Everybody around here is fat. I go to the grocery store and it’s all fat people. Fatties browsing the cookie aisle, pulling tubs of ice cream off the freezer shelves, crowding around the old lady holding a free-sample tray of sausage morsels or some other processed crap. And it’s not just the customers. Most of the cashiers are fat, too. Even some of the stock boys, I notice, have love handles spilling over their belts. Except how can you call them love handles when there’s nobody—including me, and that’s for damn sure—who wants to love or handle them. Trust me, these stock boys aren’t getting any.

People driving their cars in the oncoming lane, you can see their fat faces when they pass by. My dentist’s secretary who gives me the card for my next cleaning, and her hand is fat like a baby’s hand. On her desk is a glass jar filled with peanut butter cups wrapped in colored foil, so there you go. You’d think the dentist would take a dim view of this, but I guess he knows how she is about her candy. This secretary, her name is June, always gives me a big smile, and I appreciate it because I’ll bet there’s no real happiness behind that smile. Spend some time with fat people and you’ll find out pretty quick that they’re the opposite of jolly.

My mom, for example, who isn’t even the fattest hog in the pen, is completely miserable. She has a round face with a double chin and blubber at the waist, but she can get in and out of a car without too much trouble, and her legs are actually kind of attractive. One night when she was feeling sorry for herself I said at least be glad you don’t have cankles. I had come in early for me—around nine or so—and I knew she was down in the dumps because she was sitting on the couch eating cake and ice cream out of this huge mixing bowl. That’s her favorite comfort food, what she shoves into her face after a dating tragedy or a problem at work. I plopped down in the Lazy-Boy that dad used to sit in all the time before he left, and I watched a few minutes of some lawyer show with her. I got bored after a while and started talking, and that’s when I mentioned the cankles thing. She didn’t know what cankles were, so I told her they were fat calves that went straight down to the ankles like a big log of bologna, and I reminded her that she was not afflicted with such a mutation. But she took it the wrong way. What the fuck, man, she was the one who brought up the subject of being fat, saying that someone should kill her for eating all that cake and ice cream. But when she’s in that kind of self-pitying mood it doesn’t matter what I say. I can’t win. You’re skinny now, she said, her voice getting shrill, but just wait a few years. Wait till your metabolism changes, you’ll be big as a house.

That is so not happening.

If you think I don’t like fat people, you’d be wrong. I feel sorry for them. Everybody—except for models and movie stars, I guess—hates something about the way they look. But fat people hate their whole bodies, and that has to be awful. I hate my feet. I’ve got that second toe thing, how it sticks out in front of all the other toes. I envy Claire, my best friend, who has perfect little toes all in a row. She paints the nails orange or blue and walks around in flip-flops all day long, showing them off. Eric, my boyfriend, hates that he’s already going bald at thirty. One day we were sitting in Wegman’s parking lot and this incredible fat guy walked in front of the car. He must have been four hundred pounds. His clothes—a blue camp shirt and khaki pants—could have fit a baby elephant. He was wearing some kind of boots that he couldn’t even close because his feet were so fat. Eric and I watched in silence as he lumbered to his car, carrying two plastic bags probably filled with donuts and cookies. He was a mess, disgusting, but you couldn’t help noticing that he had this mane of thick, luxuriant hair.

Eric said, Jesus, look at his hair. Some guys have all the luck.

I just laughed. I’ve grown tired of telling Eric that his balding skull doesn’t bother me. Looks don’t matter to me that much, really. While we were watching the fat guy walk away I told Eric that even if he looked like Quasimodo I’d still do him, because I like his mind. Thanks a shitload, he said, and of course I realized it was the wrong thing to say to a guy who’s bummed about his appearance.

I’ve been with Eric for almost a year, but I don’t see much future in it. He can sense that I’m ready to walk, so lately he’s been picking on me a lot. Like about the way I dress. I’m a retro-hippie, tie-dyed and hempy. He dresses like a biker with Goth overtones, though I don’t believe he’s ever straddled anything more powerful than a Schwinn. I have a Save the Whales T-shirt that he made fun of. What’s so special about whales, he said. Why not Save the Planaria? I didn’t know what a planaria was, and he made fun of me for that, too. When he told me they were a kind of worm I said big deal, you were a bio major. Lot of good it’s doing him, too, now that he works for the University’s computer center.

That’s a mistake I don’t plan on making. I’m a psych major and I want to be a social worker. I don’t care about the shitty pay and the lack of esteem. I want to help people, because I have a compassionate Buddha heart beating under my ribs, and fuck Eric or anyone else who wants to make fun of that.

