Orientation (3 page)

So they take these few minutes before the morning shift to weigh this decision. Whale chews slowly on the last old-fashioned glazed. Bulldog pours himself another half cup, and C.B. and Red both sit hunched over, coiling and uncoiling safety line. Gomer tips his chair back, dances it on its rear legs, and stares up past the work lights. The boy clears his throat, then falls silent. He watches Gomer rocking back and forth. He follows his gaze upward. Squinting past the lights, peering into the dark, he listens to the gusts outside whistling through the tower above them.

So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire …

—Psalm 78:29

Hunger Tales

I.

She went grocery shopping three times a week, after aerobics class, stopping at a market that was on her route from the fitness center to her apartment. It was a tiny family-owned place, with a splintered wood floor and two checkout stands, dimly lit and narrow-aisled and very popular with urban professionals. They carried microbrews and power bars and arugula, plus all the staples. So when she needed bread, bananas, carrots, milk—the usual things—she stopped there.

But when she felt she deserved a treat, then a special trip—a cookie run—was in order. For such trips she preferred to go to the biggest supermarkets she could find, places that employed so many checkers and rotated them so frequently that she could never become a regular to any of them. She always went late at night, when there were fewer people. And she liked to make the rounds, to zero in on the cookie aisle by switchbacking up and down all the other aisles, from one end of the store to the other. She did not linger on the perimeters of a supermarket. Seafood and Meat, Bakery, Produce, Deli, Dairy—these areas did not sustain her interest at all. The aisles drew her, and specifically, a particular effect of her passage through them: with each turn she took, a gallery of foods unfolded before her, glutting her field of view in a visual engorgement that made her skin tingle and her innards twitch and pucker, a kind of pre-cookie jitters that never failed to arouse her in an unsettlingly erotic way. The cookies would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home—sooner if she opened the package in the car and started in on them while driving. Afterward, she would lie groggy on the sofa in front of the TV, sugar levels plunging, euphoria slipping away, feeling bloated and guilty and alone until she nodded off to sleep.

One night she drove to her favorite spot, a twenty-four-hour mega-market located at a mall just past the airport. It was the newly opened flagship store of a regional chain. It had twenty-six aisles, an all-night pharmacy and café, a video store, and a lounge with sofas and reading lamps and a fireplace with imitation logs burning in it. She scooped up a handbasket just inside the automatic doors, skirted the lounge, and headed directly for aisle 1A. These could be long nights for her. She could browse for hours, reveling not just in the sheer quantity of products but in their ever-expanding variety: there were ice creams with chocolate-covered pretzels or fudge brownie chunks or
real
vanilla bean specks in them, and made with organic strawberries or kosher cream or nuts not grown in a rain forest; there were white, yellow, blue, and red corn tortilla chips, and brown-, black-, green-, and orange-colored pastas; there were breakfast cereals shaped like peanuts, like raspberries, like doughnuts and cinnamon rolls, like waffles, like tiny slices of French toast; there were fifteen kinds of pasta sauce, ten flavors of rice cakes, and a dozen different flavors of carbonated water; there were eight varieties of something as simple as mustard. She felt immersed in abundance, gliding along like a love-drunk paramour, idly tossing items into her handbasket: brown sugar from aisle 2A, a can of sliced peaches from 7B, a box of raisins from 9B. At the end of the evening she would return most of these selections to their shelves, retaining only one or two benign items as counterbalance to the cookies. She never bought just the cookies. Nobody, she felt, needed to know that much about her.

But tonight, something was wrong. Although it was well past midnight, the supermarket was crowded. She had to squeeze past double-parked carts and around clusters of chatty shoppers blocking her path. Other late-night browsers began to loiter annoyingly on the periphery of her own late-night browsing. They sidled up next to her, perusing the same shelves she was perusing, their hands reaching for the jam jar next to the jam jar she had her hand on. One fellow trailed her all the way down the cereal aisle—inadvertently, she was sure—but persistently enough to compel her to move on. And worse, there were employees everywhere. They were crawling all over the place in their clip-on bow ties and starched blue aprons with name tags on them, briskly restocking shelves, trucking out head-high pallets of more boxed goods and taking box cutters to them with the panache of sushi chefs. They kept asking her if she needed help finding anything, and she kept saying “
No
, thank you.” She felt so rushed and prodded, so frustrated at losing the rhythm of the evening, that she curtailed her usual route. She skipped aisles 12 through 21 and headed directly for 22B, the bull’s-eye of her desire’s meandering arrow—Cookies and Crackers. Once there, she never varied in her selection—it was always either the Nabisco Chunky Chips Ahoy or the Keebler Chocolate Lovers’ Chips Deluxe. Yet she liked to mull over this choice, to savor the pretense of having to decide between one cookie or the other from the panoply before her: Which of you comes home with me tonight?

