“I apologize.”
“I had it coming, and more.”
I put the receiver back and moved the phone where she could reach it. I pulled a chair over and sat down facing her. She touched her tongue to her teeth, said: “I have that taste again. Not sweet—just a queer, gray sensation. And my ears ring a little. As though frogs were here.”
“The sugar in that sundae—”
“I know, I know.” And then: “Part of it’s lying, Duke, to myself, and taking it out on you. But part of it’s fear. Of not having the food I so desperately need.”
“You so desperately want.”
“It’s some little bit need.”
“It’s not.”
“All right, then—”
It must have been a minute before she could make herself whisper: “Want.” Then, after another minute: “Now tell me. About yourself.”
“I couldn’t hit.”
“I know. Not that I’d want you to.”
“I couldn’t hit, but I wouldn’t give up, and that spells punk, or, in other words, sparring partner. But then I got the idea I’d make that racket pay. So I did. I trained guys for title fights, guys that had to make weight. You understand about that?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid.”
“They got divisions, each a different weight, like fly, bantam, feather, light, welter, middle, light heavy, and heavy. Each division carries a title, worth plenty of dough. But some guys, who’d be rich at 160, but are bums at 175, are like you. They can’t, or think they can’t, make the weight. That’s where I came in. I talked to doctors, read in libraries, listened to stuff, and got it down to a science. I was the guy, out there in the West, who could take that 175-pound bum, work on him five or six weeks, and make him a champ at 160. I had all the work I could do. ... Listen, stupid, for you I could do the same.”
“I haven’t the—guts, you called it.”
“You think you’re the only one?”
I grabbed her shoulder, shook it, and said: “Every fatso on earth is like that from not having guts—but my business was giving them guts. I know how. Don’t you want to step out of that grease? Don’t you want to be free of it? To walk without folding up? To run? To look like other people? To be able to go in a store, see a dress that you like—”
“Shut up.”
“You finish it up.”
“You got a sireen song, Mr. Webster.”
There’s such a thing as knowing when to shut up, because guts are found inside, and can’t be laced on like gloves. I said nothing for some time, and she lay there, her arms folded over her eyes. Then: “Duke, I’ll try it. I’ll put myself in your hands, with the same trust I have in you always—on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll be facing two fights. One with myself. On that you’ve offered your help and I accept it. The other is—my fight alone. On that I must have your promise you’ll keep out. It must be my fight alone.”
After what Bill had said, I thought I knew what she meant. I said: “Are you sure you’ll have that fight? It seems to me that anyone would be only too glad—”
“Duke, it’s pride. In food. In emancipating Woman with a capital W—and Woman includes me. In something a lifetime is dedicated to. That’s part of it. But there are other parts too, that I can’t go into. Duke, I must have your word.”
“Look. On this subject, in addition to know-how, I’m one hell of a salesman. I had to be. That’s where you begin. I could make with the explaining so—”
“Duke, no!”
She wasn’t impatient, she was terrified. She said: “Unless you promise me, unless it’s to be secret between us, unless I can be sure that not even my family knows until I’ve won—if I win—it’s off. We don’t start. Have I made it clear?”
“ ... If that’s the deal, Mrs. Val—”
“It is, it has to be.”
“Then, that’s it.”
We shook and she held my hand, so we were closer than ever. And yet, as I write it now, I wish I believed it was quite as good as it looks. On her part it was, I know. But on my part, if she had a taste in her mouth, I had one too, and it wasn’t gray, it was yellow. Just once that afternoon I had remembered what Val could do to me, or I thought he could do. And maybe, even pressing her hand, I may have been slightly relieved to be standing clear of that fight, to be glad I wasn’t involved.
CHAPTER VIII
NOW, THERE’S NO MYSTERY to it, how you get a fat guy thin, a fat girl, or a fat anybody. You take them off sugar, starch, and fat, and put them on protein, fruit, and salad, saying it twice for fruit. You do it with diet, and there’s not any other way—at least, any other way that’s safe, regardless of all you hear about exercise, massage, baths, and pills. Time was, they got results with that stuff, like the dry-out, as they called it, for jockeys, drunks, and fighters. They took them off liquid, water, coffee, beer, or anything that’s drunk, and then sweated them, in Turkish, Swedish, or Finnish baths. It was a cure all right, but often the patient died. Joe Gans did, after he trained that way for Nelson, on account of getting fed up with the wrangle over weight and agreeing to one hundred and thirty-three ringside. He made it all right, but the pictures of him, which they still show you in Goldfield, look like a Congo famine victim, and t.b., two years later, gave him the final K. O. Lot of people have died, even big Hollywood stars, from going about it all wrong and believing fairy tales. It’s done, I said, with diet, and there’s not any other way.
But there’s tricks you can use to ease it, and the first one I’d used, with the fighters, was a few days of thinking it over, to get up plenty of wanna and put less strain on gotta. To that she readily agreed, so her ankles would come back in shape, she could get around, Marge would quit coming up, and Val would shove off to town, as usual before she ate breakfast, and the whole thing would be simpler. Each day we’d talk it over, how much better she’d feel, all kinds of stuff of that sort, while in between would come gaps while she screwed up her nerve. Then, toward the end of the week, soon as I saw Val off, I came in and there she was, waiting for me in the living-room, sitting up on the sofa, no longer stretched out flat. I said how pleased I was to see her around again, she thanked me and drew a deep breath. She said: “My wanna I think I have. What next?”
