(Illustration by The Studio)
The day that Lindy first noticed the trailer:
It was in March, one of those cold Midwestern days that were winter's last-ditch effort at holding onto the year. "All Things Considered" was considering the plight of downsized factory workers (an odd euphemism, "downsized" - made you think that they were losing weight, not getting canned), and she was just approaching the highway rest area that signaled her commute was half over. The truck came barreling off the exit ramp, nearly ramming into her Saturn's rear end.
"Jesus!" she muttered, stepping on the gas pedal to put distance between her Saturn and the truck cab. It was almost as if the driver had sped up just to goose her. Checking the rear view, she saw the offending vehicle slide into the passing lane to zip alongside her.
She'd been in commuter's autopilot, only half concentrating on her driving, and the moment startled her into alertness. A hell of a thing to experience, but maybe the truck's driver had done her a favor. Better to be surprised than to nod off the road at seventy per.
As the truck got nose to nose, it began to pace her: a red Ford pick-up with a dark green horse trailer hitched in back. Not an unusual sight in the Midwest, but just because it was common didn't mean they owned the road. Muttering under her breath, Lindy glanced toward the truck, only to watch it suddenly speed up. Instead of the driver, she found herself glaring at the horse trailer's passenger through the opening in back.
But said passenger did not appear to be a horse.
A flash of eyes and a round pink face - perhaps it was porcine? No, the wave it gave her could only come from a human hand. Not a hoof. And wasn't that a mane of long blond hair on top?
Easing on the gas pedal, Lindy edged forward for a closer look. At the highway turned, the figure melted back into the shadows, becoming only a vague and massive silhouette. Some kind of statue perhaps? A fast food trademark like the old Bob's Big Boy? Hard to tell.
A right signal flash, and suddenly the truck turned off the interstate. Lindy only had enough time to note the exit then watch both truck and trailer hit the country highway to God knew where. Just another unresolved motorway encounter, she thought, turning her attention back to the long commute home.
"You wouldn't believe how huge the woman was!"
Belle, the front receptionist, was regaling the rest of the office secretaries with her description of yesterday's talk shows. It was an office tradition: every day, she set her VCR to capture four hours' worth of talk shows, skipped through 'em to the choice parts and summarized these bits next day to her peers in the kitchenette. No matter how many times she viewed each subject, Bell had a knack for sounding like it all was totally new to her.
The woman in question was on an episode devoted to housebound spouses. Too obese to make it through the door of her bedroom, she clearly hadn't been averse to letting a full camera crew into the room. As Lindy rummaged through the kitchenette refrigerator in search of her SlimFast lunch, Belle was describing the lower class accommodations that comprised this unimaginable fat woman's domestic prison.
"Where do these people come from?" Lindy asked the group. She hadn't meant to be part of this conversation - there was too much work waiting on her desk - but for some reason, mention of the talk show brought up the memory of her earlier highway contretemps. All four clerical workers looked up at her. "What d'you mean?" Belle asked, stirring the noodles and sauce of her Lean Cuisine.
"This woman - how big was she? - why'd her husband let her get that fat? You say she was complaining about her bedridden state. Wasn't there a point in the relationship where they could see how big she was growing? Why didn't they stop right then?"
"I hadn't thought of that," Belle, a skinny blonde who needed Lean Cuisine less than Lindy, considered. "Once they show up on talk shows, the fat one's usually the size of a house." She looked in the faces of her co-workers to see if the answer was there. "Maybe the woman wanted to be heavy but didn't realize what a hassle it would be!"
"Sure, that's believable," Lindy scoffed. The rest of the table started snickering, making Lindy regret her cheap shot. What was the point trying to one-up Belle, of all people? Guiltily, she backtracked: "But maybe you're right. You never know what makes some people tick."
"You sure don't," Belle agreed, vigorously nodding her head. "S'what makes these shows so fascinating!"
"I guess," Lindy conceded, heading back to her office with her Chocolate Royale SlimFast. Sighing, she sat back on her desk chair and considered the half-written memo on her monitor. She seemed to be in a major rut these days. Even the simplest tasks were hard to finish. The rest of the team was expecting her memo by two, but she was having a hell of a time putting it together. The joys of Human Resources, she thought.
Popping open her can, she considered her uninspiring lunch. You had to drink this stuff quickly, while it was still cold, or else it became disgusting. Taking a big swig, Lindy straightened in her desk chair. Though her blazer hid a multitude of sins, she still could see her half-inch of extra midriff, the excess spread of resting hips.
She finished off her drink, pulled out her compact and scrutinized her face: it was pleasant enough - basic Midwestern Germanic though with darker hair - but if she tilted it, the lines around her mouth became a double chin, her slightly protuberant lips became a sensualist's mouth. Peevishly, she snapped her compact shut.
When it came to female body weight and type, Lindy was firmly in the mean. Average sized, with it all nicely distributed in the recommended hourglass (she'd recently seen a Desmond Morris teevee documentary which had stated unequivocally that this was the biological shape of choice), Lindy knew she had nothing to be ashamed about, though that didn't stop the old voices from kicking in. You always feel fat if you're a woman. Which probably explained the fascination so many folks had for the ultra-fat on television. Whatever your size, you just knew you weren't as big as them. They served as both cautionary example and as self-esteem boost.
But who, she wondered as she tossed the can and returned to her monitor, served that function for the woman on the talk show?
She asked this same question of her boyfriend, Trey. They were out for dinner in a Mexican restaurant, and, as usual, Trey was trying to get Lindy to cheat on her diet. "What's the harm?" he asked, brandishing a menu with its appetizing photos of guacamole and sour cream-laden fare. Trey had the kind of metabolism that forgave every transgression, and Lindy was still unsure whether he was deliberately rubbing her face in this fact or just guyishly unaware about how maddening he could be when it came to eating.
"I was wondering about folks like you. Earlier today at work," she began, carefully taking a single low-fat black bean chip from the bowl between them.
"How so?" Trey asked.
"One of the girls in the office had been watching Jerry last night. He had a woman on his show who weighed close to half a ton."
"And you were wondering?"
"How the people in her life could've let her become so obese. With multiple servings of this, no doubt!" She waved her hand across the entire menu for emphasis.
"'One of the girls in the office,' eh?" Trey grinned. "This isn't the first time you've mentioned Jerry. Sure it wasn't you watching that commercially syndicated claptrap?" A professor of media studies at the local university, Trey was also involved with the College of Communication's public broadcasting station. He never missed an opportunity to take a poke at mainstream television.
"Someone sounds jealous," Lindy joked. She was attracted to the professorial type but couldn't help jabbing at Trey's academic pretensions. "Pledge Week not going as well as planned?"
"Of course it isn't," he sighed. "Who has spare change these days to give to public television?" He took two chips and dipped them in their companion bowl of habanera sauce. "Y'know, sometimes this commercial-free business can be a pain in the ass!"
