the kitchenette which has always been too small. I suppose I could’ve stayed at the house on Crooked Usage – the kitchen there was fine. But what would I’ve done in it? Cook gigantic meals I was incapable of eating without ballooning still more than I had? The entire fucking house was defaced with the evidence of my bouts with the bulge. On every wall there were pencilled lists of my daily weigh-ins: ‘April 5 th –186 lb. April 6 th –184 lb. April 7 th –183 lb. April 10 th – 189 lb. SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ I must’ve gone away for the weekend – to a fucking bakery.
The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. I liked to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity, as my weight shot up to two hundred pounds and I became a Mrs Pepperpot of a woman. Sheer bravado – I hated it. I hated my fat. I’d sit sobbing on the side of my bed – things never change – and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing – was it safe to approach the obese old dragon? Emphatically not. I loathed and resented the sylphs I shared the house with. I hated their nascent curves and their burgeoning sexuality – and probably showed it too much. Said too much about quite how shitty it can be to lie with a man. Said it to Natty – in baby talk, naturally. Pas devant les enga-fengas.
Up and down went the scales, the dial flickering over weeks and months. I reckon that between ‘73 and ‘79 I must have lost and regained, lost and regained getting on for seven hundred pounds – three whole obese mes Me-me-me. Then I stabilised as a fat old pear-shaped woman. Not obese, simply fat and old. It seemed that I’d acquired the naturally pear-shaped body of the middle-class, late-middle–aged English-woman. My adoptive country’s lard had taken me for its own. How nice. No wonder Hedley didn’t fancy me. Natasha caught me sobbing on a transatlantic call: ‘I was like a seal,’ I moaned, ‘like a seal.’ I was referring to my agility in bed, but he took it to be a reference to my size and replied, ‘It’s not that, Lily – it’s not that you’re fat, believe me – ‘ I hung up and saw black bangs dangling over the banisters. ‘Whyd’jew say that, Mumu? Whyd’jew say you were a seal?’
Here comes Deirdre with the inapposite slimmer’s snack. I don’t need fucking Ryvita – I need food substantial enough to give me back my life, my vigour, my health. I need to eat an entirely new Lily Bloom, so that she can be me. Deirdre’s put it all together quite well, and she’s found the grapes in the front room too, but I should’ve told her where the trays were, tucked beside the cooker, because the crackers are sliding around on that blue plate like pucks on an ice rink. Even when the plate’s propped on my withered boobs I can’t seem to keep the things still enough to grasp them. Deirdre’s set herself down in the blue chair and is ostentatiously pretending to read her notes from the nighttime. Oh Christ! If only now were the bite time, but I know it isn’t, even before the carious corner of one of the crackers stabs into my gum, underneath my bottom plate, and inflicts a wound nasty enough to bleed. Blood on the snacks.
Hedley. He’s still alive somewhere. He sent me a chess set only last year, even though he knows I don’t play. But then he does have a chess shop in the Village – and his house was always cheap. Dead cheap. He doesn’t own a car to this day doesn’t need one. He walks from the brownstone his gonif papa left him in the fifties, trolling down Broadway in a seersucker suit and a straw panama, all the way to the Village – where he sells his chess sets and his checker boards. Not exactly demanding work. It leaves him plenty of time to concentrate on the only problems he’ll
The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. I liked to think I was maintaining an aesthetic unity, as my weight shot up to two hundred pounds and I became a Mrs Pepperpot of a woman. Sheer bravado – I hated it. I hated my fat. I’d sit sobbing on the side of my bed – things never change – and grab folds of myself up in order to present them individually with my derision. The effortlessly skinny girls would gather whispering on the landing – was it safe to approach the obese old dragon? Emphatically not. I loathed and resented the sylphs I shared the house with. I hated their nascent curves and their burgeoning sexuality – and probably showed it too much. Said too much about quite how shitty it can be to lie with a man. Said it to Natty – in baby talk, naturally. Pas devant les enga-fengas.
Up and down went the scales, the dial flickering over weeks and months. I reckon that between ‘73 and ‘79 I must have lost and regained, lost and regained getting on for seven hundred pounds – three whole obese mes Me-me-me. Then I stabilised as a fat old pear-shaped woman. Not obese, simply fat and old. It seemed that I’d acquired the naturally pear-shaped body of the middle-class, late-middle–aged English-woman. My adoptive country’s lard had taken me for its own. How nice. No wonder Hedley didn’t fancy me. Natasha caught me sobbing on a transatlantic call: ‘I was like a seal,’ I moaned, ‘like a seal.’ I was referring to my agility in bed, but he took it to be a reference to my size and replied, ‘It’s not that, Lily – it’s not that you’re fat, believe me – ‘ I hung up and saw black bangs dangling over the banisters. ‘Whyd’jew say that, Mumu? Whyd’jew say you were a seal?’
Here comes Deirdre with the inapposite slimmer’s snack. I don’t need fucking Ryvita – I need food substantial enough to give me back my life, my vigour, my health. I need to eat an entirely new Lily Bloom, so that she can be me. Deirdre’s put it all together quite well, and she’s found the grapes in the front room too, but I should’ve told her where the trays were, tucked beside the cooker, because the crackers are sliding around on that blue plate like pucks on an ice rink. Even when the plate’s propped on my withered boobs I can’t seem to keep the things still enough to grasp them. Deirdre’s set herself down in the blue chair and is ostentatiously pretending to read her notes from the nighttime. Oh Christ! If only now were the bite time, but I know it isn’t, even before the carious corner of one of the crackers stabs into my gum, underneath my bottom plate, and inflicts a wound nasty enough to bleed. Blood on the snacks.
Hedley. He’s still alive somewhere. He sent me a chess set only last year, even though he knows I don’t play. But then he does have a chess shop in the Village – and his house was always cheap. Dead cheap. He doesn’t own a car to this day doesn’t need one. He walks from the brownstone his gonif papa left him in the fifties, trolling down Broadway in a seersucker suit and a straw panama, all the way to the Village – where he sells his chess sets and his checker boards. Not exactly demanding work. It leaves him plenty of time to concentrate on the only problems he’ll
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