“Fruit.”
“Just fruit?”
“Stop looking like that!”
“We don’t have any fruit.”
“No restaurant man ever does. They know everything about dishes and nothing at all about food.”
“The Clinton store has peaches.”
“I’ll go get some.”
“Take my car.”
Taking it sounds easier than it was, as all sorts of attachments were on it, pedal extensions and so on, so the seat would push back for her belly, and at the same time she could still reach the controls with her feet. It was like sitting with your legs wound around a kid’s express wagon, but I got there and back, and found her just as I left her, getting the jitters from hunger, but still hanging on somehow. I washed off some peaches, put them in a basket, and brought them to her, with a plate and a little knife. She asked: “How many can I have?”
“Many as you want.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“You eat them, you got mineral and pulp and vitamins, but not enough sugar, compared to the syrup on cakes, even to rate a count. And your stomach’s full, so your hunger is not yet gnawing.”
While she was chewing along, I cooked the rest of her breakfast, and her face lit up when I came with it, as she’d thought fruit was going to be all. She got two boiled eggs, a strip of bacon, and a whole pot of black coffee, which I told her drink plenty of, as it would do the same as the peaches, fill her stomach up and at the same time not make weight. She spoke of diets she’d seen in the papers, cottage cheese and stuff like that, and I said: “They’re all hokumalarkey, every one of those systems. They’re theoretical, and don’t take into account that the person red
ucing is human. They’ve got to like the diet. The peaches are friendly. They look pretty, they smell pretty, they taste pretty. And you can have as many as you want. How do you feel?”
“I have to say all right.”
“Any hunger?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Say so if it’s there.”
“No, it’s really amazing.”
We went out and worked on hams, and I brought a small chair from the cottage, so she could slide it around and lean on it and in that way take weight off her feet. Then I thought I could leave her, and drove up to the city, to pick up stuff I wanted for her, like Italian cheese, a grater, olive oil, garlic, lemons, peppercorns, a grinder, more fruit, and other stuff. When I got back she was pooped, all stretched out on the sofa, but definitely yenning for food. She said. “What’s next?”
“Salad.”
“I never cared for it much.”
“And look it, I may say.”
“All right then, salad.”
I made her a Western job, of chicory and romaine torn up, fried croutons rubbed with garlic, a coddled egg broken on, lemon juice and olive oil mixed, ground peppercorns and cheese grated over it. I brought it out on a plate, and she said: “How much of that can I have?”
“All you want, pitch in.”
“My, my my.”
She chumped it down, had a second plate, but shook her head when I offered ham, saying she was full. I said: “All that lettuce and stuff distends your stomach and fills it. The egg and cheese are protein, which is fuel but doesn’t make weight. And the fat, the little bit of butter the croutons are fried in, as well as the spoonful of oil, coats it all, so digestion is slowed down and it stays with you awhile. However, I brought you some strawberries. You eat them as is, of course, without any cream or sugar, but they’ll give you a friendly feeling over your coffee.”
I ate my lunch then, cold ham or whatever it was. When I’d gathered everything up and was ready to do my own work, I asked her: “How you doing?”
“It’s really marvelous, Duke. I feel fed, I’m not hungry, I’m beginning to see how it works. And yet I’m up with it now, the real thing I’ve dreaded.”
“Say what it is, tell me.”
“I feel so weak.”
“What cures that is sleep.”
“How do you mean, cures it?”
“There are two ways your body gets replenished; one’s food, the other’s sleep. Cut down on one, come up on the other, your strength remains the same.”
I could see she didn’t yet get it, so I told her stories to prove it, like the six-day bicycle riders who get no sleep at all and equalize with spaghetti, so they weigh twenty pounds more at the end of a race than they did at the start. I said: “That was the beautiful part, for those muggs I trained out there, that they could hit the hay all day and sleep the lard off. You can do the same.”
“Go to bed now and—”
“Wake up five pounds lighter.”
“I think you’re kidding me.”
She toddled off to her room, and I toddled off to work, having plenty to do. Homer had been taken back and would be out in the morning, so I had to have stuff for him to haul. But by six I was washed up, and when I went in the house she was waiting, in a filmy pink dress. She said: “Duke, it’s a miracle. I was out three hours, like a top. I woke up feeling wonderful and I’m not weak at all.”
She asked what was next on the program, and I said a salad, which I’d fix, to start her dinner off and fill her up, and a dessert, which I’d also fix, with cut-up dates to add some sweetness, to wind it up. I said: “In between, you eat what’s offered, except of course no potatoes or fried stuff, and small portions, which, with the salad inside you, ought to leave you satisfied.”