"You act as if commerce is antithetical to art," Lindy teased. "Typical collegiate elitism." Without recognizing she was doing it, she'd managed to slip the basket of chips to her side of the table. "Nothing but class-bias: the same impulse that has you ridiculing talk shows."
"So what are you saying - that I should give in to Jerry and Oprah?"
"No, but perhaps you should consider some of the questions they ask. They speak of a world totally removed from academia."
"You're probably right," he conceded, than he smiled and tapped the drink menu. "What would you say to a Kailua and cream?"
The second time Lindy saw the trailer:
Perhaps she wouldn't have noticed it anywhere else, but when she saw the red truck edging out the back lot of the campus broadcast lab, Lindy knew it was the same vehicle.
She'd arrived on a Pledge Week date, having volunteered to "man" the phones alongside Trey through the first two hours of prime time. Since parking was at a premium on campustown, Trey had secured a "Volunteer" tag to hang on her rear view: it was supposed to guarantee a space for the night. As she turned into the lot, she got her first good view of the red truck's driver.
He was youngish with a goatee and horn rims - a far cry from your stereotypical trucker - and he nodded at her in passing. From the open window of the cab, Dizzy Gillespie could be heard chanting afro-centric lyrics. The rear of the back trailer, she saw, was covered with a dark green tarp: she hoped it meant the trailer was empty since the evening had turned muggy.
Why was she sure this was the same vehicle? Linda didn't know, but something told her it was. Perhaps our beatnik trucker had stopped by to drop off a donation?
She almost mentioned her passing encounter to Trey. But once she got inside the studio, she realized how nebulous the whole experience was. Why had the truck and trailer so piqued her curiosity? Lindy wasn't sure, but a voice in her continued to ask the question.
"Not a good night," Trey welcomed her as she took her seat beside him in Telephone Row. "We're $20,000 below where we need to be at this time, and unless some last minute philanthropist shows up, the station may have to make more program cuts."
It'd been this way the last three drives. With government support dwindling and public funding down, the station had been slowly whittling its programming, losing even more viewers in the process.
"Ever think that this pledge thing might not be the best way to maintain an operating budget?" she muttered to Trey, as they watched the station manager preparing to plead into the camera. On the monitor, the station was broadcasting a documentary about Kenneth Fisher, a local academic who'd written a controversial anthropology tome back in the 1950's.
"If this station's to survive, it'll need to be creative in its money raising," Trey agreed, "fill a need nobody else quite does without compromising its own programming."
"Sounds like you've got some ideas."
"I've been working on a few things as a consultant," Trey admitted. But before he could elaborate, his phone light flashed. They wouldn't get back to these "few things" until six months later.
"It's just plain tragic," Belle was telling her lunchtime audience. "All that time, struggling to lose the weight, and her heart gives out when she's within a hundred pounds of her goal."
Lindy paused on her way to the fridge to hear the rest of this recital. The crew was discussing the housebound woman from teevee again. In the months since that first discussion, the mega-sized figure (whose name was Beulah) had become a running lunchroom joke. Now the joke had turned sour.
"They're gonna show her last days on tape tomorrow," Belle solemnly announced, pulling back the cellophane from her low-fat Salisbury steak. "That poor, poor woman."
"She brought it on herself," another luncheon denizen thought. "Nobody should let themselves get that obese!"
"How much weight did she actually lose?" Lindy asked as she grabbed her lunch sack. Two weeks ago she'd given up on SlimFast and switched to basic cold cut sandwiches - not even lean meat, but the stuff she'd learned to love as a girl.
"I don't know," Belle admitted. "They'll probably tell us on the show itself."
"Well, I hope she got to have at least one good meal before she kicked," Lindy decided.
The rest of the room just stared at her, as she turned and went back into her cubicle. Jeez, I've been hanging around Trey too much, she thought. Where else would such a heretical statement come from?
Perhaps she was being contrary out of boredom: her job remained uninteresting, and outside of her dinner dates with Trey, she couldn't think of a single thing that appealed to her. She was growing cranky and middle-aged, turning into the kind of woman she'd vowed she'd never become: well-dressed, wound-up and neurotic as hell. "The Plight of the Professional Woman in the Nineties" - now there was a topic for the talk shows.
If she were five years younger, she'd seriously consider just chucking it all and moving in with Trey. Lindy knew he was more than willing and had even made reference to their future together. But she also recognized that the only way she could stay satisfied in any relationship was to keep mentally employed - without some form of outside interactivity, even the strongest relationship would wither. She loved Trey but knew that her love needed ongoing stimulation to keep fresh.
That night, Lindy set the timer on her VCR to record Belle's talk show while she was at work. If asked outright what she thought she was doing, she probably would have hemmed and hawed - then deleted the setting. But she lived alone, was accountable to no one, and if she wanted to waste her time watching trash television, she had a right, goddamn it.
She just wouldn't let Trey know about it.
Making her usual forty-minute drive in thirty, she sped home from work and hit the rewind button right after coming through the door. When she saw the full-fledged Lady Beulah for the first time - dressed in a massive Chicago Bears tee shirt and a ball cap that practically screamed "Trailer Park Mom" on the front, perched on a king-sized mattress that rested on the floor, pillows backed against a paneled wall - her first response was dismay. The woman was fatter than she'd imagined.
Beulah's belly, Lindy saw, was not the largest part of her. That honor had to go to her hips and thighs, which spread to the sides of her mattress, pushing her seated belly into prominence. Her legs were mountainous and dimply, each taking up more mattress space than she and Trey combined. Though a window unit air conditioner could be seen working overtime in the background, her face was red and her tee shirt clung to her damp body. The fat woman's words were halting, punctuated by deep breaths and frequent sips of Diet Coke. It was clear every moment of her life took an effort.
The talk show host, a middle-aged white guy who looked more at home reading the weather than presiding over this freak show, was deferential and empathetically pitying. When he introduced the next clip of Beulah "a year later," it was almost as if he was sharing her dieting victory with her. "'A year?'" Lindy talked back to the screen. "What time zone are you in?"
Whatever the time frame, the next shots of Beulah showed a significantly smaller woman. Still seated in bed, she was still much more animated and lively. Her legs no longer took up most of the camera frame, though they remained her most conspicuous feature. Even the space between her words seemed shorter, as she breathlessly recounted her current minuscule eating regimen (700 calories a day) and the amount of poundage she'd lost (310 pounds: more than two Lindys!) Her Bears tee shirt was now loose enough to be wrinkled - its neck no longer snug against her chins, its short sleeves no longer cutting into the fat of her upper arms. She smiled into the camera, happy to show off her new self.
The sequence was supposed to be inspirational, but perhaps because Lindy already knew the denouement, something was off. The discrepancy between celebratory gaiety and Miz B.'s fatal finish was even more pronounced in the next film clip. Standing outside the bedroom that served as her weight-bound world for so many years, lost in her drooping tee shirt, the formerly mega-sized trailer park mom was down to plump and hippy: a fourth of the woman that she'd once been. Mid-sized, somewhere in the mid-two-hundred pound range; she looked younger, confident, on the verge of a new adventure.
