Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of A Man Without a Country Review of Gail's Place Review of Three 1-Act Plays Review of Yesterday's A Dream Crossword (Solution Posted in May. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Jan/Feb Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction Imagining Nora By Lisa Norris Loving the Fat Girl By Christina Fisanick Nate's Fish and Poultry Shop By G. David Schwartz The Folly of Valentine's Day By Andy Martello Poetry Hawk King By Wanda D. Campbell After the Rain By Wanda D. Campbell You Cannot Fold the Flood. By Mariela Perez-Simons And Darkness Fell By Beth L. Block Demise of a Family Resort By Carolyn Howard-Johnson The Asparagus Cutters By Joe Wilkins Fiction Voices By Ed Boyd Little White Sambo By Brett Alan Sanders Dies Irae By Timothy Reilly Follow By Dawn Paul Crumbs By Kim Tremblett Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html.

Loving the Fat Girl By Christina Fisanick “We have constructed a culture that ensures that relatively few people will ever be at peace with their bodies.” ---Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth “Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round.” Queen, “Fat Bottomed Girls” Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be able to make peace with my body. If I will ever be able to appreciate it for all its bumps and bulges and disproportions. I want to love every inch of it, but I often come away from a full-length mirror with more than hatred for its far-from-the-middle appearance. It is not that I am always disgusted by this mass of flesh that I try to hide beneath layers of clothing and tight-fighting girdles. In fact, I often feel sympathetic for all that it has been through over the years: starvation diets, brief bouts of bulimic-like binging and purging, constant aerobic exercises, cellophane wraps, harsh chemical diet pills, and a number of other caustic methods for getting the pounds off. Yet, even as I write this, I look down at my thigh flesh spread wide across my office chair and wish that the fat could be trimmed off with a carving knife, leaving only muscle and bone to fill the space inside my skin. At the center of my relationship with my body are contradictions, interior and exterior, that prevent me and propel me to try and become one with my body. As metaphysically philosophical as that sounds, I think that the only way I will ever be able to accept, love, adore, or just plain deal with my body is by seeing it as a part of me, myself, I. I have never been able to see it as more than an object that totes around my mind, and it is about time that I make it one and the same with my identity. Sorting out those contradictions might be a way of approaching this project that I am sure will take a lifetime to accomplish. Maybe I will not accomplish it at all. ***** I started gaining weight when I was 11 years and one month old. I know the date exactly, because on that day, I started my period and have not been able to control my weight since. The change between my fifth grade school picture, taken two months before I started my period, and my sixth grade school picture, taken ten months after I started my period, is dramatic. I look like a different person. My face in the fifth-grade picture is slim and nearly perfect. I am smiling with a toothy grin. My hair is long and curly, falling softly on my crushed-brown-velvet sweater that my best friend Loretta had let me borrow. My sixth-grade picture tells a different story. Splotchy, red acne disrupts its tan, smooth surface. I am not smiling, and my face is round and swollen. My mother’s friend Pam had cut my hair short the week before, and its bobbed layers expose my thick neck and the ragged collar of the Pac-Man t-shirt that I had hastily thrown on that morning, not knowing that it was picture day. The most remarkable difference is my breasts. They had dramatically increased in size in that short period of time-they fill up the lower half of the sixth-grade print with curves of yellow cotton fabric. I hated that sixth grade picture. I destroyed all of the copies but one before I got home from school, and then told my Mom that they got lost in processing. I put the one I kept under my mattress so that my Mom would not find it. I didn’t want anyone to see it. I knew that if she gave them to my family that everyone would have something to say about it. My uncles were already teasing me about my weight, and I didn’t want that horrible picture of me hanging up on the wall in all of their houses for visitors to ask them who the fat girl is. I am not really sure why I kept the picture. Part of me thinks that it is because I thought I could use it to help lose weight. If I could see clearly what I looked like to everyone else, I might feel inspired to put down that bowl of ice cream or ride my bike to the park. Another part of me thinks that I kept it as a way of punishing myself for gaining weight. In any case, I still have that picture and look at it now and then and feel sorry for that fat girl, if only she knew what the price of her fatness would cost her later. If only she knew the teasing she would face at the hands of her classmates. If only she knew the hours of crying she would endure after each and every guy she liked would tell her or her friends that her body disgusted him. If only she could have prevented the years ahead that would send her down a long road of pain, frustration, and depression. I kept gaining weight, slowly, but with