I went to the kitchen to fix up the salad and dessert, and she came to keep me company. We got on the subject of raw food, and I told her: “It’s the rawness that keeps you healthy, not bulk, though that helps keep appetite down. Raw stuff eat first, while you’re hungry, as we always do out west, so you’ve got it and don’t hit meat so heavy.” I explained about stomach juices, how they digest cooked stuff too soon, so the large intestine quits from lack of work “and makes all kinds of trouble.” If she got what I was driving at, I didn’t quite know, but I kept on with it, as I suspected her of every ailment there was, and meant her to see the point. I told her: “Raw stuff digests slow, so the large intestine keeps working on it, clear to the end of the line.”
She listened, her eyes quite big and friendly, and then, in a complete switch: “Duke, when I woke up I called Dr. Semmes. I told him I’d read of a diet, in the paper somewhere, and had driven to town, now I’m able to be about, to get the things it called for, and he was all for it, really enthusiastic. So when my other fight begins, at least I have that advantage: I got the idea from some place that’s not personal at all, and I’m backed up by someone who knows. However, when Val comes in tonight, I don’t want you here at all. You come out of the cottage to take his car, you wait before coming to dinner.”
“Just put on a vacant look?”
“You notice nothing.”
As she had told it, Val was due to act silly, but ugly is the word I would use. He got so furious he trembled, the first time I’d seen him like that, and said it made no sense. He called the doctor, with a squawk that reminded me suddenly of what Bill had said about power, and the kind of people that want it. The idea, as he dished it out, was that Dr. Semmes had “exceeded his authority,” and that he “ought to have been consulted.” Dr. Semmes, to judge from the rasp in the receiver, dished out some stuff of his own, and told him he was responsible to his patient and nobody else, and also spoke pretty sharp of the treatment the patient had had, and the horrible effect of “all that rich food,” words Val picked up and roared back, so I had to know what had been said.
All that time, while Val was camped by the phone table, which stood against the wall with two chairs beside it, and I sat on the love seat, she sat on the sofa, the pink dress ballooned all around, not looking at me or at him, but somewhere out front, her eyes narrowed to slits. I felt the hammers’ beat, and then fear of prison would speak. I made myself simmer down, but kept having this hot wish I could smash things up for her, set her free of this man I was starting to hate. It was a grim meal, and at the end of it I was the one who took the dishes out and started them in the washer. She went in the living-room, while he still sat blinking, at the rib roast on its plank, for the first time only half eaten.
CHAPTER IX
VAL GOT UGLIER AND uglier as the summer crept along, and two things made him worse. One was the sugar, which she was improving on, as she knew from some home testing-kit the doctor made her get. But instead of making him glad to accept the diet, it seemed to act just opposite. He dingdonged at it; there was no need for diet now, and she should enjoy her food. There was some little honesty to it, as he loved to show off his cooking, as well as the applause it got him. But it seemed a costly bid for a hand to risk his wife’s health, and maybe even her life. The second thing was the awful Maryland weather. I had never known anything like it, a heavy, push-down heat that was out there whether the sun was shining or not, a mug, a humidity, that wouldn’t let you sweat, relax, or even so much as breathe. It was simply hell on this earth, and when a storm would come piling up, generally around supper time, it never helped with the mug, but it did frazzle Val’s temper. He snarled and snapped and growled, and once, when a flash put the power on the blink, I thought he’d throw things at her.
But the first big fight, or say the first one when she fought back, wasn’t about food, and wasn’t even during a storm. It was about church, on a bright Sunday morning when we’d been sitting in recliners, the three of us, out front. They’d been going to church as usual, and each Sunday I’d load take-outs into his car, twenty-five for needy people, which seemed to be the “good” she had talked of so much, or the main part of it anyway. I had done the same today—brought the car ou
t front, and sat down, as invited. I was in shirt and slacks, he in fresh blue mohair, she in a house dress, a new one but not at all fancy. By then her weight had come down, under the two-hundred mark, so she had bought herself a few clothes, “in-between things,” as she called them. Soon he looked at his watch, said: “Dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but—it’s getting quite late. It’s getting on to ten, and we really ought to get started.”
“Oh, I’m not going to church.”
“Holly, I’m surprised.”
“But I’ve nothing to wear.”
There was kind of a break, and she said: “I’m being sensible, I think. On this clothes question at least. I still have to come down by pounds and pounds, so nothing I get can be more than temporary. I can’t go in this very well, and my decent things, such as I have, are practically hanging on me.” She went on, very airy: “Besides, I’m only human, and I don’t relish the talk.”
“What talk, Holly?”
“About the change in my figure.”
“I didn’t know there was talk.”
“Oh, there will be.”
“It’s not a thing you can hide.”
“Then all right, Val. When I’m normal, properly dressed, and ready, I’ll go through with it once and for all. Right now it doesn’t suit me to do it over and over, week after week, telling all those women how I lost the weight.”
“I would think it would be duck soup.”
“Val, I don’t understand you.”
“A normal woman likes such talk.”
That’s what I thought, and I wished she’d get off that tack. But I also thought it was time for me to get out, so I asked if I could have the day, and went back to put on a coat. When I came from the cottage and started out front, they were at it again, and I could see him, through his bedroom windows, marching around. As it seemed a bad time to walk past, I stopped and heard him say: “Why don’t you out with it, Holly? It’s not the clothes and it’s not the talk.”