The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories

by Jackson, Shelley

  the sky surrendered utterly, and knew the flooding of uncontrollable pleasure

  the sweet agony wrung a moist effluvium from the sky’s throbbing center

  we shut our eyes as the warm drops drenched our upturned faces

  FAT

  I’m afraid things have gone to pot around here since you left. Cadbury has buried the remote control and I’ve let myself go. I know you think I should keep my nose clean and return to my studies; that’s all very well, but I have less and less room to move. I could barely get out of bed this morning for the weight on the coverlet, though mind you there’s no particular need to go to bed to go to sleep, now everything’s so squishy.

  Have I embarrassed you? Face it, Boney, fat falls. In the neatest homes. In palaces and hovels! But we don’t talk about it. Only a few greasy, fly-by-night presses put out the occasional pamphlet saying what we already know, just to épater les uptight. That means you, Jack. But once we read them to each other like pornography.

  “Let a house be scraped down to the last layer of paint the night before, it will be buttered by morning; leave it for a week and fat will round every contour. Vacation homes fill with fat; fat bursts the boards from old barns, leaving a barn-shaped block of suet to stand until the warm weather. Fat comes of its own accord, clogging chimneys and closets, stealthily amassing behind the drapes. Isn’t it time we admitted we all have it? Let me go one step further: that we need it? It’s our food!”

  You loved that bit. “It’s our food!” you crooned, stuffing a gooey finger in my mouth. You were holding the page open with your elbow. “ ‘We live on it’—now swallow, there’s a good girl—‘but we don’t discuss it; a vast mutual deception that people of other cultures find hard to understand. Babies love fat and are forgiven for it, but toddlers are sent to their rooms to eat, while adults lick the undersides of chairs, or floss the balustrades, in strictest privacy, and shudder to see foreigners run a finger between the sofa cushions to find a snack. Their houses wobble and shine. Ours are dry, every mitered joint painstakingly scraped clean.’ ” But not mine. Not anymore, Jack.

  You were the one who wanted a traditional wedding. I still have the article you handed me by way of asking. “Like Carnival, the cataclysm of marriage occasions a temporary inversion of values; the private is publicized, the unspoken spoken, the degraded is raised up. The bride and groom are left alone to fast. They allow fat to form on their naked bodies; this is augmented on the eve of the wedding by the bridesmaids and best man, who dab on pats of it until the couple is encased in towering masses, hers a sphere, his a cone. These wobbling, glistening behemoths are rolled on trolleys down the wide aisle. (Many urban churches no longer possess the high ceilings this ceremony requires.) In the center of each mass hangs the naked body like a larva.” While I read, you blushed and fiddled with the ring.

  “Members of the audience fling themselves upon the couple as they pass, vying for scoops of the fat, which is deemed lucky. In olden days this was a time for feasting; now the blobs are collected by church functionaries with trash bags, or left on newspapers placed under each chair. By the time the bride and groom reach the altar, they are much reduced (these were days of large weddings) and their faces bared. Our modern kiss was once the first bite of spousal fat. Bride and groom are swept off to a private chamber, where they lick each other clean, a process that may take hours. Engorged, they mate, then sleep. This ceremony, so seldom performed these days, is even more binding now, for having shared this distressing transaction, husband and wife may be bound for life by mutual embarrassment.”

  And you, Boney, with whom I shared those sacred rites, you pretend to find me unclean—you who took me for better or for worse, for saturated or unsaturated, who reveled in the ineffable textures of my lard, and whispered foul words to me: buttery, oleaginous, pinguid, adipose. Whatever you are doing now, you are a phony, Mr. Sprat.

  I am writing to tell you I’m still eating. I have seen the sun rise at fatfall and felt the hot blobs pepper my thighs. My dog swims in the center of the living room, his poop hangs above my sofa; I am letting my house fill up. I will wear a poultice on my forehead, and seal my eyes with buttons of fat. Surely these gestures deserve some response. I spread the fat on the lawn and stroke it onto the lilies. Tulip cups are plugged with it. Roses are beautiful blurs in the banks. Astonished bugs and mice and cats get stuck in the suet. It will not harm them.

