She lay back against the pillows watching San Francisco blink, and thought of a young man and how long life should be and what it should be. Her husband came into the room, greeted her, and pulled a chair closer to her bed. He took her hand. “How are you?”
She squeezed his hand. “Better,” she said. “They say I can go home on Sunday.” Days, as opposed to years… a lifetime that could so easily be cut short by misery, bricks, metal.
Let the kid live. He had been hanging from her like shrapnel, but Mike had cut him off her.
“But… you're ready? They won't make you leave if you aren't ready…” She saw now how afraid he was. “Why are you smiling?” he went on.
“Come here.” Her husband bent down and she kissed his bald head. “Because the operation was a success.”
Chocolate Milkshake
One night, after a movie, she and a woman friend dropped into one of those anachronistic ice cream parlors modeled on the fifties, where an actual soda jerk in a white cap sponged behind the counter and silver-haired denizens licked their spoons as they no doubt had been doing for years. They sat across from each other in a mahogany booth. Her friend ordered a root-beer float from an ornate leather menu. That started her thinking about when she was sixteen and Charlie Almquist took her to the Bob's Big Boy on Willow Street and they ordered the most wonderful dripping burgers and huge thick chocolate milkshakes with whipped cream. For old times' sake and in a spirit of middle-aged daring, she ordered the chocolate milkshake, thinking you can't bring back the past and that she must be out of her mind to order such a mountain of calories. When the milkshake arrived it was better than the Bob's, taller, with cream that tasted freshly whipped and semisweet chocolate tempered to bland mild perfection with milk. She sipped it slowly through the straw, finding it difficult to make conversation because it had been thirty years since anything tasted this good. When it was all gone she was full, really full, her brain still savoring the taste and her cells still lapping up the cream.
She did not dare to repeat this experience, nor did she tell her husband about it, because although they had smoked pot and even sniffed cocaine once in younger wilder days and had drunk about a thousand bottles of wine together, this was an experience he could never share with her, a truly illicit, downright obscene pleasure, and besides he was a saturated fat and salt eater, who at night in front of the TV snacked on salted nuts and nacho chips, while she usually tried to content herself with tea, since she gained weight easily and had to be careful; but after the milkshake experience she began sneaking Hostess Cupcakes in the kitchen, eating two sandwiches in the daytime when he and the children were not at home, and having a second breakfast of microwave waffles with loads of real maple syrup, which helped her sleep better and maintain the bland sweetness which he and the children needed, deadening her to the irritations and lack of money and the fact that she really didn't seem to care about her husband anymore; and then she started to put on weight, and she had to buy some bigger clothes at the Penney's on their charge card, which is how he first noticed she was getting fatter.
Meanwhile she felt deeply ashamed, as though she were having an affair, which began to be quite unlikely, as she was really piling on the weight, having stored the scale in the garage so she wouldn't have to think about it after it read two hundred one morning; but eclipsing her shame was an exhilarating feeling of fighting back, an obscure defiance, and also that delirious pleasure of letting go completely and filling up, so much better than sex with her husband, who had no idea how to please her even after all these years; so she just wanted to continue eating brownies and corn bread and her children's dreadful cookies which had to be constantly replaced; she stopped looking in the mirror and there was an extra layer between herself and her husband when they made love, but they didn't talk about it; never anything to worry about there, her husband was as faithful as the lighthouse light; he would never leave her; they had married for life and they both believed in the sanctity of marriage.
After six months she had gained eighty pounds and decided she had to stop; people were staring at her thighs on the street and she was getting embarrassed to go out to the grocery store; she had to drop out of coaching the school play, which disappointed her daughter and the teacher, and when summer came she had to avoid the swim club, where she had spent years chatting desultorily with the neighbors; tennis with her husband was out of the question; so she joined a diet center, and for four months, until Christmas, she starved herself faithfully, castigating herself after each tiny slip, suffering horribly from hunger, until her hair was falling out in little clumps and the skin under her arms hung in small quilted bags, but she was no longer fat.
Then at a Christmas party down the block she noticed she was looking longingly at the husband of her neighbor, admiring the blond downy hair glowing on his forearms, and he noticed her looking and pushed her into the kitchen with him and ran his fingers up her now thin thigh and stuck his tongue into her mouth, all slimy and tasting of beer, until she finally pulled away and headed back into the living room where people smiled at her, and she found a tray of small quiches, spinach and Monterey Jack, and she had a couple, which sent her off and running again.
After that, in the middle of the night sometimes she would gently slide out from under the comforter and flit to the refrigerator while her family slept, and the day came when she could wear nothing but muumuus and it was hard to fit into her chair at the dining room table, and all the while her husband tried to be nice and pretended things were like before, and was supportive about her therapy, which gave her a weekly excuse to visit the McDonald's for an extra lunch of two Big Macs and a large fries, even though sex with him was really impossible by now and he was depressed, but trying not to show it, loyal and true man that he was.
As the fat enfolded her legs, her arms, her neck, even her fingers and toes, she continued to eat assiduously, not for the taste or the feeling of fullness but because she had to, the fat had taken on a life of its own, and within she had shrunk to a mere pinprick of existence; she found it hard even to make the school lunches and to wash the dishes, but her husband took over these chores as he had taken over the laundry and vacuuming and bed-making; at this point all she could get up for was the cooking, and the meals she produced were odd, even she knew it, buttered garlic bread and noodles in oily pesto and chocolate cake, and her husband never got the dishes he loved anymore.
Then one evening, he caught her in the bedroom eating a dozen Mounds bars under the covers, dropping melted chocolate onto the clean sheet he had patiently fitted that morning before work. At six P.M. he was hungry, as he always was, but she hadn't started dinner and although it was obvious she was in no shape to get up, he wouldn't leave her alone; he burst into tears and told her she was killing herself and had to stop, and, the words disgorging from somewhere inside she blurted out: you could leave you know, and he sobbed, oh, no you don't, marriage is forever, we agree about that, and the children were whining in the kitchen for their dinner, their voices piercing as bird beaks, pecking at her, and her husband pounded on the dresser, saying, why, why, why, and it sounded to her like I, I, I. She felt muscles under her fat tense as every ounce of her shook, and he made the mistake of pointing his finger at her like he was pushing a cap into a dynamite stick, and she was exploding, they were killing her so in pure self-defense she took her husband's loaded gun out of the bedside table and shot him, and when the children came running with shrill shrieks she shot them, too, until the whole family had shut up.