CONSTITUENT
By John Hunter
Pullum Frontonianum, or chicken a la fronto, is a tricky little dish. You have to fry the chicken first. Not bake, but fry. And this works for the whole chicken. This recipe was one of literally two hundred or so that I collected that year. Sarah called my collection “a clear symptom.”
“Make sex to me, Errol.”
Like an aide memoire, her passion started as a low, breathy flow of lust, originating in the bedroom and extending from her lips, wrapping around the hallway and ending in a barely audible proposal in the kitchen.
Of course it can’t be that simple. Then all you have is fried chicken. Nothing calls out a boring menu more than fried chicken. Find a nice wine, perhaps Madeira for its longevity, and coat the chicken with it. Also add dill, fresh leeks, cilantro and a little olive oil. Liberally add saturei; that is if you have a good dose of it.
“Make sex to me, Errol.” Her pining swelled above an undertone, simmering above the room temperature whispers of the previously broadcasted yearning. Her nightly routine.
As soon as you season the chicken, you discontinue the frying and place the chicken in the oven on bake for about 60 minutes on 200 degrees. This gives you enough time to deal with the bedroom situation.
I always knew that I would fall in love.
“Ohhhhhhhhh...Errol!”
Through time, she always changed in my mind; the ideal woman I mean. Sometimes she was blonde, sometimes brunette. The small details. But somewhere between the cookie-cutter notion of what the ideal woman should be, the lines became distorted. The hourglass figure, the angelic face with no laugh lines, the well adjusted, All-American pin-up from Everywheresville, Nebraska; the masturbatory pipe dream that I was throwing my self into; all of those prerequisites are just the set-up.
“MAKE SEX…TO ME!”
You’ve seen her before. You couldn’t forget her. Even through the endless rotation of recycled emotions spread thin on the daytime television that you watch, you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. When she was on the model-turned-talk show host’s mid-afternoon extravaganza, you tuned in. You probably chuckled to yourself. When she made the local news, you were there. Your eyes were peeled. When she had her own one hour special hosted by the best selling author/psychologist, you watched. And when she got her own show, you glued yourself to the screen.
You watched every minute of the sensationalism. You watched as the audience members pretended to wipe the tears from their eyes, the tissues conveniently placed under their seats, careful not to stare at the camera upon cue.
You can’t be held responsible. It is tough. No, it is impossible to look away from my wife. In fact, it is preposterous to think that anyone could avert their eyes from anyone who weighs 814lbs.
“ERROL!”
Errol was Errol Flynn. If Jesus was resurrected, he would have become an actor named Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn, according to her.
Because of her condition, she was bedridden. The bedroom became a virtual home theater. Stacks and stacks of movies, any television channel from here to London, the universal remote, anything that would distract her from remembering that she was who she was.
It was
The Adventures of Robin Hood that did it for her. That was her favorite Flynn movie. He was the archetypal hero. At that exact moment, there was nothing more appropriate that she needed.
“There’s no need to be jealous,” she would say to me. “We have all had something taken from us. We all need someone to steal it back.”
So while Errol and his Merry Men were saving the day, I was busy taking care of the dirty work.
Between treating her outbreaks of cellulitis or changing her soiled sheets, along with cooking meals or changing movies, I barely found time to eat. “Starvation,” Sarah called it. I always found that little things like eating and sleeping got in the way of time that could have been spent with her. Despite Errol’s best efforts, even he couldn’t steal back wasted time.
It all becomes a routine. The recipes are the same. You look for something more exotic, something you can work with. You seek out the ingredients, you mix them together and you work your life around it accordingly. But then, just as life happens, something occurs. It’s not in your cookbooks or your self-help, one-shot fix everything cd’s. Its something that you can’t find on your instructional, idiot’s manual to life.
“Oh! It is perfect!” Those are the first words I remember her saying. Well, she was in fact screaming at the top of her lungs.
