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A. R. Taylor

THE FAT MINDER

“I can stand wrinkles, but I can’t stand fat,” Andy Wetherhead murmured, looking

at the plump bodies splayed out on the Southern California sand. His wife Paige bristled,

knowing this was a comment about both her age and her body, but said nothing. She was

used to hearing hostile remarks from her husband, eighteen years younger than herself, and

silence was the best response. They were a long time married, to the amazement of their

friends, and Paige had developed sturdy armor against the random darts Andy was likely to

hurl.

“Fat drives me crazy,” Andy repeated.

Paige looked over at his tall, wiry body and said, “Just because you can eat

anything, that’s not true for everybody else. Besides, only stupid people worry about

weight.” She gave him a brilliant smile and brushed a wet strand of red hair back behind

her ear.

Paige had never been on a diet in her life, but now, as she watched a thin-legged girl

running across the beach, she realized that without really being aware of it, she had put on

an extra twenty-five pounds. Round and rosy, in her own view she looked pretty good, but

she was bright enough to take the hint. “I've got to join the modern world, Mom,” she said

into the phone. “Andy is only forty-one, and God knows how many media sluts are

chasing after him at work. I’m afraid to look at myself in the mirror and still listen to the

Beatles. You know what they say about that, ‘You’re old!’ I'm going on a diet.”

The secret truth was that Paige hadn’t wanted to marry Andy at all. When they met

at a bowling alley he looked like a child. After pursuing her for two years, he gave up,
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joined the army, but when he announced he had a new girlfriend, she relented. He was too

sweet and talented not to love. Despite the age difference, her marriage was better than most

she thought, though recently her best friend muttered to her over drinks, “It has kept you

young and made him old.” Sadly now she wondered at the truth of this. So obsessed was

Andy with his job as a designer of interiors for high performance automobiles that he came

home only to eat and watch television, and worse than that, his sexual temperature had

dropped below blue. Perhaps she now understood the cause of that secret slop of

unhappiness in her life, fat.

Several nights later, over a dinner of penne arrabbiata, Paige said, “I want to lose

twenty pounds. Will you help me Andy?” She smiled up at him.

“Sure,” he said, guardedly. At least she knows she’s put on weight, he thought to

himself, satisfied that he’d gotten through to her. Paige chewed reflectively on her pasta.

“Maybe I should go to one of those places where they tell you what to eat?” Andy agreed,

almost too eagerly. But then a problem loomed up in front of him. What would he eat? He

loved her food, and he didn’t want her to stop cooking it.

Paige went to Diet On! the next day, where she bought ten packages to be heated in

the microwave. The first container, Turkey Tetrazzini, had a milky grayness to it that was

upsetting, but she dutifully placed the plastic package in the oven. It emerged moments later

bubbling, greasy looking. There she sat, looking out at the beach from her kitchen window,

chewing small forkfuls of this mysterious substance that had an acrid, salty flavor.

Occasionally a recognizable piece of meat slid between her teeth. She did feel satisfied,

though, when she was finished. It was only seven, a time she was normally preparing a

meal for Andy. Tonight she decided to take a walk, a passeggiata, as they do in Italy.

When Andy got home, he looked around the empty house and could smell no food.

He opened the cupboard, loaded with ancient cans and cartons that he wouldn’t let his wife

throw out, and got down a box of stale crackers. Suddenly Paige appeared at the door, red-
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faced. “Darling,” she said, breathing heavily. “I didn't know you'd be home so soon.

What can I make for you?”

“Forget it. I'll get myself some ice cream,” Andy said, as he proceeded to plunk

himself down in front of the television and eat a pint of chocolate ripple. He had had no

idea the large role food played in his domestic arrangements, and now he wasn’t pleased.

Perhaps she’d just lose the weight quickly, and they could get back to eating delicious

meals cooked by her hands. But he was too exhausted to talk about it. Earlier that day his

boss had tossed out his latest drawings with the instruction, “This car is built like a sleek

rocket with fins. Your bottom rests on a self-ejecting pod. Draw that pod.” Andy was sick

of confrontations, and another fight at home required more energy than he could muster.

Paige persisted with the small plastic packages because she lost three pounds the

first week, while Andy lived on ice cream and cookies. This regime led to his putting on a

couple of pounds, something he hadn’t done since college, and so this proved unacceptable.

“We should get a cook,” he said as he stared at her plastic packaged Chicken Marengo. It

looked suspiciously brown and thick, not dietetic at all.

