Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “La Gorda: A Speculative Exploration” by Ainhoa Palacios. Ainhoa is an emerging Peruvian-American writer splitting her time between Colorado and Florida. She is a fiction candidate in Colorado State University’s MFA program. Her writing explores themes of growing up between cultures, identity, and family. Her work has previously appeared in Somos En Escrito, Lumiere Review, and Suspot Literary Journal. She is currently at work on a short story collection.
The story goes you were born 12 pounds and out of a woman shorter than five feet, that poor woman. When Abue told the story, she called you un bodoque. According to Collins dictionary, a small ball. A lump, a swelling. You were the first of seven. The biggest of the seven.
The size of you was impressive. Abue had only one way to describe you and it was wordless. Instead, she inhaled deep and puffed her cheeks out wide. Her eyes widening like she’d seen a ghost, but what she’d seen was you, and from your first day of life, you were given the nickname: Gorda.
Gorda as endearment. Gorda as a joke. Gorda as irony.
Ironic: you’d spend your life being called the very thing you feared most.
*
There is no distinct memory. No weather, or outfit—not yours or mine—not even a location that I can remember. Nothing marks this moment and yet I know it to be true with the same certainty I know your name, my name, and if I try hard enough, I can feel your palm smacking on my belly once more. I can hear the sound of flesh on flesh, see your squinting eyes glaring my way. Your words—mete la pansa—will never leave me. Suck in your belly. Belly is the appropriate word to use when addressing a child. A four-year old. Four-year-olds have bellies.
*
You must be 9. Perhaps 10. Tio Paco tries to place himself in time geographically. Were you living in Tarma or Lima? When geography doesn’t help, he turns to the living. Your two youngest brothers are yet to be born, which means you are living in the liminal. The space between an absentee father and a padrastro who is yet to arrive. If only Abue had sent you away sooner, I wonder. Would that have shielded you from the men who would find you pretty or only expedited your arrival into the claws of another?
If only in this photo your body was still your own.
*
When I am twelve, I am a gymnast. I spend my puberty in a gymnasium. Four hours a day, five days a week, all devoted to grimacing through v-ups, pushups, and hollow body holds. Our coach always saves conditioning for the end of practice so that if we’ve had a good practice, perhaps, we can skip a set of handstand presses. All that conditioning does something to my growing body. It makes every muscle so tight and firm that I look like one of those Greek sculptures. Your words, not mine. More of your words: look at her arms; touch them, touch them. You encourage your friends and visiting family— all strangers to me—to look for my six-pack. To poke them while my face flushes.
The funny thing: none of them are as in awe of my muscles as you.
*
When I am thirteen, I quit gymnastics. I quit because I grow frustrated, bored, because I crave nothing more than normal teenagedom.
Normal teenagedom as defined by me: crashing on the couch for three episodes of Boy Meets World with whatever snack I can conjure from our bare kitchen. I do this for a year.
It is only when I see a photo of myself in the yearbook that I see what you see. That I understand why you’ve started to look at me twice before I leave the house. The weariness in your eyes makes sense now.
My A cups and size 0 jeans are no longer.
*
I think it’s safe to say by now you were already a survivor. Even if nobody knew.
I only muster the courage to ask Tio Paco once. He isn’t sure, and so I let it go. I decide you were. I decide you didn’t tell anyone and so I shouldn’t either.
Tio Paco says this was your favorite trip. All over the south of Peru. I imagine it was around this time you began daydreaming of leaving your beautiful Peru. Heading to Spain where opportunity seemed abundant, where survivors could do more than survive.
My entire childhood, I listened to passing comments on the way you struggled with your weight. My entire childhood, I wondered where the proof of that struggling was.
I do not see this photo until I am requesting images of you for a speculative project. Is this what you meant by struggling?
*
Immediately, I come to you for help. How is it I know you will come to my rescue? And you do as you stand beside me while I climb on the scale, and we subtract one number from the other and together quantify my failure. It is sixteen pounds that I’ve gained.
Your advice is simple: No eating past 6 p.m. It is the golden rule you landed on many years ago when you had your own large share of pounds to shed.
The golden rule in detail: when the cravings hit, make a plate. Put everything you want to eat on that plate. Wrap it in saran wrap and place it back in the fridge. Cut a deal with yourself—if you still want it in the morning, you can eat it then. The trick is so obvious and so cruel.
*
More than anything, I want the time stamp.
Was it 5:59 p.m.?
8:04 p.m.?
10:35 a.m.?
*
Your rule works. Sixteen becomes twelve, and twelve becomes nine, and nine becomes six. Or a number like it.
Just a few more pounds to lose and you can look at me with pride once more.
*
Tio Victor remembers. It is May 1980. You are 21.
Right around the age Tio Paco remembers no te artabas de comer pasteles y despues vomitabas. If I’d never asked about your body, he’d never have told me, and I’d never have known.
At first, I am shocked. Then amused. I laugh. It must’ve had to do with the culture, I reason. With the 80s. Perhaps back then it was acceptable to purge publicly. Perhaps, that is why you never bothered to intervene in my own purging. Perhaps, you reasoned, I was right where I was supposed to be: in womanhood.
*
When I can’t seem to lose the last few pounds, you call it a plateau.
The way through a plateau is not with hiking boots but with my older sister’s leftover diet pills. The ones you helped acquire for her, in fact, paid for.
The only way through a plateau is with dedication and perseverance and amphetamines.
*
The story goes, the one you never really told me—or was it the one I never really asked?—Carlos owned the restaurant down the road. You’d met him years before. So had Tio Paco. Back when he’d been married to a gringa who would leave him and take their two daughters with her. That those two daughters also ended up in Florida is not part of this story, and yet I can never mention them without pointing out the coincidence.
