by Mona Awad
Hot Pocket announces they’re going to need another round for this, even though he’s too drunk to drive and has one DUI already. He signals to their waitress.
“So how fat are we talking anyway?” Hot Pocket says.
Dickie appears to consider the question. Considering it, Tom thinks, like it’s a philosophical quandary. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
“Not like those chicks on the birthday cards that say, ‘Pick a Fold and Fuck It,’” he says at last, “but, you know, decent.”
“That’s disgusting,” Hot Pocket says.
“Sure, the belly’s not so hot.” Dickie shrugs with the air of a cult leader, above the understanding of the masses. “But I think pounding away at that ass might be curing me of PUP.” PUP is Dickie’s shorthand for Potentially Unable to Perform.
“Anyway, the best thing about fucking her?” Dickie continues, ignoring Tom’s dark look. “She’ll do anything.”
Tom gazes at Dickie from across the table, sitting contentedly under the antlered shadow of a goat skull on the wall. “What do you mean she’ll do anything?”
“I mean anything,” Dickie says, smiling.
They fall silent while their waitress approaches the table and sets down their drinks.
“I fucked Judy once,” Hot Pocket confesses quietly, after the waitress has left. He is referring to the plump, sad woman in IT who is in every way the physical opposite of Brindy, his ex-stripper-turned-freelance-interior-decorator wife, for whom he recently purchased breast implants.
“Judy doesn’t count,” says Dickie, like he’s a connoisseur of such things.
“What do you mean Judy doesn’t count?”
“What’s Judy, like, a size 12? I’m talking about an actual fat girl.”
“Jesus, keep it down,” Tom says, eyeing the group of waitresses behind the bar giving each other Can you believe him? looks.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve actually tried it is all I’m saying,” Dickie says. “In fact, you guys should. I’m sure she’d be up for it. She’s a real trooper, like I said.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Hot Pocket says.
“Don’t know what you’re missing. Tom knows what I’m talking about. Or he did anyway—right, Tom?”
“No idea,” Tom says, though his eyes say, Little prick.
• • •
Zigzagging down the interstate, Tom mutters sick fuck and little prick to the windshield. Between the summer storm and the shots, he can barely see the broken yellow line dividing the lanes, but thanks to Dickie, he can see the ass of the fat girl clear as a full moon on a winter night.
Tom lives with his wife in an apartment complex he hates just off the highway. On top of it being largely filled with douche-bag executives, he got tricked into paying ninety-five extra dollars a month for what he was told would be a mountain view but what is in fact only a sliver of the foothills eclipsed by the gawdy lights of the steak house across the street. Normally he would never agree to live in the sort of place that gives you a complimentary Frappuccino and a biscotti upon signing your lease, but Beth no, Elizabeth—he must remember she wants to be called Elizabeth now—was keen because it was one of the few complexes in town with a fitness center. That two dusty treadmills, a StairMaster that makes the sound of a dying coyote when you step on it, and a rack of ancient weights were what stood between him and a nice floor of a house somewhere is something he still finds difficult to accept. “Just because you don’t want to drive five minutes to Gold’s Gym down the road, I’m supposed to live with a bunch of assholes?” is what he wanted to say, but didn’t because he was being supportive.
He comes home to find Beth in the kitchen, surrounded by little piles of julienned vegetables, angrily grating jicama on a mandolin. She is wearing a dark, very tight cocktail dress. Probably new. Purchased during her break at work or perhaps online at night. A few months after she reached her goal and hit what she called a plateau, she started buying these sorts of dresses with an alarming greed and regularity. He is convinced she would devour them, these dark, tailored dresses, if she could, like the chips or ice cream she allows herself once every two weeks. Seeing her in one now still makes him think she’ll want to go out somewhere, but he’s starting to get used to the fact that this is just how she dresses now. Always. Am I overdressed? she always asks. Yes, he wants to say. You look great, is what he says. Does she look great? She does. Of course she does—look at her. She is a sleek, beautiful young woman, younger looking even than her twenty-eight years, except maybe around the eyes. Even though he himself has borne witness to her transformation over the past three years, he is still getting used to the severely pared-down point of her chin, the now visible web of bones in her throat, how all the once-soft edges of her have suddenly grown knife sharp. How they seem pointed at him in perpetual, quiet accusation.
Like it has been every night for more than a year now, the kitchen is thick with the scent of boiled barn and burnt vegetable, like Mother Nature on fire.
“Something smells good, Beth,” he says, in the overly jolly voice he speaks in when he’s been hanging around Hot Pocket all day.
She looks at him.
“What?”
“I told you not to call me that anymore, remember?”
“Sorry.” He puts his hands up like she’s holding a gun. “Something smells good, Elizabeth.”
“Nearly ready,” she says. She pulls out of the oven a tray of what looks to him like burnt turds. Every night, she sullenly exercises this form of torture upon a green in the cabbage family. It used to be she would offer to make things for him—ham and cheese scones, potato leek soup—on top of whatever punishing concoctions of grain, bean curd, and sprout she’d cooked up for herself. Recently, though, she’s been on what she calls “a slippery slope.” He doesn’t know what this means, exactly, but he promised to “be more supportive.”
