The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

he considers mocking his son’s belly fat an expression of paternal care. Imagine a father incapable of loving his son how he is. Imagine a father who pressures his son to lift weights and eat fewer softening foods, who pulls the boy’s plate away at the table and grumbles, That’s enough of that. Imagine this father, still at the wheel, now nearly three in the morning. Imagine this father driving to work on a weekend to fix a leak that doesn’t need fixing—it’s not a dangerous leak. Imagine the highway’s free of debris—a dry night in the first week of June—and imagine this father, angry and exhausted, unintentionally loses control of the wheel around a familiar turn, imagine his truck pummels through a guardrail, imagine his head webs the windshield on impact, killing him if not instantly then quickly. Imagine this is an accident.

Dyson’s body at age seventeen: Cola-colored hair hangs to his eyes. He stands a sliver under six feet, just tall enough to peer over a fence. His fingers are slender but short. A stove burn shaped like a sickle marks the back of his left wrist. His skin is the color of apricot flesh. Freckles bloom lily-pad-like under his eyes. His cheeks are as round and pitted as the rind of a cantaloupe. Acne marches across his shoulders like ants. Pimples prick his collarbone. There’re some on his thighs, the small of his back, in the places he sweats where the sun doesn’t dare shine. In the center of his body is a stomach—cushy and round—which he doesn’t consider his own: it belongs to whoever’s itching to see it. For laughs, he lifts his shirt on command. Other kids bury pencils and keys and half-eaten muffins into the flab. The red mark of a hand fades on his skin. For a long time, Dyson doesn’t object.

A week after his father died, on a hot, slurping Sunday morning in June, Dyson waited outside my front door wearing blue mesh shorts a smidgeon too short—his boxers peeked out the bottom—and a long-sleeved T-shirt with the name of our high school printed across the front. A white headband flattened his hair to his forehead. I blew into my hands, swung my legs to warm up. I want you to show me how to do it, he said.

You know how to run, I said.

To show me how to have a body like yours.

My body wasn’t much of a body. I was flat chested and tall, I felt all angles and elbows, a body inherited from my mother. My eyes rested unevenly on my face. My ears flapped out through drags of paint-straight hair that stretched past my shoulders. I hated my forearms, for reasons I cannot explain. I hated my fingers for reasons I can explain: they were long and elegant and men loved using this as an excuse to take hold of my fingers, to ask if I played piano. I didn’t. My mouth was packed with bright, prominent teeth. I had a faun-like, porcelain beauty, the type that made older men eager and nervous. I never polished my nails. I wore makeup only for the most funereal or joyous occasions. Though my skin wasn’t perfect, compared to Dyson—and compared to the rest of our school, a parade of misfiring hormones—it glowed as if it had never been touched. I’d lucked into my mother’s skin, olive colored and flawless, no need to apply or avoid or rinse the way other people applied and avoided and rinsed.

My mother modeled before I was born. Not in the types of magazines people imagine when they hear the word model; she posed for Sears and J. C. Penney catalogues wearing matronly smocks patterned with cartoon irons and kittens and babies. She was forced out of the job after becoming pregnant with me. Her stunted career soured her on “The Beauty Industrial Complex,” as she called it. She distrusted beauty the way people distrust politicians or exes. Whenever shampoo or makeup commercials came on TV, she would change the channel and scoff, Someday we’ll look back on these poisons the way we do cigarettes and DDT. She considered herself one of those women who didn’t care about looks; she intended to let herself age organically, and gracefully, to become whatever nature decided. However, she couldn’t abstain from using beauty products. You buy the product to become the product, she would mutter, as she led me through cosmetics aisles loading her basket with lipsticks and eyeliners and serums. She worked as a receptionist at a day spa, a job she hated but took, I suspect, to punish herself for never having made it as a model. The spa kept a shallow wicker bowl full of sample shampoos and cleansers and masks on her desk. At the start of each shift, she emptied the bowl into her purse—to protect our clients from poisons—only to later transfer the samples to a bowl on our kitchen counter. Someday I’ll grow a spine, she would tell me, as she plucked out packets of pricy bronzer, and throw this trash in the trash. She was among those rare people who were just as tragic as they believed themselves to be.

Despite her best intentions and bitterness, she couldn’t withstand the expectations imposed on her appearance. And in doing so she taught me a valuable lesson in the inevitability of concession. The world encouraged me to see myself as an object of men’s desires. And for years I conceded. I shaped myself to the demands made on my body—kept it slender and pretty and fit—because I feared what would happen to me if I didn’t. I’d heard stories about the women who didn’t. When Dyson said, Show me how to have a body like yours, what I heard was: Show me how to internalize the expectations of magazines and commercials and lip-licking men in the street. Show me how to obsess over myself. To hate myself. To see my body