Beth

Beth is the narrator’s roommate and intensely close friend during their sophomore year of college, a charismatic young woman whose gifts and admirers make her seem effortlessly valued. Their friendship gives the narrator a rare space for intimate disclosure, but it also sharpens the painful contrast between Beth’s social attention and the narrator’s conviction that she is unwanted. Beth sees worth in her friend before the narrator can see it herself; that difference makes her both a source of comfort and an unwelcome mirror.

Identity and Presence

The narrator describes Beth as a bright, brilliant presence who seemed to draw people into her orbit. Her talents resist any single, narrow portrait: she wore high heels to class, danced salsa and sang soprano, could change a truck’s oil and field dress a deer, and earned Distinction on their English comprehensive examinations after the two friends had studied for only two days. The narrator merely passed. Beth’s range and confidence are presented through concrete contrasts, not as a claim that she was flawless: her accomplishments were real, while the narrator’s admiration also carried the ache of comparison.

Beth’s personal attention could make someone feel singular. She could take another person’s hands, look directly into their face, and create the impression that the person before her was the only one who mattered. The narrator recalls spending much of college managing a succession of suitors who believed they had fallen uniquely in love with Beth. The strength of Beth’s social pull therefore extended beyond private friendship: other people made her the center of romantic fantasies, often with little regard for who she was beyond the qualities they had assigned to her.

Friendship and Disclosure

The first time the narrator called herself fat in conversation with another person was during her sophomore year, in a moment involving Beth. Beth had finally persuaded her roommate to disclose whom she had a crush on. Instead of answering aloud, the narrator cried and sent her response by instant message from the opposite corner of their shared dorm room. Her short message, “You count,” conveyed why the confession felt so difficult: Beth’s opinion mattered, and the narrator feared that being known would place her outside the category of people considered desirable.

The narrator characterizes their bond as a form of intense, almost codependent young-women’s friendship. That description holds both affection and strain. Beth was not simply a distant ideal; she was the person close enough to draw a confession from the narrator, even when the confession could only be typed across the room. Yet closeness could not immediately undo the narrator’s belief that Beth’s value was secure while her own was not. The friendship becomes a setting where admiration, dependence, and painful self-comparison coexist.

Admiration and Unequal Attention

Beth’s admirers repeatedly sent anonymous bouquets of yellow roses with love letters. After Beth casually mentioned wanting a Leatherman multi-tool, one appeared in her campus mailbox without a note. The narrator later reads such gestures as part of a pattern of male entitlement: admirers projected an ideal onto Beth and treated persistence as courtship. The tool’s unexplained arrival seemed especially unsettling in retrospect, carrying the implication that someone had been watching closely enough to know what she wanted.

At the time, however, the friends laughed these episodes off. Their different experiences of attention were not yet equally legible to the narrator. Beth had a box for the letters she received; the narrator recalls having no comparable romantic recognition—no flowers, dates, or love letters, and no sense of being chosen. She describes the cumulative effect not merely as loneliness but as feeling unnatural and broken. Beth’s abundance of admirers did not make her responsible for that disparity, but it made the disparity visible in the room they shared and in the narrator’s private measure of her own worth.

What Beth Sees

In one conversation, the narrator told Beth that Beth would always be worth more than she was, regardless of what the narrator did, and that she expected to remain alone because she was fat. Beth answered, “Oh, no,” then said, “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.” The narrator resented Beth’s certainty because it seemed to misunderstand how firmly the world’s judgments had shaped her. Looking back, she recognizes that Beth was ahead of her: the reassurance was not proof that the narrator’s insecurity had vanished, but evidence that someone close to her could see beyond the hierarchy she had taken for granted.

Beth’s importance lies partly in that gap between what she could offer and what her friend could accept. The narrator does not present one encouraging exchange as a cure. Four years later, in December 2006, she wrote a fat-positive sentence in a newspaper review of Dreamgirls—the first time she recalls doing so in print or aloud. That later step belongs to a longer development, not to an action Beth is said to have caused. The college memory nevertheless establishes an early counterpoint: at a time when the narrator understood desirability as proof of value and believed she had failed as a woman, Beth regarded her differently. Her faith did not settle the matter, but it remained a measure of how far the narrator’s own vision had yet to travel.