“Oh no, there's only one cook in this house,” she said, as she fixed him a salad.

Paige was from a generation steeped in the consolations of food - she would never give up

her time in the kitchen, even if it meant just pushing a button on the microwave.

She went on with the packages for another few weeks, but then one day after staring

at a black dress in a store window, she went into an Italian espresso place and had a latté and

a giant cannoli. In one swift swallow, she felt as if she had instantly regained those three

lost pounds and went home to throw out all the Diet On! packages. Confused, depressed,

she began to question the fatness or thinness of everyone around her. How did they get that

way? Had they been fat all their lives? She went to restaurants and watched people eat.

The thin ones seemed to eat just as much as the fat ones. She couldn’t figure it out.

Paige began to notice what she called ‘fat behavior.’ A large woman would push

ahead of a thin pretty one at the post office or at the grocery store, because the heavier
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woman expected a field of opposition to her actions. She knew that people were looking at

her, and the fat behavior was meant to signal power. “I can do what I want, I can get what I

want because I’m bigger than you,” she seemed to be saying. Did Paige herself engage in

fat behavior? She had always been a self-confident person, but now she became positively

meek in an effort not to do ‘the fat thing.’

Always in their personal life, she had taken the lead with Andy, made the world safe

for him, because he cared for nothing but his work. He was a kind of idiot savant, and his

great secret was focus. A bomb could go off four feet away from him, and he would say,

where are the specs? One day a robber entered the bank on the ground floor of Andy's

building and announced that he indeed carried a bomb in the box he was holding. Would

the teller please give him all her money? Helicopters circled overhead, the building was

evacuated, and still Andy refused to go. “But you have to leave,” his assistant said

plaintively. “No, you have to leave. I can’t deal with the liability. But I am fully

responsible for myself.” He even put up a sign outside his office that read, “I am here

because I want to be.” Paige heard about the incident and just laughed. It was so ‘Andy.’

On the night of her birthday, Andy took Paige to an exotic Southwestern restaurant

where they served three scallops, two green beans, called it dinner and charged fifty dollars.

The room was shaded in the beige adobe of the Southwest, with hurricane lanterns on the

table, and a single spray of purple orchid in a vase. Her husband looked over at her with a

glow of propriety and said, “I have a present for you.” Paige smiled as she swirled her one

remaining scallop in the thick creamy sauce. Andy wasn’t good with gifts, and this seemed

a happy development. He slid a small white envelope her direction. She took a sip of red

wine and held onto it, then slashed her well-manicured nail through the back. Out came a

card that read, “Rosalind Fine, Fat Minder.” Paige looked up and then around at the other

diners, who seemed to be eating without difficulty.

“Fat Minder?” she said and looked over at Andy now.

“She’s going to watch you.”

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“Do what?”

“Eat,” Andy said, trying for a smile. “She’s like a personal trainer, someone who

helps you manage your diet.”

“You mean she manages my diet for me?”

“Something like that. She also cooks the food, so I'll have something to eat too.”

“I told you I didn’t want a cook.”

“She’s not a cook!”

The festive lights in the restaurant faded before her eyes. The parceling out of food

was to be a lifelong trial - she saw that now. You can give up alcohol, you can give up

smoking, but if you stop eating, you die. “Andy, do you think this is necessary?” Paige

said, as she tried not to gulp her wine.

“I think it sounds like a great idea. Another guy in our office used this woman and

he lost thirty pounds.”

“But maybe I could just eat less,” she smiled brilliantly, trying to make it all go

away.

“No, you couldn’t.” Andy pitched this hateful remark into his wine glass and

didn’t even see the tears in his wife’s eyes.

As a result of that painful evening, Rosalind the Fat Minder injected herself into the

private life of Paige Wetherhead’s eating. She was about thirty, with long dark hair and a

sharp, handsome face. She had a dancer’s body, muscular, stretched out but thin, and she

arrived in a black leotard with a sweater thrown over her shoulders. “Hi, Mrs. Wetherhead.

I’m Rosalind. Where's the food?”

“In the refrigerator. But aren’t we supposed to avoid that?”

“Not now. I have to see what you’ve got in there, to know what we’re up against.”

“You’re up against a hell of a lot of prune Danish,” was what Paige wanted to say,

but she resisted. There was something funny about this whole business, but Andy wouldn’t

think so, and she wanted to make a good impression.