The final segment was devoted to the formerly housebound woman's funeral. While most of the family - Beulah's husband, in particular - seemed to go out of their way to avoid the teevee cameras, you could always count on at least one family member to seize the spotlight. In this case, it was Beulah's sister: observably younger than her sibling but with an unmistakable family resemblance, she damned her camera-shy brother-in-law for letting Beulah grow so big.
"It's like he wanted her fat," she sobbed into the camera. "I'll never forgive him for what he allowed her to become. She's in a better place now."
"Her body is now bound by ties stronger than any that she felt at her biggest," the talk-show host solemnly told his audience. Disgusted by this ham-fisted irony, Lindy shut off the tape and went to change out of her work clothes. Pulling out an XL tee shirt, she had a sudden thought.
Returning to her VCR, grabbing the remote as she slid her tee shirt down onto her torso, Lindy ran the tape back to its opening sequence, than skipped ahead to the follow-ups. After five viewings, she was finally certain.
"It's a hoax," she announced to her empty apartment.
"They reversed the chronology," she told Trey over dinner. "Beulah wasn't losing weight, she was gaining. But they didn't take into account her wardrobe. Someone decided to keep her in the same tee shirt to enhance the dramatic effect, but they forgot one thing. At her largest, that shirt was stretched to the utmost on her neck and arms - yet the collar ribbing didn't lose its shape when she supposedly got thinner. The reason: Beulah was growing into that tee shirt, not out of it."
She stopped to finish off her Kailua and cream. Over the course of their dinner dates, she'd gotten into the habit of ordering one at the start. The drink seemed to sharpen her taste buds.
"My girl, the investigative reporter. Thinking of changing careers?"
"Constantly - but that's not the point. These people created this tabloid tragedy: the poor little fat girl who grew too immense to leave her house, lost the weight through diet and will power only to die at her moment of triumph. It's offensive."
"Which part do you find most offensive?" Trey asked, handing over a bowl of butter-and-garlic-salt-soaked breadsticks. A year ago, she'd have waved them away, but after dating Trey she seemed to have lost much of her resistance. If she wasn't skilled at camouflage dressing, it might've shown on her (that half-inch of midriff having grown into a much more graspable inch).
"I'm not sure," she said after nibbling through two drumsticks. "Perhaps it's the reinforcement of the same old sexist line: thin and pretty is the only way for a woman to be satisfied. It feeds into women's fear of growing fat, reinforces the message of the diet-mongers."
"But isn't the message subtly anti-diet?" Trey noted. "Losing all that weight ultimately made no difference to Beulah. She still passed away."
Their salad bowls arrived, and the conversation paused while Lindy spooned extra tablespoons of blue cheese dressing on hers.
"I think you're giving these folks too much credit," she argued, waggling a fork of dressing drenched iceberg. "We're talking cynical teevee manipulation of a woman with an obvious eating disorder - and a white trash husband who probably got off on her inability to do anything but eat. They didn't show us the grave at Beulah's funeral, but I'm betting it was huge."
"Like Ruth Pontico's."
"Who?"
"'Baby' Ruth Pontico," Trey explained. "The famous circus fat lady. She reportedly grew to over eight-hundred-and-fifty pounds, and when she died, it took sixteen pallbearers to carry her steel reinforced coffin."
"Why do you know this?" Lindy asked, fascinated. During his narrative, she'd finished her salad and was dragging another stick of garlic bread through the leftover dressing.
"I'm a teacher," Trey reminded her, "a compendium of trivial information. I've always had a fascination with certain aspects of the old-fashioned side show."
"Which 'aspects'?"
"Side shows were a community where folks were celebrated for their differentness, not chastised for it," Trey elaborated. "It's different from our current talk show world - where the main point behind displaying different people is to condescend to them." He smiled as she took another breadstick.
"Aren't you being willfully naïve?" Lindy countered. She nodded to the waitress, who'd brought her plate of pasta al pesto and was offering to grate some mozzarella on top of it. "Didn't the freak show audience taunt them? Didn't the barkers make cheesy jokes at the performers' expense? 'So big it takes ten men to hug her and a boxcar to lug her!' How supportive was that?"
"Maybe I am being excessively nostalgic," Trey admitted, biting in a slice of portabella mushroom that looked so good Lindy wished she'd ordered it also. "But my belief is that the side show performers knew their worth despite all the jokes the rubes made at their expense."
"Nice to think so, anyway," Lindy thought, then she turned her attention to her dinner and forgot about Miz Beulah for the rest of the night.
The third time Lindy saw the truck:
It was waiting outside her apartment building.
She was scooting home after spending the night at Trey's, eager to change out of her rumpled eveningwear so she'd look presentable at the office, when she saw the red truck sans trailer waiting for her in the street. She knew it was for her because the driver waved as she turned into her driveway. Torn between fear and irritation, Lindy slammed out of her car and stomped over to the young man behind the wheel.
"You've been out late," he opened. As she got closer, she could pick up alterna-country coming from the truck's CD player. The man had eclectic taste, she thought. "Your mother know the kinda hours you keep?"
"Not that it's any of your business," Lindy shot back, "but I haven't had a civil conversation with my mother in years."
"I know," the goateed youth replied, holding open the passenger door. "Trey told me."
"Trey? How do you know Trey?"
"My wife and I both work with him," the young man told her. "I know you've seen my spouse. Name's Beulah Coin."
To her credit, Lindy was able to maintain her poise. Looking Mr. Coin slowly up and down, keeping herself a good yard's length away from his grasp, she smiled and said, "You kept out of camera range, but I think I can see the resemblance."
"Didn't want you catching on too fast," he explained, "or it wouldn't have been playing fair. That was clever, picking up on the tee shirt. We'd scheduled another truck sighting to keep you interested, but turns out it wasn't necessary."
"That figure in the trailer . . ."
" . . . was Beulah," Coin admitted. "Wanna meet her?" He patted the passenger seat invitingly. For some reason, the presumption behind his gesture amused her.
"And why the hell should I follow you?" she asked.
"Curiosity," he replied, "and maybe something more. Be honest now. Isn't there something about the Beulah story that's spoken to you?"
The question took her aback, in part because she really hadn't considered how unusual her preoccupation with the whole Beulah set-up had been. Perhaps her subconscious had recognized the woman in the trailer all along. Lindy tried to dredge the image from memory, but for some reason, the only picture she could reconstruct was from within the trailer looking out.
"I'll take my car," she decided, returning to her Saturn.
"Hold on!" the young man called, and he tossed her a plastic grocery sack. Inside was a variety box of Dolly Madison donuts.
"Figured you haven't had breakfast yet," he explained.
Though she had, Lindy took the package anyway.
