The house was just off of Browning Parkway, down Tyson’s Lane all the way to the end where it ended at Kunckle Terrace, a nice big powder green frame house that had not been defaced with vinyl siding but was painted, and freshly.
This is a serious yard sale, she thought, as she rumbled up to the curb in Daddy’s Girl.
These people are really having a spring cleaning sale. I’ll surely find someone to talk to here.
Martha May shut down Daddy’s Girl, and, having earned the attention of the handful of middle aged to elderly men with her rumbling muscle car, her pretty face and upward spilling cleavage, she promptly reveled in their abject disappointment when she emerged from the love of her life 100 pounds overweight.
Well that gnarly old black man is still checking you out.
His old trifling butt can walk. I haven’t put up with rejection from men my entire life—hell, before they were men, those savage little Swiebeck Boys for instance—to settle for something long in the tooth and cast off at that. It is a hunk for Martha May Wilson or nothing! If he can carry this fat ass over the threshold it’s all his!
Don’t forget articulation girl. Mother would roll over in her grave if she looked down from heaven and observed you with some knuckle-dragging beefcake.
Look at this fine china—no, that piece is cracked or nearly so. Besides, there is more than enough tableware to host the girls on Tuesday night. Oh, that’s tomorrow. Fat Girl needs a conversation starter to deflect the inevitable discussion of her not yet begun man-catching diet so thoughtfully suggested by her Barbie Doll friends. Girls’ Night would not be Girl’s Night if the conversation did not at some point turn to slimming down Martha May so she can land a worthy man. Let’s grab the girls with something more prosaic.
“Good morning miss,” came the voice of the middle-aged woman sitting behind the table which played host to the worthy goods, rather than the clutter of boxes that the man of the house was presiding over to the rear, where his dawdling self belonged.
“Good morning to you too miss.”
“You are too kind child. I simply love your blue dress. You make it work. The muted eye-shadow does it justice.”
Martha May smiled wide as she thought to herself, Yes, it’s a shame I’m a fat cow you’re thinking, and so unfair that a homely old crow like you who has worked so health food hard to keep her figure can’t be as pretty as this Fat Girl, and then reposted, “Whose being kind now? I just wish I had your figure and that golden tan.”—skin cancer here we come!
And there they were, her long lost silent friends simply pining to be let out of their fixed purgatory. Martha May placed one plump finger on the family photo in the old cherry wood frame behind real 120 year old glass. “Do you know who they are?”
“Oh dear no. My father used to buy the attic boxes at estate sales back in the day. This is the last of the family portraits kept by people who had no family remaining to treasure their captured images.”
Martha May’s voice became clinical like it did when she helped her patients through their occupational exercises. “This happens to be an area of some interest to me. These are German immigrants from the 1880s. Note the mutton chop whiskers on the young father. If this picture had been taken, let’s say around 1910, the young father would be clean shaven and standing behind seated grandparents, and the grandfather would be whiskered. The fact that there is not yet an extended family present marks these people as recent and fairly successful immigrants.”
The shapely older woman looked up into Martha May’s eyes with expansive crow’s feet as her sun-damaged face widened into a welcoming smile, “Are you an historian miss?”
“Oh no,” she smiled, "I just like to have people I can talk to hanging around the house. How much?”
The woman’s wide welcoming visage now fell victim to the force of gravity once again as she answered in a worried tone, “Five, darling.”
Martha May smiled demurely as she reached into her purse for a five dollar bill, disapprovingly noted the face of the ugly man that her father had hated so, and exchanged it for the beautiful picture of that lonely family frozen in their prime.
Without a word to the suddenly silent woman she walked off—with as little waddle as she could manage—holding her new house guests to her powdered breast.
Don’t you worry friends. You will soon be home sweet home, with no need to stare with such melancholy upon the harsh world.
Reduction in form is such a pleasing thing, when it means an entire family that had most probably never driven a car, let alone a 1979 powder blue Dodge Charger with 400 CCs of ass-kicking engine and four barrels of environmentally unfriendly emissions, could all sit together in the passenger seat as Martha May Wilson put her into first gear and flipped on her new dash mounted police scanner.
She looked to her right and then came near to panic, realizing her negligence.
“Oh I’m sorry babies. Here, let me buckle you in. There you go. Now let’s go see what those handsome men in blue are up to.”
“Looking for me Mister Police?”
“Well then Martha May and Company are looking for you!”
Daddy’s Girl was doing fifty by the time she hit Browning Parkway, windows down so Martha May could feel the wind caress her curly blonde hair the way she had once fantasized a man might on some magical night.
The biker she cut off almost bought the farm, and she barely noticed as something utterly fascinating was being broadcast by the 911 operator, something about ‘a gang rape on a golf course’, something the rule-bound police might not have the latitude to properly punish…
Martha May's story continues, and is concluded in Fat Girl Dancing, the novella due out this October.
