PASSING FANCY
It's a strange but familiar phenomenon for those with only a utilitarian interest in cars: that you rarely notice a particular model vehicle until you buy one yourself - and then you'll see examples of it all over the place. Ronnie Riverdale discovered this the day she drove her 2003 PT Cruiser off the lot of Soya City Motors. Before, she couldn't have said when she'd last seen one of these quirky half-compacts on the road. Now, it seemed like every other intersection brought a fresh variation on the theme. Red ones. Blue ones. Ugly mustard gold ones. And on the highway home from work one Monday, she finally saw her silver Cruiser's doppelganger: same model car, with sunroof and everything, cruising at 68 m.p.h. on the Midwestern interstate.
She spied it on a stretch of prairie highway, an area so flat and bereft of distinguishing features that she wouldn't be surprised to come across herself driving the other way. Of course, she had to see who was in the twin car, get a glimpse at her fellow Cruiser. Her mystery driver, she thought, had to be a new Cruiser owner. Like Ronnie, their vehicle had a temporary license taped to its back window; the empty plate holder even had the same auto dealership's name emblazoned on it.
She'd bought her new car, in part to take her mind off a recent break-up. Less than a week ago, Ronnie'd called it quits with her boyfriend Chad after a big argument outside Sinorak's Buffet. He'd taken her to the restaurant, though he knew she had mixed feelings about going to an all-you-can-eat spot (especially one as tempting as Sinorak's) now that she'd started her newest diet.
"You know I'm trying to count my calories," she'd said as he turned into the parking lot. "Why you bringing us here? It's like you almost didn't want me to lose any weight."
"I don't," he'd admitted, and that simple two word declarative knocked her for a loop. He looked at her with those damnably boyish big blue eyes of his, rubbed a hand through his spiky hair and continued. "I like the way you look right now, Ronnie. If anything, I wouldn't mind it if you were fuller figured. . ."
Chad's confession thoroughly dismayed her. It wasn't as if she was really overweight or anything. She'd recently read a study, in fact, which stated that average American woman weighed 164 pounds, a weight she surpassed by maybe ten pounds, much of it in her hips. But why would anybody want to be average? She enjoyed her time with Chad, had even started to think that perhaps he was the one. But his admission threw their whole relationship into question.
"Have you been sabotaging my diet?" she'd asked, aghast at what she was hearing.
"Of course not!" was the appalled response. "I'd be lying if I didn't say I wish you gave up on this diet madness - but that's your decision to make. You're a beautiful woman as you are, Ronnie, and my biggest wish is for you to be happy. I brought us here because Sinorak's is where we first met. I've always thought of it as Our Place."
Their meeting at Sinorak's had been a fluke. Ronnie had never been to the restaurant before, though Chad was always trying to get her to return with him. She definitely did not think of it as Their Place.
"An All-You-Can-Eat Smorgasbord?" she'd scoffed, before jumping out of Chad's car. "You don't know a lot about women. . ." With that, she'd left her boyfriend and headed for the nearest bus stop, speed walking and swinging her cushiony hips as she did. Though a half dozen phone messages from Chad were already waiting for her by the time Ronnie'd arrived home, she took her own sweet time in answering. By then, she was already certain their relationship was a wash. Chad wished she were fatter? That was just too damn weird to think too long about. . .
She hadn't expressed this to Chad, of course. Their one post-Sinorak phone conversation, she'd used the typical "We just need some time apart" dodge without delving any deeper into it. Chad seemed to have received the unspoken message, though, since he hadn't tried to call her since.
Still, since her undeclared break-up had led to her buying her first car in years, Ronnie supposed she couldn't feel too badly about the whole experience. The Cruiser was quite comfortable, was roomily seated like a mini-van, without being a gas hog. It was damnably easy to speed in and had a cruise control that actually held when you turned it on. With a CD spinning in the changer (P.J. Harvey today), the half hour highway drive from work at the title company to her apartment was gonna be a breeze.
So here she was, driving home for the first time, when she came upon her vehicular twin, glinting in the summer sun. Ronnie was set to wave at its owner once she got alongside the vehicle, but the sight of her Cruiser compadre so startled her that she dropped back into cruise speed.
