Fourteen

My mother was trying to kill me. She really was. Why else was she intent on letting me take vitamins and preparing breakfast for me everyday, forcing me to eat, when all I want, all I really want is to catch a disease? Nothing serious though. Maybe dengue or pneumonia. Something that makes you lose weight really fast.

In between the scrambled eggs and the bacon, I thought for the hundredth time how much easier it would be if I were poor. They were so much more blessed. After all, nothing to eat, nothing to gain.

It was the Christmas Holidays and she and I were shopping for new clothes to wear for Simbang Gabi and the family reunion. I climb into the car with her. You know about that disorder called anorexia? Well, my mother, she has the opposite. She looks at me and sees this beautiful child with shapely legs and makings of big breasts. But I was not a beautiful child. I was fat. I knew that just as surely as I knew I was smart or crafty or responsible. But really, when you’re in 2nd year high school, who actually cares about those things? The guys in our school sure don’t. I’d just as surely wish I were dumb but a lot skinnier, skill-less but with more coordination, boring but able to fit into dresses other than my mother’s.

And there it was, the Ladies Section. Tense salesladies going to and fro the backroom. A long line going to the dressing room. And so many clothes in disarray, I didn’t know where to start. In my mind, I was thinking of a checklist I saw in a magazine once. The topic was about ‘Take off 10 pounds by Dressing Right’. I let my palm graze through the hangers and racks. Choose Black. Look for a V-neck neckline. Maybe an empire cut. No sleeveless. Flowy material. Perhaps small prints all over.

But there it was. All the things I had not been looking for. A red dress. In stretch cotton. Sleeveless. With the simplest cut. The trouble was, the simplest things aren’t always the easiest to get. I knew this because I‘d been trying to lost weight since I was 12 and look at me. Just staring at the dress, I knew it was going to be tight. But I snatched it up anyway, not even looking at the tag and hurriedly took my turn on the dressing room before my mother comes back and insists she come along to watch.

I looked at myself in the mirror and pinched the parts that stuck out the most. The chicken wing arms. The inner thighs. The calves. The butt. But most of all, the belly. That part where from ribs to waist, all was laid flat, until I reached an obvious curve like a hump in the road. I tried all the others on and saved the red dress for last. It was difficult dressing my age. What, with all the tight shirts, tight jeans and skimpy everythings going around. The black mini was a bad idea. The see-through cream top too. The floral prints made me look old. And the jeans couldn’t even reach my crotch.

Then, the red dress. It had barely reached my breasts when the material wouldn’t go down anymore, my arms still flapping up and down like that of a headless chicken. I pulled it up, pushed it down but it wouldn’t budge. I was stuck in that red dress, grunting and flapping my way through the dressing room for what would seem a minute, five minutes, ten. Who knows. I sat there on the vinyl floor thinking somebody was going to walk in here soon and find me in this thing and laugh their heads off. Maybe they were doing that now from their security cameras.

By some intervention though, my hands seemed to find a zipper on the side of the dress. I slowly pulled it down and the material went down with it like magic. It had seemed too good to be true and maybe it was, because there in the mirror was a vivid reflection, an equal image of subtle and striking at the same time. I pulled my hair up to see the full effect and I knew it was a sight to keep. For a moment, I actually passed for someone beautiful.

The salesladies smelled of sweat and no one seemed to entertain. But finally, I had managed to find one and asked if there was one in medium. ‘Large, maybe?’, she asks me quietly and hurriedly went off to wherever they seemed to disappear. She came out smiling and my breath signaled a sigh of relief because for a minute there I—-

‘Sorry, miss. Only available size left.’, she says and hurries off to entertain another customer, leaving me to clutch the red material in confusion.

I had tried to talk my mother into buying it, assuring her I would fit into it by next month. I would diet, skip the holiday pig-out, join the volleyball team, walk from school, drink less soda, find more stress. I promised her it’d be worth it. But then she looks at me as she always does and lunges on to a 20-minute sermon about how ‘You are beautiful the way you are. You’re beautiful on the inside where it counts. Just wait. They’ll see. And---‘

Yeah. I cut her off. Whatever. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care.

In the end, she chose all the outfits for me. My attention just wasn’t in it, knowing that again this year, I would manage to look like my mother again. We left the Ladies Section an hour after, looking for something to eat somewhere else in the mall.

She went ahead and I looked behind. Because there, in that bed of mess with salesladies going to and fro, stressed buyers waiting to use the dressing room and hundreds of pretty dresses somebody else would get to wear, I knew I just had my first heartbreak.

I am fourteen and I am no one.