“Looks great,” he murmurs now, watching her pile a maggoty-looking grain that smells like hoof onto his plate. He pokes tentatively at the mound with the tines of his fork.
“What are these little wormy things called again?”
“Quinoa.”
“What-wa?”
She takes a sip of Chilean white, which she first poured in a measuring cup before pouring it into a glass, and watches him push the larval beads around with his fork. “I could just make you a grilled cheese,” she says.
“I eat what you eat, remember? That another new dress?”
“This? Yes.”
“Looks good.”
“You think so? It isn’t too much?”
He gazes at the odd bows on the sleeves, the asymmetrical neckline, the thin little belt around the severely tailored middle.
“Um, too much how?”
“I don’t know. Too tight?”
He looks at her sitting eerily straight opposite him. It is so extraordinarily tight that she has to sit rigid in her chair.
“No.” And he quickly shoves in a forkful of the larvae. The face he makes when he swallows happens without him meaning it to.
“Jesus, Tom. Let me just make the sandwich, okay?”
“No, this is interesting. Really.” He takes another bite, this time quickly chasing it with the Fat Tire he brought to the table.
She snorts something into her wine.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. So how was work anyway?”
He takes a swig of his Fat Tire. Back when she used to visit him in her heavier days, she was content to enjoy dinner in what he thought was an amicable silence, smoking a Camel Light while he slurped takeout in front of an old monster movie. Now that they eat boiled grains over candlelight, she demands dinner conversation. As he yammers on about various parts of his day, often trailing off, only to be prompted by a clipped What else? he feels like one of those old mechanical toy puppies being forc
ed to do flips.
It’s after her third What else? that he ends up telling her about Dickie’s foray into gastro sex. “He even offered her to us. Hot Pocket and me. Isn’t that sick?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just thought you would find it funny,” he says, taking another swig of his Fat Tire.
He didn’t mean to mention that last bit about the offer, but now it’s out there. He can’t take it back. He watches her grow eerily quiet as she chews on this new bit of knowledge along with a mouthful of sprouts.
“I don’t know,” she says at last, lighting a cigarette and tipping ash into her plate. “Maybe you should take him up on it.”
“Beth.”
“It could be fun for you. Nostalgic.”
He sighs, picks a small yellow ball out of the wilted pile of California greens that comprise the side salad. He turns it around in his fingers, squinting at it like it’s a miniature globe, like it contains the whole world.
“What is this anyway, a kumquat?”
What he intended was simply to change the trajectory of the conversation. Instead, her face, or what’s left of it, becomes a throbbing red blotch. “No.”
“Huh,” he says, turning it around once more. “Looks like one.”
“Well it fucking isn’t, okay?”
“Jesus. Get a grip. It’s not a kumquat. Got it. Sorry I’m not a genius chef like some people.”
He thinks she’ll laugh, but instead tears fill her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He sighs, sips his Fat Tire, lets her cry for a while, his eyes on the thin white Doric pillar to the left of her. It’s the most pointless pillar in the whole world, he thinks, eyeing it. It holds nothing up. It stands there, cutting off the living room from the dining room, because it is the kind of crap that impresses the kind of schmucks who go in for an apartment with free biscotti and a fitness center. She’s strung some purple Christmas lights around it she never turns on, which only adds to its absurdity.
“I just hate how you see me is all,” she says, swatting the tears away like flies, but it’s no good—they keep coming, causing her chin arrow to quiver pitifully.
“What do you mean how do I see you?” He looks at her intently, soberly through a dense and rippling puddle of drunk; she immediately lowers her eyes and turns her head, obscuring her face with a curtain of long black hair, a defensive gesture left over from her heavier days.
“I don’t know,” she says, pretending to examine her nails. “As some fucking . . . you know . . . kumquat eater.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says. “You’re being ridiculous.”
She rises from the table. He hears a lot of cupboard and fridge door slamming, the glugging sound of her pouring more wine into her measuring cup, then pouring it into a glass. She returns with a glass of what looks like another two ounces of white and, her evening ritual, a square of dark chocolate from a bar she keeps at the back of the cupboard like an alcoholic’s hidden stash of gin. Seeing her huddled over this small square is sadder to him than the vegetable turds or the larval grains or the carefully measured glasses of bone-dry white. It’s like watching a woeful squirrel hunched over a piece of trash he has mistaken for a winter nut.
“You’d like to, wouldn’t you?” she says quietly, after what feels like an interminable silence.
“Like to what?” he asks, knowing exactly, but he wants to hear her say it.
“Nothing,” she says.
“No, tell me, Elizabeth. What would I like?” He looks at her but she keeps her eyes on her ashed-up plate.
“To fuck that fat girl.”
Jesus. He did push her to say it but he still can’t believe she’s said it out loud. It feels like a slap. He leaves with a mild slam of the door, even though she calls his name twice to come back.
