“Wow, that’s not good news,” he said after a moment, and then he held my hand. “It’s not good news, but it’s nothing to be sorry for. If I had to catch sex cooties, I’m glad they were your sex cooties. Besides, he’s been gone for a long time; you or I probably would have noticed something by now if we had it. It’s going to be okay.”
“I GAVE YOU VD!!!!!” I screamed. “Right now, little microbe gonorrheas could be lining up and down your wingding, waiting for the signal to stab you with little, tiny VD spears of pain, ready to unlock the gates of discharge! Don’t you understand? I’ve made us statistics! ‘Ten percent of the population has a drinking problem’—sure, count me in. ‘Fifty percent of all smokers smoked their first cigarette in the field behind the high school when they were fourteen’—absolutely, I’m there. But ‘One hundred percent of all whores will infect their very nice and understanding boyfriends with the red bumpies that supposedly make boys cry when they pee’—no, thank you. I don’t want to be a card-holding member in the STD club.”
My poor boyfriend had no idea what to do, and instead of taking a hold of the situation that was at hand, he panicked and allowed the control to spin out of the room like a dust devil in a trailer park. The poor man just lost it, started chewing off his own foot and most likely an arm or two.
“We’ll get checked out, don’t worry about it,” he said, trying to calm me down. “And although I was going to save this for after the cutlets to see what meat product you had fried up for dessert, I’ll just say it now: Let’s get married.”
I just looked at him. “That is not funny,” I pouted. “Please don’t tease me right now. I think I just felt my cervix shrivel up and crack.”
“I’m serious,” he said adamantly. “Let’s get married.”
“Did you hear me? I said I GAVE YOU VD!” I yelled. “Crotch rot! Peter poison! Weeping weenie! I have soiled you with a dirty man’s sick! Who knows what tomorrow will bring—herpes, crabs, scabies? I mean, it turns out that I was involved with some pretty skanky characters—we’re talking Renaissance-fair people, you know! That’s like the monarchy of skank! In some cities, that’s almost like homeless!”
“In most cities, that is homeless,” my boyfriend said. “But I think we should get married. Especially now. I mean, if we can make it through this, a late electricity bill will be nothing. Starvation will be a laughing matter. Eviction will be a piece of cake. I mean, YOU GAVE ME VD!!!! Things don’t get much stickier than this.”
“God, it better not, or you’d better quarantine me,” I agreed. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious,” he confirmed, and then all of a sudden, agony filled his face, his body doubled over, and he screamed.
“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?!!” I panicked.
“Oh my God!” he cried shrilly. “Oh my God! My weenie is weeping! Weeping weenie!! WEEPING WEENIE!!!”
“Fine fine fine!!” I shouted. “Yes, this tramp will marry you!”
“Well, thank you, that’s the answer I was looking for,” he said, standing up straight, and then he smiled. “Actually, this will work out great. Maybe we can knock out both the VD and blood tests all at the same time!”
“I can’t believe this,” I said in a veil of happiness. “When I woke up this morning, I was just a below-average girl, but by the end of the day, I’m a fiancée with diseased genitals! And just think, I thought I scared you away for good when I fixed your paper jam and the booger came popping out of my nose.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, looking rather puzzled. “I never saw a booger, but when you leaned over to fix the paper jam, I saw that you were fulfilling one of your job duties by leaving your bra at home. I saw your boob, and that’s when I knew I loved you. I’m pretty sure it was the firmer one.”
The Fat Bride Is Not a Happy Magic Marker
Maybe it was my mistake.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything at all.
I was getting dressed after my gynecologist lifted my hood and checked out my engine for signs of gonorrhea, and I just happened to mention it.
I was slightly concerned that, if I had contracted the creeping crud as my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend informed me, it might have implications for my reproductive future.
“Don’t worry about children now,” my doctor said as she laughed mockingly at me. “You’re not even married.”
