The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  Tommy, beautiful Tommy Fango, the others paled to nothing next to him. Everybody heard him in those days; they played him two or three times an hour but you never knew when it would be so you were plugged in and listening hard every living minute; you ate, you slept, you drew breath for the moment when they would put on one of Tommy’s records, you waited for his voice to fill the room. Cold cuts and cupcakes and game hens came and went during that period in my life but one thing was constant: I always had a cream pie thawing and when they played the first bars of “When a Widow” and Tommy’s voice first flexed and uncurled, I was ready, I would eat the cream pie during Tommy’s midnight show. The whole world waited in those days; we waited through endless sunlight, through nights of drumbeats and monotony, we all waited for Tommy Fango’s records, and we waited for that whole unbroken hour of Tommy, his midnight show. He came on live at midnight in those days; he sang, broadcasting from the Hotel Riverside, and that was beautiful, but more important, he talked, and while he was talking he made everything all right. Nobody was lonely when Tommy talked; he brought us all together on that midnight show, he talked and made us powerful, he talked and finally he sang. You have to imagine what it was like, me in the night, Tommy, the pie. In a while I would go to a place where I had to live on Tommy and only Tommy, to a time when hearing Tommy would bring back the pie, all the poor lost pies …

  Tommy’s records, his show, the pie … that was perhaps the happiest period of my life. I would sit and listen and I would eat and eat and eat. So great was my bliss that it became torture to put away the food at daybreak; it grew harder and harder for me to hide the cartons and the cans and the bottles, all the residue of my happiness. Perhaps a bit of bacon fell into the register; perhaps an egg rolled under the bed and began to smell. All right, perhaps I did become careless, continuing my revels into the morning, or I may have been thoughtless enough to leave a jelly roll unfinished on the rug. I became aware that they were watching, lurking just outside my door, plotting as I ate. In time they broke in on me, weeping and pleading, lamenting over every ice cream carton and crumb of pie; then they threatened. Finally they restored the food they had taken from me in the daytime, thinking to curtail my eating at night. Folly. By that time I needed it all. I shut myself in with it and would not listen. I ignored their cries of hurt pride, their outpouring of wounded vanity, their puny little threats. Even if I had listened, I could not have forestalled what happened next.

  I was so happy that last day. There was a Smithfield ham, mine, and I remember a jar of cherry preserves, mine, and I remember bacon, pale and white on Italian bread. I remember sounds downstairs and before I could take warning, an assault, a company of uniformed attendants, the sting of a hypodermic gun. Then the ten of them closed in and grappled me into a sling, or net, and heaving and straining, they bore me down the stairs. I’ll never forgive you, I cried as they bundled me into the ambulance. I’ll never forgive you, I bellowed as my mother in a last betrayal took away my radio, and I cried out one last time, as my father removed a ham bone from my bra: I’ll never forgive you. And I never have.

  It is painful to describe what happened next. I remember three days of horror and agony, of being too weak, finally, to cry out or claw the walls. Then at last I was quiet and they moved me into a sunny, pastel, chintz-bedizened room. I remember that there were flowers on the dresser and someone was watching me.

  “What are you in for?” she said.

  I could barely speak for weakness. “Despair.”

  “Hell with that,” she said, chewing. “You’re in for food.”

  “What are you eating?” I tried to raise my head.

  “Chewing. Inside of the mouth. It helps.”

  “I’m going to die.”

  “Everybody thinks that at first. I did.” She tilted her head in an attitude of grace. “You know, this is a very exclusive school.”

  Her name was Ramona and as I wept silently, she filled me in. This was a last resort for the few who could afford to send their children here. They prettied it up with a schedule of therapy, exercise, massage; we would wear dainty pink smocks and talk of art and theater; from time to time we would attend classes in elocution and hygiene. Our parents would say with pride that we were away at Faircrest, an elegant finishing school; we knew better—it was a prison and we were being starved.

