Salon.com > Body Issues

Sexy dresses that barely fit

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:30:00 +0000

Over the past two years, I’ve lost more than a hundred pounds. There’s nothing impressive about this feat — it’s not as if I’ve lost the hundred-plus pounds sensibly, sequentially and permanently. Rather, I’ve lost the same five pounds about 20 different times through a series of dubious dietary stunts.

Per the established metrics of weight-to-height ratio and body mass index, I’m not what a medical professional would call exceedingly overweight — though Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the average “thinspiration” Pinterest page would post dissenting opinion. Essentially, I’m your garden-variety mesomorph who doesn’t eat to live but, rather, who lives to eat her feelings.

What consumes me, urging me to mindlessly consume? Usually nothing special — like so many other people, I nosh my way through shame and regret about the past and anxiety about the future. But 2011 and 2012 were exceptional — annus horribilis, times two: I got dragged off by a riptide of depression that I feared might kill me; one of my sisters learned she had lupus; one of my in-laws was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer; my mother’s COPD landed her in the hospital, and my beloved bachelor uncle fell ill under conditions too horrible to describe and died eight months later. It was not a good couple of years for illusions of familial immortality. No.

Measure of my manhood

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:30:00 +0000

There’s no moment more anxiety-inducing in a young man’s life than the first time he measures his penis. OK, maybe that’s just me. I was terrified. First of all, I couldn’t find a ruler. I had aged out of the grade where rulers were put on the school supplies list, and any ones that were left over had been lost or broken. I considered measuring against the spine of a book, but my naked-eye measurement would still only get me a ballpark answer. I needed to know the exact measurement. I finally found a ruler, one I had kept from years before, which featured all the NBA Western Conference team logos on it. Why no, this wasn’t embarrassing.

I also had the added pressure that comes with being black. That all black men have huge penises is the one stereotype we don’t riot in the streets over. I couldn’t be responsible for bringing shame to the race by walking around with a sub-nine-inch penis. What would my ancestors think? I could only hope that Marcus Garvey wasn’t looking down from the heavens shaking his head in disgust at my lack of girth.

Hiding my freckles

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 22:35:00 +0000

Angel kisses. That’s what my Grammy called my freckles when I was a little girl. And what my great-grandmother called my mom’s freckles when she was a little girl. Unfortunately, our Grammys can’t be with us all of the time, and much of the universe lacks their confectioners'-sugar-dusted worldview.

Where I grew up, in mid-coast Maine, the primary industry is lobster fishing. Although I can now recognize my hometown as an oasis of beauty and tradition, as a kid I was terrified of the lobstermen and their stories and slang. They smelled of bait and had thick Maine accents I couldn’t understand.

One day a grizzled lobsterman, still in hip waders, came toward me down the stone steps of King Ro Market, our village’s general store, which kept an enormous block of hard cheese on the counter, to be sold by the slice, as well as motor oil, Wonder Bread, and my objective whenever I escaped the carob and kale of my childhood home: Swedish fish and other penny candy.

“Jesus Christ,” the lobsterman said, laughing with genuine amusement as I tried to sneak by. “What’d a seagull shit on your face?”

Curse of my birthing hips

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I first heard that I had childbearing hips before I even got my first period. One of my middle school classmates — a beauty with a coltish build — assessed my dumpy, dough-pale body in the locker room, and declared, without malice, that I had what her grandmother called “birthin’ hips.”

At 13, I had no idea what my thick hips had to do with birth, but I was terrified by the prospect of having to care for (another) someone else. I was the loud one who drew my father’s ire — and his fists — away from my brother. I was my mother’s “little hero”: the one who powdered her black eyes and told her she was still pretty, the one who swallowed her secrets so she could shimmer in the eyes of her fellow PTA members. She taught me to draw and to drive, to bake lasagna that would make men lick their plates and to fill up with Crystal Light and water so I wouldn’t be too hungry, wouldn’t eat too much of my own food.

She’d been, in her words, “flat as a board” until plumping up while carrying me; then, she said, she “looked like a spark plug.” Her body was as soft as her will; she yielded to buttered biscuits and apologies whispered in the dark. When I was a teenager, both of our bodies embarrassed me equally. I remember the sight of us in one fitting room mirror: Her hips, narrow; her belly puckered by a Caesarean scar. My hips mocked hers with their abundance.

My skinny arm complex

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I knew Ariel seemed too good to be true. He was a muscular Israeli who lived a couple subway stops from me, and based on the photos he was sending me, he had a flawless body and lots of expensive teak furniture.