regularity. I played basketball and volleyball and was the leader of the pep club in junior high. My gym teacher, who was also the cheerleading coach, told me after tryouts that I would make a great cheerleader, but they didn’t have a uniform in my size. Despite my activities, I still found myself struggling with the way that I looked. My breasts were larger than the other girls in my middle school, even the freshmen, and I shopped for clothes in the women’s section at the mall, while they all shopped in the junior section. The junior-size clothes were stylish and more affordable than the ones in the women’s section. All of the new jeans with sequins and embroidered butterflies and flowers were in junior sizes only as were the hot pink, stretch tops that everyone seemed to be wearing in the mid-80s. My clothing choices were further complicated by poverty. We had no money for clothes when I was growing up, so the only way I got to shop for new things was when I saved up my lunch money for weeks at a time. Even then, I could only buy what was on clearance, and by that time, the fad had faded. Most of my clothes came from neighbors and friends of the family, whose girls had outgrown or just did not want their clothes. I remember my aunt giving me a pair of my cousin Ronda’s Sassoon jeans. It was the first time I had ever owned a pair of designer jeans, and I ran into my room to try them on. They didn’t fit, and I struggled for nearly an hour trying to make the zipper close over my soft belly flesh. I pushed it in and sucked in my breath, inching the zipper up farther and farther. By the time I had the zipper all the way up, my right index finger and thumb were swollen and red from the pressure of the zipper latch. Standing up was another matter. I rolled over onto my stomach and slid my feet down over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Then, I sprang up and fell back, supporting myself on the closet doors across from the bed. I could barely breathe and had even more trouble walking, but I did it. Nothing was going to stop me from wearing designer jeans to school. I would get home and take them off, marveling at the rich, I-can-breath-now feeling that came over me as soon as the zipper came down, but the greatest pleasure came with taking the jeans off and seeing the seam lines that ran the length of my thighs and abdomen. The deep, reddish-purple carvings marked my flesh for hours after I took the jeans off. But, I did not mind the pain or the imprints, I was just glad to fit in, at least for a day or two a week. I hated my body more than ever by the time I got to eighth grade. One of the only things that made me feel better about how I looked was the attention I got from older men. Older men were crazy about me. None of the boys in my school ever paid any kind attention to me, but guys in high school and much older men were paying me all kinds of attention. I wasn’t allowed to date anyone, regardless of his age, but that never stopped me. I ended up going out with every guy who asked me, but mostly men in their late twenties and early thirties. I met them at my neighbors’ or friends’ houses. Sometimes, older men would hit on me in the bars that I went to with my parents on the weekends. My parents would go to play cards with their friends, and my brother and I would play pool or video games. Men would approach me or make eye contact with me across the smoke-filled room, and I would smile at them or pretend to be sensuous and mysterious. I would spend hours getting ready for these weekend adventures. My make-up and hair would have to be perfect, styled in the dark and broody fashion of the day. I would wear tight jeans and even tighter t-shirts. I wanted their attention, but I don’t think I really wanted the kind of attention they eventually gave me. I look back on my early teens with horror. In fact, my entire teenage years were filled with older men taking advantage of my naive assumptions about love, affection, and attention. My examples were Scarlet O-Hara and Rhett Butler and soap opera couples who endured anything and everything to be together. I had no examples of what I would consider today to be positive love relationships. So, I let these men use me. They used me for sex, and I consented. They made me feel wanted and beautiful. It took me years to understand that what they did was wrong. They had sex with a young girl who thought that she was a woman, because her body and her mind seemed so grown up. They fucked a young girl who interpreted their touches and kisses and thrustings as love and acceptance of the body that others and even she hated. They fucked me, because I was there and willing to fuck. ***** I have spent too many hours to count trying to find reasons for why I am fat. I have always figured that there had to be a reason for this weight gain. At first I thought that it was genetic. My mom is overweight, my aunts on both sides of my family are overweight, and just about all of my cousins weigh as much as or more than I do. It seemed that fatness was a family trait just like brown eyes and stubby fingers. But I couldn’t accept fatness as my destiny. I just could not resign myself to feeling powerless against the force of what seemed to be a flaw in the process of natural selection. At one point, I had even hated my mother and the rest of my family for passing this affliction on to me, but I did not believe that I was destined to be fat just because my family tree’s branches were sagging with the heft of years of round