  While you keep dry in your house of shell and aluminum, in that fat-free land behind the sun, click beetles will telegraph my feats to you, and your toe bones will rattle as you wonder at me. Yes, my fat hat is as tall as your saguaros! Yes, my gown is oleomargarine and hydrogenated. One of these days I will set a match to all this, and then, dear Bones, though my flame may not outshine your sun, my smoke will put it out. I am painting trees with domestic Crisco, dear. I am covering the car, and see, what fun, I am rolling fat balls, big, bigger, biggest. What for? Meet Fatty the Fatman!

  I can’t help it, I was so lonely. He is not much like you—so rounded, so comfortable, so very relaxed. I could sink into him. In fact, I have—I tried to sit on his lap yesterday. I found myself inside him! He didn’t mind, Boney, so you needn’t shake your rattletrap head.

  I have snipped your signature off your last letter—it was months ago, Jack—and poked it into his head with a pencil. The hole closed up on its own.

  I’ve brought him inside. We watch TV. The set is buried, but we can see the moving shapes, and the blue light. In our bliss, it’s all we need.

  I am selling ties made of fat. Ties, and aprons, and mittens. I stamp them with the image of the Fatman. They’re doing very well!

  No, of course they are not doing well. Nothing is doing well. I suppose I sleep well, except I set the alarm six months ago, and it goes off twice a day, somewhere deep in the fat. I can’t reach it to turn it off, I can’t find it, I can’t bother to find it. The fat is piling above my chimney. It piles, and piles, like an upward icicle, a stalagmite, and then it topples. And then once again it piles and piles. The roof is covered with fallen piles, the mound rises higher and higher. Birds pass over the house and are seized in mid-flight. They stick there, batting their wings if they still can, until they fall into lassitude and despair. Eventually they will probably die, though surrounded by food. My dog is not so stupid; he eats his way away from his shit, and bores a shitty tunnel toward the door. Boney-o’s gone hunting, his knees a-clacking, his ribs going rat-a-tat-tat, and an oboe for a nose. Long white bones and the rest all gone.

  The pit slipped out of the apricot and went for a walk. Good riddance!

  You always warned me to scrape behind my ears and spoon between my toes, to squeegee my back and the closet doors, to wipe behind the organ and irrigate the jambs. Now I mortify myself. Frosted all over with fat, like a despairing cake, I circumnavigate the yard at a crawl. The house is the center of my orbit. Here I go, ’round and ’round, crawling, and I don’t really know why, except that someone has probably set me at it, hence this feeling of obligation and even, yes, an obscure satisfaction, not pleasure of course, but a dog’s satisfaction at obeying orders. Whose? Must be yours, Boney-o. Oh, I can see you now, adjusting your cuffs, crossing your narrow ankles, not looking at me as you remind me of your hopes for me, which I will never live up to. “Up to which I will never live,” you bark. You have a cane hooked over your elbow. What a fop you are, Mr. Clean. And what a caricature. Yes, maybe I’m getting muddled, mixing you up with a character in a storybook.

  In any case I’m growing uneasy with the idea that you ordered me to crawl around the house like this, “frosted all over with fat, like a despairing cake.” As if you could come up with something like that! No, I’m probably doing it to spite you. I’m wearing my dressing gown, the one you hate, with the roses. All my other clothes are lost. Why do you hate this dressing gown? I know, it’s the roses, big as cabbages, shameless as a beaver shot. They cheer me up.

  The little birds squeak from their weird
perch. Maybe after all they’ll be OK, the sun will melt the fat on their wings and they’ll go flapping off to their babies. No, I can hear you saying, some things just aren’t meant to work out, pull yourself together.

  I know what you want, Boney-o, don’t think I don’t see it. When I’m as thin as you wish I were I’ll be a skeleton.

  When I get tired of crawling, I go into the house, and when I get tired of the house, I crawl. Since nobody has commanded me to crawl, I can set my own hours and even take days off if I want to, though usually I like to get some crawling done every day. The point is, it’s up to me; that’s the advantage of being self-employed. I sometimes think I’m setting a new standard for crawling, or as I sometimes call it for the novelty, creeping; then I remember I’m the only one doing it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Whether I crawl with particular intricacy, or with irony, or with girlish artlessness, I’m only pleasing myself, not that I shouldn’t please myself; in fact if I wait for someone to wade into the garden to drop a medal over my neck for freestyle creeping, I’ll wait a long time.