For the past two weeks, we had been corresponding on Grindr, the gay hook-up app, and, for whatever reason, he really, really wanted to meet up. Day after day, he would send me photos of himself flexing in different parts of his living room and ask me to come over to his place after work. As a skinny 25-year-old, this surprised me, not only because I was incompetent at using Grindr, but because guys who looked like Ariel rarely went for guys who looked like me.

When I finally showed up at his Brooklyn apartment, located on a still-gentrifying block above the flashing lights of a liquor store, I half-expected a candid camera prank or a violent beating. But when he let me into his apartment, he was already half naked, showing off perfectly shaped pecs, giant biceps and a six-pack that tapered cartoonishly down to his waist. I felt like I had just wandered into a porn film.

My shazam boobs

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

“Are you upset about losing your breast?” I asked Mary, my grandmother, while my grandfather brought the car around. This was June 2000, and she had accepted the news from the doctor calmly, with one hand in mine, the other in my grandfather’s. A mastectomy was called for; she had declined reconstructive plastic surgery, dismissing it out of hand. “You know you can always change your mind and get the plastic surgery later,” I continued. She laughed. “I don’t care about that, honey,” she said. “I just hope the cancer hasn’t spread.” And that was that. We set a date for the surgery and went home.

She was 76, I was 32. I had recently started dating the man I would soon marry. When I told Andy that if I had breast cancer, I would feel the way Mary did — that I would be fine with having a mastectomy, I just wouldn’t want to die — he replied “But I like your breasts. You’d try to keep them for me, right?”

The night after my grandmother’s mastectomy, Andy took my nipples into his mouth before we made love in a grand, unusual gesture. “I shouldn’t ignore your breasts,” he whispered. As if he were nervous that they might be gone someday.

My big, strong, manly hands

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 20:15:00 +0000

I inherited a lot from my mother, though I first recognized my hands. Long fingered and wide palmed, we are women with muscular hands, working hands. In adolescence, it struck me as unfair, because my mother was beautiful — pale and ethereal, with fine features and blue eyes — and no one was ever going to be distracted from her face by her hands. But me? I felt too animal to be beautiful.

Before I gave thought to beauty, I delighted in my body. I was a strong, brown, passionate child, with lots and lots of words. I talked fast, and I moved faster – through the woods around our Cape Cod home, up trees, into the ocean’s crashing surf. I also felt a lot, finely tuned to the swells of my own heart, as well as others’ wants and hurts. I sensed a deep well at my center, and sometimes it bubbled over. I’d read or think or feel myself into a brimming state, then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, fearing I might combust – suffer a supernova of brain and heart, annihilate myself. I also fell down a lot. I banged into walls and trees, and tumbled up and down stairs almost daily. The refrain of my childhood was “slow down, Melissa!” and my nickname “Crash,” but I always got right up — skinned knees, purpled thighs, stinging palms — and brushed myself off, kept going.

Men who made my legs

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 02:00:00 +0000

At the age of four, my left foot was amputated as the result of a congenital birth defect, and I had a series of legs made by a series of men. The first prosthetist was a chain-smoking, endlessly cursing World War II veteran who asked me to hold his ashtray while he made adjustments. The second, whose office was behind a used car lot, scared me whenever he asked me to take my pants off so he could “have a look” at where the waist strap of those early uncomfortable wooden monstrosities was cutting into my hipbones. I didn’t like his voice or the way he looked at me -- lecherous and aching.

All through my 20s and 30s, I navigated relationships with men -- sexual, marital and otherwise, looking for (and not finding) the right match. But it is difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to talk about that search without addressing my relationships with my legs and the men who created them. For some reason, I have yet to meet a female prosthetist.

Never show them your back

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I used to flash my bra when I was good and drunk. I didn’t really care. It’s funny how this happens, how some part of your body considered “secret” and “scintillating” just feels like more skin. But my boobs arrived early, and grabbed second helpings on their plate, and so men would saunter up to me with that greedy look: Can I touch? When? Now? Eventually, it got easier not to care. Here, have at it, America: My tits.

But when I flashed my boobs, I kept the back of my shirt down. I did not raise it up entirely, not even when I was zombie-eyed and slipping off bar stools, because to do so would have been to reveal the part of myself that was seriously hidden, raw and vulnerable. It would have been to show you the moles on my back.

I was 7, maybe 8, when I discovered my back did not look like other people’s. Nothing dramatic: Black buckshot on a white canvas. But those things were like hideous scars to me.