Marjorie gritted her teeth and yanked again at her pantyhose. It usually took her twenty minutes and several dousings of baby powder to get them on. But without them her clothing looked even worse. These days she even wore them under her slacks. She yanked again and then froze as she felt the familiar loosening that meant she’d put a run in them. She craned around to look at the back of her thigh and saw a large hole had formed with a run, slowly inching towards her knee with every move she made.
Defeated, she collapsed onto the end of the bed and yanked them back down over her knees. Her daughter’s words from yesterday at the spa echoed in her head,
“You could at least wear a bathing suit. You look disgusting.”
She rubbed at her eyes. She knew what she looked like. She knew that even after she put on hose and her nicest clothes and makeup that most people still only saw a fat cow. She saw the looks that skewered away from her just moments after she caught them. Pitying glances. Disgusted glances. Fearful glances. What was it Marie had said to her a few weeks ago?
“God Mom, you should get the gym to pay you to walk up and down in front of that big window that all the Stairmaster machines look out on! Their business would increase tenfold! People would be knocking each other out of the way to sign up with a personal trainer.”
Marjorie pulled the ruined nylons off, dropped them onto the floor and then let herself fall sideways onto the bed.
Marie was right.
She was disgusting.
But she hadn’t always been. When she’d married Marie’s father she’d been pretty and thin. But she’d never been able to get the baby weight off after Marie was born. Oscar, as repulsed by the weight gain then as Marie was now, had stopped having any sexual contact with her.
One night he just moved out of their master suite down the hall to one of the guest bedrooms. He had never said why. He never said anything. He just made up the guest bed one night and gone to sleep in it, but she knew.
She knew that he didn’t want to be seen in public with her.
She knew why when Marie was growing up she never wanted Marjorie to come to her school.
She knew her daughter’s worst fear was to end up looking just like her mother.
She knew that her husband had been sleeping with his thin blond assistant Kimberly for the last two years.
She Knew.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t tried to lose weight. In the last 15 years she’d been on every diet imaginable.
Atkins, Jenny Craig, Nutra System, Weight Watchers, Ultra Slim Fast, Sugar Busters. Sometimes she’d managed to lose as much as 20 or 30 pounds but the moment she cheated in the slightest or started eating like a normal human being again the weight always came back. And then some. But how could anyone have a shake for breakfast and another one for lunch every day? Only eat disgusting frozen food at every meal? Never eat bread again? Be hungry all the time? Oscar, of course, had still expected her to cook him dinner every night no matter what. Who in the world could bake lasagna from scratch and then eat a boiled chicken breast?
Marjorie sat up and wiped her eyes. She usually tried to not let herself wallow like this but some days were so much harder than others. She abandoned her plans to go to the grocery store. Oscar probably wouldn’t be home until late anyway. Naked, she walked to the closet and grabbed one of the many expensive silk caftans she owned. She pulled it over her head and reveled for a moment in the feeling of the loose fabric swirling around her, the silk gliding smoothly over her skin.
She purposefully bypassed the kitchen and headed directly into the living room. She’d tivo’d an A&E Biography on Barbara Steisand and a rerun of Law and Order but she wasn’t in the mood for either of them now. Settling herself comfortably into the overstuffed sofa she reached for the remote and started idly flipping channels. Not that there was ever anything good on at two in the afternoon. “Housewife TV” Oscar called it.
Whoops and screams caught her attention and she looked up at the television. A good-looking young man was sitting next to a young blond woman who was much heavier than Marjorie was. Wearing a pink satin shirt and beige leggings, her huge thighs tapering down to disproportionally tiny feet, the woman looked like a giant melting ice cream cone. My god, Marjorie thought, hasn’t anyone ever told her that fat women should never wear bright colors or shiny fabrics? The topic flashed across the bottom of the screen, Men Who Like Big Beautiful Women.
That woman with the big red glasses was motioning for the crowd to quiet down.
She leaned towards the man, “So Curt, have you always been attracted to large women?”
The man nodded, “For as long as I can remember. My mother was heavy but I always thought she was beautiful. I never really talked about it to anyone though. The few times I tried to talk to my friends about it they acted like I was a complete freak.”
“So what made you decide to come out of the closet, so to speak?”
“I came across the Fat Admirers website on the Internet.”
“Fat Admirers?” the host just let it hang there.
“It’s an organization of men that love big women and are proud of it…and they sponsor dances and events.”
“And that’s how you two met?”
“Yes. The first time I went to a dance I was too nervous to even talk to anyone… But when I went to the second one I saw Betsy and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. So I screwed up my nerve and asked her to dance and she said yes.” Curt smiled at the audience as if he was still amazed such a wonderful thing had happened to him.
The camera and the host both zoomed in on Betsy, “So you went to this dance to meet men who are turned on by fat women?”
Betsy smiled comfortably, her blue eyes twinkling, “I went to find a man who would be turned on by me. I spent most of my life trying to be skinny, trying to diet. My mom put me on my first diet when I was eleven. Three years ago, when I was 24, I almost had a heart attack because my blood pressure was so high from taking diet pills. After that I decided to quit fighting who I was and just accept it. Some people are skinny. Some people are fat. I’m fat. But that doesn’t make me ugly or unworthy. Fat people deserve to be happy and loved too.”
“Amen Sister,” Marjorie said to the television.
“But what made you decide to go to a dance sponsored by Fat Admirers?”
Betsy looked at her quizzically, “Because I wanted to meet a man who would think I was beautiful. And that is a really hard thing do to in this society. Most men would rather be single and alone than be with a fat girl. And even the ones who are attracted to fat women are ashamed to admit it to anyone else. In our society it is considered deviant behavior to find fat attractive I admit that in a perfect world I wouldn’t have to go to a dance especially for fat women, but this is not a perfect world.”
Marjorie could feel herself nodding.
“I couldn’t bring myself to start running a, ‘Fat woman seeks…’ personal ad so I contacted the local chapter of NAAFA…”
“NAAFA?”
“The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, and I just flat out asked them if there were any programs in place for fat women such as myself to meet men. And they told me about the dances that Fat Admirers sponsor. I went to three or four and really enjoyed them. For the first time in my life I felt like I was sexy and beautiful. And then I met Curt.”