She was in a dressing room of a higher end department store. I was searching for new pants or a clever tie or some other article of consumerism that would fill the gaping holes in my life.
The door opened and the six mirrors outside of the dressing room paralleled something so lovely, so exquisite that the incessant desire to fill the gap was gone. The holes were sealed by the beautiful mess dressed in a hideous evening gown.
“My god! It’s just the thing,” she continued. She waived her arms out by her side and spun around in miniature circles. The old, rich housewives gawked. The store clerks were either too apathetic or too afraid to stop her. Every movement drew me in farther.
Her face was plastered with a sarcastic leer. It was all a production. We were the joke. Our expressions were the punch line. I wanted in.
I carried a camera everywhere I went then. I wanted people to know that I was a high profile photographer, damn it. I was the one that captured the images on the covers of the magazines that told women how to lose the pounds and gain a man. The spread of the actress with her newborn twins; that was mine. I was an artist who deserved their curiosity. I helped manufacture that masturbatory pipe dream. Now I have never wanted anything less.
Click-click-click! The snapping and the flashes from the camera drew even more attention to us. “So lovely!” I shouted. “In all my years as a professional, I have never…”
She pouted her lips and put one hand on her hips, the other on her head. “It’s not even so much me, darling,” she said in a mock French accent. “It’s this fabulous dress.”
She wasn’t always obese. She will tell you herself. In fact, she was a perfect size four the day that I met her. She will probably tell you that she was overweight as a child. She could even tell you that she often would go home and laugh herself to sleep thinking about the slight pandemonium that she caused. “At least they will have something to tell their bored husbands,” she would say.
But without a doubt she would never tell you about her Uncle Bruce. The words would stop in her throat and nearly suffocate her if she talked about Bruce, who was no blood relation but rather a family friend. She could never bring herself to tell you that he took her to the old theater downtown every Saturday afternoon to watch the matinee of the old classics when she was around eight years old.
While watching The Philadelphia Story he put his arm around her. When Gene Kelly was dancing to the title song in Singin’ in the Rain, they giggled. And when Jimmy Stewart was introducing everyone to his giant rabbit in Harvey, Uncle Bruce was forcing her to do terrible things.
“That’s what pretty girls do,” Bruce would say. “And you are such a pretty girl. You’re like one of those fashion models in the magazines, so special to me.”
“So you can’t tell Mommy and Daddy, because then Uncle Bruce would have to do something really mean to them.” His words were breathy and crisp. “You understand?” He was the kind of serious that she knew not to test. But she would never tell you that.
It would stir it all up again if she were to tell you how it only got worse. She couldn’t tell you that she hated being pretty. Anytime someone even suggested that she was beautiful or gorgeous or even cute, she would lose control, sometimes scream, and sometimes hide behind her mother. Reticent is how her parents described her.
She wouldn’t tell you that. She would never tell you that she ate. That was her way of fighting back. She ate and ate. She was swallowing her way to freedom. She didn’t want to be just chubby. She wanted to be grotesque, fat, obese. She couldn’t be that pretty girl anymore.
And it was until that Saturday, the one that she came home wearing blood soaked panties, her legs smeared with red streaks, the day that she first saw The Adventures of Robin Hood that it continued. Enter the hero, Errol Flynn, taking back what was once stolen. But you would never know.
She almost stopped eating all together when Uncle Bruce after Bruce’s sentencing.
A year into our marriage, Bruce was killed in prison. He was serving time for molesting a mailman’s daughter.
It all came back. The guilt poured in. She was responsible for his death, or so she thought. She ate. She didn’t stop. But you would never know. I never did. She wouldn’t tell you. Not until years later. All you would see was an 814 lb. woman.
Thus became my formula for life. But everybody always wants more. A steady routine of an even mixture of love and pain can cause even a man on top of things to miss the obvious.
For example, you spend a day out gathering the ingredients for minutal marinum and running errands. Routinely you lock the door. It isn’t even a routine. It has become a biomechanical reaction, as if breathing or coughing. But today you come home and there it is, not only unlocked but slightly open.
