by Wilson Barbers
The house had been custom-built for its late owner, a onetime Hollywood sex goddess who'd quit at the peak of her pneumatic career to "pursue other interests." Interest number one, a never-ending flow of willing and attractive young men, was repped by her bedroom - with its canopied king-sized bed and mirrored walls, its closet filled with specially sized erotic lingerie. The second was illustrated by the presence of an extra-wide kitchen with large refrigerators and freezers, double-sized doors everywhere, and an elevator going from first to second floor. . .
"She'd really gotten huge," Mike said in amazement as he studied a portrait photo of Anita Van Summers in her final year of life. He stood in the foyer - while his wife viewed the rest of the house with the real estate agent - and thought of those teen nights he'd spent ogling the young Anita through a windshield. The zaftig actress had been the first lust of his adolescent life, and he was surprised to see she still held an attraction to him at quadruple size.
Perhaps it was the look of self-assurance she had. The former drive-in queen had found a second love in gastronomical over-indulgence, a joy of eating that had overridden the usual egocentric obsession with staying in the limelight, and she'd decided to do what she wanted - movie career be-damned. Just one look at her photo told all: she stood before the camera flaunting her unashamed vastness in a tight-fitting dress that revealed every bulge, a smile of sensual satisfaction on her smooth fat face.
"I don't know how anyone could let themselves go like that," Trisha said, coming up behind him. "If I'd had her young body, I'd have worked to keep it!" She ruefully looked down at herself, at the midriff bulge she knew was underneath her loose top, at the hips she'd tried in vain to reduce. Trish was thirty pounds larger than she wanted to be, had been that way since teenhood, and no amount of protestation from her husband (who, after all, had been attracted to her at the size she was) could convince her that she wasn't too fat to be Really Attractive. She glared at the photo of Anita Van Summers and felt irritated at the way the actress had let herself get so large.
Mike started at her words. How long had he been staring at the photo? "Did you check the whole house out already?" he asked his wife, putting his arm around her.
"Sure did," Trish answered, carefully extricating herself from his grasp. "While you were gawking at Ms. Full Figure there."
"And did it pass muster?"
She moved her husband out of agent earshot. "I love it," she whispered. "I'm not sure why, since it isn't anything like the house I pictured, but there's something about the place. . ."
Mike soon saw what she meant. He, too, was in thrall with the setting (isolated and masked by trees), but he hadn't expect to be won by the house so readily. They walked through the place together, looking over every room critically, and by the end of the afternoon they were ready to make an offer. They waited, of course, but not for long. Anita Van Summers may have moved to the realm of "Where Are They Now?" years before her fatal auto accident, but she was still a familiar enough name to attract interest from the celebrity property pickers. They had to move fast to get the home.
Fortunately, the place came with its own furniture: sale of movie rights to Mike's second paperback novel had given them enough for the down payment but little else. Within the month, they moved their apartment's worth of belongings into the house. Mike settled into his latest writing project, and his wife started shifting the furniture around. The first thing she did was hide Anita's portrait.
That first afternoon, as Mike was struggling to find a new way to describe a gunshot, Trish discovered the diary.
"What's this?" he asked, looking up from his stalled sentenced as his wife stood in the doorway and dramatically cleared her throat.
"Looks like Ms. Anita's book o' memories," Trish said, dropping a red-bound book on top of his pile of notecards. "Found it in the bedroom behind the dresser. I just knew you wanted to see it."
"Thought they got all her personal papers out," Mike said, gingerly lifting the diary. "Maybe we should get this to her lawyers. The personal memoirs of a former movie sex goddess. . . If it names names, we could have hot stuff here."
Trish just smiled. "Read it before you get too excited, Mike," she cautioned, turning away and laughing. "I scanned it: the only names you'll find in there are Sara Lee and Haagen Daaz."
