by Kit Reed
“It’s only midnight.” You have just come inside smelling of Dave. Dave loves you but now he can see your body changing and you just had a fight. He wants you to do something about it too.
“That’s not what I mean. You had your chance, and look at you.” Dad is staring at your belly. “Annie, how can you do this to yourself?” Even in this light he can see you haven’t done a thing. You’re in love with this quest of yours, and Dad? You’d think he’d walked in on you having sex with Dave. “You ought to be ashamed!”
“I’ll be good. I will!”
“This isn’t about good,” he says. “It’s about the family.”
“It’s my body.”
“What would your brother and sister think? Look what you’ve done to yourself. Look what you’ve done to the family!”
He is mad enough to hit you but Mom intervenes. “Don’t punish her, Ralph, don’t send her away!”
“There is only one outfit that can take care of this.” He grabs the phone.
If you thought you could bring this off with tears and promises, forget it. They’re on their way.
This is how the parents handle things. Pack her bag, kiss her good-bye. Send her off to the Dedicated Sisters convent and don’t let her come back until what ails her is fixed!
By morning the Dedicated Sisters have you on the scales. Your belly is still cold from their brass calipers. They have taken your measurements. Height. Waist and hip diameters. Weight.
God you are huge and disgusting. You weigh eighty-four pounds.
3
Late afternoon segues into a dense twilight that makes the digital signs glow like the gems in a witch queen’s diadem. With her face pressed to the car window, Betz watches the glittering logos flip by while her sister’s boyfriend Dave drives On and Danny sleeps in the copilot’s seat. With Danny quiet, she can pretend that she and Dave are alone in the car. It’s practically like a date. If she can think of the right thing to say to get him started, maybe they can talk. She and her twin have been together for a long time; she knows exactly the right pitch to strike to keep Danny from waking up. She says in a low, soft voice, “Where are we?”
Any other guy would have thought it was sexy: the gathering darkness, the intimacy. The two of them together in the car. Dave says flatly, “Just crossing the state line.”
Her heart jumps. At least he answered. “Which one?”
“West Virginia, I think.”
“Is that where we’re going?” She is studying the spot where the sandy hair clings to the back of Dave’s neatly muscled neck. It’s all she can do to keep from touching it.
“Nope.”
She can’t just let the conversation die like that. She tries, “Any idea where?”
“Heading for Kentucky.”
“What’s in Kentucky?” If only he would look at me.
“Not sure.”
“Then, why …”
“There are Dedicated Sisters in Kentucky. At least one cell.” He makes it sound like jail.
“Cell!”
“Convent. Whatever.”
“How do you know?”
His voice clots. “Somebody I care about got sent.”
Her heart runs out like an anxious mother. Are you hurt? “What for?”
“Secret.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Let me hug you and make you well! Spooky, how close she and Dave are now that it is getting dark. There are confessions hanging in the air inside the Saturn, waiting to be made. Dave Berman, I think I love you. And Dave? What does Dave have to say? All he has to do to make her happy is keep talking, but he isn’t saying anything. When it comes out again her voice is too high. “So they’ve got her in Kentucky?”
“Who, Annie?” Damn, there is something too special about the way he says her name. “Don’t know.”
“Yeah, Annie.” Betz sighs. “Why Kentucky?”
“Gotta start somewhere.” Taciturn Dave.
She is so trying to be quiet here but Dave hits the brakes and Danny wakes up anyway, gumming his words like a mouthful of feathers that won’t go down. “So. Kentucky. Cool. Are we there yet?”
“No.”
Blinking, he pastes his nose to the window. “Sure as hell looks like it.”
Betz sighs. “It all looks the same to me.”
