touch. Do you have any metal in that leg?
ME: No, but you always want to check that leg and you always ask if I have metal in it. I do believe it is fatter than the other leg.
TSA LADY: Oh. Are you wearing foundations?
ME: Certainly. I’m a lady.
TSA LADY: I bet it’s bunched up around your leg. That always sets off the alarm. All of the bunching.
ME: It IS bunched up around my leg! I can barely feel the left one anymore!
TSA LADY: (Extends hand toward my crotch, then the patdown) Oh, it’s really bunched up down there. Yep, that’s it. Mystery solved.
So yeah. Maybe My Fitness Pal helped Debbie avoid future embarrassments like that, or maybe Debbie got to third base with her female assist at TSA and it caused her to join a website and count her terribly responsible calories, I don’t know.
What I do know is that when I asked Debbie how much weight she had lost, to understand her journey more completely, her honesty was more than I was prepared for.
“Oh,” she said as she nodded. “A lot.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s great. Congratulations!”
“Thank you,” she said, beaming. “I feel like a whole new person. I lost ten pounds. That is the equivalent of two gallons of milk.”
“Wow,” I said as I nodded back. Ten pounds. Way to go, Debbie! That is amazing. That you went from a size six to a size four. Slow clap for you, Miss XS! After ten more pounds, you can become a medical skeleton.
“I got to buy all new clothes!” she added. “I had to. One pair of my skinny jeans basically fell off!”
So, this is also what I know: I am not, in any way, impressed by ten pounds. At all. In the course of my lifetime, I have lost roughly two hundred pounds, and I’m not alone. Most of my friends could say the very same thing. We are experts at losing weight. We are the authorities on counting carbs, counting calories, estimating the carb/protein ratio of every meal, not eating after six P.M., pooping our pants with Alli, speeding our asses off with Dexatrim and Diet Cokes for every meal, eating salads with vinegar, and walking the equivalent of the Oregon Trail on our treadmills.
We have done it all.
And if anyone, including my doctor, wants me to lose some poundage, sending in a thin girl who has always been thin but just lost ten pounds to look better in her thong is not the way to do it. If you’ve never been fat, if you’ve never lost forty pounds only to gain it back the minute you eat a sandwich, you need to keep your speedy metabolism and your rice cakes to yourself, little miss, because I can squish you like a bug. You’re a newborn in the world of weight loss, a poseur,
a fraud. Bragging about losing ten pounds doesn’t make you an expert. It just makes you laughable.
I know you just see a fat girl sitting next to you, I wanted to say so badly. One that rolls around in a trough of Twinkies like it was a bed of money, just randomly biting at them for every meal. That is what you think I am. So think it. I am past caring. What I do know is that if I were sent to a Korean prison camp (the bad Korea, not the good one), I would be the last one standing, and I would outlive you. Not because I’m strong or because I have an unbreakable will to survive, but because I have a metabolism that moves slower than an old lady paying for groceries with money from her change purse. My body can work miracles; it can turn water into Karo syrup, it can render a RyKrisp cracker into a double-decker German chocolate cake that takes up residence on an upper arm and refuses to be evicted.
As a result, I am a gold-medal winner in the Fatty Olympics, reigning over events such as Stair Spanx, in which a chunk takes to the stairs with Spanx wrapped around her knees because she forgot she was wearing cowboy boots and was too lazy to either yank the boots off or the Spanx back up; Skin Pull, in which a chubby attempts to put on a pair of Spanx without fully drying off from the shower first, or in tropical conditions; Toe Grab, in which something valuable is dropped to the floor and the item can be more easily retrieved by grasping it with the phalanges than in an attempt to bend over; and the most demanding, Floor Rise, in which the athlete starts from a position of sitting on the floor and stands upright without the aid of rolling toward the nearest piece of furniture and using it as leverage.
I am a superior competitor in all of these categories. I will happily challenge Debbie, my doctor, and any naysayer to any of the above events. I will race you down the hall right now with Spanx around my ankles. And I will win. I will reign supreme, although my injury from my latest Skin Pull event might take a little while to heal.
“Well, thanks for the advice,” I said to Debbie, forgoing the antibiotic prescription because I was done being humiliated.
She looked surprised as I gathered my purse and coat and stood up—on my own—and opened the exam room door to walk out.