Big Summer(12)

I went back to my laptop and the article I’d skimmed. You might worry about feeling out of control… like, as soon as you start eating a formerly “forbidden” food, you won’t be able to stop. That might even be true, the first few times you introduce a “bad” food back into your diet. We encourage you to eat slowly and mindfully, savoring each bite, listening to your body, eating when that food is what you want, stopping when you’re full.

I found a recipe. I got myself dressed. In the kitchen, my father was trying to solve the crossword puzzle, and my mom was helping him. As I pulled a shopping bag out of the cupboard, I heard him ask, “What’s a six-letter word for Noah’s resting place?”

“I’m going to Whole Foods,” I told them.

“Too many letters,” said my dad.

“Ha ha ha.” I thought I sounded normal, but I saw him look at me before exchanging a glance with my mom.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything is fine,” I said.

“We need cumin,” he said, and raised a hand in farewell. My mom said “Be careful,” the way she did when either one of us left the house.

I walked to the Whole Foods on Ninety-Second and Columbus. I bought my dad his cumin and got eggs, butter, Greek yogurt, chocolate chips, and the ripest bananas I could find. Back in the kitchen, with my parents watching without comment, I melted butter, cracked the eggs, and spooned yogurt into a measuring cup. I smushed bananas in a plastic bag. I browned the walnuts in the toaster oven. I mixed everything together and scraped it into a greased loaf tin.

When the banana bread was in the oven, I got comfortable on the couch, then opened my texts. Darshini, one of my other high school friends, was first. Saw this last night, she’d written. You okay? I felt unease settle into the pit of my belly. My chest felt tight, my knees felt quivery, and my heart was thumping so hard I could feel my chest shake. The link was to YouTube. I clicked, and there I was, in all my black-clad, wobbly, triple-chinned, furious glory. “Fat Girl Goes OFF” read the headline.

I wanted to scream and to drop the phone like it had stung me, and I must have made some kind of noise, because when I looked up, both of my parents were staring at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Everything’s fine.” I saw them exchange another glance, communicating in their private marital Morse code. My mother pressed her lips together as my father reached for his phone. I held my breath and turned my attention back to my own screen, to my own face. There were already thirteen thousand views. And—I stared, feeling my jaw drop, feeling terrified—eight thousand green thumbs-ups.

Don’t do it, I thought, but I couldn’t help myself. With my heart in my throat, I scrolled down to see the comments.

Landwhale, read the first one. Well, I’d been expecting it. And I liked whales! They were graceful and majestic!

I’d do her, the next commenter had written.

Roll her in flour and look for the wet spot, a wit beneath that comment had advised. I winced, feeling sick as I kept scrolling.

You GO girl, another commenter had written. Wish I was brave enough to tell off a guy like that.

Me too, the woman underneath her had written.

Me three.

The oven timer dinged. I looked up and saw that my father was still working at the crossword; my mom had moved on to the real estate section. “One point two million dollars for a studio!” she said, shaking her head. So the world hadn’t spun off its axis; the house hadn’t fallen down around me. The sun had come up in the morning, and it would still set that night.

I put on a pair of silicone oven mitts, bent down, and grasped the sheet pan that I’d put underneath the banana bread, in case of drips. The sheet pan had mostly been used to oven-roast zucchinis and onions, peppers and tomatoes, and, as a treat, the occasional thinly sliced potato. I wondered what it made of its new circumstances as I set the banana bread on top of the stove. My phone dinged. I looked to see if it was Darshi again, or if it was Ron, or Drue, who, so far, had not reached out. The screen said DAD, and the text said Proud of you. I felt my eyes prickle as I lifted my head long enough to give him a thumbs-up.

I thought about googling for articles about how to survive online humiliation and public shaming—it had happened to enough people by now; surely someone had written a guide for getting through it. Instead, I made myself do one of the relaxation exercises a long-ago yoga teacher had taught me. Name five things you can see. My mother. My father. The dining room table. The newspaper. The banana bread. Name four things you can touch. The skin of my arm. The fabric of the dining room chair cover. The wood of the kitchen table, the floor beneath my feet. The three things I could hear were the sound of cars on Riverside Drive, the scratch of my father’s pen on the page, and my own heartbeat, still thundering in my ears. I could smell banana bread and my own acrid, anxious sweat.

I’d been on the Internet long enough to know that these things never lasted, that the outrage being poured onto, say, a New York Times columnist who’d overreacted to a mild insult could instantly be redirected toward a makeup company whose “skin tone” foundations only came in white-lady shades, before turning on a professional athlete who’d sent a tweet using the n-word when he was fifteen. The swarm was eternally in search of the next problematic artist or actor or fast-food brand, and nobody stayed notorious, or canceled, forever.