Patricia/Pat/Patti

PATRICIA/PAT/PATTI
By Lewis Baird

It's been two months, and I have to admit that I'm beginning to feel a little anxious. Usually, the time between jobs is less than thirty days, but, for some reason, I haven't hit on any good prospects. I worry that the forces which employ me have recruited new talent - and are sending all the prime prospects their way - when I receive a highlighted commercial email advising me to check out the Poli-Klatsch website. There, I find a highlighted column written by recently elected state senator Patricia Johns entitled, "In Serious Consideration of A National Fat Tax."

"All righty then!" I think, and I click on the lady senator's photo at the top of the column. The thirtyish woman politico - her gif. depicts a crisply made-up redhead with a businesslike haircut, a patrician nose, thin lips and a birthmark on her well-cut right cheekbone - writes about salvaging the nation's shaky healthcare system by instituting a nationwide tax on fast food and using the revenue to help fund the Medicare system. "The Obesity Epidemic has placed a massive strain on our health care system," she declares. "Let's put some of the economic responsibility where it belongs: on the purveyors and consumers of excess junk food.

"Perhaps," the senator concludes, "this extra expense will discourage many of our overweight fellow Americans from relying so much on fast foods. If so, the new tax will have done them and us a whole lot of good."

Ah, I think, fat people as Them.

Further investigation on the Poli-Klatsch website and I find two more essays by Miz Johns. It's clear she fancies herself a Voice of the People, but the more I read, the more I detect an edge of condescension in her writing. Her attitude toward the so-called Obesity Epidemic is laced with assumptions and judgments about her fellow fat Americans. "Too many of our countrymen - not to mention, our countrywomen - value convenience over personal health or appearance. When I look and see so many overweight young people within our schools, in particular, I can't help worrying about the future of this great nation."

I click over to Patricia Johns' public website - the creation of some overworked intern, no doubt - and see that she's scheduled to make an appearance late this morning with her husband in her home town for the opening of a new hospital wing devoted to bariatric surgery. Miz Johns' hubby, I learn, is a well-to-do real estate lawyer: ten years her senior and wealthy enough to fund her first run for state office. The two have bigger plans for Miz Patricia's political career, but she's still too young to be thinking beyond state government. From the looks of the man, I suspect her spouse's financial backing is done less out of agreement with his spouse's politics and more out of a desire to take advantage of her connections.

It's his money, I realize, that's kept our Patricia looking so crisp and lean. Her biological family has a propensity to fat, which she has managed to stave off in adulthood thanks to the daily encouragement of a personal trainer, and this, perhaps, is the key to her slightly contemptuous attitude toward the plus-sized. Pushing away from my computer table, I swivel around to take in my wife Rachel - an irrevocably plus-sized woman - and momentarily bask in her vast presence. Miz Johns would be appalled by the sight of her, but my Rachel is the one who keeps me going in between assignments.

Years of married life have made her magnificent. Lying in her specially widened adjustable bed, her massive uncovered belly looming ahead of her, her voluminous breasts covered by a red mega-sized tank top, my wife tilts her multiply-chinned head back to drain a two-quart container of melted Breyer's chocolate ice cream (her favorite thirst quencher) into her thirsty mouth. To hold the container for any length of time, she has to use both hands, since both her breasts and upper arms push against each other so insistently. If either fat hand lets loose of its grip, the one still holding the container tends to fly off to the side, sending food across the room. Whenever this happens, Rachel shrugs her fat shoulders - well, maybe shrug is too dynamic a word for what she's able to do with so much back torso pinning her down - and she giggles. The vagaries of her fifteen-hundred-pound body are amusing to her.

I walk to the closest freezer, pull out a fresh carton of Breyer's, and tell my lovely wife I have an errand to run. "Shouldn't take too long," I promise, and I honestly don't think it will. It's been at least two years since I've done an overnighter (I think it was the Marianne affair). As much fun as it can be to shake things up, these days, I'd much rather be at home with the missus. I lean across her pillowy side and kiss one of her bloated cheeks - her dimply skin feels cool from her ice cream drink - then I focus in on the hospital opening where Miz Tax the Fat is about to make a speech. In a flash, I'm there.

