Twelve Stories

Roxane Gay

For fun, my wife and I sit around and watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves because we work hourly jobs and live in a crappy apartment because our GEDs didn’t take us as far as we hoped. We got our GEDs because we wanted to get married. We wanted to get married so we could have sex because back then we believed what our parents told us about going to hell if we fornicated.  At that point, we had done everything but have sex and we knew that the disposition of our souls was in grave danger if we didn’t do something drastic. Our parents told us we couldn’t get married until we had our high school diplomas because we were too young and we needed a good solid education before we could make adult decisions and we thought they were delusional because we actually went to school every day and knew that they weren’t teaching us shit. We showed them by going across the state line to get married. But then the sex wasn’t that great, and then we couldn’t find jobs that didn’t involve customer service, and now we’ve accepted that this is as good as it’s going to get.

We watch as the extraordinarily fat people tearfully explain how they got to 1,000 pounds, how it was a slippery slope, how they tried diets, how now they’re stuck in their soiled beds and have to be cut out of their homes and taken to a special fat hospital for emergency surgery with the assistance of special fat SWAT teams with good back strength who wear latex gloves and very serious expressions.

The best part of these documentaries is when the medical professionals talk about the fat people like they understand, like they sympathize, like this is all normal, when you know that when those doctors and nurses get home, they sit in bed crying, eating a tub of ice cream, asking themselves how tragedies like these happen. The wife and I giggle when the doctors use the word “staggering” or when the fat person says, “I let things get out of hand.” For the next week, we’ll repeat that phrase as often as we can and then laugh uncontrollably. For example, I’ll get home late from work and the wife will be at the kitchen table waiting and she’ll be kind of irritated because she took the time to bake a Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven and microwave some frozen broccoli, so I’ll say, “I let things get out of hand.” She’ll try not to crack a smile, and then her cheeks will twitch and she’ll start shaking and then we’ll both laugh so hard that there’s snot coming out of our noses and we’re laugh-crying and she’s forgotten that I was late and won’t spend the next hour interrogating me about why my shirt reeks like cigarette smoke even though we both know that I’m late because I met my best friend—whom she hates mostly because he did finish high school and isn’t married—for a couple beers at the bar he owns.

The sex between the wife and I has improved significantly over the past seven years. I think we’re starting to resent getting married at seventeen a lot less. After we watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people, my wife fucks me like she’s auditioning to become a porn star and tells me that she’s so fucking glad that we’re both thin and that we have families who love us enough not to feed us to death and I tell her I’m so fucking glad we’re both thin and I lick her nipples and get extra creative and we both moan and pant and I want the moment to last so I think about the poor S.O.B. who needs a team of physical therapists to give him a bath and how he groans in pain as they heave and shift his folds and awkward deposits of fat, all so it will take me a little longer to come. Mornings after Thank God We’re Not Fat Sex, the wife and I tend to hate each other a little, so we don’t speak and make as little eye contact as possible. Instead, we move silently through our morning routines as we try to assess any damage we may have caused. She brushes her teeth and takes a shower and shaves her legs and uses all the hot water and leaves little tiny leg hairs around the drain and curls her hair and puts on her make-up and forgets to cap her mascara. The entire time, I’m sitting on the toilet pretending to read a magazine, but really I’m just staring at her naked body because she’s hotter than me.  She starts the coffee, makes it too strong just the way I hate it, fills her travel thermos, leaves for her job as a receptionist at a beauty salon, and I get to spend an hour or so alone in our apartment watching Home Shopping Network until I have to go to work at a copy shop where I spend my day in front of a Xerox machine pushing buttons.

At some point during these documentaries about extraordinarily fat people, there comes a time when a surgeon has to cut away chunks of belly or upper thigh and the fat person is lying on the operating table, vulnerable and spreadeagle. The surgeon uses special tools to spread and pull and dissect. Then, the surgeon triumphantly raises the bloody, excised body parts and shouts out how much they weigh. Everyone in the room gasps frenzied-like. It’s painfully obvious that they’re all really turned on and after they’re done sewing the patient back together like they’re channeling Mary Shelley, you get the impression that one of those surgeons is going to pull one or more of those nurses into a supply closet so that they too can have Thank God We’re Not Fat Sex. The wife doesn’t like to watch the operations―she calls it human butchering. Blood makes her nauseous, and she doesn’t even like to change her own tampon. So, when we’re watching the surgical procedures, the wife covers her eyes and buries her head against my shoulder, and I narrate in explicit detail how the fat is yellow and serpentine and pulpy and slick and how the excised body parts are dropped into biohazard bags. Then we speculate about what happens to the dead fat deposits of extraordinarily fat people and we think it would be nice if they had backyard burial ceremonies for them the way kids do for dead pets.

One night when we’re watching one of these documentaries, the wife turns to me and says, “There are no happy endings in these stories,” and then she swallows about half of my beer. She looks like she’s about to cry and then I feel like I’m about to cry thinking about these large people living such small, impossible lives, so I say, “It’s a happy ending when they’re wheeled out of the hospital and they only weigh 500 pounds, and they go back to their special chair at home where their loved ones will feed them the same way they’ve always fed them, so that in three years they’ll weigh a ton again and we’ll have another documentary to watch,” and with tears in her eyes, my wife will crawl into my lap, straddling me, and she’ll hold my face in her hands and she’ll say, “I love you so fucking much.”

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Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Necessary Fiction, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, Pindeldyboz and others. She is the associate editor of PANK and can be found online at roxanegay.com.