Stuart Watson

Party of One

Rita stood on the deck of her winter home, her cupped but empty hands in front of her. She looked down into an imagined pool of warring insects, all the emotions competing for control of her soul. She was to attend a party next door that night, in the company of “the Ptarmigans,” migratory winterfowl, like her and unlike her, all keenly aware that other people, elsewhere, were struggling mightily, while they pondered which brand of non-dairy milk to purchase.

Years earlier, at one of the Taos ski colony’s serial cocktail rallies, Rita referred to her winter neighbors as Taotians.

Aghast, the women of undisclosed age stopped and stared.

“Like Laotians, only different,” Rita said, by way of explanation.

No, they got it. They just didn’t want a mirror held up to it.

No one laughed. In short order, Rita slunk out and took her embarrassment home. Undressing for bed, she told Wayne, who suggested that maybe nobody in ski pants wanted to be associated with villagers from a war-wracked southeast Asian country. “Or colony?” he corrected himself. “Whatever.”

Now they were back. In Taos again, at the third of their colonial homes. Rita reminded Wayne that she would be attending the Bye-bye Baggage Party that night.

“Odious,” she sniffed. “So, now you’ve got two hours by yourself. Heat up one of your box pizzas.”

She held his culinary taste in the lowest regard. She wondered how much disapproval he harbored for her own tastes, her BMI yo-yo, mood monitored only by the needle of her bathroom scale. 

She would join “the Ptarmigans,” seasonal birds of a frosty feather. They needed her to help celebrate a decade of their myriad rejections, reversals, reappraisals.

Some had jettisoned husbands.

Some had jettisoned drink.

Some had jettisoned workplace lovers and were eluding the gropes of new employers.

Others had tossed a fuckable fitness instructor or moved out an underachieving child or cleaned out the garage to the point that it could actually absorb a parked car.

Rita would go, and she would hate it. Idle chat with the seasonal neighbor and the seasonal friends who all knew that she loved icing more than cake and cake more than the husband who administered gas to people someone else would cut. Yet she did so love the husband, when he brought her frosting.

Before she left, while pushing crusted snow from the deck, Rita asked Wayne to “move that footstool.”

Wayne couldn’t figure out why. She put it on the deck. After she used it, she left it there. 

It wasn’t bothering anyone, least of all Wayne. Apparently it bothered Rita. Not enough for her to put it back. Just enough for her to ask him.

“I thought that was its new place,” Wayne said.

He had sidestepped it several times with little thought. Rita had her ways. Maybe she had intended to hang a basket of flowers directly above where the stool now sat.

“That's not a place,” she said.

“I beg to differ. That is so a place. Every place is a place. As places go, that is about as  place-worthy as anywhere one could choose to situate a step stool.”

“That is not its place.”

“Maybe it was in its place before it got up and moved itself to  this place.”

“Is this that place?” she said, lifting her skirt.

He stared for a second. Then he moved the stool.

It had come to this: jousting over nonsense. In the wake of their volley, she realized her request had come from a need to control something in her life.

Wayne could have persisted in his obstruction, but he was her minion. On top of which, he knew that she expected him to mix a pitcher of martinis before the party. Balancing their power over the footstool fulcrum would delay that chore.

Fortified with gin, she would go and eat salad. With people who had known her when she was a size six and, after she launched into the 20-plus size strato and then plunged through re-entry to something more in the ground fog BMI state of things. Not exactly her original body weight, but proximate. Some of the weight came off when she had her surgeon remove the overly large boob bags. The rest was her doing.

At no time during those years of self-deprivation had Rita consumed a single Safeway sheet cake as she had, often, in the front seat of her car on a 95-degree day in Anaheim. She never spoke of her excesses, although a casual observer might have inferred as much.

The last time she ate sheet cake, she sat becalmed after the frenzy, staring at the store. Was it the heat, or the carbo coma that left her inert? She glanced in the rearview mirror. Icing outlined her mouth, like clown makeup.

She hid her food thing from her seasonal friends, some of whom sold her houses, others of whom set a table for her and her anesthesiologist. Crash weight loss preceded her annual return to Taos.

A long-ago Rita, a pre-Wayne Rita of the single sort, knew she was born to bait a hook. Two decades younger, she was aggressively starving herself, limiting herself to a jelly donut in the morning and a mid-afternoon pear. The rest of the day, she gagged down carrots and celery sticks, minus the peanut butter.

