The Fat Woman

“That’s nasty,” Kate sneers, leaning against the counter while I pile three scoops of chocolate ice-cream into a blender. I’m making a milkshake for the fat woman who comes to the diner by herself multiple times a week. I don’t mind waiting on her though; her bill’s always high, and she thinks the food’s great even though it isn’t. “I could never let myself get that big, I’d kill myself first,” Kate says, watching the ice-cream morph into a thick liquid. “Plus Jay probably wouldn’t fuck me if I gained ten pounds.”

Kate is thinner than I am, though she always says otherwise. I can see it though, when I stand beside her. Kate is the type of skinny I always tried to be, but couldn’t, because we have different bone structures and she has a naturally petite frame. Weight isn’t always fat, its muscle, height, and bone mass, my therapist from high school had told me. She had urged me to throw away my scale and focus on how I felt inside, and we’d go through positive qualities every week before her office lost funding and we had to discontinue our meetings.

I bring the woman her milkshake and take her order, as if I don’t know it’s going to be the same cheeseburger with extra curly fries that she gets every week. As I walk back to the kitchen, I feel my legs start to tingle and my chest flutter like a jar of moths. Billy’s working on the line.

I had sex with him two weeks ago at the staff holiday party and I want to again, though he hasn’t tried talking to me since. He reaches his hand beyond the heat lamp and grabs my ticket without looking at my face. I try to think of something to say, but my mouth goes dry and he starts talking to Eric, the other cook.

I circle the floor again, my face stinging from rejection. Kate has three tables; a couple in their young twenties sharing a plate of pancakes, the mother with her twins, and a man in a business suit sipping endless coffee with his laptop plugged into the only wall outlet. She seats guests in her own section and skips others in the server rotation, which is why the other servers hate working with her, especially on slow weekday nights like tonight. I don’t really mind, though, this is my first serving job and I can’t yet balance the stress of too many tables at once. Kate knows this which is why she doesn’t boss me around, or feel threatened by my presence. This is in turn why she feels safe telling me things, like how she thinks her boyfriend Jay stole money from her nightstand last night. And how they both used to do heroine together but stopped. And how they get in vicious fights almost every week that end in passionate makeup sex, her descriptions so vivid that I can picture her on top of Jay with her long skinny body and disproportionately large tits, digging her claws into him, leaving traces of blood.

The fat woman is my only table, so I pretend to refill sugar caddies in my section until her plate is almost empty. “Anything else I can get for you?” I ask, and she says “Yes actually, tonight I’ll have one of your amazing brownie sundaes, please!”

Kate’s leaning against the ice-cream counter in the server alley on her phone, texting furiously. She throws her phone onto the counter in a fluster and watches me put a frozen brownie in the microwave. “Is that for the fat lady?” she asks. “Of course it is,” I say, setting the timer for 30 seconds. “She thinks it’s gonna be amazing!”

Kate laughs and saunters off into the kitchen. I hear her talking to the cooks. I think she’s telling them about the fat woman, because I hear her say Brownie Sundae, and they all erupt in laughter. Kate has a way of talking to men. She does it so easily, without blushing or stumbling over words. .I top the brownie with a scoop of vanilla and whipped cream. The woman has an excited expression on her face as I bring the melting sundae to her table, but doesn’t say anything aloud.

I fill a large paper cup with ice-cream and for myself, a tower of vanilla, chocolate, whipped cream, nuts. I unwrap a frozen brownie and crumble it on top. I eat it quickly, the cold numbing my throat, my mouth so full I can barely swallow. I feel my stomach expand against my belt, growing tighter and tighter until I feel the heat rise in my cheeks, and I go to the employee bathroom.

I’ve been doing this for so long now that I don’t need a finger or toothbrush, I just lean over the toilet with my hands on my thighs and lurch it back up, like a snake swallowing an egg in reverse. The ice-cream develops a cold film for my throat which makes the vomit less acidic; I learned this from my high school therapist who warned me not to keep ice-cream in my house anymore for this reason. Because ice-cream would make vomiting enjoyable, and I wanted to get better. Bulimia is the ugly disorder, I told her. Puking is ugly, and bulimia shows no self-control, and nobody wants to be with someone with bad teeth and popped eye-vessels and no self-control.

The blood rushes to my head and bloats behind my eyes. When I finish, my reflection is watery and pink in the mirror. I blow my nose and flush twice. My wrists shake and I feel like I might collapse onto the floor, but that’s what I wanted: that complete empty, as if to say “try again now, with more confidence, and less nerves.”

I pass the kitchen line; Billy looks up but I look away and pretend I don’t see him; I don’t want him to see me as I pass with watery pink eyes, wiping my nose and mouth with my sleeve. The woman is ready for me to clear her plates, but doesn’t flag me down. She orders a second cheeseburger with curly fries, to go, for her husband, and says she’ll take the check when it’s ready.

“A second burger?!” Billy shrieks when I drop the ticket. “It’s for the woman’s husband,” I say, and set up a paper bag with two sets of silverware. “Poor bastard,” Billy says, and they both snicker, and I do too, because it’s the first time Billy’s responded to me all night which could be a good sign. Eric and Billy go back and forth about what her husband probably looks like, and I say it would be funny if he doesn’t even exist and she ate all of the food by herself. “Woah!” Billy laughs. “That’s fucked!”

I feel the blood rush to my cheeks, but he starts talking to Eric instead. Under the whir of kitchen noise I can hear them talk lowly about what it feels like to fuck fat women. They laugh, and Billy makes a squishing noise with his gloved hands, which makes me think Billy’s fucked a lot of different women of different sizes, and he probably told Eric about fucking me in the employee bathroom.

“I fucked Billy, at the Christmas party.” I blurt to Kate in the server station. This is the first time I’ve told anyone I work with. She looks up from the glow of her phone, and her stare makes my eyes well with nerves. “And?” she says.

“I got drunk and fucked him in the employee bathroom and now he won’t even talk to me.” Her eyes are like burning lasers. I feel like she can sense it all over me: the bloat of my cheeks, my glassy eyes, and the smell of vomit still clinging in my nostrils.

She breaks the stare and pokes a melted puddle of ice-cream that I left on the counter and wipes it off of her jeans. “Who hasn’t?” she snorts, rolling her eyes slightly as she walks back onto the restaurant floor with a water pitcher.

The fat woman gets up to leave, clutching her to-go bag. “Thank you!” she calls out to whichever one of us hears her first, and makes her way for the door. Maybe she really does have a husband waiting for her at home, who talks to her, and loves her body filled with sugar and dairy and diner grease. Or maybe she doesn’t, and she eats the second burger alone with nobody watching, shrouded with blankets in the comforting glow of her television screen.

Mary Benson lives in Boston, MA. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Fried Chicken and Coffee, and Contemporary American Voices. Mary’s writing often focuses on workplaces, service jobs, teenage rebellion and loneliness.  She plays drums, and has a cat named Judy.