fiction by Jason Edwards
The treadmill’s been unplugged for three months now. There’s a folding chair sitting on it, and the ground around is littered with food crumbs: Cheetos Doritos, Ruffles and Pringles. Funyans, Fritos and Fuck-Me boxes of Ritz Crackers. You can put anything onna Ritz. Or you can just eat ‘em plain, one sleeve at a time.
She’s perched on the chair, Fat Martha. Her real name’s Tabitha, Tabby, Tubby, Tabs, Tubs, but she calls herself Fat Martha. The treadmill is too big to fit through the apartment door. Hank put it together for her. Fucking Hank. Fucking Hank said, I can’t handle your shit anymore, Tabs. Good riddance.
Fat Martha sits on the chair and watches television. Mostly reruns. Mostly things on basic cable. Friends. What a terrible terrible show. Only Joey ever eats. Fat Martha wipes a sweaty paw on her chest, wiping more crumbs to the floor. Her cheese powder-stained sweat shirt. The one that used to be pink. Not aggressive pink, more like a subtle pink. A pink a boy could have gotten away with wearing. Fucking Hank had worn it once, after he’d put the treadmill together, and taken a shower, and gotten into her bed, and then gotten out of it again and thought it would be a good idea to run down to the bodega for a few diet sodas.
Bugs don’t even bother with the food crumbs. Fat Martha thinks about changing the channel, but the TV is perched so she could watch it while walking the treadmill, and the remote is who knows where, so she watches a commercial for Burger King. Does Burger King deliver? Fat Martha can’t make herself leave the apartment.
Fat Martha weighs 87 pounds. She’s five foot four, tall for a short girl. Her BMI is 14.9. If she can just get to 15, Fucking Hank will come back. She eats chocolate and donuts and very fatty steaks. She tries not to move much. She holds it in and doesn’t go to the bathroom very much. But she’s stuck.
The commercial’s over. Now Phoebe is saying something naïve, Chandler’s responding snarkily, and the other two skinny bitches are smiling knowing smiles. Joey looks confused. Ross looks like he’s just swallowed a small basset hound. Fat Martha is almost 40. She remembers when sit-coms would have “very special” episodes where they dealt with some problem. Like teen pregnancy, alcohol abuse, or racial intolerance. Sit-coms don’t do that anymore. Sit-coms are happy to help you build a treadmill in your tiny postage stamp apartment, laugh about how it’s impossible to get it back out again, but they don’t bother filming the episode where you admit you’re less than 90 lbs now and you don’t know why.
Fat Martha is not anorexic, or bulimic. She does hate her body. She does puke, on occasion, but never on purpose. Usually because the shit she crams down her throat is so vile, she can’t keep it in. She has a bucket for that. It is the only exercise she gets. She pukes until she sees spots, then she drags the bucket to the sink and washes it. It always smells like bleach. It’s gotten to the point where the smell of bleach is comforting because what comes next is the terrible terrible knot of hot hate in her guts exiting violently.
She doesn’t know what to do. Friends is over, and another episode of Friends is coming on. The box with the grocery store delivery is in the kitchen. There’s a clean path, in the debris, for the delivery guy. He’s foreign, thank god, and if he sees Fat Martha and her filthy apartment and her dusty treadmill and her pristine puke bucket, his noticing doesn’t show on his face. She tips him well. There are bags of garbage everywhere.
Lost her job, but so what. Mom died, but so what. Never knew her father. Blame him? Girls without daddies were supposed to be sluts. But she could never manage it. Too fat. And for a day, between too fat and too not fat enough, there was Fucking Hank. All the Friends are looking out the window. Fat Martha doesn’t even have to pay attention to know they’re staring at Fat Naked Guy. She absolutely hates that she knows this.
She tries to stand up. She feels a head rush coming on. She’s teetering on the edge of the treadmill. If she falls, she might land on the bed. If she has momentum, she might roll off again and land next to the tiny refrigerator. Then, as she lies dying, she can have a chocolate milk. Dying of multiple broken bones. Can multiple broken bones kills a person? If a rib goes through her heart, maybe. Hopefully.