I liked Buddha the first time I ever heard about him. I liked that he sat under a tree waiting for enlightenment to come to him. Sort of like Newton with the apple. I’ve never been big on striving. My dad, who’s this nauseating go-getter type (his hero was Pete Rose, which tells you everything you need to know about him), used to yell at me for bad report cards. What the hell’s wrong with you, he’d ask. Why can’t you study more? It’s hard, I would say, when you have the work ethic of Marie Antoinette.

I learned about Buddha in Professor Kantrowitz’s American Lit course. We were studying the Beats, and he spent a whole class on their reverence for Buddha. Dr. Kantrowitz—but I call him Sid now, because I fucked him—was very eloquent when he described how Buddha ran out on his wife and baby one night, and left a note behind explaining that just because birds sit together on a branch for a little while, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay there forever. Sid had recently dumped his wife, so I guess that part of the story had some resonance for him. One night at Sid’s apartment I found a picture of the wife when I was rummaging through his stuff while he was in the bathroom. Fat and fifty, what can I say? Sid’s past fifty, too, but he’s not fat. Just short and balding, and homely, in an appealing, Woody Allenish way.

Lest you think I have some kind of mental problem that prevents me from hooking up with anyone hot, I will tell you that my boyfriend before Eric was a dead ringer for Heath Ledger, who, in case you don’t know him, is a total dreamboat. He didn’t dump me, either. We just sort of came apart, no big deal. I do lots of guys, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s an interesting lifestyle.

Better put that in the past tense. After Sid I’m not so sure I’ll be fucking somebody just because I’m horny and he’s a little bit interesting. You’d think a guy who’s lived as long as Sid would be smart about life, but one night after just a couple of months of us being together he said maybe we should get married. No way that was happening, and I told him as much. It was a bad idea to give him the news while I was still naked. He couldn’t handle the derailment. He started raging around the apartment, throwing his hands in the air and saying I’d ruined his marriage and his life, which wasn’t fair because he’d shitcanned his wife before we even got started. I tried to calm him down while putting my clothes on. It was a very awkward scene. Finally I just told him he was being an asshole and hoisted my backpack and headed for the door. I turned to say goodbye for the last time. He stared at me, an anguished look in his watery old eyes. You have the face of an angel, he said, but the heart of Dr. Mengele. I knew the gravity of the insult because I’d recently seen Gregory Peck as this Dr. Mengele dude in The Boys from Brazil. Okay, if that’s what he thought of me I wouldn’t spoil the picture. I’m glad you think I’m pretty, I said, and walked out of his life forever. Not very compassionate, I know. But he asked for it.

Since Eric and I are not officially splittsville yet, you might think that my dalliance with Sid was cheating, but I would disagree. I know for a fact that Eric has been boning this mousy twat he works with, and also that he has picked up a bar slut or two while we’ve been together. No problemo. Our contract is not exclusive. Still, I imagine the time will come when it gets too pissy or weird and we have this ludicrous dramatic breakup, which will be unfortunate because I like hanging with him.

The thing is, I’m growing tired of sex. I asked Claire if she thought it was possible to be burned out sexually at the tender age of twenty. We were polishing off our chocolate shakes at Friendly’s, and she almost did a spit take. We’re pigs, she said. We’re just getting started.

I’m not so sure. I foresee a period of celibacy coming into my life, although I’m wondering does that mean I can’t use my pocket rocket once in awhile. I mean, I can’t imagine never being turned on again. But what I don’t want anymore is the mess and entanglement that comes with getting your rocks off with a guy. I can handle it myself, thank you.

I want to be a real Buddhist. I want to separate myself from all things that will cause me to suffer because I desire them. And that includes guys who turn out to be creepy when that’s the last thing you expect them to be. Like last week when I bumped into Andy Whalen at the mall. I was in Hot Topic going through the CDs and he was in the next aisle checking out T-shirts with rude sayings on them. I was happy to see him. He was the first prof I had a crush on, although I later figured out he wasn’t a full prof, just an adjunct they plugged in to teach lowly Comp courses. But it didn’t matter, because he was cute. He had long brown hair down to his shoulders, which were quite broad, and he was tall and had nice green eyes that looked always on the verge of filling up with compassionate tears for wayward, heartsick freshman girls, of which I was one. Even though it was a Comp course, he would read us poetry in class, and sometimes take us out to the quad so we could sit on benches and write about what we were experiencing at the moment. I wanted to jump his bones, but I was a rookie and thought there might be repercussions.