• • •
In the empty parking lot outside Del Taco, he sits in his Honda and drinks his super-size Coke, shoving damp chili fries into his mouth gluttonously, staring neither at the bug-streaked windshield nor at the starless night but straight ahead. Back when Beth first lost the weight, she used to treat herself to a biweekly plate of cheesy fries, which they’d get at a sit-down fast food place that had big fake leather booths with phones in them where you placed your order. She’d eat them with a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise. Even though he grew up in the state where they invented this concoction, it grossed him out slightly, watching her greedily whip the red and white gloops together with a matchstick fry until they formed an obscene bloody pink. He even made a face once at the sight. She saw the face and cried. Didn’t eat anything but her draconian fare in front of him for months afterward.
A call from Beth is making his cell vibrate on the passenger seat for the fourth time. He ignores it. When he gets home he’ll tell her the phone fell between the seats.
• • •
When he gets back, she’s curled on the couch, flipping through a cookbook called Roast Chicken and Other Stories, watching America’s Next Top Model. The only thing more disturbing than when she does this is when she watches the Food Network with a legal pad on her lap, taking notes for decadent meals he knows she’ll never make.
“Went for Wendy’s, did we?” she says, not looking up from the screen.
“Course not.” It isn’t a lie.
He sits beside her on the couch. She’s watching the final episode of cycle ten. He knows this because this is the one cycle she has on iTunes, the one she watches the most often, where a plus-size model wins. The first time they watched the fat girl win—he didn’t so much watch as look up every now and then from playing World of Warcraft on his laptop—even he was moved. He thought, Good for her. Good for society. He turned to look at Beth thinking she would be ecstatic, and was surprised to see a punched-in look of abject pain on her face.
“Jesus, Beth. What is it?”
“I just think that Somalian girl should have won. She had prettier features. Overall.”
Despite this stance, she still watches this episode every so often, always with a shameful fascination. When it’s over, she turns off the TV, closes Roast Chicken and Other Stories, and looks at him.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“In a bit. Think I’ll just fuck around on the computer for a while first.”
• • •
Dickie won’t shut up about the fat girl. Tom figured after a few weeks, Dickie would have moved on to other pastures. That once more, he’d start telling tales about a hot receptionist’s subpar blowing technique or how he got one of the Goldman Sachs girls who work nearby drunk enough on Tito’s to dress up as a furry. But no, every time Dickie opens his mouth it’s to tell them about this chick. How it’s the best sex he’s ever had. He can’t even quite put it into words, it’s so good. It’s like they’ve reached a higher sexual plane or something. Really, it’s enough to drive anyone crazy. He talks about it over Fireballs at Dead Goat. Pizza benders at the Italian Village. The free lunch buffet at the nearby strip bar, Southern X-posure, where Dickie’s eyes don’t even graze the firm curves of the glaring dancers whom he describes as hot but dead inside. Over cigarettes in the office parking lot, the exhaust from the nearby interstate blowing in their faces like an end-of-the-world wind, Dickie tells them it’s getting serious. In fact, he thinks he might be in love. Last night, he’s pretty sure they broke some records. After, they got high and made butter tartlets. He brings in a Tupperware container full of them and offers some to the fat secretaries, all of whom snatch greedy handfuls and say they’re just scrumptious. “Aren’t they, though?” Dickie winks.
He offers one to Tom, who coldly refuses.
• • •
Saturday. Fourth of July. He and Beth are driving toward Hot Pocket’s house for the staff barbecue. She’s sulking in the passenger’s seat, hunched over
a veggie platter with a ramekin of fat-free hummus in the center. Hunched as much as she can be, given that she is wearing yet another far-too-tight dress. New. Black, like she’s in mourning. Patterned with small, prim flesh-colored flowers. Fishnets. Heels. To a barbecue.
“Is it too much?” she asked him on their way out the door.
My god, yes.
“You look great.”
Now she isn’t talking to him, just staring fixedly at the windshield. When he asks her what she wants to listen to, she says, “Whatever you’d like.” He pats her knee and she pats his hand but she’s still staring at the windshield.
“Seriously, you choose,” she says to the glass. Probably she’s upset because she’s missing what she calls her “treat day.” Every other Saturday night, she permits herself two double margaritas and enchiladas verdes at the Blue Iguana, followed by a Brownie Bonanza at Ben & Jerry’s. Though it scares and saddens him a little to see her hunger let loose upon a small complimentary basket of tortilla chips, he too looks forward to these Saturday nights. It’s the only night when her smirk goes slack, the noose of restraint loosened enough for her features to soften, her beauty at last unbuckling its belt. She is never more expansive and easygoing in conversation than when she’s snatching chips from the basket with quick fingers. He’s learned not to look at the fingers. If he does, she’ll stop. On those nights, they discuss what they used to discuss on those long phone chats and during her first visits: movies and books and their mutual music loves and hates. It’s good for a while. What he does not relish is seeing the naked disappointment splayed across her face when the last chip has been eaten, the final spoon of ice cream swallowed, the knowledge that there is another two weeks of sprouts ahead dimming her features like a pre-storm sky. And then of course, on the way home, she’ll begin to feel sick. I’m so full. I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t even enjoy it. Do we have any Perrier at home? She’ll spend the rest of the evening scowling and sucking back Perriers from the bottle, too full and sick for sex.
