Loving a Larger Woman

by Bruce Guberman

I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.

She was out on a bike ride, and I was home watching football, leafing through the magazines on her coffee table, when I found her Weight Watchers folder — a palm-sized folio with notations for what she’d eaten, and when, and what she planned to eat next, and whether she’d been drinking her eight glasses of water a day. There was her name. Her identification number. And her weight, which I am too much of a gentleman to reveal here. Suffice it to say that the number shocked me.

I knew that C. was a big girl. Certainly bigger than any of the women I’d seen on TV, bouncing in bathing suits or drifting, reedlike, through sitcoms and medical dramas. Definitely bigger than any of the women I’d ever dated before.

What, I thought scornfully. Both of them?

I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser. But when I met C., I fell for her wit, her laugh, her sparkling eyes. Her body, I decided, was something I could learn to live with.

Her shoulders were as broad as mine, her hands were almost as big, and from her breasts to her belly, from her hips down the slope of her thighs, she was all sweet curves and warm welcome. Holding her felt like a safe haven. It felt like coming home.

But being out with her didn’t feel nearly as comfortable. Maybe it was the way I’d absorbed society’s expectations, its dictates of what men are supposed to want and how women are supposed to appear. More likely, it was the way she had. C. was a dedicated foot soldier in the body wars. At five foot ten inches, with a linebacker’s build and a weight that would have put her right at home on a pro football team’s roster, C. couldn’t make herself invisible.

But I know that if it were possible, if all the slouching and slumping and shapeless black jumpers could have erased her from the physical world, she would have gone in an instant. She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft.

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.

And I knew it wasn’t paranoia. You hear, over and over, how fat is the last acceptable prejudice, that fat people are the only safe targets in our politically correct world. Date a queen-sized woman and you’ll find out how true it is. You’ll see the way people look at her, and look at you for being with her. You’ll try to buy her lingerie for Valentine’s Day and realize the sizes stop before she starts. Every time you go out to eat you’ll watch her agonize, balancing what she wants against what she’ll let herself have, what she’ll let herself have against what she’ll be seen eating in public.

And what she’ll let herself say.

I remember when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and C., a newspaper reporter, wrote a passionate defense of the White House intern who’d been betrayed by Linda Tripp in Washington, and betrayed even worse by her friends in Beverly Hills, who were busily selling their high-school memories of Monica to Inside Edition and People magazine. After her article was printed, C. got lots of hate mail, including one letter from a guy who began: “I can tell by what you wrote that you are overweight and that nobody loves you. ” And it was that letter — that word — that bothered her more than anything else anyone said. It seemed that if it were true — the “overweight” part — then the “nobody loves you” part would have to be true as well. As if being Lewinsky-esque was worse than being a betrayer, or even someone who was dumb. As if being fat were somehow a crime.

Loving a larger woman is an act of courage in this world, and maybe it’s even an act of futility. Because, in loving C., I knew I was loving someone who didn’t believe that she herself was worthy of anyone’s love.

And now that it’s over, I don’t know where to direct my anger and my sorrow. At a world that made her feel the way she did about her body — no, herself — and whether she was desirable. At C., for not being strong enough to overcome what the world told her. Or at myself, for not loving C. enough to make her believe in herself.

I wept straight through Celebrity Weddings, slumped on the floor in front of the couch, tears rolling off my chin and soaking my shirt as one tissue-thin supermodel after another said “I do. ” I cried for Bruce, who had understood me far more than I’d given him credit for and maybe had loved me more than I’d deserved. He could have been everything I’d wanted, everything I’d hoped for. He could have been my husband. And I’d chucked it.

And I’d lost him forever. Him and his family — one of the things I’d loved best about Bruce. His parents were what June and Ward would have been if they were Jewish and living in New Jersey in the nineties. His father, who had perpetually whiskered cheeks and eyes as kind as Bruce’s, was a dermatologist. His family was his delight. I don’t know how else to say it, or how much it astonished me. Given my experience with my own dad, watching Bernard Guberman was like looking at an alien from Mars. He actually likes his child! I would marvel. He really wants to be with him! He remembers things about Bruce’s life! That Bernard Guberman seemed to like me, too, might have had less to do with his feelings about me as a person and more to do with my being a), Jewish, and hence a marriage prospect; b), gainfully employed, and thus not an overt gold digger; and c), a source of happiness for his son. But I didn’t care why he was so nice to me. I just basked in his kindness whenever I could.