Mike flipped through the book. It was, he saw, over ten years old, ending a decade before its author's death. He read the opening entry. It was nearly printed and succinct:
"June 17, 1969. We wrapped up Frankenstein Conquers the Army, a dog of a movie from the word 'go'! I'm so tired of keeping myself thin for this trash. I keep thinking that it's time I finally said goodbye to all this damn denial. Ten years ago, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world to lose my teen-age fat and maintain my current shape; these days I spend all my time thinking of the food I keep denying myself. This is no way to live. Tonight, I'm going to order the biggest course meal at the most expensive restaurant I can find. . ."
So - Mike thought, flipping ahead through the diary - it wasn't going to be a kiss-and-tell book, after all. More like an eat-and-tell. The further he read into the book, the more its late author delved into her rediscovered love of food and dining. He skimmed through page upon page devoted to descriptions of different sumptuous delicacies. Anita had clearly made gourmet eating a way of life. And alongside the descriptions were annotations indicating the ex-actress' growing weight:
"June 17, 1997: 276. Three years after the anniversary of my decision to say goodbye to restraint, and I'm over twice my movie star weight. Where some people would view this as a tragedy of mammoth proportions, I rejoice in my freedom. . .
"March 3, 1975: 403. I look at myself in the mirror today and marvel at my size. The larger I get, the more of me it seems there is to feel. To grab the breeze and sun, to spread myself out on the cool soil, to move with the slow rhythms of nature - this is a part of me now, and I can't see living any other way.
"June 17, 1978: 675. I seem to have stopped gaining, to have reached my real body weight. . ."
It was dark when Mike finally put the book down. It was easily the weirdest thing he'd ever read, weird and yet oddly exciting. He wasn't about to admit that last bit out loud, though, especially not to Trisha.
He found her in the kitchen, preparing dinner: steak, potatoes, and green beans spiced with bits of bacon. In the fridge were two items that Mike had never seen on their table before: butter and sour cream.
"Looks like quite a spread," he said, pulling a beer from the Kenmore. "In celebration of our first house?
Trish looked up from the sink, where she'd been draining grease into the green bean can. "While you were reading," she explained, "I went out to the store for provisions. The cupboard was bare, you know."
Mike set the dining room table and dimmed the lights. Trish was a good cook, but she typically went for low-cal. From the looks of the fridge, she hadn't bought a single dietary item at the grocer's. Maybe they were too expensive; it'd always vaguely bothered him that you were expected to pay so much more for food with less in it. We're definitely on a budget now, he thought.
But whatever the reason for Trish's sudden change in nutritional orientation, Mike didn't complain, not when it included strawberries on angel food cake with real whipped cream. They made love after dinner on the living room couch, the taste of strawberry still lingering on their lips. Mike went to bed full and properly relaxed; he slept so soundly that he never heard Trisha get up and raid the kitchen.
The next three days were so sensual, so full of erotic experience, that Mike didn't immediately notice the physical change in his wife. She spent so much time in the enormous kitchen or at the store shopping, worked so much on preparing greater and greater meals, and was so darn aggressively sexual in the evenings that Mike was too absorbed to notice anything different - until Trish split the seams of her dress. She was bending over the stove to pull out a roast, her once-loose summer dress straining to hold her in, when a sudden rending sound shot across the kitchen.
"What th - ?" Mike said, coming in from the dining room. He stared at his wife. She looked like she had gained about thirty pounds, much of it in her midriff. Her white flesh pushed out through the three-inch gap in the side of her dress, and Trish was fingering the strands of cotton nonchalantly.
"Ripped my dress," she said matter-of-factly, turning back to spoon juice over the roast. "Looks like it's gotten too small for me." She turned and grinned saucily at him, and Mike saw the start of a second chin grinning with her. "I guess there must be more of me to love," she said.
Mike was stunned. He'd never heard Trish talk like this before, and he'd never thought he would. He wasn't sure how to take her sudden unconcern about weight gain. If it wasn't so alien to her nature, he might have taken it as a joke. But Trish would never joke about something she felt so strongly about.
He was so distracted by the change in his wife that he barely ate his half of the meal. She, on the other hand, plowed into her meal with a disregard that astounded him. Trish went for seconds, thirds and then picked at the scraps on the serving plate. As she ate, it almost seemed as if she were gaining weight before him: that chin line had definitely deepened and become more noticeable; her cheeks had clearly grown fuller. It was disconcerting, yet so erotic that he didn't know what to say.
