Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Twenty-One: Gaythal Dethloff, Mother of Murder

209 I have not seen Vivica Planet for six weeks now, not since she took me to her laboratory and revealed to me the ylem of her brother, man I killed, accidentally, magnified for me a particle of that heart that no longer beats with desire, the cell whose soul we gazed into perhaps the very one that blazed with regret as he clutched his throat, the last sentiment to seize him, be pumped to his extremities, now an illegible smear on a slide (Vivica would surely send me off with a flea in my ear if she got the faintest whiff of such a plaint). But she called me and asked if I’d take her to visit a housebound friend, someone she thinks I’ll be interested to meet. She is schooling me in women with fallen hearts, women who know better than to nourish expectation. I have dreamt of Vivica since then, have watched her debone my body with a fish knife and carve me into tiny bits, chum for a grander catch, twenty-one Gaythal Dethloff, Mother of Murder 210 then place the fragments under a lens that made each part of me tinier yet, until all that remained was the glare of the microscope’s bulb on glass, and I found myself smiling hopefully when I awoke. Vivica Planet, I strongly suspect, aims to erase me, erase us all, sister colossi with our pocket-sized siblings, and I find myself not entirely opposed to the idea. I have always longed to be less than I am. I am a quarter inch taller than Vivica Planet—she insisted we measure—and this made her livid; she stifled a roar as she let the tape measure angrily retract, snap! So whenever we’re together, she wears heels that have her mincing nearly on the tips of her bunions, implausible plus-plus-plus-size danseuse, and she rests a weighted mitt on my shoulder until I slouch. I am not the tallest tomato in the universe. There are women larger than I in Borneo and Patagonia, Lichtenstein and Turkmenistan, even in Alabama, hardy beanstalks who best me by an inch or two, hulking exceptions who walk with a pronounced oxbow hunch so as to put the peewees at ease. They’re in for a lifetime of bulging discs and migraines , sciatica and creaking knees. I’ve read their stories in The Book of Very, Very Large Women, a gift from my father. In the chapter titled “Everyday Ailments of the Common Sheclops,” there’s a cautionary X-ray of a woman from the Azores whose hardened C-shaped spine kept her from ever gazing into the wide blue above her, though she was in closer proximity to the sky than anyone else on the islands. She died standing up, after having apologetically stared at her own feet for fifty years. Gaythal Dethloff was the size of a grand piano, wide as the day is long, I could imagine my father remarking. She lay in a bed that appeared to be fashioned from several king-size 211 mattresses, a molten mass of flesh that seemed to be erupting yet: she was geologic, cooling magma atop igneous rock marking the passing of time, rippling from epoch to epoch. Her belly bowed in the air like a yurt, a stupa, a shrine to her remarkable rotundity, and I imagined tiny people living and fasting and praying inside her. She reminded me of everything . Her cheeks were freshly rouged, her face round as a wall clock and dull with powder, chin upon chin, a glacier thawing , and her hair was an orderly cap of curls, snowy ringlets coiled against her taut scalp. The skin of her face was stretched nearly to the breaking point of its elasticity and her eyebrows plucked and penciled into two faint Greta Garbo arcs, a line of single hairs stitched on her forehead, making her appear permanently startled, as though she had awakened to find she’d ballooned overnight (gadzooks! she looked poised to exclaim). Her lips were bee-stung red. It didn’t appear to me that her hands could easily reach across the volcanic expanse to the mouth, and I wondered who had dolled her up, whose full-time job it was to feed her and tend to her body. It was a body that had long ago exceeded all acceptable limits, and...