Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes Read online

  “Well, I’m making it my business. You probably can still kick my ass, but I’ve been learning to be more gracious about that over my lifetime. Here’s the deal. You tell me why you’re here, and you tell me what happened, how you got burned, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “I don’t have to tell you nothin’!”

  “And I don’t have to keep my mouth shut about whatever I think, or whatever I trick out of Dale Thornton.”

  Sarah Byrnes stares ahead, stone silent.

  “Look, Sarah Byrnes. I’ve proved I’m your friend. I didn’t go off after I lost weight and leave you behind. I’ve been up here every day, even when I thought you didn’t understand a word I said. I’m still with you even though I feel like a fool, knowing you’ve understood every word I’ve said over the past few weeks. You’re still the person who knows me best. But you coming up here scared me. It’s been like you died. This friendship thing goes two ways. You had to know I was dying. That’s chicken shit.”

  Sarah Byrnes waits as the nurse brings my juice, and a glass for Sarah Byrnes. She places a straw in each glass, then wanders back behind the desk.

  “It might be chicken shit, but I haven’t been okay. This has kept me alive. Friends aren’t the same for me as they are for you, no matter how scared you were or how fat you used to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at my face, you cheeseball!” she spits, almost blowing her cover.

  “I’ve seen your face,” I say back, holding my own. “What’s different about it now than ever?”

  Sarah Byrnes’s shoulders slump, and I briefly glimpse deeper into her, past that hard crust, past her inclination to double up her fist at the sound of the first syllable of the wrong word. “Every day I live with it is one more day I’ve lived with it; I’m a little fuller up. Nothing changes. I have to be tough or funny every minute. If I let up for a second, it gets me. It gets me when I’m half awake in the morning and forget who I am. After all these years, I still dream I’m okay once in awhile. In fact, I dream it all the time.” She glances sideways again. “Look, ask the nurse if we can go for a walk—outside. I’m tired of talking like Edgar Bergen.” Sarah Byrnes knows Edgar Bergen from all the old television shows we watch on cable TV. He’s like the granddaddy of ventriloquists. I know him because his daughter is Candice Bergen, who I would like to own.

  I step over to the front desk to make my request, the nurse makes a couple of calls, and before I know it, Sarah Byrnes and I are in the elevator.

  “Might as well trust a fat kid,” she says, when we’re definitely out of earshot of the hospital. At least two inches of snow covers the ground, and we crunch over the unshoveled walk, alone in the freezing afternoon: Frost stands on the bare branches of trees like white icing.

  I say, “Fat kids give you more to trust.”

  “My dad burned me on purpose.”

  “What?”

  “Spare me the surprise, okay?”

  “Okay. Jesus, you mean he poured the spaghetti on you?” It’s my last lie to Sarah Byrnes. My last lie to her ever. But I have to make her believe Dale didn’t tell me anything. When I saw him in my neighborhood, standing next to his junky car looking all out of place—and like he knew it—I knew what a risk it was for him to be there. I’d rather have Sarah Byrnes think I was the liar than Dale.

  “There was no spaghetti. I was only about three and a half, but I remember it like it happened this morning. My mom and dad were fighting. Real bad. Hitting, throwing things. It’s the only time I ever remember my mother fighting back. Dad had her by the hair, and he was filling the kitchen sink to put her head in. I was sure he would kill her—that she’d be gone and then it’d be just him and me. I was so afraid of him.

  “I was watching from this little cave underneath the stairs, where they couldn’t see me. Then the sink was full. She was screaming, but it didn’t sound as much like fear as rage. She kept threatening to kill him. Dad laughed and yelled, ‘Oh, yeah?’ over and over, and then he pushed her head down. She kicked and I heard the bubbles, and then I had to try to save her. I ran at him, screaming, and crashed into his legs. It knocked him off a little, and he loosened his grip and my mother got away. I swung at his legs as hard as I could, over and over, but all of a sudden I was in the air, almost over his head.