women. ***** At this moment in time on this day in this chair, I weigh 315 pounds. There, I wrote it. I haven’t told anyone my true weight in ten years. I always lie about it. Even to myself, in my journals. I don’t know why I feel like I have to lie. It just seems to come naturally to me. My driver’s license says that I weigh 150 pounds. I haven’t weighed that since high school. I am not even sure that I want to way that now. I think that I don’t tell people how much I weigh, because I don’t want to hear the criticism that would surely follow. Partly, because I think that some of it would be right. ***** According to the (in)famous Metropolitan Life Insurance charts, the normal weight for an adult female of my height, 5’6”, with a small frame is 120-133, a medium frame 130-144, and a large frame 140-159. I think I might have weighed somewhere around those ranges when I was seventeen. Where do they get those numbers from anyway? Did they pull them out of a hat? Did they put people on liquid diets and then weigh them in the hopes of getting more money from fat people for insurance policies? It says at the bottom of the chart that the data was gathered by Metropolitan Life in 1957. Were the people in the study from the upper class, the lower class, the middle class? Were they Caucasian, Hispanic, Irish, American, European, African? I read an article a few weeks ago that described the way these numbers were gathered. According to the author, policy holders would lose weight before the insurance adjuster would collect their next payment. The lower their weight, the less their insurance rate. Also, most of the policy holders at the time that these charts were created were men. Much of the numbers for women were estimated or determined from a small number of women. In addition, policy holders represented a specific demographic of Americans-white and upper-middle class. There is little variance for race, class, and even gender. I wondered as soon as I saw those charts in my health textbook in junior high how many women (and men) starved themselves to fit into those tightly-formed categories. I have also wondered when I will forget about the numbers. Even now, as I write this, I am trying to figure out the difference between the “healthy weight” for my height and frame and my actual weight. The be(gi)rth seems far too wide. “Obese” is a scary word. When I think of the word OBESE, I see images of enormously fat women on the beach in bikinis that disappear into their fleshy folds. I picture enormous men with gigantic bellies that hang down to their knees and quadruple chins that hide their necks. Even I cannot escape the labels and negative images that have been engrained on my mind since I can remember. News reports about the dangers of being overweight that always show large people eating whole pizzas and heaping plates of fried chicken. Comedy skits that create characters that are not real people but gross distortions and one dimensional representations. It is that idea of the fat person eating and eating and eating that disturbs me. Most of the fat people I know (including myself) do not eat more than average weight people. It is when and how they eat and what they do with the fuel that makes the difference in how the food shows up on the body-and they know it. Most fat people I know (including myself) are nutrition experts. Go up to a fat person and ask them to define calories or carbohydrates or ask them to tell you how many grams of sugar equals a gram of fat. They will know. Ask them to describe the FDA food pyramid, revised edition. They will know. Ask them how many calories and/or fat is burned off when a person walks in place for seven and a half minutes or cycles uphill for a half hour on a ten-speed bike. They will know. Fat people make food, calories, exercise, and anything related to weight control a major part of their lives. It is their mission to understand and try everything they can to lose those 30, 70. 125 pounds. It is their job, often a full-time job, to discover the newest way to shed the weight that is ruining their lives or at the very least making them feel like it is. It would seem, then, that fat people, knowing the ins and outs of nutrition, would be able to lose the weight and keep it off. Most often, they don’t. I have wondered if it is the obsession with food and dieting and counting every morsel that gets put into your body and every glass of water and every pants size that helps people stay fat. Sara Tisdale in “The Weight that Women Carry” writes that dieting becomes the thrill, the challenge. After spending decades trying to lose weight, imagine how a person would feel if they were thin and no longer needed to weigh their food or fast every two days. It would be more than shocking. If you lose the weight, you lose the goal. . . ***** My friend Lisa and I saw a commercial for a new weight loss drug one evening in between clips of the evening news. The drug promised to remove up to 30% of all of the fat that a person consumes and pretty much guaranteed weight loss for those people who “just can’t do it alone.” The ad warned that the symptoms included “gas with oily discharge, an urgent need to have bowel movements and an inability to control them, and severe intestinal cramps.” We wondered who in their right mind would take such a drug, knowing the horrible side affects that accompany the weight loss. We laughed about it, but in the back of my mind I was wondering if it would really work. I wondered if my doctor would