Falling for the Story
“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” ~ Louise Glück, Nobel Prize Winner
This week’s guest contributor explores what it means to fall through the lens of a childhood ‘companion.’
I Fell for the Story
by Dee Marie Kite
I hated the fat girl.
She ran from trouble, clutching bags of Hershey’s kisses, cartons of ice cream, Bacardi and Cokes, cupcakes. When she was really young, she carried plastic cups of the sweet tea my mother made and joined me and my library books on the pink chenille bedspread. I read so many books, and she drank so much tea, our teeth rotted. Nine cavities in one dentist’s visit. Because of her, I wore the “chubby” girl clothes from Sears.
Of course I hated her. I’d fallen for the story. I came from a tribe of fat-haters. At raucous Kite family parties there were jokes about women who “ate too much pie.” Just the other day my dad told me about a woman who was so big if she fell, she’d roll down the mountain all the way to Lenoir.
When I got old enough to babysit, the fat girl dug through kitchen cupboards, scouting out what she could eat without the kids’ parents knowing. She slivered away at cakes, she ate cookies—stopping only when she thought one more might give it away. Once, she ate a whole can of white tuna mixed with Kraft mayonnaise. And she wasn’t even hungry. At least not the normal kind of hungry.
The fat girl made me chubby enough for my parents to applaud my diet when I was 12. For my mother to celebrate the results of another diet when I was 16. “I can see the curve now,” she said, her finger on my waist.
I did not feel happy when she said that. I don’t think I said anything. I didn’t know how. In my family we never scratched beneath the surface of the mud. Never scratched to see what the fat girl was saying. We all fell for the simple story. Fat bad. Thin good.
When I turned 17, headed toward the end of my junior year, from the outside everything seemed magical. After all, I lived in the tropical paradise of South Florida. I could hop on my bike and in fifteen minutes meet my friends at the beach or the tennis courts. In ten minutes I could get to the public library or the community center. One Saturday at the inlet, where boats glided from the Atlantic Ocean to the Intracoastal, my friends—and my first boyfriend—snapped our Kodak moments in the brilliant sun.
A month later, my professor dad took a sabbatical for consulting work in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I made a quick 17-yr-old choice between spending my senior year of high school with strangers and accepting early admission to an unheard of university, eight mountainous miles from where my parents and brother would live. I chose the strange university over the strange high school.
My parents dropped me and my things at the dark redbrick dorm. Administration stuck me on the empty side of the 4th floor. All the girls in the Early Admissions Program were established on the other side, having enrolled and started for the first half of summer, six weeks earlier. They’d already bonded. On the concrete walls of my room, I taped the Kodak moments from that magical day with my friends in Florida. My window overlooked the unfamiliar trees and the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. I was alone. Truly alone for the first time in my life. Even under the blankets on my cot, it was cold.
I didn’t think of suicide then. I didn’t need to because the fat girl had a coupon book for food. She gathered ice cream, fried chicken, cookies, snack cakes, Coca-Cola and brought them back to the room. She chewed, swallowing down fear and despair until we were numb. I hated what the fat girl did to me. She pushed me past the Freshman 15 to the Freshman 50. My body grew beyond recognition.
Though I believed the story I’d fallen for, that a fat person was not worthy of anything, I knew I was still there, underneath the folds of fat. But no one came to help me. Only the fat girl. The fat girl anesthetized me, smoothed over me like icing on a cake.
My father offered me money, a trip to Europe if I’d lose weight. He said, “Dee Marie, your head is so beautiful, why would you do that to your body?” My mother and my brother rejected me, too. I do not know what I said to any of them. Only that I felt deep, deep shame.
The next fall I got myself back to Florida, the University of Florida, where a girl I’d known in high school stopped me on the sidewalk. She said, “Dee Marie Kite? What happened to you?” I don’t remember what I answered. I only remember feeling deep, deep shame.
I dated a guy I’d known in high school. He motioned to my body and said, “That’s not Dee Marie.” I agreed. It was, after all, the fat girl. And I felt deep, deep shame. I accepted all cruel comments, all dirty looks, as my just reward for being fat. Because, of course, I’d fallen for the story. The story that people could judge a book by its cover. And I could judge myself by the numbers on a scale, the amount of fat spilling over my waistband.
I started reading. Historically, societal expectations for women’s bodies correlated with our political power. The more powerful we got, the more pressure to be thin. I learned why none of my diets had worked. Food deprivation only resulted in binges. I learned it was normal for some of us to turn to food when something was missing, when something was wrong.
One night, I climbed the stairs of the old stone church near my apartment. I’d never heard of Overeaters Anonymous until then. A group of women sat in a circle of metal chairs. One woman stood. She was fat. She had some crazy pink outfit on, and I thought ‘What am I doing here?’ Then she spoke. And from her words, from her story, I saw her. I saw her pain. I saw my own. There we focused on healing, not on what we ate. Not on what we weighed.
With the 12 Steps and what I’d learned from reading I knew I had a choice between escaping with food or paying attention to what was happening. I learned I could continue to fall for the story or I could take the fat girl in my arms and listen to what she had to say.
When Covid cracked my world apart, the fat girl grabbed bags of chocolate chip cookies. After about the fifth night, the fifth bag, I stopped and listened to the fat girl, my emotional thermometer. It wasn’t cookies she needed. She needed stillness. She needed for me to know what I was actually feeling. It wasn’t comfortable, this being still. But when I sat with my feelings I was able to put the cookies back in the pantry. She showed me the way to peace.
I love the fat girl.
_____
Dee Marie Kite lives in San Antonio with her husband, two dogs, and the fat girl. She is working on a memoir.