The Wife's Tale (5 page)

Rising from the bed, Mary felt the stricture of her heart as she thought of the photographs. She clutched at the wall in the
narrow hallway, femur bones at odds with hinges as she made her way to the thermostat and tried once more, unsuccessfully,
to shut the furnace off. She worked down the buttons of her nightgown, casting it off her shoulders and draping it over a
kitchen chair as she moved toward the breeze from the window.

In searching through her boxes for Wendy, Mary’d found one picture that she’d kept out and slipped into her bedside drawer—a
snapshot of Mary Brody and her favorite teacher, Ms. Bolt, arm in arm on the steps of Leaford Collegiate. Mary isn’t slender
in the photograph, dressed in sloppy sweatpants and a sweater that showcased her stomach rolls, but seeing the photo again
after so many years, she thought her smile was as lovely as it had ever been.

Ms. Bolt, in addition to teaching social studies and homeroom at Leaford Collegiate, had offered an elective course she called
Progressive Thought. She was the darkest black woman Mary, with her tender years and limited travel, had ever seen in person.
She appeared to float rather than walk, sweeping the floor with her silky caftans, a dozen gold bangles chiming on each wrist,
her breasts so enormous they preceded her into the room, while her rump so large seemed tardy.

In the older woman’s eyes Mary saw her reflection. Not fat, sulking Mary Brody, but an eager student with a voice of her own
and a very pretty face. She felt
known
by Ms. Bolt, who seemed not imprisoned within her abundance but liberated by it, her every breath a celebration. Ms. Bolt
was not a rebel against beauty but a particular kind of disciple. Her wildness polished. Her casual studied. As Mary beheld
her, the teacher was radiant.

She’d attempted to describe Ms. Bolt to Irma, when prodded at the dinner table about the new teacher. “Her name is
Ms.
Bolt,” she’d said, articulating roundly so there was no misunderstanding her heroine’s politics. “She’s
black
.”

“So I’ve heard,” Irma had said.

“And she’s
beautiful
.” She said it like a challenge. “She’s big. Ms. Bolt is
big
.”

“Like Mrs. Rouseau?”

“Bigger.”

“Bigger than Mrs. Rouseau?”

Mary rolled her eyes—which, apart from overeating, was her single defiant gesture. “She accepts herself. It’s part of what
she’s teaching us. Self-acceptance.”

“If Miss Bolt is bigger than Mrs. Rouseau, she’s morbidly obese, dear.”

“So?” Mary rolled her eyes once more. “Self-acceptance is a good thing, Mum.”

“If doctors all over the world call a condition
morbid
, could that be a good thing to accept? Honestly.”

Only five students had signed up for the elective class. No girls from the cheerleading squad, but one boy from the basketball
team—Jimmy Gooch, having registered for the class on a dare from his teammates. Mary felt the rush of air as Gooch breezed
past her toward the back of the room, but she didn’t turn to look. She’d learned to avoid people’s eyes, convinced that her
gaze held some unintended menace.

Ms. Bolt joined her hands together, eyes twinkling, bracelets tinkling, floating down the rows as if the class held fifty,
not five. “On your desk you will find a piece of paper and a pair of scissors. Please cut out the shape of a circle.” The
group did so, Gooch signaling his boredom by sighing loudly from the back corner. “Now,” Ms. Bolt continued. “In black ink,
on the circle you have cut, write the letters T-O-I-T.” She waited. “T-O-I-T.” The students finished.

Ms. Bolt’s passion was infectious. She was like the preacher who could make you believe. “In your life, my beautiful young
friends, you will have limitless choices. You come from a world of privilege and opportunity. You can do
anything
. And it is your duty to take advantage. It is your
raison d’être
. Don’t find yourself old and regretful, saying, I wanted to go to college but I never got around to it. I wanted to vote
for my leaders but I never got around to it. I wanted to learn Spanish but I never got around to it. I wanted to travel—read
the classics—scuba dive—climb Everest—join Greenpeace—but I never got
around to it
. Look at the circles you’ve just cut. Now you have no excuse.”

The students looked at the circles for a long, quiet moment. Finally, it was Mary Brody, speaking in class for the first time,
who held up her paper and said, “A
round
TO IT.”

Ms. Bolt clapped her hands. “Thank you, Ms. Brody!”

