She watches him walk away, turns back to look at the mess of her kitchen. Martha Grace spends the next three hours cleaning up. Scrubbing down the floor, the table. Changing the sheets, wiping surfaces, picking up after herself. When she sits down to her own supper she thinks about the boy out for the night, spending her money on the little blonde. She sighs, he could buy the girl a perfectly adequate meal with that money. If such a girl would ever eat a whole meal anyway. Poor little painfully thin babies that they are. Living shiny magazine half lives of self-denial and want. Martha Grace chooses neither. Before she goes to sleep, Martha notes down the visit and the payment in her accounts book. She has not paid the boy for sex. That would have been wrong. She paid him for the work he’d done. The lawn, the fence, the pond. The sex was simply an extra.
Extra-regular. On Saturday afternoons, after winter football practice, after summer runs, late from long holiday mornings sleeping off the after-effects of teenage Friday night, Tim Culver walks to the crazy lady’s house. Pushes open the gate he oiled last weekend, walks past the rosemary and comfrey and yarrow he pruned in early spring, takes out the fresh-cut key she has given him, lets himself into the dark hallway he will paint next holiday, and walks upstairs. Martha Grace is waiting for him. She has work for Tim Culver to do.
Martha Grace waits in her high, soft bed. She is naked. Her long grey hair falls around her shoulders, usually it is pulled back tight so that even Martha’s cheekbones protrude from the flesh of her round cheeks, now the hair covers the upper half of her voluminous breasts, deep red and wide, the nipples raised beneath the scratch of her grey hair. Tim Culver nods at Martha Grace, almost smiles, walks past the end of her bed to the bathroom. The door is left open so Martha Grace can watch him from her bed. He takes off his sweaty clothes, peels them from skin still hot and damp, then lowers himself into the bath she has ready for him. Dried rose petals float on the surface of the water, rosemary, camomile and other herbs he doesn’t recognise. Tim Culver sinks beneath the water and rises up again, all clean and ready for bed.
In bed. Tim Culver sinks into her body. Sighs in relief and pleasure. He has been a regular visitor to her home and her flesh for almost three years now. The place where he lays with Martha Grace’s soft, fat body is as much home to him as his mother’s table or the room he shares with an old friend now that he has moved away. Tim Culver has graduated from high school fucks to almost-romance with college girls. Pretty, thin, clever, bright and shiny college girls. Lots of them. Tim Culver is a good-looking boy and clearly well worth the bodies these girls are offering. This is the time of post-feminism. They want to fuck him because he is good looking and charming and will make a great story tomorrow in the lunch-time canteen. And Tim is perfectly happy for this to be the case. The girls may revel in the glories of their fiercely free sexuality, Tim just wants to get laid every night. Everyone’s happy. And the girls are definitely happy. It’s not just that Tim Culver is good looking and clever and fit. He also, really really, knows what he’s doing. Which is more than can be said for most of the football team. Tim Culver is a young man of depth and experience. And of course it is good for Tim too, to be seen to be fucking at this rate. To be this much the all-round popular guy. But as he lies awake next to another fine, thin, lithe, little body he recognises a yearning in his skin. He is tired of fucking girls who ache in every bone of their arched-back body to be told they are the best. Tired of screwing young women who constantly demand that he praise their emaciated ribs, their skeletal cheekbones, their tight and wiry arms. Weary of the nearly-relationships with would-be poet girls who want to torment him with their deep insights into pain and suffering and sex and music. Tim Culver is exhausted by the college girls he fucks.
They are not soft, these young women at college, and they need so much attention. Even when they don’t say so out loud, they need so much attention. Tim learnt this in his first week away from home. Half asleep and his back turned to the blonde of the evening, her soft sobs drew him from the rest he so needed. No there was nothing wrong, yes it had been fine, he’d been great, she’d come, of course it was all ok. She wasn’t crying, not really, it was just... and this in a small voice, not the voice she’d come with, or the voice she’d picked him up with, or the voice she’d use to re-tell the best parts of the story tomorrow, but... was she all right? Did he like her? Was she pretty enough? Thin enough? Good enough? Only this one had dared to speak aloud, but he felt it seeping out of all the others. Every single one of them, eighteen, nineteen-year-old girls, each one oozing please-praise-me from their emaciated, emancipated pores. But not Martha Grace.
With Martha Grace Tim can rest. Maybe Martha Grace needs him, Tim cannot tell for certain. She likes him, he knows that. Certainly she wants him, hungers for him. As he now knows he hungers for her. But if she needs him, it is only Tim that she needs. His body, his presence, his cock. She does not need his approval, his blessing, his constant, unending hymn of there-there. And maybe that is because he has none to give. She is fat. And old. And weird. What could he approve of? What is there to approve of? Nothing at all. They both know that. And so it is, that when Tim comes home to Martha, there is rest along with exertion. There is ease in the fucking. Martha Grace knows who she is, what she is. She demands nothing extra of him, what sanctions of beauty or thin-ness, or perfection could he give her anyway? She has none of those and so, as Tim acknowledges to himself in surprise and pleasure, she is easier to be with than the bone-stabbing stick figure girls at school. And softer. And wider. And more comfortable. It is better in that house, that bed, against that heavy body. Martha Grace is not eighteen, and a part of Tim Culver sits up shocked and amused — he realises he loves her for it. The rest of Tim Culver falls asleep, his heavy head on her fat breast. Martha Grace smells the other women in his hair.
One day Tim Culver brings Martha Grace a new treat. He knows of her appetite for food and drink and him, he understands her cravings and her ever-hungry mouth. He loves her ever-hungry mouth. He brings gifts from the big city, delicatessen offerings, imported chocolates and preserves. Wines and liquors. He has the money. He is not a poor student. Martha Grace sees to that. This time the home-from-college boy brings her a new gift. Martha Grace had tried marijuana years ago, it didn’t suit her, she liked to feel in control, didn’t understand the desire to take a drug that made one lose control, the opposite of her wanting. She has told Tim this, explained about her past experiences, how she came to be the woman she is today. Has shared with Tim each and every little step that took her from the wide open world to wide woman in a closed house. And he has nodded and understood. Or appeared to do so. At the very least he has listened, and that is new and precious to Martha. So she is willing to trust him. Scared but willing. And this time, Tim brings home cocaine. Martha is shocked and secretly delighted. But she is the older woman, he still just a student, she must maintain some degree of adult composure. She tells him to put it away, take it back to school, throw it out. Tells him off, delivers a sharp rebuke, a reprimand and then sends him to bed. Her bed. Tim walks upstairs smiling. He leaves the thin wrap on the hall table. Martha Grace watches him walk away, feels the smirk from the back of his head, threatens a slap which she knows he wants anyway. Her hand reaches out for the wrap. Such a small thing and so much fuss. She pictures the naked boy upstairs. Man. Young man. In her bed. Hears again the fuss she knows it would cause. Hears again as he calls her, taunting from the room above. She is hungry and wanting. Her soft hand closes around the narrow strip of folded paper and she follows his trail of clothes upstairs, clucking like a disparaging mother hen at the lack of tidiness, folding, putting away. Getting into bed, putting to rights.