You Must Change Your Life

I wished that I’d washed my pants. I wondered if everyone else in the class could smell me. The thought made me squirm with self-consciousness. My armpits were sticky and my forearms had the fiberglass itch. I felt her looking my way, surreptitiously inviting me to flirt, and I willfully ignored her, tenderly probing my hollow molar with the tip of my tongue.

The class was arraigned in a loose semicircle: seven tables and fifteen chairs facing a dry-erase board where the hapless teacher was once again sketching out the arc of a storyline.

The fat girl always made sure that she sat opposite me. This time she was wearing a lacey black button-down top that threatened to burst open under the pressure exerted by her hefty breasts. She was wearing a red mini-skirt, and under that (she made sure I knew) flame-red panties.

I slipped up and made eye contact, and she giggled and grinned victoriously. My traitorous penis twitched involuntarily inside my stained and torn work jeans.

She couldn’t have been much older than 25 or so; and she might have been as young as 19. She seemed gloriously unaware how uncomfortable her stories made everyone else in the class -- up to and including the poor teacher-- when she read them aloud in that raspy, husky, ‘I’m reading literature’ voice of hers.

It was a fiction writing class, and she wrote erotica. Nothing but erotica. Really, really strenuously bad erotica, complete with run-on sentences, dangling participles, swollen bosoms and throbbing manhoods. Lately her stories had taken a turn for the worse – and the more explicit – featuring glowering daddies with studded leather belts and ten-inch dicks and a penchant for golden showers. And for the last three weeks she had been following me home.

She was going to read again tonight. We all knew it and we all dreaded it. This story was about an erotic dream she’d had in which a man was suckling at her breast. When she woke up, it wasn’t a man at all but Fifi, her little black and white Pekinese licking her nipple. The whole class was appalled, but only I knew that the story had been written exclusively for me.

She sat smiling, oblivious to the stunned silence that followed her reading. While the teacher tactfully tried to suggest that she branch out to other areas of fiction, she leered at me and once again flashed me her Satan-red panties.

I thought I had lost her, but then I saw her in the next car back on the #7 train, furiously scribbling into her wire-bound notebook.

When the train stopped at my station Hunter’s Point, I sprinted up the stairs and ducked into the corner bodega. The South Asian shopkeeper looked at me with distaste, but sold me two cans of SPUR caffeinated malt liquor beverage. He disdainfully counted out my greasy and crumpled singles as I popped one of the cans and took a long swig of noxious alcoholic Kool-Aid. The panic attack that had been building up inside me like a Midwestern thunderstorm abated slightly. Clutching the unopened can to my chest like a swaddled infant, I ventured back out onto the street.

Such a miniskirt should be illegal. Maybe it is, in Kansas or Mississippi or some joint like that. She had to be sporting a dozen acres of pink, bare skin, thighs that went on for whole city blocks, fields of glistening gelatinous vein-mottled flesh unflatteringly lit in the cold hard light of mercury vapor street lights.

She was about half a block behind me and I knew that tonight I was going to invite her up to my apartment. A wave of exhaustion and despair washed over me, and I sat wearily down on the stoop. She took her place next to me, and I was overcome with the deep crushing sadness of a fat woman in a skinny woman’s world.

I cracked the second can and we sat quietly drinking together for a while under the moonless sky while low clouds raced from horizon to horizon.

END

First published in Ugly Cousin May 2009