Sugar Land

by tammy lynne stoner

  I stood there in her transformed hallway closet in my “good” underwear—the only pair without holes—and my eight-year-old bra that was held fast on the left side with a safety pin, and listened to her read out my measurements as she wrote them on her hand.

  52-53-54. The numbers got bigger, as if I were sliding down—a mud flow off a mountain.

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton wound her tape measure around three fingers and clipped it together with a paper clip. Her nails were painted an even, unchipped pale pink. They were filed short, professional but pretty.

  She stepped back a few feet, fully exposing the lightbulb overhead again. “Get dressed, and I’ll see you out front.”

  The measuring room had been painted sky blue to make it feel bigger, but still I could barely breathe. When Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton shut the door, I stared into that mirror under that aggressive lightbulb, and I saw myself again without any filters. I saw a woman who hadn’t really allowed herself to be a woman in fifteen years—maybe more.

  I saw a belly rising like too much yeast and breasts that weren’t so much lifted by my bra as stopped from flowing onto my belly. I saw a flap of blubber falling over the front of my beige underwear, directly blocking access to my lady bits—should access ever be wanted. Even my elbows were fat, with sacks hanging from them like chins.

  At first, I tried telling myself that it was the light, but there’s only so much you can blame on light.

  “You all right in there?” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton called out.

  “I am.”

  I grabbed my old dress off the bistro chair in the corner of the closet, dressed—careful not to tear the fabric—and walked out.

  “You look pale, are you all right?”

  “I’ve let myself go,” I said.

  “Parts of us go as time moves on, to be sure.”

  “I can’t think of one part that has stayed.”

  “With eyes like yours, you don’t even notice,” she said.

  The delicate bell tied on the front door rang as a new customer came in. Of course that woman looked like God damn Jean Harlow.

  “Have a look around, I’ll be with you in a minute!” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton called out to her. She looked me up and down in a business-y way. “You want the same style dress?”

  “How about I let you decide that.”

  “Well—” she stepped back and eyed my dress again, squinting—“that one suits you, but maybe we could raise up the length a little—show some calf.”

  “OK.”

  “And fabric?”

  “How about—”

  “Oh right, you’re letting me decide.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked up and smiled. “Will do.”

  Jean Harlow the Second interrupted from across the quiet shop. “Do you do coordinates?”

  “I certainly do,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton told her, as perky as static cling.

  Jean Harlow the Second gestured to the two big brown bags she was carrying. “Mind if I set these down?”

  “Not at all. Right on that chair there would be fine.”

  She lifted the bags and plunked them onto the chair. “I found the most amazing things down outside Mrs. Lynne’s old shop. I’m always on the hunt for a good sidewalk sale.”

  “They must be making out well down there,” Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton said.

  The woman helped herself to some lemonade, obviously taxed.

  Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton readied her pen and looked up at me. “So, your name?”

  “Folks call me Nana Dara.”

  “And how many dresses?”

  “How about four?”

  “Four. All right then, Nana Dara, I’ll see you in ten days with four dresses.”

  Not knowing what to say—not that there were many things I could have said—I nodded like a fat sheep on the way to the abattoir and walked out to my truck.

  I blotted my forehead with the back of my hand and started her up. Exhaust came in the windows as I shifted and moved ahead, not looking at the dress shop in case Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton was looking out.

  I thought about her while I took the slow right past the pumpkin patch. How could we be so similar but so different? Those thoughts led me back to think about how I looked in that mirror. It’d been years since I’d seen myself in full view like that, and it struck me that I behaved as if I didn’t look that way. There was a confidence to me—a way I took my place in a room. Until that moment in the mirror, I saw myself as a large, middle-aged lady who made people feel comfortable. But now—thanks to that mirror—I saw myself the way other people saw me: a fat woman with a flap of blubber and three chins who looked a little like a huge baby doll in a crazy dress. People felt comfortable around me, sure, but maybe it was because I proved—as I once had with Beauregard and his ladies—to be no competition in any way.

