My favorite Fatty was an old one, whom I couldn’t remember my mother making; she had always just been there. She was the ugliest of the bunch, her face like an imploding planet, her large breasts hanging almost to her crotch, her hands gnarled and monstrous, her kneecaps misaligned. I named her Beth, and when I was very young I would sit on the garage floor between those massive feet and tell her stories, bring her tiny treasures I’d found. Shells, beads, Jolly Rancher wrappers. Beth liked that sort of thing. Later, I tucked one of my favorite plastic ponies—the palomino, dearly beloved—between two rolls of Beth’s cold cracked flesh, a gift. Beth was my first refuge when my parents would argue, my mother’s voice rising like steam into my bedroom, my father’s an imperceptible murmur, or when I was home alone and afraid, seeing eyes in all the corners. I liked to rub Beth’s flabby butt; you can probably still see the small circle I wore down with my rubbing. I liked to see how much of my face I could fit into her massive hand. But when I began to become aware of my body and the ways it should and should not look, I stopped going into the garage. I became afraid of the Fatties, as if their grotesquerie might somehow be contagious. I thought that if I loved Beth, there was some chance I would become her. This is a logical fallacy to which I have willingly subscribed for many years.

Does beauty, in the end, hurt us? my mother used to ask, idly, as she smoothed the contours of a bulbous face, or packed a massive clay hump onto a shoulder or groin. I admit: until that summer, I never considered the answer.

Studies have shown that the act of looking at something attractive—a person, a product, some honest-to-goodness nature—triggers an involuntary series of synapse firings in the motor cerebellum. As it turns out, this is the exact same neural sequence that causes us to reach out a hand. Beauty, then, literally moves us. We all know this: beauty can easily force a hand. But will we ever shake the pressing delusion, as Tolstoy put it, that beauty is the same as goodness? After all, how often does goodness truly force a hand? More likely it stays it, and even then, barely, and even then, only for a time.