The senator's audience is small: hospital employees and a few press-folk, primarily. I take a place right next to a plump black woman who I know is one of the hospital billing clerks, then I focus in on Patricia Johns as she ascends onto the platform. She's wearing a dark blue pants suit that accentuates the slender lines of her size six body, and, as she crosses the platform, she stops to exchange a few words with the new wing's biggest name, a famous bariatric surgeon who has even had one of his operations covered on The Learning Channel. While she continues shmoozing, I focus in on the woman's family history - rather like hitting "recall" on my Universal Remote - to do a little tweaking.

I see Patricia as a teenager, size twelve or so, in a family full of big-boned farm-stock Midwesterners. Compared to her parents and siblings, she's effortlessly average-sized and would remain that way if I didn't do a bit of rearranging. To get things started, I push the word "diet" more emphatically into her surroundings. It doesn't take much - the weight loss industry is ubiquitous, after all - just a few small nudges that no one else in the household even notices. A slightly louder Weight Watcher's commercial on television. A copy of People left open in the bathroom to an article on some Hollywood starlet's most recent weight loss. A "Dear Abby" letter in the newspaper by a twenty-something self-described "chubbo" lamenting about how shallow men are. It does the trick.

Before too long, seventeen-year-old Patricia has decided to embark, without her parents' knowledge, on her very first low-cal diet. She purchases a purse-size calorie counter at her local Walgreen's and vows to restrict herself to an 800 cal-a-day regimen. She doesn't tell her folks about her plan because - as she rightly suspects - they'd object. Eating next to nothing during the day and halving her usual dinner portions, the girl is quickly able to drop down to a daily average of 750 calories. She maintains this strict routine for eight days, losing six pounds of water weight and maybe one pound of real fat. But by the ninth, she's feeling so malnourished that she finally gives into her body's entreaties.

Young Patricia breaks her diet for good at the family Sunday supper (and who can blame her since the dinner table is packed with so many enticing items?), grabbing seconds and then thirds of her mom's juicy fried chicken, taking an extra large helping of buttery mashed potatoes, gravy and two bowls of Jell-O parfait with Cool Whip as her fat mama nods approvingly. (The woman was beginning to worry that her daughter was coming down with something.) After eight days of starvation dieting, the young girl's metabolism has grown so flummoxed that she quickly gains all seven pounds back - and ten more besides - over the next three months. It's her body's insurance against any further unexpected periods of deprivation.

When I click back to the present, the senator is turning back toward the podium forty pounds heavier, much of it in her hips and tummy. The woman's suit has been cut to mask this extra weight, but when she swivels onstage, the back of her jacket noticeably flares up on a rounder rear that even her control-top panties can't completely subdue. And though you can't really see from where I'm standing in the audience, her face has grown less angular, too; her familiar birthmark now rests on a cheek grown less defined as it's filled in. In addition to that personal trainer, I know that she's currently on the Nutri-System program.

"This new wing," Senator Johns opens, "holds the promise of good health for a community of overweight Americans." To my right, the plump billing clerk is already wishing that she didn't have to stand outside and play the dutiful audience. I can sympathize, but I, at least, have an out: I hit "recall" and visit Patricia as a freshman Political Science major. Again, I don't need to change too much: a pamphlet placed underneath her door warning about the dangers of the "Freshman Fifteen," a shift to a dorm floor primarily inhabited by Phys Ed majors, a few overheard catty remarks in the elevator. A cute and healthy size fourteen, Patricia seriously and openly leaps into the diet life. To facilitate this, she checks a copy of the then most recent Adkins Diet book out of the library and vows to follow its advice to the letter.

This time, she holds to her vow for a good three months, but by Christmas, the girl has fallen off her diet with a vengeance. The next three years hold to the same basic pattern: new diet, big crash, a solid five months of collegiate overeating followed by a summer at home spent buying new clothes in a larger size. Her college regimens have definitely pushed food to the forefront of her life. Whenever Patricia's in the midst of a new plan, she finds it difficult to concentrate on anything other than forbidden foods. It's even affected her grades, though not disastrously so. By the time she receives her Poli Sci degree, Pat's gained five times the Freshman Fifteen - and has thoroughly screwed up her metabolism.