  The revelation of how I appeared shocked me so much that I played it over and over again in my mind for the whole drive, missing a stop sign or two along the way, not that there was ever anyone around to mind, except maybe a wayward rooster.

  I lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window. At least I had the title of “widow.” I could barely tie my shoes and my fat behind had ripped through dresses, but I was a widow. I had proof that someone had loved me once upon a time.

  When I walked into the Opry, there was the Fiddler, leaning back against the sink, eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon.

  “You get some new dresses?”

  “What I got was a hard look at reality, Fiddler, and it is ugly,” I said when I walked by him to my room. He knew better than to follow.

  I clicked on the radio, fell down on my bed, and pulled out one of my secret stashes of treats: a marshmallow rolled in sugar. Every time I ate one, I hated myself for eating it, but I couldn’t stop. The taste made me feel good for a few minutes—and then I needed another taste to bring me back up again. This reminded me of how it had been after the Warden died and Edna—Eddie—took off.

  I tried to eat slowly, but knowing I had more marshmallows to follow caused me to speed up. Before you know it, I’d eaten all twelve. The sugar coated my teeth, and I wanted more. I went to my second stash: a tin of malted milk balls.

  Usually when I eat a malted milk ball, I bite it in half, then suck on each half, letting the inner malt melt away. But, that day, I popped them in two or three at a time and chewed them with an emotion that was part anger and part greed—gluttony maybe.

  I stuffed myself until I couldn’t eat one more bite. Then I sat there, feeling fatter than ever, and I accepted my fate. My fate was to eat until I got so huge that I could barely move. I would die in bed and have a recovered pedophile find me. That was my future in one sad sentence.

  I’d always wanted a family who loved me for who I was, and who I loved for who they were. A true family. My parents loved me as their child, and the Warden loved me as his wife—but no one truly knew me, except maybe Rhodie and Huddie.

  So the two folks who ever knew me were dead. Perfect.

  Somewhere in my mind, I realized, I held this dream that me and the girls would be like a true family, able to talk about everything—not just the comfortable bits. I’d be able to say, “I met this woman today, and she was so pretty that I was embarrassed about my weight.” But then I chastised myself for being a damn fool, grabbed a bottle of pop from beside my bed, and guzzled it down.

  × × ×

  I only left that stuffy room once over the next three days, to go to the store and fill up on snacks. Now I knew how I truly looked with that cart filled with candy and ice cream and breadsticks dipped in chocolate. For the first time, I saw it reflected in the eyes of that skinny girl who took my money. Maybe that look had always been there when I made my secret runs, but I hadn’t noticed it. Before, I’d cheerfully handed over my money after unwrinkling it, and I’d said something like, “A little something for my sweet tooth,” or, my standby, “Poker night treats,” and she would smile back at m
e. I’d never seen anything except a genuine smile before. What a flabby fool I’d been.

  As the girl bagged up my things for me, she snuck a look to the other cashier—a boy with blond hair sculpted to a flattop. They exchanged looks over me, the fat lady with all that fat-lady food.

  I held my head up as I picked up my three bags and walked out to the truck, past a few other people who gave me looks in the parking lot. They gave me looks without even knowing what was in my bags. They gave me looks just because I had bags—like a big lady wasn’t supposed to eat at all!

  I prayed that, when I slid into my truck, the front seat wouldn’t give that awful shriek that the springs sometimes gave when I sat down. But it did, and they heard. The tall girl laughed, and her friends joined in.

  I wasn’t even out of the parking lot before I broke into my Sugar Daddy caramel lollipop, chewing on that thing like I didn’t give a good God damn about my fillings or my teeth or anything else in the world out there.

  × × ×

  By the end of the week, that one dress that still fit me was tight in the belly. I was imprisoning myself in fat, shrinking the prison walls I’d worked so hard to push back. But I didn’t stop.