Anyway, here he was two years later, looking about the same except that his hair was shorter and he had gotten a little softer around the belly. I was happy that he remembered my name. We bullshitted for a while in the store and then he said why don’t we get something to eat. He drove us to the only Mexican restaurant in town where I gorged on burritos while he caught me up on what he’s been doing for two years. Writing a novel, mostly, he said, and teaching poetry workshops here and there. I didn’t know you were a poet, I said. He shrugged and said that he’d had a few poems printed in little magazines no one’s ever heard of, but that it didn’t matter because teaching poetry—and even writing it—was just a business like anything else. That was news to me. I could still remember how passionate he’d been when he read us poems in class. Some of them he knew by heart, like a nice one by Emily Dickinson about God preparing a mansion in heaven for a mouse, and another one by some Brit that had the word "fuck" in it and the last line said not to have any kids. He hadn’t seemed like a businessman then.

Well, we got onto the subject of Buddhism, probably because I’m always bending people’s ears about it these days, and he said that he had an enormous collection of books on the subject and maybe I’d like to poke through them. Cool, I said. Then he suggested we go to his place right now so I could borrow a couple. It was a pretty transparent "Come up and see my etchings" ploy, but I didn’t care. No harm in checking out his digs, and if I felt like it I could put celibacy off for a while.

He had a typical struggling writer’s small apartment downtown over a Salvation Army thrift shop, but I noticed a Bose stereo in the living room, so he couldn’t have been struggling too much. The bookshelves were wall-to-wall, and he showed me where the religion and philosophy section was. There were plenty of books on Buddhism all right, and I grabbed one that had Dharma in the title and started paging through it. Meanwhile Andy had excused himself for a moment. I heard him puttering around in the bedroom. Should I go in there? I wondered. My eyes were looking at the pages of the book, but I was thinking about sex. What would it be like to do him? He didn’t seem as cute as two years ago, and I didn’t feel much more than a nostalgic attraction. Then I remembered that he was a published poet, and that tipped the scales in his favor.

I heard him coming out of the bedroom and turned to give him a nice fetching smile, and I saw that he was completely naked.

I have to admit it scared me. Was he a nut? Was he going to try to rape me? But something in his expression put me at ease. He was smiling pleasantly, and his body language wasn’t tense or weird. It was as if he’d walked into the room wearing a turtleneck and jeans instead of nothing at all. My eyes first went to his dingle—how could they not?—but then I made sure not to stare at it. Find anything you like, he asked?

Okay, I thought, this is not normal, and I am not going to pretend that it is. So what’s with the birthday suit, I asked. Oh, jeez, he said, I’m sorry. Does it bother you? I guess I got naked without even thinking about it. I’m a nudist, and it’s such a natural thing to me that sometimes I forget to warn people.

Oh, please. This was so wrong that if I’d had a dick it would have shrunk like a leaky balloon. I gave him my best "whatever" look and said nah, it’s no big thing.

Lust was over. The whorls of hair on his chest and belly couldn’t hide the fact that he’d gone to flab. He looked better with his clothes on.

He glanced at the book I was holding. You want to borrow that one, he asked? I shoved it back on the shelf. Noo, I said, maybe some other time. Anyway, I just remembered this shit I have to do, so I better get going.

And get going I did. I hopped a bus home and grabbed an overnight bag and told my mom I’d be staying at Claire’s, which I often do. It was raining pretty hard by the time I got there and Claire and I watched a couple of old black and white flicks on Turner Classics and ate popcorn while the rain drummed against the windows. She shrieked with laughter when I told her about Andy the pervert. The night had turned chilly so we slept together in Claire’s double bed, which girls can do without raising any eyebrows, thank god. We even spooned for warmth, and fell asleep while quietly telling each other stories from our respective girlhoods. It was a sweet ending to a fucked-up day.

But in the middle of the night there was a pounding on the door, and Claire got up to let in her boyfriend Chris, who was drunk and loud. They had a brief fight but then it got quiet, and I knew Claire would be spending the night on the futon in the living room with Chris. I didn’t want to hear the sounds of their lovemaking, so I dug my walkman out of my bag and listened to Morrissey until I drifted off.

I woke up to the sound of soft, steady breathing. Claire had returned sometime in the night, probably to escape Chris’s beery snores. I felt rested, and lay for a while looking out the window. Claire’s bed was just a mattress and box springs on the floor, so all I could see was the top of the neighbor’s house and a rectangle of blue sky, but it was enough. Summer’s end had brought hurricanes to the south, and here in Pennsyltucky we’d been getting spin-off downpours for a couple of weeks. The ponds and rivers were swollen and the ground was soggy wherever you walked. I wanted the blue sky to last.

