for people who don't apologize for their size
The Food Artist
by Kristen McDermott
Fat? No, not fat. Not totally obese. She'd known obese people, back before the Great
Reduction. She had never been really fat, not an "obee," and they were by now either
slimmed down or dead. Most of them were dead.
She was not fat. But she was clever. It took a special kind of mind to make something
fattening out of a week's exchanges, and she had that kind of mind: creative, subtle.
Hungry.
Helen was a food artist.
She was well paid for her talent. Housewives would trade a week's allowance of tofu
for a small bowl of Helen's marshmallow creme. Where do you get sugar! they would moan.
Where do you get butter! And then would flee to avoid knowing.
She wouldn't have told. If they knew how many apples or cherries it took to make a pint of
simple syrup...how many fish she rendered, how many skinless chickens, to get precious
oil...how many godforsaken hours it took to churn skimmed milk!
No one could begin to pay that kind of price. Helen made no profit at all - and so her
crime was worse than Aggravated Gluttony, far worse than Passing Contraband. It was, in
fact, nearly Treason.
Helen loved food. With a passion.
It was enough for her just to create felonious dishes. She didn't have to eat them -
though, of course, sometimes she did. Helen was plump, perhaps - a bit pudgy, you might say
- but in no way obese. And in her Spandies, those constrictive, totally illegal
undergarments, she escaped detection.
One day the madness would end, must end. TV stars would allow their cheeks to fill out,
ever so slightly. Breasts would again become fashionable, not to say functional. Small
children, watching their grandparents pause in mid-toe-touch to reminisce about ice cream,
would demand to hear the beloved summer truck bell once more! Something would happen,
someday, and she would have to be there to teach the new generation about cream, about
cocoa, about fried clams. About the very word "fry," which had been stricken from every
American dictionary.
When the National Diet was finally broken, Helen would be there, ready to cook.
But it had been twenty-three years already and even Helen was beginning to forget what
prosciutto tasted like. There had been people who were born and who died without ever
knowing a Dove Bar.
She had no heirs. She carried on alone.
Until at last a guilt-crazed customer led the Fat Police to the odor of vanilla wafting
from Helen's kitchen vent. They were not gentle.
* * *
"She's a tough one," growled the warden. "We've had her on IV and forced Exercycle for
three weeks and she still won't lose it."
The trusty nodded soberly. He was short but powerfully built, a chuck roast of a man,
trimmed of all visible fat. He had been sent up for grinding stray animals into Italian
sausages which he sold and ate, overwhelmed by a blood-deep urge for pizza. He was
completely rehabilitated, no question, but his fat had turned to muscle and he still looked
heavy for his height. He preferred the Exercise Camp to life in a society that would always
scorn his fleshiness.
Every convict feared him. He would accost the meekest of prisoners, jerk his or her shirt
up to the armpits, and viciously "pinch an inch" of trembling midsection. His own barrel
chest was as the trunk of a redwood, covered with the thinnest of fine leather. He kept a
kennel of stray dogs and cats and fed them lavishly, in expiation, from the extorted
rations of his convicts. His breath smelled of broccoli. His name was Otto.
He was in agonizing love with Helen.
* * *
"We've got to get to the bottom of this," the warden said, pacing. His own body was long
and flat, the only softness about it his rich growth of hair. "The woman's a menace.
Jesus, a whole saucepan of caramel she put away before we took her. Do you realize what
she'd have been capable of when the sugar reaction hit? Thank God we made her vomit."
The warden would never allow himself to forget last year's spectacular crime: a teenaged
boy who'd smuggled chocolate from Germany. He ate two pounds of the filthy stuff and, in
the resulting blood sugar crash, plowed his red van through the dayroom of an old-age home.
Thirty-four healthy, happy centenarians had perished. The Warden had seen to it that the
boy was force fed bags of joke hot-pepper candy and raped at regular intervals by an obese
mental defective kept for the purpose.
He had no such hatred of the woman, but her failure to reduce puzzled and frustrated
him.
"You can't possibly be getting extra food," the warden snarled at her after the second
week. "And you're burning three times more calories a day than you're taking in. Where's
the damn fat coming from?"
