Fat Arms
There is one Jewish deli in town and it is run by a family where all the women have arms the size of small tree trunks. They slice deli meat and bagels and their skin swings back and forth, hanging down from their bones like drapes. People come from all over town to see their arms and eat their food. We usually go on Sundays. I imagine climbing into the folds of their soft skin and sleeping for days. That must be what comfort feels like. My mom thinks the women are obscene. She never says it out loud, but she looks at my sixteen-year-old arms with the same eyes. I want to shout that my ancestors were big and tough and fat, with giant hands making bread during the day and playing piano at night. My mom never lets me leave the house without a sweater. People forget things so quickly.
It seems like most people come to Florida to leave something behind—the cold, their family, the law. It gets a bad rap, but what do you expect from a former penal colony where the swamps produce animals that look like dinosaurs. The deli is always full of people I never see elsewhere, maybe don’t even speak their language or know their customs. My parents never socialize with gentiles. They like to posture that they are better than them, but I think they’re just scared. I never understand what they are scared of. We usually eat Jewish food at home or at Shul, but this deli is crawling with gentiles. It makes me feel electric, everybody loves bagels.
It sure is full today. Some families, a few couples, one woman sitting alone. Luckily my dad smokes a lot. So when my mom is waiting in line at the deli counter, admiring how skinny she is in the mirrors lining the walls, my dad is outside smoking, and me and my brother can be left alone with the world. To observe how things are for other people. Maybe they’re better.
The woman sitting in the corner alone is pretty. Large curly hair, a red sweater that’s falling off her shoulders, and she’s smiling as she eats. Her smile is so beautiful and there’s nobody around her to see it. Except me, I guess. I wonder what she’s thinking about. Maybe it’s all the cream cheese. Maybe she’s got a boyfriend at home, or a girlfriend. What is she doing here alone? She doesn’t look afraid.
Do you know that feeling when your real self is somewhere way deep down inside of you? That if you could be alone in a cold spring, where it is safe, and you could undress under the water and take a microscope to your middle, you’d find something marvelous? But that right now with your dad smoking, anger escaping his lips with each breath, and your mom, who’d be a Nazi if it made her more popular, you have to keep it all inside you. They don’t deserve to know what I have inside of me. They don’t like me, they never have. So when he’s outside and she’s in the line, I get to look at this woman and wonder if she’d like me. Would we get along? Would she let me wear boy clothes and paint my nails black? Would I be able to lie on her shag rug carpet with my legs relaxed, not worrying what she is going to do to me when it gets dark?
The line is really long today and my brother is immersed in a book like always, and so it’s just me and I can’t help but stare at this beautiful woman and the cream cheese in the corner of her mouth. But then she looks up. As if she can hear my inner thoughts. We lock eyes and I go to turn away but I can’t. That deep down in me won’t let me look away. Her eyes get big and her chewing slows and she puts her bagel down without moving her eyes from mine. And just as I see my dad stub out his cigarette and reach for the door, and my mom put the change back in her purse, the woman says something. At first, I can’t hear above the deli noises of slicing and chatting and coffee refills. And as my parents head to my table, I have one last chance to hear the beautiful woman, so I furrow my brow and crane my neck forward and just as she is eclipsed by my parents, I hear it: “Go through the closet door.”
“Food’s still not here, Jesus,” he says.
“It’s your fault we left so late from the house,” she says. And suddenly we are back in the tension of their terribleness, where the only way to not sink is to be a floating device, so I say something about the food being out soon and it’s so nice to have this tradition. Anything to stop the collision of two people who hate each other almost as much as they hate me. And then a swinging, beautiful, soft arm swoops in my view and drops off our food and the adults can be satisfied and I can remember to take a breath. I look back to the beautiful woman in red but she’s gone. A bite of a bagel left on her plate. Red lip stain on her napkin. Her purse no longer on the chair.
My brother never has to stop reading, but I am expected to have my eyes up, which makes it hard to escape. I wait until my parents start talking badly about a couple who lives down our street. “They don’t have children.” “Ugh, new money.” I’m not sure what makes the age of money better or worse, but my parents light up when they are talking badly about others. It’s the one thing that brings them together. And so I whisper that I’m going to the bathroom and they nod, but don’t look my way, and I slip off the crunchy plastic chairs, and confidently head towards the bathroom at the end of the deli. I try to walk as nonchalantly as possible. Bobbing my hips up and down, even clasping my hands behind my back, which I never do. It feels so odd, but my body always feels odd.
I’m a klutz, always running into things, so I am concentrating hard as I squeeze through the tables of patrons, until I get to the back of the deli and stand in front of the bathroom and pretend that it’s in use. In reality I haven’t checked, but nobody is going to question me. I am in a theater class in school and it’s paying off right now. I do one of those turns that you do when you’re waiting in line, to keep yourself from being too bored. I make the first turn but I move too fast to see if the closet is behind me. I wait another few seconds before turning again, this time slower, like, Oh boy, this person in the bathroom is taking so long! In a half-blur I see a small brass label nailed to the door that says “closet.” I look towards my parents and they are eating and talking and not looking my way, so I think to myself, what’s the harm? My parents would never make a big fuss here in public. If anything, I’ll get punished back at home. But that seems to happen no matter what I do, so fuck it.
