After calling off her engagement, my grandmother urged her to go back to school, but she couldn’t. Not out to grief, but shame. She looked at herself in the mirror and discovered she had aged a great deal during the few months of the engagement. She wasn’t fat, but she’d gotten bigger. She would look at her trousseau and hold up her wedding gown to her plump figure, feeling like she was already a married woman. Sometimes, she pretended to be pregnant and would strap a pillow onto her belly to see how she would look.
How was she going to contain her gigantic body beneath the blue school uniform? How could she shackle it behind a small school desk and expose it to the instructions of the teachers, their aides and their reprimands? How could she submit to the girls’ questionings about her en
