Paula Bomer - Inside Madeleine

At lunchtime she came home to eat. Most kids ate cafeteria meals of microwaved meat and vegetables, a small carton of milk, and a piece of cake in the perfect-sized squares of the styrofoam trays. Other children ate sandwiches packed in brown bags with a chips and a Twinkie. But Maddy raced the two blocks home, and her mother’s back would face her again, as she stirred pots of chicken soup with dumplings and fried potato pancakes with sour cream and applesauce. Maddy ate sausages cooked in the pan and split down the middle slathered with a mustard that brought tears to her eyes. She ate stews with meat and potatoes and carrots. Everything she ate she washed down with large glasses of milk, pushing down chunks of barely chewed food, food she swallowed so quickly her throat was often scratched. Then she ran back to school, her stomach as tight as a basketball, her belly pushing against the snap of her jeans. She ran the two blocks back so as not to miss the next class, the food hard and painful in her stomach.

After school she had a snack. Her mother’s face would be in the paper, her feet up on a chair as she sat in the living room. Maddy would throw her books on the kitchen table and open the refrigerator and then open the cupboards. There was peanut butter on crackers and boxes of moist raisins. There were bags of pretzels and cheese wrapped in individual plastic slices. She ate fruit-flavored yogurts and candy bars and homemade cookies left in a tin. She ate slices of luncheon meats rolled up in a tube shape, her fingers holding on to the greasy meat, sliding it down the root of her tongue, swallowing it whole. She ate until she couldn’t eat anymore and her stomach felt as tight as it did after lunch, stretched and hurting, and she’d lie down in the living room or on her bed, the blood flowing away from her mind, flowing straight to her stomach, leaving her sleepy and digesting.

She grew. She grew three and a half inches between the age of ten and eleven. Her shoe size went up two sizes. Her clothes bound her body uncomfortably. Her mother began standing behind her on the scale, watching the needle shake up and up as she continued to gain weight. Her mother took her shopping and bought her loose sweaters and shirts with matching elastic waist pants and new white underwear from the women’s section of Goldblatt’s department store. She wasn’t allowed to wear prints, because they would draw attention to her girth. The matching outfits were in solid colors only, no whites or bright yellows, rather colors her mother thought were slimming, such as dark purple and dark blue. She bought a new winter coat and new fluffy, red mittens. She weighed well over two hundred pounds by the end of the sixth grade.

Her schoolmates called her Fatty, Fat Girl, Fatso, Jiggle Butt, Jelly Butt, Big Ass, Big Titties, Piggy, Cow, Lard Ass. They called her Maddy the Fatty, Moo Moo Maddy.

For dinner her mother cooked whole stuffed chickens and baked potatoes and steamed broccoli with hollandaise sauce. Maddy ate beef Wellington and pork chops and baked fruit pies for dessert. There was cheese fondue and meatloaf and homemade pizzas with onions and sausage. They rarely went out to eat. Her mother’s back, sturdy and industrious, preferred to stand guard at the counter in the kitchen. After dinner Maddy snacked while she watched TV. She ate donuts and bags of red licorice. She ate oatmeal cookie sandwiches that were filled with icing. Her stomach ached, stuffed hard, packed down with a shovel.

Her father stopped looking at her. He looked at the air next to her instead when he addressed her. Her mother cooked. Her sister Amanda was a teenager and didn’t notice anything. Maddy ate and ate and ate. Her breasts grew but so did the rest of her body so they almost didn’t seem like breasts, just an extension of the layers of fat and flesh that surrounded her. She grew hips that hid in the lumps of fat that accumulated above and below them. She grew pubic hair, strangely dark and prickly, under her arms and between her legs. Folds of peach-colored flesh hid the brown patches of fur. But they were there, dark and alarming, underneath all the layers.

Her hands grew big and round, dimpling in the palms. They perspired a thin wetness while pulling meat off of a chicken leg and grabbing handfuls of peanuts. Sweat came out of the pores in her chin and the many hidden folds of her flesh. Her armpits and inner thighs began smelling musty like a dirty drain in a bathtub. They stunk like brown hay, like a sink full of dirty pots. Her crotch smelled of lukewarm shrimp, salty and damp. The skin where her breasts met was covered with a film of mildewy sweat; her cleavage grew red and splotchy from the heat and damp and the rubbing against itself.

She bathed at night, filling the tub only halfway, sinking her huge body down and watching the water rise to the edges of the bath. She scrubbed herself with a washcloth, a bar of Ivory soap, rubbing herself until she turned pink and raw. She scrubbed her armpits and her breasts and feet and neck. She washed behind her ears and behind her knees. She rubbed the bar of soap between the lips of her crotch, sliding it down to the groove of her asshole. She rubbed it back and forth until her arms ached from reaching around her body and her crotch burned. And as soon as she stood up, the milky water now cool, dripping off her, she began to sweat again. As she vigorously rubbed a bath towel against her back and around her neck, her skin became damp again, her own fluids free to cover her body once more. By the time she lay down to sleep, she could smell herself strongly, smell a musty animal smell emanating from the secret parts of her ever expanding body.

Her schoolmates called her Stinky and Funky and Sweaty and PU and You Smell Like Shit. They plugged their noses with their hands when she maneuvered herself into her school desk. They called her Maddy the Fatty you smell like hell. They called her FatShitStink. She used prescription creme deodorant that came in a jar and a medicated body powder. Her mother washed her clothes separately from the rest of the family’s with a scented detergent made for tough grease stains.

Her mother took her to a doctor. A specialist. A tall gray-haired man with a red, veiny face and bad breath. They drove two hours south of South Bend to see him. She undressed and put on a pale, flowered robe. He weighed her. He made her raise her arms. He made her try and touch her toes. He looked inside her mouth with a tongue depressor. He asked her why she ate so much. He felt her breasts and underneath her arms and asked her to breathe while he listened to her heart. She lay back on an examining table, and he prodded and asked and prodded some more. He gave her mother a strict diet for Maddy to follow and a prescription medicine to reduce appetite. He asked her if she would like them to put a ball in her stomach. He said this sternly, his eyes hooded by dark drooping lids. He said, with a clammy hand on her bare shoulder, that it would be a serious operation. For six months the ball would remain inside of her, he said, sewn up into her gut so that she would fill up easily and not eat much at all. They drove home and looking at the road ahead, her mother cried. The operation would be expensive.

Every morning and every night she stepped on the scale and her mother stood behind her and watched the needle dance. Every morning and every night she took two red prescription capsules that left her head jittery and hollow. She ate dry toast for breakfast and drank a diet chocolate shake that came in a can. She came home for lunch and was given a bowl of fruit. She drank glasses and glasses of water with squeezed lemon. Endless ice cubes rattled against her teeth. She ate specially prepared chicken for dinner, grilled with herbs and served with white rice. She had a pink book with the words My Little Food Book on it where her mother wrote down everything she ate and how many calories it contained. Her mother bought her exercise clothes and new sneakers. Sweat suits and rubber sweat clothes. Maddy jumped rope in the kitchen while her mother cooked, counting the turns of the rope out loud, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. She ran around their neighborhood block five times with her mother every night. The neighbors looked out of their windows at first. Small, featureless faces peering sideways out windows. Parents and children walking from their cars to their front doors, stopping momentarily, necks turning to watch the woman pull her daughter down the block. Sweat poured out of Maddy faster than before, more watery than ever, staining her bright athletic clothes with dark, damp patches.