  “It’s a world I never made,” said Ramona, and I knew that her parents were to blame, even as mine were. Her mother liked to take the children into hotels and casinos, wearing her thin daughters like a garland of jewels. Her father followed the sun on his private yacht, with the pennants flying and his children on the fantail, lithe and tanned. He would pat his flat, tanned belly and look at Ramona in disgust. When it was no longer possible to hide her, he gave in to blind pride. One night they came in a launch and took her away. She had been here six months now, and had lost almost a hundred pounds. She must have been monumental in her prime; she was still huge.

  “We live from day to day,” she said. “But you don’t know the worst.”

  “My radio,” I said in a spasm of fear. “They took away my radio.”

  “There is a reason,” she said. “They call it therapy.”

  I was mumbling in my throat, in a minute I would scream.

  “Wait.” With ceremony, she pushed aside a picture and touched a tiny switch and then, like sweet balm for my panic, Tommy’s voice flowed into the room.

  When I was quiet she said, “You only hear him once a day.”

  “No.”

  “But you can hear him any time you want to. You hear him when you need him most.”

  But we were missing the first few bars and so we shut up and listened, and after “When a Widow” was over we sat quietly for a moment, her resigned, me weeping, and then Ramona threw another switch and the Sound filtered into the room, and it was almost like being plugged in.

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “I’ll die.”

  “If you think about it you will die. You have to learn to use it instead. In a minute they will come with lunch,” Ramona said and as The Screamers sang sweet background, she went on in a monotone: “One chop. One lousy chop with a piece of lettuce and maybe some gluten bread. I pretend it’s a leg of lamb, that works if you eat very, very slowly and think about Tommy the whole time; then if you look at your picture of Tommy you can turn the lettuce into anything you want, Caesar salad or a whole smorgasbord, and if you say his name over and over you can pretend a whole bombe or torte if you want to and …”

  “I’m going to pretend a ham and kidney pie and a watermelon filled with chopped fruits and Tommy and I are in the Rainbow Room and we’re going to finish up with Fudge Royale …” I almost drowned in my own saliva; in the background I could almost hear Tommy and I could hear Ramona saying, “Capon, Tommy would like capon, canard à l’orange, Napoleons, tomorrow we will save Tommy for lunch and listen while we eat …” and I thought about that, I thought about listening and imagining whole cream pies and I went on, “ … lemon pie, rice pudding, a whole Edam cheese…. I think I’m going to live.”

  The matron came in the next morning at breakfast and stood as she would every day, tapping red fingernails on one svelte hip, looking on in revulsion as we fell on the glass of orange juice and the hard-boiled egg. I was too weak to control myself; I heard a shrill sniveling sound and realized only from her expression that it was my own voice: “Please, just some bread, a stick of butter, anything. I could lick the dishes if you’d let me, only please don’t leave me like this, please …” I can still see her sneer as she turned her back.

  I felt Ramona’s loyal hand on my shoulder. “There’s always toothpaste but don’t use too much at once or they’ll come and take it away from you.”

  I was too weak to rise and so she brought it and we shared the tube and talked about all the banquets we had ever known, and when we got tired of that we talked about Tommy and when that failed, Ramona went to the switch and we heard “When
a Widow,” and that helped for a while, and then we decided that tomorrow we would put off “When a Widow” until bedtime because then we would have something to look forward to all day. Then lunch came and we both wept.

  It was not just hunger: after a while the stomach begins to devour itself and the few grams you toss it at mealtimes assuage it so that in time the appetite itself begins to fail. After hunger comes depression. I lay there, still too weak to get about, and in my misery I realized that they could bring me roast pork and watermelon and Boston cream pie without ceasing; they could gratify all my dreams and I would only weep helplessly, because I no longer had the strength to eat. Even then, when I thought I had reached rock bottom, I had not comprehended the worst. I noticed it first in Ramona. Watching her at the mirror, I said, in fear:

  “You’re thinner.”

