The Weight of Him(48)
He stopped at the front desk to register, still unable to rein in his breathing. Then he plodded to the changing room—the space teeming with men and boys in various states of undress. He crossed the room, trying to ignore people’s double takes and the wall-to-wall mirrors. He recognized a couple of faces, one lad from the factory and one older man from the chemist where Tricia worked, but he pretended not to know them.
He located an empty locker down the back, parked himself on the damp bench, and kicked off his shoes. After a struggle to reach his feet, he peeled off his socks. When he went to pull off his sweatshirt, though, he couldn’t do it. Too many eyes. He moved across the wet, cold tiles in bare feet and entered the toilet stall, eying the wet patches on the floor with suspicion. He sidestepped the dubious spills and stripped down to his supersized navy boxer swim trunks. Then he waited.
As soon as the chatter and activity outside lulled, he lurched free of the small space. There in the corner, the weighing scale beckoned. Curiosity beat out mortification and he climbed aboard, this professional scale likely more accurate than his one at home. He waited for the numbers to settle, feeling watched. He stepped off and back on, to be sure. Three hundred and sixty-one pounds. He had lost a total of forty pounds. The number echoed inside him, biblical. He hiked up his arms and pumped the air.
The sense of triumph dissipated as soon as he emerged from the changing room and into the noisy, chemical-seeped pool area. Already the reek of chlorine annoyed his eyes and nostrils. He pushed on, his feet slapping over the sopping-wet tiles as fast as he could move. He would gladly take the cover of the poisonous pool over standing here in front of everyone, with so much of him showing.
At the water’s edge, he hesitated, trying to decide how best to enter. The metal stairs didn’t seem substantial enough to support his bulk. He held his breath and stepped off the wet, paved deck, dropping into the shallow end. He recovered from the chill shock of entry and the blindness of the gargantuan splash he’d made, only to hear the shrill sound of the lifeguard’s whistle. “No jumping!” Everyone turned to look.
Worse, his big splash had caused a toddler to cry. The child’s mother glared, the bawling, red-faced boy fastened to her hip. Billy raised his hand apologetically. “Sorry.” The woman turned her back, an indignant swing to her water-beaded shoulders, and trudged to the other side of the pool, the boy still squawking and staring back at Billy. Billy brought his hands together and pushed down into the water.
He reached the deep end and burst through the surface, gasping. The chlorine burned his eyes. Next time he would wear goggles. His reflection in the rearview that sunny, blinding day came back, the fat of his face bubbling over the arms of his sunglasses and drawing ever more attention to his meaty head. The added humiliation of goggles hardly seemed to matter here, though, when he was already letting everyone see so much of his outsides. The two men he’d recognized in the changing room swam laps nearby, but he continued to ignore them. He touched the wall of the pool, turned around, and started back toward the opposite end, thinking, Forty pounds, thinking, Michael.
He tired after only three laps. He tried to continue, but his lungs felt as if they would burst, his rib cage as if it would collapse. Get up, he told himself, echoing his father’s herding of the cows. If he could only make six laps today, and next time build from there. His arms sliced the water and his legs kicked. He told himself he would drown if he didn’t go on, he would boil in a vat of oil, but he couldn’t muster another stroke. He stopped mid-pool and grabbed the blue lane rope, struggling to tame his breathing. Earlier, on the drive into town, he’d noticed several crows on the telephone wires. The birds had swayed on first landing, as if they would fall, but they held on, their claws curled around the wire. His hand tightened on the lane rope, holding on until he’d recovered his breath and the painful tightness in his chest eased. Then he pushed off, finishing the lap.
The rest of the week, he returned to the swimming pool in the evenings, straight after work. He continued to see faces he recognized, but thankfully didn’t run into anyone he knew well enough to have to stop and chat while standing in all his inglorious flesh. Every time he tired and thought he couldn’t continue, he pressed on, squeezing the last possible lap out of himself. By Friday, he’d lost another three pounds. Forty-three pounds gone. It would never get old, this kind of ecstatic descent.
*
One night in bed, Billy jerked up from the pillow, and dropped back down. Tricia’s face swam above him, concerned. She pressed her hand to his cheek, her first tenderness toward him in so long. “Relax, it’s over.”
His thumb and finger rubbed hard at his eyes. “Michael was a boy and he went missing. I couldn’t find him—”
“Shush, it’s okay.” Her hand remained on his face.
He remembered the first time he’d seen her, in the village church, at their friends’ wedding. She was wearing a short, floral dress and a little cerise cardigan, her hair so blond, her eyes so blue, and a smile that could heal wounds. It was love, and heartbreak, at first sight. No way, he’d thought, a girl like that would have anything to do with a lump like me.
She was still leaning over him on the bed. His fingers reached for her hair, its past luster gone. He lifted several dull locks, and moved his fingers down their shaft, letting each strand fall slowly away. Their eyes searched each other. His hand slid to the back of her neck and eased her face toward him. They kissed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had kissed her full on the mouth. She pulled away.