Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Seventeen: Couvade

147 On the day Obie disappeared, the last child to go missing from Kingdom Come, Kansas, I came home from school in a prickly humor. I had gotten my period while playing basketball in PE, felt the blood spurt as I sprang for a jump shot, launched myself forward and upward, into the stratosphere of the gymnasium, looked down at the shrinking hoop like Buzz Aldrin bidding farewell to a diminishing Earth he could eclipse with his thumb, then I descended toward the backboard, felt the moist warmth ooze between my legs, and, slam-dunk!, back to solid ground and the slack-jawed stares of my peers. I took it on the heel and toe to the locker room, but the blood had already begun to soak through to my shorts. The thought of the tidal gush between my legs made my classmates cut me a wide berth the rest of the day, and when I prepared to leave, I discovered someone had left seventeen Couvade 148 a papier-mâché sanitary napkin the size of a sack of flour in front of my locker, the red paint of menstrual gore glopped in the middle, Mrs. Snowbarger’s art class finally put to practical use, no greater creative motivation in junior high than ridicule. When Obie got home, he asked, “Did God have a good day at school?” “God…zilla,” I said through gritted teeth, “bled all over the girl’s locker room and was the object of school scorn.” Obie beamed beatifically with understanding. It was impossible to scandalize him with harrowing tales of the misshapen body, its latest betrayal. “And now God has cramps and is comforting herself with thoughts of Job-like recompense for the faithless, those sneering ne’er-do-wells at John Dewey Junior High.” Obie nodded, as though he understood perfectly the burden of being capacious. And then into my oversized bean flew this thought: No… more, no more. I looked into Obie’s adoring eyes and had the sudden and startling desire to savage him, open his arteries until he was exsanguinated, bled dry of his devotion. I was tired to the mortal bone of trying to be worthy of Obie’s boundless love, and, in a fit of pique I couldn’t bridle, I spat at him the thought that had been quietly festering in my mind for years: “If I truly believed I were God,” I said, “the only honorable thing to do would be to kill myself and save the world the trouble.” Obie shook his head mournfully, and he took my hand, mindful that in this world there is no greater, more expansive sorrow than that born of the suffering of a supreme being, but I was not reassured by his touch and I let myself for once feel just how weary I was of having his worshipful gaze trained on me, how fed up with being buffeted 149 between my brother’s need to hold me aloft on a celestial pedestal, to worship at my epic feet, and my mother’s desire to erase my enveloping body, to wipe the very DNA of me from the genetic map. So I pulled away from him, felt a flood of fury wash over me and drown the good and godly Wallis, tore off my t-shirt, and roared, “See! Here is my body!” I was surprised and perhaps both elated and saddened to see Obie finally back away from me, and I couldn’t stop myself. I bit into my forearm with such vigor my own lips were wet with blood when I opened my arms to him. “Here is my blood!” I bellowed, gargantuan banshee released at last, chimera both animal and illusion, my own hypostatic union. “Take, eat, this is my body which was broken for you!” I bit into my lip, goading Obie to begin the final feast of my flesh with the appetizer of my yowling mouth, initiating the Eucharist myself , self-cannibalizing and irredeemable redeemer. And then I looked into Obie’s face, so stunned he seemed absent of features, gone blank with disbelief, the vacant moon of his sweet mug, a lunar eclipse. “This…do in remembrance…” I whispered, “of me,” expunging myself with each word.  Obie had lately befriended an elderly couple who moved in to the house across the street formerly occupied by Twyla Neely and her boyfriend Leo, a...