by Kit Reed
28
Journal
God it was close. Zoe and I waited forever for the night detail to finish making the feast for whatever waited in the barn. They were taking a crown roast of pork down to the barn tonight, Devil’s Food cakes and this French thing called a croque en bouche, a pyramid of puffy, brittle pastries that they filled with creamy custard and glued together with caramelized sugar. There were veal birds stuffed with pâté, fried zucchini flowers, I don’t know what else. Lying on our cots in the room off the kitchen, Zoe and I waited for them to be done. We were strung tight and writhing with—I can’t tell you, exactly. Was it hunger, desire or fear? When you’re as hard up as we are, there’s no way you can sort them out. You can’t even stipulate: desire for what. Imagine being deprived of everything you ever cared about. Imagine being deprived and knowing it’s there, just out of reach. You think about it all the time. That’s the way we were.
We waited while the night detail loaded all the covered dishes on the rolling cart and we waited while they jockeyed it down the ramp next to the back steps and headed downhill to the barn. Then we waited some more. After much time and with great caution, we followed. Crouched behind the bushes, we watched them go in and when we were about to die of waiting, we saw them come out. I was ready to get up and start working on the door but Zoe put her hand on my arm and pulled me down. “Wait.”
After an unconscionable amount of time, she stood. I stood. Skulking like felons, we started downhill.
When you are treated like a criminal, you start feeling like one. Furtive. Unworthy. Unsure. We emerged from the bushes on tiptoes, ready to approach the barn. Motioning to me to hang back, Zoe put her ear to the door. Just when she thought it was safe, somebody coughed. The barn door slid open and we scattered like leaves in front of a blower. Zoe threw herself behind a truck. I rolled under a tractor just in time.
The Reverend Earl stood framed by light. He was golden-haired and backlit like a William Blake angel in a golden frame. He came out wiping his hands on his pants.
“My God,” Zoe said when it was safe. “I had no idea the Reverend Earl …” Shaken, she broke off.
“The Reverend Earl what?”
“I’m sorry, it’s too awful.”
“Zoe, what?”
“My poor friend.” My poor Zoe! Her voice quavered with uncertainty. “I don’t want to say until I’m sure.”
“If there’s something you aren’t telling me …”
“Shh. Just let me do this. Please.”
I didn’t expect her Discover card to work on the key card lock, but it did. Magically, the door slid back on rollers and we went in. The place smelled wonderful. Better, even, than the kitchen where the food was prepared. In seconds I was reliving those wonderful secret revels Zoe and I had shared in the sweat lodge, grease-stained and wallowing in all our innocence, smearing crumbs and chocolate on our bed of hides. “So this is where you got the …”
“Follow me.”
I would have followed her anywhere. There were the food smells, drawing us along like pheromones. The barn was clean and sterile and bright as a biotech lab or a model dairy farm but there was no livestock here that I could see. Instead, crates of the Reverend’s Herbal Compound lined the corridor and filled the stalls, waiting to be moved out. I thought I heard somebody singing—a soprano, faint but beautiful, high and pure. “Zoe, be careful! Somebody’s here.”
Zoe turned. Oh, yes. It was clear. She has been here before. “Yes. Somebody’s here. And she … Oh, Jerry, this is so terrible.”
“So this is where you got all the …”
“Yes. Will you be quiet?”
“—beautiful food we had!”
“Shh.” Too late. The singer heard me and the song stopped. At the end of the main hallway we could go either to the left or to the right because the residential wing crossed the main building like the bar on a T. Which way to go? Zoe turned right and I followed her down to the end. We were at the last stall. Empty, I thought. No crates piled up, no horse nickering for sugar and no sweet cow staring out with a white blaze on its face. It looked empty. Zoe said anyway, “Betty, I brought a friend.”
I heard breathing.
Somebody said, “I don’t want anybody to see me. Not the way I am.”
Zoe said kindly, “Don’t dis yourself, Betty, you have a very pretty face.”
