>>4024Amazing! I’ve pulled the segments from respective chapters that represent the representative scenes. Let me know if this is helpful?
*Fuck America*
>SCENE ONE: Young Stewardess from Jordan (~135lbs)“The funny thing about being a stewardess is that you work long hours and eat out all the time, yet at 22 years old, it never caught up with me. I had amazing varieties of food from across the Middle East. I never even worked out (Arab women don’t work out), though I’m sure the hustle of my job burned plenty of calories. The most difficult part of being a stewardess to me wasn’t the hours, or the clean up, or the pay that doesn’t go as far as you’d think. The hardest part was the men. Even though I came from an old Arab Christian family, most of the men around me were Muslim. And Muslim men are notorious for how they see women. They see you as property—and specifically sexual property when you’re young. You may not be their property at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you’re not “property”. And a 22 year old unmarried woman apparently is “obviously asking” for their attention simply by wearing a red uniform and working her way down the aisle.
I had quite a share of unwarranted advances to say the least. It’s hard to sleep at night when you have drunk pilots pounding on your hotel room door threatening you. Two at a time sometimes, demanding entry. What do you do? If you call security, the pilots may later see to it that you get fired. Or worse, security simply may let them in—after all if you are in a conservative country, they are men, and you are only a woman. Your only option is to deadbolt the door, lie as silently as possible, pray, and hope the pilots are so drunk they won’t remember in the morning.”
>SCENE 2: After Moving To America, Slapping Her Cheating Husband (~185 lbs)>Weight mostly in hips, ass, and thighs“Food never fucked me over. But Yousef did.
One day he came home to the house drunk. It didn’t happen often, but it was never good when it did. He started going on about how he wasn’t a ‘real man’ because he had a fat wife. So somehow if your wife gets fat, your penis gets smaller? I slapped him. I slapped him so fucking hard. A full 185lbs of slap, landing perfectly on his smug face. He may have been drunk but he smacked me back so hard against the kitchen counter. My body flew back against the granite and I could feel the cold stone bruise me as it hit my lower back. That fucker, to this day it doesn’t feel the same.
I came back at him and smacked him with the full force only a fat girl can manage, even better than the first time. Left to right, like a boxer landing a hook. Yousef, drunk, went flying on the floor. The bastard was out cold.”
>SCENE 3: Eating Drive Thru Between Uber Pick-ups (~250lbs)“The only other thing to occupy my mind was to plan where I would eat after I dropped off my passengers. Every fast food sign that would sail by popped a new idea into my head—a chance to nourish the emptiness and frustration. And I felt frustrated in those days. Very frustrated.
I would turn off the app for a while and pop around the corner to whatever I had finally decided upon. It felt special when I would pull up to the menu. It felt anonymous and like a treat at the same time. I could just ask for whatever I liked and 2 minutes later I could be hidden in the parking lot finding sweet relief in crunch wrap supreme, double whopper with cheese, a pile of egg rolls, a pile of bean burritos, a few junior bacon cheese burgers—whatever I wanted. I could feel good again and ditch the evidence under my seat until the next drive thru break and open my windows on my way to the next pickup. They always supplied trash bins at the end of drive thrus to ditch your last endeavor without leaving the car, so it all worked so perfectly. And there would never be any Yousef at home to give me shit about it, or any new pounds. Take that Yousef. Every bite made me feel a little bit better, and every bite felt like another perfect ‘fuck you’ to the man who wanted to control what I ate.
And my fat Arab ass spread across the driver's seat as a consequence.
>SCENE 4: Smashing breakfast tacos at work (working as a college security) (~350lbs)I was determined to save myself the embarrassment of arriving to Jordan fat.
Derek strolled behind me one morning, whatever he had just eaten wafting in the air. “WOW, TACO ‘BOUT DELICIOUS, here’s two for the lovely lady…” Two paper-wrapped, cheese-oozing, immaculate, bedeviled pieces of perfection landed beside my keyboard. I glared up at Derek.
“What?” He looked confused.
“I’m not eating this. I’m on a diet, Derek.”
“Okay, well perfect, because these two bad boys are diet tacos.”
“Diet tacos?! Fuck you, Derek, there is no such thing as ‘diet tacos’!” I wasn’t supposed to swear, this was a Christian college. In America, Christians aren’t supposed to swear.
“You kiss your tacos with that mouth?!” This was witty in English, but I was only half-sure why. I picked up each taco, unbuttoned the pockets on each breast of his ‘security’ uniform, pulled my eyes close to his chin and slowly stuffed each oozy taco into a pocket. I pressed the outside of his shirt pockets until I could hear the crispy shell break. The old me was a fat fuck, Derek, but not anymore. This was a ‘lifestyle change.’ No more fucking tacos.
>SCENE 5: Parents Shocked by their fat daughter at the airport (~325 lbs)After you pass through customs at the Amman airport, there is there is this long awkward corridor you have to make your way through before you’re free.
My mother and father greeted me. Well they came to greet me—there was this long awkward trod through the tunnel pulling my luggage trying to make eye contact before they realized it was me lumbering toward them.
“My dear? Is that you?” my mother stared at me. “Oh my dear! You are SO FAT!”
I didn’t even get in a single happy word in the trip before my mother had cut me down to size. I was stunned. In Arabic, “so fat” comes out as just a single word, and it sat in the air like a knife dangling from the airport ceiling. There was silence as we all stared at it. I had no idea what to say next. I had no idea that, despite months and months of dieting and hard work, my weight would completely eclipse all other topics this Christmas. I had no idea just how stressful the size of my ass could be to everyone else.
>SCENE 6: Seeing the photo of her accepting a “heroism award” from the College (~450lbs)The next day, I saw the emailed photos of me accepting the award. It made me sick to my stomach. I was glistening with sweat, red in the face, and fucking huge. Absurdly, monstrously huge. My black dress did little to hide the outline of my shockingly wide hips and ass and my low, sagging belly pulled the dress’s fabric to its limits. Why were photos so high definition now? I studied the pictures—I had no idea I had gotten so big. No wonder the room gasped at the sight of me struggling to get on stage. If this is what I looked like, I would have gasped too. I was red—sweaty, breathless, and red. My upper arms seemed unhumanly puffed and bulky; my absurd beachball stomach hung low and mispositioned. You could see my navel pressed unwillingly against the thinning black material, confessing my gluttony to all the world. My breasts were absurdly huge, comically stuffed into what had been my largest bra. Below the vast dress, folds of white fat peeked out from my knees and calves, leaving no doubt that my shocking corpulence was comprehensive. I held back tears that this was how I looked on display, in front of everyone in my finest hour.
