Carefully, I put this feeling away like folding a letter, stuffing it back into its envelope and storing it in a kitchen drawer.
June 24th
Early in my twenties, I decided to accept my big body. I remembered my body as a boy being thin and frail and vulnerable. Once it hit puberty, though, my body discarded its litheness for a thickness that surprised me.
My mother likes to remind me periodically that of the eight children she bore, I was her biggest: 9 lbs 10 ounces and 24 inches long. She wants me to be proud of this as if I were built for the long haul like a dependable station wagon.
I reasoned that if I couldn’t be skinny, I might as well be a boy with muscles. I joined a gym and worked with a trainer to build up my shoulders and biceps and pecs and quads. For a week, I took steroids that a guy at the gym sold me, but I was afraid they’d turn me into a freak—the kind I’d seen strutting around the gym—and I wasn’t that committed to my body. Or that the pills would tap into a well of anger that I’d spent so much of my life containing the way toxins are kept in check at a superfund site.
A few years later, I was talking to my father about financial security, which was strange because my mother has always complained that my father can’t keep money in his pocket and has to spend every last cent he has as if money is a moral stain you have to constantly be rubbing out. His talk had nothing to do with financial security and instead was meant to teach me about responsibility and loyalty, which he sees as my weakest character flaws.
Suddenly, though, he said, “Be careful how big you get because sooner or later it’s all going to sag.”
In college, my father was a football player because he had the body for it and because he was tough. He had dreams of taking his athletic career further than his talent could take him. A disappointment, I see, whenever