If you were here now, I’d ask what attracted you to my father. Was it his style? Those bell bottoms and deep V? Perhaps it was his dancing? Someone somewhere told me he was a great dancer. He also had a great smile. A charming smile— it was the gringa who confirmed it on the phone years ago.
Whatever it was, you halted your plans to leave Peru and make your way to Spain. With Carlos, you were going to build a family. A life.
I know mentioning him might seem out of place right now, but I know where the story is going. I know what my father will tell you, call you, do to you—at least I’ve imagined it countless times—but in this photo, I choose to believe you were happy. In love.
*
Here is what 1200 calories a day looks like:
½ cup of oatmeal with a child-sized handful of nuts & blueberries.
½ cup of cottage cheese & 1 medium-sized apple.
1 chicken salad w/o dressing.
½ cup of carrot sticks & 1 hard-boiled egg & 4 whole wheat crackers.
Black coffee, no sugar, no creamer.
2 shrimp tacos w/o any creamy dressing of sorts.
The amphetamine-induced nausea makes it difficult to chew anyway.
I spend most of my night running on the treadmill anyway.
*
The timeline of your love is fuzzy like this photo. How many years passed before Brianna arrived and you realized the alcoholic in him would be forever?
When I ask Tio Paco, he tells me to ask Tio Victor. Tio Victor doesn’t really know. Would anyone?
I decide you always knew.
*
I am 15 when I begin taking your car for joyrides and secretly defy you. Typical teenager.
The only difference between every teenager and me: I don’t sneak into abandoned buildings or boy’s bedrooms but rather the Dunkin Donuts drive-through. I order munchkins because they satisfy my craving for variety—blueberry and chocolate and raspberry stuffed— but what about old-fashioned donuts? What about the strawberry-iced ones? I get them all.
Other nights, I go to Steak N’ Shake. Not the one near our house, not the one that I work at, but the one a couple miles down Brandon Blvd. where the nightshift crew won’t recognize me. I order a Frisco melt and French fries with honey mustard. Mint cookies & cream shake, extra thick.
I order all the things I never let myself eat in front of people.
Some nights when I return home, I vomit quietly because my rebellion can never quite overtake my compulsion for validation.
*
As a little girl, I liked to do the math. If Brianna came first, and by then Carlos was already an alcoholic, I grinned, calculating the years, how could I have come four years later?
What I was asking: why did you make me with a man you no longer loved?
Your cheeky grin confirmed what I already knew. What you wanted most was to be a mother of two, and at 36, you didn’t have the time to fall in love again.
What else I know—as in deduce— as in guess—you didn’t want: the extra 60 pounds you gained with motherhood.
Somewhere around this time, my father will have pinned you down on a table with his hands around your throat. Your C-section scar will only be a few days fresh. You should be resting but instead, in words I will never truly quote perfectly, words I have translated so many times into countless stories—you will say, kill me motherfucker because if you don’t, I’ll kill you.
Around this time, you call him an alcolico de mierda.
His response is one you’d cling to. Worry about your own problem: your weight.
*
Ages 16 to 17 are spent tiptoeing out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. They are spent avoiding eye contact as I fix myself the only acceptable evening snack according to you: a bowl of cereal. The laundry room, an area just beyond the kitchen, is the space I use to fill my hoodie pockets with the unacceptable snacks. Slices of bread slathered with globs of margarine. I fold the bread in half to keep my hoodie pockets clean.
You sit in the living room pretending not to see but even if your eyes never meet mine, your attention fills the room, and your judgement suffocates it.
Years later, Brianna will tell me about the calls you’d make to her. “She’s hiding food in her room.” We laugh at how concerned you were.
*
You take my father’s advice to heart. It is not discipline but vengeance that wins after all.
After the second pregnancy, after me, you’ve mastered the trick you will teach me when I face my own weight gain and am petrified of it.
*
See, it’s true. All those years later and not a single pound heavier.
*
And then you begin to die. And suddenly, through every conversation we have, you’re asking about what meal I will have next. It is as if you’ve completely forgotten about all the meals you told me not to have.
You ask “what are you going to eat baby?”
“I’m not sure,” I say knowing you will tell me what to get. What you want me to get. What you would get if only your new diet wasn’t so strict. Stricter than the golden rule.
“That salad from Wendy’s sounds good, no?” you say.
I ignore the irony and drive through Wendy’s on your behalf. These days, everything you say is a dying wish. I ask for a Southwest Salad only they no longer make them.
*
How it is that even when your belly begins growing, the rest of you is still shrinking?
*
What you don’t do before you die is tell me you were wrong. That to spend waste your entire life chasing one number is wrong.
How badly: I need that. I wish for that. I imagine that.
My imagination:
“Baby, I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“I made a mistake. Don’t be like me. Don’t spend your life fighting your body.”
(I would’ve fought you. I would’ve said you didn’t waste anything. I would’ve said your life was precious. It needed to be.)
“No, no. Baby, listen,” you would have persisted because I needed you to. “Look at me now. All that worrying for what? To end up on this bed?”
You would try to lift your arm but even that would take too much effort.
*
If only you’d stopped shrinking.
*
But this never happens. You simply die.
No big conversation. No last words. No sage advice.
And I am left to recreate this conversation in the corners of my mind. To be both your persecutor and defendant.
She fucked us up, I’ll tell Brianna. She did the best she could, I’ll tell myself. I’m not so sure she would have loved me if I was fat. To be fair, the world wouldn’t love me if I were either. She was only protecting me.
That’s it, I decide. You were only protecting me in the best way you knew how.
Thank you all for taking the time to read my work. This piece was so very special to me as. it includes images of my mom. It means the world to me that you've all connected to it in some way.
This was beautiful and crushing.