Page 48 - WTP Vol. IX #10

Ihad a bolt of wool across the table, a collection of fibers pulled apart and brought together again
as one, as a bolt. I was eating lunch, or I was sip-
ping something bitter while my lunch settled in my stomach. The bistro deck was rising and falling with traffic, young people in sweatshirts, old people wear- ing caps, their ceramic mugs and paper napkins. Tree limbs wobbled back and forth over the line of tables nearest the patio fence, over the bent-over heads of the hungry or the back-leaned heads of the wrinkled conversationalists. The branches’ shadows were climbing east with time. Soon, my wife would be back at our apartment, home from work.
The wool on the table was originally meant to be a coat, a sheep’s coat, but then someone had repur- posed it to be a heavy shirt or a blanket at the mill across town, where I had interned during college. Now, thanks to the kindness of a former supervisor, the wool was going to be a set of scarves, one for me, one for my wife, one for her dog, all three for a picture I’d promised to take before the holidays. The wool was immaculate plaid, black and green with sharp blue streaks, not a hint of defect. My former supervisor had joined me at the bistro for lunch, to drop off the fabric and to wish me luck with it. Then she’d left me behind with the dishes, hardly a shared memory left uncov- ered in only half an hour. I ordered something to drink while smears of cheese and a pale green sauce coagu- lated on the otherwise empty plates.
“Right this way.”
A hostess pointed a couple to their table, which was on the other side of my table. I inched forward to watch them pass, my belt digging ridges into my belly. Beneath the skin, food was melting away into energy, into waste. Within hours, all that was good of my lunch would be gone, that is, if I was lucky. In the best of circumstances, it would be used-up before it could make its way to the spare tire I was carrying beneath my shirt.
I was gaining weight nearly every week back then, my wedding weight or however close I’d been to achiev- ing that weight, becoming something like a school- yard tale, something that someone else had told to
me instead of an image of my own body. So, I was eating sandwiches with potato chips and counting every empty calorie that entered my body during mealtimes. My wife remained slender in spite of her hours spent on the couch. By the time we’d tied the
knot, we’d already been living together for years, since just a year after college. When we first met, I had been earning my living behind a sewing machine and kept my sketchbook on the bedside table. Despite the delay and the seemingly clerical nature of the whole thing, my body knew the weight of matrimony, and the pounds gathered en masse over my belly, in knots of jelly at my sides, the way that it had done for nearly every television father who had guided my childhood.
The couple sat mere feet from me. I could imagine their scent. I flagged down some waiter or other and ordered another drink, a cup running over with foam and fat-to-be. The couple was younger than I was, maybe 10 years younger, probably still in college, a shaggy-haired boy and a girl in cat-eyed sunglasses. The boy tossed his head around when he made jokes. The girl dipped her glasses down to flash her eyes
at the boy from time to time. They both laughed the controlled laughter of polite adoration, first date laughter, that great equalizer and safety blanket, half-bared teeth and dimples. They took turns listing names and explaining their respective relationships with the names.
“Trey Humphrey?”
“He was totally in my bio class!” More laughter.
Before the couple, the bistro patio had kept about its business with a sense of reservation, hushed tones and library propriety. Their arrival signaled that it would soon be time for the youth to overtake the pa- tio like Jacobins. They would fill the place with their crackling voices and chai lattes, and they would run
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The Thread
G.d. BRown