Authors: James Keene
Fat
FAT
by James Keene
Copyright © 2011
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0615625959
ISBN-13: 978-0-615-62595-9
To my wife and family.
Look at my new wife, wading in her black one-piece. Even at seventy-two, she is jaw-dropping: lean, tall and leggy, peach skin delicate without noticeable turkey neck or cottage cheese, and filling out her top with a perked hyperbolic curve as if thirty years younger. Her attractiveness has only intensified as her telomeres have shortened. From a peck-on-cheek childish crush to hormonal teenaged lust to young adult love, her effect was such that it could always erase complicating time and accumulating neuroses. We had finally made it to this beach.
“Bill, honey, come on in, the water is great.”
I wave to her. I will join her in a bit, but not before I watch the water lap at her body a bit more. She is the only light on this beach.
There is a topless sunbather a dozen yards to my left who, even in her mid-30’s, looks like an overfed cow with two overused udders on her chest that are more Slinky than skin; her breasts were leaking off the flanks making her nipples areola-down in the sand like two embarrassed ostriches. A middle aged man had just walked by me who was either completely naked with his genitals disappeared under belly and thigh rolls, or he had on a too-tight Speedo that had disappeared under belly and thigh rolls. The dozens of swarming kids all had the physiques of aged bowlers and were running to and from the snack bar with cheeks overflowing, as if the rush of hogs around the trough finally filled with the day’s slop. My wife in the ocean looks like the size of something everyone else would eat for lunch.
My cell phone starts chiming, and interrupts my ogling. Nearby people glance in my direction. My ring tone is a bleating tuba repeating the same two notes, the soundtrack of Humpty Dumpty ambling down the street, or of any of these other beach-goers trudging through the sand.
“Hello...yes, this is him...hi, Dr. Reebs…okay…he went when?…okay…well, thank you for all of your efforts…we will…okay, goodbye.”
There are overweight people populating this country, young and old, but rare is the four hundred pound ninety year old. They just don’t last that long. Well, if they do, they’re just rotting away in a nursing home unseen, needing constant orderly assistance in turning and feeding, not having felt fresh air or a new person’s stare on their skin since their weight was measured in pounds and not in fractions of tons. Eventually, their existences becomes one of self-imposed debility, to live out their time as carbon based machines whose sole purpose is to produce shit and piss. Dr. Reebs just broke the news that this guy didn’t even make it through to the end of his mom’s honeymoon.
BABY FAT
Labeling something as a miracle has become rhetoric. Does imitation mayonnaise deserve such a moniker? Blueberries? How about raw shrimp turned into suckling pig?
Sure, Albert and Kate were ecstatic that their boy was born with two arms and two legs, two eyes, two ears, ten fingers and toes. A symmetric baby is always a joy. Now several months later, the child was still alive, with thicker wisps of blonde hair, though he was still as bald as his father. He giggled constantly, as if he knew life was as good as it probably could ever get: suckling on mommy’s teat for hours on end, getting shit and piss cleaned up for him as soon as they exited his body, and mommy and daddy constantly hovering as if they were the Secret Service protecting the leader of the free world. The baby only smelled of artificially constructed flavors of flowers, sweetly tart through the nose onto the tongue, made so by vigilant diaper checks and application and reapplications of every sort of over-advertised lotions and herbal butt pastes. Xander was born with a silver spoon in every orifice: Burberry onesies, cruising in the baby beemer Bugaboo, an ornate crib constructed of handcrafted Brazilian hardwood, mahogany chests overflowing with so many playthings as to seemingly allow for a different toy to be played with every hour of his waking infancy, a kitchen pantry stocked to look like the baby aisle at Whole Foods, and bookshelves stacked with worn copies of every latest bestselling parenting self-help book. He was fast on his way to a life of Perrier and pastel sweaters.
The way this baby’s development was being curried, he should have already been well on his way to inventing a more efficient biofuel or curing breast cancer, but in all these visits to Albert and Kate’s home, usually invited under the guise of a dinner party or a meaningless birthday though just a rouse for occasion to show off baby Xander, all I have ever seen that baby do is eat. Mom boasted that she nursed to near empty and still had to supplement with a fortune of formula to keep Xander happy. Dad beams of Xander going through baby food so fast as to require weekly grocery trips to replenish their supply of mush filled glass jars in bulk lots. They were proud of his consumptive abilities, as if imitating livestock was a virtue. They scoffed at their pediatrician’s advice to moderate his intake, noting Xander’s weight has always been off the standard growth chart, and simply dismissed his skyrocketing percentiles by repeating, “Babies were meant to grow and that’s just what he’s doing. Xander is going to be a football player. Hahaha!”
A baby’s birth weight is normally supposed to double by about 6 months, triple by 12 months. Xander was born 6 lbs. 4 oz. (the statistic widely known by most of Chicagoland from being on Albert and Katie’s
Baby Xander
mass email list) and now at 9 months was about 25 lbs. Quadrupled size in 9 months. His Escherichia coli like accelerated growth rate seemed at risk of outpacing the expansion of this universe, until the margins of his mass faded beyond our local supercluster. This baby had become a crawling food dumpster.