Betsy and Curt’s eyes met and you could just tell how happy and in love they were. Marjorie almost felt like crying. She was so happy for them and she was also so jealous. It had been so long since Oscar had looked at her like that. These days he hardly ever looked at her at all.
“Eight months later we got married.” Betsy held up her pudgy hand, a shiny wedding band glinting under the studio lights.
Wedding pictures of Betsy, huge and glowing in a big white satin gown, and Curt, grinning in a tuxedo, flashed up on the screen. The kiss. The first dance. Feeding each other cake.
The camera panned back to the host. “When we come back we’re going to talk with Gwen Sullivan, the president of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, to talk about discrimination against fat people and SouthWest Airlines’ new policy that people over a certain weight must now purchase two seats.”
Marjorie hurried into the kitchen, grabbed a pen and paper and then rushed back to the television. Across the top of the page she wrote “Fat Admirers”, and under that “National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance”.
…
Marjorie sat in her car in the parking lot trying to screw up her courage. She’d had her upper lip waxed, had her hair and makeup done. She’d even gotten a pedicure. She’d sworn after the last time she’d never go back to that spa, but she had amended that to never going back when her daughter was there. And the staff had made her look beautiful. She checked her reflection for the tenth time in the mirror under the visor. She’d purchased a new dress and the burgundy silk really did set off her coloring nicely. True, she still looked like the overweight mother of a grown woman but she looked like a darn pretty overweight mother of a grown woman. For once she was glad that she hadn’t been able to get her wedding ring on for years. Having to take it off would have meant admitting more to herself than she was ready to yet. A symbolic act she wasn’t ready to commit.
Yet.
“You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it,” she told herself. “If you’re uncomfortable or you don’t like the atmosphere you can just turn right around and go home and no one ever has to know you were here.”
“And if anyone laughs at me and this is all a cruel joke to make me feel even worse about myself well then I’ll just go home and kill myself and God will just have to give me a free pass.”
She checked her lipstick one last time, took a deep breath and opened the car door. She followed the sounds of laughter and conversation to the entrance of the Veterans Hall where the Fat Admirers dance was being held. She paid a handsome young man in his 30’s $25 for her ticket and then walked into the hall. And stared. There had to be at least 200 people there. Fat women laughing and dancing and talking with men. Some of the men were overweight too, but most of them just looked like, well, men. A few of them were even exceedingly good looking. And the women. At least half of them were as heavy as Marjorie, and some of them were a LOT heavier. My God she felt positively svelte in comparison.
Marjorie looked around, impressed. Instead of the folding chairs and lunchroom tables she’d expected, the all four walls of the room were lined with large comfortable chairs and ottomans with little cocktail tables scattered around them. In one corner several women who were obviously too heavy to dance sat laughing together, surrounded by a bevy of male admirers. As she stood there a woman rolled by in some kind of modified electric wheelchair, her enormous stomach resting on her legs. She smiled at Marjorie as she motored slowly past. For one fleeting moment Marjorie worried that maybe she wasn’t fat enough and then the humor of the idea struck her and smiled at her own silliness, relaxing just the tiniest bit.
She made her way over to the refreshment table and helped herself to a glass of punch. Sitting down at an empty table she looked around in amazement. Why had no one told her about this before? Why had she let her husband and daughter convince her that she was too fat to be loved? Why had she let herself believe it? She had been a good wife and a good mother. She deserved to be loved. She deserved to…
“Excuse me, Ma’am?”
Marjorie snapped out of her reverie and looked up. There was a nice looking Italian man about her own age standing next to her table.
“Yes?” she had no idea what to say to him.
“I was wondering if you would like to dance?”
Marjorie looked at him blankly for a second. She realized that until this moment she hadn’t really believed in any of it. That some men found fat women attractive, even preferred them to skinny women. She looked up into his face again and saw the dejection beginning to form there. He thought she didn’t want to dance with him and HE was disappointed. He really wanted to dance with her.
“I’m sorry. This is my first time at one of these events and I’m a little nervous.” A nervous giggle slipped out and she added, “Yes. Yes I would very much like to dance.”
His face brightened and he held his hand out to her, “I thought this might be your first time. You seemed a bit nervous. And I would have noticed you if you’d been here before. My name is Antonio.”
Marjorie felt her pulse quicken as he led her onto the dance floor. She placed her hand on his shoulder and smiled up at him, “I’m Marjorie. Nice to meet you.”
And it was. It was very nice indeed.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Thursday, December 1, 2005
FICTION: The Bionic Ear
Out of the corner of her eye Eunice caught a flurry of movement in the window. Cindy had finally come home from school and was now in the kitchen talking to her mother. Eunice was fascinated by this family, not by what was said but by what was not. The dinner conversations seemed almost like a throwback to a previous time. A long ponderous prayer before meals, always said by the father, please pass the green beans, how was your day dear, did you learn anything interesting in school today honey. It was like nothing had changed since she was young herself. That they were actually named the Rockwells seemed beyond cliché and almost absurd. Her transcripts of their conversations read like scripts for old black-and-white sitcoms that had been discarded because they weren’t very funny. No one ever yelled. No one ever fought. No one ever, ever used a dirty word. It was almost as if instead of looking through binoculars she was looking back through time to another era.
Except for one small detail. Well not so small anymore. The daughter, Cindy, an eighth grader, was obviously at least six months pregnant. Her belly had begun to loom in earnest over her low-rise jeans and her little cropped T-shirts now covered less than half of her rounded stomach. She had been watching this family for years and had only missed a handful of family dinners, and she hadn’t missed any in the last several months. In all that time nothing had been said about her rapidly progressing pregnancy. It was like there was a huge elephant in the room and everyone just pretended not to notice. Or stranger yet, actually didn’t notice it at all even though it was dropping peanut shells everywhere and defecating in the corner.
At first Eunice had thought that maybe the girl was just putting on weight as part of puberty. Tiny, she was still under five feet as well as Eunice could estimate from this distance, and she couldn’t have weighed more than 85 pounds. Now with her rounded belly she looked distorted, like she was built on a different scale than the rest of her family, like a normal grown-up pregnant woman who somehow had been resized at 75% of normal while the rest of the scene was still regular-sized.
