But even here she was hampered. There were people in the aisle — a couple, a man and a woman standing not just at the cookie shelves, but planted right in front of the Nabisco-Keebler array. She stopped a few yards up from them and pretended to scan the cracker shelves, waiting for them to leave. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore stylish black trench coats that made them look long and lean. They were young — in their mid-twenties, she guessed — and very attractive. They were standing there, hands deep in their coat pockets, talking intently, not leaving. She went back to Dairy and exchanged her two percent cottage cheese for one percent, then to aisle 6A to put back the sliced peaches. She returned to 22B. They were still there, in the exact same spot, slouching comfortably and murmuring to each other in that enticing and arrogant way couples in public do, inviting our exclusion from their intimacy. See how we can hear each other, they seemed to be letting the rest of us know. See how what we share is just out of your range.
She walked stiffly past them and went down the adjacent aisle, Pastas and Grains. She stood at the shelves, blindly running her hand over the packages. She heard the man’s voice rise in pitch, heard the woman laugh. What could she be laughing about, for Christ’s sake? She listened to their low, muffled tones, the thrum of their voices languid and melodic. There was more laughter, until finally — finally! — she heard them moving away. She trailed along, paralleling their slow progress out of the aisle, when suddenly a blue-aproned employee appeared before her, a tall, boyish, rawboned man with a big smile and a receding hairline and a name tag that read BRAD IS HAPPY TO SERVE YOU! He asked if he could help her find anything tonight. “No!” she thundered, rushing past him only to barrel into the cookie aisle couple. She muttered an apology as she plowed between them, then took the turn into aisle 22B.
It was empty, at last. “Yes,” she said, reaching the cookie shelves. And she was standing before them for just a few seconds — she had hardly taken them all in, still adjusting her position so that they would fill as much of her peripheral vision as possible — she had just gotten to the cookie shelves when a woman moving past the end of the aisle turned to look at her. She, too, wore running shoes and tights and a big, fleecy sweater. Her dark hair was pulled taut into a ponytail that highlighted an unblemished face. The woman’s gaze moved idly over her, then to the cookies she’d been looking at, then back to her. And just before gliding out of view beyond the end-aisle display, the woman’s impassive face registered a barely discernible smile. It was a small and intimate grin, the tiniest check mark of a smile, but in its tininess was laden a knowledge of her so large — so complete an understanding of her evenings alone in these supermarkets, her enthrallment before these cookies, and the aftermath of it all — that she fled. She ran. She raced out the other end of the aisle and along the back of the market, loping past Seafood and Meat to the far end of the store, to take refuge in Produce. She paced among the bins, between homely mounds of polished fruit, breathing heavily, her eyes stinging, acutely aware of her own ridiculousness. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Stupid!” she hissed. “Stupid, stupid!” Yet back and forth she went, hemmed in by her desolate longing, blinking and pacing amid the shine and sparkle of mirrors and the reflected abundance of freshly misted vegetables.
II.
It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was sitting on a love seat that had one arm sawed off to accommodate his girth. The rear legs were raised on four-by-sixes, so that he was positioned on a forward incline. A rope was within reach, one end looped loosely around a nearby floor lamp, the other bound to an anchor bolt drilled into a ceiling joist. He used this rope to pull himself out of the seat when he had to go to the bathroom, an operation that could take forty-five minutes — hauling himself up, teetering toward the wall and groping along it for balance, squeezing through the doorframe (the door had been removed long ago), shitting or pissing into the tarp-lined tub, then moving carefully back toward his seat, sliding along the tracks sanded into the wood floor by his thickly callused feet. He did not want to fall. The last time, the fire department had been called to get him back up, and a TV news crew had tagged along to cover the story.
Because he could no longer dress himself, he wore caftans, which were easy to slip on and off. They were immense garments, handmade, beautifully embroidered, donated by a television sitcom star with a weight problem who had heard about him on the news. (I want, the sitcom star had said, to express my solidarity with him — with big people everywhere — by contributing to his comfort in this small way.) In addition, a big-and-tall men’s store had paid several tailors to make him a full suit coat, trousers, vest, a pima cotton button-down shirt, and a red and blue silk tie that was a yard and a half long. (We feel, the big-and-tall people had said, that no one — whatever their circumstances — should be deprived of a fine ensemble of clothing.) He wore this suit only once a year, when the local newspapers and TV news shows sent reporters to do their holiday stories about him, stories in which they would pity his confined existence and marvel at the tenacity of the human spirit. He didn’t like doing these interviews at first. They asked the same questions every year: What is your typical breakfast? What diets have you tried? What do you do for fun? Are you happy? Are you lonely? He learned to give the answers they wanted to hear, and he played along because the publicity was good for freebies. One donor paid for his subscription to the daily paper; another took up a collection at her office to pay his utility bills; a chef at a local bistro brought him fabulous meals every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which prompted a chef at another restaurant to prepare an annual birthday buffet. So the interviews he got used to. But he hated wearing the suit, which the TV people insisted on. It took four volunteers two sweaty hours to get it on him, then another hour afterward to strip it off without damaging it. Mostly he wore his caftans. Once a month, a Filipina on the second floor took them to the laundromat. She and her two daughters would need most of a day to transport and launder these vast garments.
It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was flipping distractedly through the channels with the remote. He got free cable. (We believe, the cable people had said, that no American should be deprived of TV-viewing options.) He lived alone. He was forty-two years old. He had been honorably discharged two decades ago, returning from Southeast Asia with a medal of valor, an addiction to alcohol, and an inability to answer the question: What now? When he’d stopped drinking, he could not stop eating. He had found a kind of answer within his insatiable appetite. At the age of twenty-five he weighed 380 pounds, and he reached the 500 mark — joining the quarter-ton club — by his thirtieth birthday. He currently weighed just over 600 pounds. And he was at this moment very, very hungry.