She followed Coin's truck off the same exit that she recalled from her first encounter. It was a trucker's exit, she saw with all manner of fast food spots off the highway. KFC. Pizza Hut. Hardee's. Steak 'N' Shake. She'd always wondered about the tendency of fast food restaurants to cluster so closely together.
They drove through dawn-lit farmland and small towns whose only business appeared to be combo gas stations/food shops or video stores. Every few miles, she'd reach over to the passenger seat and grab another donut.
They finally took a turn onto a country road that lead into a small wooded outcropping. At the edge of the woods was a large pre-fab metal building with the unhelpful label "A.S. Enterprises." Within the trees was a sprawling log cabin. Coin parked his truck in a lot to the side of the house. As Lindy got out, she saw the start of a second domicile a hundred feet away.
"We can do a tour of the studio later," Coin told her as she followed him up the walkway to the rustic seeming cabin. "But you'll want to meet B. first."
"'Studio'?" Lindy repeated, as she stepped through the open entrance. Coin just smiled and gestured toward a figure waiting inside.
"My husband's being deliberately obscure," Coin's wife told her once Lindy settled her gaze upon her. "He enjoys playing the Man of Mystery."
She looked even more gigantic in person. Unconstrained by the boundaries of the teevee screen, Beulah Coin loomed before them overwhelmingly. In a navy blue sleeveless dress that had to have been specially made to fit her pyramidal form, her bespectacled face lightly made up, she was a far cry from the lumpen mom on the talk shows. As she sat back in her amply cushioned chair, her outfit rose to show off her bulging legs and Birkenstock-clad feet. To her right was a semi-circular desk with phone and a Gateway computer; on the other side was a small apartment refrigerator with an eight cup Krup coffeemaker on top. Lindy stood and unabashedly stared, unsure what to say.
"Forgive me if I don't get up," the fat lady said. "It takes more time than I'm sure you want to wait."
"That's okay," Lindy reassured her, stepping forward to shake the woman's hand. "I didn't know you could get up! My name's Lindy. Can I call you Beulah?"
"Beatrice," the woman corrected. "Beulah's just my screen name. And now that I'm dead, I don't think I'll be using that any more!" She laughed heartily, causing her mammoth torso to shift and sway, slapping against the desk. The phone rang, and without even swiveling to see, she stretched her arm out and grabbed the receiver. "Yeah, she just arrived," Bea told the voice on the other end of the line. "You'll be the first to hear once the interview's over." Dropping the phone back on its hook, she grinned and confided to Lindy, "That was Trey. Checking up."
Lindy turned to Ian for an explanation, but the young man had taken advantage of her earlier stunned paralysis to disappear. "Ian's gone to get brunch," Bea explained. "It's just you and me, so I'm the one who gets to do exposition.
"I'm sure you saw our sign outside. A.S. Enterprises is in the business of supplying people for 'reality television.' Virtually every talk or syndicated news show uses us - some more than others, though they'll all come to us when they're in a pinch."
She indicated a chair to the left of the doorway, so Lindy took a seat. Opening the small fridge, Bea pulled out a ceramic pitcher (shaped, Lindy noted, like a fat woman in a bathing suit) and poured cream into two mugs. A dash of coffee in each - then she slid the closest mug along the desk toward Lindy. Soon as her guest took a sip, she continued her explanation.
"Most of our clients are acting students from the university," the fat woman explained. "We give 'em a role - the former homecoming queen who wants to tell her king that she's a lesbian, say - and prep them in the rehearsal studio. For most of 'em, it's a fairly easy gig. Good experience, too."
"I'd always heard that talk show guests didn't get paid much," Lindy thought, as she came to the end of her coffee.
"That's what they'd like you to believe," Bea said with a smile, refilling Lindy's cup. "But when ratings are down or Sweeps are approaching, you'll be surprised at how flexible that rule can get. The big money is in finder's fees - which we split with our clients. Not only do we 'find' the guests, we guarantee the guests are genuine!"
"Lesbian homecoming queens?"
"Okay. So we embellish a little. I assure you that the actress who played the part was gay."
"And you?"
"I'm fat. But unlike Beulah, I rather enjoy my size."
This was the part of Bea's explanation that Lindy most wanted to hear.
"Say more."
Before she could, Coin re-entered the room behind a wheeled cart laden with covered serving trays. All three shelves were packed to the brim. As he passed before Lindy, she caught a whiff of poached eggs.
"Brunch!" Bea exclaimed, as her husband uncovered the first dish - two stacks of French toast tall enough to feed a family of six. "Would you like some?"
Without giving her time to answer, Coin handed them both empty plates. Bea deftly slid the first pile onto hers and then began to fill each layer with butter and syrup. Though the sight should have appalled her, Lindy slowly nodded her head. Coin placed the sister stack on her plate
"Butter?" he asked.
"Just syrup," she said, all the while wondering about the rest of the covered dishes. Lindy didn't think of herself as much of a breakfast eater, but something about that stack kick-started her appetite. She was halfway through her plate before she realized Bea's narration had ceased. Then Bea's husband waved a full platter of eggs benedict under Lindy's nose, and her questions once more retreated.
She went through half of every platter - hash brown potatoes with green peppers, mushrooms and cheese; blueberry crepes with powdered sugar and real whipped cream; oatmeal with vanilla cream and strawberries; whole wheat toast with butter and orange marmalade; crispy bacon by the pound - without ever feeling full or stopping to question her marvelous new capacity. Sitting with Bea, eating just seemed to be the thing to do. To not, would've been the height of rudeness. It all tasted so fresh and invigorating, how could she resist?
It was going on eleven when they finished Bea's Brunch.
"I was always plump as a girl," Bea told her once their breakfast ware was rolled out of the room. "But it wasn't until I got to college that I came to terms with my body. Meeting Ian helped, but I think I would've gotten there by myself even if I hadn't found him in that Soc/Anthro class." She indicated the coffee pot and offered a fresh cup to Lindy.
"It's in the cream, isn't it?" Lindy realized, as she settled back with her mug. "Whatever it is that's piqued my appetite!" She took the fat lady creamer and added a generous dollop to her cup. In for a penny, she thought.
"You are sharp," Bea said appreciatively, sipping her own cup of java. "But let me tell you: none of this would've worked unless you were predisposed to it."
"Why all the rigmarole? Why play peek-a-boo on the highway?"
"That was Ian's call. We didn't wanna scare you off. Seemed better to parcel info gradually." Pausing, she eyed Lindy in her chair. "You gained thirty-five pounds this morning," she finally said.
The statement was more curious than upsetting. "How can you tell?" Lindy asked.
Bea shrugged, and her belly emphasized the gesture. "I'm very attuned to it," she explained as it were no big deal. "When you arrived, you weighed about 156; I'd guess you'd put on fifteen pounds since you first saw me in the trailer: size fourteen, size sixteen. Now you're about 190. Does that bother you?"
