When I was five, I gave the camera my favorite smile.  It is an open-mouthed display case of tongue, sandwiched between two rows of small white teeth whose edges just barely peek from behind stretched lips- looking the way any smile of pure, unadulterated joy should look.

I like the smile, because the little girl to whom it belongs is five.  She is still perhaps two years away from commencing the building of a monument she will admire, come to idolize, and eventually sacrifice herself to.  It is the image of a thin person.

I actually can't remember not being heavy as a child.  Food was simply the greatest comfort to me during my tumultuous time in school and at home; and although I gained weight steadily from elementary school onward, it was at that time that I began to long for thinness.

When I was seven and in the third grade, lunch at our elementary school was quite ordinary.  We slid yellow foam trays along a grooved metal track, as an assembly line of middle-aged women wearing sour expressions heaped food onto our trays.  At the end of the line waited a cashier, to whom we would hand the money our parents had counted out for us that morning.

But none of this is important.  What is important here is the poster tacked to a door behind the cashier.  It is a photograph of a girl of normal elementary school age, drinking milk and looking up into a long oval mirror.  What looks back at her from the mirror is not her own image, but what she supposedly will become by drinking the milk: a woman who is tall, beautiful, and- most importantly- very slim.  Each day, that woman on the poster whispered in my mind, "If you want to be like me, you have to be thin!"

I looked at that woman- and drank my milk- every day for the three years I ate in that lunchroom.  But somehow, I did not look like her when I graduated from Sylvia Rosenauer Elementary School.

     "Ew, it's Betsy the Cow!" two girls exclaimed when we were in the seventh grade, having decided on my new nickname while following me from the lunchroom back to class.

     "Hello-o-o, fat girl!" greeted me when I walked into class on the first day of high school.

I'd just taken a seat in art class the first day of my sophomore year of high school, when a student entered and asked the teacher the location of something they'd made.

     "It's over there," Mrs. Allaire answered.  "Right behind the dumpy girl with no waist."  I turned around in my seat to watch the student walk just behind me and retreive their pottery.

Somehow, though, the things I heard at home hurt the worst.

     "This is Chess!" my sister would squeal, thrusting her four-year old stomach forward and trying her hardest to waddle.  My mother affectionately but unthinkingly called me "Meaty Merita."  My father's plan of encouragement to lose weight involved eyeing me at every meal; every helping, every dash of Parmesan cheese or squirt of syrup, he inventoried- and he made sure I knew it.  He humiliated me in public, thinking I would change.  I responded to him, and to all the correspondents at school, by retreating further into my room, my books, and my beadwork; but the "thin-is-good-fat-is-bad" message followed me even there.

It was not, however, until college that I decided to take action, having seen firsthand the most damning evidence that being thin brought you boys, friends, and happiness.  Rutgers introduced me to my freshman year roommate, Sara.  She was 5' 7", with blond hair and porcelain skin; she had a sprinkling of minute freckles across her nose and cheeks that an artist could not have placed more skillfully.  She also had a svelte figure she constantly lamented, and a modeling portfolio that somehow was always within easy reach whenever someone asked to see it.

After the first couple of months I'd made a few friends, but the door resounded night and day with requests for Sara.  Anytime the visitor was male, the exchange went like this:

     "Hi, is Sara here?"

     "No, I'm sorry, she's not."

     "Oh...okay.  Just tell her I came by."

No guy ever came to see me but I was sure that some might show up if I lost some weight.  I started that January, exercising moderately and eating less.  That summer, I got together with friends from college to visit New York, and a week later received a letter from one of them.  The words "You look fabulous!"  were inserted amongst her summer.  I was silently pleased, and pulled on my sneakers for another hour of kickboxing.

Sophomore year started, and my new vegetarian roommate Kim was a substitute for Sara.  She had a boyfriend, and a habit of taking diet pills when she did not want to eat.  Her lithe frame always discouraged me, although she herself was encouraging and supportive.  I stopped drinking soda, eating French fries, and began running with Kim at night before bed.

At the beginning of junior year, I'd lost 50 pounds, and bought my first red shirt, having always hidden myself in shades of blue.  And although the compliments flew left and right, I felt that something wasn't quite right.  Where were the dates?  The crowds of friends?  Why wasn't I happy?