I stop in on her to take a quick peek the day she breaks her senior year diet. I see a chubby redhead, dressed in sweats and a tee-shirt that can't quite cover her bulging midriff, sneaking down to the dormitory cafeteria early in the morning ahead of her still sleeping roommate. Her roomie has already seen her through three failed regimens, and she's trying to postpone the inevitable sarcastic comments for as long as possible. The sparsely populated cafeteria contains no one she recognizes, so Patricia feels free to load her tray with cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, biscuits and gravy, and a large glass of whole chocolate milk that she'll refill twice. It's the bacon that really makes her swoon: it'd been far too long since she'd had a slice. She considers going back for more, but the room is already starting to fill up. On her way out of the cafeteria, though, she grabs two cheese Danishes, figuring if she meets anyone she knows, she'll just claim one's for her roommate. They're both gone before she gets off the elevator at her floor.

The woman speaking at the podium is now the thirty-something version of that meal-sneaking coed. Size twenty-six, Pat (her name has been shortened by political advisors to suit her less, err, patrician form) wears her off-the-rack jacket open because to do otherwise is to risk having her forefront pop its buttons whenever she gestures. Hidden beneath her jacket is a small egg yolk stain on her blouse that only she and I know is there. Matronly and round-faced, her birthmark now resides on atop a bulging cheek; her once slim nose has widened and made her nostrils more prominent. (At least one hostile political cartoonist has done a caricature of the plus-sized senator, which makes her nose appear more porcine.) She's applied extra foundation in an attempt to make her chin line less noticeable, but, of course, it doesn't work. Her poly pants suit is also incapable of camouflaging her 55-inch hips, while her ballooning belly keeps bumping into the podium. She's given up on the control tops, despite the advice of her political advisors; they're just too damn confining.

The pudgy lady politico is a trace more self-deprecating than her former self. She begins her speech with a joke about appearing at the opening of a wing primarily devoted to surgical weight loss. Standing off to the side is her husband, a pudgy high school English teacher named Gene who she met in her last year of college. A personal trainer is beyond this couple's family budget, though she's still shelling out good money to Nutri-System.

"As someone who's fought her own battle of the bulge most of my adult life," Pat says, gesturing to show off her plus-sized form, "I can appreciate the work these good doctors do." The shift in perspective is something only I notice, of course: where once Miz Pat would've described fat Americans as someone other than her, now she opens by including herself in their number. She turns to the new wing's head surgeon and half-jokes, as she runs a pudgy right hand through her Cost Cutter bob. "Hey, Doc, do you have any special rates for hardworking public servants?"

I hit "recall" before he can reply. It's eight years earlier and Pat is sitting in a classroom in this very hospital, participating in an Overeaters Anonymous group. She's wearing a dark loose dress she's been told will slenderize her mid-sized body, though, of course, it does nothing of the sort. Seated on a metal folding chair, her wide end dropping over both sides of it, her bulging calves quivering as she impatiently taps her feet, there's a look of boredom in her slightly over-made-up eyes. She's only partially listening to a zaftig group member whine about her life as an out-of-control fat woman - by now, she's heard variations of this tedious lament many times - but at the moment she's mainly thinking about how good a large plate of simple Kraft Macaroni 'N' Cheese would taste. In the back of her mind is a thought that, with just a little bit of tuning, grows clearer in her head. When the group leader asks if anyone has anything to add to the almost-plump group member's story, the fat woman speaks her new mind.

"I'm thinking," she says decidedly, "I've spent a lot of my adulthood beating myself up like Jill here, that I've spent much of my life either on a diet or coming off a diet. I'm thinking that I really want to see what living another way feels like, and I'm also thinking that I'm really fucking hungry." She rises from her chair, smoothing her dress down her large thighs, then turns to leave the room. No one in the group circle says anything to call her back because - to one degree or another - they all wish they could say what she's said.