prescribe it. I wondered if anyone I knew had tried it. We still laugh about it, and I still go on wondering if it is a lost opportunity for me to finally have the body that I have been wanting for so long. That commercial is just one of many commercials and infomercials that tempt people to try dangerous drugs and procedures to lose weight, to become acceptably thin. These treatments range from breathing exercises to Richard Simmons’ “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” and Deal-a-Meal to herbal-based pills that give you constant diarrhea and make you vomit. I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I am not immune to these alluring late night ads that promise fast, effect weight loss. Some products even offer guarantees. I figure that they will not work and will most probably make me sick or make me gain even more weight than I already have, and yet the testimonials and even the scientific proof make it all sound so appealing. I imagine myself thin and wearing a bathing suit without fear of criticism and embarrassment. I imagine myself wearing a size eight, six, and maybe even a four. I imagine myself eating in public without feeling like everyone is watching every bite that I take. Then, just as I am about to reach for the phone and call the 1-800 number, I remember that I am broke and hang up the phone, thinking that poverty alone kept me from dialing. ***** What in the hell is morbid obesity? About three in the morning, my husband Nick and I were up reading and listening to the radio. The news came on from the Associated Press that announced a new study that was done about the higher rates of morbid obesity in America. My husband and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and then laughed. We wondered out loud what morbid obesity could possibly mean. When I think of morbid, I think of death or someone who is obsessed with death. Nick said that when he thinks of morbid, he thinks of Edgar Allan Poe and necrophilia. Then, I said, that when I think of obesity, I think of my childhood neighbor, Randy, who drew pictures (very good pictures) of coffins, funerals, and corpses. He loved burying the neighborhood animals that died (either by accident or by his hands), and then digging them back up again to marvel at and draw the degree and look of decomposition. He always scared me. He was morbid. I was left to ponder the connection I kept making between the word morbid and death. It started to worry me. I kept thinking about the warnings the AP had announced about obesity and health problems. I was just about over the edge and into a full-blown anxiety attack about the nearness of my own demise when Nick started laughing. His laughter made me angry, even though he had no idea that I was taking this seriously. I asked what was so funny and he started talking about all of the possibilities for different categories for obesity: ironic obesity-when a person eats very little and is still obese; ignorant obesity-when a person is obese but does not know it; defiant obesity-when a person keeps saying that are not obese when they are. I laughed so hard. It was funny. I think it was funny because of the absurdity of the category, morbid obesity and the lack of definition of what morbid obesity actually means. I added my own categories in between laughs: projection obesity-when a person thinks that everyone else is fatter than they are; scapegoat obesity-when a person blames someone or something else for their obesity; apathetic obesity-when a person acknowledges their obesity and does not care about trying to change it. After we stopped laughing, we went back to reading, and I started wondering if I fit any of those categories. I knew that they were created out of fun, but I couldn’t help but see myself in almost all of them. It also made me realize that there is something to this idea of morbid obesity. There is a level in which being overweight, obese, is fatal. I am not sure where that line is drawn. I think that all our bodies are different in terms of just how heavy we can be and still be relatively healthy. A few days after our late night laugh session, I looked up the word morbid in Webster’s: 1. suggesting an unhealthy mental state or attitude; unwholesomely gloomy, sensitive, etc. 2. gruesome; grisly. 3. affected by, caused by, causing, or characteristic of disease. 4. pertaining to diseased parts. I found no definition of morbid obesity, so I looked up the word obesity and found obese: “very fat or overweight.” If I put the words together, I would get definitions like crazy fat person or diseased overweight person. I continued my search for a definition of morbid obesity on the Internet, and I finally found what I was looking for at HealthCentral.com: “a person who ways 100 or more pounds over their ideal weight.” What is a person’s ideal weight? The weight on the Metropolitan Life charts? The weight that their doctor recommends is right for them? The weight that they hope to reach to look like Cindy Crawford, Helen Hunt, Calista Flockhart, Tyra Banks? What is a person’s ideal weight? For me, I guess, it is the weight at which I feel comfortable enough to interact with other people without constantly thinking about how fat I must look to them. I have been to that weight a few times in my life, but I had to eat only rice for months or had to work out for three hours every day or had to starve myself two days a week. I felt sick during those times; tired, unhealthy, morbid. ***** The night before a presentation