Allergies

The seats on the large plane from Columbus to Denver were smaller than the seats on the little plane from Denver to Hayden. And, the seatbelts on the large plane with the small seats were much larger than the seatbelts on the small plane with the larger seats. Are you still reading? On the little plane from Denver to Hayden, Colorado, I was too fat for the seatbelt. The woman next to me noticed how fat I was and was visibly disgusted. This was before I asked for the seatbelt extender.

The flight attendants are taught to very discreetly hand you the extenders, should you ask for them. The seat extenders are rolled up compactly and handed to you silently, palm facing the floor, the way you would hand your needy girlfriend a tampon at the office. Despite the quiet, nearly imperceptible way the flight attendant handed me the extender, the woman who hated my girth was so horrified that she moved her seat.

It was as if she suspected I was “that big”, but the extender confirmed it for her. I was taking up too much space. How dare I? My outer thighs were slightly touching her outer thighs, and it offended her. So she asked a very tall man a few rows back if she could sit next to him. But first, she took several puffs off of her inhaler. Her skin looked wrinkly and pale, like she may have been a smoker. A smoker with asthma?

I heard the voice of my friend, a nurse practitioner, who recently said, “Don’t you know? Fat is the new smoking.” So, my outer thighs and their proximity to this wrinkly, gasping fretting woman is akin to second hand smoke which could give me lung cancer?

I am dying to tell this encounter to my sister. When we were 22 and 18, we lived in downtown Philadelphia in a loft apartment. My sister, a former model, is five feet ten inches tall and has long blond hair. She is stunning at any weight. But, she never thinks she is. She is certain people are thinking she is taking up too much space, her thighs crossing the invisible line into others’ arbitrary and unpredictable personal space constraints.

In Philadelphia, my sister and I went to the Wells Fargo office to pick up wired money from our father. Likely, it was an emergency such as we needed dinner at the Greek restaurant. We walked there and stood in a long line with unsavory characters, one of whom was vocally opposed to fat people. I have been overweight most of my life so I am certain the woman in the Wells Fargo office was talking about me, though my not-obese sister thought it was both of us. I believe the woman was schizophrenic.

She said, “Obesity. Obesity. I’m allergic to obesity. That and leprosy.” For some reason, my sister and I turned this into a song on the way back to our apartment. To the tune of Todd Rundgren’s Ooooohh Baby Baby. “I did you wrong. My heart went out to play. But in the game I lost you. What a price to pay….. I’m cryin’…Ooooooh oohhh. Baby baby.” Baby Baby became “beach ball, beach ball.” The woman may have said that, too. My sister would remember.

So, twenty-two years later, I found a non-schizophrenic woman who was also similarly allergic to obesity. It was hard not to sing as I walked off the plane, especially since I had a lovely flight with so much room to stretch out in after she removed her wheezing self from my personal space.