When I climbed out of bed Claire groaned a little but otherwise made no sign of waking up. I got dressed and padded out to the living room to find my K-Swisses. They were underneath Chris’s smelly T-shirt on the floor next to the futon. I sat in a chair opposite and tied my shoes while looking at Claire’s loser boyfriend, with his scraggly mustache and long greasy hair, his tattoos and ratty boxers. He’d kicked the comforter off during his restless sleep. It was cold in the apartment and I considered draping it back over him, but something in the picture irritated me, so I thought fuck it and got up to leave. There would be food in the kitchen, but so what. A bakery not more than two miles away had good sticky buns, and that’s what I was after.

I left without waking anyone up, without making a sound, like a ghost vanishing at sunrise. That’s how my dad left us. Home at night, gone in the morning. Not even a note. Poof. He was in California now, selling real estate, living with a woman not much older than me, the prick. But I didn’t care anymore. Of all the things I might have trouble detaching myself from, my cruddy father was way down on the list.

To get to the bakery you had to walk a few blocks through Claire’s residential neighborhood and then over a bridge spanning a small river—they called it a creek around here—that ran into the mighty Susquehanna. The sun had only been up an hour or so, and the streets were deserted. There was a light breeze, cool to my skin, and puddles shining on the pavement. I guess I felt happy.

When I got to the bridge I saw a yellow police tape stretched across it, and a big sign that read Bridge Closed. The sidewalk part of the bridge hadn’t been blocked off for some reason, and people were standing there looking over the railing. Was it a drowning? But I didn’t see any cop cars. Then I heard the roar, and as I walked closer I saw that the creek’s brown rushing water was dangerously high. The bridge began at an intersection, and when I looked left I saw bulldozers and cop cars farther up where the river might be spilling over its banks.

I stepped onto the bridge and grabbed a part of the railing for myself, away from the rabble. There was a carnival atmosphere, people shouting to one another, talking on their cell phones, pointing down at the churning water. I’m not really a misanthrope, but at times like this I wish there weren’t so many people in the world. Their noise interfered with my listening to the gurgle and rush of the creek. Well, at least they weren’t so close that I had to smell their BO. I breathed in deeply and savored the damp earth smell rising from the muddy water. A fat kid ran behind me yelling something I couldn’t make out, calling to a friend or parent. I looked down along the railing and sure enough, half of the people on the bridge were fatties. Slice the blubber off them, just from under their chins, and you could feed an Eskimo family for a month. It seemed to me there was more danger of the bridge collapsing under their weight than from the rising water.

A trio of high school boys was a few feet away, whooping it up and making jokes. I’m pretty sure they noticed me and wanted to look cool, but I paid no attention. The river moved swiftly beneath us, carrying tree limbs, plastic fencing, garbage, a tire, a baseball cap. I saw lumber, maybe from a chicken coop or shed that had been washed out of somebody’s back yard.

I felt the sun on my hair, the wind in my face. There was no hurricane here, and the floodwaters had not reached my feet. I was ready to turn and head to the other side of the bridge, ready for sticky buns and maybe a cheese Danish.

But before I let go of the railing I noticed something else coming down the river. It was a chest of drawers, painted bright pink and yellow. It was tall rather than wide, and not too big. With those colors, probably a little girl’s dresser. Hey, Matt, yelled one of the high schoolers, what’s your dresser doing in the water? There was laughter, but it trailed off. The dresser was moving closer. It was floating on its back, and you could see that the drawers were plastered with stickers. I bent over the railing, looking hard, and saw images I remembered from my own childhood—the Little Mermaid, Care Bears, Cookie Monster. I watched—we all watched—as this casualty of the flood, this lost dresser from a little girl’s bedroom, disappeared under the bridge.

It had gotten quiet. I walked behind the folks on the bridge, determined to get to the bakery.

There was a line, but I took a number and waited. Outside I waited again, for a bus. It took me home, and for some reason I was breathing hard as I put my key in the door lock. Mom, I called, but there was no answer. I put my bag of pastries on the kitchen table and went upstairs to my bedroom. I threw myself on the bed and reached over the side to pull a cardboard box out from underneath. From the box I extracted Puppy, the long-eared white plush toy I had slept with all my life until just a few years ago. Puppy was tattered and smelled dusty, but I held him tightly to my chest.

When the tears came I wasn’t surprised. But I wasn’t sure who I was crying for.

Larry Gaffney lives quietly in Pennsylvania.

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