“OK so she was a slave to her marriage,” the counselors said. “But how did her words make you feel?”
The third time I talked about it—my mother was unhappy, she didn’t want me to have too much sugar, I was the last child at home, a burden—the overhead lights in the group room buzzed noisily, their droning suddenly loud in the otherwise silent room. Ten faces—two counselors and eight other patients--stared at their laps. No one said, how did you feel about being called a fat ugly pig by your mother? No one said anything.
“I felt,” I said finally, but I didn’t know how I felt.
“What did you do?” someone asked.
I thought back. I caught the dime against my chest. I got out of the car and walked back across the parking lot and into the synagogue, through the dark sanctuary and out the other side to the Coke machine. I dropped the dime in the slot and punched the button and waited for the little red cup to fill. I drank the entire thing and chewed up all the little ice cubes. I walked back across the parking lot to my mother’s car.
“I can see it like it was yesterday,” I said.
What do you notice?
Nothing. I’m staring at the ground. No wait—I’m staring at my thighs—they’re slapping together.
What else?
My belly--a round mound beneath my stretchy shirt.
What do you feel?
Fat.
Fat is not a feeling. Happy, sad, angry, lonely, tired. Which of those emotions do you feel?
Fat.
What I don’t know at the time of course is that is the real source of my mother’s anger is lying at home in front of the television set eating a lunch of hard salami and Saltine crackers. What I cannot fathom as a ten year-old is that my mother is unhappily married and the discontented mother of three. That she is in a world of grief that has nothing to do with me or my need for second dime. But in the way that unrelated consequence can seem to answer earlier inquiry, what arrives at the doorstep of my consciousness this day in the upper parking lot of my synagogue is my answer to Randy Russell’s lunchroom question: what happened was that I became a fat ugly pig.
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