Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Eight: Die-O-Rama

55 Once when I was a girl, one of my classmates invited me to a birthday celebration. Lynette Saunders had long, fine, silvery-blonde hair and eyelashes the color of moonlight that made her eyes, when she blinked, look like summer moths fluttering. Lynette herself was a smiling daisy, slender and sweet and sun-loving, a must for any cheerful floral arrangement . My mother loved her, and for Lynette’s birthday, she tried to squeeze me into a sparrow-sized party dress, seams and zipper ruthlessly stretched, ruffles and bows aslant, making me look like a hastily-wrapped, disheveled present, tried, my mother did, eyebrows pinched together, lips gone prim with determination, to shoehorn my walrus flippers, like the most dogged footbinder, into moppet-proportioned Mary Janes, and it was then that she issued an exasperated groan, a hissing complaint about my body being a crime against eight Die-O-Rama 56 nature, and that’s how I began to think of my king-size carcass , as a crime someone had committed, a Class 1 felony, a crime I was determined to solve. And I thought that when I tracked down the fiendish brute who had corrupted my biology , I would bring him to justice myself, dangle him in the air by his scrawny neck from my king crab mitts and demand he confess his sins, beg for forgiveness, then I’d fling him into the next world and break the spell, immediately shrink to fit that girly frock, and my mother would love me and coddle me and wish me no harm. Thus began my fascination with crime and the ratiocination I hoped would give me the skinny on the world, my body. So when I grew up (and up and up), I became a miniaturizer of crime scenes, an architect of dioramas that reproduce the site and aftermath of alleged villainy. I scrupulously replicate every observable detail in the hope that the scene will eventually sing, will divulge the exact nature of the misdeeds and the identity of the miscreant behind the treachery, and I’ll figure out the question whose answer is the corpus delicti—delectable dead I once thought that meant, crime body, body of evidence, body that is evidence (body that is itself a crime)—clear as a scrying gypsy spies your prospects in a crystal ball. God may skulk imperceptibly in mystery, but the devil is in the details. It started, as I said, when I was nine years old, the year the children began disappearing: The Hidden Hoyden of Kingdom Come, alliterated one early, hopeful headline in The Kingdom Come Tiller and Toiler (formerly The Kingdom Come Harold, founded in 1873 by one Harold Pertwee, a sawyer and salesman of tinware with a gift for gab and the only Kingdom Comer at the time free-spoken enough to editorialize in 57 print). They’re just naughty children, hidden in the nooks and thickets of Kingdom Come, like fairy-tale ragamuffins. They’d reappear when they tired of wandering through blackberry briars and had properly terrified the town and their parents, would show up ragged and thin with a tall tale about a piper or a witch or a wolf or a girl with silken tresses the length of the Mississippi. With the help of Obie, who had perfect visual recall, and domestic skills my mother’s doomed efforts to make me marriageable had equipped me with—I could crochet a pair of diminutive socks with the gnat-leg needles used by Belgian laceworkers—I began reconstructing and studying the bedrooms of the vanished children, and eventually I recognized in a drawing tacked to a wall of one of these rooms an old fort deep in the woods at which Locust Lane dead-ended. There was no suspicious figure prowling in the shadows of the drawing, but there was a pair of what looked like eyes resting on the branch of a tree, and I pointed this out to the police, led them to the spot, and there they discovered a pair of saddle shoes, sitting neatly, laces tied, at the foot of the fort, belonging to one Elise Dimbleby, the artist of the picture. Elise had disappeared two weeks before, and though nothing else of note, not even adult footprints, turned up in the woods, word got out about my involvement in this, the only clue in the case, and it...