It sure attracted me, he thinks, whose prick has just gone out, its nerve ends snuffed, doused as wick, and who recalls, with detachment, almost dead, too, not against his will but in dead will’s leaden absence, all sexual nostalgia gone, all bias—that stout girl. (Always one of the code words. Stately, plump, buxom, portly. Words whose meanings he knew but looked up in a dozen dictionaries just to see them written out.)
That stout girl. Her strapping, robust, sturdy sisters. Their heavy haunches, their meaty hams. Their thick hair and big hands. Their full busts and statuesque figures.
Because maybe we really are clay. Something in flesh which takes an imprint and strikes us off like medals, human change.
“You can’t,” she said, and hoped he could, that someone could.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to try.”
“Maybe in water.”
“Oh no. On land.” (And that moment has before him all his fantastic, dumb ideal. The woman who can’t be raised even in water, who drops on him like female anchor, sunk, unbuoyant treasure, against all the annulled, mediate influence of displacement, whelming him, his striving, kicking, bucking limbs. All I ever needed, he thinks, was to be drowned real good, and does not remember his actual wife who actually was.)
“You can try, but if I fall and hurt you it’s not my fault.”
She was not even teasing, he thinks now. Nor was I. I had such dialogues by heart. I put them through them like a cross-examiner with my ploys like so many idioms, leading them on, and my professed disbelief just one more idiom.
“No, that can’t be so. Your bathroom scale is off.”
“You think the doctor’s scale is off?”
“Oh, the doctor’s scale. You didn’t say it was the doctor’s scale.”
“Yeah, well it was.”
“Still, no scale’s always reliable. Unless you’re one of those people who looks lighter than she actually is. Let’s see,” he had said, “I know I can lift” and names a weight ten or fifteen pounds less than the one she has told him, fifteen or twenty more than he knows he can raise. “If I can’t pick you up, the scale’s probably right.” And he can’t, his knees already buckled in capitulate sexual deference to female mass, this body of body against whose volume he opposes his own, and not even he knows if he’s really trying, though he thinks he is, hopes he is, even as he fumbles, slips, goes down.
And if his tears had not already died he would be weeping now, and if his ability to sorrow were not gone he would be wretched.
And sees one last time their outsized dresses, their hundred relaxed postures — large women on benches, in bleachers, in stockinged feet along the slopes of shoe salesmen’s stools, sidesaddle on horses or climbing out of cars or down steep hills, sprawling in parks, on picnics, on beaches, floating in water or soaking in tubs, clumsy in changing rooms, bulging the sheets on examining tables, sitting on toilets or putting on shoes, reaching for dishes or passing the soup, turning in sleep, their nightgowns hiked up, or fetching a slipper from under a bed, stretching or bending or praying to God, sweating in summer and fanning themselves, looking behind them in mirrors for bruises, doing an exercise, letting out seams. In all disarray arrayed. Mead’s large ladies, Mead’s fat forms, his sprawled, spilled women tumbling his head like the points of a pinwheel.
He is already dead when God comes to collect him, already dead before Mills or his daughter or Messenger notices that he has closed his eyes.
He has died with Louise’s birthday pie in his mouth, with Cornell’s plastic Meals-on-Wheels fork in his teeth.
“Tell us about,” the brand new orphan demands of her parent, and asks for some event she herself has fleshed out into a story. “What is it, Dad? Are you asleep?”
The death is discovered and the irrational is suddenly loose in the room, all the gases of the unstable like heavy weather. The house is too small to contain its tricky, too fluid volumes. Even the dead man’s stolid constancy seems willful, some petulant obstinacy. George Mills’s mood ring flashes a bright yellow, cautionary as the back of a school bus. For all of them, mood is wayward, volatile, uncapped, at once murderously resolved and open as the tempers at gaming tables. They are not in shock but in shock’s agitate, high-strung otherness, their reckless affections jumpy with rampage.
“Well this is it,” Cornell says. “Who needs this? I don’t need this. Under the circumstances I said a perfectly normal, natural thing. The woman’s dying. All I said was is there anything I could do. Bam! She dumps her volunteer work on me! The horror, the horror! Now I see my mistake. I rushed things. In these situations you wait, you buy time and keep your own counsel. Afterward, if you want to be helpful, you say a word to the widower. You never ask the principal. Never. You ask the principal it’s like some deathbed pledge, high oaths. God knows what they’ll come up with. They could whisper the name of their killer in your ear. Then where are you? I’ll tell you what I learned from this. If it’s terminal you shake their hand if they’re a man and kiss them on the lips if they’re a woman.”
Mills’s wife says, “There wasn’t a thing wrong. Nothing. He was old is all. That’s no sickness. I won’t say I never saw him looking better. That would be hogwash. Sure I’ve seen him look better. He wasn’t always old. He used to be young. I’ve seen him when he could be downright playful. There was this great big gal the next farm over that whenever Dad saw her he’d say how she must have been dieting and that he knew he could lift her. And he’d try. Then and there. He’d try to pick her up. But she was so big, well of course he never could. Sure. I’ve seen him look better. But I’ve seen him look worse, too. He even laughed. He was laughing not ten minutes ago. You heard him, George. What? What are you making that face for?”
“I mean it never even occurred to me that it would be open-ended. Even after she told me I could take over her Meals-on-Wheels and I found out it fit my schedule, it never occurred to me it would turn into this ongoing thing. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I must have been stoned. I wasn’t, but I agreed. You’d have to be stoned or otherwise impaired to agree to such a nutty proposition. I’m needed at home, for God’s sake. I got a teenage kid doesn’t get the point of knock-knock jokes and one old enough to vote thinks he’s a fucking prince. Works part time, minimum wage, to get cash to see ball games, calls the movies eleven times to check when the show starts. I mean look what time it is, for Christ’s sake. When is lunch over? When some old fart dies? Oh.”
“What is it, George?”
“His bowels. Phew! It’s got to be his bowels.”
“Do they do that? I heard they do that, but I’ve never been sure. It’s like that thing you hear about hanged men, that they get, you know, a big one. Is that true, too? I shouldn’t be the one to have to clean him up. He was my father. That’s what I’d remember. That wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t. It isn’t right to expect a daughter to wipe up her father’s intimate dirt. What’s that, a way of dealing with grief? I guess if you have something practical and nasty to do you don’t feel so bad afterward because all you remember is how awful it was and you’re only glad he doesn’t have to die again. Oh, these arrangements. Everything supposed to come out even. What’s even about it? What’s so damned even about it? Dad and I didn’t have such an easy time together. No thank you! If the city wants him cleaned up, let the city do it!”