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Rosalind opened the door and started grabbing the butter, cheese, sour cream -

everything Paige needed to make her luscious dishes, now a thing of the past. “This is

loaded, just loaded,” she barked as she tossed all the containers into the trash compactor.

Then she hit the cupboard in the pantry. First to go was the tomato aspic, which Paige loved

to have for lunch, then the pineapple in syrup, next the Bing cherries, finally the cans of stew

that were to protect them in an earthquake. “Loaded, what can I say?” When she found

Paige’s stash of peanut butter, stars shot through her eyes. “We’ve hit pay dirt.”

Obviously this young woman was going to introduce Paige to an alternative set of

food wonders. Rosalind lifted out one jar of the nutty, natural peanut butter that Paige

loved. She pulled off a long piece of paper towel and drove it straight down the center of

the bottle, like a flying wedge. She pulled it out just as dramatically, holding it up before

Paige's face. Now it was infused with disgusting brownish oil, like something that might

emerge from a car engine. “You see,” Rosalind said triumphantly. “Loaded! This fat is

what clogs your arteries until you die.” Ah, the lowly fate of peanut butter. Killer of

human beings, death to hordes of school children who had never met Rosalind Fine. Paige

could see their grisly future writ large in twenty million sandwich bags.

Once they had evaluated the food, Rosalind moved into the living room and put

Paige through a battery of physical exercises to test her skill level. Now here was an area

where she was genuinely deficient. She came from a family that thought excess movement

indicated a nervous constitution. Up, down, sideways, bending herself like a pretzel. It was

a horrible experience. But the one virtue of the activity was that she got to see Rosalind's

body up close. She wore a thong leotard which slid straight up the crack in her fanny. That

behind was inhuman, so firm that Paige thought she must have come here from another

planet. The absolute condemnation of her own plump self that she saw in Rosalind’s body

was really disheartening. She could never be that shape or size and wondered if indeed that

was what Andy wanted of her. Perhaps if she just drank water, but even then she would be
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bigger than the stick woman sweating before her. Maybe if she were in a plane crash in the

Andes and forced to eat snow!

After they did their exercises, it was on to the question of food, not the actual eating,

but the cataloging. What had she consumed over the last several days? This they did with

green file cards arranged in a plastic box. It wasn’t just the eggs she had eaten yesterday,

but the bacon, the fruit juice, the two chocolate kisses she found in the cupboard. It all

added up, until she turned out to be the consumer of a grotesque number of calories.

Rosalind kept shaking her head. “We can’t have this.” Then she shook her head again.

“What do you eat?” Paige asked suddenly. Maybe if she followed her lead, she

would weigh the same.

“In the morning I have a piece of rye-krisp and a little peanut butter, de-fatted of

course. At lunch I have a salad or just cottage cheese. At dinner, it’s usually tofu and a

vegetarian dish, eggplant maybe.” Paige stared down the vast tunnel of food hell. Was this

to be her fate? Consumer of grains, grass and cheese? She wanted to climb into bed and

suck her thumb. What about the vodka and the schnitzel she loved at the Hungarian

restaurant? French fries, pasta, steak? It all vanished. “You need to change your life,”

Rosalind opined. Just what Paige herself had been thinking, although not quite along these

lines.

Her days became filled with the presence of Rosalind, writing notes on her cards,

pushing her piece of towel down through the peanut butter, pumping and grinding as she

and her trainer worked on the abs, buns, and thighs. Andy had been traveling the first few

days of Rosalind’s reign, but when he finally got home, he was pleased with what he saw.

“Now this is progress,” he said as he rifled through the cards in the plastic box, “Pickled

beets? Marshmallows? Wow, I hope you don’t eat that stuff anymore.”

“How could I? Rosalind is watching me. And stop reading those cards.” He was

startled. Paige almost never spoke sharply to him, as if he were a fragile child who had to

be kept from the bruising world, and it was her job to do it.
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Andy invited Rosalind to go out with them for dinner that night. She ate eggplant

parmigiana, Andy had steak, roasted potatoes and a salad of red onions and avocado, while

Paige had two ounces of skirt steak and a tomato. Since Rosalind spent the whole evening

asking about Andy’s job, the dinner dragged on. Hungry and bored, Paige drank more

wine than usual, a Pinot Grigio. The first glass tasted fresh, the second more bitter, but by

the third, then fourth, it tasted like food. “A friendly wine, tarty really, with a nose,” Paige

said, out into the air, but the skinny twosome didn’t hear her. As the two of them chomped

and chattered, wine filled her stomach, and at some point Paige realized that she had lost the

ability to speak. She could smile, but her lips wouldn’t move. Andy looked over and shook

her by the arm. “Paige? Paige honey, is anything wrong?” No response. She seemed to

have lapsed into a glowering stare at the wall behind her husband's head.