Ms. Bolt was, as everyone at Leaford Collegiate knew, a big
lesbo
, and whether it was her sexual preference or her
too
progressive thinking, or maybe one of her own limitless choices—whatever the cause—she did not return after that single glorious
semester. And although Mary had wanted to uncover the roots of feminism and honor her sisters in suffrage, her passion vanished
along with Ms. Bolt, the round TO IT crumpled and tossed in the trash. Mary was deeply wounded by the teacher’s departure,
particularly as Ms. Bolt had told her once that she had a very old soul.

Goodbye, goodbye. A final goodbye. For a short time, a long time, forever. Songs and plays and novels and films written about
goodbye. Mary felt it as a theme. Closure—she disliked the modernity of the term describing so ancient a ritual. The acknowledgment
of those who had left, those who remained. Gone. A final parting moment. And for Mary, so many farewells left unsung. She
wondered if the accumulation of such abandonments should be held accountable for her hunger. The heavy finger of blame.

There was movement in her periphery, and Mary spun around thinking,
Gooch
. It was a form, beautifully rendered, momentarily unrecognizable in the glass of the window at the door. Mary stood still
as the form took shape and saw that it was a woman—a fat, naked woman.
So that is me,
she thought. She clocked the nightgown on the kitchen chair behind her. It had been years since Gooch had seen her naked.
She shuddered to think of the last time. Though she loved to remember the first.

N
ot a soul in Leaford, particularly Mary Brody herself, could have predicted her weight loss that summer before she entered
her senior high school year. Irma guessed she’d become interested in boys. Kim and Wendy from the cheerleading squad, who’d
regarded her with alternating doses of pity or contempt since kindergarten, decided that she’d done the grapefruit diet from
a magazine. Orin reckoned that his daughter had simply been late in losing her baby cheeks, considering that no one on either
side of the family was big. The boys at Leaford Collegiate didn’t wonder about her secret, but shared their rock-hard relief
that suddenly gorgeous Mary Brody hadn’t lost her B-3s, code for
big bouncy breasts
.

The strawberries came early and, as was a Brody family tradition, the three, Orin, Irma and Mary, drove out to Kenny’s big
“pick your own” farm near the lake beyond Rusholme to fill flats with juicy berries that they’d bake into mouth-watering tarts
and pies, or boil with dangerous amounts of sugar to make jam for the winter. Stepping out of the car in the muddy parking
lot, Irma took Mary’s face in her slender hands and instructed harshly, “Pick. Don’t eat.”

Orin and Irma were skilled pickers, and set to work—bent at the waist, hands moving furiously, eyes scouring low leaves for
ruby treasures. But as Mary could not bend over easily at the waist, she sat on her rear, inching forward like a crab to comb
each bountiful plant. She was not expected to keep pace with her parents. And neither would glance back, not even once, to
see if she was picking more than eating. Each fragrant berry was a world of senses. Sweet. Sour. Grainy. Musky. Juicy. Gritty.
Silky. Silty. Smooth.
That’s enough,
she would tell herself—then,
Just one more
.

Some days following, while stirring a pot of volcanic red sluice at the stove (remembering last year, when she’d tested the
boiling jam and burnt her lips so badly that she’d had to get a prescription from Dr. Ruttle), Mary’d felt the sudden roiling
of her stomach. Perspiring heavily, she’d dropped the ladle and rushed to the toilet, where she liberated an effluence so
redolent of strawberries that she would be unable to eat a spoonful of jam that entire year. She had always been fascinated,
as she thought all humans must be or should be, with her by-products, and routinely studied her release.

She wondered why it floated, or why it sank like anchors. She marveled at its tenacity. Admired its cohesion. Felt gratified
when it did not fracture upon entry, and cheated when expulsive forces shot it beyond her field of vision. While ashamed of
her revolting curiosity, she nonetheless appreciated its earthy autumn shades, and found great satisfaction in its variant
aromas.

On that day she glimpsed, when she rose to inspect, a thing she’d never seen before—a thing that did not cause her to turn
away or scream for Irma, but beckoned her to lean forward, come closer, examine. Wriggling. Waving. Dancing. Greeting. Jubilant.
Life. And as Mary Brody discovered the limbless invaders, she realized that, for the first time in memory, she couldn’t hear
the obeast. In the field of her flora and fauna, a silent battle had been waged and won. Mary Brody was free.