  It’s interesting, though, that there are aesthetic satisfactions to be had in, loosely speaking, crap: the rattle of phlegm in the throat, the shine and firmness of some turds, much nicer than the raggedy look of others, and fat, too, that offal, is sometimes, oh, marvelous—a trembling, fragile, cream-colored gateau—while sometimes, I’ll just say (to spare your sensibilities), less marvelous. For example when it has hair and sweepings mixed with it. Or has gone a bit curdy and horn-colored on the exposed parts. But I did not mean to describe it.

  Crawling, I have made a circular track around the house, with built-up edges. My dressing gown smoothes it into a glossy, even surface, which is a never-ending pleasure to look upon, shining a short distance ahead of me to where the curve cuts it off from view. Though sometimes Cadbury trots after me and spoils it.

  I have had to make a path from the house to the track and so I have just continued this radial line, in accordance with a rather geometrical sense of order, out to the mailbox. From this path I make irregular tracks outward to continue frosting the yard. I have not coated the mailbox, because I am afraid the mailman would not pick up the letters, but I’ve almost finished the fence and the tree, and of course all the smaller plants are done. I don’t expect congratulations, needless to say.

  Even though I trowel out wheelbarrow loads of fat from the house, the space inside gets smaller and smaller. I crawl up a sloping tunnel to my cave in the center of the biggest room, the living room. It is a little round hollow like a stomach. Below me I see the vague shape of the couch (itself covered with roses, another bit of gaucherie, no?) and the coffee table. The bookshelves are no longer visible except when the sun shines through the fat. Then I can see everything, though foggily: the colored spines of the books, Cadbury’s turds, a pair of my underwear floating like a jellyfish, and a mouse who, like me, has made himself a little round cave with a tunnel leading up to it, and lined the bottom with part of the jacket of my collected Kafka (black and red shreds). It is almost like flying, to float here in the middle of the room, only it is more like being mummified, because my legs are trapped; in fact whenever I stop moving, I begin to melt a little way into the fat, making a cavity shaped precisely like me, as if it were a mold in which I’d hardened, like a candle or a statue. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To be a statue, I mean. So definite, so martial. They might even melt you down for bullets!

  Cadbury is in a worse state, for sinking in, because his body heat’s higher, though the fur insulates him; still, by morning he’s swimming. By morning, too, the tunnel has closed up, but so far it hasn’t been too hard to dig my way through again, though once—I was pretty groggy—I tunneled the wrong way and didn’t even know it until I hit the kitchen sink. I expect the mouse has the same problem. It’s a bond between us.

  The windowpanes have popped out, forced from their frames by the fat, and are lying unbroken on the heaps outside, reflecting the sky.

  I can no longer fit the Fatman into the house. It is too big a job digging the tunnel wide enough every evening to push him up it, not to mention the disturbing way he sticks to everything. If I’m not careful he might even grow into the house and vice versa, and I will have to dig him out in handfuls, or else there will be nothing left of him but two embalmed carrots and a slip of paper, somewhere in my living room, and only visible on sunny days!

  Two carrots, you ask? Why, sir, I blush.

  I have left him outside. I smoothed his body into three shining white spheres, so he will look his best. I’m not coming back.

  Yes, I’m planning to stay in from now on. In the end, my skeleton will hang here, in the center of a block of lard, beautiful as a bug in amber. One day maybe you will come home. If you want to gather my adorable bones, you will have to eat your way to them. Yes, Mr. Nobody, that’s only fair: a second wedding most prodigious. At last, Boney-o, we will each have what we crave, you a skeleton, and I (and this is my revenge) a fat man.

  I fell asleep and dreamed I was a candle. A wick ran through me and out the top of my skull, and as it burned the fat level sank in the room. First the crown of my head was bared, with a flame standing above it; then my whole skull, blazing like a jack-o’-lantern. My shoulders freed themselves and my rib cage became a lampshade to the flame in my chest, but when the descending flame reached my pelvis, I woke up.

