Chapter 1 - a room for cheryl

It was Friday night and the buffet was packed and noisy. Cheryl Czup sat at a table by herself, staring down at her plate and trying to ignore the stares and comments of the people around her. She took up two chairs and she knew she was eating like a freak, scooping up French fries with chocolate sauce and cramming them into her mouth. Her eyes watered — those people had no idea what she was going through. She needed this. She had to do it. Even though it had ruined her.

Two months ago, the group house Cheryl lived in had been put on the market. Everyone else had found a place to live and tonight was the last night she was going to be able to stay in the old house. Everything had been packed up and put into storage.

Cheryl had burned through her savings over the last weeks, eating here every night, trying to get some relief from the feeling of doom that had crushed her ever since she’d heard the news. She was going to have to find a place to live tomorrow, somehow, or…

Cheryl stuffed her mouth so full she had to open it to chew and she hated the sounds and then she did it again, stuffing her mouth just as full. She couldn’t bear to think about what was going to happen when she stopped eating, couldn’t think about what it was going to be like to sleep on the floor tonight, let alone what what she was going to do the next day. She wasn’t going to be able to get a place to stay. Not only had she spent all her money, she’d taken four hundred dollars she didn’t have out of the bank. That made her an actual criminal and why would they make it so easy to rob a bank when she needed to fill herself, needed the emotional space a good pig-out would give her. She just hadn’t remembered it was Friday night. She just wasn’t ready for the crowd.

A well-dressed woman patted her on the shoulder and leaned close to speak. She was fat. Nothing like Cheryl but broad and doughy in the hips. “Excuse me, may I sit here for a moment? I need to talk to you.”

Cheryl choked and some chewed-up chocolate French fry dropped onto her shirt as she reached for a napkin and shook her head.

The woman sat down opposite Cheryl, who spitefully noticed the way her flabby buttocks overhung the chair. “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She gave Cheryl a pleading look. “I know this is going to sound awful but I really, really, really need to ask you a favor. Please, just think about it. If I pay you a hundred dollars and your bill, will you let me watch you eat? I’m on a diet and I know it sounds crazy but I need to see someone really enjoying their food and as soon as I saw you, I knew you were perfect.”

Cheryl didn’t want to tell the woman to leave her alone; she wished the woman had left her alone in the first place. Now Cheryl had to think about something other than the taste of sweet and salt and rich and creamy and crunchy all in her mouth at once.

But God, that money. She could get a hotel room, just for one night while she figured something out.

Cheryl, still looking down at her plate, said, “Okay.”

The woman stood up. “Well, let me go get you another plate. You’re almost done. Would you like chicken and waffles this time?”

Cheryl, feeling like a massive lump, like a human tombstone, said, “Okay.” But she felt… scared? No, she wasn’t scared, why should she be scared of some little roly-poly? But it made her uncomfortable that the woman had gotten her food just right, a big plate piled high with chicken and waffles, each layer of waffles saturated with butter and syrup, each layer of chicken coated in whipped cream and hot sauce and the whole thing topped off with more whipped cream and a handful of maraschino cherries and another small plate of chocolate French fries on the side. Fast as the woman had been, she’d taken the time to pluck the stems from the cherries. Cheryl could hear people whispering around her and it made her feel like cockroaches were crawling on her skin. People were horrible.

The woman sat opposite her and stared openly and avidly as she waited for Cheryl to start eating. At first Cheryl thought the woman was staring into her eyes but she wasn’t. She was staring at Cheryl’s mouth like it was a white eagle or an eclipse. Or a car accident, something wet and red and you can’t look away…

Cheryl began eating. The woman licked her lips as though moistening them for a kiss and the look of desperation and longing on her face resonated with Cheryl’s own desperation and made the moment strange. Instead of feeling insulted and freakish, Cheryl felt as though she were doing something good, helping someone in pain. The woman’s hurt expression, the way her lined face hung as though she’d been deflated. Cheryl knew that in this moment, the woman would have done anything in the world to have been Cheryl rather than herself.

The money seemed less important and because of that Cheryl felt grateful to the woman rather than resentful. Now it felt nice that the woman would want to do something for her. There was something like a legitimate exchange going on.

“Thank you,” the woman said, opened her purse, got out her wallet, and handed Cheryl five twenties and a hundred. “I know this is a little extra but you’re wonderful, you really are. I could watch you forever. You know, I’ve seen you here before and I’ve thought of you ever since.” The woman, despite her lined face, had a sweet, shy expression on her face, worried about what Cheryl was going to think. “If you have enough room for another helping, I’d be happy to give you another two hundred dollars.”

Cheryl closed her eyes, leaned back, breathed heavily, thoughtfully judged her capacity and said, “Okay.” Then her head tipped forward, eyes still closed, and she started to sob softly, trying not to draw any more attention than she already had.

The woman reached across the table, carefully keeping her sleeve away from the debris of Cheryl’s feast, and patted Cheryl’s arm. “What’s the matter, dear? What’s wrong?”

Cheryl told her. When she was done, the woman patted her arm again and let her fingers rest on Cheryl’s skin for a moment. She said, “That is awful. I am not having you sleep on a floor, let alone a bench. Come back to my house. I have a perfectly good spare room that needs to be used. Stay with me until you get back on your feet.”

