Wendy’s
By Ofelia Montelongo
The smoke of your car and the bitter wind is sneaking inside, but you can’t roll up the window because you’re waiting at the Wendy’s drive-through. You prefer tacos, but this is the only fast-food restaurant on your way home to Maryland from downtown D.C. You spoil yourself. You had a long day at the university, and your cravings won’t let you go in peace.
Your shoe is pressing the brake. You don’t want to park it. If you do that, that’ll mean you were there, and you don’t want to be officially there.
This is the place where your brother worked during the summer years ago. His name is Eduardo, but his nametag read John. Once you get your brown bag, Diet Coke, and change, you snap a photo and send it to him.
¿Pediste chili? He texts back. You can’t order the chili because it’s hard to eat in the car. Besides, you don’t understand the wannabe beans concept too much. Eduardo returned to Mexico a long time ago, but you still connect with the American food he used to indulge in.
Smelling the salty and greasy aroma, you drive to the parking lot next to a car with its brake lights on and a Stitch sticker on the back window. You unwrap your Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and give it a juicy bite. This is not your best meal, but your stomach stops crying a little bit. Your body is a sedan, and you’re feeding it with diesel. You raise the burger towards your mouth, but you stop before giving it another bite. From the corner of your eye, you notice someone from the car next to you, watching you. The intrusive gazing makes you put down the burger. You change the gear from drive to reverse and leave.
*
One after another, four students approach the empty seat next to you on the university shuttle, but when they take a better look at the space left by your thick hips, they sling their backpacks back over their shoulders. They walk away from you, one by one. One twists her mouth. Another says, “oh,” and keeps walking toward the end of the bus. Another hops off the bus.
“It’s full,” he says to the driver. But it isn’t full. Next to you, there’s still space, but no one wants to take it. Even if you are squishing yourself toward the window, you can’t hide your 300-pound almost six-foot body. A dull ache in your belly demands you to explain yourself.
*
After leaving the parking lot, you come back to the drive-through for more napkins so you can put your burger on your lap on your way home.
At a red light, you steal two bites of your burger. You sigh. With a hand on the steering wheel and the other on your burger, you move forward when the light turns green. Your stomach roars again. You grab a salty fry and keep driving home, taking occasional sips of your soda.
*
At the doctor’s, the nurse leads you to the scale before going to an examination room. “No matter what the number says, you look great,” she says with a soothing voice. A smile is plastered on her face.
You don’t want to overthink her comment, but you do. This “you look great” is fake. You can see it in her eyes, in the way she wrinkles her nose. She says it like she has been trained to do it. She probably took a body positivity course and decided to practice on you. You notice the green tinge left by a fake golden chain on her neck while she scribbles some numbers. You return a big, plastered grin.
You have worn this smile before as a response. One time you used it when a random man on the street in Mexico told you and your sister to drink a glass of water upon waking up. “Van adelgazar así muchachas,” he said—you are going to lose weight that way, girls. Fifteen years later, you still drink that glass of water.
*
You still have half of your burger in your lap, and you take advantage of another red light to indulge. You grab a chicken nugget from the bag and toss it in your mouth while tapping your fingers on the steering wheel to the rhythm of Shakira. You slurp your Diet Coke. The SUV next to you rolls down the window. A golden-haired woman is raising her eyebrows at you, mouthing something. The lady, probably in her forties, is shouting, “Gross.”
Are you imagining this?
She does this several times to make sure you hear her. You stop chewing. The chicken nugget in your stomach feels sharp and unwelcome. You face forward, avoiding the lady’s muffled barking. The green light saves you. Still, the whole scene has stirred up the old memory of your father waking you and your sisters up to go running with him and saying, “A los gordos no los quiere nadie”—Nobody likes fat people.
*
You are seated at the front of an author’s reading in a crowded D.C. bookstore. You didn’t decide to sit in the middle of the first row—an usher walked you there, and you couldn’t say no. It was the last seat available. You usually take the seat farthest back and closest to the door. You squished in your caderas in the plastic chair and hid your belly with a book. Angie Cruz is singing Bésame Mucho, a song by Consuelo Velázquez first written in her novel Dominicana. She is seated behind a floor-level table next to two interviewers. This means that whoever is sitting behind you is not going to be able to see her. You tilt your head, trying to give the woman behind you a chance to see Angie. You hear her tsking away. Hunched over, you fidget around to give this person a view, but your thighs are poking out of the sides of the chair. You’re afraid it’ll break or bend, so you stop.