“You might as well know, babe. I’ve. Ah. Put on a little weight.”
I wanted to look over the wooden palings but Zoe shook her head. “Don’t worry,” she said to the woman inside, “you’re still beautiful. So, Betty, this is my.” She didn’t finish because she didn’t have a word for it. What we were to each other. Not yet.
I mouthed the word, love.
So cool, Zoe nodded! Then she cleared her throat and said, “Betty, this is Jeremy Devlin. Jerry, this is my friend Betty Constable. We entered in the same class.”
“Entered?”
“She started as a convert, just like us.”
A gust came out of the unseen Betty like escaping steam. “But I didn’t get thinner, I just got big.”
My Zoe matched her sigh. “She did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When you get too big, they send you off to the … Oh, never mind. They keep you there until somebody rolls you on the scales and stamps you READY. Then they bring you back.”
“You never explained that,” Zoe said. “Betty, what are they doing to you?”
“Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
Zoe turned. “She won’t tell me what they’re doing to her. She won’t even tell me what she’s doing here.”
Betty said, “Trust me, you don’t need this on your plate.”
Zoe pulled me aside. “We need to talk.”
I could hear Betty breathing but I still couldn’t see her. Even standing out here in the corridor I was aware of the food smells mingling with the perfume she wore and the aromas of her bath soap and shampoo. I was curious and distracted by the presence of food. I was thinking about my Zoe, and Zoe—what was Zoe thinking about? Everything about my love told me she was in distress. Now that she had my attention she was hanging in air. She was trying to tell me something but she couldn’t figure out what to say. We were in a corridor in a barn in stasis outside a cow stall where food was and where some unseen person was, these things were all tied up together but nobody seemed ready to explain. I said quietly, “Zoe, why are we here?”
“I thought together we could get her out,” Zoe said. “I thought together we could save her and run away, but now …”
Betty’s sweet voice rose from the stall. “How, when I’m too big to hide?”
“We’d handle it!” She made it conditional. It was clear Zoe was upset for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess. “But now …” Helpless, she turned to me. “Now that you and the Reverend Earl …”
“I hate him.” This was a surprise. I did.
Betty said, “It’s OK, if Zoe likes you, you can look.”
I leaned over the rough wall of two-by-fours that marked off the stall and looked down. She was pooled at the bottom in a puddle of pink silk. If barns have singles, doubles and suites, the way hotels do, Zoe’s girlfriend Betty was in a suite. The rough wooden walls were quilted in pink velvet and instead of flooring there was a gurgling mattress with satin sheets, probably a water bed, and expanding to fill the space I saw the woman we had heard singing, the donor of all those splendid leftovers that Zoe and I had shared on our lost desert nights. Zoe was right. She had a very pretty face. And she was huge.
I went a little crazy trying to think of something polite to say. “How. Uh.” I could not ask this woman How do you do? “H—. Um. How did you get here?”
“Things happen.” Even the sigh was huge.
But Zoe was distracted and upset. I saw her gnawing her knuckles the way she does, I saw her trying on several faces before she leaned over the edge of the stall. Finally, it came out. “Betty, what was the Reverend Earl
doing here?”
Betty’s voice was big and beautiful. Heartbroken. “Oh, Zoe, I thought you knew!”
“You mean you and he?”
“He says he loves me!”
“Betty, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry, Zo. I was scared of what you’d say.”
This enormous woman was the Reverend Earl’s prisoner, I guess, unless she was his lover—my sweet Zoe’s girlfriend Betty, the biggest human being I’ve ever seen.
Zoe groaned. “Oh, Betty.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Betty, not the Reverend!” Zoe was heartbroken too. As if she personally had been betrayed. “How could you?”
My teeth clashed. “How could he?”
There are things women know without having to tell each other. “It isn’t about sex,” Betty said.