The murmur of their voices drifted out of the window. Eunice quickly put down the book she had been reading (this had been such a slow day) and placed the padded headphones over her ears. She aimed the bionic ear at the window, adjusted the frequency slightly and caught the tail end of what Cindy was saying to her mother, “… no, but I do have a science test on Friday. Mr. Sloane says it will be multiple choice but his tests are always hard and he always does that all of the above OR none of the above thing so you can never just use the process of elimination to guess if you don’t know the answer.”
“If you study you shouldn’t have to guess, Cindy,” her mother said reprovingly.
“I know mom… don’t worry, I have an A in his class right now.”
“And what about your English class? I thought you had an essay due this week?”
“Not until next Friday… I already finished the book and started my outline.”
“Well, dear, after you set the table why don’t you go study until your father gets home,” her mother suggested, turning back to stir the pan simmering on the stove. She was, of course, wearing an apron.
“Okay, Mom,” Cindy nodded, and she heaved the stack of plates off the counter and began placing them around the table, her belly straining against the edge of the table as she leaned forward. She repeated the process with the silverware and glassware and then, having finished that chore, she hauled her backpack onto her shoulder and headed upstairs.
Eunice hated that the Rockwells’ windows upstairs faced the opposite direction. It was quite possible that some discussion about the pregnancy had gone on, at least between the parents, perhaps in whispered tones late at night in their bedroom, but she had no way of knowing that. No way of knowing if there was some kind of plan in place, adoption maybe, or if it was just total family-wide denial. Or even something worse. She couldn’t even guess who the father was. The girl was a good student, never seemed to cause trouble and had never brought home any boyfriends. With her best equipment Eunice could see the corner where Cindy parted from her friends when they walked home from school together and there had never been any boys with them. Eunice sighed. Eventually someone would have to say something, if only when the girl actually went into labor.
She watched the mother cook for a few more minutes, humming what sounded suspiciously like an off-key rendition of Amazing Grace, and then looked up at the digital clock on the wall. It was workout time. She grabbed her binoculars off the table, walked into the study and nudged the end of them through the blinds. Ah yes, Mr. Universe was right on schedule. She pulled off her headphones, placed the bionic ear back into its box and then reached up onto the next shelf and deftly removed the amplified laser microphone from its box and rested it on her shoulder, fitting it carefully into the shoulder mount leaving her hands free to hold the binoculars. She aimed the beam of light at the window, angling slightly until the beam hit the glass and bounced back to the receiver, and then latched it into place. She’d actually tried head-mounted binoculars but they made her so dizzy she’d fallen over twice before tossing them in the garbage. At her age the last thing she needed was to fall down and break a hip. Luckily it wasn’t dark yet so she didn’t need the night vision binoculars which were much heavier and made her arthritis flare up.
She adjusted a few knobs and the sound of Patrick counting off reps between gasping breaths came through crystal clear from the small box mounted on her desk. She’d paid an extra $200 for the extended recording receptor so that she didn’t have to take notes while she was watching. She could simply transcribe the recording later.
…
Eunice watched him mop at the sweat pouring down his face and back as he wiped distractedly at himself while posing first one way and then another in the mirror.
He loved how he looked immediately after working out. She could tell by the way he admired himself in the mirror, the poses he struck. Flex. Pose. Flex Pose. Flex Pose. He usually spent more time posing than actually lifting weights. He stripped off his gloves and weight belt and then, with a quick glance towards the doorway to confirm that he was still the only one home, walked over to his weight cabinet and spun the combination lock. Eunice watched him reach in and pull out a bottle of tablets which she seriously doubted were just vitamins, considering that he only took them when he was home alone and that he kept them hidden and locked up. Probably steroids. She’d overheard more than one conversation that seemed to indicate that he hadn’t been fulfilling his husbandly duties. It might be because he didn’t want another baby. She couldn’t blame him, but she suspected his lack of performance was a side effect of all those pills he was taking. She’d read on the Internet that they had some highly unpleasant side effects.
She watched him wash down three of the pills with that new carbohydrate-enriched water and then carefully place the pills back behind his cache of Muscle Magazines and then pull out something else. He squeezed a big blob of brown goo into his hand and started rubbing it into his arms. This was new. What the hell was he doing?
“Patrick?” neither Eunice nor Patrick had heard her come into the garage.
Patrick dropped the bottle and whirled around.
“Is that my Clinique self-tanner?”
Self-tanner. So that’s what that stuff was. “Uh, yeah, I thought I’d give it a try….” Patrick trailed off obviously unable to think of one witty or clever way to explain himself. Eunice watched his wife consider pushing the issue, watched her calculate the relative unimportance of her husband using her beauty products, watched her consider how long it would take her to get dinner ready, and then decide she didn’t have time to get into it with him now. She was highly predictable.
She turned to leave, “Well put it back in my cabinet when you’re done, okay?”
Patrick sighed audibly, “Sure, baby. I’ll do that right now. What’s for dinner?”
“I got the most fabulous recipe today from this woman I met at the spa.” Eunice sighed as Ellie began to describe, in detail, her latest recipe discovery. “It’s for this fabulous summer cantaloupe salad. On the way home I stopped at Trader Joe’s and they had these wonderfully fresh cantaloupes so I bought some so I could make it for you tonight. The secret is to mix in just a TAD of limejuice with strawberry yogurt and, here’s the part you would never guess, just a pinch of cilantro. And the best part is that it is low fat AND low carb!” She beamed proudly at him.
Patrick smiled back at her, “That sounds great honey. I’m just going to grab a quick shower okay?”
Ellie nodded, smiled at him again and then walked back into the house. Patrick watched her go, flexed one more time in the mirror and then followed her into the house.
