phoenix {rising}
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Troublemaker
<<2005-12-25 - 2:06 a.m.>>

A year ago my sister and I had a party in place of my parents' party, a quietish littleish one, champagne and dessert, in place of their huge elaborate out-of-hand open house that they've been having since I was maybe eight, though it wasn't always so insane. Now there are sextuple batches of brownies, and Balducci's catering (I offered to go with my father to pick up the food; he declined this offer; I was secretly glad; he ran into Philip Seymour Hoffman—"Phil"—and I wanted to tear my hair out) and so many people that my big apartment is thick and clotted. And I wear a black wrap dress with a red scarf knotted around my waist and tango shoes that have my feet still hurting and my friend Charlotte from elementary school turns up in gold lamé and fashion mullet with a really charming new boyfriend and it's all air kissing and making dates for drinks that we won't keep and her asking me about my boyfriend about whom she's heard through the grapevine and me asking her about her job at ELLEgirl about which I've heard through ditto. We used to invent recipes together after school in her brownstone on Leroy Street. Gold lamé.

My favorite part was shocking the grownups in the following fashion: they ask me what I am planning on doing after graduation; I smile in a smalltalk-y fashion, cock my head, and remark, "I'm going to start a thrift store for fat people." I love this. I love it. I feel like all I do these days is yammer on about fatness and fat fashion and the politics thereof. This, somehow, has become my passion, what lights me up. Clothing for fat people. Looking at pictures of a sixteen-year-old girl who's saying that she's terribly proportioned and telling her what to wear and how to build a wardrobe on the cheap. I fucking love this.

Also the shock value of the easy use of "fat." There was, once, the requisite: "You're not fat, you're beautiful!"

It was great fun. My friends all play along.

"My mother wanted me to be a slim respectable socialite. Instead, I became an overweight troublemaker." Of course, I'd replace "overweight" with "fat," but I love Brigid Berlin.

The Italian tennis pro and his superglamorous wife, intimidating in their couture in the middle of the room. I was supposed to chat up the editor of Poets and Writers but ever since the advent of the Thrift Store For Fat People Idea, my drive is gone, and I talked instead to his stepdaughter and her fiancé about my thesis and Zadie Smith and MFA programs.

Four hours after taking my shoes off, my feet still hurt.

Chloë and Nikki and I exchanged gifts in my bedroom as the party ended and we got it right because at this point we all know each other pretty well. Giggled a lot. Nikki talked on the phone to one of the girls with whom she's currently involved, back hunched against my hissing radiator.

And then we sat on the couch, Chloë and Nikki and Emma and Arthur and my parents and my aunt Theo and Arthur and I, remembering disasters of other parties: Richard's imitation of the pope like a dying elephant, Jason's "Do you remember me?" to Chloë and her father's perfect response: "Did you go to Hunter?" And my father was giving Theo overstrong advice on dealing with her family issues and her girlfriend troubles, and there hadn't been a hitch. There still hasn't.

Last year we couldn't have the party not only because of the disaster of two years ago but also because I was so fragile this time last year. Tenterhooks. These parties are all check-ins, all, "So, what are you up to?" and last year, I couldn't bear either the lying or the telling the truth. Either the tinny optimism, "Took a semester off, looking forward to getting back," or "I am waiting to go back to school after being in treatment for an eating disorder." All those people who must have known (grapevine) but must have known they weren't allowed to talk about it.

All the things I hadn't done then. The unsteadiness of my footing. Versus now. It is for this that the talking about fatness is a metaphor.

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