She’s right. It does. In frontier days roads like this one ran through farmland under empty skies with the wall-to-wall cornfields broken by the occasional gas station or Last Chance country store. In the days before car seats Abercrombie twins’ forefathers tumbled around in the back of their parents’ Fords or Nashes playing cow poker, a hundred extra points if you spotted a white horse. Now the skies glitter with revolving elevated signs and every state road in Middle America is lined with solid ranks of discount barns, outlet malls for upmarket designer stores, you can find walk-in everything from cosmetic surgery clinics to wedding chapels along these four-lane roads, pick out the wedding party’s outfits at the next strip mall on your way from the clinic to the chapel, kiss your new man being careful not to hurt your nice new nose and progress to the next motel you come to for the honeymoon, it’s the apotheosis of one-stop shopping, efficiency at its best. After the honeymoon you can always stop in at the multiplex for a movie and if you get sick there are medi-marts where you can get treatment for what ails you as smoothly as you drop Martha Stewart sheets into your shopping cart, they’ll fix you fast and if you live around here you can get the whole deal done in a day and still be home before dark. Better yet, if you drive this stretch of U.S. State Road Whatever for long enough you can use the day-care centers and walk-in psychiatric clinics and in case the marriage doesn’t turn out the way you expect there are platoons of law firms specializing in the low-cost no-fault divorce, all your earthly needs can be met right here on the strip. You don’t even have to get old, there’s a world of estrogen out there to prevent that, or Viagra, vitamin B shots, industrial-strength DEHA, whatever your aging body needs to stop the clock; it’s all available, along with your goat or monkey gland transplants with more upmarket transplants available (if the price is right, no questions asked) at any one of our Rejuvenation Centers and interspersed with all this bounty is the occasional funeral parlor, because not all of these arrangements work out. And for the failures? The Reverend Earl is advertising something called Solutions, no details yet, so who’s to know?
Betz looks out the window morosely. The same signs keep popping up in rotation. “Why does it all have to look the same?”
“Because it is;” Dave says, which may or may not be the basis for a lasting relationship. “It is all the same.”
This impression is underscored by the soothingly regular mix of fast-food places for the lazy-but-hungry, slapped into position along the road like houses on Boardwalk or Park Place, with familiar logos popping up like emblems on the national coat of arms, everything from doughnut chains and coffee shops and ice cream chain stores to sushi bars and Taco-Ramas represented; the roadside is peppered with Fat-boys and Fryboys and elite steak houses that exude enhanced cooking smells like so many pheromones, and as suppertime creeps up and slips past them Danny Abercrombie jerks to attention, shifting abruptly in his seat.
Oh-oh, Betz thinks.
Danny mutters, “Hey dude.”
“If you’ve gotta piss, it can wait.”
“Chow time.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Really. Gotta eat.”
Dave shrugs without answering and drives on.
The franchise layout is on a grid that alternates excesses with atonement; it’s what makes this the great nation that it is. By law the Crossed Triceps gyms are partnered with Light Diet, Slenderella and SkinnyVision clinics to help you get off and keep off the weight: in this day and time a little excess is OK but balance is everything. Gorge and be glad, but if you aren’t willing to binge and purge or scarf and barf you’d better work it off, and if you can’t mana
ge without supernatural help, there’s always the Reverend Earl. Diet Chapel and Atonement Gym signs keep popping up as they go along, but that isn’t what has Danny Abercrombie’s attention now. All he sees is the food signs, one after another after another. Luring him. They’ve been on the road for hours and Betz can hear his appetite alarm going off all the way from here. It isn’t just hunger, she knows. For Danny, there are the exigencies. Remember, he is in training. She recognizes that jittery note in his voice when he says, “Chow time.”
Dave drives on.
If it was just Danny and Betz in the car he’d be yelling by this time. But Dave is older; he’s a senior this year and extremely cool, so Danny is trying to sound cool. He is working hard on casual but Betz can hear the anxious hitch in his voice as he starts:
“So. What. Are we ever going to stop?”
Dave snaps, “What is it with you?”
Danny sounds OK but he is isn’t; Betz knows the signs.
She picks up her cue. “Hungry?” She is too, a little, but she’s more committed to sitting down under a strong light in some nice place where she can look across the table at Dave instead of studying the back of his head.