…
Eunice sighed and put the binoculars down. They had to be two of the most BORING and shallow people on the face of the earth. Even more boring than the Rockwells. Low-carb cantaloupe salad. Self-tanning lotion. Mr. Corporate Body Builder and Mrs. Martha Stewart wannabe and of course little baby Huey. She sighed again. Maybe the little dealer next door would be up to something a bit more interesting later. Ellie was right about one thing. It was time for dinner. She rubbed her hands together, flexing her fingers, and then walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer door briefly contemplating the neatly stacked piles of frozen dinners. She picked one at random, closed the freezer and opened the box. Microwave for 5 minutes on high. She slid the tray into the microwave and set it for five minutes, poured herself a glass of water from the tap and then sat down and waited for her dinner to finish cooking. The timer chimed and she pulled open the door, removed the tray, set it on the table and pulled off the plastic covering. Pork Chops and a green bean carrot medley. She carefully cut the meat into tiny bite-size pieces and then ate them one by one trying to remember not to chew on the left side. As long as she didn’t exert any pressure on her back right teeth they hardly hurt at all. The night guard she’d ordered through the mail had relieved a lot of the pain. As did the vicodin.
…
After waiting for a little over two hours Dino had finally come home and he was definitely up to something with entertainment potential. He seemed to be doing his best to arrange his bedroom like a movie set. He had a video camera set up on a tripod, which he kept looking through and moving slightly, and he had just changed the sheets for the third time. Now he was kicking all the dirty laundry into the corner out of sight behind the camera. She watched him unscrew the regular light bulbs from the bedside lamps and replace them with pink ones. What was he doing?
She watched him look over at the window and then after a few seconds look away again. She was fairly sure that he, out of all the people she monitored, knew she was watching. And he didn’t care. Which was fine with her. Most of the time she only needed the bionic ear and sometimes, if they were particularly drunk or amorous, not even that. Something seemed to startle him into quick action and she watched as he lunged across the room and pushed a couple of buttons on the stereo.
Eunice watched Dino’s girlfriend, Marie, enter the room and look around. Eunice knew them pretty well by now but she wasn’t sure how she was going to react to what looked to her like the set up for them to film their own dirty movie. Not that the tramp had ANY morals to speak of, the things they did together -- with the curtains and window wide open like they actually WANTED her to see them -- and the words she yelled out had made that abundantly clear. Such language. But filming actual porn would be a whole other step down the hussy ladder for her.
She screwed the bionic ear into place, turned on the recorder next to it and then raised the night vision binoculars.
“Dino… what is all this?”
Eunice smiled to herself. The woman didn’t sound at all happy. This was going to be good either way.
“Well you know how we were watching that video I rented last week and I said you were so hot YOU should be in one and you laughed and said it would be fun to make one of our own?”
“Yeah… I’d had three glasses of WINE when I said that, Dino.”
Eunice watched her look around. Watched her gaze drop to the bed. Watched her lean over and pick up a large purple box.
“What the hell is this?”
He squirmed uncomfortably “A present for you babe. Your favorite color and everything.”
Marie shot him a long look and then opened the box, sliding out a long purple cylinder. She stared at it. Eunice stared at it too. In her day they hadn’t had such things and no nice girl should know about them today, but Eunice had followed enough of the links in the spam she received every day to know what it was. A dildo. Eunice focussed in on the box, which read COSMIC INVADER in big metallic letters.
Marie didn’t seen any more impressed than Eunice was. “And what do I need THIS for?”
“For the film, baby…”
She raised her eyebrows at him, “And I need it because…?”
Dino gestured rather desperately towards the video camera. “Well I need to run the camera so I thought…”
She cut him off, “So you thought I’d just hop onto the bed and masturbate and get myself off with this THING while you film it and then what, sell it?” She pointed the dildo at him accusingly. “Wow, Dino, this is beneath even you, although I suppose I should give you some credit for not trying to get me drunk first.”
Dino flushed and looked at the ground.
“Oh so you DID think of that! You little shit. And I know why you don’t want to be in this so-called FILM with me and it has nothing to do with your needing to run the camera. You just don’t want anyone ELSE to know your left ball is twice the size of your right one.”
Eunice smiled. She’d seen him naked several times and that would have been her guess too. How that woman could ever have sex with that deformed little stoner was beyond her.
Marie was really on a roll now, “You know what Dino? I think you should make your own film. Directed by you, starring you. You can call it “A Skinny Guy with Lopsided Balls Sticks a Purple Dildo Up His Bony Ass.”You can sell it as Performance Art, you Asshole.”
Flinging the dildo back onto the bed she stormed out. Eunice could hear her muttering something about how all the free drugs in the world were not worth it to put up with this shit. Eunice had to agree with her on that one.
…
Eunice watched Dino wander despondently out of the room, waited for a while to see if he was coming back and then slowly turned all her equipment off. She really needed to transcribe her tapes. She had two from yesterday and the one from today and the gardener, if he actually showed up this week, would be here first thing in the morning. Of course that was much less intense surveillance since the gardener worked alone, and, as of late, much more slowly. She’d managed to glean that he had some sort of illness that caused him to spend much time coughing into a handkerchief, but she knew no more than that. Like all the service people who came to her house she’d had no direct contact with him. They cut her grass or delivered her groceries and she paid them though the mail or directly over the Internet. She simply watched, listened and recorded.
She sighed, carefully put down her equipment, put on her reading glasses and turned on her computer, logging in her passwords and bringing up a spreadsheet. Then she rewound the recording, opened the Rockwell file and hit play. Quickly she tabbed between the fields, entering the data in the appropriate spots, noting the day, time, participants and content of the conversation. She didn’t interpret or analyze, simply recorded the conversation accurately, stopping occasionally to rewind and make sure her transcription was exact. Next she recorded the brief conversation between Patrick and Ellie. She could now make a low-carb cantaloupe salad if she’d been so inclined. She wasn’t of course. She didn’t cook anymore but even if she did she hated cilantro. The taste always reminded her of having her mouth washed out with soap by her mother when she was little. Finally she opened the Dino and Marie file and recorded the entire incident, which took longer. She added the new words to the spellchecker (it had recognized Vibrator but not Dildo) and then saved all the files and closed them. It was almost time to burn another CD to add to her archives.