Having now quit O.A., Patti drives home, stopping on the way to buy a six-pack of Kraft Mac 'N' Cheese and a twelve ounce carton of sour cream. Her husband has parent/teacher conferences that night, so she only makes two boxes of the stuff, replacing the milk in the box's recipe with the carton of sour cream and adding a cup of shredded mozzarella to make it even more flavorful - then eats the fixings out of the pot as she watches one of the C.S.I.s on television. Her former diet crazy self would be horrified to observe that she's scarfing down almost four times the amount of her low-cal college days in one sitting. But, damn, who could've thought something as simple as plain ol' mac 'n' cheese could taste so satisfying? As she scrapes the bottom of the pot, the happily freed and gluttonous Patti carries it back into the kitchen and begins grilling up a half pack of Jumbo hotdogs.

When I return to the present, Patti is standing in the crowd, less than a yard away from me. Wearing a colorful, 8X cotton gauze dress, she looks across the lot toward the podium and the lady senator there to dedicate the opening of the hospital's new children's ward. Within her 64-inch waist, her stomach starts to growl, so she reaches into her purse for a Hershey bar that she'd bought in a sale pack at Kroger's. As the super-sized BBW bites into it, relishing the homely taste of simple milk chocolate, she wonders how long the politician will take to finish her speech. The senator's appearance has already forced her and her co-workers to skip mid-morning break, and the chocolate bar from her purse barely made a dent in her appetite. Back at her desk in the hospital billing office, Patti has two homemade sandwiches calling for her.

Five minutes into the presentation, she decides to hell with it and trudges back toward her office. Her nearby co-workers chuckle among themselves as they all can guess what's calling her away from the public event. There aren't a lot of times when the hungry billing clerk doesn't have something edible close at hand: she's a whiz at simultaneous snacking and one-handed data entry. Though her unmasked gluttony has probably kept her from moving anywhere higher in the office, Patti doesn't seem to mind. "My husband makes enough to pay the mortgage and the bills," she once told an office-mate, after offering the woman first reach in a freshly opened bag of Lay's Potato Chips. "My take-home mainly goes for food and clothing. We get by."

At 440 pounds, Patti has grown comfortable enough with herself as a fat woman that she no longer wears clothes fecklessly designed to "hide" her size. Her gauze dress hugs her prominent 74-inch hips; her dimply thighs catch the dress's fabric within each fold; her upper back bulges out almost as much as her breasts used to. As she waddles across the parking lot, her rear teeter-totters merrily. Because she spends much of her workday at her desk - and her home time at the kitchen table - the SSBBW is panting heavily before she makes it back to the Administration subsection. The back of her dress has grown damp from perspiration.

To give her energy to make it back to the office as quickly as her super-sized body will permit, I put a sixteen-ounce Hershey bar in her purse and send a little reminder her way. She stands outside the building and quickly makes work of the candy bar, dropping a couple of moist chocolate slivers on the top of her dress. They're not the first barely detectable food remnants to land on her dress; she goes through a stick of Spray 'N' Wash at least every other week. On the fullest part of her shelving right hip, I can also detect a small hole from one too many times in the washer.

When she enters the revolving door, I hit "recall" one last time to look in our Patti a year after her final break with O.A. I see her and her teacher husband in the kitchen, seated at a well kept Formica topped table, as she's cutting into a store-bought chocolate cake. Away from work, the super-sized Patti's dressed down in a sleeveless tee-shirt with some particularly resistant grease spots on her forefront and sweats that have dropped 'neath the swelling hang of her two-fold belly. She slices about a fourth of the cake and places it on a sturdy paper plate. Behind her, I can see a pile of dinner dishes waiting to be rinsed before deposit in the dishwasher. Portly hubby Gene watches as she takes her first appreciative forkful. The look on Patti's vast face is so beatific that it almost takes his breath away, though it isn't enough to banish the concerns that I've pushed to the front of his mind.

"I sometimes worry, Dear," he finally opens. "You spent so many years dieting that I still have moments when I expect you to announce that you're going on a new one! Whatever you choose to do is alright with me, but I still feel like I have to tell you: I love you just as you are!"

