Up, Up, Up

by Katherine Grasso

Hamza Baig

An image: a digital timer above my head. The numbers ticking upward, the red digits rolling.

*

In elementary school my mom bought me a dark purple leotard for ballet class. I hated the way it made my hips look. I tried it on in the kitchen without my usual pink tights, stood there, looking down at my pale skin, the yellowed linoleum a blur in the background. It was cut so high that when I développéd my leg I could see the fold of skin between my thigh and hip (even Barbie has it). Revolted and angry, I grabbed two fistfuls of eggplant cotton, one under my armpit, one near my hip bone, and yanked it as hard as I could. The stitches in the seam popped, bursting open to show the ripples of my ribcage.

*

In the Kingsbury Middle School bathroom, I stood with my peers performing the girlhood rite of passage. Girls thinner than me whined about being so fat. And I, in front of girls larger than me, complained about being so fat. And we’d already learned from the women in our lives to just wait ’til you’re older.

It will get worse?

I learned quickly. My body is a life sentence. A never-ending walk in soft sand. An unwanted companion. Go away. Other women have been quick to condemn calories as the enemy, to share the secrets to slow the signs that we are merely human — lots of water, of course, this serum, this cream, leafy greens, special teas, no sugar, no carbs, discipline, denial.

Inevitably, we fail. We’ve been failing from the start.

*

Meanwhile, the timer in my mind keeps track. The numbers dutifully moving up. My precious time. Time devoted to my body; labelling it, criticizing it, hating it, wishing it away. The seconds climbing, even as I type.

*

I look out onto my classroom of Gen Z undergrads. Enthusiastic, they switch between different colored pens to take notes. They sit in the same seats, even though seats are not assigned. They crinkle their noses in confusion, laugh at a select handful of my jokes, raise their hands — not above their heads, but in front of their shoulders — to share examples or ask questions. Some show up in pajamas. Others have spent much more time getting ready — wearing winged eyeliner, hair curled with a 2-inch barrel iron. My class is a sliver of their day; I am happy they are here. They are athletes or work part-time jobs. They commute. They help care for siblings, they are club presidents. They’re anxious, they’re lonely. And they are, for the most part, doing their best. I ask them to write about how the media make them feel about themselves. And they tell me they’re suffering. We’re all wasting so much time.

*

But time. Time’s relative. Time means different things in different places. Running late to an appointment in Bilbao, Spain? No problema. It’s just time after all. A sign in my counselor’s office warns if you don’t cancel an appointment at least 24 hours in advance, you’ll be charged $95. Here, time is money. Pay up. My question: In what culture is it okay that I use my time to contemplate the width of my thighs and the untoned flab on my arms? Is this the price I pay?

I hate my acne. I’m too short. I had an eating disorder all through middle school. I bought a waist trainer, but it hurts to wear it for very long. I wish my hair was shiny. I’ve followed every diet I can find, but they don’t work. I hate how tall I am. I need a boob job. I’m not strong enough. I buy clothes three sizes too big because I still don’t believe I deserve to wear fitted clothing.

I spent a couple of hours grading their essays. But what about their time? Their precious time. They are in class, taking notes with teal and pink pens; in their dorms, surrounded by patterned duvets and twinkly lights; in their cars drinking iced coffee. Hating themselves.

But why am I surprised?

*

My younger sister is trilingual, a solo world traveler, and every dog she’s ever encountered has been drawn to her. When my beagle Jacob was dying she was the only one who could get him to eat. She fed him his last meals out of the palm of her hand. The other morning, she stood in our bathroom, smoothed her stomach with those same hands, and said with a bit of distant embarrassment, “I’m considered plus size.” We’ve done this our whole lives. In between jobs and degrees and travels and time with loved ones, there’s always time to despair over our misfortune of being born with a body. We look at old pictures, backdrops of natural hot springs, the Duomo di Milano, the Nicaraguan surf, the golden hills of Tuscany, and all we can see are our bodies. Our flaws. They are synonymous.