A trip to the Leaford Library confirmed it. Parasites.
Worms.
Not pinworms, though. And not roundworms. Something else. Thicker than thread, the color of fat under chicken skin. She couldn’t
find a picture of them. Parasites found in animal excrement, viable in dirt, likely contracted by eating unwashed fruits or
vegetables—gardening without gloves.

Home from the Leaford Library, after Irma’d announced it was time to get dinner over with, Orin noticed that she only picked
at her roast, and slathered butter over her baked potato but didn’t eat it. Her mother put a hand to her daughter’s forehead,
but Mary assured Irma that she felt fine. And she seemed fine. Better than fine. Her secret was a symbiotic, not parasitic,
affair.

Having lost her appetite completely, feeling no ill effects save the constant but, Mary would conclude, bearable itching of
her anus, Mary only nibbled bits of each meal those first weeks of summer—enough, she hoped, to sustain her occupants. Each
trip to the bathroom was agony, as she feared the disappearance of her saviors. She tallied their numbers, keeping mental
charts, and by the time sweet corn was ready—noting a marked decrease in population, had panicked that her army might be deploying
altogether. Mary surprised her mother by offering to help in the garden. She stopped washing her hands. She began making long,
twice-daily treks to the park near the river, where, with a spoon from the cutlery drawer, she shoveled dirt and ate it, hopeful
that in one mound hid a nugget that might colonize her anew.

At first Mary didn’t notice her melting flesh, and didn’t celebrate her reduction the way Irma and Orin did. She accepted
their pride in her achievement, though it was not strictly hers, with grunts and tight smiles. “Keep it up, Murray,” Orin
remarked, watching her decline a coconut cupcake, “and none of the cousins’ll recognize you at the reunion this fall.” Mary
thought that a funny thing to say, for she was certain the Brody cousins had never really looked at her before, and would
have no context for comparison.

On that day of the Brody family reunion, wearing her new Jordache jeans, Mary was several times mistaken for her cousin Quinn’s
new girlfriend, who they’d all been told in strictest confidence was a stripper from Detroit! They laughed about it, Irma
and Orin and Mary, each for personal reasons, but their shared amusement was a major source of the day’s remembered pleasures.

Finding her greatest satisfaction in freedom—no longer enslaved, her mind not occupied with the details of food—Mary felt
expanded and dared to imagine her future. She pored over magazines that offered courses in fashion and design. She looked
in the mirror frequently, obsessively, not admiring herself but struck by the simple truth in her eyes. She was not hungry.
Still. Not. Hungry. She took her gift money and walked all the way to the Kmart to buy several coordinating outfits in her
new size. She felt the muscles in her stride. The lengthening of her torso. The swing of her shiny dark hair. She continued
to eat dirt. She decided to get a part-time job.

Mary’s Aunt Peg, recently retired from the pharmacy department at Raymond Russell Drugstore, had heard that Ray Russell Sr.
was looking for a girl to work front cash. The staff already knew Mary. In a town so small, with only one pharmacy, the staff
knew the whole of Leaford with embarrassing intimacy. Mary had spent more than the average amount of time at the back desk,
waiting for her parents’ prescriptions, and felt at home amidst the clove oil and Metamucil.

It would have been impossible to consider such a position just months before, since Raymond Russell had the largest assortment
of Laura Secord chocolate in Baldoon County; the proverbial kid in a candy store, Mary could not have trusted herself in the
presence of such bonbons. But with no yearning for the almond bark and no desire for buttered toffee, she pulled on a sundress,
borrowed Irma’s mules and arrived ten minutes early for her interview. She would work mornings, the shift no one else wanted,
and Saturdays for the rest of the summer, and cut back to just Saturday when school began. Past Mary, present Mary, in-between
Mary—like Gooch, the walls of Raymond Russell’s had borne witness to most of her life.

Jimmy Gooch hobbled into the drugstore on tall, squeaky crutches one Saturday morning in November of their senior year, having
been absent from school for two weeks, during which the Leaford Senior Cougars had lost four straight games. He’d been in
a terrible car crash for which his father had been hospitalized, and no one had seen him since the accident. There were rumors
at school that his leg was broken in four places. A stitched cut was healing on his forehead, and there was a faint yellow
cast to his left cheek, where the worst of the bruising had been. He was wearing a stained sweatshirt and basketball shorts
to accommodate the huge plaster cast on his left leg. Seventeen-year-old Gooch searched the store, pinching a square of white
paper in his big, trembling fingers, a drowning man, until he spotted Mary Brody sailing toward him.