  I was stuck fast! The fat cleaved to my forehead and cheeks, and fluttered against my nostrils. A thin, constant stream of warm oil was running into my mouth and down my throat. I forced my eyes open. It was morning, the sun was out, the window was closer than the door, and I began to swim, the hardest thing I’d ever done. I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t sure I was moving; was that my foot I felt? I thought I might be batting my feet, that was something I could do, they had called it the flutter kick when I was learning to swim as a girl, it didn’t seem very effective back then, plenty of splash but very little forward movement, much like everything else we do, and it seemed even less effective now, but I did it. My hands, if I could find them, I could pull in to my sides, and then slide them, very craftily, with a minimum of fuss, up along my body, past my ears, and then shoot them forward together. And as I pull them down, flutter kicking, I will inch forward.

  Shoot forward, pull down, flutter kick. I think I am moving; I might not be. I’ll know by the mouse. That’s it, I’ll steer by the mouse, poor little carcass, it will be my North Star, I’ll set my astrolabe to it. Musculus the Mouse Star. Verminus?

  Why does no one help me? Funny, that, when I think about it. Shouldn’t there be a policeman around, at a time like this? Or a handsome policewoman, stretching the long arm of the law through the window to tow me out? Maybe nobody knows I’m here, nobody saw me, crawling through the roses in my rosy robe, ‘round and ‘round. A rose is a rose is a rose. I would accept a helping hand from the stalwart Miss Stein. Shoot forward, pull down … I close my eyes, so that when I open them again I will be amazed at how far I’ve gotten. Instead I’m amazed at how close I am to being exactly where I started.

  How is it possible nobody saw me? Of course, I lied about the ties, nobody buys ties made of fat, nobody wants to look at fat, least of all my fat, if they want to look at fat they can look at their own.

  I am inching past the sofa. The window is at 19 degrees off due Mouse. I will get there, after I swim through twenty-seven pancakes and a lake of syrup, and those tigers that turned into butter. I could eat my way out, but that would take too long.

  If I could gather my resources for a really good fart, it might propel me some distance, but I am becalmed. Mouse to starboard. Somebody must have seen me, if I was there; of course I was there. Boney’s the one who’s missing, even if he does get all the mail. I used to throw it in the closet, when I could reach the closet, throw not being the right word, poke or stuff rather. Then after a while I just put the mail on the pile in the garden. I looked on it as a rustic touch, a sort of haycock of le
tters. I covered that with fat too, and each new letter, as it came. They saw me, I guess, and at the same time didn’t see me. Who notices the fat lady? In an hour I will reach the windowsill. Thank God the glass is gone.

  Musculus before me. I will take him with me, to commemorate our voyage together. I carve out a ball around him and hug it to my stomach like a football player. Now I must swim with just one arm and the after all much underrated flutter kick. I press my eyelids open and I can see green, blue, yellow light coming in from outside.

  I touch the windowsill!

  At last my head pops through.

  I lie still for a while, poking out the window. Mostly I am breathing, and spitting clots of melting lard. Despite the fat plugging my ears, I hear the birds—the flying ones, and the sad ones that are stuck in my tower. Clouds are running across the sky. It is funny the way an accident happens, I am calling it an accident though we both know better, and for a while one has a purpose. I felt important for a little while, charged with the task of saving myself, inventing a system of navigation and brushing off my flutter kick. I will probably remember that as the best time of my life. But now that I’ve arrived at my destination (which a short time ago was precious and almost unattainable), how disappointing: I’m in an ordinary and slightly ridiculous position, halfway out of a window. It is worth philosophizing about, Boney.

  So I won’t rest on my laurels. Now that my house is uninhabitable, I must build an igloo. The first thing I do, after I climb down, is trace a circle on the ground. The first block I lay must be the one that encases Musculus. I hew it into a brick and place it on the circumference. Now I have my plan, I am zealous. Of course, I cut blocks in which there are roses, beautifully embalmed. I am saddened to find Cadbury, too, buried in a deep bank, and I cut a large block around him and place him opposite Musculus, at the entrance. Near the tree I find fat full of ants and I cut a block of it, and of a batch into which a caterpillar has fallen. I lay my blocks systematically; I work in a circle, creeping around my igloo, and when I have used all the blocks, I creep up to the roof of the house—not as difficult as it sounds, because the drifts come up to the eaves—and I push over the fat pole and cut blocks full of birds, and from these I make the ceiling, standing on Fatman’s lap. Did I forget to mention I built the igloo around him? I take off my robe, bundle it outside, and seal the door with one last block.