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For my dear family, Ella, Asa, Samaria, and Caylao, and for anyone doing their best to be all of who they are.
Before Summer
Who Am I?
The life in my head seems
so different from the life outside,
where I am so big
that everyone stares,
but no one sees the real me.
My name is Ari Rosensweig.
This year, I am the newest seventh grader
at Mill Valley Middle School.
I have sandy-brown hair
and green eyes like my father’s.
I’m average height, but
I am a fat kid, and I hate it when
people call me names.
Even though I’m overweight,
I can still do everything
everyone else can—
ride my bike, play video games—
but people just see me as different,
only notice who I am
on the outside.
My mother is an artist
who sculpts giants in clay
and paints the world
on canvas, on murals,
and even on clothes;
my father sells what she paints.
I’m an only child.
Sometimes I get lonely,
wish for a brother or sister,
but I get so much time to myself
to do what I like to do,
and no one interferes.
I make role-playing games.
I’m going to be a cryptozoologist.
I want to find the creatures out there,
like Bigfoot, that might seem so different
but that belong to this world too.
My mother says we are going
to spend the summer at the beach;
Out in nature, she says.
I like the beach, but I don’t like
taking off my shirt.
I always have to hike up my pants,
and I worry that there isn’t enough food,
because I’m always hungry.
More than anything, I think,
I want to lose weight,
and I don’t know how.
Why Are You So Fat?
people always ask (not always out loud)
I’m not fat.
I sit up straighter,
feel the rolls on my body unbuckle.
I just have big bones. That’s what my mom says.
I have big bones and bigger spaces in between them.
Why are you so fat?
Well, they say my grandfather, from eastern Europe
had a mysterious disease that made him big;
he carried it with him,
and he gave it to my mother
and my mom had it and now I have it.
Why are you so fat?
Because my grandmother made me eat every bite,
told me to never leave anything on my plate.
Why are you so fat?
It’s a gland problem.
I’ve got bad glands.
Someone told me about glands,
so I think I have bad ones.
Why are you so fat?
The doctor says I can’t help it.
He says I may not look normal,
but I’m healthy enough to carry the stars,
and this fat keeps me safe.
Why are you so fat?
Because I love school lunches: meat pies and yogurt cups
and a giant cookie, and then after school
I take the five dollars my parents give me
and buy slices of pizza from Mario’s and play the old Pac-Man machine until dark,
stack quarters along the edge
until I pass the second apple.
Why are you so fat?
My parents are never really home anyway.
They’re busy,
and I fill myself up with food and watching TV,
comic books, and going to the park, and hot dogs with ketchup and onions.
Why are you so fat?
Sometimes I get home to an empty apartment
and the echo of the cars going by on the street outside.
Why are you so fat?
Because if someone asks enough times,
then the question becomes the answer.
Moving
When your mother is an artist,
you move a lot.
We stretched ourselves
across the whole country
from New York to San Francisco,
far from our family
and everything we knew.
For the artist,
making a new life
is as simple
as scraping off a palette,
setting up a new studio.
For me
the studio means
quiet corners
with slabs of clay,
sketch pads
and universes,
hands and face chalked
with pastels, potato chip grease,
and Pepsi.
Spider-Man comics,
The Hobbit, and Bridge to Terabithia.
For me it means waiting.
It means space,
suspended in time
between the mother
who is the Artist,
the father who is too busy,
and a son
whose story is about being
the new kid in seventh grade,
awkward, big, different
from everyone else.
Since Leaving New York
we haven’t celebrated
the high holidays like we used to,
with the rest of the family.
It’s like things that used to matter
suddenly don’t anymore.
I didn’t know I cared.
I thought of it as something we just did,
who we are, but now that it’s gone,
I think about those long tables
back in New York,
overflowing with food
and candles at Shabbat,
and the grown-ups
talking long into the night,
the cousins playing ring-a-levio
outside, or capture the flag.
When we left,
they stopped talking to us,
or we stopped talking to them,
like we were all suddenly
not in the same story anymore.
When I tell this to my father
on the way to the rabbi’s office,
his eyes get wet,
so I don’t say anything else.
Rabbi’s Office
Right away I am nervous
because we are already
a year late in the process
of my bar mitzvah because my parents
just didn’t make the time.
My father waits outside,
and I go in.
The first thing I notice
is a little glass globe.
Inside is a blue river
and green trees in the center,
a whole world, so peaceful,
a storybook inside glass.
If I could, I would sleep
next to the trunk of the tree
closest to the rock,
where words are etched
in delicate precision:
“I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground.”
The rabbi tells me that his grandson
brought the globe back from Israel.
He lets me hold it.
He gives me saltwater taffy.
He’s calm,
and everything he says
sounds like a story
I might be a part of.
I make promises to practice,
and he writes down some dates
for when to come back,
all the way through the summer.
It’s a good meeting. A start at least.
It won’t be the worst thing
to come here.
Grown-Up Talk
In my room, I watch
The Greatest American Hero.
It’s an old show
I watch with my dad about these aliens who
give a suit to some guy
and it makes him a superhero.
I think about what I would do
if I had the suit.
How I would fight for good.
How I would streak across the sky.
How I might look in that skintight suit.
or maybe the suit would change me
just by my putting it on.
