Full
Polly Kresbach doesn’t know if she can reach far enough to reach the remainder of the cherry cheesecake. She’s starting to sweat. She can see the dimples in her elbow. She can see fat clinging loosely from where other people have biceps, fat that hangs onto her bones like a fallen mountain climber scratching for the rope. She’s already staring eye to eye with three pitless olives swimming in the bottom of a jar she’d picked up at a boutique in Manhattan a few years back. She’d forgotten about the olives. She reads the expiration date. Yikes. April 2004. She swats the olive bottle, but too hard, and it zooms past her dimpled elbow, under her armpit, and against her cushioned tummy and thighs. The bottle rolls harmlessly to the linoleum floor where it spins for a second before stopping, as good as new. Polly wishes, really wishes that the bottle had broken. The fact that her insoluble body gave the bottle a safe place to land makes her want to cry. Why couldn’t the dumb thing have broken like it would have against an average human body?
She’s glad no one else is home right now because with the way she’s down on all fours, half of her body consumed by the mouth of the gaping refrigerator door and all of her ample butt flaring like the feathers of a peacock, if anyone found her, she’d feel inclined to get up and in her present plump state, that would take a shamefully long time. She’d have to back up on all fours. Then she’d have to hoist one knee up. Then she’d have to use her left hand to get some purchase on the Formica counter top of the breakfast island. Then she’d have to strain audibly to pull herself up into a standing position where she would feel inclined to tell the person, whoever it was, that she was on a new diet: Weight Watchers. Yes, she was getting rid of all the junk: the cheesecakes, the boxed chocolates, the Hostess pies, the gourmet ice cream, the frozen burritos, the breaded corndogs, the Polish kielbasa. All of it! “Good Lord, how’d I let myself get this fat?” she’d say, and then she’d cry and hope for their sympathy.
The doorbell rings.
Polly slams her head against the underside of the clear plastic tray holding up a half-used can of condensed milk which now drips down onto the small of her back and then into her pants. It’s a pity, she thinks. There had been enough sweetened condensed milk in that can to make her neighborhood-famous Can’t Leave Alone Bars, the recipe that calls for half a pound of caramels. Oh yes. She can almost taste them now.
Hungry
Grace’s husband, Alex, walks past her and the kitchen table and into the kitchen itself. “I’m starving,” he says. He opens the refrigerator and looks at its emptiness. Grace knows what he’s looking at: ¼ of a gallon of expired milk, some bottles of salad dressing, and an old half-used red onion sealed in a baggie. They say anything can be memorized after seven repetitions and he’s stolen a peek into the fridge many more times than that. Alex closes the door. He walks over to the pantry, places his hand on the knob, and leans the full weight of his body against the open door. Again, Grace knows what he’s looking at: a box containing three taco shells (one broken), a box with two ice cream cones, a near-empty bag of pinto beans, three cans of cream of chicken soup, and a crinkly wrapper containing 18 spaghetti noodles. He fishes out an ice cream cone. Grace can hear him chomp into it. It’s his second ice cream cone in ten minutes.
She waits for the next bite, but it doesn’t come because he’s put the entire thing in his mouth and now breaths through his nose as he chews. After a couple swallows, he holds up the box containing the final cone and says, “Want it?”
Grace shakes her head no, but Alex doesn’t eat the cone. He puts it back in the pantry. “For later then,” he says. “For you.”
Grace returns her eyes to her notepad. She has written HEALTH and then two inches below this she has written EXERCISE. Two inches below this, she writes NUTRITION—temporal and spiritual. She’s been asked to fill in late notice for the Sunday-School teacher tomorrow. She guesses she can do it. She draws a cloud around NUTRITION and puts a smiley-faced sun emerging from the cloud. Grace doesn’t smile. Her head aches. The ache seems to be picking up momentum too. It rocks inside her skull like a boat docked amidst heavy waves. She drops the pen with a click because she thinks she felt her fingers twitch without her approval.
“You’re shaking,” says Alex.
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are. Are you cold?”
Grace says nothing. Off to the right of NUTRITION she draws a rainbow and more clouds. She hears Alex lift the lid off the cookie jar. Her head shoots up and she’s angry.
“No Grace,” says Alex before she can talk. “You haven’t eaten anything real since we had beans and spaghetti two days ago. We’re going to use this money.” He fishes a twenty dollar bill out of the cookie jar. “I’ll get paid again on Monday. We’ll pay the tithing then. I don’t think the Lord wants us to starve. It’s not like the universe is going to crumble without this twenty bucks.”
Grace stands and rollicks a bit. “We can make it two more days. Have a big drink of water. You can fool your stomach.”
“I can’t make it two more days. I can’t.”
Satisfied
Polly wishes she would have double-bagged. She opted not to in order to save time but now one of the plastic handles on the bag with the chocolate milk and pints of Ben and Jerry’s has stretched to useless. She sets the bag down and leaves it. She’ll come back for it later. There’s more stuff back at the house anyway. She could have driven it all over but she is serious about this Weight Watchers thing—might as well kill two birds with one stone. “I’m going to feel this tomorrow,” she says.
She hopes the pints of Phish Food won’t melt. She uses her shoulder to wipe at a sudden tear. “Someone should enjoy it,” she says. She takes in a big breath. This is taking longer than she’d planned. The streams of sweat gliding down her cheeks are already an embarrassment. She uses her shoulder to wipe at this too. Four more houses to go. Good Lord, four more. Had she truly received inspiration to come here? Or, more likely, had her body’s withdrawals from sugar and fat caused her brain to stop functioning properly?
A slender girl in a bikini top is sitting on the top of the back seat in a passing convertible. She is wearing shades and laughing. She yells out a hello to Polly as she cruises on by, but Polly pretends to study the houses. She can do this.
At one house from her destination, Polly hears screaming. It’s Grace, “Don’t, don’t.”
She cannot fathom Alex hitting her and yet that’s what has come to mind, instantly, without premeditation. She moves like she hasn’t moved since her eleventh grade PE class when she ran an eight minute mile. She takes the steps two at a time. The trays of sausages, the pellets of sugar cereal, the tubs of Almond Roca, and the columns of asiago cheese bagels bounce in the bags and don’t stop until her heart is racing and her sweat is pouring and her mind is forgetting it all in its effort to make a fist and produce a knock. The door opens instantly amidst the crash of a bottle of artichoke hearts on the porch.
It’s Alex and it’s Grace looking flushed. A twenty dollar bill is falling to their feet. “Are you okay? I heard screaming. I’m getting rid of this food. For some reason, I can’t get the two of you out of my mind. Can you use it?”
Another plastic handle snaps. Alex lunges for it. Polly thanks him, and compliments him on a good catch.
“We’re fine,” says Alex. “And yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Polly doesn’t know why but she believes him. Maybe it’s the tears in his eyes. “Let’s get this in your kitchen then. I’ve got some ice cream melting down there on the sidewalk.”
In the kitchen, Alex and Polly heave the bulging sacks up to the counter. Grace opens the cookie jar and drops in the $20 bill, where it will wait until Sunday.