In her own way she was magnificent, quivering in her pink silk gown, graciously offering the roast duck they’d brought along with the pork and the creamy, jam-smeared English trifle she’d saved—in case of guests, I think—but Betty’s charm, her good manners in spite of her apparent misery made me embarrassed and afraid.
“All this. All this!” My hands waved out of control. I do not know what I was asking her. “Why does he do it?”
She flicked at a scrap. “You mean Sylphania? Three things.”
“No. This. All this food, and you in a stall.” I looked at this enormous, beautiful woman lying here in a cow barn like a dirty secret that the Reverend Earl loved for just that reason, because I knew the preacher of thin had to get down deep and dirty somewhere, and it was here. “What is he doing here?”
“And what’s he trying to do with the cult?” Zoe asked. “And what’s with the formula, and why do we work so hard and do everything right and still end up gaining weight?”
“I’m trying to tell you!” Betty snapped.
“Why?” Zoe and I overlapped, asking different questions. “What’s it about?”
“I told you, it’s about three things.” Betty sighed and the great bed rippled. “The money, of course. And before the money, the power.”
Zoe said, “You don’t have to stay here, you know.”
“How can I run away, when I can’t even walk?”
I groaned. “We’ll save you!”
Zoe said, “We’ll bring in a forklift if we have to. Whatever it takes. Just sit still and we’ll …”
But Betty shook her head. The next thing she said plowed into my midsection like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. “What makes you think I want to get away?”
“Betty, you’re in a stable!”
“And he loves me,” Betty said. “He’s made me his queen.”
Zoe groaned. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Come with us.”
“We’ll get you out!” Forgive me I almost said, We’ll help you get thin.
Love-struck, Betty shook her head with a brave little smile. “No thanks, I’m fine.”
But Zoe was still fighting. “Betty, he’s a monster.”
“And I love him. Outside, I’m nothing. In here, I’m a queen.”
“The rest,” I said. “You haven’t told us the rest.”
“The rest?”
“You said the Reverend Earl wants three things. You said he wanted money.”
Zoe added, “And power.”
“That’s two.”
“What’s the third?”
Rocking, Betty considered. Then she looked up at us with those beautiful blue eyes and smiled. “He loves to watch me eat.”
Zoe glanced from me to Betty and back. There was a click. Our eyes locking. Something understood. Still, I had to find out. “And you shared your food with us because?”
“When your best friend falls in love, you want to help,” Betty said with a girlish smile. “And besides …” Still smiling, she blushed and said modestly, “I’m trying to cut down.”
“Oh, Betty.” My heart went out to her. Aren’t we all?
We could have left Betty where she was and gone out to expose the Reverend, that is, assuming we could get off the place. We could have stolen a camcorder and recorded what happened next and found a way to get it on the TV nightly news; at that point we could have gotten out of the barn unseen, no problem, but how were we supposed to know? By that time Zoe was crying, not sobbing or anything, just letting tears roll down her face because of everything that was happening to her friend; of course Betty started crying out of sympathy the way people will go on laughing jags because the other person’s laughing; I was trying to get them together on a plan and what with one thing and another we stayed too long. We heard a rattle. The door at the far end of the barn rolled open. We heard footsteps in the great hall. Turning the corner into the hallway that crossed the structural T. Coming this way.
“It’s him!” Betty’s face lit up like a Times Square sign. “He’s coming back! Hurry. In here!”
I boosted Zoe over the ledge and into the stall, and jumped in afterward. We landed on a gigantic water bed; it was astounding, the way Betty flowed. As the bed billowed, she billowed with it. Debris bobbed up and down: hairbrushes and mirrors, giant negligees like froth on storm-tossed waves; magazines and cellophane candy bags and styrofoam take-out cartons floating like driftwood on the satin waves. He spoke. Zoe gripped my arm. It’s the Reverend.
“Betty, I’m back.”
“Oh, Earl. You’ve come back!”
There was something weird about the way he said it. “I couldn’t stay away.”