She realized her hands were going numb again. Probably all that typing. For the thousandth time Eunice wished that video surveillance was even half as advanced as audio surveillance. Surely by now someone should have come up with a video-recording device that had the distance and sensitivity of the laser microphone and had night vision built in. The best the spy shops had to offer were pin-sized cameras, hidden in everything from pens to clocks to teddy bears, that you could hide in someone’s house and use to monitor them. But to use those you had to get into the house first. And most of them only recorded video, not sound. Perfect for spying on your nanny to see if she was beating your kid but not a viable option for her. So until they came up with something that could record video and audio from great distances she was stuck transcribing her tapes. Of course she’d progressed a long way from the days when all she had to work with was a regular pair of binoculars and her own dimming ears. Back in those days, she’d written everything she overheard and observed in shorthand and then transcribed her notes using an old manual typewriter.
She turned off the computer and then massaged her hands trying to work the feeling back into them. When the symptoms had first started she had done some research online, concluded that it was probably high blood pressure, since people rarely developed MS at her late stage in life. She then ordered what she hoped was the appropriate medication from an online pharmacy in Canada that, at least so far, didn’t actually require a doctor’s prescription. She knew that the FDA was cracking down on such loopholes but they hadn’t yet stumbled across that site. She walked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, washed down a couple of pills and then sat down at the table and slowly flexed her fingers trying to will the feeling back into them. She’d make one last check to make sure nothing else was going on and then go to bed early.
…
Eunice tried again to raise her head off of the pillow. She needed to get up. She was way behind schedule, as the gardener should already have come and gone by now. Patrick would already have left for work and Ellie might be out for the day by now too. If she didn’t get up soon even the little stoner would have finally woken up and left the house. There would be gaps in her data. Her reports would be incomplete. But maybe it wasn’t as late as she thought. She could have sworn the sun had been pouring through her windows earlier but now her room seemed quite dark. Maybe she had just dreamed it. She let her eyes drift shut again. Surely that was it. She drifted.
She opened her eyes again and tried to focus on the dark form moving through her room. She blinked. There was a man standing in her bedroom. A black man walking very slowly towards her bed. She knew that wasn’t possible. She had three locks on her front door plus the chain. All her windows were locked. There was no way anyone could have gotten in. She was still dreaming. Had to be. What a strange dream to be having. She’d never dreamt about a black person before. Even in her dream it seemed so strange to have another person in the house with her. It had been years. She tried to remember the last time someone else had actually been inside. She watched him lean over her and tried to concentrate on his face but he kept slipping out of focus. She swallowed and tried to speak but nothing happened. She felt him rest his hand, cold and dry, on her forehead, and shuddered slightly. This could turn into a nightmare. Was a nightmare. She couldn’t see anything now and his hand was so heavy. I want to wake up. I want to wake up. I want to wake up. She felt herself falling backwards and tried to grab onto him.
…
She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Now it sounded like there were more people in her house. More men. What were they doing in her house? She wanted to tell them to get out. She tried to form words but nothing came out.
“Is she stable enough to be moved?” a male voice asked.
“I think so… I’ve got her on oxygen but the sooner we can move her the better. She must have had a stroke or something, she’s obviously been laying in this bed for days and she’s really dehydrated” another male voice answered him, this one deeper and louder.
Eunice felt herself being lifted up briefly and then slowly laid back down on something hard.
“Ma’am,” she heard the deeper voice close to her head, “Ma’am just try to relax and breathe, we’re taking you to the hospital okay?”
The hospital? No. She couldn’t leave the house. She had to tell them, had to tell them to leave her there, leave her alone. Go away. With every ounce of will she tried to speak but all she managed was a small gurgle. The voice next to her head spoke again. “Just try to relax ma’am and we’ll take good care of you.” She felt a warm hand pat her arm.
Then she heard other male voices further away. Who were all these men in her house? Was she still dreaming? She heard static and the squawk of radio codes being called out, “Unit Six we’ve got a 319 in progress over.”
Policemen? Why were the police in her house? Had they somehow found out what she was doing? How was that possible? She’d been so careful.
“Hey Bill, take a look at this…”
“Whadya find?”
“Look at all this shit. Tell me, what does a little old lady need with night vision binoculars? Holy crap she’s got a laser microphone too. Do you have any idea how much these things cost?”
“For one that good I’d say about two grand, easy.”
“At least. I sure would like to know how she got it. The neighbor across the street says she’s a shut in, hasn’t left the house in years. The grocery boy dropped off this week’s delivery and the one he’d left behind the planter for her last week was still sitting there. So when he knocked and there was no answer he called 911. Maybe after they remove her from the premises we better take a closer look at some of this stuff. Just to be on the safe side.”
“I’d have to agree with you. Maybe have Lance from CSU come out and take a look at her computer. This is the same model my son’s been after me to get for him. One of these’ll run you at least thirty five hundred bucks. Do we know what her source of income was?”
She could hear them rummaging through her stuff. How could they do that? Eunice tried again to raise her head, to tell them to get away from her things, get out of her house. Tried to remember if she’d erased the last tape she’d recorded. She couldn’t remember. Oh God, she couldn’t remember. Would they confiscate her equipment? She knew most of it wasn’t legal. Just purchasing it had been quite difficult. At least all her computer files and CDs were double password protected. They wouldn’t try to access them would they?
“What is this?”
There was a brief pause, the sound of a tape rewinding and then Marie’s angry voice reverberated through the house, “I think you should make your own film. Directed by you starring you. You can call it “A Skinny Guy with Lopsided Balls Sticks a Purple Dildo Up His Bony Ass.” You can sell it as Performance Art, you Asshole… all the free drugs in the world aren’t worth putting up with this kind of shit. I am out of here.”
For a moment there was complete silence.
“What the hell was that?”
“I have no idea but I really would like to find out. I think we have probable cause at this point. I think we better get Lance in here now… because I just found about 250 CD’s labeled with dates and some kind of code and I want to know what’s on them.”
Except for one small detail. Well not so small anymore. The daughter, Cindy, an eighth grader, was obviously at least six months pregnant. Her belly had begun to loom in earnest over her low-rise jeans and her little cropped T-shirts now covered less than half of her rounded stomach. She had been watching this family for years and had only missed a handful of family dinners, and she hadn’t missed any in the last several months. In all that time nothing had been said about her rapidly progressing pregnancy. It was like there was a huge elephant in the room and everyone just pretended not to notice. Or stranger yet, actually didn’t notice it at all even though it was dropping peanut shells everywhere and defecating in the corner.