It takes two more forkfuls before Patti answers him, but he's grown used to this. "I know you do," she says, "and if you're worried that I might some day turn around and start blaming you for this fat ol' body, please don't. I grew this way on my own: dieting myself upwards for years, then finally saying 'screw it.' Though it surprises Doctor Paul every time I have a check-up, I'm as healthy as a horse. My stats are all good; you love me as I am. I'm no longer gonna beat myself up over my size." She stops to cut off another fork full of cake, then holds it up to her mouth. Her chins quiver, as if in anticipation of all the full meals ahead. "In fact," she concludes, "I've got years of guilt-free eating to catch up on!"

Her husband grins and says nothing more as she finishes her first piece. When she reaches across the table to cut a second slice, her upper arm droops and sways appealingly. "Would you like some ice cream with that cake?" Gene finally asks her. It's the first time he's openly made such an offer, but it won't be the last.

I return to the present for one last look at Patti, who is toddling past Reception toward the Billing Office. She wonders what her hubby Gene will be making for dinner tonight - he hinted at something special over breakfast - and as she does, she enters one of her periodic foodee daydreams. More than once, over the course of a workday, she'll pause and mentally conjure up some magnificent repast. This time, as she fantasizes over a banquet-sized feast, I take that imaginary meal and make every calorie real, depositing the end results on her lower half. In an instant, her rear shelves out an extra inch; the backs of her lower thighs droop down a little lower onto her bulging calves.

She enters Billing, angling through the office doorway to keep her hips from scraping on the doorframe, and exhaustedly collapses at her desk. Standing in the hall outside the office, I take a peak inside through the door window. The rest of her co-workers eat in the cafeteria, so Patti will be lunching alone at her desk. It's not as if she's shy about eating in public: it's just that with her sizable appetite, dining in the cafeteria can get pretty pricey - even with an employee's discount - and besides, she likes the meals she makes better. Too, the damn cafeteria is all the way on the other side of the hospital complex.

Arranged before her is a quartet of well-layered cheese and cold-cut sandwiches on hoagie buns, plus a thirteen-ounce bag of Dorito's. The past few years of "catching up" have definitely worked their way on her: she's really pushing it by wearing that 10X poly work dress, particularly where she's seated and her 84-inch hips have spread against the chair. At 542 pounds, she special orders most of her clothes from the cheapest possible mail order outlets and struggles to make her outfits last as long as she can, though from the two gaping holes on the right side of her torso, it's obvious this one is getting close to the end. The sleeves of her dress bite into her upper arms like rubber bands - and that's even after she had taken the elastic in the hems out - the top of her dress is so form-revealing you can practically see every seam of her JJ bra.

Behind the cover of her desk, Patti slips her extra-wide white canvas flats off her feet and lets the waistline of her too-snug panties slip down her 73-inch waist, relishing the sudden coolness that now hits her lower belly. There are some days, I know, when she leaves work without bothering to pulling them back up, letting her loosened paunch jiggle freely and balloon out even further. As she leans forward to grab her first sandwich, her forefront spills over the edge of her chair within her dress. Though she'd be embarrassed to acknowledge it, the feeling of her underbelly against the desk chair padding gives her a thrill she can't quite explain.

Eagerly pulling off the plastic wrap, the obese billing secretary licks her large lips with ravenous anticipation. Her fat face beams as she takes her first big bite, a large dollop of mayonnaise and tomato pulp squeezing out the other side of the sandwich against her puffy fingers. Looking at her straight on, I can no longer see the birthmark on her face: it now rests on top of her beautifully bloated cheek. Both her cheeks push past her broad nose and lips, so the large hoagie bun smears against them when she brings it to her mouth. She stopped wearing makeup over a year ago because she didn't appreciate the taste of it on her food. Her once businesslike hair-style has gotten shaggier since she's cut back her appointments at Cost Cutters.