“I’m getting married . . . soon,” I explained hesitantly. “And I don’t want to have a newborn when I’m so old that we can sleep in cribs next to each other.”
She laughed even harder.
“Let’s wait and see if your marriage works out first,” she scolded me. “It’s no fun being a single parent.”
Her comment felt like the slap of my mom’s flip-flop to the side of my head. What? I thought as I looked at her. What did you just say? My mother is the only one who has the right to pop my self-esteem with a harpoon like that. You don’t have that right! You’ve only seen me naked! The only right that gives you is to talk about me behind my back to other guys at the bar! My doctor made me feel like I was fifteen.
“And,” she continued brazenly, “you shouldn’t let your biological clock dictate when you have children.”
OH NO, my mind yelled at her. Why pay any attention to that silly old biological clock? No, I’ll just bring it to you to fix when it shoots out of me like a rocket and lands at my feet, how’s that? Hopefully it will happen when you’re giving me a Pap smear!
I suddenly felt like I was ten.
“I’m not letting that dictate when I’m going to have children—”
“Besides, you’re too chubby to have children. You’ve gained twenty pounds since last December,” she said, cutting me off in midsentence.
Too chubby to have children?
Then she said, motioning with her hands around her abdomen, “You’d have a hard time with all of that against your ovaries.”
All I could think was, in a five-year-old’s voice: (GASP) YOU ARE SUCH A BITCH!
So, okay, to be completely honest, I knew I had gained weight, it was obvious to me when I couldn’t fit into certain items of clothing anymore. Rest assured, however, that I didn’t have to pay someone to rev up a tractor to haul me out of bed in the morning.
She headed for the door, but before she left, she stopped in front of me, poked me in the belly, and said, “Just quit eating Twinkies and junk food.”
I will not cry, I told myself, this devil woman will not make me cry.
She’s just a bad lady, I told myself as I struggled valiantly to hold back my tears and the desire to pummel her bloody and pulpy with my fat rolls and my jiggly-wiggly thighs. She’s a bad lady. A bad lady! And some day, a Hostess truck full of fresh bakery products will hit her and flatten her like a rug.
I finished getting dressed and rushed out of the room as fast as my fat, fleshy, stumpy little legs would carry me, and I went right up to the front counter where I promptly wrote her a big, fat, bad check in retaliation.
Then, I quickly escaped to the safety of the parking lot, the ground violently seizing with every step I took, where I jumped into my car and raced home.
“How did it go?” my boyfriend asked when I walked in the door.
“My doctor called me FAT,” I shrieked.
“Are you okay, though?”
“I’M FAT,” I shrieked again as I ran like a brachiosaurus down the hall and threw myself on the bed.
“You are not fat,” my boyfriend asserted. “You look fine.”
“Really?” I whined. “Do you really think so?”
“Well, honey, we eat nothing but assorted fried meats, mostly accompanied by some sort of butter sauce and occasionally cheese,” he confessed. “You know, I’ve put on some weight, too.”
“But I was plumping you up with cutlets so no other girls would find you attractive,” I wept. “Just the typical ‘pig to slaughter’ tactic, nothing out of the ordinary. I would have stopped before you became
freakish in size. It was working so well, and now my plan has backfired! Now I’m the fat one!”
“You’re not fat,” my boyfriend said again. “Some of your angles just have rounded corners now.”
“I don’t want to be a fat bride,” I sobbed.
I went to work the next day and told everybody at the magazine what happened. I bequeathed my three-pound, neighborhood-size box of Oreos to Meg and Laura, the editors who sat across from me, and left my Hostess variety pack to Troy, the editor who sat next to me.
Both Laura and Meg said they understood my pain.
“I have to go on a diet, too,” Laura said sadly.
“I know,” Meg agreed. “Look at this roll when I sit down.”
Meg then demonstrated her girth when she hunched way over in her chair until her head was basically resting on her knees.
“LOOK!” she cried enthusiastically, pointing to her middle. “Can you see it?”