It was all too horrid, especially the torture of going at lunch into the French patisserie across from the hospital. She recalled one such visit, staring into the display case, tasting every item with her eyes, sliding past it all.

“May I help you?” the clerk asked.

“How could you help me?” Rita snapped. “Do I look like I need help? I’m not the one who needs help here. Look at yourself. You’re fat.”

She walked out, disgusted with herself. The clerk was a stir stick.

Denial was not in her toolkit. Not of pastries, not of sex. For too long before Wayne, her love life was all comme ci comme ça. She tired of self-gratification. She craved someone who wanted her as badly as she wanted him.

A year out of nursing school and eager to recreate some echo of life inside the lux bubble of her father’s Cuban medical career, she prowled St. Eustace Medical Center with an eager eye and selective smile.

Not him: Too much the unmade bed.

Nor him: Had he never heard of shaving?

And most definitely not him: No saddle worth the straddle.

Male nurses approached. She declined, and realized in the wake of those rebuffs a regrettable brusqueness. Girlfriends scolded her for it. She chose not to see it as a character flaw. More like strategic selectivity. Why waste time on the unworthy?

“I need to focus,” she told Sheila, who worked the same shift. “Doctors have the best assets.”

“True, I like a good doctor ass,” Sheila said.

Wayne saw her first, locked on as she passed. They shared a smile. He asked around, learned enough to address her by name when he asked her to dinner.

Later, she asked, “Do you like this?”

Or, “How about this?”

Or, “Does it feel good when I stick my finger … here?”

He would nod, or grin widely, or tremble, or purse his lips in equivocation. She logged every note. Before a week was up -- time not at work, they spent in bed -- she knew enough about Wayne to own him.

Wayne knew somewhat less about her. He registered the sound of retching from the bathroom. He noticed how little she ordered and ate when they dined out. It moved him to ask her more often to join him for meals so he could feed her. She let him. Salads.

“I want to look nice for you,” she said once.

She carried him to the altar like a Louis Vuitton Bandouliere.

She became just the latest of his addictions. He liked vodka and pot and blowjobs. He became her gateway to consumptive lust. Mutually assured destruction, he called it. She got the joke, giggled.

He could afford her favors. She liked buying haute, if not clothing, then houses, if not travel, then …  mille-feuille, St. Honore, Tart Tatin. Sex was just a metaphor for her greater hunger -- flour and butter and cream and chocolate and a dusting of nuts.

At first, Wayne just thought himself blessed to have collided with the horniest women on the planet. Of course, he hadn’t met or experienced them all. If not Rita, then who?

Through her post-coital guidance, Wayne and she came to own three houses, one in the south of North America, one in the north of South America, and one in the middle of Middle America. They spent the year flying from one to another, from the ski slopes of Taos to their bungalow in the Hollywood hills to a hilltop overlooking the Pacific just north of Puerto Escondido.

At each, she would cook and he would play.

He craved Mexican point breaks. Or New Mexican chutes full of frozen dander. Or the cliffs east of L.A., raked with thermal updrafts, into which he would step beneath a large fabric sail. Big drop. Big lift. He dreamed of soaring with hawks, looking for gerbils, eating entrails.

He was an aging child, addicted to adrenaline. The billings more than covered his and Rita’s extended time away. They didn’t want children, but they did want each other, often, with sound effects and lubricious extravagance. To supplant her cravings for food, she adopted dogs.

She shared none of Wayne’s cravings for risk. She fed him, and she fed herself. She planned their shuttles, from house to house, and he tagged along, leashed to her agenda as much as to the dog.

She stocked her kitchen with commercial-grade equipment. He applauded her enthusiasm. Who was he to complain that she loved cooking? In truth, she needed something to do while Wayne was risking his life. She was an artiste of the edible. It happened so naturally, the short sweet step from avoiding the pastry aisle to creating her own.

She always had a nibble to keep her company as she worked. It added up, and on. She started to gain weight, then more, in billowing folds.

Wayne seemed unaware. He said nothing, but Rita wondered if he was just being polite. A year or so into her growth curve, fearing that he might find her less than desirable, she bought and dressed for the first time in a negligee. It both hid and revealed.

