Prompt: A Blessing (300 words or less)

It’s a bad year no matter who you are. Acne, blackheads, facial hair, chest hair, pubic hair, underarm hair, breasts on parade, testicles dropping—dropping? dropping how?—and the dank smell of it all. Sniff your underarms, take a whiff of your panties, socks, jockstraps, and if you bleed through your tampon, stray dogs will follow you home. No one loves you, no one understands you. You have no friends. It’s a wonder you don’t kill yourself.

And, as if adolescence weren’t already enough of a shit-storm of frogs, it was then, the year I turned thirteen, that inexplicably and practically overnight, I packed on the pounds. A roly-poly, jelly-belly, tub of lard, five-by-five, avoirdupois, fat, fat, fat, I was an anomaly in my ectomorphic clan.

Back then, on Sunday nights there was a popular TV show, a family favorite, documents of real-life stories, human-interest stories with an Oliver Twist-ian sensibility—heartwarming, puke-inducing treacle. That week’s episode was about a piglet who was rejected by the sow, but adopted by a border collie with a litter of her own. Basically, this was the same storyline as the movie Babe, although Babe—the movie and the book which preceded it—didn’t come out until years later. This is not to accuse anyone of ripping off anyone else’s story. It’s a common enough occurrence that great discoveries—and lousy ones, too—happen independently of each other. Like how Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both formulated calculus, and a few years back two novels based on the Siamese twins Chang and Eng were released in the same season, and I once had a boyfriend, a musician, who thought he’d invented a new kind of music when he distilled the complexity of European classical music with the simplicity of the four-quarter beat of the Beatles. Then, someone told him about Charles Ives. It happens.

This pre-Babe story we were watching took place on a farm in Scotland. The camera homed in on the piglet nursing along with the collie’s four puppies, two on either side. Piggy in the middle. My sisters shared a sidelong glance and a smirk, and our mother said, “Aren’t dogs just the sweetest animals?” The film then cut to the puppies and piglet at play, all of them delirious with joy, happiness unrestrained, happiness that can come only with being new to the world. That the piglet was oblivious to his inability to keep up with the puppies—pigs can’t dart and weave or crouch, paws down and ass in the air—rendered his efforts all the more adorable. It was too cute for words.

What I wanted most then was to be invisible, but to get up and bolt from the room would be to call attention to myself. To cry in front of them, in and of itself, was not at issue. Not when twice weekly at a minimum I went practically berserk with crying. What’s one snivel more? What was at issue was the likelihood that sudden departure would be misinterpreted as fat-related: pigs are fat; I am fat; ergo, I am a pig. Except that wasn’t it, but I knew that any attempt to explain myself would’ve only widened the divide. If I had said, “It’s not the pig, per se. The pig as a pig is irrelevant. It could’ve been a goat or a squirrel or whatever the fuck,” and our mother, after admonishing me for using the f-word, would’ve said, “So, what then are you crying about?” and, at that, I would’ve said something like, “Go oink yourself.” Go oink yourself, a retort for self-delight; I would’ve thought it funny as all get-out, and I would’ve been alone there, too. What I did was this: I bit down on my lower lip to keep it from quivering, and like that, biting down hard on my lower lip, hard enough to draw blood, I sat out the minutes until the end of the show about the piglet, unwittingly Chaplin-esque, who thought he was a dog right up until that very moment just before slaughter. At that same moment, border collies were on a grassy hill darting and weaving, herding the sheep, to bring them home.*

In the eighteen months that followed, the weight I’d gained fell away. Snap, poof, just like that, with no explanation despite the girls at school insisting that there had to be an explanation: Grapefruit? Juice fast? Atkins? Laxatives? Amphetamines? Did I barf it up? As if there had to be an explanation for everything. Whatever it was, the pounds were lost for good, and in that way I was again the same as everyone else in my metabolically blessed family.

 

*That last bit about the pig going to slaughter while the dogs herded sheep, that wasn’t part of television show, but that’s what really happened.