  “Mom got a knife out of the drawer and came at him, but he held me in front of him and backed through the open hallway into the living room, laughing. Then he said, ‘Here’s your pretty little baby for you,’ and I looked up and saw the wood stove coming right at my face. I put my hands out and…”

  My stomach is in knots I believe will never unwind. God, I don’t want to hear this.

  “I don’t remember him actually doing it,” she says. “When I woke up, I was in the hospital with bandages covering my face and hands, and a nurse there said I had pulled a pot of spaghetti off the stove onto myself. I couldn’t talk, or even move, but I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but all I did was lie there and drift off. The next thing I knew, Dad was leaning over me. He said Mom was gone and would never be back, and that if I told what happened he’d burn the rest of me. He said he didn’t care what they did to him.”

  I sit hard on a cold cement bench, staring silently up at Sarah Byrnes’s scarred face. Words would jeopardize the thread of trust, because they would sound fake. They would be fake. There aren’t words for this.

  She says, “That’s it.”

  I put my hand on the side of her hip as she stands in front of me, and she doesn’t knock it away. She stares straight ahead into the trees behind my head, looking so tough; and so fragile. “What happened to your mom?”

  She shrugs. “Gone. I never heard anything from her again. Eric, I swear to God if you ever tell anyone this, I’ll kill you, but I used to sit in my room and look out the window at the stars and the moon and stuff and imagine she was figuring a way to come get me; that one night there’d be a light tap on my window, and I’d just put some clothes in a bag and crawl out onto the limb of the big tree and slide down and be saved. I even thought she’d make me look pretty again. But my dad accomplished what he wanted when he ruined my face. Mom didn’t want me anymore. I’ve thought maybe he killed her, but I guess I don’t think so. I don’t think she could have just disappeared without somebody checking. He told everyone she left.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  She nods. “Yup. No shit.”

  We’re quiet a second or two. “So why did you come to the hospital? I mean, why now?”

  Sarah Byrnes closes her eyes. “Dad was getting crazy again. I started having dreams about the stove. He held my face against it, Eric. He’s drinking more now, and he sees and hears things. I got the same feeling I had that day he burned me, and I decided if I had the feeling it was probably right.”

  “Jesus, Sarah Byrnes, why didn’t you call the cops or something?”

  Her soft edge instantly hardens. “What’re they gonna do? Put him in jail until he dries out? Then what happens? Jesus, Eric, get an idea.”

  “You could tell them what really happened.”

  “Right. Why would I be telling it now? It’s been fourteen years. They’re sure gonna believe me. Besides, just after it happened some people tried to get the state to believe it couldn’t have been from scalding water, but I was afraid to talk and that ended it.”

  “Yeah, but it ended because you didn’t tell them.”

  The spell is broken, Sarah Byrnes’s interior is closed for the day, and I’m angry because my need for revenge on her father is what closed it. “Look, Eric,” she says impatiently. “Don’t ask me a bunch of questions. I told you because you said you’d keep quiet. Don’t make me regret it.” She looks away. “Or you will. I came to the hospital to think. I needed to get away before something really bad happened. I’m old enough to get away now. I’ve always known I’d have to. It’s just hard, looking like this….”

  “Yeah. Listen, Sarah Byrnes, what do you want me to do?�
�

  “For right now, don’t tell them I talked, but that you think the walk helped. That you want to do it some more. Then all you have to do is keep your mouth shut. I mean it, Eric. You can’t tell your swimming friend, or your coach or your mother. Nobody. You said you wanted to prove how good a friend you are. This is your chance. You tell nobody.”

  “Okay.” I know what Sarah Byrnes is doing. She has to have control because of how big this is. You don’t let something this big out unless you have it on a leash. It would eat you alive.

  It’s after midnight. I’m in my room, staring at the ceiling, lost in the 1960s with the Lovin Spoonful. Do I believe in magic? they want to know. We’ll see. I’ve been thinking about what a huge risk it was for Sarah Byrnes to tell me her story; not about the story itself, which is certainly bad enough, but about how scary it must have been to let me see her like that. Scared. Vulnerable.