  On day ten, I asked the Fiddler if he would mind taking the truck into town to get my dresses. I didn’t want to see Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton. I had the cash, if he could pay.

  “No trouble,” he said, chewing on another innocent toothpick, his nervous habit quickly becoming a full-time hobby.

  I motioned to the keys, hanging from the key peg by the door. “The shop is a few blocks from Mrs. Lynne’s old place. You can’t miss it—there is a red woman in a red dress painted on the mailbox.”

  He nodded and headed out. “Need anything at the store?”

  “You know I don’t,” I said, thinking: I have enough food stashed to last through the winter.

  He held up his hands. “All right now, dang!”

  For years, I’d been fine with the way the Fiddler whiskered up the sink, scraped dog doo off his boots using the edge of the deck so it got hot and stunk up the whole area by day, and how loudly he cleared his sinuses every morning. I’d been fine with his odd need for raw goat’s milk, telling me some craziness about how it reminded him of his mother, who’d raised him on it. Trouble was that anything I had in the ice chest near his open jar of milk tasted goaty, which is to say it tasted like scrotum.

  That week, I grew to hate all of it. Every breath he took rattled my strings. When he dropped and dented the trashcan lid, I was so angry that I asked him if he’d ever been tested for mental disease. The worst part of it was that he just took it—and that made me even more aggravated.

  About the only time I wasn’t aggravated was when I was snacking. And since the Fiddler was always around, I was forced to do most of my snacking in my room, where the sheets were now sticky with sugar. I grew tired of hoarding wrappers in a bag in my closet. My room stunk.

  This anger inside me was poisoning the area around me, but I couldn’t stop it. I ruined everything for five minutes of feeling good with a snack—and I knew it—but I just couldn’t stop it.

  My mind just kept spinning: I was the horrible person who’d broken Rhodie’s heart, and the horrible mother who’d let my child grow up alone and angry in doll outfits so I’d look normal. It was my fault that Eddie then got herself pregnant—by someone I never even met—and, even worse, my fault that she’d given up her own child, my sweet little PD.

  Beyond that, I knew I’d never be truly known and loved. I would die a fat, loveless, unknown lesbian in a tie-dyed room that smelled like rotten cream and bologna.

  The Fiddler retrieved my dresses while I ate and smoked and thought about what it would be like if he weren’t here—if I could just get fat and eventually die in peace. The picture wasn’t a pretty one: me being able to yell at the evening news and leave the bathroom door open so I could be comfortable on the commode and keep my Milky Ways in the freezer, the way I liked them—things a timid, skinny man in recovery would never understand.

  An hour later, the Fiddler carried the dresses in—each one on a hanger, with the hangers tied together with the same ribbon on the little bell on Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton’s door. Sweat dripped from his underarm afros down his tan arms.

  “Dammit, don’t sweat on them,” I snapped.

  “Sorry,” he said and dropped them over the red vinyl chair in the kitchen. “Goodness, you are in a mood.”

  “I’m in a state.”

  “Well whatever state that is, the taxes are too high,” he said and stomped to his bedroom, chewing another toothpick.

  THE MANY FACES OF HELL

  By the first week of December, none of my four new dresses fit. Not one. I’d get them on over my head and shoulders, but then they’d get stuck either at the breastline or around my belly. Not a one made it to my thighs.

  I stood in my bedroom, buck naked, looking down at all my new dresses in a pile on my bedspread. She’d chosen some gorgeous colors too, Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton did. Just like she said, she made one with a bright peach and one with a bold blue and one with zigzags of green.

  I sat down next to the pile in my hot, stinky room and wondered what to do next. I had nothing to wear. Not one God damn thing.

  I rifled through my closet. My old white cotton robe—the one the Warden gave me on our third wedding anniversary—was about the only thing I could get around my girth. I was about to put it on, ready to do my best to act casual in only a robe, when I remembered that I had a T-shirt from the chili cook-off, where Miss Debbie’s Bo had placed second a few years earlier. I put that on with my pajama bottoms that had the elastic waist, and I was ready to leave my room. On the way out the door I decided to jazz it up, so I added a silk scarf around my neck.