At first Eunice had thought that maybe the girl was just putting on weight as part of puberty. Tiny, she was still under five feet as well as Eunice could estimate from this distance, and she couldn’t have weighed more than 85 pounds. Now with her rounded belly she looked distorted, like she was built on a different scale than the rest of her family, like a normal grown-up pregnant woman who somehow had been resized at 75% of normal while the rest of the scene was still regular-sized.
The murmur of their voices drifted out of the window. Eunice quickly put down the book she had been reading (this had been such a slow day) and placed the padded headphones over her ears. She aimed the bionic ear at the window, adjusted the frequency slightly and caught the tail end of what Cindy was saying to her mother, “… no, but I do have a science test on Friday. Mr. Sloane says it will be multiple choice but his tests are always hard and he always does that all of the above OR none of the above thing so you can never just use the process of elimination to guess if you don’t know the answer.”
“If you study you shouldn’t have to guess, Cindy,” her mother said reprovingly.
“I know mom… don’t worry, I have an A in his class right now.”
“And what about your English class? I thought you had an essay due this week?”
“Not until next Friday… I already finished the book and started my outline.”
“Well, dear, after you set the table why don’t you go study until your father gets home,” her mother suggested, turning back to stir the pan simmering on the stove. She was, of course, wearing an apron.
“Okay, Mom,” Cindy nodded, and she heaved the stack of plates off the counter and began placing them around the table, her belly straining against the edge of the table as she leaned forward. She repeated the process with the silverware and glassware and then, having finished that chore, she hauled her backpack onto her shoulder and headed upstairs.
Eunice hated that the Rockwells’ windows upstairs faced the opposite direction. It was quite possible that some discussion about the pregnancy had gone on, at least between the parents, perhaps in whispered tones late at night in their bedroom, but she had no way of knowing that. No way of knowing if there was some kind of plan in place, adoption maybe, or if it was just total family-wide denial. Or even something worse. She couldn’t even guess who the father was. The girl was a good student, never seemed to cause trouble and had never brought home any boyfriends. With her best equipment Eunice could see the corner where Cindy parted from her friends when they walked home from school together and there had never been any boys with them. Eunice sighed. Eventually someone would have to say something, if only when the girl actually went into labor.
She watched the mother cook for a few more minutes, humming what sounded suspiciously like an off-key rendition of Amazing Grace, and then looked up at the digital clock on the wall. It was workout time. She grabbed her binoculars off the table, walked into the study and nudged the end of them through the blinds. Ah yes, Mr. Universe was right on schedule. She pulled off her headphones, placed the bionic ear back into its box and then reached up onto the next shelf and deftly removed the amplified laser microphone from its box and rested it on her shoulder, fitting it carefully into the shoulder mount leaving her hands free to hold the binoculars. She aimed the beam of light at the window, angling slightly until the beam hit the glass and bounced back to the receiver, and then latched it into place. She’d actually tried head-mounted binoculars but they made her so dizzy she’d fallen over twice before tossing them in the garbage. At her age the last thing she needed was to fall down and break a hip. Luckily it wasn’t dark yet so she didn’t need the night vision binoculars which were much heavier and made her arthritis flare up.
She adjusted a few knobs and the sound of Patrick counting off reps between gasping breaths came through crystal clear from the small box mounted on her desk. She’d paid an extra $200 for the extended recording receptor so that she didn’t have to take notes while she was watching. She could simply transcribe the recording later.
…
Eunice watched him mop at the sweat pouring down his face and back as he wiped distractedly at himself while posing first one way and then another in the mirror.
He loved how he looked immediately after working out. She could tell by the way he admired himself in the mirror, the poses he struck. Flex. Pose. Flex Pose. Flex Pose. He usually spent more time posing than actually lifting weights. He stripped off his gloves and weight belt and then, with a quick glance towards the doorway to confirm that he was still the only one home, walked over to his weight cabinet and spun the combination lock. Eunice watched him reach in and pull out a bottle of tablets which she seriously doubted were just vitamins, considering that he only took them when he was home alone and that he kept them hidden and locked up. Probably steroids. She’d overheard more than one conversation that seemed to indicate that he hadn’t been fulfilling his husbandly duties. It might be because he didn’t want another baby. She couldn’t blame him, but she suspected his lack of performance was a side effect of all those pills he was taking. She’d read on the Internet that they had some highly unpleasant side effects.
She watched him wash down three of the pills with that new carbohydrate-enriched water and then carefully place the pills back behind his cache of Muscle Magazines and then pull out something else. He squeezed a big blob of brown goo into his hand and started rubbing it into his arms. This was new. What the hell was he doing?
“Patrick?” neither Eunice nor Patrick had heard her come into the garage.
Patrick dropped the bottle and whirled around.
“Is that my Clinique self-tanner?”
Self-tanner. So that’s what that stuff was. “Uh, yeah, I thought I’d give it a try….” Patrick trailed off obviously unable to think of one witty or clever way to explain himself. Eunice watched his wife consider pushing the issue, watched her calculate the relative unimportance of her husband using her beauty products, watched her consider how long it would take her to get dinner ready, and then decide she didn’t have time to get into it with him now. She was highly predictable.
She turned to leave, “Well put it back in my cabinet when you’re done, okay?”
Patrick sighed audibly, “Sure, baby. I’ll do that right now. What’s for dinner?”
“I got the most fabulous recipe today from this woman I met at the spa.” Eunice sighed as Ellie began to describe, in detail, her latest recipe discovery. “It’s for this fabulous summer cantaloupe salad. On the way home I stopped at Trader Joe’s and they had these wonderfully fresh cantaloupes so I bought some so I could make it for you tonight. The secret is to mix in just a TAD of limejuice with strawberry yogurt and, here’s the part you would never guess, just a pinch of cilantro. And the best part is that it is low fat AND low carb!” She beamed proudly at him.
Patrick smiled back at her, “That sounds great honey. I’m just going to grab a quick shower okay?”