  I wanted to get off by myself afterward, just to consider things, but I had my date with Jody, and only a natural catastrophe would have kept me from that.

  This was a strange date. In the beginning Jody seemed as removed as ever, except she sat on my side of the booth and her hand touched my leg enough times to kick start me pretty good. Not that I’m complaining, but the Burger Barn is a local hangout and Brittain’s friends could have easily seen us—that is, if they weren’t joining hands in a circle at the Church of Jesus Christ of All The Good Guys, praying for me to drop fifty pounds the hard way: in a leper colony. But Jody didn’t seem to mind whether anyone saw us, and believe me, if she didn’t mind, I didn’t mind.

  “So,” I said, after we had ordered, “what did you want to talk to me about?”

  She smiled. “Get right down to business, huh?”

  “I’ve been real curious all afternoon. I mean, I don’t get invited out much.”

  She smiled again. “Did you have guesses?”

  “Yeah,” I said, running my hand over the back of my neck, “I guessed you’d developed a brain tumor. Then I guessed you were writing a research paper on Chunko Swimmers of the Western Hemisphere. Then I guessed…”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “I have been busy. Then I guessed those weren’t good guesses, and decided to just come out and ask.”

  “Tell me what you think of Lemry’s class.”

  I said, “I think it’s the best class I’ve ever taken. It makes me think. Sometimes I hate that, but mostly I don’t. Why?”

  “I’ll bet you think I hate it.”

  “If I had to bet a month’s pay one way or the other, that’s the way I’d go.”

  “I’ll bet you think Mark Brittain and I think exactly alike about everything we’ve covered so far in that class.”

  Now I smiled. “That’s crossed my mind, but I’m getting the feeling you’re about to tell me how full of shit I am.”

  She smiled back. “You’re so full of shit.”

  “That’s what I thought. Exactly how full of shit am I?”

  “I had an abortion.”

  Jesus.

  “Surprised?”

  “Naw. Girls are forever asking me out for a burger so they can tell me about their abortions.” I paused a minute. “Was it Brittain’s?”

  “Yeah. It was Mark’s.”

  “Does he know? I mean, he knows, right?”

  “He knows.”

  God, put that together. Mark Brittain. What a hero. Broke major blood vessels in his neck and eyes today in class preaching the evils of fornication and all the time he’s been a fornicating fool.

  “I almost spoke up in class today when he got so excited, but it’s not something I want the world to know.”

  I swatted the thought of what all this meant about Jody and Mark out of my head like a mosquito off the back of my neck, because that could make me seriously depressed. Plus I found myself genuinely curious. “What does he say to you? I mean, after an attack of hysteria like he had today, what does he say? He has to know how chicken shit that is.”

  Jody smiled sadly and stared at the table as the waitress placed our burgers and fries in front of us. “Sure,” she says. “But he says he’s different, that when you have a mission, you can’t let human errors stand in your way. You expect people to help you with that.”

  “Meaning you?”

  “Meaning me. He says people as committed as he is get special leeway in the Lord’s eyes. It was my job to prevent it.”

  God’s sliding scale. I bit into my burger. “Committed. That’s a good word for what he ought to be.” Then it occurred to me. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’ve known all along—in fact, since I had the abortion—that Mark and I weren’t going to make it. He’s treated me like shit since then, at least when we’re alone. One thing about Mark, he forgives himself a lot more easily than he forgives others.”

  “He gets forgiven for ‘fornication,’ but you don’t.”

  “Something like that,” she said. Suddenly tears welled in her eyes. “God, I’ve been so stupid. I didn’t want to go to bed with him in the first place. Then I didn’t want to have the abortion. Oh God, and then I got starry-eyed and lovey and wanted to get married and have a family with him. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt so dirty I wanted to do something right.”

  I put my hand on hers and felt it tremble.

