thulasie01’s Reviews > 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl > Status Update

“So one night, on a dead shift, my coworker Archibald casually tells me there are things he’s been picturing doing to me of late and when I say, “Like what?” he hands me a small scrap of paper with the word cunnilingus written on it in red ink.
I stare at the jagged letters. All lowercase. The cunni written eerily straight, the lingus curved and veering downward like a tail. Each letter separated by a space as though they’re acronyms for other words.”

man i actually have no idea what cunninglingus is

you can bold omg

“I tell myself, Laugh. It’s a joke, obviously. But when I force a one-note laugh like a cough, Archibald doesn’t laugh with me.
“I’m good at it, Lizzie,” Archibald says. “Quite good. I play the harmonica semiprofessionally. Chromatic scale.”

yeah it must be a joke lowk

“He doesn’t care,” Archibald said in a low voice when we first got into the cab and he tried to take off my shirt. “He sees this kind of stuff all the time, trust me.”
I shook my head.
“You’re holding out on me, Lizzie. But that’s okay. I consider myself lucky just to be here with you. Just keep driving, Jesus,” he called. “We want to see more.”
“Where I go?”
“Just drive us around. Turn some circles, you know? Give us the grand tour of downtown.”
A few minutes later, I’m smiling pleasantly at Jesus’s eye in the rearview mirror, trying to act like Archibald’s head is not under my maxi skirt, between my legs, where it has been for some time now. I’m moaning quietly. Moaning so as not to be rude to Archibald, but trying to do it quietly so that I’m not being rude to the driver. The moans come out of me like hiccups.”

man what the hell do they have no shame

“That’s when I say, I love you, the words just flying out of my mouth like brassy butterflies.
Jesus looks at me. He heard it, but maybe, hopefully, Archibald didn’t.”

erm

“He starts coming over regularly. Nights we work together. Nights we don’t. After a few weeks, I start calling him my boyfriend sort of, adding the sort of only when I’m talking to Mel. We have sex that I tell myself is good, it is good surely, certainly it is okay, it is definitely not terrible, and then afterward he tries to educate me about the jazz harmonica, which he says is the most underappreciated of instruments. He’ll be deeply stoned on the generous joint he rolled himself from the bag of pot I keep for him in my freezer, drunk on the alcohol he toted over here in a worn plastic bag. I’ll watch him pace my bedroom, going on about dissonance and scales, his head too big for his body, his glasses too big for his face. I remind myself that these lectures, delivered in his underwear with an earnestness that I tell myself is charming”

girl you don't like him!!

“I like the way he touches me a lot,” I say, thinking of how on the subway the other day, he grabbed my boob through my shirt and how it was actually pretty embarrassing and I told him repeatedly, People are watching, because they were and he said, Let them. But this is not a good example.”

erm this is sexual harrassment

“I come into my room to find Archibald lying on my bed playing his harmonica, kicking his feet against my dark blue wall. A grown man in a windbreaker. Hair going gray at the veiny temples. Pants too short for his thin, white legs. I’m wearing a lace slip in which I now I feel naked, fat, stupid. I put my housecoat on over it to gain some dignity. I sit in my desk chair, wait for him to notice that I’m not joining him on the bed.
At last he stops playing and turns to me. “What?”
“A woman named Britta just phoned. She says you’re sleeping with her. Are you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I was descending to sleep with you, you know. I was descending! And you cheat on me? And you’re smiling? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. Just you’re super hot when you’re pissed is all,” he says, biting on his grin.
I start to cry.
Now he’s on his knees explaining. He explains for a long time, while I smoke one cigarette after another. Britta isn’t really his girlfriend. Not really, he says.
“She’s just this crazy woman who lived on the fifth floor of our house for a while. I actually felt sorry for her, you know? All by herself on the fifth floor. She had this little dog she washed every night. You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. I thought of the dog I heard yipping in the background. “When I told her it was over, she started stalking me. Like seriously stalking. Wouldn’t leave me alone. I guess she likes what I can do or something. But she was clinging to me. It was embarrassing, you know?”

man wahat the hell hes probably so chopped too OMFG

“He starts to kiss my hands. Kisses them all over, multiple times. Someone like me. I am the one he has always wanted. Never thought he could get. I feel my eyes well up again. The room becomes warped and swimmy. Then he kisses my thighs, starts to gently pry them apart with his hands. Get out. Get out right now. The words rise in my throat like bile, but they don’t come out. Instead, I just sit there limp, letting him.
 • • • I promise Mel I’ll end it. I promise myself I’ll end it. Every time I go over to his place or he comes over to mine, every time I hear the plaintive wail of his approaching harmonica, I think, End it. I tell myself this for weeks. Fucking end it. Speak the words. But what comes out is, Hey. I missed you. How come you’re late? For the first few weeks, I even picture myself walking away from him. Chin tilted high. Already lighter for having left him.”

she so relatable (not to me but to the female population im sure!)