Ellie nodded, smiled at him again and then walked back into the house. Patrick watched her go, flexed one more time in the mirror and then followed her into the house.
…
Eunice sighed and put the binoculars down. They had to be two of the most BORING and shallow people on the face of the earth. Even more boring than the Rockwells. Low-carb cantaloupe salad. Self-tanning lotion. Mr. Corporate Body Builder and Mrs. Martha Stewart wannabe and of course little baby Huey. She sighed again. Maybe the little dealer next door would be up to something a bit more interesting later. Ellie was right about one thing. It was time for dinner. She rubbed her hands together, flexing her fingers, and then walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer door briefly contemplating the neatly stacked piles of frozen dinners. She picked one at random, closed the freezer and opened the box. Microwave for 5 minutes on high. She slid the tray into the microwave and set it for five minutes, poured herself a glass of water from the tap and then sat down and waited for her dinner to finish cooking. The timer chimed and she pulled open the door, removed the tray, set it on the table and pulled off the plastic covering. Pork Chops and a green bean carrot medley. She carefully cut the meat into tiny bite-size pieces and then ate them one by one trying to remember not to chew on the left side. As long as she didn’t exert any pressure on her back right teeth they hardly hurt at all. The night guard she’d ordered through the mail had relieved a lot of the pain. As did the vicodin.
…
After waiting for a little over two hours Dino had finally come home and he was definitely up to something with entertainment potential. He seemed to be doing his best to arrange his bedroom like a movie set. He had a video camera set up on a tripod, which he kept looking through and moving slightly, and he had just changed the sheets for the third time. Now he was kicking all the dirty laundry into the corner out of sight behind the camera. She watched him unscrew the regular light bulbs from the bedside lamps and replace them with pink ones. What was he doing?
She watched him look over at the window and then after a few seconds look away again. She was fairly sure that he, out of all the people she monitored, knew she was watching. And he didn’t care. Which was fine with her. Most of the time she only needed the bionic ear and sometimes, if they were particularly drunk or amorous, not even that. Something seemed to startle him into quick action and she watched as he lunged across the room and pushed a couple of buttons on the stereo.
Eunice watched Dino’s girlfriend, Marie, enter the room and look around. Eunice knew them pretty well by now but she wasn’t sure how she was going to react to what looked to her like the set up for them to film their own dirty movie. Not that the tramp had ANY morals to speak of, the things they did together -- with the curtains and window wide open like they actually WANTED her to see them -- and the words she yelled out had made that abundantly clear. Such language. But filming actual porn would be a whole other step down the hussy ladder for her.
She screwed the bionic ear into place, turned on the recorder next to it and then raised the night vision binoculars.
“Dino… what is all this?”
Eunice smiled to herself. The woman didn’t sound at all happy. This was going to be good either way.
“Well you know how we were watching that video I rented last week and I said you were so hot YOU should be in one and you laughed and said it would be fun to make one of our own?”
“Yeah… I’d had three glasses of WINE when I said that, Dino.”
Eunice watched her look around. Watched her gaze drop to the bed. Watched her lean over and pick up a large purple box.
“What the hell is this?”
He squirmed uncomfortably “A present for you babe. Your favorite color and everything.”
Marie shot him a long look and then opened the box, sliding out a long purple cylinder. She stared at it. Eunice stared at it too. In her day they hadn’t had such things and no nice girl should know about them today, but Eunice had followed enough of the links in the spam she received every day to know what it was. A dildo. Eunice focussed in on the box, which read COSMIC INVADER in big metallic letters.
Marie didn’t seen any more impressed than Eunice was. “And what do I need THIS for?”
“For the film, baby…”
She raised her eyebrows at him, “And I need it because…?”
Dino gestured rather desperately towards the video camera. “Well I need to run the camera so I thought…”
She cut him off, “So you thought I’d just hop onto the bed and masturbate and get myself off with this THING while you film it and then what, sell it?” She pointed the dildo at him accusingly. “Wow, Dino, this is beneath even you, although I suppose I should give you some credit for not trying to get me drunk first.”
Dino flushed and looked at the ground.
“Oh so you DID think of that! You little shit. And I know why you don’t want to be in this so-called FILM with me and it has nothing to do with your needing to run the camera. You just don’t want anyone ELSE to know your left ball is twice the size of your right one.”
Eunice smiled. She’d seen him naked several times and that would have been her guess too. How that woman could ever have sex with that deformed little stoner was beyond her.
Marie was really on a roll now, “You know what Dino? I think you should make your own film. Directed by you, starring you. You can call it “A Skinny Guy with Lopsided Balls Sticks a Purple Dildo Up His Bony Ass.”You can sell it as Performance Art, you Asshole.”
Flinging the dildo back onto the bed she stormed out. Eunice could hear her muttering something about how all the free drugs in the world were not worth it to put up with this shit. Eunice had to agree with her on that one.
…
Eunice watched Dino wander despondently out of the room, waited for a while to see if he was coming back and then slowly turned all her equipment off. She really needed to transcribe her tapes. She had two from yesterday and the one from today and the gardener, if he actually showed up this week, would be here first thing in the morning. Of course that was much less intense surveillance since the gardener worked alone, and, as of late, much more slowly. She’d managed to glean that he had some sort of illness that caused him to spend much time coughing into a handkerchief, but she knew no more than that. Like all the service people who came to her house she’d had no direct contact with him. They cut her grass or delivered her groceries and she paid them though the mail or directly over the Internet. She simply watched, listened and recorded.
She sighed, carefully put down her equipment, put on her reading glasses and turned on her computer, logging in her passwords and bringing up a spreadsheet. Then she rewound the recording, opened the Rockwell file and hit play. Quickly she tabbed between the fields, entering the data in the appropriate spots, noting the day, time, participants and content of the conversation. She didn’t interpret or analyze, simply recorded the conversation accurately, stopping occasionally to rewind and make sure her transcription was exact. Next she recorded the brief conversation between Patrick and Ellie. She could now make a low-carb cantaloupe salad if she’d been so inclined. She wasn’t of course. She didn’t cook anymore but even if she did she hated cilantro. The taste always reminded her of having her mouth washed out with soap by her mother when she was little. Finally she opened the Dino and Marie file and recorded the entire incident, which took longer. She added the new words to the spellchecker (it had recognized Vibrator but not Dildo) and then saved all the files and closed them. It was almost time to burn another CD to add to her archives.
