“Not knowing that I watched, fat men ate meat; fat man drank wine made of the rice; fat men sat on naked little girls.”
When asked what superpower I would like to have, I always used to respond with invisibility. I wanted access: to forbidden places, to people’s conversations when they thought I wasn’t there. I framed it for myself as an answer born out of a want to always know the truth, what did people really think about me, but I think it was (and is) mostly a narcissistic insecurity. My desire for the superpower hinged mostly on a desire to be proven right that people didn’t actually love me or my writing or my looks as much as they pretended they did to my face.
In sixth grade, I was friends with a girl who had my same first name and same birthday. She was small and ropey with gymnast muscle and downy soft brown hair. I was tall and chubby, my hair thick and strong. I was deeply jealous of her and her smallness, her seeming abandon. Katie took me to egg houses with her, she encouraged me to jump higher on the trampoline than was safe, to roll my cheerleading shorts up higher and higher, to talk shit about our friends.
Katie used to do this thing, on the phone. Along with Katie, the trick was spearheaded by J, the meanest girl in our friend group, who I now can see was just the one of us with the most difficult life at home. Once, her younger brother chased us around her house waving a knife menacingly at us. It was not like playing with my brother, I could see quickly. There was no adult around and there wouldn’t be for hours. Her brother was mean and his eyes glinted with real anger. I remember that he looked flinty and unreachable that day, the anger he had didn’t seem like normal kid anger, easily deflated. I remember real fear. I remember feeling a background wash of relief knowing that I could and would leave this house the next day and return to a house where the cupboards had food in them and my brother would never wave a knife at me that way. I have more sympathy for her now than I did then. It’s been like that growing up, I’ve gotten less harsh in my judgements, even if I only privately lessen the harshness.
The thing they would do was this: they would call each other (or, alternately, just Katie or just J would call another friend) and then three-way call a third friend. The third person who picked up the phone wouldn’t know they were on with both J and Katie and would think it was just one of the two. During the phone call, J or Katie would start to trash talk the other and ask the third caller to agree or add their own two cents. I remember it happening once to me. I don’t remember who exactly was one the phone with Katie but I remember that after I’d said some mean things, apparently enough to satiate their desire or enough to make me look bad, the other person piped up. I’ve been here the whole time. They both laughed and said they couldn’t believe I’d said those things, I was such a bitch. I remember the sinking feeling of hurting someone, the immediate realization that the words I said could mean something real to someone and they could mean something bad. They laughed about it but I can’t imagine they hadn’t really gotten their feelings hurt.
I had my own phone in my room, a purple and white cordless phone that meant I could talk and talk and talk in my bedroom, never even have to emerge into the kitchen to hang it up. It was another one of the ways that my bedroom could become my own little planet of hurt and longing and solitude. I think of those girls and what drove them to make those calls. I should say us girls, really, because although it hadn’t been my idea, I’d go on to have other worse ideas about how to alienate people, how to gossip about friends, how to leave them out of sleepovers and parties and adventures, how to quietly knife someone in the back. Maybe what we’d wanted was just some superpowers, more than one. Super-strength: call me anything you want, say anything about me, I am hard as ice, unbeatable, so much more metal and steel than you ever could be. Invisibility: you won’t know I’m here, though I’m here, I’ll get the truth through the 2002 magic of three way phone calls.
I wish I could go back there, to myself in the magenta pink bedroom of my house, to my room full of cottage-style furniture painted a milky white, to my 5-disc cd player playing an almost inexplicable combination of Outkast and church songs, to myself feeling too fat and too ugly to ever be real social threat to anyone. I wish I could tell her that things would get hard enough without manufacturing the difficulty for yourselves. There will be days when you overhear things you wish you never had, days when you will have to be a woman made of metal to just make it through. I wish I could say, you are doing it to yourselves, you are doing to yourselves what the world wants you to do. You are turning against yourselves. But I can’t make it back there. And besides, despite the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, at the time I would have sworn it was just a fun meaningless trick, no matter how many times you asked.
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