Kim moved out of our room and out of my life that October, and I was crushed.  I must not be thin enough, I decided.  During that fall semester, my other two roommates dubbed me the "Exercise Queen."  In the spring they dropped the endearment and called me the "Exercise Psycho."  I didn't care what they thought anymore, and began counting calories and fat grams.

"Chess, please don't lose any more weight," Olga, a friend since middle school, said to me in an email after a visit a couple of summers ago.  I'd lived vicariously through her in middle and high school, as she with her 5'9" and thin figure, rejected strings of admirers and attended all the parties I was never invited to.  I emailed her a month later:

     "Too late."

My senior year of college has begun, and I weigh less now than I did in the fifth grade.  But I have found the one responsible for my social troubles- my social phobia, my crippling shyness.  She is the one who won't let me raise my hand in class, and not the extra pounds I carried.  For years, I'd stayed in my room on Friday nights, Saturday nights, afraid of what would happen if I left the safety of my room and my books.  I was hostile to every guy I met, clinging to the memories of their ridicule in grade school.

     "Chess, you push people away," my mom tells me often.  "You make it impossible for people to get close to you."  I know now that she is right; for although my younger sister is somewhat more padded than I, she is the life of any party, and has a boyfriend only found in fairy tales.  I can see my ribs, but have yet to go out on my first date.

I know now what I wish I'd known years ago.  But out of an uncomfortably comfortable habit, I still ask myself daily: Am I thin enough yet?

I ask you, who are most assuredly a better judge than I, to tell me: When does one choke on too much of a good thing?

I think...I might...be "back."    *fingers crossed*

I've not neglected to write for lack of time or willingness or sentiment to express,

but because

the song

in my heart and mind and viscera is now

 a dirge, to which

 I don't know

the words.

Currently Reading:

-Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten

-"The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism," by Homi K. Bhabba

And for dessert...

-Golden Stud, by Lance Horner

-Cell, by Stephen King

The first two give me agida, the second two...don't.  I dunno.  I'm not feeling too witty tonight.

For you viewing or scanning or ignoring pleasure...the first two paragraphs of a paper, the last one I'll ever have to write as a college undergrad.  The one and only assignment whose incompletion has kept me from that most coveted and elusive of items: the college diploma.  Every time I approach the material and the theory it's like climbing into the boxing ring alone, and I already know the only person around to battle, to batter, is me.

To use the phrase "processes of representation" acknowledges that gendered subjects are continually constructed and re-constructed over the course of a text. The discourses, then, occupying space within these subjects also remain under construction until the end of a text. The sense of fluidity expressed in textual representations comes into opposition with the notion of "fixity" Homi K. Bhabba uses in his text "The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism." Bhabba suggests that constructions of "otherness" in colonial texts are perpetuated by their adherence to "fixity." He claims that fixity simultaneously "connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition" (Bhabba 66). This simultanaeity of fluidity and fixity thus serves to create ambivalence within the figures of a text.

Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel Nigger Heaven was described as engaging in a "progressive discourse that sought greater understanding between the races" (Pfeiffer ix). The novel sought not necessarily erasure of or even intervention in these stereotypes as much as "understanding," an absolute truth impossible to find in a book of ever-changing representations. If, as Bhabba suggests, "[Colonial discourse] seeks authorization for its strategies by the production of knowledges of colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated," and if this authorization is produced through what he defines as a tension between the "fixed" and mutable— through the ambivalence of the stereotype— then any text claiming that it proffers or is intended to promote "understanding" is engaged, ultimately, in a "fixing" of identity rather than destabilizing the ideologies of racism, sexism, or homophobia. In this essay, I will examine two moments which will "reflect" the tensions produced by the ambivalence in these processes of representation, and the effects produced by this tension.

P.S. - I did make it the entire week, without breaking down.  Friday was the hardest because the day was spent on campus within yards of my old haunts -the grocery and convenience stores just off campus- where they all knew me when I walked in the door.  The first six hours were spent under supervision, working and presenting my TA with draft after draft of the paper whose beginnings you see above.  The last sliver of an hour (so unevenly divided was the day!) I spent with the only friend who makes me miss being on-campus, and I value that much more than food. 

P.P.S.  Some moments of silence or contemplation or a "gee, that's too bad," are in order for Don Knotts, Darren McGavin, and Dennis Weaver-- three great actors, all of whom passed away in the space of two days (February 24th-25th) and whose works I hope endure.