She realized her hands were going numb again. Probably all that typing. For the thousandth time Eunice wished that video surveillance was even half as advanced as audio surveillance. Surely by now someone should have come up with a video-recording device that had the distance and sensitivity of the laser microphone and had night vision built in. The best the spy shops had to offer were pin-sized cameras, hidden in everything from pens to clocks to teddy bears, that you could hide in someone’s house and use to monitor them. But to use those you had to get into the house first. And most of them only recorded video, not sound. Perfect for spying on your nanny to see if she was beating your kid but not a viable option for her. So until they came up with something that could record video and audio from great distances she was stuck transcribing her tapes. Of course she’d progressed a long way from the days when all she had to work with was a regular pair of binoculars and her own dimming ears. Back in those days, she’d written everything she overheard and observed in shorthand and then transcribed her notes using an old manual typewriter.
She turned off the computer and then massaged her hands trying to work the feeling back into them. When the symptoms had first started she had done some research online, concluded that it was probably high blood pressure, since people rarely developed MS at her late stage in life. She then ordered what she hoped was the appropriate medication from an online pharmacy in Canada that, at least so far, didn’t actually require a doctor’s prescription. She knew that the FDA was cracking down on such loopholes but they hadn’t yet stumbled across that site. She walked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water, washed down a couple of pills and then sat down at the table and slowly flexed her fingers trying to will the feeling back into them. She’d make one last check to make sure nothing else was going on and then go to bed early.
…
Eunice tried again to raise her head off of the pillow. She needed to get up. She was way behind schedule, as the gardener should already have come and gone by now. Patrick would already have left for work and Ellie might be out for the day by now too. If she didn’t get up soon even the little stoner would have finally woken up and left the house. There would be gaps in her data. Her reports would be incomplete. But maybe it wasn’t as late as she thought. She could have sworn the sun had been pouring through her windows earlier but now her room seemed quite dark. Maybe she had just dreamed it. She let her eyes drift shut again. Surely that was it. She drifted.
She opened her eyes again and tried to focus on the dark form moving through her room. She blinked. There was a man standing in her bedroom. A black man walking very slowly towards her bed. She knew that wasn’t possible. She had three locks on her front door plus the chain. All her windows were locked. There was no way anyone could have gotten in. She was still dreaming. Had to be. What a strange dream to be having. She’d never dreamt about a black person before. Even in her dream it seemed so strange to have another person in the house with her. It had been years. She tried to remember the last time someone else had actually been inside. She watched him lean over her and tried to concentrate on his face but he kept slipping out of focus. She swallowed and tried to speak but nothing happened. She felt him rest his hand, cold and dry, on her forehead, and shuddered slightly. This could turn into a nightmare. Was a nightmare. She couldn’t see anything now and his hand was so heavy. I want to wake up. I want to wake up. I want to wake up. She felt herself falling backwards and tried to grab onto him.
…
She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Now it sounded like there were more people in her house. More men. What were they doing in her house? She wanted to tell them to get out. She tried to form words but nothing came out.
“Is she stable enough to be moved?” a male voice asked.
“I think so… I’ve got her on oxygen but the sooner we can move her the better. She must have had a stroke or something, she’s obviously been laying in this bed for days and she’s really dehydrated” another male voice answered him, this one deeper and louder.
Eunice felt herself being lifted up briefly and then slowly laid back down on something hard.
“Ma’am,” she heard the deeper voice close to her head, “Ma’am just try to relax and breathe, we’re taking you to the hospital okay?”
The hospital? No. She couldn’t leave the house. She had to tell them, had to tell them to leave her there, leave her alone. Go away. With every ounce of will she tried to speak but all she managed was a small gurgle. The voice next to her head spoke again. “Just try to relax ma’am and we’ll take good care of you.” She felt a warm hand pat her arm.
Then she heard other male voices further away. Who were all these men in her house? Was she still dreaming? She heard static and the squawk of radio codes being called out, “Unit Six we’ve got a 319 in progress over.”
Policemen? Why were the police in her house? Had they somehow found out what she was doing? How was that possible? She’d been so careful.
“Hey Bill, take a look at this…”
“Whadya find?”
“Look at all this shit. Tell me, what does a little old lady need with night vision binoculars? Holy crap she’s got a laser microphone too. Do you have any idea how much these things cost?”
“For one that good I’d say about two grand, easy.”
“At least. I sure would like to know how she got it. The neighbor across the street says she’s a shut in, hasn’t left the house in years. The grocery boy dropped off this week’s delivery and the one he’d left behind the planter for her last week was still sitting there. So when he knocked and there was no answer he called 911. Maybe after they remove her from the premises we better take a closer look at some of this stuff. Just to be on the safe side.”
“I’d have to agree with you. Maybe have Lance from CSU come out and take a look at her computer. This is the same model my son’s been after me to get for him. One of these’ll run you at least thirty five hundred bucks. Do we know what her source of income was?”
She could hear them rummaging through her stuff. How could they do that? Eunice tried again to raise her head, to tell them to get away from her things, get out of her house. Tried to remember if she’d erased the last tape she’d recorded. She couldn’t remember. Oh God, she couldn’t remember. Would they confiscate her equipment? She knew most of it wasn’t legal. Just purchasing it had been quite difficult. At least all her computer files and CDs were double password protected. They wouldn’t try to access them would they?
“What is this?”
There was a brief pause, the sound of a tape rewinding and then Marie’s angry voice reverberated through the house, “I think you should make your own film. Directed by you starring you. You can call it “A Skinny Guy with Lopsided Balls Sticks a Purple Dildo Up His Bony Ass.” You can sell it as Performance Art, you Asshole… all the free drugs in the world aren’t worth putting up with this kind of shit. I am out of here.”
For a moment there was complete silence.
“What the hell was that?”
“I have no idea but I really would like to find out. I think we have probable cause at this point. I think we better get Lance in here now… because I just found about 250 CD’s labeled with dates and some kind of code and I want to know what’s on them.”
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