So he said nothing.
The next two days, Mike watched his growing wife from a distance. She was almost constantly snacking now, spending more and more time in the kitchen and at the grocer's. Once he followed her to the store: on her way both there and back she stopped at Dairy Queen for a Full Meal Deal, quickly polishing it off in the parking lot. At this rate, she was going to quickly exhaust their bank account.
To compound matters, Trish was close to outgrowing the baggiest clothing she had. In less than two days, it looked like she'd gained another twenty pounds. Her flannel top gapped distressingly at every button; her once-loose painter pants were perpetually unsnapped. What was she going to do when she could no longer squeeze into any of her clothing?
She came up with an answer to that last the next day, however. Mike was still in bed when Trish excitedly came in to show him what she'd uncovered: Anita's old wardrobe from her early days of diet busting. "I just woke up, wondering about her old wardrobe," she was saying, munching on a cinnamon roll as she displayed the dress she'd discovered. "There had to be a ton of stuff that she'd outgrown that could still fit me, so I checked in the attic and found all of it hanging there."
She led him down the hall, widened hips swaying merrily, to a ceiling ladder. "C'mon up," she said, climbing the fold-out stairs, her plump butt before his face. He followed her into the attic and discovered another part of Anita's history.
In the remarkably dust-free attic were three long rows of clothing, hanging in chronological progression, from the smallest outfits of the actress' sex bomb era to the super-sized gowns of her next-to-fattest period. Trish happily worked her way down the first row and pulled out a sheer black nightgown. Holding it up to herself, the fabric clung to her excitingly, delineating her growing pot belly and fuller breasts. She grinned and said, "Isn't it beautiful?"
Mike had to admit it was. But something was puzzling him: "How'd you know her old clothes were still in the house?" he asked. "She could have thrown them away."
"I don't know," she answered, rummaging through the wardrobe for more items that fit her. "It just came to me when I woke up: check the attic. So I did. A lucky find, eh? Don't think my jeans would have fit me another day."
The sheer strangeness of this conversation didn't fully hit Mike until later. For one thing, there'd been no mention of Anita's lost wardrobe in any of their discussions with the sellers of the house. So why was Trish so certain that she'd find it? Even more outre was the hidden premise in her relief at discovering the cache of clothing: clearly, his expanding wife knew she was growing and would continue to grow. The billowing wardrobe was designed to meet her growing body's needs!
And grow her body did. Halfway into their second week in the home she was up to about 280 pounds: no longer chubby but fully and proudly fat, with a double chin that was verging on triple, a folded belly and hips that had finally started to spread and grow past her midriff. She was changing sizes every day, getting down to the end of the first row of clothing.
He finally got up the nerve to confront her. They were seated at dinner, of course, (their meals were lasting longer and longer, he noticed: at this rate, there'd soon be no time for between meal snacks) and Mike was typically feeling stuffed into the first course. His pants had gotten a bit tight on him, but that small gain wasn't worth worrying about.
"You've changed your dress again," he said, putting his fork down across his plate.
"I know," Trisha answered, spearing an asparagus tip and swirling it in cheese sauce. "The one I had on earlier was getting a bit snug."
"A bit snug?" Jeez, he thought, that dress was a size 34! "This doesn't sound like you, Trish! Ever since we've met, you've been obsessed with your weight. Yet all week you've been acting like you don't give a fig about it."
She bit into her asparagus tip and slowly chewed it before she answered. "Maybe," she said, "I just got tired of all that damn denial." She reached over for the platter of twice-baked potatoes, her great breasts shading her plate, and went for her fourth spud of the evening. "I don't understand what's bothering you," she said. "You've always said you liked me as I am. Are you saying things have changed?"
Was he? Mike picked up his fork, wiped it with his napkin and once more went at his plate. All week he'd found himself more stimulated by his wife than he'd ever been: if truth be told, it was probably the real reason he'd taken so long to broach the subject of her weight gain. He was finding it awfully damn sexy, and he couldn't help wondering if this was perverted.