The driver was a woman: a brunette like Ronnie with longish wavy hair and a short-sleeved dress that looked close to hers in color. But there the resemblance ended. For where Ronnie, as we've already established, was maybe ten pounds over the currently established average weight for a woman of average height, her fellow highwaywoman was huge. Though she only got a passing glimpse of the woman's face and upper torso - along with a flash of swollen forearm - the woman looked wide enough to fit two Ronnies in her dress. Turning her moon face in the direction of her sister Cruiser, the fat driver smiled and waggled what looked like a Blimpie's sub in her right hand. A small piece of tomato slapped against the window, but Ronnie inadvertently dropped back too suddenly to see what happened to it.
Why was she so stunned? It was not as if Ronnie'd never seen a fat woman before, and, from what she could tell, the Cruiser was a very size-friendly car. Maybe it was the fact that the woman was coiffed and dressed so much like Ronnie - and driving a car that could've passed for her's. Now that she looked at it from behind again, didn't the dealer's license number also look awfully close to hers, too?
"Perhaps," she said out loud to the caterwauling Polly Jean, "this is how Chad would like me to look? That gal's 'fuller figured' to the max!" With that, Ronnie once more revved past cruise control speed to take a second look at the driver. The woman's car, she realized, sagged on the left from its driver's weight.
The fat lady, apparently, was expecting her. She'd discarded her sandwich and was using her free hand to point toward an oncoming exit. Her smile was even broader, emphasized by two dimpled cheeks that looked like they belonged on a kewpie doll. This time, though, Ronnie was not going to let herself be thrown. "Me?" she gestured with a splayed hand. The woman nodded in reply.
Alrighty, Ronnie decided, and she once more dropped back to follow the first silver PT off the highway. She'd driven this route for years, but had never taken this exit. Two hundred feet from the off-ramp, she saw a large mock cabin restaurant and gas station. The first Cruiser headed into the gravel-covered lot, and Ronnie followed suit. Soon as she got off the county road, the car ahead of her kicked up a cloud of dust, momentarily obscuring her vision. By the time it cleared, the Cruiser was already parked in front of the seemingly nameless restaurant, its driver nowhere to be seen.
Without even stopping to consider what she was doing, Ronnie parked alongside the twin Cruiser - they were the only vehicles in the lot - disembarked from her car then stepped through the restaurant's double doors.
"With you in a moment!" she heard a woman's voice shout, though it took a few moments for her to adjust to the place's dim light. While she waited, Ronnie examined herself in the door's reflection. Her hair could do with a little combing, she decided, but her outfit looked fine. In a lightweight navy blue summer dress that hung to mid-calf and hugged her slightly prominent hips, she actually looked better than she imagined herself. (The Ronnie Riverdale in her mind's eye was a good ten pounds heavier.) Her face, admittedly, was more chipmunk-cheeked than she liked and gave the impression that the body beneath it was even larger. But there was nothing she could do about that. If the woman she followed was built the same way, perhaps her hidden body wasn't as massive as Ronnie had been guesstimating.
"Oh," the female voice suddenly said in her ear. "Didn't know it was you!" Ronnie turned to see a motherly looking figure, dressed in a polyester pantsuit a good two decades out of date, a name tag on her left lapel indicating that her name was "Sandy." She grabbed Ronnie's nearest arm and led her startled visitor across the restaurant. "Got your place ready for you by the buffet."
Before she could lodge a protest, Ronnie found herself in a second room, standing before a large steaming food table. The room as a whole was dim and shadowy; only the buffet and a single large table was adequately lit. There were no other diners around, so every pan in front of her looked smooth and untouched. Among the entries Ronnie saw: barbecued chicken, pepper steak, beef and noodles, lasagna in alfredo sauce, fried catfish, kielbasa and kraut, breaded jumbo shrimp, macaroni and cheese, au gratin potatoes, French style green beans in creamy mushroom sauce - all the things you expected to find in a typical Midwestern smorgasbord. After weeks of carb and calorie counting, it all smelled luscious. Almost time for dinner, she realized, her mouth watering at the appetizing scents. Perhaps she could splurge just this once.
"Be back with your drink," Ronnie heard as she picked up a ten-inch plate and started spooning some shrimp and potatoes onto it. Without intending to, she covered most of the plate with both items, then placed a piece of chicken and two dinner rolls on top. Carrying her selection back to her table, she was about to sit down when the scent of the alfredo lasagna struck her nose. Maybe just a second plate, Ronnie thought as she returned to the buffet table. Though her second platter towered even higher than the first, she saw nothing untoward in her selection.