Lindy considered the question. Sometime while they were noshing, she'd rolled down her control-top pantyhose. The elastic on her dress' cinched waist seemed to've popped out, too.
Thirty-five pounds.
It should have bothered her, but it didn't. When had Lindy undergone such a significant attitude change? She couldn't pinpoint the moment, and perhaps there hadn't been one. One thing was certain: Bea's brunch had been so luscious that already she was anticipating lunchtime.
"Only gained twenty with my first morning binge," Bea told her. "I think you have potential to be the largest woman teevee's ever seen."
"And after that?"
"A.S. Enterprises needs someone with your Human Resources expertise," Bea answered, pulling a drawer packed with bags of Nestles' chocolate. She tossed a sack of milk chocolate with almonds to Lindy, then bit open a bag of dark. "What d'you say?"
"Hell of a way to interview someone for a job," Lindy told her.
"That's the kind of input we'd expect from our H.R. Director," Ian interjected, re-entering the room with a single handheld tray filled with cut vegetables, cheese and crackers. "Wanna tour of the studio before lunch?"
"Maybe I should go home and change into something a little more - um - free-flowing, first," Lindy decided. When she stood, her dress made a tiny protest.
"No need," Bea reassured her, casually popping a slice of cheddar into her mouth. "We've got your size in our costume department!"
Lindy picked a size twenty-four jumper (she already knew where lunch would be taking her) and followed Ian through the metal building. It proved to contain a series of sets and dressing rooms, most of them occupied by actors and their coaches. She recognized a few of the latter from Pledge Weeks.
"Who comes up with these scenarios?" she asked Ian, reading off a series of titles from a call sheet on a hall bulletin board.
"I do, actually," he confessed. "Just a frustrated writer."
She watched two actors rehearse ("My Boyfriend Is Attracted to My Grandmother"), absently polishing off the sack of candy like it was popcorn at the movies, then hit the building's kitchen for a box of Frappucino ice cream bars. The fridge and freezer were, of course, well stocked.
"Bea doesn't make her way over here all that often," Ian explained, "but we like to be prepared for her." Lindy nodded. She'd already noted the strategically placed benches throughout the grounds and building, offering respite to bodies not designed for extensive walking.
"I don't see any cameras," Lindy noted. "How'd you film Beulah's home scenes?"
"Thought you'd figured that out," Ian tsked. "You saw us on the way to the studio that first day. And saw me outside the studio on Pledge Night. "
"The public television station," she realized. "You filmed there?"
"Trey worked out the original arrangement; it's become a good source of extra revenue for 'em. He sez you first gave him the idea."
She was not the least surprised to find her erstwhile lover waiting for her once they returned to Bea's workstation.
"So," he asked, once she'd settled back into her seat. "What d'you think?"
"I think I'm famished," Lindy told him, smiling as Ian rolled her own lunch cart before her. Lifting the first cover, she found a foot square serving of spinach lasagna encircled by well-buttered garlic bread. "You made this, didn't you?" she asked her boyfriend.
"How'd you guess?"
"Ian was with me, so I figured you'd phoned earlier from the kitchen. Didn't know you were such a good cook, but, then, we've mainly eaten out."
"Ian and I switch off," he said.
"Well," Lindy noted, as she cut into the lasagna with her fork. "I hope he's as good as you." Her hunger surged, and she swiftly sampled the pasta dish. It tasted divine - divine and addictive. It wasn't until Lindy made her way through a third of it that she thought to check out the rest of the room. Bea was working on her own helping; Trey was sitting back, watching her.
"Want a piece?" she asked, but Trey shook his head.
"More fun watching you eat," he confessed.
"Suspected as much," she thought out loud. "Perhaps that could be our hook!"
"'Hook'?"
"'My Husband Won't Stop Feeding Me.'" She pushed her empty plate to the edge of the tray and started on a tureen of broccoli cheese soup. "A perfect tale for the talk show crowd."
"'Husband,'" Trey considered. "Is this a proposal?"
"You up for the part?"
"Babe, I've been rehearsing it for months!" He indicated the tray before her.
"Guessed as much," Lindy said. "I still wanted to hear it from you!" She paused to consider the rest of her lunch, started buttering a twelve-inch loaf of French bread and then dunked a tip in her soup. "Don't think I could stop now if I wanted. But since I don't want to, it probably doesn't matter. It's clear I'm meant to be a mega-sized woman. I just hope that I can be that woman with you!"
"You can and will," Trey said, pulling a ring from within his sports jacket. It was at least twice the size of her thumb. "Will you marry me?"
Lindy called work in the midst of lunch and told them a family emergency had arisen. The rest of the day was spent getting to know the limits of her appetite. While she was learning, Trey returned to her apartment and packed her personal items, bagging and dumping her outgrown clothing into the nearest Goodwill box - so long, size sixteen. Her other possessions would be stored in an empty rehearsal room until their house was finished.
"Didn't want to start on the main structure until you said, 'yes,'" Trey told her as he prepared to cart an armload of unmade packing boxes out to Ian's truck. Lindy, her mouth full of cherry cobbler, smiled and loosened her jumper's straps, then returned to her meal. Their lunch lasted through most of the afternoon. The more she ate, the more she settled into her new role.
At workday's end, Bea slowly disembarked from behind her desk and took Lindy to dinner. The dining room was located behind the office: a darkly sumptuous room with a long heavy table loaded with mountains of roast beef, potatoes, pasta and freshly made bread - all of them smothered in a cream-based gravy. The room's light was muted, the better to focus on the stimulating scents wafting from the serving platters. Ditching her too-tight jumper for a simple free-flowing sundress, Lindy rapaciously dove into dinner.
By the end of her first day, she was close to 300 pounds.
Ian and Bea put them up in a guest room with a double king-sized bed, a mini-fridge and a closet filled with Bea's cast-offs. Though Lindy should have been bloated and uncomfortable, all she felt was exhausted: a side effect of the appetite stimulating cream, perhaps. She fell asleep in her once-loose sundress, worn out from her day of gluttony, too gone to even notice when Trey climbed into bed with her.
Her sleep was restless, however - from both the unfamiliar bedding and the equally unfamiliar body padding all around her. Once in the middle of the night, she woke, discombobulated by the way she was splayed across the bed, panicked by her strange new situation. Staring at the room made featureless by the dark, she felt the figure sleeping up against the wall of her back and wondered if her fiancé had led her down the wrong path.
Those doubts vanished with the daylight, though - as they would throughout her metamorphosis. With dawn, Lindy's morning hunger stirred, pushing aside all worries. As she rolled her new body out of bed, she visualized the stack of French toast from yesterday's brunch and imagined digging into a plate load twice its size. By the time she was ready for her morning coffee, her fears seemed distant and somewhat childish - a young girl's dread of her inevitable adulthood.
They charted her character arc over breakfast (at the rate she was gaining, it was essential to have a general idea of her character from the get-go), Ian and Trey both throwing out suggestions but ultimately deferring to Lindy for the final take.