"No," he finally said aloud. "This last week has been wonderful. But I've never heard of anybody gaining weight like this so quickly. It can't be healthy, can it?"
"It feels right to me," Trisha answered. "But if it'll make you feel better, we'll make an appointment with the doctor tomorrow."
By the time they got to the doctor, two days later, she was up to 320. They went in under the pretense of getting their physicals: Mike was reluctant to say anything to the doctor about his wife's astonishing weight gain and Trish was content to act as if she'd always been her present size. They both came out with a clean bill of health.
"You should watch out for the cholesterol, though," the doctor told Mike the next day over the phone. "You're in the upper range."
"And Trisha?"
"I checked her cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and they were fine. You'll see that in a person who's been big all their life: Trish is fat and healthy. That's an old-fashioned concept these days - that a person be both big and fully healthy - but I'm an old-fashioned kind of doctor. Not all my fat patients have been in as good shape as your wife, but I've had a few. The former owner of your house, for instance. . ."
Trish started gaining weight faster after that - as if the doc's verification of her health had somehow given her body permission to burgeon. Mike put his novel on back burner indefinitely, no longer bothering with surreptitious observation but instead just following her around the house. Her meals were getting increasingly elaborate and subtle, a gourmet's feast every day. As an adult woman, Trish had always invested in the role of housewife, but these days the focus of that role had narrowed. Cook and consumer, that was Trish, her only housekeeping an ongoing maintenance of the kitchen.
Whatever she ate immediately manifested itself on her body, ounce for ounce, pound for pound. This is impossible, he thought: food was for energy first and storage second. Yet here his wife was, gathering in and keeping everything she ate. Where was she getting the energy to survive?
Two days later, he got an inkling. He was up in the attic, pulling down everything in Trish's newest size, when he saw his wife through the gaps in the attic vent. She was past 400 now, unable to get her broad-beamed torso through the attic doorway, so naturally he thought she was down in the kitchen. He didn't expect to see her out in the forested backyard, naked in the morning sun, spreading her dangling dimpled arms to receive the rays of light through the trees.
"To grab the breeze and sun, to spread myself on the cool soil. . ." The words from Anita Van Summers' diary rushed through him. How could he have been so blind? It was clear that Trish's phenomenal growth had no natural explanation. What did that leave but the supernatural?
Now that he had a clue to the source behind Trish's growth, he was unsure what to do next. He spent the rest of the day going over Anita's diary, searching for something that might tell him more about the mysterious presence influencing his wife. He found no clues.
That night, Mike was woken from a restless sleep by the sensation of his wife rolling out of bed. He sat up to see her struggling to her feet and waddling towards the kitchen. It may have been a trick of his eyes growing accustomed to the dark, but it looked like a wavering brightness surrounded his fat wife. Jumping out of bed to get a closer view, he saw that his first impression hadn't been an illusion: there was a wider, rounder, fatter, translucent female form glowing around Trish. It was the form of Anita Van Summers in her final phase of fatness.
She's sleepwalking, he thought in panic, and then this second idea hit him: Trish is possessed! Frightened for the first time, he watched his corpulent spouse as she opened the kitchen fridge and prepared to nosh, the ghostly apparition around her dimming in the appliance light. "Trish!" he cried. His wife turned to face him, and with her turned the glowing spectral body.
Behind this image, his wife smiled reassuringly. "Mike," she said (but wasn't there another voice somehow echoing in the background?), "you look distraught!" She pulled a plate of gourmet cheese off the shelf and started nibbling on a slice. "What's the matter?"
"Around y-you," he stammered. "It's Anita Van Summers!"
"Oh, yes," Trish answered. "She's with me all the time these days!" She reached under the plate's Saran wrapping and pulled out another piece of cheese.
"What's she been doing to you?" he cried, dismayed.
"Doing to me?" Trish laughed. "Nothing! You act like I'm possessed or something!" Anita's ghost laughed soundlessly around his wife. The sight was disconcerting.