Finally taking her seat, Ronnie picked up her first jumbo shrimp. It was so tender, it practically fell apart in her fingers. Before she could drop any part of it, she quickly placed it between her lips. . .
. . .and was lost.
The shrimp was so succulent, that she unknowingly let out a tiny moan. Its breading was Cajun spiced but not so strong that it overpowered the shrimp itself. Dropping the tail onto her bread plate, Ronnie picked up two more than swiftly sucked them clean. Within ten minutes, she was finished with her first plate and digging her fork into the first of four lasagna wedges. These were really yummy - she could tell they were using real ricotta, instead of making do with cottage cheese and mozzarella, and had also added some kind of nut into the mixture - that she was eager for a second helping as soon as she wiped the last bit of sauce off her plate.
When she returned to the buffet table, she intended to sample the rest of its entries, but since she also wanted more of that lasagna, Ronnie wound up filling a plate with it, too. Her stomach growling hungrily within her lightweight dress, she loaded and then carried five full plates to her table, laying them in a row before her chair. While her back had been to her dining table, someone had cleared away the dishes and brought in two pitchers of chocolate soda.
Despite all that she'd devoured, Ronnie still was famished, and, what is more, her belly felt like she hadn't eaten a thing. Once more seated at her table, she consumed each entree steadily, yet rapaciously, never feeling full yet eating deliberately enough to savor each magnificent flavor. At some level, she knew what she was doing was impossible, but it didn't matter: she was so caught up in the pleasure that she wanted to prolong the experience as long as possible. Her original reason for coming into the restaurant had fallen by the wayside.
And so she sat, alone in the buffet room, eating without respite and relishing every swallow, periodically reaching across the table for a pitcher of something to drink. She was unaware of the passage of time - if, indeed, time did pass - or the way she looked as her body swiftly absorbed every calorie. The average adult metabolism requires 3500 calories above their usual intake to gain a pound; the average serving of alfredo lasagna contains something like 1,000 calories, though if pressed, Ronnie would have said that these servings were anything but average. In this, she would've been right.
When she finished her second round of plates, she returned to the buffet and this time gathered enough to fully cover her table. By her chair, Sandy had wheeled a cart containing six fresh pitchers of chocolate-flavored cream. Drinking them was like swallowing melted Breyer's, a decadent experience. She didn't even bother pouring into a glass, just held the spout up to her eager lips and let the cream flow into her mouth. All six pitchers were cashed long before she polished off her "third course," but, thankfully, a second cart was quickly brought in to replace the old one.
By the end of her third round, Ronnie'd sampled every one of the entrees and side dishes - and found them all addictive. Back at the buffet, the plates had been replaced with sixteen-inch serving platters. She spooned a platter full of shrimp onto the first, then did likewise with the lasagna, occasionally stopping to surreptitiously spoon a mouthful from the tray itself. (Had to keep her strength up!) As she did, an unseen restaurant staff pushed a second table alongside her first. She had enough room for platters containing every entree now, and she took advantage of it.
Though it defied the dictates of conventional nutritional math, Ronnie was now sixty pounds heavier than when she'd first entered the restaurant, putting her in the range of 235 pounds. Much of this weight had found its way to her belly, hips and legs, though the rest of her wasn't exactly being shortchanged. (Her breasts may have been losing the race to her paunch, but were plenty full in their own right.) Her blue dress stretched to accommodate her new weight, but it wasn't hiding anything.
If she'd even taken time to notice the changes that her gormandizing was wreaking on her physique, the famished Ronnie probably wouldn't have cared. In this timeless room, away from any judgmental eyes, given the freedom to indulge in a way she'd only dreamed of doing, all that mattered was the bliss of eating. Even when she hadn't been on a diet, Ronnie had always refused to give in to that urge for just a little more; as a young American woman, she was all-too-familiar with the omnipresent bleats of diet culture. Now she was saying to hell with it; she was catching up on every one of those Just A Little Mores.
She had polished off about a third of each pan after she'd cleaned and stacked the serving platters. Slowly rising from her chair (her newfound heft - more than a hundred extra pounds now - was letting itself be known), the still-hungry Ronnie revisited the serving table and took a long look at the remains. To hell with serving platters, she decided, reaching for a convenient pair of hot pads that'd been left by the silverware, then carrying the closest pan to her table. Though the steam table pan was not as hot as she'd expected, the entrée (beef and noodles in what appeared to be a bleu cheese sauce) was still fresh and warm.
