Sometime after eleven, Marie barged into my room and said, “C’mon, we’re leaving.”
We went to three stores and I tried on twelve pairs of jeans. Some were too baggy, some too tight, some came up too high on my waist.
I tried on the twelfth pair and came out of the dressing room to see Marie staring at me, bored senseless.
“They look fine; just get them,” she said. She was wearing head-to-toe Abercrombie & Fitch. It was the turn of the millennium. All of New England was wearing head-to-toe Abercrombie & Fitch.
“They look weird in the butt,” I said, staying perfectly still.
Marie stared at me, as if she expected something.
“Are you gonna turn around so I can see if they are weird in the butt, or what?” she finally said.
I turned around.
“They make you look like you’re wearing a diaper,” she told me.
“That’s what I just said.”
Marie rolled her eyes. “Hold on.” She circled her finger in the air, indicating that I should go back into the dressing room. And so I did.
I had just pulled the last pair of jeans off when she threw a pair of faded straight-leg ones over the top of the door.
“Try these,” she said. “Joelle wears them and she has a big butt like yours.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, grabbing the jeans from the door.
“I’m just trying to help you,” she said, and then I could see her feet walk away, as if the conversation was over simply because she wasn’t interested in it anymore.
I unzipped the fly and stepped in. I had to shimmy them over my hips and suck in the tiniest bit to get them buttoned. I stood tall and looked at myself in the mirror, posing this way and that, turning my head to check out what I looked like from behind.
My butt was growing shapelier by the day and my boobs seemed to have stagnated. I had read enough of my mother’s Glamour magazines to know that this was referred to as “pear shaped.” My stomach was flat but my hips were growing. Olive was starting to gain weight in her boobs and her stomach and I wondered if I wouldn’t prefer that sort of figure. Apple shaped.
But, if I was being honest with myself, what I really wanted was all that my mother had passed on to Marie. Medium butt, medium boobs, brown hair, green eyes, and thick lashes.
Instead, I got my father’s coloring—hair neither fully blond nor fully brunette, eyes somewhere in between brown and green—with a body type all my own. Once, I asked my mother where I got my short, sturdy legs from and she said, “I don’t know, actually,” as if this wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever said to me.
There was only one thing about my appearance that I truly loved. My freckles, that cluster of tiny dark spots under my right eye. My mom used to connect the dots with her finger as she put me to bed as a child.
I loved my freckles and hated my butt.
So as I stood there in the dressing room, all I wanted was a pair of jeans that made my butt look smaller. Which these seemed to do.
I stepped out of the dressing room to ask Marie’s opinion. Unfortunately, she was nowhere to be found.
I stepped back into the dressing room, realizing I had no one to make this decision with but me.
I looked at myself one more time in the mirror.
Maybe I liked them?
I looked at the tag. Thirty-five bucks.
With tax, I’d still have money left over to get teriyaki chicken from the food court.
I changed out of them, headed to the register, and handed over my parents’ money. I was rewarded with a bag containing one pair of jeans that I did not hate.
Marie was still missing.
I checked around the store. I walked down to the Body Shop to see if she was there buying lip balm or shower gel. Thirty minutes later, I found her buying earrings at Claire’s.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” I said.
“Sorry, I was looking at jewelry.” Marie took her change, delicately put it back into her wallet, and then grabbed the tiny white plastic bag that, no doubt, contained fake gold sure to stain her ears a greenish gray.
I followed Marie as she walked confidently out of the store and toward the entrance where we’d parked.
“Wait,” I said, stopping in place. “I wanted to go to the food court.”