  “But that threw a crank into his mission. I should have stopped seeing him before the abortion, I really should have. I still don’t know how I’d have handled it if it hadn’t been for Mark, but I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can’t imagine the emptiness. There’s a piece that isn’t getting talked about in class. Mark took me to the clinic, but he dropped me off two blocks away because he thought somebody might recognize him. When I came out, I was just lost. All Mark wanted to talk about was how we’d made the right choice and how his life was no longer ruined. I just wanted to cry and have somebody hold me.”

  This was a very different Jody than I’d imagined. God, nothing is as it appears. I placed my fingers on the chords running the length of her neck and massaged easily. They were strung like the high notes on a grand piano.

  “All I could think was to get away from him, so I went home that night and laid down in my room and cried and hated his guts, and I was going to go to school the next day and tell him to go to hell.”

  “That would have been appropriate.”

  “Before I got a chance, he got me alone in the breezeway out by the gym and said how sorry he was he hadn’t paid better attention to my feelings yesterday—said he’d been a senseless boob and that he’d make it up to me. I felt so bad about myself, so really desperately bad, that I went for it. I just wanted somebody around me who knew, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone else.” She shook her head. “I marched in the picket line with him.”

  “I take it you couldn’t tell your parents,” I said, thinking how Mom is the first person I’d go to in that kind of a jam.

  Jody looked at me as if I’d blown my nose on her burger. “They’d die. Right after they killed me.” Enough said. “Anyway, I just wanted somebody to like me, and Mark was it. Later I saw he didn’t really like me any better than I did, but I was convinced I’d done something so horrible that nobody would ever like me again. I thought people would be able to look at me and know.” She touched the back of my hand. “My family goes to the same church Mark does. Ms. Lemry’s class is really the first time in my life I ever heard an adult question anything I grew up believing to be a sin. At least an adult I respected. If my parents knew what goes on in there, they’d jerk me out so fast my seat would ignite.”

  I feel bad about what I said next, because I should have just been thinking of Jody, but I said this for me. “I wish you’d known me then. I don’t think there’s anything you could have done to make me treat you like Brittain.”

  She smiled and said thanks. “I knew that, I think. That’s why I’m telling you now. I don’t w
ant you to do anything about it, I’m not hustling you. You just seem to know about…”

  “Feeling like a piece of shit?”

  She smiled. “Feeling like a piece of shit.”

  So I’m lying here, thinking I may have a girlfriend or something. And you know what scares me? It’s easy to sit back, like in Lemry’s class, and take shots at guys like Brittain, but if Jody and I end up being together, I’ll have to perform, and to tell you the truth, I’ve always been a better sniper than a true soldier. In my friendship with Sarah Byrnes I’ve just followed her lead, and up until recently my friendship with Ellerby has been a couple of guys loaded up on testosterone yukking it up. When the class is discussing abortion, I can’t sit back with no real opinion if I have a girlfriend who’s had one.

  I need to have a serious talk with my mother before it’s too late.

  CHAPTER 10

  I find Lemry folding towels near the clothes dryer back behind the lockers.

  “I thought that’s what managers were for,” I say, leaning on the long table next to the two industrial washing machines.

  “It’s therapy,” she says back. “It’s the one thing I do in life that gets results.”

  “Hey, you get results from me. And Ellerby.”

  She gawks, snorts, and walks over to the wall phone. “Could you send down more towels, please?” she says into the mouthpiece. “The wrestlers must have towels they need washed. What about basketball?”

  I slap my chest. “I’m crushed.”

  She puts the handset back onto its cradle. “If only it were true. What do you want, Mobe?”

  “World peace. An end to hunger. Homes for the homeless…”

  “Very noble.”

  “…a new car.”

  “That’s closer to the truth. I meant why have you invaded my sanctuary? What do you want from me? Now.”

  “What would you think if I started taking out Brittain’s girlfriend?”

  She places the towel she’s folding slowly on the top of the heap and stares up at me. “You mean Jody?”