But even here she was hampered. There were people in the aisle—a couple, a man and a woman standing not just at the cookie shelves, but planted right in front of the Nabisco-Keebler array. She stopped a few yards up from them and pretended to scan the cracker shelves, waiting for them to leave. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore stylish black trench coats that made them look long and lean. They were young—in their mid-twenties, she guessed—and very attractive. They were standing there, hands deep in their coat pockets, talking intently, not leaving. She went back to Dairy and exchanged her two percent cottage cheese for one percent, then to aisle 6A to put back the sliced peaches. She returned to 22B. They were still there, in the exact same spot, slouching comfortably and murmuring to each other in that enticing and arrogant way couples in public do, inviting our exclusion from their intimacy. See how
we
can hear each other, they seemed to be letting the rest of us know. See how what
we
share is just out of your range.

She walked stiffly past them and went down the adjacent aisle, Pastas and Grains. She stood at the shelves, blindly running her hand over the packages. She heard the man’s voice rise in pitch, heard the woman laugh. What could she be laughing about, for Christ’s sake? She listened to their low, muffled tones, the thrum of their voices languid and melodic. There was more laughter, until finally—finally!—she heard them moving away. She trailed along, paralleling their slow progress out of the aisle, when suddenly a blue-aproned employee appeared before her, a tall, boyish, rawboned man with a big smile and a receding hairline and a name tag that read
BRAD IS HAPPY TO SERVE YOU!
He asked if he could help her find anything tonight.
“No!”
she thundered, rushing past him only to barrel into the cookie aisle couple. She muttered an apology as she plowed between them, then took the turn into aisle 22B.

It was empty, at last. “Yes,” she said, reaching the cookie shelves. And she was standing before them for just a few seconds—she had hardly taken them all in, still adjusting her position so that they would fill as much of her peripheral vision as possible—she had
just
gotten to the cookie shelves when a woman moving past the end of the aisle turned to look at her. She, too, wore running shoes and tights and a big, fleecy sweater. Her dark hair was pulled taut into a ponytail that highlighted an unblemished face. The woman’s gaze moved idly over her, then to the cookies she’d been looking at, then back to her. And just before gliding out of view beyond the end-aisle display, the woman’s impassive face registered a barely discernible smile. It was a small and intimate grin, the tiniest check mark of a smile, but in its tininess was laden a knowledge of her so large—so complete an understanding of her evenings alone in these supermarkets, her enthrallment before these cookies, and the aftermath of it all—that she fled. She ran. She raced out the other end of the aisle and along the back of the market, loping past Seafood and Meat to the far end of the store, to take refuge in Produce. She paced among the bins, between homely mounds of polished fruit, breathing heavily, her eyes stinging, acutely aware of her own ridiculousness. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Stupid!” she hissed. “Stupid, stupid!” Yet back and forth she went, hemmed in by her desolate longing, blinking and pacing amid the shine and sparkle of mirrors and the reflected abundance of freshly misted vegetables.

II.

It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was sitting on a love seat that had one arm sawed off to accommodate his girth. The rear legs were raised on four-by-sixes, so that he was positioned on a forward incline. A rope was within reach, one end looped loosely around a nearby floor lamp, the other bound to an anchor bolt drilled into a ceiling joist. He used this rope to pull himself out of the seat when he had to go to the bathroom, an operation that could take forty-five minutes—hauling himself up, teetering toward the wall and groping along it for balance, squeezing through the doorframe (the door had been removed long ago), shitting or pissing into the tarp-lined tub, then moving carefully back toward his seat, sliding along the tracks sanded into the wood floor by his thickly callused feet. He did not want to fall. The last time, the fire department had been called to get him back up, and a TV news crew had tagged along to cover the story.