Away from even her husband's ears, the super-sized Patti lets out a small moan of delight as she gets her first full taste of lunch. There are three different cheeses on the sandwich, none of them low-fat, and she can distinctly taste each one atop the slices of honey-cured ham. She rapidly polishes off two of her sandwiches and - because that's the kinda guy I am - I gift her with three more and add four more inches to her belly besides, blowing the two smaller gaps on the side of her dress into one big hole. True to my nature, when I made that last little stretch, I also increase her stomach's capacity. Even when she's finished her prodigious lunch, there'll still be a few pangs of hunger left behind. She'll make up for it at dinner, and tomorrow, taking a preemptive strike at her post-lunch hunger, she'll up her daily breakfast accordingly. I've already made sure that Gene will send her a box of chocolates at work. It'll be just what she needs.

Then, since it's become my signature, I place a cheery fat-faced Petunia Pig tattoo on her pendulous right breast. Patti keeps her tat covered at work, but when she's home, she likes to let it show in the cleavage of her sleeveless tees. Whenever she catches sight of it in the mirror, it's like her personal "fuck you!" to all those years she wasted on a diet. She's grown to love her unrestrained eating habits - the feeling of feeding herself to please no one but herself - and could never go back to living any other way. As her breasts loll ever more pendulous across the expanse of her growing belly in the coming years, Petunia's face will remain unchanged. I take pride in my mark.

My work completed, I leave to return home to my own happily gluttonous wife. Behind me, Patti is happily lost in her lunch, her earlier irritation over being pulled from her desk to listen to some blathering politician totally abated. Back on the podium, the former billing clerk/now state senator is glad-handing her constituents. On the Poli-Klatsch site, there's a totally different column beneath the plump black senator's photo. I don't bother reading it, however.

"Home already?" Rachel says as I step into her line of sight. Balanced on the top of her belly, angled in the space between her breasts, is a nearly empty family-sized pizza carton. From the last piece, I can see she's ordered a deep dish with everything on it: what our local pizzeria laughably calls a "gutbuster." She brings the last piece to her mouth with one hand and quickly nibbles it down to half its size before dropping it back onto the box and letting her arm spring back to her side. As she swallows, she grabs the rest of her last piece with her other hand and then quickly nibbles it into oblivion.

"Thought you might be longer, so I ordered myself several pizzas," she explains, shifting in her bed so the now-empty box is jostled down the front of her belly. At the foot of her bed, I now see two other cashed boxes; the third stops at a navel radiating fold, balances there for a second, then flips to land across what little you can see of her swollen right calf. Within reach of her extended right hand, a serving cart contains a still warm fourth pizza.

"Told you I wouldn't be gone long," I say, and I open up her pizza box - extra sausage and pepperoni on this one - and hold a piece up to her wide mouth. Three pizzas on her lonesome have to have been pretty wearing on the arms, I think, so I'm happy to do it. Her lowermost chin, I see, has grown another half inch in its drop down her forefront; as she contentedly chews, it waxes and wanes provocatively. I feed her almost the entire pizza, taking two slices for myself midway into the course. My wife doesn't begrudge me the pieces since she knows there's always more food in our house. When we're done, she makes quick work of another carton of melted Breyer's - French Vanilla, this time - then closes her eyes for an afternoon nap.

I watch my wife rest for a few moments; at times, I think I could spend the whole day just drinking in the sight of her, gazing on her grandly mega-sized body, taking in each inch of her great spreading form. She was my first, and perhaps I'll tell her story one day, though unlike all the other transformed women I've visited, I'm unsure where her basic story ends - because it's my story, after all, too. As I walk around her bed and toss empty pizza boxes, cartons and paper plates into a yard-sized Hefty bag, I remember my overeating beauty as a buxom young college cheerleader. There are moments - common only to Rachel, I know - when she suddenly recalls that she once was on an entirely different life path. It's been a while since she's had one of those flashes, but I'm always on the watch for them. It isn't that they're distressing for Rachel - more confusing than anything.

I twist tie the trash bag and take it out to the dumpster, then head for the kitchen. My balance-given powers are abating once again, but I'm able to conjure up the fixings for an afternoon supper. After all those delivered pizzas, I know my hungry wife is going to want something homemade when she wakes up. And as her loving husband, I'm only too happy to oblige . . .