LITTLE FAT
I.
Cold spring puts green buds on gray branches all over the city. They open as it gets warmer and the babies appear. I swear this year I see more babies than ever before. Always when I wait in line the woman ahead of me holds a child over her shoulder, easy in her hands as a small yam. These children seek me out, radiance that doesn’t expect anything they reach towards me opening their fists, they offer precise rows of eyelashes. I see them on the bus, and out the windows at every intersection in strollers waiting to cross, bodies warm, bodies tucked in blankets.
Saturdays in the apartment courtyard I see two sisters, mittens on strings, tug-boating in and out of the first floor door. Their mother must set them down for meals, scrape the food off their hands with a towel, even in between each finger, she must give them baths together and dress them together and lay them next to each other in their bed. Curling like seashells. They must hear her sound like the rush near the train. They go up the walk and under the porch where the mailboxes are, and after that I can’t see them.
Towards the end, when I got talking about babies, Shaner got upset, told me no man wants to hear this from his girlfriend. He sometimes introduced me as his partner, later on, his fiancé, but when we were back on this conversation he called me his girlfriend. Girlfriend was a character in a song: she will play you, she will get knocked up and get you in a trap, she needs someone to take care of her.
Shaner was a careful person. Right out of school he got a job working on MRI machine shields. He sealed entire rooms with soldered copper sheets. He was meticulous, never any gaps. He told me the shields made things shining and silent and kept the rays inside. He went to all the biggest hospitals. On his visits home he took me shopping.
Later, because he begged me, I went on the trips with him. I stayed in his hotel rooms on his expense accounts. I missed school for a month at a time.
Those days were so small. He woke at 4:30 and ordered his breakfast, turned on all the lights. He would pile the extra blankets and towels over me. He loved leaving me naked and small in the huge bed, and he liked to come back at night and find me just that way, wrapped up, my nursing books all over the floor. He’d pull me up in my blanket pile, wake me up to eat. He liked seeing me so hungry and so sleepy at the same time. He’d bring me my clothes and open the Styrofoam food boxes with omelets, chicken sandwiches.
In the airport going home we’d sit against the wall on a duffel bag, just at the height of passing toddlers. And their faces would open – you can make a face at a little kid, a crack up face or put your tongue out at them – and they will make that face right back at you. And then they’ll laugh, and their laugh will include you in it.
In the old days Shaner would joke, “You’ll freak out the parents,” but with a soft voice that meant, stop looking at them and sleep on the side of my arm. And in the old days I talked into the smoke-smell sleeve of his coat, “Parents always love to have their babies loved. Parents think their babies are beautiful and perfect and are glad to have the attention.”
He laughed saying, “Oh, but babies are so ugly, like little fat men.”
I drowsy-said, “Everyone loves fat little old men.”
At the one-year-six-month mark they promoted him to selling the machines that go inside the shield rooms. He wanted me to go with him. He had to go to dinners and needed help meeting these people. On the first night a man from the hospital put his hands on both sides of my waist and I screamed. On the second night they took us to a steak house with oily orange booths. I ordered only fries. I watched the man’s wife talking, watched her flat face and neck bones moving. Shaner was discussing on and on about a TV show he had never seen. I slumped against him in the booth, put my face on his belly and said, “We go home now?” It was kind of a joke. He was dead silent driving to the hotel. He was furious with me.
After that I stayed home. I wrote him messages. “Shaner I saw two strollers and two families with so many kids – I only went from our house to the grocery store I had to buy juice – you would have loved them – so many babies–” “Shaner the babies are everywhere–”
And they were.
When my mother visited the city she saw it. We went to breakfast at a Greek diner near her hotel where a screaming kid with a red flush around his mouth was pushing his hash browns onto the floor. My mom said, “You’re quite the baby watcher.” I said, “He’s screaming. If you were screaming wouldn’t I stare at you?” The way that she smiled at me was breath-warm.
“By the time I was your age,” she said, “I’d had two of your brothers. Not that you should, well not immediately, it can ruin your life. It can change you entirely, and then it’s the best thing you ever did.”
And behind her the hashbrown kid is in his mother’s arms, he is pulling like hell on her earrings. She walks to the register with her arm supporting his round bottom. And I sit in the booth with my feet folded under me and my hands in my lap, and with my fingers I feel the rounded planes in my ankles and the moving tendons and the sticking hairs. I could lay my face against the chairs, stare up at chewing-gum constellations stuck under the table. My mom talks about ‘women these days,’ and I see her from down a long tunnel. She says workforce, childcare, makes her very happy to know that I am thinking of having children. She has it so upside down, and I get to feeling strangely sick. I lay my face on the mirrored diner wall.
“Are you coming down with something, Baby?” She puts her hand over my forehead. She takes me home and makes me drink tea.
Look for Part II of “Little Fat” in our debut issue.