Frankly, I didn’t see a damn thing. Although Meg was one of my closest friends and I dearly loved her, I wanted nothing more than to ram an entire Death by Chocolate cake right down her throat, because that girl hasn’t gained a single ounce since she stopped wearing undershirts.
Laura, too, joined the game and slumped down in her chair.
“Look at my roll! Look at my roll!” she yelled, pinching a wrinkle of skin that was smaller than what I can pinch on the back of my hand.
“Look at my roll when I sit down!” Anna shouted.
“NO, look at my roll when I sit down!” Rexia yelled back.
“SHUT UP!” I screamed. “Shut up about your roll! You all weigh as much as my leg! I have that roll in pairs all over me, and they don’t go away when I stand up!”
They both stopped their Cirque du Soleil contortionist exercises and stared at me.
“This morning, I was on the potty after I got out of the shower, and I looked down,” I confessed to them. “I know better than to do that, and I tell myself, ‘Don’t look down, don’t look down,’ but I did, and I realized that I’m in the body of a white, hairless gorilla. Come see me in Rwanda, I’m a friend of Dian Fossey’s.”
In Meg’s motherly, concerned way, she tried to console me.
“Oh, dear,” she started, stroking my hair. “PUV. Puffy Upper Vagina. That is a curse, now, isn’t it? But I have a nice story to tell you. There was a chubby girl in my class, and she used to get made fun of all the time. Then, one day, she said something that I’ll never forget. She turned around and told the skinny girls who were making fun of her, ‘I’d rather be a happy Magic Marker than a toothpick with boogers on it.’”
Oh my God.
“Who is the Magic Marker in this scenario?” I asked. “I’m the Sharpie, aren’t I, Meg? I am the Sharpie and you and Laura are the toothpicks, huh?”
“Troy’s a happy Magic Marker, too,” Meg offered.
This method of consoling, however, rarely works. Because you know what happens when you tell a fat person they’re FAT? Well, they get sad and then they eat a cookie. They get sad and then they eat a doughnut. They get sad and then they eat a pizza. And then, the next day after you’ve called them fat because you “love them and want them to get healthy,” THEY’RE FATTER. If you want a chunky to gain some skinny ground, tell them they look nice. Tell them that they look slimmer despite the obvious bad choice of the horizontal-stripe capri pants. Give them something to work with, something to build on.
“I want my Oreos back,” the fat bride, who was no happy Magic Marker, huffed. “And only Troy and I get to eat them!”
“That’s fine,” Laura said as she handed over the cookie bag with both hands. “I’m still full from my breakfast of rice cakes and carrot sticks.”
“And I just ate a whole grapefruit,” Meg admitted. “If I even look at a cookie, I think I may burst!”
The next day, I decided to go on a diet, and packed Laura- and Meg-type things to eat at work, and when I showed Troy my lunch, he didn’t even recognize any of the food groups in it.
He, on the other hand, had ordered himself a magnificent ham and cheese sub on a beautiful white, shiny roll, and his sandwich had mayonnaise on it.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
And then I peered over his majestic sandwich and spied his gorgeous side of potato salad and the brick of carrot cake he had for dessert.
I opened my Tupperware bowl of tomatoes and sat at my desk.
I couldn’t help it.
“Hey! Magic Marker!” Troy yelled at me. “Quit looking at my food. You’re only hurting yourself!”
I was suckling on my boring tomatoes when my phone rang, and who was it but the doctor who had caused me all of this agony in the first place.
“This is a follow-up call to your last visit,” she said. “Your test results were normal.”
The tomato dropped out of my mouth. “You mean I’m not fat?” I cried gleefully. “I can go back to eating things that have flavor and that bring me an unparalleled joy and deliver a comfort as no other activity can? Oh, thank you, Doctor! Thank you! Troy, give me half of that goddamned sandwich before I break your fat little arm!”
“No, you are still quite overweight,” my doctor said. “Although you are free from the sexually transmitted disease known as gonorrhea.”