"You're the one who has to live this role," Ian conceded. "Since it's largely unscripted, it all has to feel natural to you."
The affianced couple posed for their wedding shots right after breakfast: the official start of their feeder relationship. Packed into a wedding dress that emphasized her spherical body, Lindy stood beside Trey in his cheap tuxedo. She'd picked a name to go with her character: Candy. Lindy liked the way it combined seventies bimbo naiveté with her burgeoning sweet tooth. As part of her role, she affected a nervous girlish giggle and wore too much makeup in her pictures.
"Candy" stood eye to eye with the groom in her wedding pictures, but it would've taken three-and-a-half of him to block her from camera sight. In her white dress and veil, bare legs and flat white shoes, she looked even fatter than she was. Unlike Bea, Lindy was gaining most of her weight in her trunk: her breasts were each the size of table globes; her belly hung halfway down the front of her thighs. If she bent either of her knees, it brought her paunch into such clear relief against her dress that the droop of her belly apron was clearly delineated. The lower part of her face had so filled in that you could barely see her neck. Even when she wasn't eating, she looked like she had her mouth full.
Their wedding was shot on a soundstage at the college public television station - the same soundstage that had served as Beulah Coin's bedridden quarters - and followed by an outdoor video shooting in Trey's backyard. For story background, a series of ersatz home videos was shot documenting Candy's weight gain. The first was set at an outdoor birthday party, our heroine in a form-fitting housedress being pressured into eating extra birthday cake by her feeder hubby. It was difficult pretending to be reluctant, but Lindy managed. In the end, she got to eat all the cake she wanted, anyway.
Next day Lindy phoned and resigned from her old job. Ian concocted a tale of family woe to justify her abrupt resignation, and she never returned to her old office. Belle and the rest of the lunch crew wouldn't have recognized her if she had.
She grew through Bea's outfits at a much faster rate than the former talk show star. "Took me a couple weeks to get the size I am," the bottom-heavy office manager admitted that second night at dinner. Bea sliced a slab of breast off the large roasted duck in front of her, and held it before her mouth while she finished her thought. "I see you passing me before the week's out." She bit into her poultry contentedly. "It varies from celebrant to celebrant."
"'Celebrant'?"
"A phrase from Ken Fisher's book," Trey explained from his end of the dining table (both he and Ian took the table's shorter ends, so Lindy and Bea could have more room to spread their selections). "Celebrants are figures - usually female - who bring abundance to the village by themselves becoming abundant. They become, if you will, living symbols of success and prosperity."
"Bea's been our symbol," Ian continued. "Her first appearance on teevee really built interest in the company."
"And I'm her successor," Lindy deliberated, as she savored the taste of her own plate of duck.
The flavor lingered in her mouth. She was developing several levels of eating, Lindy noticed. Sometimes, taste was her primary concern, the different sensations each separate item brought with it. Others, it was the simple act of pushing as much food as possible into her demanding stomach. It was difficult to select the more satisfying approach, so she alternated between them. Her body never felt so full that it muted her hunger.
"My heir apparent," Bea agreed, saluting Lindy with her fork.
Bea's successor beamed happily, unable to speak with her mouth full of duck and apple stuffing.
Lindy added poundage with a rapidity that would have astounded the talk show audience if it knew the truth. They videotaped her daily to chart it but had to be careful shooting individual set-ups. Spend too much time on one sequence and her visible gain wreaked havoc with continuity. No wonder they'd missed the tee shirt with Bea.
The second day of shooting, "Candy" celebrated the Fourth of July by downing a pack of Ballpark franks on camera. (At one point, she thought of DeNiro in Raging Bull and started giggling uncontrollably.) Dressed in a pair of cut-off jeans that cut into her thighs plus a sleeveless top that crawled up her abdomen, settling into the folds on her sides, she sat back in a wooden lawn chair and let Trey bring plates of franks, chips and potato salad to her.
The feedee actress weighed close to four hundred pounds (according to Bea). Reposing in her lawn chair, her belly rested on her thighs, inches away from her dimpling knees. Her lower face was taking up more of her profile, blending into her neck as if to draw greater attention to the basic act of swallowing. Lindy was turning into an exemplar of appetite, and the thought neither shamed nor worried her.
That night, Trey pulled out Fisher's book, Magical Abundance in Primitive Societies, and read to Lindy as she sat in bed devouring K.F.C. for eight. (Her days were spent gorging on wholesome Midwestern cooking, but nights were made for junk food.) Whenever a passage sparked a question she'd raise her hand and Trey would pause to first let her swallow than ask. There were, she learned that night, people throughout the country who had been transformed by Fisher's book. Most of them kept out of the limelight, content to consume whatever was brought to them, happy to bring good fortune to their fat-worshipping lovers.
Third day of shooting, and "Candy" was at a place in her marriage where she no longer put up even token resistance to her husband's feeding. Lindy got up early and rode to the television studio in the passenger's seat of Ian's truck, her famished belly wedged against the dashboard. Waiting for her was a restaurant set with a table and nearby buffet serving table. The day was spent gorging through breakfast, brunch and dinner buffets - breaking between meals to change into a larger sundress.
At day's end, Lindy hefted herself out of her chair and was helped off set by Trey and Ian, the studio crew applauding her work. Standing, she could feel her forefront dangle past her outstretched knees; she had to shift her full body just to take a step. Every move she made, it was like discovering her body for the first time. She loved the way she felt: transfigured and scupturesque, gloriously gluttonous.
They took her to a mini-van with the center seats out and set her in the back seat, then drove to a grain bin out in the country. There, Lindy was able to get her first formally measured weight: 624 pounds - four times the woman she'd been when she first met Bea.
"You look so lovely," Trey told her as she stared at the numbers on the scale. "Better than I ever imagined."
"How long have you imagined me this way?" she wondered.
"Since the day I met you," Trey admitted. "Is that upsetting?
She considered his question, then shrugged.
"At this point," she said patting her 88-inch belly, "the only thing that'd truly upset me would be to find there's nothing to eat back home."
"No worries there," Ian replied. "Bea's already phoned the order; Ian will go ahead to pick it up. There'll be a carton of Steak 'N' Shake burgers waiting for you back at the house."
"With cheese?"
"With cheese," he reassured her.
They skipped filming the next day, but it didn't mean a respite from eating. Lindy still had many pounds to go to reach her end weight.
"There's a point where the cream's effectiveness diminishes," Bea explained as she watched Lindy efficiently lift cubes of honey-glazed ham to her mouth. The celebrant's capacity had grown over the last three days to the point where she was eating four meals to every one of Bea's. "Your body develops a tolerance to it." She took a sip of decaf coffee, then continued. "You'll never lose your love of great eating, even if your appetite tapers off a bit. I've even managed to gain a few more pounds since my big growth."
Lindy realized she'd never asked the question, so she did. "What is your current weight?"