  She turned with tears in her eyes. “Nelly, I’m not the only one.”

  I looked around at my own arms and saw that she was right: there was one less fold of flesh above the elbow; there was one less wrinkle at the wrist. I turned my face to the wall and all Ramona’s talk of food and Tommy did not comfort me. In desperation she turned on Tommy’s voice, but as he sang I lay back and contemplated the melting of my own flesh.

  “If we stole a radio we could hear him again,” Ramona said, trying to soothe me. “We could hear him when he sings tonight.”

  Tommy came to Faircrest on a visit two days later, for reasons I could not then understand. All the other girls lumbered into the assembly hall to see him, thousands of pounds of agitated flesh. It was that morning that I discovered I could walk again, and I was on my feet, struggling into the pink tent in a fury to get to Tommy, when the matron intercepted me.

  “Not you, Nelly.”

  ‘I have to get to Tommy. I have to hear him sing.”

  “Next time, maybe.” With a look of naked cruelty she added, “You’re a disgrace. You’re still too gross.”

  I lunged but it was too late; she had already shot the bolt. And so I sat in the midst of my diminishing body, suffering while every other girl in the place listened to him sing. I knew then that I had to act; I would regain myself somehow, I would find food and regain my flesh and then I would go to Tommy. I would use force if I had to, but I would hear him sing. I raged through the room all that morning, hearing the shrieks of five hundred girls, the thunder of their feet, but even when I pressed myself against the wall I could not hear Tommy’s voice.

  Yet Ramona, when she came back to the room, said the most interesting thing. It was some time before she could speak at all, but in her generosity she played “When a Widow” while she regained herself, and then she spoke:

  “He came for something, Nelly. He came for something he didn’t find.”

  “Tell about what he was wearing. Tell what his throat did when he sang.”

  “He looked at all the before pictures, Nelly. The matron was trying to make him look at the afters but he kept looking at the befores and shaking his head and then he found one and put it in his pocket and if he hadn’t found it, he wasn’t going to sing.”

  I could feel my spine stiffen. “Ramona, you’ve got to help me. I must go to him.”

  That night we staged a daring break. We clubbed the attendant when he brought dinner, and once we had him under the bed we ate all the chops and gluten bread on his cart and then we went down the corridor, lifting bolts, and when we were a hundred strong we locked the matron in her office and raided the dining hall, howling and eating everything we could find. I ate that night, how I ate, but even as I ate I was aware of a fatal lightness in my bones, a failure in capacity, and so they found me in the frozen food locker, weeping over a chain of link sausage, inconsolable because I understood that they had spoiled it for me, they with their chops and their gluten bread; I could never eat as I once had, I would never be myself again.

  In my fury I went after the matron with a ham hock, and when I had them all at bay I took a loin of pork for sustenance and I broke out of that place. I had to get to Tommy before I got any thinner: I had to try. Outside the gate I stopped a car and hit the driver with the loin of pork and then I drove to the Hotel Riverside, where Tommy always stayed. I made my way up the fire stairs on little cat feet and when the valet went to his suite with one of his velveteen suits I followed, quick as a tigress, and the next moment I was inside. When all was quiet I tiptoed to his door and stepped inside.

  He was magnificent. He stood at the window, gaunt and beautiful; his blond hair fell to his waist and his shoulders shriveled under a heartbreaking double-breasted pea-green velvet suit. He did not see me at first; I drank in his image and then, delicately, cleared my throat. In the second that he turned and saw me, everything seemed possible.

  “It’s you.” His voice throbbed.

  “I had to come.”

  Our eyes fused and in that moment I believed that we two could meet, burning as a single, lambent flame, but in the next second his face had crumpled in disappointment; he brought a picture from his pocket, a fingered, cracked photograph, and he looked from it to me and back at the photograph, saying, “My darling, you’ve fallen off.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late,” I cried, but we both knew I would fail.

