Fat People

Chapter One

Train Riders

Iflop down into my seat - there’s no nice way to say it. To make matters worse my left thigh overflows into my annoyed seatmate’s space on one of the two facing bench seats as the train speeds away from the platform in Greenwich. It’s at the end of the car where the two blue Naugahyde seats face one another. The coach is redolent of coffee and a disorienting mix of fragrances emanating from the city’s cubicle-dwellers. I’m sitting across from a fat girl who is not a businessperson. She nibbles around the edge of a blueberry muffin and clutches a brown paper bag, translucent with grease. She has no purse. Crumbs speckle her neon-blue blouse with its deep décolletage and the pale white breasts trussed into it. Thin veins spider across her white flesh like the map of a river drainage basin. She is looking out the window, avoiding my gaze, although she senses it.

I wear loose-fitting clothes to conceal my fat, an expanse of oxford shirt over chino slacks. There is no subtlety to her fat, exaggerated by tight-fitting jeans and polyester blouse. How can she walk, bulging in those tight jeans? She looks up and catches me staring, perhaps wondering if I’m interested in her. I smile and look away.

I’m not a commuter, but this is familiar terrain. I’m making my way to the city to help empty the contents of grandmother’s apartment. I wonder why the fat girl is going into the city. She looks out the window again and appears to be listening to one of the many airborne cellphone conversations. A man is assuring his wife that he loves her even though he will be late again tonight. From his defensive tone it’s easy to guess that the wife is not happy.

I brace my bulk as the train rounds a curve at speed. My seatmate shifts his weight defensively. The girl, alone in her seat, also adjusts her position to compensate for the centrifugal force exerted by the fast-moving train. She clings to the bag as if it were her lifeline. Cell phone conversations compete with track noise. From my many childhood trips along these tracks I recall the hypnotic da-duh, da-duh, da-duh of wheels clicking over bolted joints in the now-welded rails. Today the noise is steady, arrhythmic, a shrill hum except for the occasional screech of steel as the train rounds a curve or the engineer brakes for bad track.

When the coach door opens and the punch-wielding conductor walks in, grabbing seat backs for balance, the train noises intensify, as if someone brushed a volume knob in error. Inside the car I make out snippets of conversation as, outside, the tenement windows flying by afford an occasional glimpse of the lives within. I have no phone or paper so I look out the window, careful to avoid the gaze of the girl, who continues to nibble around the edge of her diminishing muffin. Station platforms scroll by the window as the express train speeds toward Manhattan.

I’m thinking ahead to the physical and emotional exertions of helping my grandmother sort through and haul away the accumulation of her generation. But my attention keeps returning to the fat girl. We’ve somehow managed to park our bulks so that our knees don’t touch. I imagine the round contours of pale flesh overflowing her tight clothes and underwear. The fat around her middle bulges out to meet and support her substantial breasts. She pulls down her blouse when she sees me looking at her again. I’ve made her uncomfortable. She hikes herself sideways on the seat as if to look away, but instead she is trying to reach something squeezed into her jeans pocket. Now she must extend her right leg. It touches mine. She excuses herself with a faint smile. She gets her hand into the tight pocket and with some difficulty extracts a cell phone that she brings to her ear, greeting the caller. Above the din of the coach I had not heard it ring but it might have been on vibrate.

It’s the same conversation I’ve heard a hundred times between lovers, assurances of love and longing, discreet recountings of intimate moments, promises of fidelity and reunion. I wonder if she is on her way to meet her lover in New York, and if her lover is also is fat. For a moment I’m consumed with the complex ergonomics of their love making with all its lipid impediments. There were enough embarrassments of ineptitude when I first made love, when I was younger and thinner. I’ve avoided it—or perhaps love has avoided me, as a fat person. I wonder if her lover is kind to her. I recall my stepfather once asking me, So now you know how to use a woman to come, but have you learned to make love to her?

The tenements give way to massive warehouses, empty streets, and an occasional diner. The girl ends with an expression of love and she again struggles to replace the phone into her tight pocket.

For the first time, she speaks to me. I’m sorry, it was my boyfriend. We are engaged. He is stationed upstate and we only get to see each other when he visits his mother in New York City. I hope I didn’t bother you.

Not at all.

Do you have a girlfriend? she asks.

Not right now. I did but it didn’t work out.

I’m sorry. You seem so nice.

Thank you. I fix my gaze out the window as the train rolls through the industrial sidings of Queens, occasionally tossing us against one another as we pass a switch and change tracks at speed.

As the train moves on into Harlem and miles of tenements, the girl extends the bag she is clutching and offers me a doughnut. But I am no longer comfortable eating in public. I fear the reproach of those around me, watching a fat man eating fattening food. It’s safer to eat alone.

I watch the drape of fat swinging from her extended arm. I unconsciously straighten my shoulders as if to remind myself of the muscles I once earned from years of farm work, although my arms, too, are now encased in fat. I’ve not lifted a bale since going away to school.

She withdraws the bag and her smile fades with our loss of connection. The lights flicker as the train enters the tunnel beneath Park Avenue and begins screeching through the outer arteries of Grand Central.

I recognize the dusty lights, jolting turns, even the graffiti in the tunnels. I wonder if she has been here before. The cubicle-dwellers are stowing papers into briefcases and setting coffee cups on the floor for others to remove. The smell of spilt coffee overwhelms even the ambient after-shave.

Over the screaming of steel I hear a squeaking sound. I look over to see the fat girl quietly sobbing. I do not want to engage; I am less than a minute from sprinting out of her life—as much as a fat man can sprint. Yet I can no longer pretend to be distracted by the world outside the train windows.

Are you okay?

She sniffles, gathering herself for a response.

You knew, didn’t you?

