Fat Lover

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It upsets some people to hear me state this so baldly. 'Doesn't it hurt her feelings?' they ask, as if the polite thing were to act as if I hadn't noticed that she weighs nearly 300 pounds. Perhaps they think she hasn't noticed, either.

'You are the only person in my life who hasn't discouraged me or made fun of me,' she tells me one morning over breakfast, crying. She's listening to musica de trios, traditional Puerto Rican ballads, and it's making her nostalgic. She remembers how her mother used to dance to this music, spinning with the broom through their little house. She remembers island breakfasts with cafe t*rmino medio -- half strong coffee, half warmed milk -- French bread, and omelets filled with fried plantains. Then her face darkens as she also remembers how she was friendless throughout her childhood. 'I weighed 180 pounds at age 12,' she confesses, as if this were an explanation. She tried to kill herself at 16.

There are few things harder than growing up fat.

What about growing up with a disability? you might ask. What about growing up neglected, or on the streets? True, these conditions are enormously difficult, but they are not seen as the child's fault. Fatness is always the fat person's fault. As everyone knows, fat people eat like pigs. They smell bad. They don't bathe. They lack that revered American attribute: willpower. They are, quite simply, disgusting.

My lover showers every day. She has a closet full of stylish clothes in a wide range of sizes, reflecting her lifelong battle with the scale. But she grew up fat, and she is fat still. Not in a wheelchair, not on the streets, but the pariah of an entire culture.

I am not a 'chubby-chaser' -- someone erotically excited by fat -- nor was I always, to use the politicized term, 'fat-positive.' I grew up in a family as red-bloodedly fat-phobic as most. My mother, who is five-foot-two and weighs just over 100 pounds, was perpetually on a diet. My father's and my grandmother's standard greeting to all family members they hadn't seen in a while was, 'You look good -- you've lost weight.' At age 16, weighing barely 100 pounds myself, I, too, dieted. Some days I'd eat nothing but a single doughnut. When I got to college I made rules for myself: Each night I could have a salad and an entr*e or a salad and dessert -- but never all three.

Around the time our parents were splitting up, my younger sister, Jennifer, took to watching hours of TV each afternoon, her hand in a bag of snacks the whole time. By age 9 she'd grown chubby, a fact that did not go unnoticed in our house, and by 12 she too had begun to diet. When she got down to 85 pounds, the family started noticing that this exercise of willpower had gone a little too far. Those were my mother's exact words: 'I admire her willpower; she just takes it a little too far.'

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