I turn around again and without pausing I grasp the knob and swoop the closet door open and quickly shut it behind me. I’m inside and it’s pitch dark. Oh, wait. My eyes are shut, tighter than I’ve ever shut them before. And before I dare open them, I smell something wonderful. It’s like if you were deep in the forest, and there were trees with peeling bark, and the grass was kinda wet, and it was night, so there was a bit of a coolness. That’s what it smells like, and it makes me want to open my eyes. It makes me feel good inside. Like this is a place I want to be. And so I do. I open my eyes.
You can’t even call it a closet. It’s more of a space that just keeps going. On and on and on, forever. And it’s filled with soft, supple, fat bodies. Just one after the other. And they are draped over one another. On the floor, and on couches, and lying in hammocks hanging from the ceiling; fat women fill the space. And none of them seem to notice me. Or at least, they don’t seem bothered by me. No scowls, no confusion. Their eyes look towards me and keep going, some smile, others make their eyes soft. And at the very end of the long vast space, I see her. The beautiful woman in red. She’s so far away it feels impossible to get to her, but before I know what’s happening, I’m moving. And as I move through the space, the fat women continue to give me looks that make me feel like I am allowed to be here. I walk and my body moves closer to their bodies, and I even brush them with my arms as I pass. Their skin is cool and it makes me feel the inside of my body. For the first time maybe ever, I can feel my breath inside of my chest. Have you felt that before? It’s like the smell of the cool forest, but inside. I can even feel my toes in my shoes. Each toe touches the bottom of my shoe as I walk, and my socks feel warm. I rub my fingertips together and each finger feels different, and as I continue down, past the soft women and their fat arms, I start to grow taller. Every few steps, I grow an inch taller and suddenly I am huge and I take up just as much space as the women here. I walk and grow and my sweater falls off, until I’m standing in front of the beautiful woman in the red sweater.
Teens my age love to touch each other and kiss each other, and I have always felt that I’d rather barf. I’d rather eat a bag of chips, drive to the shoreline, paint scraps of paper, play the radio as loud as I can. But now, as I stand so tall, taller than the beautiful woman, and so big, my arms cool, like I could swear the ocean was nearby, and with my toes rubbing against each other, I want to grab her face and put my lips on her lips. I want to put my arms around her body and lift her up and say let’s go. Let’s make our own closet and make our own smells, and—can I put my face in your hair and kiss your neck? But I don’t say any of that, I just look into her eyes and she says, “You made it.” And I ask her, “What’s your name?” And she says, “That doesn’t matter.” And I say, “Can I be with you forever, and live here? With you and all these women and all these arms?” And she answers a different question. “Did you know that this is also life?” She takes my hand into hers and I want to pass out on the cool floor and scream! I want to roll around and put my face into one of the women’s arms and I want to lick the inside of my palms to taste something salty.
With our hands intertwined, she leads me through the space past different groups of women. Bodies lying on top of each other reading books. Interlocked arms doing some kind of dance. Palms and shoulders hoisting each other up towards the sky. We weave and weave, and I swear we see bodies in every configuration I can imagine and people talk but it’s hard to hear, like there’s cotton in my ears. And then suddenly I hear the beautiful woman say, “You know that this is also life,” but this time it’s not a question, and the smell of wet bark turns to sliced meat and I’m mid circle, turning back towards the bathroom at the end of the deli.
I feel dizzy. I grab at my chest because I’m not sure if I’m breathing, but actually I’m breathing so clearly I don’t even have to do anything. It’s just happening. Then something wet hits my hand and this time I go into the actual bathroom and when I look at the mirror I’m crying. I’m not sad I don’t think. I’m a little scared of what might happen when I return to the table with those people I have to call family. I’d rather go right back through the closet door but just as I think that thought, I buckle. I know that the closet door won’t open again. I know, like I really know, that it won’t. And this knowing, that lives deep down, below my heart, somewhere in my stomach, makes my body feel big again. I look back in the mirror but I am still at my regular size. I am crying and covering my arms back up with my sweater, but I can tell that the inside of me is bigger than it was before. And I know that when I step out of this bathroom and back into the deli, that when I go home and the night comes, that there exists this bigness inside of me, this knowing that could fill a million closets. The most giant cave that is two buildings tall, that is soft, that is only mine, that will never go away.
Leo is a queer, jewish, multi-genre writer and filmmaker. They have an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin where they also taught. Their fiction appears in Terrazzo Mag and their films have screened at SXSW, Locarno, Hot Springs, and on PBS. Leo lives in Los Angeles where they can be found making soup, painting, and singing their favorite songs out loud.