Knew what? I ask.

There was no one there, she answers with a convulsive sob that lifts her chin off her breast.

What do you mean?

On the phone, she says. Her eyes are red and swollen.

The train stops in a blaze of platform light and jostling commuters fill the aisles.

There was no one on the other end.

Chapter Two

Baybie Denton

Baybie Denton lives in a trailer behind the dump. Her stepbrother Floyd lives in a nearby trailer. It’s perpendicular to hers so he can’t look in her windows, at least that’s what Baybie says. Baybie is blind from birth and Floyd sees to her needs when he’s sober enough.

Baybie wasn’t blind at birth, but rather from birth. Doc Limoges never drank until after office hours, but Baybie was born at 2 a.m. in a breach birth in the trailer she lives in today. Doc Limoges was called just before midnight and had to be roused from the leather chair behind his desk by Baybie’s father, Pearlie. Doc Limoges grabbed his birthing things and hurried out to the trailer in his Plymouth with Pearlie Denton trailing behind on his Harley panhead.

The birth was complicated, but Doc Limoges had delivered many children under difficult conditions, even when drunk. Pearlie made him some coffee, boiled water, tore up clean rags, and did as he was told. Emma Denton delivered a baby girl who weighed nine pounds on the rusty bathroom scale.

Doc Limoges checked her for jaundice, counted fingers and toes, and did what he had done for countless newborns in Lamoille County. He dipped a cotton ball into the vial of boric acid in his medicine bag and washed out the little girl’s eyes, but the vial was not boric acid, though it looked the same. It was the formaldehyde and methanol solution he used to sterilize hypodermics when his autoclave broke down last year. The newborn baby cried out in pain. He smelled the vial and realized what he had done. He said nothing for a moment, rinsed out her eyes, and, turning to Emma, he said, Your little girl was born blind.

Emma cried out and asked How can that be? Doc Limoges simply said, God’s will as he packed up his black bag and left.

Shortly thereafter Pearlie left for the logging camps in New Hampshire where he worked the spring log run, only he didn’t return that fall and the monthly envelopes with a few bills and no note stopped coming in June. Emma later heard he’d gone off to Canada with a camp cook.

Emma raised Baybie as best she could under the care of the Overseer of the Poor, a kindly man who had known the benevolence of an earlier overseer when he was a young man and lost his farm in the Depression. In those days, folks generally elected an overseer from the ranks of those who had been under a prior overseer’s care to ensure that they could distinguish between those in genuine need and chronic shirkers, but could also show proper empathy and respect for the truly needy.

Emma raised Baybie alone until she was eight, but times were hard right after the war and it was increasingly difficult to care for a blind girl. Emma began using her weekly stipend for beer rather than food and Jim Willis, the overseer, decided it was time for Baybie to go to the school for the blind down state in Bellows Falls. After a difficult separation, Jim drove Baybie down and stayed with her until she was registered. Emma disappeared several months later with what Wyvis the dump manager called a drifter, leaving the furnished trailer behind to freeze up in the winter. After her first year at the school, Baybie was remanded into the foster care of a family in Hardwick. The childcare officer introduced her to her new foster mother, Clarisse LeFèvre, and her burly husband, Léon. She could not see her new parents or her new surroundings, but tried to imagine them. She did not cry when the childcare officer left.

In her thirteenth year, Baybie’s periods both began and ended. Clarisse soon discovered that her foster daughter was bearing her husband’s child and called the childcare officer. Clarisse blamed Baybie with a concocted story of seduction and evil intent. Baybie was removed from the household and taken to the Chesley Home for Unwed Mothers in Clarendon where she gave birth to a healthy but premature daughter who was taken away from her as soon as she emerged from the birth canal.

When the considerable pain of a 13-year-old girl giving birth finally subsided, Baybie pleaded to be allowed to touch and hold her new child. Such contact, however, was not allowed, nor was she told that her child was a girl, or that she had been surgically altered so she would not become pregnant again. The Chesley Home’s authorities knew not to allow contact between mother and newborn, as it would only make the separation more difficult. A kindly nurse later whispered to Baybie that she had given birth to a baby girl and that she had had a full head of beautiful black hair, and that her features were not only normal, but beautiful.

Baybie’s sightless imagination limned an image of her daughter that lived with her for the rest of her life and grew as the years passed into the image of a lovely young woman. Her own image of a young woman’s face was composed from tactile classroom exercises designed to give physical dimension to facial features and the after-lights-out nights in the school dorm where girls continued to explore one another’s faces and bodies in an effort to weave an image from exploring fingers.

Like many of the girls, Baybie was given a ragdoll to hold until the post-partum yearning subsided, but it never did for Baybie and she was allowed to take the doll with her when she left the home and returned to the school for the blind.

A kindly nun who taught music to the girls recognized a singular beauty in Baybie’s alto voice, as well as her ability to sing a hymn she had heard only once. Baybie joined the chorus and, before graduation, had committed hundreds of songs and hymns to memory.

Baybie kept the small ragdoll through the remainder of her schooling at the school for the blind. The tattered doll was with her when she moved back into her parent’s trailer near the dump. Floyd had cleaned and repaired it as best he could with some modest resources supplied by the Jim. He replaced the burst pipes that had frozen, leaving them empty until Baybie returned. He primed the water pump and got the water running again when she moved in and painted the inside of the trailer with some leftover paint, knowing full well that Baybie could not see his work, but that the overseer would.

Baybie is 54 now and lives alone in her parent’s trailer. The east end of the trailer has settled into the sandy loam and is no longer level. She has learned not to set eggs or round things on her kitchen counter or dining room table. She still has the ragdoll she was given after her daughter was born and now has over seventy dolls that she takes care of. Wyvis rescues discarded dolls