Bruce’s mother, Audrey, had been the tiniest bit intimdating, with manicured fingernails painted whatever shade I’d be reading about in Vogue the next month, and perfectly styled hair, and a house full of glass and wall-to-wall white carpeting and seven bathrooms, each kept immaculately clean. The Ever-Tasteful Audrey, I called her to my friends. But once you got past the manicure, Audrey was nice, too. She’d been trained as a teacher, but by the time I met Audrey her working-for-a-living days were long past and she was a full-time wife, mother, and volunteer — the perenniel PTA mom, Cub Scout leader, and Hadassah president, the one who could always be counted on to organize the synagogue’s annual food drive or the Sisterhood’s winter ball.

The downside of parents like that, I used to think, was that it killed your ambition. With my divorced parents and my college debts I was always scrambling for the next rung on the ladder, the next job, the next freelance assignment; for more money, more recognition, for fame, insofar as you could be famous when your job was telling other people’s stories. When I started at a small newspaper in the middle of nowhere, covering car crashes and sewage board meetings, I was desperate to get to a bigger one, and when I finally got to a bigger one, I wasn’t there two weeks before I was already plotting how to move on.

Bruce had been content to drift through graduate school, picking up a teaching assignment here, a freelance writing gig there, making approximately half of what I did, letting his parents pick up the tab for his car insurance (and his car, for that matter), and “help” with his rent and subsidize his lifestyle with $100 handouts every time he saw them, plus jaw-droppingly generous checks on birthdays, Chanukah, and sometimes just because. “Slow down, ” he’d tell me, when I’d slip out of bed early to work on a short story, or go into work on a Saturday to send out query letters to magazine editors in New York. “You need to enjoy life more, Cannie. ”

I thought sometimes that he liked to imagine himself as one of the lead characters in an early Springsteen song — some furious, passionate nineteen-year-old romantic, raging against the world at large and his father in particular, looking for one girl to save him. The trouble was, Bruce’s parents had given him nothing to rebel against — no numbing factory job, no stern, judgmental patriarch, certainly no poverty. And a Springsteen song lasted only three minutes, including chorus and theme and thundering guitar-charged climax, and never took into account the dirty dishes, the unwashed laundry and unmade bed, the thousand tiny acts of consideration and goodwill that actually maintaining a relationship called for. My Bruce preferred to drift through life, lingering over the Sunday paper, smoking high-quality dope, dreaming of bigger papers and better assignments without doing much to get them. Once, early in our relationship, he’d sent his clips to the Examiner, and gotten a curt “try us in five years” postcard in response. He’d shoved the letter in a shoebox, and we’d never discussed it again.

But he was happy. “Head’s all empty, I don’t care, ” he’d sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I’d force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I’d care.

And what had all my hustle gotten me, I mused, now slurping the boozy slush straight from the bowl. What did it matter. He didn’t love me anymore.

I woke up after midnight, drooling on the couch. There was a pounding in my head. Then I realized it was someone pounding at the door.

“Cannie?

I sat up, taking a moment to locate my hands and my feet.

“Cannie, open this door right now. I’m worried about you. ”

My mother. Please God no.

“Cannie! ”

I curled tight onto the couch, remembering that she’d called me in the morning, a million years ago, to tell me she’d be in town that night for Gay Bingo, and that she and Tanya would stop by when it was over. I got to my feet, flicking off the halogen lamp as quietly as I could, which wasn’t very quietly, considering that I managed to knock the lamp over in the process. Nifkin howled and scrambled onto the armchair, glaring at me reproachfully. My mother started pounding again.

“Cannie! ”

“Go ’way, ” I called weakly. “I’m … naked. ”

“Oh, you are not! You’re wearing your overalls, and you’re drinking tequila, and you’re watching The Sound of Music. ”

All of which was true. What can I say? I like musicals. I especially like The Sound of Music — particularly the scene where Maria gathers the motherless Von Trapp brood onto her bed during the thunderstorm and sings “My Favorite Things. ” It looked so cozy, so safe — the way my own family had been, for a minute, once upon a time, a long time ago.

I heard a muttered consultation outside my door — my mother’s voice, then another, in a lower register, like Marlboro smoke filtered through gravel. Tanya. She of the sling and the crab leg.