Wayne saw her with one knee on the bed, dusk filtering through the window and lace. She tried on a little coy. He went berserk, ripping away the fabric, kissing and licking her from neck to the clefts of her back and belly and thighs.

Afterward, stroking his head, she asked if he still loved her.

“What just happened?” he said.

“I know I’ve put on weight.”

“Is that what happened?”

“It happened to me.”

“It happens to us all.”

He hasn’t put on an ounce.

He didn’t want to tell her that he had found her previous self a bit emaciated. When she spoke admiringly of Hollywood waifs, he listened politely.

“No interest in sleeping with a stick,” he said.

She loved his reassurances, but doubted his sincerity. Surely this body isn’t what men want?

She felt in his sustained ardor an implicit critique of her as she had been when they married.

Staring at herself after her shower, she thought of how she and Wayne were squandering her investment. So many years, so much work, such extreme denial … and he wants to feed me? More and more? Doesn’t he see what he is doing? How can I be what he wants, who he married, when his every gesture contradicts? How can he be happy with who I am now, if he was happy with who I was then?

His other addictions left her feeling wholly inadequate. The waves. The sky. The fallen, unpacked snow. All his. All like lovers, flouted as he openly kissed her goodbye and ran to their arms. How could she compete?

All she could do was fuck him and feed him. And herself. All she could do was wrap him in her arms when he came home, alive, to what she had cooked. And join him in bite after delicious bite. And listen to the voice inside, casting doubt on every languid after-moment, inferring disgust where nary a word or glance or reluctant advance suggested anything of the sort.

She was a mess. Wayne was clueless. When she started to put on pounds, Wayne felt a huge relief. He said nothing, but secretly celebrated the way she seemed to relax into their life. He found himself unable to pull his eyes away. More of Rita, to him, was a good thing.

Between adrenalin shots, he enjoyed shopping with her. As she tried on garments,  capacious things, caftans and mu’umu’us in vibrant colors, he would appraise like an art buyer. Gentle nods. Creeping smiles. Arms thrown wide.

“My queen,” he exclaimed.

She looked in the fitting room mirror and felt her meal rise.

Grotesque. How can he stand me? What about this is attractive?

Tears welled. She held back the sobs, the rising gorge. There, faced with the shocking reality, she resolved to unwind it all, to take herself back to her wedding night.

She faked consumption. When he wasn’t looking, she spat food into her hand, then tucked it into her napkin. With her mouth full, she excused herself to attend a kitchen chore, and spat into the disposal.

Temptation again became her most powerful foe. She wanted to sweep from her mind the addresses and hours of her favorite pâtissiers. She avoided buying gas. Her car sat in the garage. She had no way to shop her druggists of choice.

She learned to avoid the mirror. When she did, after a month, she was less of her former self.

Encouraged, she redoubled her efforts. She declined casual get-togethers with friends, who loved to nibble. She hired kitchen help, to prepare low-carb meals.

It was an exhaustive retreat. The day she fit comfortably into a size 8, she told Wayne she had been … “cheating.” He looked shocked, until she explained.

“It wasn’t fair, to keep getting larger and larger,” she said. “I don’t know how you put up with it.”

He protested his continued affection.

“You were so sweet,” she said. “And terrifying.”

“Terrifying? How?”

“I couldn’t believe that you would find me attractive. Nobody does. The world is not a welcoming place for … what do they call us? Plumpers?”

“You didn’t marry the world.”

“That may be. I just couldn’t go there. I’m back.”

“You never left. But it’s nice to have you home, from wherever you went.”

A week later, they headed north from Mexico to New Mexico. Her winter neighbor was raking leaves when they parked. Annette looked up, smiled, waved. As Rita’s dog bounded from his kennel and started sniffing for squirrels, she strolled into Annette’s embrace.

“Ready for skiing, I see,” Annette said. “Mexico suits you well.”

Rita hadn’t skied in years, not since the weight went on.

“Yes. It’s been a good fall.”

Annette waved at Wayne, unloading bags. “Who’s the hottie?” she called.

There it was, Rita thought. Circumspect in the Age of Largesse, celebratory at the reclamation of lost allure.

“I’ve lost a little weight,” Rita said.

“You look fantastic,” Annette said. “I bet you feel better, too. Doesn’t she, Wayne?”

Wayne smiled, lugged their luggage inside. Rita busied herself with unloading, her back aimed at the busy body of Annette.