“Oh,” I stuttered loosely. “Oh, that’s good news, that’s great, thank you.”
“It would be a prudent idea if you employed the aid of prophylactics during your sexual encounters to prevent this kind of problem in the future,” she remitted.
“I’m getting married soon, so that won’t be a problem,” I stammered.
“You came in for a test, so obviously it is a problem,” my doctor informed me. “Good marriages are hardly built on such foundations.”
By that time I had had it, and I guess it was the hate that only hunger can cause in me, because in a moment, it all came rolling out in one, grand purge.
“You really don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said as I reached for Troy’s sandwich. “My boyfriend will totally still want to marry me even if I don’t have VD! And maybe you think you can talk to people as if you were getting instructions straight from God’s stethoscope, but I’ll tell you one thing—not even God can help you cash this happy Magic Marker’s check.”
And then I took a big, splendid biteful of ham and cheese.
Hair of the Dog
Right according to plan, the moment my poor future mother-in-law opened her front door, she looked at me as if she had just seen me slide down a brass pole and shake my bare hips to a Nazareth song as a fat biker rewarded me by sticking a buck in my thong.
It was absolutely horrible.
And I suppose she had every right. There I was with my bleached and pink and purple hair; what else did I expect? Certainly, I’m sure, she expressed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t just been on the news for diddling the president or a congressman, so things could have been worse, but still. I was far from Julia Roberts, even as a hooker in Pretty Woman.
When the ghastly moment passed, my boyfriend’s mother bravely put on her best smile and invited me in.
After all, it was Christmas Day.
Frankly, I just wanted to find the bathroom and stay there, and I probably would have, had my new in-laws not thought that my absence was due to snorting a pound of cocaine rather than bone-chilling fear.
“I don’t understand your friend’s hair,” I learned later that my boyfriend’s sister said. “Why is it so many colors? And so unbrushed? I’ve only seen homeless people with that kind of hair.”
“I used to have purple hair,” my boyfriend reminded her. “And the knotty parts are just a couple of dreads; they’re supposed to be there.”
“Why is she wearing cowboy boots? Is she in the rodeo?” the other sister inquired.
“People wear combat boots who aren’t in the army,” my boyfriend reminded them.
“And this is the girl, Gloria, that you’ve been seeing?” they a
sked.
“No, this is the girl, Laurie, that I’m going to marry,” he reminded them.
“Oh,” they all said.
I really tried to put on a good show, to smile, to act pleasant, chew with my mouth closed, all of that stuff. I even retired the red lipstick for one day and switched to the Saucy Mauve that I had left over from my duty as my sister’s bridesmaid.
In a kind maneuver to make me feel like I was part of the family, my future mother-in-law took me upstairs and asked if I’d help her wrap some last-minute gifts, a duty I couldn’t have been more grateful for. It would permit me a few minutes out of the spotlight, I thought as I wrapped and followed her instructions for which tags went on which presents, enough time for them to get used to me, and now maybe the children wouldn’t cry or ask if I was a witch when they saw me come back down the stairs.
As I returned with the wrapped gifts, my boyfriend met me on the landing.
“This is horrible, they hate me,” I told him as I handed over some of the presents. “I think I’d rather have my next Pap smear broadcast over satellite TV or have my credit report published in the paper or just about anything than go back in there.”
“It’s fine, it’s really fine,” he said. “They seemed to like you a whole lot more when I told them you weren’t pregnant.”
“Oh, good, good,” I said, nodding my head. “They think I’m Courtney Love, don’t they?”
“Listen, you’re wearing a bra, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Because somebody said something about maybe seeing a boob . . .”
“Yes!” I whispered back. “Of course I’m wearing a bra! You know we have to wear bras at the magazine because if we don’t, the police surveillance team might mistake us for one of the porno people making movies in the office downstairs from us!”
“Just checking,” he said. “Just checking. Keep your arms crossed, just in case. Okay, are you ready to open presents?”