13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad

Author:Mona Awad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

Fit4U

She took the dry cleaning ticket from me and disappeared behind the plastic shrouded coats and yellowed wedding dresses I don’t know how long ago. I’m standing by the counter, smoking in her gutted aquarium of an establishment, trying not to breathe in the scent of chemicals and old clothes people should have thrown out, given away, maybe burned a long time ago. I’m feigning interest in the ugly walls, the dubious certificates, waiting for whatever it is my mother brought here a few days ago and never picked up.

I found the dry cleaning stub in her knockoff Gucci purse, which I picked up from the police station. It was in the swampy main pocket along with some loose change, one Chanel lipstick, and a worn leather wallet full of cards. The ticket was carefully folded, its corners nicked here and there with her uncapped plummy lipstick. Fit4U, the ticket says. Pick up after 5:30 Mon to Fri. Pick up 2:30 Sat. There’s an address and a number underneath stamped in red ink.

I found Fit4U in a mini-mall on the outskirts of town, between a holistic center that looked closed and a Thai massage parlor that looked very open. A narrow storefront of murky glass. A small statue of a fat Buddha leering through the barred windows beside a profusely flowering fake plant. A woman behind the counter with hair and eye shadow out of John Waters, a worn tape measure around her neck. Glasses perched so far down the bridge of her slender nose, I wonder how she can possibly see out of them. She was wearing a sweater patterned with Christmas trees even though it was June. Her palms were pressed hard into the countertop like there could be a shotgun beneath it. There was a man sitting absolutely still on the rust-colored love seat beside the counter with his eyes wide open. Maybe she’d killed him. This is what I sincerely thought until I saw him blink.

Surely my mother did not come here, I thought, for her dry cleaning/alteration needs. Surely there was somewhere nicer she could have gone. I looked at the dry cleaning ticket again and sure enough, this was the address, and when I handed the woman behind the counter the stub, she didn’t blink, just turned around and disappeared into the back of the store.

That was at least an hour ago now. Since then, I’ve taken a hungover tour of the mini-mall. Smoked five and a half cigarettes in my mother’s Taurus with the window rolled down slightly, staring at the barred storefront through her streaked windshield, the scratched-off letters in the shirts/laundry/alterations sign, trying to think about nothing. Not the funeral director’s message on my voice mail, his tone striving for grandfatherly. Telling me it’s ready for me to pick up anytime. It meaning my mother.

Then I go back inside the shop, but she’s still nowhere to be seen.

I stand at the counter, tapping my foot, my eyes fixed on a dusty bell beside the ancient cash register.

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