Into the Wilderness: Story 48
And then there was Joe. I didn’t want to pull this string. I let it dangle until I singed the threads, a definite end. He was smart, kind, gentlemanly, open minded, polite. I don’t remember how I met him, only that he was more enthusiastic about dating me than I was him. I was a sophomore in college and wasn’t looking for husband material. I suppose he was the male version of me- the one you can bring home to mama, but you really aren’t interested in doing so. He drove a Subaru, so practical for a college boy in the 1980s; he bit his nails. Shamefully, I believed I could “do better.”
I now know this is a poor excuse for refusing intimacy. He liked me too much. I was still exploring the male species. He was good for political sparring but not for a spicy date.
What I liked most about Joe was that he liked me. He liked me so much that I mistook his liking for acceptance. Years later, when we saw each other again, I found that wasn’t true.
I had left Oklahoma for New York, an emotionally wrought time when both physical and emotional ailments manifested with enormous ferocity. I developed PCOS- thought then to be “imaginary” as most women’s illnesses were back then. PCOS causes insulin resistance, a miserable condition of unrequited hunger and inability to move the scale downward. Practically overnight, I had ballooned from a petite 105 lb cutie to a 200 lb monstrosity,
One feature of obese women, at least in my case, was a loss of femininity. Our society’s expectations of women are blown apart by obesity. Women are supposed to not take up space. An obese woman is a space filler. Women, traditionally, are expected to have defining sex characteristics. Obesity enfolds curves in a literal box of fat. With obesity, and especially with PCOS- which is a real and legitimate endocrine disorder- other non-feminine traits emerge- thinning hair on the head, but also hirsutism; largeness without muscle; strange skin discolorations and skin tags. literally, it’s an ugly dysmorphic condition.
So imagine coming to Oklahoma for the Christmas holiday. I was on break from graduate school and starved for validation. I looked him up and we planned a date. He sounded so excited on the phone to see me. How sad, then, when he saw me again after five years. I was a blob of my former self. We went to a Mexican dinner, discovering we had zero in common.
That’s when I figured out my average Joe didn’t like me for me. In spite of his seemingly liberal leanings, he valued the baby girl in me, not the hulking woman my body had forced me to become. With size, my giggles and agreeability disappeared. No longer demure, I expressed forward-thinking opinions with an incisive logic I had hidden. Not only was I big, but I also was damn smart. Joe no longer seemed the almost liberal, journalism-major stable young man. He seemed stuck in time.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this at the time. Back then, I flushed with horror. How could I believe anyone would want to be seen with this mutant I had become? I saw Joe only one time after that. I had lost all but 20 pounds of my weight gain. Though I could show him I could be petite again, I couldn’t hide my intelligence and critical thinking, which I had unapologetically unleashed, social expectations be damned. I left that date knowing I would never see him again.
This string was meant to be singed at the ends, no ability to fray to open another chance. It was the hanging jungle vine whose swing was done.
I learned that nice guys aren’t universally nice. Their nice guy exposition could hide gender expectations as definitively as today’s Incel could. I learned that for many physical surface triumphs over mental substance and acuity.
There was another Joe I left behind-and regretted for a while. This Joe was a straight A student, an engineer, student leader. I foolishly didn’t know he had fallen for me. I thought we were freshmen exploring the cornucopia of college dating. I found out from a good friend who had been set up on a blind date with him that he had fallen for me and was devastated by my wanting to date other people. I had no idea. When I finally figured it out and called him, he had transferred schools and marked me off. The unwitting rejection I delivered-he never told me how he felt- could never be healed.
As I look at these average and not-so-average Joes, I recall how tenuous and fanciful attraction is. How do people ever find each other in direct and uncomplicated ways? Attraction, for me, was a foggy harbor, the shapes uncertain and shifting among the limitations of light. Even today, these shapes seem unreal, ghostly, almost. I’ll leave them in their historical space where they belong.
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