"Well, how do you explain this - this phantom?" he challenged.
"She's a ghost, of course - or at least the ghost of Anita Van Summers' appetite," Trish answered. "And she's been talking to me for quite some time now. I didn't hear her directly at first, only caught the sense of her messages. Now she comes in clearly." She pulled another slice of cheese off the plate and continued. "As for whether she's been making me do something that I wouldn't otherwise: I'd been making myself miserable for years by worrying so much about my weight. Anita showed me that it's okay not to worry, showed me the joys of real eating.
"I don't know why she's here. All I can guess is that years of living the way she did put their mark on this house, left part of her here. I'm just glad for the new life she's given me!" With that, she turned back to the fridge, her spread backside blocking his view of the food. "I know we're getting near the end of our bank account," she said with her mouth full of cake. "Do me a favor and take a look at the end of Anita's wardrobe."
Dazed, he made his way up into the attic and followed the rows down to the end of the line. Hanging by the attic fan was a massive faux fur coat (the fat woman's growing love of nature having apparently extended to the way she dressed). What does Trish want with this? he thought as he pulled it off its hanger. Once he felt the lining of the coat, however, it all became clear.
The fur was stuffed with jewelry, a collection of diamonds and what looked to be a sack full of old coins. It was plainly worth a fortune. As he pulled open the bottom seam, the cache of valuables spilled onto the attic floor. There was enough here to keep Trish well-fed for years!
Dawn was edging through the windows when he got the last of Anita's treasure downstairs. His wife had moved into the dining room and was polishing off a half gallon of French Vanilla ice cream, her ghostly companion vague but still visible. In the hour or so that he'd been in and out of the attic, she'd gained another fifteen pounds.
"I'm getting closer," she said, holding the carton in her sausagey fingers and letting vanilla drip onto her spoon. "Another two hundred pounds, and I'll be up to Anita's last weight. I'm not sure, but I think that's going to be the cut-off point."
Trish was right, at least as far as her unnaturally rapid weight gain went. She reached 675 in less than a week, a physical mirror of Anita Van Summers at her vastest. With that goal attained, her supernatural enlargement ceased, and with the end of this mysterious growth process, Mike was once more able to focus on the pure love that he felt for his massive wife.
She was majestically feminine, a monument to sensuality: her belly was round and ponderous, pushing her huge legs apart and hanging down to the middle of her calves; her breasts were gargantuan, dangling to both sides of her paunch; her upper arms had grown fabulously, draping over to obscure her elbows; her neck was invisible, hidden by a set of chins that pushed forward like belly folds. She was Anita Van Summers' body double, but to Mike's eyes, she was even more beautiful.
Trish's appetite dimmed somewhat, but it still was enough to daunt even the heartiest eater. With the money from Anita's jewels they were able to buy enough clothes to fir her and keep the larder full. Their experience had brought Mike new interest in the occult, and while he never was able to find another case quite like his wife, his research was enough to give his material for several books. He junked his stalled novel and was able to complete a gothic within six months.
Trish began to spend more time in the backyard: she didn't have it in her to walk very far, but she loved lying down in the trees, feeling the breeze on her great sphere of a body.
The shade of Anita Van Summers vanished once Trish reached the ex-actress' peak, though occasionally Mike's wife would smile to herself while eating, as if listening to another voice. Her whole attitude towards life and herself had mellowed, as if the healthy satisfaction that Anita had felt in her last years had also passed on to her. She continued to love good food and her husband passionately, and if her appreciation of the former lead to her slowly growing fatter - well, that was alright with Mike.
"I guess I've got a different set-point than Anita did," she said months after her supernatural ballooning. She had just stepped off their industrial strength scales, two pounds over 700. "Will you still love me now that I've grown bigger than the sexy Anita Van Summers?"
He embraced his wife's great width, leaned over and kissed her tasty lips. They looked into the foyer where Anita's photo portrait once more hung. "I'd love you if you were twice her size," he said.
Which turned out to be the truth.
Corrected version: copyright 1998 - Oakhaus Designs