*

So, let’s calculate the hours on the digital timer. I know, I know. I can’t go back and get a do-over. I can’t recover the past. I just want to know what’s been lost. Spent. Here’s a starting calculation. An hour a day since I was 10 puts me at 8,030 hours. That’s a lot. And also, that’s not even close. Could it be possible that somehow every waking hour counts? 16 hours/day for 21 years = 122,640 hours. This assumes sleep doesn’t count. But just the other night I dreamt that I was walking behind myself, burning with shame because of how wide I looked. So, somewhere between 8,030 and 122,640 hours.

Although I haven’t logged the hours I’ve spent having sex, I know many have been spent observing my body like an uninvited third party. Never mind how I feel or what I want, but does he think I look okay? Decent? Will he notice the dimples on my butt? The softness of my hips? The way my stomach pudges when I sit up? I consider positions. No, not positions. Poses. I’m posing. For him.

*

I’m posing for them.

I stand in front of my classes about 12 hours per week, 30 weeks per year. I walk into every lecture with a side-by-side set of reels in my head. From one, the lecture unspools. From the other, running simultaneously, my inner critic unloads her concerns. I explain intersectional feminism and when I turn to write out the notes on the board I wonder, can they see my cellulite? I ask about their experiences with sexism. I point to students whose hands are raised and listen to their comments and connect them to the material. When I turn to erase the board I worry that if I erase with too much zeal, my body will jiggle and shake. In some ways, I just don’t want them to see me at all. But there I am. Front and center. Neither professor nor scholar nor mentor. I shift my weight, press my hips back, suck in my stomach. I am an unruly body, heavy with disappointment. They must think I’m out of control.

*

That’s the thing. We. Must. Stay. In. Control.

*

Salmonella has never scared me. Last Christmas I bought a package of cookie dough to make cookies for my neighbors. I ate the dough faster than I could form it into shiny, round globs and drop them onto an ungreased baking sheet. I bought another package. For cookies. For my neighbors. I ate it all again. Every raw bite was sublime — gritty sugar, firm chocolate chips, buttery goodness. And every swallow confirmed my truth — I’m fat, gross, out of control. It’s not just the shameful trips to the refrigerator to eat, bit by bit, a roll of premade cookie dough that consumes my thoughts. It’s every meal. The lead up: What will I eat? What’s too much? Have I earned it? And as I’m eating: I hope this will fill me up. This is too much food. This is so good. I’m a slob. And the after: Is it gone already? Was it worth the calories? What’s next? I watch the clock and will time to pass. Can I eat yet?

There is a scene in the movie The Time Traveler’s Wife when the main character, Clare Abshire, played by Rachel McAdams, is shown sitting up out of bed and the audience can see the smooth ripple of her ribcage. There’s a torrid desire in me to have visible bones like that. Not just my ribs, but my hipbones, collarbones. But my body does not follow my orders.

Neither does my appetite.

*

They say we are 60% water, but this is hard to picture. Especially when I see so much of me. To consider this, I close my eyes and imagine my insides are liquid, held by the shell of my soft skin. I see an algae-covered pond, an icy alpine lake, a salty ocean. A tsunami. I think of water pooling over my open palms, pouring neatly from my ears when I tilt my head.

I went on a celery cleanse in middle school. I’d learned that foods that were high in water content were the key to losing weight. Learned that I’d burn more calories than the stalks contained, just by chewing them. I daydreamed about how I’d feel once I had a smaller body. Spent an hour chopping the celery into piles of short sticks, portioning them into small plastic bags. I made it about four hours, gripping those stalks, snapping off watery bites, as if dull green could describe a flavor. Then I gave up and slathered crunchy peanut butter on each.

I suppose I wanted to be more water, more nothing. Less of everything else.

*

The hallways of my middle school had scratchy blue carpet. If you dragged your feet, you’d get shocked when you touched a door knob. I remember the hallways more vividly than the classrooms, the most important lessons in adolescent navigation happening on that sea of blue. I was thirteen, my parents had taken me to the DMV to get an ID card and I was showing it to my friends. For the only time in my life I was honest about my weight on my ID. 104 pounds? My friend exclaimed. You’re so lucky! Since, the number has steadily risen. Up, up, up. I consider putting my real weight on my new ID, as if that will be some sort of powerful, feminist protest. But I don’t. I imagine going missing and the sad, crinkled posters and the social media posts describing me — my hair and eye color, my real height and my ID weight alongside a recent picture. An inaccurate calculation. And as word gets out, people snicker.

