In childhood, the big woman would sometimes sneak up on me when no-one was around. Approaching a tractor’s weight, she wore smelly, ragged bandages about her ankles and a green scarf made out of a plastic kite. She never got into her name and rarely sounded at all. She always came from behind my eyes and would paste my head to her belly.
She liked me. I was seven. I smelled pretty good. I had no stubble or debt, a healthy relationship with Santa and the Easter Bunny. She just liked me. She wanted me all to herself. She cried when she had to leave.
My mother caught a whiff of her a few times but ignored the offal and had me cut coupons. I thought it best never to ask her about the big woman, but somebody had to explain. Once when mother went to buy vanilla extract, I called the Fifth Precinct. The policeman wasn’t amused. You little turd! You don’t call women big. They get mad if you do. They take things away. They make it difficult to watch football. If you don’t get to the flower shop before kickoff, you’re screwed.
From then on, I stayed clear of the phone. Instead, I called radiothons in my bed about the big woman, but the little guys in my head didn’t have any answers either. The big woman liked to bring me crackers. She carried a thimble of peanut butter and we sat in my yard chewing and licking. Then smacking, picking, and stinking. She brought a banded bundle of travel brochures and maps, and sometimes she opened them and I saw the squiggly lines she had traced from city to city. The map of the Western states, my favorite. California, a mess of ink. Arizona, somewhat. Oregon, yes. Idaho, Colorado, Utah, too, but Nevada was blank. I slammed my fingers onto it and said, Why? She pulled the map away. She kissed the top of my head with a medicinal grunt, worked her heft upright, and trudged west to the hilly cemetery. The splayed grass where she sat slowly rose—once restored, our secrets were concealed.
When the big woman left I started staining things. I thought it was what she would have wanted. I took out couches, chairs, coats, rugs, bookcases, bags of potatoes; I reached for my poison, balsamic vinegar, and stained. You see, the big woman had given me something I didn’t know existed, and now that it didn’t exist again I was a rage-filled, punitive American in a miniature blue-jean jacket.
When I convinced myself my mother knew where the big woman had gone, I stained her. The old man took me upstairs. Some would call it a lesson. I called it a massacre and screamed that they would never again be in my love light.
I saw the big woman once more. Her bags were just as full of newspaper and cans. She stood behind a fire truck with her eyes closed, the empty thimble dangling from her fanny pack. Features squeezed, her face glistened—it told of wrung feelings and betrayed solutions. The old man hauled me in a direction I didn’t know and wouldn’t have preferred. I wanted to find my hand clutching her warmth no matter if it smooched one of her steaming lesions, but the old man pulled us into an alley. To keep her bulky after-image, I tried not to blink. I held out for a while, but then we had lunch. In the chewing I remembered who I was, the parents, the house, my room—playtime. That disappeared her. I asked the old man about the future, toys and such, but he didn’t want to talk about it; he wanted to get home and see the game.