“Cannie, open up! ”

I struggled back into a sitting position and heaved myself into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and stared at myself, reviewing the situation, and my appearance. Tear-streaked face, check. Hair, light brown with streaks of copper, cut in a basic bob and shoved behind my ears, also present. No makeup. Hint — well, actuality — of a double chin. Full cheeks, round, sloping shoulders, double D-cup breasts, fat fingers, thick hips, big ass, thighs solidly muscled beneath a quivering blanket of lard. My eyes looked especially small, like they were trying to hide in the flesh of my face, and there was something avid and hungry and desperate about them. Eyes exactly the color of the ocean in the Menemsha harbor in Martha’s Vineyard, a beautiful grapey green. My best feature, I thought ruefully. Pretty green eyes and a wry, cockeyed smile. “Such a pretty face, ” my grandmother would say, cupping my chin in her hand, then shaking her head, not even bothering to say the rest.

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliché, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed, and there were two determined lesbians banging on my door. My best option, I decided, was hiding in the closet and feigning death.

“I’ve got a key, ” my mother threatened.

I wrested the tequila bowl away from Nifkin. “Hang on, ” I yelled. I picked up the lamp and opened the door a crack. My mother and Tanya stared at me, wearing identical L. L. Bean hooded sweatshirts and expressions of concern.

“Look, ” I said. “I’m fine. I’m just sleepy, so I’m going to sleep. We can talk about this tomorrow. ”

“Look, we saw the Moxie article, ” said my mother. “Lucy brought it over. ”

Thank you, Lucy, I thought. “I’m fine, ” I said again. “Fine, fine, fine, fine. ”

My mother, clutching her bingo dauber, looked skeptical. Tanya, as usual, just looked like she wanted a cigarette, and a drink, and for me and my siblings never to have been born, so that she could have my mother all to herself and they could relocate to a commune in Northampton.

“You’ll call me tomorrow? ” my mother asked.

“I’ll call, ” I said, and closed the door.

My bed looked like an oasis in the desert, like a sandbar in the stormy sea. I lurched toward it, flung myself down, on my back, my arms and legs splayed out, like a size-sixteen starfish stapled to the comforter. I loved my bed — the pretty light blue down comforter, the soft pink sheets, the pile of pillows, each in a bright slipcover — one purple, one orange, one pale yellow, and one cream. I loved the Laura Ashley dust ruffle and the red wool blanket that I’d had since I was a girl. Bed, I thought, was about the only thing I had going for me right now, as Nifkin bounded up and joined me, and I stared at the ceiling, which was spinning in a most alarming way.

I wished I’d never told Bruce I wanted a break. I wished I’d never met him. I wished that I’d kept running that night, just kept running and never looked back.

I wished I wasn’t a reporter. I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I’d have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they’d even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods.

I wished I could trade places with the guy who wore the “FRESH SUSHI” sandwich board and walked up and down Pine Street at lunch hour, handing out sushi coupons for World of Wasabi. I wished I could be anonymous and invisible. Maybe dead.

I pictured myself lying in the bathtub, taping a note to the mirror, taking a razor blade to my wrists. Then I pictured Nifkin, whining and looking puzzled, scraping his nails against the rim of the bathtub and wondering why I wasn’t getting up. And I pictured my mother having to go through my things and finding the somewhat battered copy of Best of Penthouse Letters in my top dresser drawer, plus the pink fur-lined handcuffs Bruce had given me for Valentine’s Day. Finally, I pictured the paramedics trying to maneuver my dead, wet body down three flights of stairs. “We’ve got a big one here, ” I imagined one of them saying.

Okay. So suicide was out, I thought, rolling myself into the comforter and arranging the orange pillows under my head. The muffin shop/sandwich board scenario, while tempting, was probably not going to happen. I couldn’t see how to spin it in the alumni magazine. Princeton graduates who stepped off the fast track tended to own the muffin shops, which they would then turn into a chain of successful muffin shops, which would then go public and make millions. And the muffin shops would only be a diversion for a few years, something to do while raising their kids, who would invariably appear in the alumni magazine clad in eensy-beansy black-and-orange outfits with “Class of 2012! ” written on their precocious little chests.

What I wanted, I thought, pressing my pillow hard against my face, was to be a girl again. To be on my bed in the house I’d grown up in, tucked underneath the brown and red paisley comforter, reading even though it was past my bedtime, hearing the door open and my father walk inside, feel him standing over me silently, feeling the weight of his pride and his love like it was a tangible thing, like warm water. I wanted him to put his hand on my head the way he had then, to hear the smile in his voice when he’d say, “Still reading, Cannie? ” To be little, and loved. And thin. I wanted that.