Instead the head rush clears and she’ still perched on the edge of the treadmill, 5 inches above the floor. Fat Martha looks down, and sees her knees. Her knees are now the biggest part of her body. Her belly disappeared, her boobs disappeared, but her knees, they stayed right in. She’s in a filthy sweatshirt and nothing else, because clothes make you sweat and sweat makes you lose weight. Maybe the phone will ring.
Maybe the phone will ring. Ring, ring, Fat Martha lets it ring. Who has a phone that hang on a wall, these days. A gigantic intruder-bashing plastic thing. Answer it. Hello. It’s me. Who. Me, Fucking Hank. Oh. How are you. I’m fine. I called to tell you I’m sorry. No you didn’t. Yes I did, Fat Martha, I called to tell you I’m sorry I couldn’t deal with the way you were disappearing right before my eyes. Don’t me melodramatic. I just wish you would go to the doctor. How, Fucking Hank, am I supposed to do that? Don’t yell at me. Why not, you deserve it. I’m just a figment of your imagination, Fat Martha. So. So would I really call myself Fucking Hank? And you always called me Tabs, not Fat Marha. See. Yeah. So. Yeah. So go see a doctor, Fat Martha! Oh fuck you. And if she had enough energy, she’d slam the phone into the cradle so hard it would shake the walls and some asshole number would thump the floor with a broom.
But the phone doesn’t ring. Friends chatters away, the tiny refrigerator looms, the cupboards stuffed with chips beckon. But she’s not hungry. She wants to be hungry. Wants so desperately to be hungry. But she’s not. Fat Martha steps off the treadmill, winces with then pain that shoots through one knee. Chandler gets off three jokes and Joey alludes to sexual prowess twice in the time it takes her to shuffle around her bed. Now she’s standing next to the frig. It’s way down there. What if she bends down to open it and can’t stand back up? Well, that’s happened before, so who cares.
Fat Martha bends down to open the tiny frig, and all energy leaves her back. She’s hanging from her own hips. She grabs the gigantic jug of chocolate milk. She opens it. The cap falls… somewhere. She puts the jug to her lips. God damn it is so heavy. She takes a deep breath, cold chocolaty air into her lungs, a few millicalories of energy, some kind of weird cocoa osmosis, and with Herculean will she straightens up, the jug upended above her, chocolate milk splashing onto her face, coursing down her body naked underneath her filthy sweatshirt as she falls back into the bed.
The weight of the jug pushes it into her gums, gashing them, hot copper in their with the chocolate. Finally it’s empty and she lets it fall away. Her face is sticky. Her hair is sopped. Her bed is soaked. Fat Martha licks her lips, limps a hand onto her belly, wrist bone cutting into exposed ribs. Did she get any in her? Did she swallow any one the way down? Her life flashes before her eyes. It’s a fat flash.
In Junior high they read To Build a Fire, and her teacher kept bragging about how everything was foreshadowed in the first paragraph. Fat Martha must have read that story a hundred times, at least a dozen, at least three times, trying to see what the teacher was talking about. But it just wasn’t true. There was nothing in the first paragraph that foreshadowed the ending. Nothing in that first paragraph that let you in on the secret. You read the whole story thinking there was a chance. Sure, the second time you read it, you know the guy had no chance at all. But the first time—the writer was making it up as you went along. Anything could have happened. Anything at all.
The treadmill’s been unplugged for three months now. She gets up, relishes the sticky sweetness on her face, gluing one eye shut, fights off waves of head rush and plugs the treadmill back in. There’s a folding chair sitting on it, and the ground around is littered with food crumbs: Cheetos Doritos, Ruffles and Pringles. She kicks off the chair, and it smacks the walls, wedges up against the front door. Funyans, Fritos and Fuck-Me boxes of Ritz Crackers. Underneath her finger nails, in her hair. You can put anything onna Ritz. She’ll put a mile on every one she’s ever eaten Or you can just eat ‘em plain, one sleeve at a time. Fat Martha’s gotta lotta sleeves to get through. She starts the treadmill, starts running.