Cheryl, holding a napkin to her face, tried to get herself under control. She didn’t want to get thrown out. “Thank you,” she said with a sniff. “Oh, my God. Thank you so much. You saved my life.” She blew her nose. “Oh, my God.”

“I’m Marilyn,” the woman said as she stood and gathered the dirty plates. “And you are very welcome. It is my pleasure entirely, you know. Now, you just get yourself settled down and I’ll be right back.”

She was and the plates were stacked even higher this time, mountains of food drizzling maple and chocolate syrup onto the table. Cheryl ate.
***
The ride back to Marilyn’s house had been a minor ordeal for Cheryl, who rode in silence except for the periodic belch. Not burp. Great, rolling, reverberant belches that made Cheryl feel disgusting but with every one, Marilyn reached out and patted her arm consolingly. Once she said, “It’s not easy eating that way. I really appreciate your doing that for me.” She should be grateful; Cheryl had never eaten so much in her life. And Marilyn had stared openly at each and every bite, silently and irresistibly urging Cheryl on. God, she was glad she wasn’t going to sleep on a floor tonight.

Her new room had pale pink wallpaper with peach lozenges. The door to the hall was a regular door but in the room, the sliding door that opened on the patio and pool operated with a button and was six feet wide when fully opened. There was no door to the bathroom, just an opening running floor to ceiling and as wide as it was tall, shielded by a bead curtain. The bed was big, bigger than any Cheryl had seen before, and low enough for a fat girl to get in and out of easily. When Cheryl sat on it, it was rock-solid, not a squeak or wiggle.

Marilyn walked up to her, awkwardly, and paused for a moment before giving Cheryl a fleeting hug, as if resisting the temptation to cling. “Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
***
When Cheryl got up to go to the bathroom a couple of hours later, she felt again a sense of disquiet, of something wrong. The tub was a full-sized Jacuzzi, the kind you could have a party in. The toilet was short and wide and the seat had collapsable wings on either side so someone with an ass even bigger that Cheryl’s two-chair model would be able to use it comfortably.

The scale was what made Cheryl feel uncomfortable. It had a science fiction look to it, charcoal and stainless steel, and it was a platform two feet deep and four feet wide and the readout was on the wall in front of it so you could read it no matter how big your chest or belly. She’d never seen a scale like that before but she knew it was specially made for fat people. Why else would it be that way?

And on the way back to bed, she took a closer look at the wallpaper. The peach pattern was made out of happy little fat pigs. Cheryl thought about that and the scale and the doors and the tub and toilet until worry, confusion, and the sheer surfeit of the meal Marilyn had eaten by proxy put her to sleep.
***
There was a light but decisive knock at the door and Marilyn’s voice asked, “Are you up?”

“Uh-huh.” Cheryl rubbed her eyes and pointed her toes so her ankles cracked satisfactorily. The light on the pink wallpaper gave the room a pleasant rosiness that put Cheryl in a good mood.

Marilyn, wearing an apron, came in carrying a flowered metal tin and what was either a very large glass or a very small pitcher of milk. She set them down on the bedside table and said, “It’s nice in here, isn’t it? It was my room when I slept on the first floor. I hope you like it.”

“It’s nice. Thank’s for letting me stay here.”

“You are perfectly welcome to stay here as long as you want. It’s so nice to see someone here again.” Marilyn pulled a glass jar out of her pocket and handed it to Cheryl. “Here. You need to take these before real breakfast. They’re vitamins.”

There were a lot of pills in that jar. Big white ones, big yellow ones, regular-sized blue-and-white capsules, and one evil-looking little red oil-filled capsule. Cheryl unscrewed the jar, popped the pills in her mouth, picked up her glass of milk with both hands, and washed the pills down.

It wasn’t milk. It was half-and-half.

Marilyn said, “I’m going to go make your breakfast now. I’m making what you had last night but it’ll be better, I swear, I’m a wonderful cook. I’m going to put dark and white chocolate chunks in the fries and make Southern-style chocolate gravy so it’ll be like a chocolate poutine. And my fried chicken is wonderful. I put it in the buttermilk marinade before I went to bed so it’ll be perfect for breakfast. And I make whipped cream from scratch.” She tapped the tin. “I brought you some malted shortbread in case you got bored while I was cooking.” Marilyn got that shy look again. “Could you try a piece? So I know you like it?”

Cheryl silently nodded and opened the tin. The smell of brown butter rose up and now Cheryl was hungry again, starving. But she ate the first cookie slowly, watching Marilyn react as she voluptuously nibbled and chewed and extracted every possible iota of flavor from the shortbread.

When she swallowed the last bite, Marilyn sighed. “It’s going to be so nice to be able to really cook again. I’ll let you know as soon as breakfast is ready. If you want, you’ve got plenty of time for a shower and you may as well look around and find out where everything is. Bye, dear,” she said, and shut the door behind her.

Cheryl looked at the shortbread and the half and half and the wallpaper and thought about the scale in the bathroom.

Once Marilyn had gone down the hall, Cheryl started stuffing the cookies in her mouth, packing it full, then washing the sweet crumbly mass down with gulps of half and half. She was only going to be here until she figured out what she was going to do next; may as well take advantage of the situation until then.