I hear my parents
talking in a low hum
in the dining room,
a gentle
stream of words
flowing through the house.
It’s comfort,
the uncomplicated vibration
of grown-up talk,
the sound, not the words.
But then, in the middle of the second commercial,
I hear a crashing sound,
the dining room table, the pewter cup,
the dinner dishes falling.
The bass of my father’s yell vibrates
through the wall.
I hear the shriek
of my mother’s angriest voice.
I hear
crashing,
bumps,
door slams.
I hide in my room and wait.
The Greatest American Hero
slides under a car
to stop it from crashing
into a school bus.
My parents yell,
but it’s when I hear crying
that I try to be brave.
I open my door,
sneak down the very short hallway
until the sound burns like fire.
My father sits on top of my mother,
holds her head down,
screaming, Fatso, you’re killing me!
She screams back
every word
I have been told
not to say.
Other words too,
about traveling,
about lying again,
another woman’s name,
about businesses. About money.
Words in spit and terrible angles.
His body hangs over her,
his weight over hers, trying to maneuver
their awkward, swollen adult bodies.
I want to rush in and knock him over.
I want her to stop screaming.
I’ve heard yelling before,
always shouting at each other
as if this pitch and fury
is just a part of who they are,
but I’ve never seen them like this before.
When my father finally notices me, his eyes are broken,
pleading, guilty, hopeless.
She’s driving me crazy, he says.
He stops, stand ups, grabs his cigarettes,
walks out of the apartment.
My mother gets off the floor too,
stops crying,
tries to pull herself together,
takes a drink of whatever is on the table,
stares at the door, left slightly open.
Grown-up talk, Ari, she says,
and sits down in her chair.
Just grown-up talk.
School over the Bridge
I should be going
to school in San Francisco,
where we live,
but my parents
send me over the Golden Gate,
to Mill Valley Middle School.
They say they want to send me to the best school.
It’s won all the awards, my mother tells me.
I ask her if she’ll get me a phone now
since I will be going so far every day,
but she tells me, No!
Under no circumstances, she says.
Those things stifle creativity!
You can always reach me on the school phone.
At first, my father drove me every day,
and we laughed and talked about school
or the family in New York
or the best ways to talk to girls,
but after doing it for a while,
I could tell he didn’t like
driving over the bridge every day.
One day he got really quiet,
played the music a little louder,
and we didn’t talk at all.
This drive is too long, he said.
There’s got to be another way.
I Will Fight You
Words are the source of misunderstandings.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
When you are fat,
you get picked on.
It’s just how it is,
especially if you’re the new kid.
I don’t know what to say
most of the time.
I just want them to like me.
At the Ping-Pong table
before school,
Frank tells me
that he is afraid of Mark,
that he made him mad somehow.
Frank’s one of the people
I see before school,
because his parents drop him early
for the breakfast program,
and sometimes I get there early too.
We eat doughnuts between games,
and I eat way too many.
Powdered sugar
wafts onto the table,
white flecks
on a green field.
I want Frank to be my friend
but usually he is mean to me,
picks me last at PE,
makes fat jokes,
even pushes me.
Sometimes, on bad
days, he chases
me on the bike path after school.
One time he called me “Jewboy.”
When I told my parents,
they said to stay away,
but there is
nowhere else
to go.
For now, we are
battling on the table,
and for once I am winning.
You’re pretty good, he says.
I used to have a table at home, I reply.
I didn’t. I try not to lie,
but I’m scared to tell him
that I learned to play
with my parents, in New York,
on vacation in the Catskills
and at Camp Shalom.
I don’t want him
to ask me questions
about being Jewish.
Mark is weak, I say between serves.
Mark is not weak. Not at all.
The mini-doughnut wrapper blows across
the table. Powdered sugar
covers the green field, the paddles, our hands.
You are way tougher, I insist.
Frank is strong, but not the toughest,
maybe in the bottom of the top ten,
behind the obvious choices,
mixed in with the dark-horse contenders,
strong kids, good athletes,
kids who do karate and kung fu.
I tell Frank that he can kick
Mark’s ass, that he shouldn’t worry.
The bell rings.
Frank smiles and grabs his bag.
Later, he says.
I feel the pride of helping,
and soon, in my mind,
I am standing on the far field,
across from the basketball courts,
right alongside him and the other cool kids.
I see Frank later in PE.
He stands next to Mark.
They are looking at me and laughing.
Mark is the tallest in the class.
In the mile run,
he glides past us
like some action hero.
Crushes baseballs,
spirals footballs.
After lunch, in the bathroom,
Brian Yee whispers to me,
I hear Mark and Frank are going to kick your butt.
Why did I open my big mouth?
I meant well.
I just didn’t think past that moment,
that I was the outsider,
but I can’t go through people
to get inside.
I don’t fit into those spaces,
no matter how much I lie to myself.
I am too big,
even in theory,
to hide,
too slow
to run.
I shouldn’t have said anything.
We’re gonna get you, Fatboy, they say.
How long do I have?
First Friend
On one of my first days
in this new school,
the counselor ducks me into class,
unannounced, sits me near the back,
close to a wiry, brown-haired kid
with bright eyes and a square jaw.
I’m John, he says.
Ari, I reply.
His desk is filled with notebook pages
of robots and mechs from Transformers,
Robotech, Voltron, and Battle of the Planets