Sunday morning I woke up and smelled the funk Miss Debbie had complained about. I sniffed around until I figured it out. That stench was coming from me or, more specifically, from inside one of my rolls of stomach pudge where my sweat and some crumbs got trapped. When I flattened out my roll, I saw a red patch of irritation. On closer inspection, I saw lines of gray smudge that had a smell to them.
I was molding.
Horrified, I climbed into the tub and did my best to reach all my creases, but to my shock, I could no longer reach my backside—the biggest crease of them all. I had grown too big to wash my own ass.
× × ×
By the day of New Year’s Eve, a week later, I had to call and cancel on Miss Debbie since I was having trouble getting behind the wheel of my truck.
“But I drove out there to ask you in person!” was her first response, followed by, “And PD is looking forward to seeing you. Plus I just put fresh butter in the butter bell.”
“I can’t make it. I have to do something.”
“What? You have hardly any friends, especially with the Fiddler gone. I still don’t understand that one.” She paused. “Unless you can’t drive. Are you too big to drive now? Wait, don’t answer that. I’m going to have Bo get you. He won’t mind. He has a new engine he wants to test out anyway. Bo! Bo, baby, can you get Nana Dara? She’s unable to drive herself.” I knew she was gesturing to him that I was too fat to squeeze in behind the steering wheel. “OK, he said yes. Put on one of your nice, new dresses and bring some acorn squash,” she said, like I just had acorn squash on hand. “And ice.” She hung up.
My head spun trying to figure out how to get out of this. I walked out to my truck, opened the door, and held my breath in as deeply as I could. I grabbed my chub with my left hand and held it up, pressing up against my breasts, and tried to slide in. For the third time in two days, I checked to see if the seat could move back any further. It couldn’t.
I exhaled, and my fat fell down on the wheel. I was in, mostly. I could do this—so long as I didn’t need to make any hard lefts or rights with the steering wheel. I struggled back into the Opry and called Miss Debbie, who said I was in luck—Bo hadn’t left yet.
“Good. I’m driving myself over.”
For those of you not from the rural South, sometimes the driving can be fast, with empty roads and bright blue skies—or it can take forever, with deep potholes and cotton trucks and big green tractors. I’d gotten a long driving day when I had to stop for some rodeo cowboy hell-bent on crossing ten steer on a single rope.
While me and my weighted-down Ford idled, the heat came up from the truck’s guts under the metal hood, despite the chilly day. The clouds gathered and I hoped for rain to cool down the engine, but no such luck. Meanwhile, those steer took their good God damn time crossing with Jimmy Cowboy tugging the gentlest of tugs and chewing on turnip greens.
I stuck my head out the window. “Can you get them moving? I’d like to see midnight tonight.”
“Sorry, ma’am. You just can’t rush ‘em.”
I couldn’t wait one second more, so I swerved around the cattle and pressed the gas down—then ran straight into a hay truck. I heard the crash before everything got dark on me.
× × ×
The nice folks at the hospital took a slew of X-rays and settled me into a room. I’d been there for about ten minutes when PD, still as sweet as pecan pie, walked in hand-in-hand with Bo, who was graying even more around the temples in that handsome way some men grow old.
Little PD was apparently wearing the clothes she wore for bug digging, which let me know that this was serious since Miss Debbie had rushed over before she made sure her little girl didn’t look like a little boy. Behind them Miss Debbie stomped in, wearing those sunglasses that were as big as the fish bowls you could win at the carnival for three bull’s-eye ring tosses.
She cried out, “Nana Dara, first Daddy then you!”
Bo waved to the nurse in the corridor, saying it was OK—Miss Debbie was just a little passionate, is all. He closed my hospital room door.
I sat up as best I could. “The Warden had a stroke. I had an accident. And, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not dead.”
“You need to get your life together,” she said and stood over my bed like the messenger of death herself.
PD looked up at us and smiled. “I drew you a sun,” she said, holding out a piece of binder paper with a yellow smiling sun on it.
Miss Debbie sucked in a breath. “She’s so good she can even draw in the car.”
“Though that car is pretty smooth,” Bo said, putting his hands on PD’s little shoulders.
Miss Debbie sighed. “Now is not time for car talk, Bo.”
“Nor is it time for Hell talk,” I said.
“What the heck is the matter with you!” Miss Debbie pulled out a cigarette from her bra but didn’t light it. “You are killing yourself!”
Bo asked PD if she wanted to go look at the fountain in the middle of the hospital yard and PD, always one to be fascinated with the workings of water, nodded her head up and down. She waved to me as they left.