What do you do? Panic, right?
So here you are, scurrying through the house, looking for signs of an intruder. What you are really looking for is a trail of blood, a barely recognizable corpse, one with a wedding ring. Her wedding ring.
But even more horrifying, even more sickening, you find absolutely nothing. No sign, nothing to stop the brutal murder imagery from punching and kicking your head until it causes a throbbing pain right above your eyelids.
So you head to your bedroom. But as you hit your heroic, gallant stride, you crumple like a piece of paper. You grab your stomach and writhe on the ground. You feel like you are going to shit yourself, but you can’t.
How embarrassing. Your wife is missing and all you can do is collapse because your body is eating itself. And you bought the wrong broth for the minutal marinum. Sarah calls it “poor insight”.
In a sick, desperate move, you crawl to the bedroom. The room, her bed, is empty. Nothing. And right before the inevitable blackout, you notice the enormous hole in the bedroom wall.
The beeping sound is the first thing that I heard when I awoke. A heart monitor. The stinging feeling in my hand was an IV. The hospital.
“That was your wife on the news tonight.”
My mouth felt like a wasteland.
“What? Who?” I asked.
“She was lifted from your house with the crane. They rescued her, you know.”
She read the monitors in the room and took notes on her clipboard. Her hourglass figure was draped in all white attire. Her name tag read SARAH.
“That guru, the fitness guy, he found her. Apparently one of your neighbors called him. Said they were concerned,” she continued.
“Rescued? What happened?”
“You collapsed. You haven’t eaten in, oh, probably six days. Your wife, they took her away. They are going to help her.”
I wanted to rip out the IV and run clear of the hospital. I wanted to scream. But I was almost too weak to speak and the catheter in my urethra had me chained to the bed.
She turned on the television. Every channel showed the same scene at different angles. My wife was being “rescued”. Everything went dark again.
For the next week and a half I spent time in or around the hospital talking to doctors, shrinks, dieticians and nurses. They all saw her on the news, my wife. I know this because they found it necessary to tell me.
Sarah walked me out the day that I was cleared from the hospital. “It’s not your fault. You can’t save everyone. I have tried,” she said. She handed me a card with a telephone number written on it. “We all want to feel needed. Call me.”
For the next year, I tracked my wife through the daytime television. When she filmed the “very special” weight loss episode with the fitness guru is Seattle, I was forbidden from the premises. During the special hosted by that balding, mustached psychologist, I tried to find which hotel she was staying in.
Calls were never returned. Letters were never answered. Doors were closed. I was floating at the bottom.
For weeks I watched as she had her stomach stapled, as she lost weight, as she crusaded to help others. Months and months on end I watched. I was helpless.
“We have all had something taken from us,” my wife would say. “We all need someone to steal it back.”
And as I watched, I ate. And I ate more. For days, weeks, months, I ate. I stared at the screen everyday, eating my way back to her. I needed her to save me.
Yeah, you have probably seen me too. I am the house ridden man from the viral video on the web, the giant orca who can’t get out of bed. I too have made my way through the day-time television circuit. I have had my own half- hour, heartbreaking segments. But all you saw was a humungous man who has eaten himself into a death sentence.
Sarah calls it “a serious attempt at romance.” She has been taking care of me for a few months. While my wife is saving the some obese mother of three, Sarah is busy taking care of the dirty work. “Mental health days,” she calls my time in bed.
“You know, its funny,” she said. “God set us free with that apple. He gave us the ability to choose, to make decisions. We have to decide what color socks to wear, what the best type of toilet paper to use, what to eat, what to watch on television.”
She climbs into the bed beside me and grabs my hand.
“But the most important of all decisions, the one we want to control…you can’t choose who you fall in love with. You can only choose how you deal with it.
She holds my hand tighter and lays her head on my chest. For the first time in a year, I turn the television off.