If time seemed meaningless, the buffet table servings proved ultimately finite. Yet when Ronnie finished the last of them, she still felt ready for more. "Up for dessert?" she heard, and as she turned in her chair, her now prominent belly jiggling against her thighs, the lights over the buffet flashed off and a second set flicked on to reveal a dessert buffet on the other side of the room. Behind it were a large soft service ice cream dispenser and a soda fountain. Standing between them was a beaming Sandy, holding a large bowl beneath the vanilla ice cream spigot.
"Dispenses up to 900 four-ounce servings an hour," the hostess told her, and she demonstrated by swirling about eight ounces into the bowl. Without once taking her eyes off the bowl, Ronnie rose and carried her 300-pound body across the room; there she saw a tall and sturdy stool placed alongside the dessert buffet. Among the goodies offered for her delectation: sheets of chocolate, white and cheesecake; pans of cherry and apple cobbler; tubs of tapioca and banana pudding; trays of fruit that were sprinkled with sugar or coated with real whipped cream, plus enough plates of lemon meringue and French silk slices to comprise a dozen pies.
She wanted it all.
So she had it all, down to the last sputtering droplet of soft serve ice cream. Seated on her stool, Ronnie dug into each tray, one at a time, her dimply elbows resting on the edge of the gleaming silver table as she joyfully spooned each sweet delight into her mouth. When she finished with the table, she scooted her stool over to the soft serve dispenser and started filling bowl after bowl to the brink. Near the end, she was pouring the ice cream into pitchers with an equal amount of pop, then happily swigging it down, her full cheeks bulging ever more as she swallowed.
"Everything to your satisfaction?" Sandy asked, carrying a copy of the check to the well-fed Ronnie as she drained the last of her ice cream soda.
"Definitely," Ronnie said, stifling a tiny belch as she took a gander at her bill. Her meal, she saw, cost two dollars less than dinner at Sinorak's. "You sure this is all you wanna charge me?" she asked, and the hostess nodded her head.
"A pleasure to see a woman like you enjoy our food so much," she said, "and, besides, once the dinner crowd arrives, we'll do well enough. Don't worry about us, Dearie." She handed Ronnie a bowl of chocolate-covered mints in exchange for Ronnie's MasterCard, then scooted off to get it processed. When the hostess got back, the bowl was empty, of course. Ronnie wrote a tip twice the price of her meal. She would've done more, but she wasn't sure how much it should be.
Ronnie still wasn't full, and already the memory of her fantastic meal was becoming nebulous. As she dropped off her stool, her fleshy forefront jiggled within her dress. Unconsciously, Ronnie patted it as she as she took her first heavy step in her fat woman's body. "Hurry back," Sandy shouted from the shadows, as the obese brunette slowly made her way to the exit.
The 430-pound woman who waddled out into the early evening sunlight was not the same Ronnie Riverdale she'd been on entering the restaurant; this Ronnie was the woman she'd followed into that timeless buffet. Still bedecked in a much-expanded lightweight dress that hugged every bulge on her voluminous body, showing off calves and upper arms that each contained a fold and extra bulge at their lowermost points, Ronnie was an anything-but-average woman. Where once her full-cheeked face had looked like it belonged on a much larger woman, if anything, it now seemed a bit slight for the super-sized body beneath it.
Her 62-inch belly pushed ahead of her as she unhurriedly carried it to the solitary PT Cruiser parked by the entrance; her shelving rear nearly pushed behind as prominently. As she sidled onto the pushed back driver's seat, breathing heavily from the exertion of her long walk across the restaurant, her paunch settling on her swelling thighs (all told, Ronnie's hips had an extra eight inches on her paunch, the better to support her demanding tummy), she checked the clock on the dashboard. It was a few minutes past 4:30, she saw - she'd only been in the restaurant long enough to learn they were still setting up for 5:00 dinner.
What had possessed her to drive off the highway to this place, anyway? Sometimes, she chuckled to herself as she leaned forward to start the car, breasts and belly bulging through the gaps in the steering wheel, her hunger made her impulsive. She couldn't remember the last time she'd intentionally said no to her insistent appetite. The moments when she didn't feel at least mildly peckish were rare, indeed. Fortunately, there was a ten-ounce pack of Milky Way Poppables in her purse: enough to tide her over until she reached the next exit twelve miles away.
