Last week, I had the misfortune of encountering a hostile fat woman. I know, I know — for me to call someone fat is like the pot calling the kettle “cookware of color”. But there’s fat and there’s oh-my-God-get-out-of-her-way fat. This woman was big enough to send skinny people in search of solid objects to duck behind as she thundered past.

Some fat people wear their weight like mink coats: they bare it without reservation, dressing it up in clothes designed for much smaller people, tanning it in the summer and oiling it in the cold months. This woman wielded her fat like a weapon, moving people aside with her ass, planting her hands on her ample hips as she stood spread-footed with her belly thrust forward, like she was defying you to notice her size.

There is a stereotype about fat people being jolly. Like if you dressed us up in red and gave us a glass of egg nog we’d all turn into St. Nick. But as someone who’s fat I assure you I’m not happy about it, I’m just lazy. This woman also was not happy, and she seemed determined to make sure we all knew it.

One of the good things about being fat is that you tend not to wrinkle. (The other being ginormous cleavage which, if you’re a male, isn’t an advantage I suppose.) This woman? She’d clearly spent a lifetime scowling at the world, so deep were the crevices alongside her nose, the furrowed canyons that traveled her forehead.

With the overweight it’s always a chicken-and-egg question about which came first: the fat or the misery hiding behind it? Of course, there are some who insist their weight has nothing to do with what they eat or what psychic need they’re trying to feed; they were just born that way. After a few hours in this woman’s presence, I have no doubt she came out of the womb pissed off at the world. If it’s possible to gain weight by sucking the joy out of others, then that’s how she did it.

She had an uncanny ability to chew up even the most innocuous of pleasantries and spit out aspersions. The pattern became almost comically predictable: someone would make a comment on the beautiful fall weather we’re having, for instance, and the woman would bark that it’s proof we’re all going to die in a blizzard this winter.

One lady, tossing out a compliment the way lion tamers toss bloody meat to a snarling cat, admired the fat woman’s admittedly awesome shoes. She responded by noting that yes, she could see her feet, if that’s what everyone was wondering. Which we were not. What we were wondering was how much liquor it would take to turn her into a nice person, and whether we could afford the attempt.

Not that this was an open discussion, mind you; it was one silently held through a series of glances from the woman’s glass to the bar then back to our own drinks. In the end, we all tacitly agreed it would be easier to get ourselves blotto trying to cheer up that woman.

Around the fourth round of cocktails — or maybe it was the fifth, hard to say — a silence descended on our group the way it does sometimes among relative strangers. One minute everyone had been chattering, our voices rising to that shrill pitch drunk women get when we’re trying to be more interesting, more fascinating than those around us. The next we emitted a collective sigh followed by a chorus of “anyway”s (the sign we each knew we’d been talking too loud and too long). Then silence, while we all waited for someone else — anyone else — to take up the conversational slack.

And that’s when it happened: the crinkle.

Not a terribly loud crinkle, mind you, but a whiffling rustle made louder for coming amid that awkward conversational pause. A plastic, manufactured crinkle easily recognized by every mother in our group as the sound of a squished diaper. For those of us who doubted our ears, the bitter ammonia cloud wafting over us confirmed what our brains already knew.

Further confirmation came in the form of the fat woman’s swearing a stream of such original profanity that for a moment I felt more admiration than disgust. Then she struggled to her feet and revealed the wetness that had spread over her pants and chair and, I suspect, was working its way in rivulets of urine down the cellulite gullies of her thighs.

I’ve never seen a woman of her size move as fast as she did in the direction of the bathroom. This time the skinny women among us didn’t bother looking for things to duck behind, they just scattered to leave her a wide berth and, no doubt, to find dry ground.

Not surprisingly, we didn’t see the woman again that night. I assume she went home to clean up and change clothes, but I can’t say I care. After her departure the rest of us finally had a chance to enjoy our evening without her pissing all over our fun, both figuratively and literally.

Let me just assure you, there is indeed a moral here: it is one thing to have physical issues that are the equivalent of a disability and another to be an intolerable boor. You have a right to be respected and treated well regardless of the former, but the latter makes you fair game for laughs… especially when your adult diaper says what those around you had been thinking all night: piss off, bitch.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009, 9:58 am   |   My Venomous Life  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.