After they settled in, Rita called Annette to ask if her favorite local market was open. Annette mentioned wanting to have “a few of the girls” over to celebrate everyone’s return to Taos. In a couple of days, if that was alright, hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.

“Nothing heavy.”

Really? They were inviting her. Rita gave it little thought, agreed to come. She wondered how she would navigate re-entry as a curiosity.

On party day, she helped Wayne maneuver the stepstool, swallowed the double martini, grabbed some chardonnay and stepped out.

Inside Annette’s, the Ptarmigans greeted her warmly.

“So tan,” Maris Deaver said. “You wear it well.”

That was elliptical. Rita felt like one part of herself was standing to the side, listening for pokes directed at her former self. The Ptarmigans all embraced her, holding the hugs with hands overlapping behind her back. It had been years.

“Has Wayne not been feeding you?” Gen Pettit asked. “I hope everything’s OK.”

“Jet lag, I think,” Rita said. “We had to fly coach.”

“Ouch. Still, it must be easier now.”

“Coach is never easy.”

“I meant, since … you’re … “

“Not as fat? You’re right. But now I’ve got three bags full of stuff I can’t wear.”

Gen laughed. Touché.

Rita propped her drink hand with the other arm. How to send Gen on her way?

“What are you going to do with all that stuff?” Gen asked. “Those mu’umu’us, those harem pants? I can’t imagine much interest around here. It’s not like real estate. Not everyone wants the really big houses.”

Rita felt the blood and heat rising to her face. She turned and strode from the room.

Swimming with sharks. Flotation lay ahead, on a buffet, a life ring in a sea of circling fins. She reached for the small china plate, which she piled high with crudite, gougères, profiteroles, foie gras mousse and, spoken to herself, a huge fucking slice of blackberry pie. Plenty of appetite, but no room for ice cream. On the next pass.

She drifted to the side, forking in bite after bite, as one after another Ptarmigan approached and invited her to get involved. Scholarship program. Homeless shelter. Elementary school reading group. Rummage sale for the library.

To each offer, she mumbled incoherent excuses.

She didn’t like asking for money.

She didn’t like meetings.

She didn’t like reading out loud.

She drifted closer to the door, caught Annette’s eye, held her hands in “sleepy” prayer beside her head and slipped out.

The next day, she rose to raging hunger. She drove to her favorite Santa Fe mall. On her way to Cinnabon and Winchell’s and Cocoa Loco and the Pie Spy, she added some turquoise and silver. She spent the afternoon furiously sweeping clothes from racks and charging their purchase and stuffing them over and over into the belly of her car until there was room enough for no more than her behind the wheel.

Exhausted, she headed home. As she approached, she slowed. Wayne was waiting, she knew. She hadn’t called. Nor had he. He couldn’t know how she had attacked the buffet last night. How she had binged sweets and clothing she didn’t need, couldn’t wear if she returned to the weight from which she had come.

What did Wayne really want? Could he ever be completely honest with her? Would he see her reversion as weakness? He’ll say he just wants me to be happy. But how can I be happy if I don’t know what the word even means?

She couldn’t stand the thought of him lying to her. Hiding his disgust would be worse than if he admitted it, castigated her for such a supreme lack of resolve. If he had the willpower to lie to her, she would surely need to make a statement of her own.

A fatigued sun sat on the horizon. With questions buzzing her brain, Rita aimed her car back toward the highway.

She stopped.

She looked both ways.

She pulled slowly into traffic.

In her rearview mirror, she saw the smoke and heard the screaming tires of the semi-truck and trailer, the trailer swinging into the oncoming lane, a mini-van caroming off it and spinning into the desert, and the truck coming to a stop, angled across both lanes.

Up the road lay Colorado. A thought of something never done. A thought of somewhere never seen. A thought of someone never been.

As she accelerated, Rita wondered if anything more – or anything less – would ever be enough.

Stuart Watson wrote for newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. His writing is in  yolk.literary, Barzakh, Two Hawks Quarterly, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bloom, Fewer than 500, Mystery Tribune, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), 433, Flash Boulevard, Revolution John, Montana Mouthful, Sledgehammer Lit, Five South, Shotgun Honey, The Writing Disorder, Grey Sparrow Journal, Reckon Review and Pulp Modern Flash, among others. He lives in Oregon, with his wife and their amazing dog.