The Arrow of Time tells us time only goes in one direction. Forward. None of us really knows, but we all agree. Linear time. Seconds are, well, seconds, 60 seconds is a minute, 60 minutes is an hour. The average lifespan of someone in the U.S. is 78.5 years, that’s 687,660 hours. And then what? Time. Our other forever companion, until it runs out. Does time end? Or does it run off? Come back. We keep track, plan, schedule. We save time, we spend it wisely. We waste it. But time, that elusive bastard, propels us into the unknown.

*

“I just wish everything was a little smaller” — my college boyfriend, while gesturing vaguely in my direction. A dance teacher picked a two-piece costume for our high school performance and said it would motivate us to lose weight. After a student pointed out the recurring ingrown hairs on my armpits I paid $800 (and about 5 hours) to have the hair singed off. I couldn’t decide if I hated them or if I hated myself.

Actually, I could.

*

Let’s try a little algebra.

If:

y = total hours I have spent criticizing my body

x = total days I’ve been alive & aware of my body

z = total ‘extra bad’ body image days

a = hour(s) devoted to self-criticism on an average day

b = hour(s) devoted to self-criticism on an ‘extra bad’ day

c = hour(s) devoted to appreciation of my body on an average day

Then:

y = (ax + bz) — cx

Yes, I’ll just solve for y. But first I must figure out z. And a. And b and c.

Maybe I should work backwards instead. I’ve been alive for 271,560 hours. Let’s make the generous assumption that I didn’t feel critical of my body until I was 10. That leaves 183,960 hours. Now, for what proportion of that have I been critical of my body? 25%? 45,990 hours. No, it’s more like 40%. 73,584 hours. At this rate, if an average life is 687,660 hours, and I continuing spending 40% of it criticizing my body (assuming that proportion is stable), how much of my life will have been spent being critical of my body?

275,064 hours. That’s 11,461 days. Which is 31.4 years.

That can’t be right.

*

Can that be right?

This is who I am. They say we are 60% water, so the rest of me is self-loathing. I’m 275,064 hours of wistful, unsuccessful shrinking. I’m an ever-expanding distance of scarred terrain.

*

My friend Sarah and I have cycled together for years. Thousands of miles, hundreds of hours. Our coordination as we ride is evident in the synchronized shifting or our gears, the wordless hand gestures to warn of potholes or a slowing speed. And in that silence, I devote miles and miles to thinking about my body. We’ve powered ourselves across the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. I’ve been mad that my arms jiggle when my bike rattles over train tracks.

I’ve observed her muscled shoulders and back from behind, reminding myself to lift weights. I count and regret those unnecessary snacks. I revel in the calories that I’m burning. I curse my legs, hoping no one ever notices how unusually short they are.

“Car back!” she’ll yell, warning of a car coming up from behind. And sometimes I wonder if the driver looks at me and notices my large hips precariously balanced on my narrow saddle. I’m not an athletic woman pedaling 60 miles in the sticky heat of summer. I’m a large clown on a small trike. The timer is ticking. Up, up, up.

*

I know: time is also a beautiful thing. It has healed my often broken heart. It has rescued me from bad haircuts. It has carried me across long distances. It has returned toenails lost to an arduous hike in unforgiving boots. It has drawn me close to friends. It is a luxury on a Sunday afternoon.

I downshift my thinking, pausing the clock. I should feel grateful that my big quads push me up steep climbs, hold a steady rhythm after hours of riding, but — restart the timer — they just look so disappointing in my spandex shorts. And my stomach! I find myself reaching down to pull the Lycra waistband over the doughy roll that clings to my middle. It is central, self-defining.

*

I jumped out of a plane once, over sand dunes near Sossusvlei, Namibia. For a moment, time stood still. In the Nama language, sossus means a dead end; a place of no return. From high above, the golden red smoothness of those dunes looked voluptuous, their perfect, gentle curves. But up close they were rippled and cracked, marred with the footsteps of travelers, forever changing with the wind.

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Katherine Grasso is an associate professor of communication at a liberal arts college in PA. She loves cycling, yoga, traveling, eating chocolate, and being a beagle mom. She is also a current MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at DeSales University. You can follow her on Twitter @klgrasso5.