  And fail I did, even though I ate for days, for five desperate, heroic weeks; I threw pies into the breach, fresh hams and whole sides of beef, but those sad days at the food farm, the starvation and the drugs have so upset my chemistry that it cannot be restored; no matter what I eat I fall off and I continue to fall off; my body is a halfway house for foods I can no longer assimilate. Tommy watches, and because he knows he almost had me, huge and round and beautiful, Tommy mourns. He eats less and less now. He eats like a bird and lately he has refused to sing; strangely, his records have begun to disappear.

  And so a whole nation waits.

  “I almost had her,” he says when they beg him to resume his midnight shows; he will not sing, he won’t talk, but his hands describe the mountain of woman he has longed for all his life.

  And so I have lost Tommy, and he has lost me, but I am doing my best to make it up to him. I own Faircrest now, and in the place where Ramona and I once suffered I use my skills on the girls Tommy wants me to cultivate. I can put twenty pounds on a girl in a couple of weeks and I don’t mean bloat. I mean solid fat. Ramona and I feed them up and once a week we weigh and I poke the upper arm with a special stick and I will not be satisfied until the stick goes in and does not rebound because all resiliency is gone. Each week I bring out my best and Tommy shakes his head in misery because the best is not yet good enough, none of them are what I once was. But one day the time and the girl will be right—would that it were me—the time and the girl will be right and Tommy will sing again. In the meantime, the whole world waits; in the meantime, in a private wing well away from the others, I keep my special cases: the matron, who grows fatter as I watch her. And Mom. And Dad.

  —Orbit 2, 1967

  In Behalf of the Product

  Of course I owe everything I am today to Mr. Manuel Omerta, my personal representative, who arranged for practically everything, including the dental surgery and the annulment, but I want all of you wonderful people to know that I couldn’t have done any of it without the help and support of the most wonderful person of all, my Mom. It was Mom who kept coming with the super-enriched formula and the vitamins, she was the one who twirled my hair around her finger every time she washed it, it was Mom who put Vaseline on my eyelashes and paid for the trampoline lessons because she had faith in me. Anybody coming in off the street might have thought I was just an ordinary little girl, but not my mom: why, the first thing I remember is her standing me up on a table in front of everybody. I had on my baby tap shoes and a big smile and Mom was saying, Vonnie is going to be Miss Wonderful Land of Ours someday.

  Even then she knew.

  Well, here I am, and I can’t tell you how happy I am to be up here, queen of the nation, an inspiration and a model for all those mil
lions and billions of American girls who can grow up to be just like me. And this is only the beginning. Why, after I spend a year touring the country, meeting the people and introducing them to the product, after I walk down the runway at next year’s pageant and put the American eagle floral piece into the arms of my successor, and she cries, anything can happen. I might go on to a career as an internationally famous television personality, or if I’d rather, I could become a movie queen or a spot welder, or I could marry Stanley, if he’s still speaking to me, and raise my own little Miss Wonderful Land of Ours. Why, the world is mine, except of course for the iron curtain countries and their sympathizers, and after this wonderful year, who knows?

  I just wish Daddy could be here to share this moment, but I guess that’s just too much to hope, and I want you to know, Daddy, wherever you are out there, I forgive you, and if you’ll only turn yourself in and make a public confession, I know the authorities will be lenient with you.

  And that goes for you too, Sal. I know it was hard on you, always being the ugly older sister, but I really don’t think you should have done what you did, and to show you how big I can be, if the acid scars came out as bad as I think they did, Mom and I are perfectly willing to let bygones be bygones and sink half the prize money into plastic surgery for you. I mean, after all, it’s the least we can do. Why, there aren’t even any charges outstanding against you; after all, nobody was really hurt—I mean, since Mr. Omerta happened to come in when he did and bumped your arm, and the acid went all over you instead of me.