“Does she take pills?” Rosalind said.

“Maybe, on the sly,” said Andy.

Paige could hear what they were saying, but she could not speak back. She looked

around the room, as if mystified by her location. Even her silence didn’t prevent further

conversation on Andy’s career. Finally Andy said, “Maybe we should go home, darling.”

Paige said nothing, but she could hear Rosalind's voice – “She’s seized up, like an

engine with all the motor oil drained out. My car did this once, on the freeway.”

Andy waved his hand in front of her face. “Paige, what’s wrong, sweetheart?” She

had fallen beneath the waves. The people before her were moving their heavy arms, as

through a gel, opening their mouths like fish, a sucking hole. Her stepsister had had those

fish, kissing goramis she called them. On the way home in Andy's low slung sports car, she

felt herself flying through the night sky, on a wave of smog and alcohol. She was

conscious of someone talking, of herself talking, but the sound was muffled in her ears.

The next morning she could remember only enough to be ashamed. She slunk into

the bathroom before Andy was up and stared at her surprisingly healthy face, but her head

was killing her. She took two aspirins. Andy sauntered in, glared at her and wandered out.
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Oh my God, she thought, what did I do? She was afraid to ask. At breakfast she dutifully

fixed one of her assigned portions, a swirl of eggs and green pepper, and when she turned

around, Andy loomed behind her. "You know what you kept saying last night?" She didn’t

want to admit she had no idea, so she just nodded ambiguously. “You kept saying, ‘In

your dreams, buddy,’ over and over again. While we were driving home you must have said

that thirty times, ‘In your dreams, buddy.’ What does it mean?”

“Maybe my body was taken over by space aliens.” Paige said this with a nasty

smile, and Andy went nuts.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled. “Were you drinking last night, Paige? Now tell me if

you were.” If Andy had noticed her at all during the course of the evening, he would have

seen that she drank vats of alcohol, veritable jugs. She could feel it in her system now,

fermenting her bones.

“I had a few glasses of wine, Andy, you know I did. You kept ordering them. I

noticed you and Rosalind had quite a few yourselves.”

“Yes, but we didn’t keep saying, ‘In your dreams, buddy.’”

Paige stared at Andy a moment before she startled him with a screech. “Maybe it

meant in your dreams, buddy will I ever be thin like Rosalind. I'm going to get fatter and

fatter until I simply explode. I’m going to roll around like a giant tub. You’re going to see

my fat as it slaps from side to side on my thighs. People will laugh at me. ‘See that fat

woman over there,’ they’ll say. When my skirt hikes up, you’ll see globules of fat dripping

down over my knees - All your friends will say ‘there goes Andy Wetherhead’s fat

disgusting wife!’” Paige was howling with rage as she screamed into her husband’s face.

“Stop!” Andy yelled back and slammed down his plate.

Rosalind came over that day and said not a word about the strained dinner. She

simply brought out her exercise mat, laid it on the floor, and inserted her music tape into the

cassette player. Meekly, Paige went through her paces, even though bending down made
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the block of concrete in her head shift sideways. She was no longer angry about Rosalind's

tiny behind. Let her have it. Let them be thin and alone.

Andy wasn’t speaking to her, so Paige settled down to a regular regimen of small

plates of microwaved food and her evening walk. The walks got longer and longer, because

her husband now stayed at work until at least ten every night.

Then something odd happened. Paige noticed that there was a concave place where

her stomach used to protrude. At first, she experienced an empty, frightened feeling, but she

resisted the impulse to panic and fill that hollow place out. She just kept on eating her tiny

steak or chicken and vegetable dinners, with no soda and certainly no wine. She knew she

was losing weight, but was terrified to get on the scale. She didn’t want to do anything that

might trip her over into whatever her ‘fat thing’ had been.

Paige could now follow Rosalind along on the exercises fairly well, even though her

back was killing her. But she liked her pink face afterwards and was beginning to

experience some of her own muscles. Andy didn’t notice most of these changes, because

he was never home, but also because they came about gradually, over months. To him Paige

still looked big.

