A Selfie as Big as the Ritz by Lara Williams

Author:Lara Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Toxic Shock Syndrome

Jennifer had been to a hospital only once before. Age fourteen. Her first use of a tampon. Toxic Shock Syndrome.

She committed to using a tampon from her first ever period. It was at that same time she got big. Puberty kicked in and her metabolism conked out; and she grew and grew, spilling into the space around her. Since then people were always telling her she was big; big heart, big smile, big personality, big the lot. Just generally, abstractly big. There was no reference to her body though it was implicit. Skated around like a pivot. Something that needed acknowledging or pointing at, though indirectly so. Her period congenitally, inexorably linked. That big heart of hers pumping blood around and out of her body; leaking it like an excess, like stuff to spare. There was something more uncomfortable about big women menstruating. Something presumed to ooze. It felt shameful and as she stared at the rich red blood pooling in her sanitary napkin she acquiesced to stop the slop at the source; forcing a super plus tampon into her (likely) large vagina.

She hadn’t always been big. As a child she was delicate, nimble, quick on her feet. She had an ethereal quality. She could get into small spaces. For a long time she still felt like that same slip of a thing; running her hands over where her hipbones used to be, sitting with the elegance of the impossibly tiny. But gradually she came to accept her new size; the knowledge sitting inside her like a foreign object. Unwelcome, though very much there.

But she did not feel sprawling or vast, she felt composed; as perfectly contained as palms pressed together. She gave nothing away. There were no leakages, no ooze. You saw of her only what she wanted and she was judicious about that. And yet lying in bed feeling the weight of herself push down into the mattress there was no denying it; she’d occupied more mass than that to which she was entitled and she’d never even been given a choice.

“Jenny,” her doctor told her. “Jenn.” People were always sawing off bits of her name, reducing it, making it neat and pretty where she liked its entirety. Its needless sprawl. Its somewhat awkward prosody. Jennifer, she would correct them. JENNIFER. She’d wanted some Valium for a flight. Not because of nerves or fear, just something to knock herself out, to get it over with. “Is this because of your size?” her GP inquired. “Wear flight socks. You can get them in Asda.”

Her size recurred again and again as cause over effect. The supposed route of all her pain. When she fell over at work, slapping her spine against the dense marble of the office reception, peeling back her jumper to reveal the flesh, pink and bruised, her resultant back problems were denoted by the GP as “more to do with your size.” When she began feeling lightheaded, lacking in energy, before her blood tests revealed an acute B12 deficiency, she was told she “probably just needed to lose some weight.

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