We plunged to the edge of the mattress and hid behind the quilted velvet pad that covered the wall. The giant mattress lurched as Betty surged up to greet him and when she spoke it was on a new, sweet note so loving that it made me tremble, “You do love me. You’ve come.”
“Sweetest,” the Reverend Earl said in a voice I’d never heard before. It was like velvet but a little ragged, with the nap rubbed the wrong way by lust. “I brought a suckling pig.”
“Oh darling, you shouldn’t have,” Betty said with mixed emotions.
“Nothing but the best for my queen,” he said. Then he said, “I have something to tell you. But first.”
She didn’t hear. She was reaching for it and resisting all at once. “I’ve eaten so much!”
“Never enough for my sweet queen,” the Reverend said in that smooth, smooth voice. “With girls like you, there’s never enough.”
“I’m trying, I am!”
“Of course you are, pretty, take this.”
“You know I’m trying to cut down.”
“Mmmmm, lovest, you know I love you just the way you are.”
“Oh no, it’s just too much, please take it away,” Betty said, and I recognized the desperation—what the poor girl was trying so hard and failing to tell her lover/torturer/voyeuristic partner in unspeakable crime. Pretty, gigantic, sad Betty was in a place all us fat people and skinny people harboring fat souls know by heart. She was salivating, begging for more even as she pleaded to be left alone. We are all weak, weak.
Hence the Reverend Earl’s religion, I guess. I whispered to Zoe, “This is awful.”
Zoe nodded. “I know.”
“Just one little bite won’t hurt you, it’s a gift of love.”
Sadly, Betty responded to her lover, her captor, “You know I’m trying to lose the weight.”
And he put her on the skids. “Of course you are, and I’m helping. Before they stuffed this baby, they filled the cavity with buttered mushrooms instead of bread.”
Betty said weakly, “Oh, no!”
“Now now, you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.” Bastard, bastard! “I won’t be hurt.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.” There was a seismic shift as Betty grabbed the tray.
Then the Reverend told the lie. I knew he was lying and it was then that I knew I had to bring him down. “No, darling, and I’ll never hurt you.”
Hidden behind padded velvet, Zoe and I heard the tray settle damply into he
r lap and we heard her eating and weeping and eating more in spite of it but most of all we heard the Reverend Earl, and as the truth oozed out in stages, I vowed that I’d find a way to stop him, no matter what it took. The Reverend Earl Sharpnack, sponsor of sacrifice and sanctimonious purveyor of the Afterfat, was crooning, “Look at yourself, you’re wonderful, big, beautiful wonderful,” and then he slipped, “God you are disgusting,” Betty was too preoccupied to hear it but Zoe heard it, and I did.
“Oh, please stop me, I’m so full!” Betty moaned like a woman in the transports of love and like a lover, the Reverend Earl responded, throwing chocolate truffles like flowers.
Cautiously, I raised the quilted pad higher for a better view.
Sobbing, Betty sat a pink mound of her own satin-draped folds and ate. Perched on the edge of the stall like a Roman with front-row seats at the Colosseum, the Reverend Earl egged her on. “Just one more bite, sweetheart, one more little bite for me,” and the whole time he was panting like a pervert at a peep show while poor Betty sobbed and gobbled and gobbled and sobbed until the suckling pig was gone and the Reverend had his fill of the spectacle and then he dropped into the stall next to her and slipped onto the mattress and fell asleep like a child with his head on her tremendous flank, while behind the quilts Zoe and I shivered, wondering whether he would ever leave and if he didn’t, what would happen to us next.
Thank God his watch alarm went off. He must have set it before he ever dropped into the stall. “Ooops,” he said, patting her on the rippling haunch. “Love you, got to run.”
“Not now,” she said, still sobbing.
“Have to. Something big is coming.”
Her head came up. “You haven’t kissed me.”
I saw the look he gave her: eeeewww. “Sorry, in a rush. But next time, baby, I promise. I can never get enough of you.”
“Just one kiss,” Betty said in a mixture of shame and desire, “please don’t leave me like this.”