It couldn’t have helped that when mom was carrying Xander, she went crazy with food. She was always a slender adult, from a lifestyle of peer pressured restrictive dieting, but when she got pregnant, she took it as a golden pass to eat anything she wanted. No more granola and yogurt for breakfast; it was McGriddles time. Low –fat turkey and swiss on whole wheat for lunch? Try a double stack meal. Dinners of grilled salmon atop a garden salad with a glass of red wine turned to spooning into a quart of chocolate ice cream with Reeses Pieces mashed into it. She gained fifty pounds – fifty pounds to kick out a kid that weighed about seven. Everyone excuses weight gain in lieu of pregnancy, so when that dam of social deprivation finally cracks from sperm fertilizing egg, it unleashes burgers, fries and chocolate shakes. Because of Kate, Xander had been awash in calories since he was a few cells old.
His abnormal weight development pushed me to cycle through unlikely differentials of congenital anomalies like Prader-Willi or Bardet-Biedl and refer him to a pediatric endocrinologist in case of some hormonal disorder, but those were CYA workups, as he was developing normally in every other way. The most memorable quote from the endocrinologist’s consultation letter: “Although his weight gain is unusually accelerated, I do not suspect it is due to anything other than a robust appetite and overfeeding.”
Now when he comes into my office for his well-child checkups, it is a misnomer – he is far from well. His parents appear to be force feeding him as if getting a goose ready for the foie-gras harvest. Then they ask me to assess his development. He was only developing how a rancher would describe his steers as developing. Then they have the gall to rush him into the office in full panic with an emergency of “spitting up”. Imagine if you force fed yourself a family-sized pan of al fredo? Re-tasting that creamy regurgitation? How about getting a hose rammed down your throat and a tanker of milk getting unloaded into you? This baby was not pathologically vomiting with a bowel obstruction or at risk of starvation from spitting up too much of his meals; he was just trying to normalize his intake by gurgling up some extra milk. Spitting up was this baby’s only recourse.
I remember at one month of age, Kate was concerned that he wasn’t eating a much as usual. Xander had previously fed on each breast for fifteen minutes each, then took four to six ounces of formula every three hours on top of that; Kate was worried at the visit because even though he was still on each breast for fifteen minutes, he only wanted two to three ounces of formula afterward. She thought he was wasting away. I remember I had seen him the week before for some bogus constipation complaint from Kate (expelling normal stools “only” twice a day is not abnormal) and he had weighed nine pounds, six ounces. Today, he weighed ten pounds, six ounces: a weight gain of one pound in just one week. A normal one month old should be gaining about an ounce a day – Xander was filling his cells at more than double that rate. The kid wasn’t eating as much now because he was simply stuffed. Kate was so used to seeing Xander put away superhuman amounts of milk that when he finally scaled back his intake due to constant over-satiety, she thought he was sick. I guess he was sick, with food.
Maybe there is no such thing as an excessively fat baby. That is, no baby should go on a diet, no baby should do South Beach, and no baby should have to worry about getting in bathing suit shape. But Xander is making me reconsider, because this is one fat ass baby. Look at this kid squiggle in his Stokke Sleepi crib. The crib’s joists are creaking under the shearing strain. He has rolls of baby fat insulating a Buddha body supporting a candy-apple melon. He looks like the less hairy twin of the overstuffed Vermont stuffed teddy bear plopped down at the head of his crib. The bear’s thread face had the appearance of someone watching a fat man down a dozen deep fried bacon wrapped butter sticks. Most stuffed bears have the same face of naive, saccharine optimism as the Snuggle bear, but this one had an abject look of disgust from thinking this fat baby wasn’t going to make it to his next birthday because of a heart attack. The bear’s eyes seemed enraged at the sight of his de-conditioned bedmate, with its furry body language stiffened in aggressive posturing to say, “Hey baby, what the hell have you been eating? Why are you so damn fat? I’m a pear shaped fur ball of hibernation storage, and even I think you look disgustingly huge. Ever hear of saying you’re full? Passing on seconds? And get your ass crawling on a treadmill sometimes. Those legs were made for moving, not storing blubber. Geez.”
And here I was for this kid’s nine month “birthday” party.
“Ooh, Dr. Grant, do you want to hold Xander? Just sit there on the rocking chair, it’s a
Dutailier Glider,
” Kate squealed as she plopped Xander onto me.
Great, now I have Xander on my lap cutting blood flow to my lower legs while having to listen to him gasp for air in between feeding himself handfuls of Cheerios. The kid had a kangaroo-like pouch sewn onto the front of his overalls that was just holding Cheerios. Now that Xander had officially started junior foods, he was likely feeding on mounds of Cheerios and soft veggies that would easily compete with his parent’s dinner portions. My leg was in tingling pain from Xander’s body weight tourniquet. At least it was an amazing rocking chair. Wish I had one to sit in just to watch football. There were three in this living room alone.
“I bet you haven’t held him since you delivered him.”
The clowns surrounding the Xander show starting piping in with their usual interjections:
“Look at that, he’s feeding himself!”
“Let’s take a picture!”
“Smile, Dr. Grant, smile, cheeeese!”
All that I could muster in this photo with this ugly baby was the uglier baby of my gritting teeth and my every facial muscle straining to forcibly upturn the corners of my mouth. My forearms were burning trying to hold this kid steady. Why are they trying to take these pictures with a small, handheld camera? Pictures of this baby are going to need at least three sequential pictures taken with a real good SLR and collaged together, because a shot from a satellite is the only thing that has a chance of capturing this kid in a single snap. A dozen other members of the watching gallery start to applaud and coo at the awful picture of me holding the baby, and their excitement plays sarcastic in my mind and I let a few chuckles escape, but when I closer examine everyone’s faces, most look to be genuinely excited with the results of the camera work. They must be great actors because no one should be this pleased with a snapshot of a lanky nerd balancing a squirming piglet on his knee.