Danny says, “Pretty much.”
“Yeah, me too.” Because she and Danny parachuted into the world one after the other in a matter of seconds, what one twin wants, the other knows. If Betz has needs, so does her brother. There are exigencies.
Danny half turns in his seat to look at her. “Gotta eat somewhere. Right, Betz?”
Betz says, “Right.”
They exchange twinly, complicit grins.
Dave’s voice is sharp. “What’s the big rush?”
Betz sees Danny’s fingers drumming on the fake-wood window frame and she says without explaining, “The longer he waits, the longer it’s gonna take.”
“Yeah well, we’re not stopping now.”
“Now would be good.”
Danny offers, “Dude, I’m in training.”
“What the hell is eating you?”
“Dave, he’s trying to explain.”
“Well, tough. We’re not stopping until I stop for gas.”
Danny groans. “Oh, maaaan.”
Pressed, Dave loses it and starts to shout. “So. What. Is this about the porn?”
It is an ugly thing to bring into the car. “Shit no.”
“You a Jumbo Jigglers junkie, or what?”
Danny yips angrily, “I said no!”
Embarrassed, Betz says, “He’s in training, OK? Really. He has to eat. That’s all.”
“Yeah, right that’s all. I know a J.J. junkie when I see one.” Angry for no reason they can see, Dave gets off a last shot. “If you want me to put you out at the Jumbo Jigglers, Abercrombie, say the word.”
Betz says without thinking, “It takes one to know one.”
“What the fuck do you know about it?” Dave says angrily and she thinks, Oh shit, I’ve pissed him off . He barks, “I’m not the one that brought it up.”
In fact, nobody brought it up. It was in the air. What nobody talks about that everybody knows.
The thing is, there are second and third tiers in this garden of free enterprise—places these kids have never seen that you hear about, and whoever you are, admit it, it makes you feel excited and dirty, just knowing that this kind of thing goes on.
Behind the solid front of the well-kept commercial establishments that line the road there are shadier places. Hidden by the front ranks with their slick facades and Formica interiors are businesses that ordinary citizens like the twins can’t see from the road. What little they know they’ve picked up from tales told by classmates just out of Juvie, or from checkout-counter tabloids and seamy reality-TV exposés, the kind of secret, dirty businesses advertised in their dad’s secret stash of chubby mags. These places are an open secret. Leave your car in front of the super in the strip mall if you get the urge, dodge between the slick, cookie-cutter buildings that house legitimate businesses and you find the shadier ones: illicit lipo dens (Your Pastor Doesn’t Have to Know), shops that specialize in illegal operations like stomach stapling by unlicensed practitioners (Bring a friend to drive you home) and dingy leather stores where in the cellar, which is usually called the Dungeon, waist whittlers for men and women’s girdles are sold under the counter by a designated dealer who can help you trim those unwanted inches before your pastor or—heaven forfend!—the government finds out. For a price.
Everybody has to make a living somehow. This part of the behind-the-scenes scene is ugly, but this is only the second tier.
The real dirty business goes on in the third tier.
Drop your name to the right person in one of these places and you’ll be directed to the third tier of commerce, the seamy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks area where the biggie brothels abound. It isn’t about sex, remember, it’s about something that is gross and disgusting and exciting because it is forbidden. This is the vice everybody loves and nobody talks about. Society’s dirty secret, laid out and waiting for you. These, OK, these cathouses cater to all genders and every proclivity but you won’t start here, you will come to it in stages.