"1058," Bea announced proudly, settling back in her chair to emphasize her belly. "When I did the talk shows, I hadn't yet passed the half-ton mark. That won't be a problem for you, though."
"Think you're right," Lindy agreed. She dipped her ham into a ten-quart casserole dish of potatoes au gratin and returned to the business at hand.
Without having to stop for camera set-ups or even costume changes, Lindy ate incessantly. At times, she thought she could feel the inches accumulating, though this had to be her imagination. It was in the smaller parts of her body where this seemed likeliest - where her lower arms rolled against her wrists or her jowls swelled beneath her ear lobes, for instance. But more likely it was simply the result of shifting and redistributing her weight.
She more than doubled the consumption of her previous days, never feeling sated. At times, she thought of the women at her old job, of their meager lunches and pointless dieting, and she'd feel a flash of pity for them. They would never know the sense of freedom she felt.
By the time Lindy ponderously trudged back to her sleeping quarters, she was somewhere in the upper 800's; another day of this, and she'd be passing Bea.
They started alternating Trey's readings at night with taped viewings of early mega-sized talk show guests. Though her growth seemed unaccompanied by any of the physical or medical complications that she associated with extreme fatness, Lindy knew she had to assume some of these traits for the camera. A slow walk around the bedroom got her breathing much more heavily for the next half hour; a bowl of fried jalapenos made her face flush.
It was fakery, but few people wanted to know the truth: that a woman her size could still be healthy, that a woman would willingly let herself grow so large, or that she'd do it in so short a time. To acknowledge this would be to deny all that one knew about fatness.
"Let's not do any more filming," she decided that night as she sat in bed surrounded by Pizza Hut cartons, "until I reach my real weight."
"Won't the change seem abrupt?" Trey wondered, making his way through two empties to sit and stroke her thigh. "Already, you're considerably bigger than you were on your last film footage."
"Ian can think of something," she said between bites of stuffed-crust pepperoni. "Perhaps Candy's hubby decided to keep her out of sight for a while to focus on some heavy duty feeding."
Ian nodded happily, and Lindy noticed the gesture.
"You knew this would happen, didn't you?" she grinned. "That once I had a day without delays, I'd be unwilling to go back to 'em! You love watching me gorge!" She piled two slices of pizza on top of each other and bit into them avidly.
"Not as much as you love eating!" he countered, and he held a fresh open box before her. Lindy couldn't disagree with that, not with an eighteen-inch Hawaiian pizza calling her. Swallowing the last of her pepperoni, she stretched her fat hands toward his offering, her unfillable paunch edging up her calves as she did.
The next three days were spent in unstaunched gluttonous indulgence. Seated at the dining room table, Trey and Ian serving her in shifts, Lindy lost herself in gormandizing. She grew more adept at pulling out every flavor, every nuance of seasoning. Her servings remained simple fare - nothing more esoteric than what you'd find in a Betty Crocker Cookbook - but that was apparently part of the ritual. The point was to immerse yourself in the food of your culture, to appreciate it in abundance. This she did.
By week's end, she knew she was finished.
Lindy's first sign was a sense of fullness: a sensation she'd began to think she might never experience again. She was halfway into a pumpkin pie, slathering tablespoons of real whipped cream on top of her third quarter, when a sudden heaviness began forming deep within her belly. By now, the act of gorging was so routine that this feeling didn't stop her from biting into her third slice. But as she took each forkful, they grew progressively more tasteless in her mouth. Undaunted, she finished the piece, then determinedly went to work on the final quarter. She was not about to be beaten by a mere pie.
"Done," she finally declared once she'd swallowed the last bit of crust, stifling her first belch. She felt happily sated, yet somehow tearful - rather like she'd been at the end of her first real sexual experience. Sitting back, she surveyed the devastated dining room table.
"I'll get Trey and Bea," Ian said from his corner of the table, and he dashed from the room. While she waited for her hostess to arrive, Lindy took stock of herself.
She'd outgrown Bea's largest two days before and had been keeping A.S. Enterprise's costumers busy hastily stitching together larger dresses. The design was simple: sleeveless, minus any frills or pleats, and belly length (the bottom hem designed to match the lowest hangs of her belly apron). Seated, her dress draped to the floor. As did her paunch.
Lindy could feel it flatten against the hardwood; it brought a surprising sense of accomplishment. Two nights earlier (Long John Silver night), Trey had shown her a photo gallery of famous circus side show performers. Among them had been a photo of Robert Earl Hughes, another Midwesterner. Hughes had reached a purported weight of 1069 pounds; sitting back, his cover-alled paunch ballooned within inches of his feet but did not touch them. Lindy's totally covered her bare feet. She felt it pressing constantly, was amazed that her feet didn't fall asleep. But her body had adapted to her weight in ways she never would have expected.
Though she hadn't gotten a full look at herself in days, Lindy had full sense of her new body. In her bench-length chair, her arms rested at a ninety-degree angle against her sides. From this position, she could touch both her hips and torso with the palm of her hands without bending her arms. When she lifted her hands to her mouth, her tremendous upper arms pushed her breasts up past her chins.
Her breasts had strived to keep up with her belly, but it was clear she was destined to be apple-shaped. They lay in wobbling splendor on top of her abdomen, but there was no way they could compete with the magnificence of her body center. Lindy's paunch, after all, was over two hundred inches in circumference. If she reached down with one arm (she could not do both at the same time), she could feel two folds along the side. Neither was very deep: her torso, she thought with a smile, was a solid construction.
"Lindy!" Trey boomed as he came into the dining room. "Is Ian right? Are you really feeling full?"
"You disappointed?"
"Only in that I wanted to be here when it happened," Trey explained, wiping his hands on his striped chef's apron. "I've been imagining this moment for days now: the expression on your face. What'd she look like, Ian?"
"Same as she does right now," Ian told him. "Beaming."
"The girl's got a lot to be proud of," Bea huffed from behind him. She paused to catch her breath and take a deep swig of chocolate malted milk shake. "She's outgrown me by yards!"
"Have I outgrown your ability to tell my weight?" Lindy wondered.
"Not in the least," Bea said. "Want it in pounds or kilograms?"
"Pounds. I've never been good with metric measurements."
"Fair enough," Bea said. But she still had to prolong it a bit. She handed Ian her half gallon glass (it was nearly depleted, anyway), then proceeded to slowly walk up to the seated Lindy. She didn't say a word until her belly came into contact with the mega-sized actress. Then she backed away.
"Well?"
"Seventeen hundred and change," Bea pronounced.
"How much change?"
"Thirty-five to thirty-six pounds."
Lindy considered the number, and then deliberately shifted in her chair. Her body shook sumptuously; raising the hem of her dress of the floor while her lowermost paunch still remained there. Her breasts bobbled up ahead of her chins.
"Do we wanna admit that much on television?" Trey wondered aloud. "It's much more than anybody has publicly seen."