This reminds you of the time you went to a Mexican restaurant in North Scottsdale, Arizona. It was a business lunch, and when you sat on the plastic chair, your hips didn’t fit, so you had to shift sideways. With a hand close to your mouth, you whispered to the waitress if she could bring you another chair, but she shook her head. There were no other chairs, precisely like in this bookstore. There’s no space left for you to fiddle. This chair was not made for you. This room was not made for you.
You feel the plastic warming down under you. Scooching down, you try to fade into the seat, but you are expanding instead. You hear only snippets of the author’s talk.
“Different sacrifices,” says the author, “moving around the promises of family.”
You imagine yourself as a published author in the spotlight. What if they give you a plastic chair and you don’t fit? What if an auditorium full of people sees your hips trying to squish themselves into impossible furniture?
You stop breathing for a minute and come back to the present; maybe that way, the person behind you can see you are invisible. “Compromises,” the author says. “Be grateful for what’s working. Pay attention to the external sense of nature.” You arch your body upward, lean back, and scribble on your notebook, pretending you are not trying to make yourself disappear.
The event finishes, converting the tsking into applause. You scramble off the seat, feeling your legs getting numb. You step back to survey the wobbly chair. You didn’t hear any cracking, but you want to be sure it is not broken. You twirl around and walk away before you can see the woman and catch any sneering.
-
You finally arrive home after Wendy’s. You check your reflection in the rear mirror and wipe your mouth with the back of your hand. The image of the SUV lady flows through you. You save the taunting scene in a mental jar for now.
After smashing the brown bag with fries, half of a burger, and ranched chicken nuggets still inside, you throw it away in a waste container before entering your apartment. You scrape out of your fingernails restos of French fries and smear your hands with Hawaiian hand sanitizer, cleaning any leftovers with your pants. You can’t let anyone know you have been eating Wendy’s. Your family will give you disappointing looks. Just like the time you saw your childhood friend who said to you, “Tan bien que ibas.” Or your uncle who said, “¿Hace cuántos kilos que no nos veíamos?”—how many pounds ago have we seen each other? Or perhaps they’d again encourage you to get weight loss surgery or to tape in pieces of garlic on your belly button. You only have done the latter.
You want to avoid those comments and those looks. You stow away the real you, just like you do in photos when you ask someone, a shorter and more confident person, to stand in front of you. You adjust your head into a rehearsed profile that shows less of you. You smile, burying half of you—even if you are wearing all black.
*
You are riding on the D.C. metro toward home, and the seat next to you is empty as usual. It’s rush hour. People prefer to stand than to sit with you. You scroll down your phone, feigning carefreeness. A large woman wiggles through the carpeted aisle and makes her way to your spot. She squeezes her bottom into the seat and rests her purse on her lap. She yawns and fishes out her phone out and plays Candy Crush. The bags under her eyes light up in green and purple colors. She doesn’t seem to mind your bulky tights rubbing each other, and that amazes you. You look around to see if people notice the both of you. Men in suits hang their arms in metallic tubes above themselves—some have a book in hand, others headphones on. Women in pantyhose ignore the world the same way. The only noise in the wagon comes from the screeching train waggling its way to Maryland. Even the lady next to you is playing with the sound off.
This silence reminds you of the loudness of your family, country, and culture. You didn’t know you were loud until the first time your parents and siblings visited New York with you. You were squealing about the arrival to Times Square to your sister, Cake, in the back of a bus. Cake responded with a shrill voice, taking a break from singing with your nephews. A middle-aged lady grunted and fiddled in her seat. When the bus halted, the lady got off, not before raising her voice to say, “Por eso no nos quieren a los latinos en este país, por gente como ustedes,”—that’s why they don’t want us Latinos in this country, because of people like you. Gente como ustedes—people like you, is a phrase that still haunts you. That’s why you learned to be silent, to adapt like the tongue-tied tamed birds in the D.C. metro.
*
The body that you feed with Wendy’s is the one making you dance in the elevator when no one is there and Lizzo is playing. That body dances away in Zumba classes. It moves you away from the unflattering full-length mirror but enjoys counting to eight with every sequence. It’s the one that takes you to the ballet barre for a water break where huddled animal-print jackets are hung. The ladies in the room dancing could be your grandma. They are slender but far from being fragile. They are lightly muscled and wear colorful yoga pants. They carry five-pound weights and smile at the mirror. When you take a break before the rest, they come to ask you if you are doing okay, looking at your belly, then hips. These looks are not strange to you. This is the look the weight-loss-breathing-exercises lady gave you every time you went for new exercises. This is the look your writer roommates shot at you when they saw you break the wooden boards below your bed in a retreat. This is the look you felt someone dart at you when you left the Wendy’s parking lot.