I rolled over, groped for my nightstand, grabbed a pen and paper. Lose weight, I wrote, then stopped and thought. Find new boyfriend, I added. Sell screenplay. Buy large house with garden and fenced yard. Find mother more acceptable girlfriend. Somewhere between writing Get and maintain stylish haircut and thinking Make Bruce sorry, I finally fell asleep.

Good in bed. Ha! He had a lot of nerve, putting his name on a column about sexual expertise, given how few people he’d even been with, and how little he’d known before he’d met me.

I had slept with four people — three long-term boyfriends and one ill-considered freshman year fling — when Bruce and I hooked up, and I’d fooled around extensively with another half-dozen. I might’ve been a big girl, but I’d been reading Cosmopolitan since I was thirteen, and I knew my way around the various pieces of equipment. At least I’d never had any complaints.

So I was experienced. And Bruce … wasn’t. He’d had a few harsh turn-downs in high school, when he’d had really bad skin, and before he’d discovered that pot and a ponytail could reliably attract a certain kind of girl.

When he’d shown up that first night, with his sleeping bag and his plaid shirt, he wasn’t a virgin, but he’d never been in a real relationship, and he’d certainly never been in love. So he was looking for his lady fair, and I, while not averse to stumbling into Mr. Right, was mostly looking for … well, call it affection, attention. Actually, call it sex.

We started off on the couch, sitting side by side. I reached for his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. And when I casually slung an arm over his shoulder, then eased my thigh against his, I could feel him shaking. Which touched me. I wanted to be gentle with him, I wanted to be kind. I took both of his hands in mine and tugged him off the couch. “Let’s lie down, ” I said.

We walked to my bedroom hand in hand, and he lay on my futon, flat on his back, his eyes wide open and gleaming in the dark, looking a bit like a man in a dentist’s chair. I propped myself up on my elbow and let the loose ends of my hair trail gently across his cheek. When I kissed the side of his neck he gasped as if I’d burned him, and when I eased one hand inside his shirt and gently tugged at the hair on his chest, he sighed, “Ah, Cannie, ” in the tenderest voice I’d ever heard.

But his kisses were horrible, slobbery things, all bludgeoning tongue and lips that felt as if they were somehow collapsing when they met mine, so that I was left with a choice between teeth and mustache. His hands were stiff and clumsy. “Lie still, ” I whispered.

“I’m sorry, ” he whispered back unhappily. “I’m all wrong, aren’t I? ”

“Shh, ” I breathed, my lips against his neck once more, the tender skin right where his beard ended. I slid one hand down his chest, lightly feathered it over his crotch. Nothing doing. I pressed my breasts into his side, kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the tip of his nose, and tried again. Still nothing. Well, this was curious. I decided to show him a trick, to teach him how to make me happy whether he could get hard or not. He moved me enormously, this six-foot-tall guy with a ponytail and a look on his face like I might electrocute him instead of … this. I wrapped both of my legs around one of his, took his hand, and slid it into my panties. His eyes met mine and he smiled when he felt how wet I was. I put his fingers where I needed them, with my hand over his, pressing his fingers against myself, showing him what to do, and I moved against him, letting him feel me sweat and breathe hard and moan when I came. And then I pressed my face into his neck again, and moved my lips up to his ear. “Thank you, ” I whispered. I tasted salt. Sweat? Tears, maybe? But it was dark, and I didn’t look.

We fell asleep in that position: me, wearing just a T-shirt and panties, wrapped around him; him, with only his shirt unbuttoned, only halfway, still in underwear, sweatpants, socks. And when the light crept through my windows, when we opened our eyes and looked at each other, it felt like we had known each other much longer than just one night. As if we could never have been strangers. “Good morning, ” I whispered.

“You’re beautiful, ” he said.

I decided that I could get used to hearing that in the mornings. Bruce decided that he was in love. We were together for the next three years, and we learned things with each other. Eventually, he told me the whole story, about his limited experience, about always being either drunk or stoned and always very shy, about how he’d been turned down a few times his first year in college and just decided to be patient. “I knew I’d meet the right girl someday, ” he said, smiling at me, cradling me close. We figured it out — the things he liked, the things I liked, the things we both liked. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it would have been raunchy enough to raise eyebrows even in Moxie, where they ran regular features on new “sizzling sexy secrets! ”

But the thing that galled me, that chewed at my heart as I tossed and turned, feeling clammy and cotton-mouthed from the previous night’s tequila binge, was the column’s title. “Good in Bed. ” It was a lie. It wasn’t that he’d been some kind of sexual savant, a boy wonder under the sheets … it was that we had loved each other, once. We’d been good in bed together.

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