Big Summer(13)

It won’t last, I told myself. It isn’t real. Real was what I could see, and touch, and smell. This was just pixels, moving invisibly through space, mostly bots and strangers who’d never know me in real life.

I went back to YouTube, where another eighty-three comments had been posted during my absence. Ignoring them, I copied the video and moved it to my own channel. I’d been using the same image as my social-media avatar for the last three years, a picture of two knitting needles stuck in a skein of magenta yarn. I deleted that shot and replaced it with a screen grab from the video that showed me with my mouth open, one hand extended, finger pointing at the cringing bro, the universal pose of Angry Lady. My first thought was You can see my chins. My next thought, hard on its heels, was But I look brave. And at least my hair looked nice.

I went to my biography. Underneath Daphne Berg, Vanderbilt U, NYC native, happy crafter, I added fierce fat girl, along with the hashtags #sorrynotsorry and #justasIam. I changed the name of my blog from Daphne’s Crafty Corner to Big Time.

The banana bread was cool when I touched it. I cut a thick slice and put it on my favorite plate, which was white with a pattern of blue flowers. I pulled a fork out of the silverware drawer, folded a cloth napkin, and set it on the table. I took a seat. Unfolded the napkin and spread it over my lap. Used the fork to remove a generous wedge from the slice. Popped it in my mouth and closed my eyes, humming with pleasure as I chewed, tasting the richness, feeling the textures, the hot, slippery melted chocolate, the crunch of the nuts, the yielding softness of bananas and butter. I ate every morsel and used the side of the fork to scrape the plate clean.





Chapter Three


After I’d finished my video, I slung the garment bag securely over my arm and walked away from the bar without looking back. At Eighty-Sixth Street I caught the crosstown bus to Madison Avenue. Five minutes later, I arrived at the sidewalk in front of Saint David’s School just as the crowd of nannies and mommies (with the very occasional daddy) was reaching its peak. With five minutes to kill, I opened Instagram. Already, my video had thousands of views, hundreds of likes, and dozens of comments. So pretty, typed curvyconfident. I double-tapped to like what she’d said. Where’s your shirt from? asked Joelle1983. I typed in Macys but it’s like four years old. I think Old Navy has something similar—will check later! “Feeding the beast” was how I thought of it. Not that my followers were animals, but it could get exhausting, the way I had to be extremely online all the time, clicking and liking and answering back, engaging so that the algorithms would notice my engagement and make my feed one of the first things people saw when they opened the app, so that I’d get more followers, so that I’d be able to charge more for my posts.

Like, like, comment; comment, comment, like. I worked my way through the replies, until one of them stopped me: I am a teenage girl. How can I be brave like you?

I paused, with the phone in my hand and my eyes on the sky, reminding myself that this so-called teenage girl could be a sixty-eight-year-old man living in his mom’s basement, trolling me. I told myself that, no matter who’d asked the question, my reply wouldn’t really be for her (or him)—it would be for everyone else who’d read it. And one of those people could very well be a fat teenager, a girl like the one I’d once been, wondering how she could be brave, the way she thought I was.

I resisted the impulse to type out a fast, glib Fake it ’til you make it!, which was more or less the truth. I wasn’t brave every minute or every day, or even most minutes of most days… but I could act as if I were, almost all the time. Which meant that most of the world believed it. But did this theoretical girl need to hear that someone she respected was only pretending?

I cut and pasted the message and put it in my drafts file for later consideration, just as the final bell rang and dozens of boys in khaki pants and blue blazers came racing toward their caregivers. I put my side hustle in my pocket, and my real job began.

Three years ago, the Snitzers—Dr. Elise and Dr. Mark—had hired me to take care of their kids, Isabel and Ian, for four hours after school let out. I would pick the kids up, feed them snacks, supervise homework, and ferry them to their various engagements. Izzie had ice-hockey practice, playdates, and birthday parties; Ian had his therapist. Izzie was part of a running club and sang in a choir. Ian had his allergist. Izzie was a sweet, outgoing girl, but Ian was my favorite. He reminded me of me.

That afternoon, as usual, Ian was one of the last boys out the door. Ian, his mother had told me, had been born two weeks early, barely weighing five pounds, and he’d been a tiny, colicky scrap of a thing. He’d grown up to be a boy with a narrow, pale face, a reddened nose thanks to constant dripping, wiping, and blowing, and pale-blue eyes that were frequently watery and red-rimmed. When he was a baby, his mother had doctored his mashed peas and carrots and sweet potatoes with olive oil and butter, cramming calories into him to help him grow. He’d gotten shots and exposure therapy; he even had a mantra to recite before eating wheat or dairy. All of it had helped, but Ian was still wheezy and rashy and small for his age. Today, like most days, he was stooped under the weight of a backpack that probably weighed more than he did.

“Do we have time for a snack?” he asked as he used his forefinger to loosen the knot of his tie, an incongruously adult gesture that never failed to amuse me when eight-year-old Ian performed it.