"We can claim any weight we want - bigger or smaller," Lindy thought. "Nobody knows what this weight looks like."
"We do," Bea said, and the foursome settled down around the table to discuss their plans for Candy's teevee unveiling.
The following day, however, Lindy commandeered a spare room in the studio building and set up a temporary office. (At her current size, there wasn't much comfort space for both her and Bea in the Coin house office.) Ian and Trey moved the kitchenette refrigerator along with a cabinet for dry goods behind her desk. With two kitchen chairs placed before her desk, Lindy started interviewing applicants.
She started early each morning because of the time it took for her to get from one building to the next. Lindy loved to watch each job candidate's reaction to her when they stepped in for an interview. In a full-length dress, she looked large enough to have a love seat draped underneath her clothes. How they coped with the sight of her made for a good gauge of their ability to cope with the unexpected.
For the first time in years, Lindy found herself interested in her work. The combination of casting coach and H.R. person had its own special challenges, she found. She was flexing job muscles she hadn't used in years.
Though her earlier voracity had abated, she still had a healthy appetite. She always made time for a quick nosh between interviews - and kept a full bowl of candies within easy reach on the desk. Trey liked to brag that her taste buds had become so refined, she could even tell if two Hershey's Kisses had been part of the same batch. Lindy had become a connoisseur of American comfort food - which suited her since her body was so largely comfortable.
They shot her first live talk show sequence four weeks later in a studio bedroom set. Seated width-wise on a king-size bed that rested against the wall, her legs and rear obscured by sheets, wearing a turquoise spaghetti strap top that accentuated her multiply bulging arms, Lindy was fully immersed in her character. As she waited between camera set-ups, she nervously nibbled through several boxes of Dolly Madisons. To Candy, a carton was the equivalent of a candy bar.
"Could you walk us through a typical day's menu, Candy?" the talk show host asked at one point in the interview.
"Well, Jerry," she said, smiling sweetly into the camera and pausing to wipe a dab of powdered sugar off her lightly lipsticked mouth. "I dunno. I don't do a lot of walking these days. . ." She laughed, watching the host's puzzlement on the studio monitor. Out of camera range, Trey gave her a thumbs-up.
They'd decided that the full-sized Candy was not going to be the least bit apologetic about her size. It was a stance that Lindy felt much more comfortable taking, even as she knew the majority of the talk show audience would still be unable to accept it.
"Fair enough," Jerry finally replied. "What'd you have for breakfast today?"
"I ate light because I had to do the show," Candy began, then she launched into her real breakfast: a dozen eggs in a Texas omelet, half a loaf of toast, a six pack of bagels with lox and cream cheese, several bowls of cereal and a gallon of whole milk. "Did I mention the sausage patties?" she asked innocently. Over her earpiece, she could hear the studio audience murmuring in amazement.
"Not yet," the talk show host told her.
She grinned and her chins followed along.
When they finished filming, Lindy cast off the sheet and eased off the bed. Both she and Trey watched undisguised footage of her form from all angles: as a record and a means for Lindy to get full view of herself. In the weeks since her life-changing binge, she'd put on close to forty pounds, tipping over 1800 pounds. It was her intention to reach the two thousand mark for their wedding day. Though Trey had reassured her that he had no need for her to grow any larger, the marker was significant to her.
Not that she was any petite fleur at 1800 pounds, of course. In her form-hugging top and skirt, Lindy was an overpowering icon of obese womanhood. Her breasts and belly hung before her majestically, past the range of her outstretched arms. Looking down at herself (as far as her chins would allow, at least), she saw a nearly unimaginable topography of swelling breast and far-off forefront. Her enhanced flesh dimpled and folded beneath the fabric of her dress with even the slightest adjustment of her body.
"Quite a show," Trey said, as Lindy slowly steadied herself. By his side, the public television station manager was watching her efforts, taking care not to gawk too openly. In a studio next door, they were readying for the station's Fall Pledge Drive.
Trey rushed to her side with a bottle of Fruitopia and a knapsack full of snacks. Lindy took a grateful swig, then beamed at the studio crew. Already Ian was working on the scenario for her next talk show appearance (they had four planned until her inevitable demise), so they all knew they'd be working together again.
When she walked to the trailer Lindy had to arch her back as far as possible to keep her front from dragging the floor. Moving inexorably toward the exit, her whole body jiggled all around her. At her present size, the biggest hassle walking was in keeping her body from interfering with itself: her legs had to push against a wall of dangling belly; her upper arms and breasts were like fervent lovers doing a slow dance against each other; her out-of-reach backside was constantly pleading with her to sit back down. Though she had the musculature to move, there were times she thought immobility might even be a relief.
Those times passed, however. She wasn't Candy.
As she backed up the steel ramp into her trailer (she didn't have room to turn around once she got inside), Trey followed.
"Just got the word," he told her, unzipping and hanging her knapsack on a nail for easy access. "They've finally finished setting up our house." He smiled and squeezed her free hand. They no longer, Lindy noted, saw quite eye to eye. As her pelvic girdle had widened to support her torso, she'd lost three inches of height.
"Including my office?" she asked, as she lowered herself onto her trailer-width bench. The floor space in Bea's office had been growing increasingly dear, and she was looking forward to stretching out in her own place.
"Your office and mine," he reassured her. Trey had not signed a contract for the new semester; instead, he planned to devote all his energies to the business and his hungry fiancé.
"Great," Lindy said, and she blew a kiss to her lover as he raised the trailer gate then headed for the truck's driver seat. She could hardly wait to get to her new home. She was already anticipating the housewarming feast.
And now she was within the trailer.
The Midwestern landscape was bare, its corn and soya crops harvested. She could almost imagine next year's crop, though, as she passed each field, bestowing benedictions like some well-fed harvest goddess. Perched on her bench, Lindy's eye level was more than a foot-and-a-half taller than it used to be: her own seat had so much padding that it made her tower over Trey when she was in repose.
She watched the cars trailing behind them, thinking back to the day she'd first seen Bea and the trailer. They hit a curve, sending a swish of breeze beneath her skirt, chilling her lower belly teasingly. For some strange reason, this touch from the outside world piqued her appetite.
When they got near their exit, she saw a gray Buick LeSabre approaching. Craning forward, she looked across her forefront to the driver. It was a thirtyish young woman with a round face, large eyeglasses perched on her hairdo, a professional but day-rumpled blouse. Lindy knew the look, had lived the look, so she didn't need to stare too long. Settling back, she tore open a box of Hostess cupcakes from her knapsack and happily bit into her first.
The sweet chocolate flavor filled her mouth. Before it could subside, she was ready with a second helping. She swallowed and finished off her first cupcake - careful to keep from spilling any crumbs - then she pulled a second Hostess from the box. Deep within the recesses of her body, Lindy's stomach was crying for even more. She had no intention of ignoring that request.
As they turned off the highway, she waved at the Buick.
Copyright (c) 2000 - Oakhaus Designs