It held, and when Ronnie got to the exit, she made a quick side trip to the Hardee's drive-thru, ordering just one half-pound burger because she knew she had a big dinner waiting for her in the crock-pot at home. Before she'd left for work, she'd placed two boned chickens in the pot for chicken-and-dumplings: it was a comfort meal, and she'd need it if she was gonna spend another night without hearing from Chad. The other night at Sinorak's they'd had an argument so trivial that she couldn't even recall its specifics - but it'd been enough to keep them apart ever since.
When she got home, the smell of cooking was enough to lift her spirits. She stripped out of her dress and tied an apron over her bra and panties. As she stopped to examine herself once in the mirror, wondering what Chad saw in her. It wasn't that she, as a fat woman, could see herself being any other way (she loved good food too much to ever turn her broad back on it), more that she wondered if Chad ever visualized her as a different woman. Sure, he said he loved her as she was, but wasn't that just what men said?
Ronnie left a message on his answering machine while she dropped dumplings into the crock-pot, then spent the night sitting in the kitchen with her dinner, listening to CDs and delighting in her evening meal. At ten, she went to bed without hearing back from Chad, lying awake with large bag of Oreos and some warm milk until she'd finished them all.
First thought to enter her head on waking was of Chad - not of breakfast (though that wasn't far behind). But since she didn't want to appear too desperate, she refrained from phoning him again. Instead, she distracted herself with a cheese-and-bacon omelet, then showered and dressed for work. She drove to the office in her still-new PT Cruiser (definitely a fat-friendly vehicle, she thought, as she once more settled behind the wheel), stopping once to buy a dozen bagels and two containers of cream cheese for the whole office, then, as she usually did, going through half the bagels herself over the course of the morning.
If Ronnie looked a little down or otherwise different to her co-workers, nobody said anything. She always believed in looking the best that she could, even though she worked in an office where few members of the public actually saw her, and today was no exception. With her long hair pulled back, wearing a white cottoned short sleeve top that showed off her overflowing elbows plus a gray dotted skirt that hugged her ballooning belly as it showed off her stockings stretching calves, her well-jowled face lightly made up, Ronnie was the picture of a well-fed office professional. She ate her lunch (some twelve-inch subs from a nearby Blimpie's) at her desk, and after she finished, she finally yielded and phoned Chad. He'd left, she discovered, a message on his answering machine:
"I'm not home at the moment, but if that's you, Ronnie, I got your message! I can't wait to see you again!"
The message was so uplifting that Ronnie went out and rewarded herself with a snack break at the nearest Baskin-Robbins. She buzzed through the rest of the day on a prolonged chocolate ice cream high, then eagerly headed for the highway drive home. She was happily biting into a Blimpie's sub that she'd saved in the office fridge when she saw the PT Cruiser coming up alongside her. It was, she saw, a silver Chrysler just like hers, though its driver was a skinny little thing. She cheerfully waved her sandwich at the girl, who was so startled to have been noticed that she decelerated.
Ronnie smiled, took another bite from her sandwich, then carefully placed it on the passenger's seat. There sure seemed to be a lot of Cruisers out on the road today, she thought. Why just ahead of her was a second silver chariot! Might as well take a look at her second sister driver, Ronnie decided, and she sped to catch up with it. When she got her first look, she was nearly as startled as that skinny driver'd been.
Seated behind the wheel was a mega-sized woman, holding onto a slice of pizza as she kept her eyes on the road ahead. She had to be at least three hundred pounds heavier than Ronnie, maybe twice her size. The super-super-sized brunette's quivering chins took up almost as much space as her facial features. She was crammed into her seat with her breasts and belly barely giving her room to move the wheel, riding at least four inches higher in the driver's seat. (Unless she was sitting on a pile of phone books, her rear had to be gigantic.) Beneath the pizza slice, an unseen passenger was holding a napkin to keep the tomato sauce from plopping onto the woman's expansive white cotton blouse.
Ronnie dropped back into the right hand lane, watching her doppelganger's Cruiser speed up for the exit that she somehow knew was ahead. Right behind her, the first Cruiser was speeding up for a second look, and as it came alongside Ronnie, the fat woman waved and pointed toward the exit that she planned to take. The skinny li'l thing looked a lot like Ronnie might've looked if she'd wasted her life saying no to all the good food out there. Perhaps, she thought with a smile, the two of them could have dinner together. From what she could see, the poor girl looked like she could use a good meal. . .
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