I tried on the outfit that I planned to wear the next day. It was a blue pants suit with gold buttons. I had only worn it once, sometime during the previous year, and it had looked great. It slimmed my hips and reduced the size of my breasts. I knew soon after I buttoned the top button on the pants that I couldn’t leave the house dressed liked that. I went to the mirror, and barely recognized myself. I looked huge and round and blue. I felt like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I felt like I had been “chewing and chewing all day long; the way that a cow does.” I didn’t know what to do. I had no money to buy a new outfit. I searched my closet and managed to find a baggy pink dress that I had worn to a friends outdoor wedding a few years before. I tried it on and it fit, barely. It stuck so tight to my hips and ass that I had to pull it down hard and then harder to straighten the wrinkles. It accentuated all of my trouble spots, my thick, lumpy thighs, my round ass, the small pocket of fat that hangs beneath my bra line. I found a black jacket to cover up most of the major flaws and decided that I had no choice but to wear it. I felt embarrassed as I walked into the conference room the next day. No one seemed to notice, but I could feel the dress material rubbing against my skin each time I moved. I could feel the material strain against the pressure of my thighs as I walked back and forth from the overhead to the chalkboard. I just wanted to finish so that I could go home, get into bed, and cry. ***** Most of the time, I don’t even feel like I am fat. I feel like I am a normal, everyday person who goes to school, teaches college English, and hangs out with her friends on the weekends. I feel healthy, active, and average. Then, there are times when my obesity or fatness seems apparent to me, because someone else draws it to my attention. For example, a few weeks ago, I was walking across campus to return a book to the library. On the way, I had to walk through a cement circle where students meet and chat with their friends in between classes. On either side of the circle sat two young men. As I walked closer to them, I started getting anxious. I began thinking of the nasty words they might shout or the grins they might exchange as I walked through what I was sure to be a gauntlet of insults. I got about halfway through when one of them said, “Eeewwww,” which was quickly followed by the rhyming “Mooooo.” I was humiliated and angry. Humiliated at being publicly jeered at and angry with myself for allowing them to get away with their abuse and not doing anything about it. I thought, for one brief moment, that I was going to turn and face them and yell at them for their cruelty. Then, I heard one of them say, “Looks like fatty is on her way to get some ice cream.” They laughed loudly. I walked away, pretending that I didn’t hear what they had said, that I didn’t think they were talking about me. I got to my office and sat down, wondering about why I let them say those things. I could think of nothing else for the rest of the day. It made me so angry. Do they not realize how their insults hurt people? Do they not understand that some people have very little control over the size and shape that their bodies take? Did they not realize how they hurt me? At the same time, I felt angry with myself. I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t. I think that if I would have said something to them it would have meant that I am the person that they were talking to; that I am the fat girl that they were teasing. Also, I was afraid of what they might say or do if I confronted them. I have never been able to stand up for myself when issues about weight are involved. I think about it, but then I walk away quickly. **** Last week, for the first time that I can remember, I went swimming without a t-shirt or shorts to cover up my body. Nick and I stayed at a Holiday Inn for our anniversary, and we decided to go swimming in the hotel pool. We had to go to Wal-mart and buy suits. I bought my usual cover-up shorts and t-shirt that I always wear when I go swimming. For some reason, I think that these garments make me look thinner; that somehow they disguise my wide hips and make my cellulite disappear. All the way down on the elevator, I kept thinking about how I would look in my suit. I had tried it on upstairs to see if it would fit, but I refused to look at myself in the mirror. I wanted to have fun, and I didn’t want to constantly worry about whether or not my hip fat was creeping out under my suit line or what my side profile looked like. Did my stomach bulge out as far as my breasts? Did my ass stretch the material to opaqueness? Instead, I got onto the elevator with Nick and made a commitment to myself that no matter how many people were at poolside, I was going to take off my shorts and t-shirt and jump in. I did just that. I surprised myself and Nick. It took more bravery than I can possibly explain here. It felt good. I felt good. ***** Here I am. Still fat. Still trying to come to terms with my own fatness-the essence of my fat. The fat that consumes me. I am surrounded by people who laugh at me because I am fat. And, despite what statistics say, I am surrounded by a town, a state, a country filled with thin people. Will I ever reach some kind of ideal weight? Will I ever be able to look in the mirror and like/love what I see? Will I be able to talk about my body as if it is apart of me and not a part of me? I will continue to try.