You’ll start where everybody starts. With the Jumbo Jigglers. When you first hit the scene you tell yourself you’re only sightseeing, pub-crawling in the nether parts of the universe—that you only want to look, not touch, leave that to the pervs and foodaholics. You’re just looking, thank you, so this is the place for you: plush-lined floor seats lining the doughnut runway at one of the Jumbo Jigglers clubs. This is the specialty chain where the obscenely obese are shoehorned into G-strings and pasties and rushed onstage because the profound humiliation will always be your secret, yours and theirs, the magnificently fat dancers of all genders. Look and lust and don’t worry about the objects of your obsession, any inconvenience they suffer is outweighed by the money that pours in. These big people aren’t kidnapped into service, exactly, they are lured, with huge paychecks guaranteed, to say nothing of the tips: cashing in on the shame of the observer, strippers can count on the proliferation of hundred-dollar bills that sweating, enthusiastic patrons tuck into their straining G-strings or lodge between the voluptuous rolls of fat. Big and proud of it, the king-size strippers cavort for the multitudes who leer and salivate and throw beer nuts and Buffalo wings at them in a lewd, orgiastic combination of superiority and envy.
What would it be like if we just let go?
Wriggling with excitement, the customers laugh and throw bar food at the dancers, giggling and panting in the dark. This is no-fault voyeurism at its best—unless the repeat customers accidentally scarf up some of the goodies they are throwing and start down the primrose path to perdition. And afterward—for a little extra—afterward you can invite the dancers to your table and buy platters of rich, calorie-laden anything au gratin and fried everything and sit there and watch them eat. It’s a classic case of want-to, don’t-want-to, dying-to-but-would-rather-die: Who willingly succumbs to the Fate Worse than Death? The excitement is in the risk. It is the excitement that makes the scum-balls who run Jumbo Jigglers rich.
Unless it’s the risk and for everybody—even Betz Abercrombie if she lives to hit thirty, face it, Betz even now! Even for lithe little Betz Abercrombie—this is the risk:
Inside every thin person there’s a fat one screaming. Millions of brown cells lying in wait. At the right moment these dormant fat cells will expand and the whole huge, suppressed person will spring into shape.
It makes them feel dirty just thinking about it.
It makes Betz feel guilty, accusing Dave. It takes one to know one. Gack, did she really say that? OK, she thinks, I’ve pissed him off. She thinks she’s about to apologize but instead she says, “I can’t believe you thought Danny would do that.”
“Go to Jumbo Jigglers?”
“Hell yes. My brother would never …” She falters. Would he?
“Well there’s sure as hell something on his mind.”
“Yeah, but it’s not wh
at you think. Tell him, Dan.”
But Danny has tuned out. Driven by ambition, he has been scouring the landscape, looking for the right sign. Now he points like a bird dog and his voice spikes. “Guys.”
Dave says reflexively, “No J.J. and I mean it.”
“That’s not—”
“And we are not going to any Scarf-and-Barforama.”
“It isn’t that either.”
“Dammit Dave, he doesn’t want to—”
“Last warning, Abercrombie, no shit. No porn.”
Danny grabs Dave’s left bicep and clamps down hard. “This isn’t about porn. Look! Steaks!”
“Oh,” Dave says, “Oh, cool,” even as Betz reads the sign and mutters, “Oh no. No Bonanzarama. No way.”
“Looks like a deal to me.”
“You don’t understand!”
BONANZARAMA, the sign reads. EAT ONE OF OUR STEAKS AND YOU EAT FREE.
Danny’s voice buzzes with urgency. “Guys, this is the place.”
“Seriously,” Betz says to Dave—he doesn’t get it! “Not here. Anywhere but here.”
Maybe Dave is hungry too, maybe he’s just tired, maybe he wants to Web-search the Dedicated Sisters on the Computer at Every Table Guaranteed or maybe he’s over them. Betz is trying to fire off her Early Warning but Dave doesn’t want to hear. Instead of getting the warning vibe, he recycles Danny’s line. “Everybody’s gotta eat sometime.” Then he elbows Danny. “Right, guy?”
“Right.” Nudge. Wink. Us guys. Except Danny adds in an undertone, “Eat, hell. Gotta train.”
“Say what?”
Betz warns, “He’s in training. This might not be the best—”
But Dave doesn’t want to hear. “Hey, eat enough and we eat free!”
“—place to do this,” Betz says anyway.
“Finish their steak? No problem.”
“It’s in the small print. Fifty ounces,” Betz says.
