Heavenly Bodies in Seven Parts by Diane Gottlieb

I

You want to matter. Everybody wants to matter.

Physics and you were never best friends, but you know matter makes up the world. The table you’re sitting at, the chair, your notebook. Matter. Your whole body is matter, but how to matter? Is this aqua flair dress, these Rag & Bones jeans, this size ten, the measures of your worth?

Size. Bigger is not better when it comes to bodies, you’ve learned. But there was a time you wished it would be. You longed to take up space in a family where there never seemed to be enough room. So, you ate and ate, and you grew and grew. But the more flesh and fat, the greater number of folds, the more invisible you became.

Your body is matter. But what does it matter and to whom?

II

You read somewhere that fitting rooms reveal the personality of the store.

Take Bloomingdale’s with its spacious dressing areas, with solid doors that click as they shut, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. The elegantly upholstered chair tells you you’re worth it, whatever the “it” is you’re trying on. But are you?

There’s the dressing room at Macy’s. More clutter, less chintz. Maybe there’s a stain on the chair in the corner or the last person’s rejects in a pile. Someone’s left a candy wrapper under the mirror, and straight pins scatter the floor. You walk in. You feel worn.

There’s Marshall’s. Marshall’s tries too hard. Some dressing room attendant hands you a brightly numbered tag, the words “Treats for Your Closet” on top. Inside the stark, white room, three clothing hooks compete for that same upbeat vibe: “definitely,” “possibly,” “tomorrow.” But outside are racks of unwanted clothes, orphans cast to the side. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

You remember yesterday. A yesterday, years ago. Alexander’s Department Store on 63rd Road and Queens Boulevard. Alexander’s with its giant bins of sneakers. All those new Keds. The feel of coarse cloth, the thick smell of rubber, sticky, like a crate full of tires. Dig deep to find your size. You can still feel the pull of the Huck-a-poo shirts, bold polyester patterns to splurge on, buttons tight across your chest. Two-toned bell-bottoms, chocolate jeans with pockets of light blue. And the dressing room. Communal. Everyone could see.

III

Physics. It’s not your thing. Unless you’re talking astronomy. Copernicus, he’s your guy. None other than the father of the modern study of space. His own father died when he was a little boy. Maybe Copernicus was searching the heavens for his dad.

If you could be a star, which star would you be? Would you be happy out there in the vast open space, a single bright blip in the dark?

IV

Your sister took you to Alexander’s to buy clothes. She was twenty-two. You were ten. You’d been busting out of your pants, skirts, tops, pushing hard against constraints.

Up the escalator and to the back, you shopped at the chubby section for kids. The sizes marked with an X—3X, 4X, 5, 6, 7. Sometimes there were even two: XX. Your cheeks burned. When your sister asked what’s wrong, you had no answer. You hadn’t yet learned the word shame.

There were few people in the dressing room when you walked in. Just one woman and her daughter, both long and lean, both with thin shoulder-length hair. Your sister hung the X-sized clothing on a hook beside the mirror where you stood. She lifted the first skirt off the hanger, as you pulled down your elastic-waist jeans.

“He norah shmenah,” you heard the woman tell her daughter, who was trying on pastel pink shorts. The woman. She’d been staring at your ample body. You felt her eyes bore through the barrier of your soft, tender flesh.

“He norah shmenah.” The woman didn’t consider that you might know Hebrew. You didn’t understand much, just the words your mother used when she spoke behind your back. Scorching words like shmenah.

V

Your mother was born in the Old City of Jerusalem, where she lived in an orphanage from the age of six. At fourteen, long after she’d given up hope, she was adopted by a wealthy family. They brought her into their home to serve the wife and children—and to service the husband. But that’s a story she never told. You wouldn’t learn it until many years later. Still, it haunted you then, screamed out in its silence.

You wonder now about such ghost stories. Phantoms, some say, disappear into thin air. But you know better. Air, you learned in physics, is matter too. You may not see it, but air takes up space.

VI

“Teree!” The woman in the dressing room screeched. “Look!” But her daughter, bless that tall, thin daughter. She turned away.

Your sister, though, jumped in and scolded the woman: “Sheket! At lo yodaat me medaberet evereet!” Translation: “Be quiet! You don’t know who understands Hebrew!”

Your sister, your dear sister, didn’t know you understood. You kept it your secret, didn’t let on you knew exactly what the woman said: “Look! That girl is so fat.”

The lady shut up. And so did you. But only after you swallowed her words. Later that night, after everyone else was asleep, you snuck into the kitchen and swallowed a few extra pieces of pie.

VII

Black holes are bodies from which there is no escape. Matter is pressed tightly into a tiny area where the pull of gravity is so strong not even light can get out. Black holes form when stars are dying. You never wanted to be squeezed into a tiny space, to be pulled so fiercely that your light couldn’t break its way out. You refused to be a dying star.

Many revolutions around the sun have passed. You still want to matter. Most days you believe you do.

Sometimes, you dream of your mother. She’s fourteen again, before she’s learned from her adoptive father there is only one way she can matter. Always, you want to protect her. You never can. You long to take her soft, freckled hand, as if she is your child. Hold her slight body, breathe in her salty breath, but she slips away, forever slips away. You find yourself alone. Haunted.

On a cool, clear night, you walk outside. The sky. It’s filled with stars. You think about the ghosts from long ago. About the stories we keep inside. You wonder if Copernicus ever found his father in the heavens. You look for your mother beyond the waxing moon.

*

The story behind the story:

I’ve had a challenging relationship with my body, with food, with dressing rooms for as long as I can remember. Size had always mattered in my family—how big, how small, how much space we each were allowed to take up, what we needed to do—or look like—to be seen, to matter. I read once that Copernicus’s father died when Copernicus was very young. I had this notion that Copernicus became interested in the heavens because he was looking for his father. And then there’s my mother—my dear, complicated, beautiful mother. All these separate ideas felt deeply related to me somehow, so I connected them in seven parts. 

“Heavenly Bodies in Seven Parts” was previously published in Tiferet Journal and won the journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in nonfiction.

Header Photo by Amr Taha™ on Unsplash.