“A huge woman with bubble-flipped dirty blond hair. She had with her then, as she does now, a little yipping dachshund on an absurdly short leash. The moment I see her I know she is the woman who called me. This is the dog that was barking in the background.
I lie there, still unable to move, while she seats herself in Archibald’s chair beside the bed, the one with the huge burn stain on the seat, with the overflowing ashtray on the armrest—full of all my ash and cigarette butts imprinted with Girl About Town gloss. She takes the dog in her arms and he wriggles there like a demon-possessed sausage, yipping like mad. He’s wearing a little tweed coat that looks like a cape.
I look around for Archibald but he is now nowhere to be seen.
“You’re Lizzie.” When she says my name, it isn’t a cup anymore. It’s shards on the floor.
“Yes. You’re Britta.”

i did not think britta would also be a fat woman does archie have a thing for them

“He is going to make a speech. He is opening his mouth to say God knows what. More about how he can’t let me go, but he’ll understand if I never want to see him again. More about how unworthy he is of me. More about how insane Britta is. More about how I am the one he really wants.
“Lizzie,” he says, hugging my knees, and I am trying to pry myself loose.
“Asshole!” Britta screams.
I turn and see her charging toward us in the not-too-distant distance, waving a harmonica in the air like a gun. She hurls it and her aim is remarkable. It hits him right in the face. In the mouth.
For what feels like minutes, we both just stand there. Watch the blood gush beautifully, hideously out of his mouth while he burbles, presumably in shock. Eyes blinking. Then she runs over to him. Takes off her terrible cardigan. Underneath, she’s wearing one of those basic scoop-neck tops I have a dozen of at home.”

oh wow wtf!

“Did Archibald ever play you that Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’” I ask her.
For a while she says nothing, just frowns into her magazine at a photo of a wreath made out of dark green pipe cleaners.
“Archibald played a lot of songs,” she says at last.
I look back at the TV.”

now why would she ask her that

“At home, I eat the other half of my salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn’t used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking the oil off them one by one. ”

oh...

“I met Tom nearly a year ago on the Dirty List, this online music forum dedicated to fans of Underworld, and we’ve been in this long-distance thing ever since. I told everyone, including the girl I hate, that Tom and I met at Underworld’s last live show in New York before they stopped touring, which is where we actually did meet in person for the first time. Even though I was at my fattest then, he just looked at me, took my hand, and said we should probably line up.”

that's sweet but why are all her bfs from online

“Later, after I’ve hung up and I’m lying awake in bed, I think of the perfect comeback to the salady remark. I put us both back in the bakery and I make her say that I’m salady with clotted cream in each corner of her lips. But instead of replying, Am I? I lean in and in a low voice I say, Listen, you little skank! Not all of us can eat scones and have it turn into more taut littleness! Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-“dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly, so dancingly into your smug little mouth. And the way I say it, leaning in like that, with all this edge and darkness in my voice garnered from months of restraint, makes her bow her head in genuine remorse.”

youre so true lizzie

“On my walk to work the next day, I make a promise to myself. I promise that when the girl I hate asks me out to lunch I’ll say No, I’ll say No, I’ll say No. Then, at around eleven, when she sends me a text that says, Weird Swedish Pizza!! Omnomnom!! I text back, .”

ihnomnom!!

“But she won’t let it be. She lifts her heart-shaped sunglasses, leans forward, peers down into the bowl, and sort of wrinkles her nose like she’s just smelled something awful.
“It looks small because it is small,” she says, sitting back. She cocks her head to one side, like I’m curious. “How come you got that?”
I say something about how I just like pomegranate seeds, how they’re pretty, like rubies.
She stares at me until I feel heat creep up the back of my neck. Then she shrugs. She’s wearing this strappy tank that exposes how her shoulders are all bone. She opens her mouth wide and takes a pointedly large bite of pizza, then leans back, chewing, and tilts her tiny face toward the sun.
“I love shun,” she says.”

idk if shes pick me or actually so loving of lizzie and just a little whimsy girl

“Soy Foam was annoying, really annoying, but at least I got her. I didn’t at first. At first all I saw was this terribly small woman from Accounts who, whenever we’d go to lunch, would order an Americano with steamed soy milk on the side, then eat the foam with a spoon, like soup. “Then one night, during happy hour, after devouring all my cocktail garnish, she drunkenly confessed she hadn’t had her period in two years and that as a result of premature menopause, she’d had to start shaving her face. After that, I hated her less. But it’s different with Itsy Bitsy.”

hmm call from inside the house?