Miss Debbie watched them go, holding her smoking-arm elbow with her free hand like a fashion model. I looked over at her, and I understood that she was stuck in a place that would never support her being what she could be—some style-minded woman in a big city somewhere, with places to go. Her life would always be too small.
“Your truck is totaled,” she said. “They had to saw it open because you were too heavy to just come out the window.”
“What?”
“They cut the doors off and drug you out, Nana Dara.”
“Where’s Eddie?” I redirected.
“What? How the heck should I know?”
“Did you call her?”
“I sent a carrier pigeon,” she huffed.
My nurse—a short thing with a ponytail left over from high school some decades earlier—came in and asked if I wanted anything to eat.
“Jujyfruits,” I said, just to gouge at Miss Debbie a bit.
“Nana Dara!” she squawked.
The nurse didn’t look up. “We have catfish.”
“That’ll do,” I said, ignoring thoughts about how it must have looked with them dragging my fat body from that cut-open truck. Lord.
Miss Debbie rifled through the one cabinet in the room like the nurse wasn’t there. The nurse watched her, waiting for Miss Debbie to notice and stop, but she never did, so she turned back to me. “Catfish. OK. You get well.” She squeezed my leg through the white blanket and sheet. It felt comforting to be touched. It’d been so long.
“Can we smoke in here?” Miss Debbie asked me.
“Only if you don’t mind your face being blown off by loose hospital oxygen.”
She set her giant vinyl bag down on the guest chair by my bed. The chair looked like tweed, which made me wonder how they could possibly keep it clean in a place that specialized in bodily fluids. She pulled out a pack of menthols to hold.
“What are you going to do now?” Miss Debbie asked, as if I had just attempted to climb a hill and rolled back down.
“Save money for a new truck.”
“I could go back to making birdhouses. I make the best birdhouses.”
She softened. “I remember.”
“I could sell them down at the market.”
“That’s a lot of birdhouses.”
“You here to cheer me up?”
Miss Debbie scratched her forehead. Her nails were bright blue with New Year’s stars painted on them. It always amazed me how she never damaged herself with those talons.
I looked around the white sanitized room, wondering how I’d let it go this far. I truly could die, and that frightened me so much I almost left a gift on my clean hospital sheets.
“I’m going to start walking to get this weight off,” I said, something inside me clicking on. “I’m going to wrap myself in plastic and start walking. I need to make some serious changes. My life will never be like this again.”
Miss Debbie let out a sigh and nodded. “Good. But start with short walks, like once around the Opry. You are big, Nana Dara, so start small. And you can’t seriously wrap yourself in plastic.”
“Extreme is needed.”
She held onto her menthol pack. “I’m so worried about you. You—you are my second mama, you know.” She smiled and cried a little, not caring that her tears were destroying her carefully laid makeup plans. “I’m just so worried.”
“You’re going to be more worried in a moment.”
Miss Debbie paused, then lit a cigarette from the pack she’d been squeezing. “How’s that?”
“Stand up near the door there,” I said.
She moved over to the door and crossed her arms, making sure the cigarette was out of the way of her vinyl bag.
“You ready?” I asked.
Her hand shook as she took a deep drag on her cigarette. “Yes.”
“I’m saying this because I want us to be family—real family. I want you to know me for who I am so maybe someday we can talk. Love is important, you know, and so when we leave it out of conversation, it leaves a hole.”
“Are you feeling dizzy?”
“Miss Debbie, I’m a non-practicing lesbian. Always have been.”
Miss Debbie wiped her eyes and yanked open the door. She hollered out the door: “Come quick, she’s having a stroke or her mind’s being overtaken! She must have hit her head—hard!”
“Miss Debbie, calm down.” I tried to sit up but was too afraid of jostling the monitors on me. “I am not having a stroke, and I am not crazy. I have always been a lesbian—though I did love your daddy.”
“I cannot hear any more of this.” She let the white door close behind her and looked toward Heaven. “God is sending me more tests than Job.” Miss Debbie glared at me and dropped her sunglasses down from her auburn hair. She stubbed her cigarette out in the plastic vomit tray sitting on the cabinet. “You need to get some sleep and get your shit together, Nana Dara. Get your shit together. Praise be his name.”
Miss Debbie tried to make a grand exit, but when she yanked the door, it wouldn’t pull open fast enough, and her vinyl bag dropped from her shoulder. She fell a little to one side, stumbling on her clunky heels. “Well, hell!” she yelled just as she got the door open and crashed into the hallway. “If you need me, I will be at church—praying. You know the way.”
Her sunglasses fell, and she kicked them out of the way, so as not to be distracted as she stomped out on her righteous path.