Melanie Thon: First, Body: Stories

She’s valuable now, at last: she’s given herself up, her body in exchange for care. In an hour, Dr. Juste will begin his demonstration and Gloria Luby will be exposed, her massive mistakes revealed.

Sid thinks they owe her something, a lift instead of a shove, some trace of respect. He won’t prod. He isn’t going to call another orderly for help, isn’t going to subject Gloria Luby to one more joke. How many men does it take to change a light bulb for a fat lady ?

Later, he may think it isn’t so important. Later, he may realize no one was watching, not even Gloria Luby. But just now this is his only duty: clear, specific. It presented itself.

None, she has to turn herself on . He knew what Juste would say when the interns gathered: Shall we cut or blast ?

A first-timer might be sick behind his mask when they opened her abdomen and the pools of toxins began to drain into the grooves of the metal table, when the whole room filled with the smell of Gloria Luby’s failures. But everyone would keep laughing, making cracks about women big enough for a man to live inside. He knew how scared they’d be, really, looking at her, the vastness of her opened body, because she was big enough for a man to crawl inside, like a cow, like a cave. Hollowed out, she could hide him forever. Some of them might think of this later, might dream themselves into the soft swamp of her body, might feel themselves waking in the warm, sweet, rotten smell of it, in the dark, in the slick, glistening fat with the loose bowels tangled around them. They might hear the jokes and wish to speak. Why didn’t anyone notice? There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak — she can’t speak — the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over — she’s closed, she’s done — and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby — bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.

It could happen to anyone. Anytime. Sid thinks, The body you hate might be your own; your worst fear might close around you, might be stitched tight by quick, clever hands. You might find yourself on this table. You might find yourself sprawled on a road or submerged in a swamp; you might find yourself in a bed upstairs, your red hair blazing, your useless legs swelling. Shadows come and go and speak, describing the deterioration of your retinas, the inefficiency of your kidneys, the necessity of amputation due to decreasing circulation in the lower extremities. Extremities . Your legs. They mean your legs. You might find yourself face down in your own sweet back yard, the hose still in your hand.

He doesn’t think about God or ask himself what he believes — he knows: he believes in her, in Gloria Luby, in the three-hundred-and-twenty-six-pound fact of her body. He is the last person alive who will touch her with tenderness.

The others will have rubber gloves, and masks, and knives.

So he is going to lift her, gently, her whole body, not her shoulders, then her torso, then her terrible bruised thighs. She’s not in pieces, not yet — she’s a woman, and he is going to lift her as a woman. He is going to move her from the gurney to the table with the strength of his love.

He knows how to use his whole body, to lift from the thighs, to use the power of the back without depending on it. He crouches. It’s a short lift, but he’s made it harder for himself, standing between the gurney and the table. If he pressed them together, they’d almost touch — a man alone could roll her.

He squats. He works his arms under her, surprised by the coolness of her flesh, surprised, already, by her unbelievable weight.

For half a second, his faith is unwavering, and he is turning with her in his arms; they’re almost there, and then something shifts — her immense left breast slaps against his chest, and something else follows; her right arm slips from his grasp — and he knows, close as they are, they’ll never make it: an inch, a centimeter, a whole lifetime, lost. He feels the right knee give and twist, his own knee; he feels something deep inside tear, muscle wrenching, his knee springing out from under him, from under them. And still he holds her, trying to take the weight on the left leg, but there’s no way. They hit the gurney going down, send it spinning across the room. The pain in his knee is an explosion, a booby trap, a wire across a path and hot metal ripping cartilage from bone, blasting his kneecap out his pants leg.

When they hit the floor, his leg twists behind him, and he’s howling. All three hundred and twenty-six pounds of Gloria Luby pin him to the cold concrete.

She amazes him. She’s rolled in his arms so his face is pressed into her soft belly. The knee is wrecked. He knows that already, doesn’t need to wait for a doctor to tell him. Destroyed . He keeps wailing, though there’s no point, no one in that room but the woman on top of him, insisting she will not hear, not ever. There’s no one in the hallway, no one in the basement. There are three closed doors between Sidney Elliott and all the living.

He has to crawl out from under her, has to prod and shove at her thick flesh, has to claw at her belly to get a breath. Inch by inch he moves, dragging himself, his shattered leg, across the smooth floor. He leaves her there, just as she is, face down, the lumpy mound of her rump rising in the air.

Dr. Enos is trying not to smile while Sid explains, again, how it happened. Everyone smiles, thinking of it, Sid Elliott on the floor underneath Gloria Luby. They’re sorry about his leg, truly. It’s not going to be okay. There’ll be a wheelchair, and then a walker. In the end, he’ll get by with a cane. If he’s lucky. It’s a shame, Dr. Roseland tells him, to lose a leg that way, and Sid wonders if she thinks there are good ways to lose a leg. He remembers the boy on the table. He remembers all the boys. Are those my legs ?

He’s drifting in and out. He hears Roxanne laughing in the hallway. Then he sees her at the window, her mouth tight and grim as she sucks smoke.

She wants to know if it’s worth it, the risk, the exchange: Gloria Luby’s dignity for his leg. The idea of her dignity. She laughs, but it’s bitter. She tells him he’s a failure; she tells him how they found Gloria Luby. It took six orderlies to get her on the slab. They grunted, mocking her, cursing him.

He sleeps and wakes. Roxanne’s gone. Even her smoke is gone. He asks the nurse, a thin, dark-skinned man, Where is she ? And the nurse says, Where’s who, baby? Nobody been here but you and me .

His father stands in the corner, shaking his head. He can’t believe Sid’s come back from the jungle, nothing worse than shrapnel in his ass, only to get it from a three-hundred-pound dead woman in a hospital in Seattle. Three hundred and twenty-six , Sid says. What? Three hundred and twenty-six pounds . His father looks as if he wants to weep, and Sid’s sorry — not for himself, he’d do it again. He’s sorry for his father, who’s disappointed, and not just in him. He’s been standing in the closet in Sid’s old room all these years, sobbing in the musty dark, pressing his face into the soft rabbit fur. He’s been in the other room, in the summer heat, listening to Sid plead with Roxanne, Just let me lick you . He’s been in the kitchen, watching Sid’s mother fry pork chops, chop onions, mash potatoes. He’s tried to tell her something and failed. He’s stood there, silent in the doorway, while she and Sid sat at the table chewing and chewing. Now, at last, when he speaks to his son, he has nothing to tell him, no wisdom to impart, only a phrase to mutter to himself, What a waste, what a waste , and Sid knows that when he says it he’s not thinking of the leg. He wants to forgive his father for something, but the old man’s turned down his hearing aid. He looks befuddled. He says, What is it, Sid ?