The tea set is mine. Royal Doulton from the 1920s, hand-painted flowers embellished with gold leaf. None of them had the foggiest what it was worth, so I wrapped each piece in old newspaper and took all of it. Gilded-rim saucers swaddled with the editorial page blaring complaints about the school budget (‘them kids don’t need a new lunchroom’) or how the town is run by a bunch of damn crooks (‘why else would the board give the garbage contract to Dave Winston?’). Bone china cups stacked four high, separated by a layer of wood pulp trumpeting how the boys from Park High pulled off a fourth-quarter comeback for the ages and are moving on to States, but they’d have a tall task to get by top-ranked Donaldson Prep in the semis. They did not, in fact, get by Donaldson Prep, losing a 42-6 nailbiter six years ago. Each piece was Tetris’d into a plastic tote, newsprint staining my fingertips black like frostbite. Everything else was bound for the dump.
Margaret said she paid a visit when COVID was just settling in, but the rest of us hadn’t set foot since who knows when. Ronnie moved to Tempe years back for work and a girl, then stayed even when the girl didn’t and the summers got so searing he needed to replace his lawn with rocks. Beth was only a half-tank of gas away, but decided those twenty-six bucks would be better spent on another round at Bigby’s. And me, I just couldn’t accept how bad it had gotten, so excuses were made instead of time.
How does someone let themselves get to 600 pounds? You don’t just wake up one day the size of a grizzly. There are benchmarks along the way – 250 pounds, 275 maybe – when an alarm should go off telling you “LISTEN, you fat pig…you’re eating yourself to death!”. Body positivity aside, you should never sniff three bills before having a come to Jesus moment and cutting out the Little Debbie’s. And you should never crest four hundo, let alone five, when you have four kids in school and there’s nothing funnier than a fat mom.
Yo’ mama so fat, I didn’t laugh when she fell but the ground cracked up.
Yo’ mama so fat, her car has stretch marks.
Yo’ mama so fat, when she got on the scale it said “To be continued...”
Yo’ mama so fat, she wakes up in sections.
Ronnie raged so hard on the bus one morning that he made some aspiring Jerry Seinfeld spend the last two months of seventh grade in a hospital bed. And Ronnie, he spent the rest of his seventh grade getting rides to school every day in the car with stretch marks, and then going to detention for two hours after class. But he didn’t hear the jokes anymore.
Margaret and Beth and I didn’t have strong fists, so we absorbed the snickers and whispers without fighting back (if you want to make a joke about my mom absorbing Snickers, go ahead; I get it). We walked to class, pretending not to hear “her mom is so fucking gross” or “oh my god, do you know how bad she must smell?” from the mouths of girls who used to play hopscotch and four square in our driveway. We ignored the boys when they said they’d have to roll mom in flour and look for the wet spot to fuck her. We didn’t answer when someone asked if mom struck oil when she wore high heels, or said she had more chins than a Chinese phone book.
But the thing is, none of us wanted to be around mom once we puzzled out that she was the reason we caught so much shit. We looked for reasons to be anywhere but home or, if that wasn’t possible, to make sure nobody else was there with us. Countless birthday parties, just the five of us sitting around a sagging cake, the handwritten invitations having been tossed in the trash at the bus stop lest they fall into the hands of our classmates. Eight-year-old me saying “It’s ok, momma. You can eat the last piece.” Years of lying that Donna was on vacation or Ed got grounded or Patty caught chicken pox, so they couldn’t make it. Holding our breath as she tucked us into bed and leaned in for a smooch, then struggled to get upright without toppling over like a donkey dead of a stroke.
One by one my siblings learned how to drive and blinked out of existence. Always off to so-and-so’s house, or another errand to run. Then college, where they all seemed to score killer jobs just off campus so no, they wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, and maybe not over the summer either. That left me, an only child in a family with four kids, to watch mom swell up like Violet Beauregarde. She showed me magic tricks, like the one where a package of hot dogs disappears in a sitting. The peanut butter spoon, the big kind like you’d normally use to scoop mashed potatoes onto your plate, sat on the windowsill with tongue marks leaving an oily sheen like a cave painting. Me, sitting on the floor in my Dora the Explorer costume, emptying a pillowcase full of Halloween candy and sliding every Zagnut, Mallo Cup, and Tootsie Roll her way, while I kept the Smarties and lollipops. Stuffing and mayonnaise sandwiches. Brownies topped with scoops of Rocky Road and crumbled chocolate chip cookies, dusted with crushed pretzels and a handful of gummy worms. Sometimes, her after dinner snack was butter. Mom drank sodies before the world knew them as sodies.
Yo’ mama so fat, her cereal bowl has a lifeguard.
No amount of orlistat or naltrexone or semaglutide was going to get mom back down to her fighting weight. If you can’t lift your head off the ground, crunches mean jack shit. Spare me your lat pulldowns and kettle bell swings and progressive overload. Don’t bother with Romanian deadlifts and preacher curls and high-intensity interval training. Show me a treadmill that can handle 600 pounds and I’ll show you a woman who couldn’t climb onto it anyways.
Anyone that owns a dog or cat is hip to the fact that someday it will need surgery that’s too expensive or get a bad case of parvo or chase one too many Buicks. Or maybe you’ll wake up one day to find Master Sargeant Marty Meowington curled up like a potato bug in the triangle of light that moves slowly across the kitchen floor each morning, then recoil in horror when ear scratches lead to the revelation he’s stiff. You accept their mortality while also pretending they will live forever, until you can’t ostrich anymore and need to decide between turning them into a box of dust for $180 or digging a hole behind the peonies for free. This is how we moved through life, me and my siblings. Just waiting for the call saying mom’s heart finally quit. Wanting her to be alive and healthy, but understanding she hadn’t been the latter in decades and wasn’t likely to be the former very much longer.
What we didn’t bank on was a call from our aunt, telling us mom was found dead with 11 stab wounds and our father was charged with murder.
Yo’ mama so fat, her blood type is Ragu.
***
Nine years old. Ronnie, Margaret, and Beth had all moved out, escaping for college and jobs. Just me and mom, living together and taking care of each other. We’d play princess and pretend we were fancy like in Beauty and the Beast. Sometimes I’d be Belle and cram my shoulders into a yellow dress that had been around since kindergarten, and mom would roar “You shouldn’t have been in the west wing!” Other times we’d switch roles, and as the Beast I’d invite her to dinner. After being told no, I’d yell “Fine! Then go ahead and starve!” and we’d both laugh till our bellies ached. Once, mom went to the cabinet in the dining room and returned with a teacup and a gleaming white pot, each decorated with a delicate gold band around the rim and clusters of pink, yellow, and red roses. Royal Doulton from the 1920s. She said, “You be Chip, and I’ll be Mrs. Potts.”
Tetris’d. I like