  Listen, I told myself, if women those days could wear dresses that looked like boxes and pants that used to be quilts I could wear my Watch Them Beans! T-shirt from the 1953 Hotter Than Hell Chili Cook-Off.

  When I was younger, I vowed that if my stomach ever protruded past my breasts, I would make some weight-loss changes. That was twenty years ago. I had done nothing for those twenty years but watch the race between my breasts and my belly, which my belly had clearly won. Now there was a better chance that bears would dance with bunnies than that my breasts would ever catch up.

  “Oh, well, uh, where’s your dress?” the Fiddler asked when I walked down the hallway in my unique outfit.

  “Where’s your tact?” I answered.

  The Fiddler threw up his hands. “You’ve been riding me for two months now, Nana Dara, and for no good reason that I can tell. I’m sick with all the tension. I’m chewing so many toothpicks that I’m worried about wood getting stuck in my stomach.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, then: “Come on. Let’s sit a spell.”

  We walked out to the deck. Thankfully we were deep in winter so I could leave the robe on.

  The Fiddler, all elbows and sad eyes, sat down. “You don’t like the dresses?”

  “I wore them before—two weeks ago—didn’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I said I liked them, didn’t I?” I swatted at spider webs I wasn’t sure were there.

  “You are growing too mean. I am nothing but nice to you, and you are growing too mean.”

  I leaned away from the Fiddler. “Seems I am growing, that’s for sure.”

  He nodded like this was no news to him.

  “Is it that obvious?” I asked.

  “I noticed.”

  “Well, damn, thanks for telling me.”

  “That’s not right fair.”

  “Just take your redneck ass back in the house and leave me be!”

  The Fiddler walked off the deck, through the kitchen, and out the front door. He wasn’t around for the rest of that day—or the next. I’m not sure where he went, but he didn’t come back for two days, and when he did he smelled like the armpit of a French harlot.

  “Fall asleep on the floor
of a distillery?” I asked, without looking up from my crossword puzzle.

  The Fiddler, in the same jeans and flannel he left in two days earlier, stepped past two of the cats, who were sleeping together on a sunny square on the floor, and walked to his room. Just before he went in, he stopped and turned to face me. “Ever given any thought to why you suddenly care about your weight?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t care what I saw or what your family saw. You only cared what Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton saw.”

  I felt a rush of panic and wished I could backpedal somehow out of the room. “What now?”

  “You are having sinful thoughts or inclinations toward Mrs. Tanya May Rogerton, and so you’re hatin’ on yourself.”

  I looked him dead in the eye. “What?”

  “You are overeating because you are hating what you are. What you are is sinful, that’s true, but I don’t want to see you kill yourself over urges of the flesh that can be overcome.”

  “Overcome?”

  “Like I did.”

  I stood up from the couch in the same motion that forms a tidal wave. The Fiddler took a small step back but held his ground.

  With a fierce tension in my voice I said, “I am not you, Fiddler. My adult love is not your lust for young girls.”

  “What you feel and think is wrong. It ain’t right. It’s wrong.”

  I took a step toward him. The muscles in his face strained so much that they actually bulged out at the end of his jaw, in front of his ears.

  “I had a friend once named Huddie,” I said, “and he told me that he was the way he was because he couldn’t hide the color of his skin. Well, looking back, I wish to God I couldn’t hide. I wish everyone looked at me and saw right off that I am a lover of women, God dammit! Maybe that way I would have been forced to step up and find myself someone to love. Instead, I’m sitting here with you and getting told I’m a wrongful person, when I am so sad about it all that I’m eating enough to explode. God damn you, Fiddler!”

  The Fiddler looked down with his forehead all scrunched up the way he did. His hair was fluffy on top, on account of him needing to get a trim after the past few days. I watched him struggle with what to do.