Helen merely smiled peacefully. "I think about food," she murmured. "Mind over matter. If I
can't eat, I'll pretend I'm eating. I'll imagine food." She slowly caressed her stomach. "I
have a vivid imagination, Warden."
He found her expression inexpressibly obscene. "Slut!" he gasped, terrified. "You can't eat
with your mind."
But Helen didn't answer. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moved slightly as she recited a
recipe for mousse au chocolat. With heavy cream.
The Warden fled, gagging.
* * *
Otto was in love with Helen. The softness of her hands, strapped quivering to the
handlebars of the Exercycle, attracted and repelled him. He wondered what it would feel
like to hold flesh of such softness in his arms. He'd had a fat woman once - there were a
few such hardcore bordellos left - but she'd refused to take off her Spandies. It had been
like bedding a kettledrum.
Otto tried not to think about Helen, but it was his task to change her IV, to strap her on
the Exercycle in the morning and pull her off, fainting from exhaustion, in the afternoon.
He alone, the most trusted trusty, was given Helen's care.
But there was such seduction in the curves under Helen's jogging suit, and the way her
breath was perpetually vanilla-scented.
A marshmallow, thought Otto. She's just like a great big, lovely...
His stomach growled, and he thought he would die of shame.
In her prison-bed, Helen heard him. She smiled up at Otto, who stood beside her, IV tube in
hand.
"Hunngreee?" she purred.
Otto trembled.
"I can tell you're a man who likes his food," she whispered. She slowly moistened her lips.
"Wow," he groaned. Nothing had ever excited him as much as this woman's dirty talk. She was
better than those girls you could call up at 976-EATS, $2.50 a minute - she was here, in
the flesh. The flesh...
Helen closed her eyes and arched her back ever so slightly. "I was just thinking about
coffee cake," she said. "You know, the sour cream kind. With veins of cinnamon through it,
and a crust of brown sugar and pecans sprinkled on top. Warm, too, right out of the oven."
Her eyes flew open and she stared at Otto. "With a pat of sweet, creamery butter melting
all over it. Oozing through the crumbs, yellow and rich-"
"God," choked Otto, falling to his knees. "You whore!"
"Or what about this, Otto," she said brightly, sitting up and wrapping her arms around her
knees. Her adorably plump little knees. "How about... PIZZA?"
Otto crashed against the wall, panting. "Go on, tell," he gasped, clutching the Levelor
cord.
"Oh, Otto, don't you dream of pizza, with melted cheese an inch thick, and pools of olive
oil and hot tomato sauce and, oh! broiled mushrooms and sweet grilled onions - "
"And the sausage, you bitch, don't forget the SAUSAGE!"
"Yes, all spicy and greasy and hot, so hot and good, on a thick, crunchy crust - "
Otto lunged, buried his mouth in her yielding throat. "I love you," he mumbled.
Later they lay together, sated, and Helen caressed his tummy.
"Why Otto," she smiled, "I do believe you've gained a bit."
* * *
The warden rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. It had been a hell of a week, and the worst
part was, he missed Otto sorely.
He still smarted from the memory. He'd been watching Otto grow ever so slightly softer,
even a bit jowly, day by day, but still never suspected - He flushed, ashamed. Of course
they could never have hoped to get away with it for long. Still, they had managed for
several weeks to meet, to talk, to...
Oh, it was too disgusting. He had been the one to find them, when Otto had failed to report
one evening. The warden had flung open the cell door to find the couple ecstatically
kneading each other's upper arm flab, chanting "Two all beef patties, special sauce..."
Otto might be re-rehabilitated. It would take time and intensive programming. And perhaps
surgery. The woman, however, was an Incurable - but gifted. He had placed a call to
Washington, pulled a few strings, and, thank God, managed to tie up this whole mess without
any public fallout.
He dug into his evening salad, picked up a sheaf of papers, and fleetingly wondered what
Helen would be cooking for the President tonight.
An image emerged in his mind of pâté de foie gras, and he swiftly brought the
tines of his fork down, with great force, on the back of his hand.
His scream sounded something like "Waiter!"
* * *
Kristen McDermott lives in Atlanta and teaches Renaissance literature and Shakespeare at
Spelman College. She has promised herself that if she finishes all her dissertation this
summer, she may write a novel for dessert.