It was now five minutes to eight. Evelyn had stopped eating ten minutes earlier, when she had heard Henry get out of bed and go to the shower. She had put away all the packages and dusted crumbs off the polished oak of the window seat. Now she heard Henry get out of the shower and pad across the wall-to-wall carpeting to the dressing room. She got up and started to make her way downstairs, slowly and painfully. All movement was painful for her these days. Her feet hurt so much when she stood up on them, she wanted to cry. They had become big too, so large and wide she had trouble finding shoes to fit them. She had started buying expensive men’s athletic shoes made of black leather and decorated with brightly dyed stripes meant to look like lightning.
“Your feet will get smaller when you lose the weight,” Henry would tell her. “They won’t hurt so much either. Believe me. I know.”
When Evelyn had first met Henry, he had been massive, impressive, beautiful. Now, thinner, he seemed diminished to her. His mouth was always pinched tight. His flesh hung slackly against his bones no matter how much he exercised. When she saw him with the other men on the stone terrace of the country club, drinking gin and tonic, hefting tennis rackets, Henry was always the one who looked fake, phony, totally out of place.
“Marriage is a crapshoot,” Evelyn’s mother always said, and: “You have to take men the way you find them.”
I would be happy to take Henry the way I found him, Evelyn told herself. I just don’t want him the way he is now.
There was a professional doctor’s scale in one corner of the breakfast nook. Henry had put it there to check Evelyn’s progress every morning. He had also locked up the coffee and the tea and the Perrier water, so that she couldn’t drink them before he got up and blame any weight gain on fluid in her system. He made her take off her shoes and stockings and dress and stand in the nook in her underwear, her big breasts spilling down over the rounded swell of her belly, her thighs lumpy and veined and mottled blue and red with fat and age.
“Look at you,” he would say as she stood there, a breeze coming through one of the open skylights, feeling cold, feeling stupid, feeling as ugly as she had always known she was inside. “Look at you.”
Upstairs in the bedroom there were mirrors now, all along one wall, so that she couldn’t escape looking at herself. If she tried to close her eyes, she fell. If she fell, she had a hard time getting up. Henry would have to get up himself and help her. Then the questions would start. What are you doing up and dressed this early in the morning? Where are you going? Where are you hiding the food?
“Look at you,” he would say, spinning her around so that she was forced to face the mirrors. He would grab at the front of her dress and tear. The dress would pull away from her body and hang off her shoulders in tatters. In the mirror a grotesque fat woman with bulging eyes and pussy red pimples along the line of her jaw would stare back at her, hateful and angry, as hateful and angry as Henry had gotten to be.
“Look at you,” he would say, and one day, provoked beyond endurance, finding a trail of crumbs wound along one of her massive breasts, he had torn at her bra too. He had torn it right off, snapping the elastic painfully on her back, dragging the spike of one bra hook into her flesh until she bled. Her breasts bounced up and down and side to side, and that hurt too. Her nipples and the area around them were as thick and dark and dry as leather. There was a mountain of crumbs in her bra, between her breasts. It popped into fragments as soon as her breasts came free and scattered over the white wall-to-wall carpeting like ashes blown into town from a distant forest fire.
“Look at you,” Henry had screamed loud enough so that Evelyn was suddenly glad of all that central air-conditioning, all those sound buffers placed on all the properties, all those illusions of space and grace. Her breasts were shaking, hurting, bouncing. They were so big now that she even wore a bra to bed. Henry’s face was so red, she thought he was having a heart attack. His eyes seemed to be coming out of his head. The knuckles on both of his hands were white. Suddenly he reached out and snatched at her underwear. He grabbed the elastic waistband in his fists and pulled with all his might. The elastic tore and the nylon tore after it. A second later Henry had shreds of underwear in his hands and Evelyn was standing naked. The only thing Evelyn remembered after that was that her pubic hair seemed to have disappeared. It was hidden by the curtains of flesh that had draped themselves around her, hanging like an apron from her waist.
Look at you, Evelyn thought now, listening to the sound of Henry’s footsteps on the staircase. A second later he was in the kitchen, dressed in white chinos and a bright red polo shirt and deck shoes, his hands in his pockets, his hair combed to make maximum use of the fact that it was every bit as thick now as it had been when he was twenty. I really hate this man’s face, Evelyn thought as she waited for him. I hate it so much, I would like to boil it off with acid. Then she was just glad that she hadn’t been sitting down when he came into the room. More and more lately, she didn’t quite fit on a single chair. More and more, Henry tended to notice it.