You have learned to love your body thanks to Lizzo, Lindy West, Roxane Gay, and many others. You have read their books and highlight inspirational phrases with a marker. You know you should love your body, whatever shape it is. Nevertheless, any time you can, you hide it from the world.
*
“I love myself.” You repeat this mantra often. You do. But your mantra rips apart when it hits the real world. How can your mantra survive when people call you a giganta? People ask you why you are so big. Mexican women are not supposed to be this tall—this corpulent. They are supposed to be small, complacent, mute in public places like the people in the metro. Even if you want to get rid of these thoughts, you have kept friends’ conversations in a jar, and often lift the lid open to replay them. “Dijiste que ibas adelgazar para mi boda”—and I lost weight for her wedding, but not enough to be anywhere near her size. Your body makes your girlfriends feel “safe” having their boyfriends hang out with you. For them, you’re an asexual-sexless being and not a hazard to them. For them, your body is temporal. There is another version of you they are expecting. You lie to them. You let them believe you’re also waiting for another you. You don’t really want to change, or do you? Your performance changes depending on whom you are talking to. With your family and close friends, you are on this quest for another you. With others, you pretend you don’t care, but your imposed ashamedness wins often. Maybe this imagined persona won’t have to pray for a thin person next to you in the plane––or crop your photos or slouch and hide behind someone.
In your mind, you tell all these people to mind their own business, to leave you alone, and to fuck off. Your mind embellishes your body in dresses that magically don’t make your legs shaft. Your outfit shows off your arms, and you are not afraid to put them in the air and clap while you sing.
*
You stitch yourself back together and go back to the Wendy’s drive-through, still thinking about the lady on the D.C. metro. How comfortable she looked when she claimed her space. How she let her body plop and merge into you without giving it a second thought. Your shoulders rubbed each other, and she didn’t dart a look, a comment, not even the slightest expression. You want that. You are yearning for the unbeknownst comfort of not giving a fuck about what other people think about your body. You want to claim your space. You want to own it.
You order your standard order 4 for $4, including a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger, nuggets, fries, and a soda. When you order through the intercom, your brother Eduardo—the one who still calls you Cochi, Piggy—comes to mind; sometimes you want to remind him you wear the same XXL t-shirts, but you keep yourself quiet. You come back here because Wendy’s reminds you of him. He used to tell you about living in another country, flipping burgers, not freezing the meat—about taking home the leftovers, about being sick to his stomach of eating the same thing over and over.
You snap a picture of your food and send it over to him. No chili again, you text. You check your bag to see if you got extra napkins as you requested. There are plenty for you to use on your way home. When you pull away from the drive-through, you notice other cars with their brake lights in the parking lot—one of them with a Stitch sticker in the back. You breathe in and out and re-route. You park next to two vehicles—one is empty, and the other hosts a person inside. You change the gear from drive to park. I’m doing this, you tell yourself. Unwrapping your burger, you glance over to your right. It’s dark, but you can see a heavy man looking blankly ahead, gulping down a sandwich and trying to be invisible to your gaze, or so you imagine. Maybe the smell of Wendy’s reminds him of something or someone.
You keep gazing at him until he turns to his left to see you. His shadow is frozen, and you are wondering if you’re being intrusive. You don’t want that. You lift your cheeseburger and say “cheers.” He manages to smile, raising his sandwich and nodding his head as well.
Are you imagining this?
If you were closer to each other, you would probably touch each other’s burgers and talk about your day. But you are not, so you both eat in peace in your cars. Perhaps one day, you will eat at the noise-filled restaurant and take your time indulging in front of other strangers, but for now, this is enough. You feel like the D.C. metro lady. You have claimed a space. You have closed one of the lids of your jars. You turn on the radio to listen to Lizzo, singing along as you eat.
Ofelia Montelongo (she/her) is a bilingual writer from Mexico. She has a MA in Latin American Literature. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2019 The Writer’s Center Fellow. She currently teaches at The George Washington University and was a PEN/Faulkner writer in residence, a 2021 Macondista & a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. Check out her newest adventures on her website, ofeliamontelongo.com.