Because he could no longer dress himself, he wore caftans, which were easy to slip on and off. They were immense garments, handmade, beautifully embroidered, donated by a television sitcom star with a weight problem who had heard about him on the news. (I want, the sitcom star had said, to express my solidarity with him—with big people everywhere—by contributing to his comfort in this small way.) In addition, a big-and-tall men’s store had paid several tailors to make him a full suit coat, trousers, vest, a pima cotton button-down shirt, and a red and blue silk tie that was a yard and a half long. (We feel, the big-and-tall people had said, that no one—whatever their circumstances—should be deprived of a fine ensemble of clothing.) He wore this suit only once a year, when the local newspapers and TV news shows sent reporters to do their holiday stories about him, stories in which they would pity his confined existence and marvel at the tenacity of the human spirit. He didn’t like doing these interviews at first. They asked the same questions every year: What is your typical breakfast? What diets have you tried? What do you do for fun? Are you happy? Are you lonely? He learned to give the answers they wanted to hear, and he played along because the publicity was good for freebies. One donor paid for his subscription to the daily paper; another took up a collection at her office to pay his utility bills; a chef at a local bistro brought him fabulous meals every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which prompted a chef at another restaurant to prepare an annual birthday buffet. So the interviews he got used to. But he hated wearing the suit, which the TV people insisted on. It took four volunteers two sweaty hours to get it on him, then another hour afterward to strip it off without damaging it. Mostly he wore his caftans. Once a month, a Filipina on the second floor took them to the laundromat. She and her two daughters would need most of a day to transport and launder these vast garments.

It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was flipping distractedly through the channels with the remote. He got free cable. (We believe, the cable people had said, that no American should be deprived of TV-viewing options.) He lived alone. He was forty-two years old. He had been honorably discharged two decades ago, returning from Southeast Asia with a medal of valor, an addiction to alcohol, and an inability to answer the question:
What now?
When he’d stopped drinking, he could not stop eating. He had found a kind of answer within his insatiable appetite. At the age of twenty-five he weighed 380 pounds, and he reached the 500 mark—joining the quarter-ton club—by his thirtieth birthday. He currently weighed just over 600 pounds. And he was at this moment very, very hungry.

He looked at the clock in the kitchenette. That bastard had left with his money over two hours ago. He had asked a neighbor, a fellow vet who lived two doors down, to go to the market for him, to buy as many packages of hot dogs—cheap, filling, and quick to eat raw—as he could with a ten-dollar bill. He knew he should not have trusted this man, a chronic boozer who’d lost his legs just below the knee and who, several times a year, would lose his prostheses as well, and could on these occasions be heard returning predawn from an all-night bender—filthy and bruised and penniless—scuttling and grunting in the stairwell, violently refusing any assistance as he made his lone and legless way five flights up.

The apartment window was open, and the curtains eddied with the onset of a breeze. He pulled up his caftan to expose himself to it, wadding yards of cloth and gathering the rolled wad onto his forearms to pinion it against his neck and shoulders. This took some work, and he was breathing hard when he was done. It was a hot one today. Days like this made him keenly aware of how badly it smelled in his apartment, much of the stink wafting from the bathroom, which the volunteers cleaned for him three times a week. Years ago, when he had finally gotten too big to leave his apartment, the members of a local church banded together and made him their special project. They deposited his monthly VA checks, shopped for his groceries, cooked him an occasional hot meal. Toward the end of the month, when he frequently ran out of food, they urged him to call. “Just give us a jingle,” they chided, amused at his reluctance to summon them. They were reliable and earnest and devoutly generous, completely committed to their good works, and he could not stand having them around. They said “Howdy!” upon arrival and punctuated everything they said thereafter with either “Okey-dokey!” or “Alrighty!” When they gave him his sponge bath, or when they applied the ointments and powders prescribed for his lesions and fungal infections, they undertook these tasks with the glee of schoolchildren working a charity car wash. And they proselytized incessantly, paraphrasing biblical passages that warned against gluttony and submitting too readily to the appetites; they spoke of hunger and desire as one would speak of disreputable kin. They had given him a Bible, and reading through it—reading the whole damn book—he had found only a handful of references that warned against eating too much, but hundreds that celebrated eating and appetite. God rewarded his children with bountiful harvests, and the tribes of Israel, when not slaughtering each other, were always breaking bread. Jesus was the metaphysical short-order cook, serving up fishes and loaves and wine to multitudes wherever they gathered. And what about the Last Supper? Nobody was counting calories in the Bible. Everybody had their fill. But he did not engage this issue with them. He did not want to antagonize the people he hated needing to cook his meals and wipe his ass and offer the only companionship he had. So when he ran out of food, he did not want to give them a jingle. He tried to manage on his own, asking various transient tenants in the building to buy things for him.