One night, about six months after the fat minder project began, Paige and Andy were

required to attend an automotive industry party. As usual, Andy couldn’t come home from

work to pick her up. She had to drive up to a restaurant in West Los Angeles from

Manhattan Beach in her own car. Dressing carefully, she chose a short black silk dress and

a sculpted silver necklace. Her hair had gone by the wayside lately, so it was now very long

and full, with unexpected red curls around her freckled face. Fetching, she thought as she

closed the door behind her.

Andy arrived first. He was standing with his back to the entrance, talking to a small

rat-like man who was important in the business, when he heard someone next to him yell

above the crowd, “My God, Wetherhead, isn’t that your wife?”
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Andy turned and saw no one he recognized, until a woman in black turned his way.

It was Paige, but a dramatic, beautiful Paige, a thin Paige, a woman who didn’t look like his

Paige at all. She walked toward her husband, hesitantly, until another one of his colleagues

rushed up to her and said, “What in heaven’s name have you done to yourself? You look

fantastic.”

“Just a little jogging,” Paige said, pretending not to see Andy. Now he led her by

the arm over to her husband, who gaped. She smiled brightly at the man she had lived with

for many years. “This is your wife,” another of his friends announced.

“I know, Frank. I ought to know my own wife.”

A brash young man from Andy’s firm, dressed in black with a ponytail, pulled

Paige away and out onto the dance floor. Andy stared after them, speechless. The rest of

the evening he said even less than usual, and less was fine, since his wife garnered all the

attention. As he drove home that night, alone, he went over in his mind how she had

changed so dramatically. Obviously it was the diet, and then of course it was Rosalind, but

it was more than that. There was a look in her eye. He wasn’t sure he liked that look.

Getting undressed for bed, he didn’t say much, but kept giving Paige furtive

glances. “Are you all right, darling?” she asked several times. He grunted and said little.

She had on a peach nightgown that even he had to admit was lovely. “Did you have a good

time?” she said.

“Fine, it was fine,” he muttered. “You look good Paige, quite good.” He had

finally done it. He had praised her looks. She knew that it took him a huge effort to go that

far. It had always been the marital mythology that she might have everything, but she didn’t

have looks. Being thin had, in fact, honed her face, let her bones show through. What was

once round now appeared angular, exotic.

Andy wanted her to look at him. Paige climbed into bed, not doing his will. She

picked up a magazine, trying to read, but could feel the pressure of his eyes. She stared up
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at him finally, and he smiled back. Then she said, “I could make Irish stew tomorrow for

you, darling.”

Now he grinned and kissed her on the cheek. “I’d like that, Paige honey.” He

began rubbing her arm affectionately, yawning all the while and finally curled himself

around her from behind.

The next evening, Paige found herself alone in the kitchen, chopping soft vine-

ripened tomatoes, green peppers, three russet potatoes she then plunged into cold water.

She placed thirty or so cubes of meat on a chopping block next to her heavy French stew

pot. It seemed, for a moment, like the past, when she cooked every night. Out of her

kitchen window she watched several neighbor children playing ball. She used to take such

pleasure in that view, but now she was thin and changed. Everything was changed.

Over in the pantry, while looking for cooking oil, she spotted a tin of lard, a

substance so discredited, so unhealthy, that she never used it anymore. Andy always said it

was tantamount to swaddling your heart in a glob of grease, yet he refused to throw it out.

Paige lifted off the plastic cover and saw that there were still brown spots where a dirty knife

had cut through the heavy white fat. Behind the tin of lard was a container of allspice, then

one of cloves and behind that paprika, again very old. These things were here because Andy

was sure to ask, “What happened to the allspice?” He once went completely nuts when

she could no longer find a grater he swore he’d had for fifteen years.

She picked up the ancient spices and smelled them, then sprinkled the paprika and

allspice onto a plate and covered them with cloves. Next she got out her spatula, took a big

hunk of the rancid lard out of the can and threw it into the hot pan. It sizzled and stank like

crazy. Paige gathered up the chunks of rump roast, rolled them in the spices, and then

tossed them into the steaming pot. Smelly, spice-laden steam engulfed the kitchen. It rose
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up around her newly beautiful face, and as it did, a bright, mysterious world opened itself

before her, of a whole new list of goodies she might put in her husband’s stew.