Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

My dad left when I still had a month to go in the darkroom, and historically when people have tried to figure me out (as in, “What went wrong?”), they usually conclude that Mom spoiled me; gave me everything I wanted because I had no pappy. Truth is, Mom thinks I'm a whole lot better off without that particular pappy and has told me a thousand times she's glad I had the good sense to stay packed away until he split. They were young. My mother was my age now when I was born, and so was my dad.

I don't know very much about Dad, really. In eighteen years he's made no effort to contact me, and all I have is a picture. He's a college professor somewhere in the Midwest, Mom thinks in Geology. She doesn't think Geology is in the Midwest, she thinks that's what he
teaches. The fact that he's excited about rocks hasn't had much genetic influence on me as far as I can tell, but what I see in the picture of him has. My dad is a tub of lard. At least he was at eighteen. I'm not talking about a guy who should have gone light on the desserts and between-meal snacks. I'm talking about a guy who should have spread Super Glue on his lips before showing his face outside his bedroom each morning. My dad could have sold his extra chins for marble sacks.

And my mom is a fox. Really. Bona fide, hundred-thousand-dollar silver-pelt fox. She has dark brown hair and green eyes and this slinky, long, muscular body that she keeps in perfect working order, and I know for a fact half the kids who come to my house hope to catch her in shorts and a tank top. Christ, she's only thirty-six years old.

“Mom,” I said one morning a couple of years ago, Dad's picture clutched tight in my beefy paw, “tell me something. Tell me why somebody who looks like you would fall for somebody who looks like
this.
” I plopped the picture on the coffee table in front of her.

“Looks aren't everything, Eric,” she said.

“His looks aren't
anything,
” I said back. “And he left them for me.”

She looked up and smiled. “You look a lot better
than your dad,” she said. “He was compulsive, ate all the time. You're big and solid. That's different.”

“Big and solid as twelve pounds of mashed potatoes in an eight-pound bag,” I said. “If you dressed me up in an orange-and-red sweater, you could ride me around the world in eighty days.”

“And you have a much better sense of humor than your father,” she said, probably remembering Dad's high regard for rocks. Mom was never one to let me dwell on the parts of me I didn't like.

My name is Eric Calhoune, and though I have spent hours in the weight room since that conversation, most folks call me Moby. My English teacher, Ms. Lemry, who is also my coach, sometimes calls me Eric the Well Read, because I'm pretty smart. She also calls me Double-E, for Eric Enigma. “I can't figure exactly how you're put together inside,” she says. “You're a jock who doesn't compete in his best sport, a student who doesn't excel where his aptitude is highest, and you surround yourself with a supporting cast straight out of âThe Far Side.'”

“Tweech his own,” I said, and pirouetted to tippy-toe out of the room, in keeping with my image as Double-E.

If my belly button were a knothole it would certainly be more congruous with my keg-like body. I have chiseled away at my father's genetic code since I realized I was better equipped to roll to school than walk, but the bare-bones me is still more Raymond Burr than Arnold Schwarzenegger. All of which wouldn't matter, but for the amount of time that belly button is exposed, which approaches four hours a day. I'm a swimmer. I probably don't have to tell you the Speedo people don't employ William Conrad as a fashion designer, and I therefore do not step onto the starting blocks looking like a
Sports Illustrated
fashion plate.

Looks alone would be enough to keep most guys with my particular body design as far away from water as the Wicked Witch of the West, but swimming is a thinking man's sport and Ms. Lemry is a thinking man's coach. Besides, it keeps me far from the clutches of Coach Stone, who has been trying to get me to come out for wrestling since I was a frosh because he fancies me unbeatable as a heavyweight, which I very well might be. But the idea of a permanent gash across the bridge of my nose and mat burns on every pointed appendage does not appeal to me no matter how many trophies I might walk away with. I'm not a great swimmer, but I'm goodâa lot better than you'd think looking at meâ
and I like the challenge of the clock, as well as the people involved. I also like the wake I create for the guy in the next lane.

We're eight thousand yards into the workout. Lemry's whistle blasts. “Let's wrap it up. Twenty-five yards. All out. Five breaths.” Five breaths. No sweat.

“Twenty-five yards,” she yells two laps later as we pull ourselves onto the deck at the far end. “All out.
Three
breaths.” The oxygen bill is in the mail.

“Twenty-five yards. All out.
Two
breaths.” Serious oxygen debt begins.

“Twenty-five yards. Did I say all out? One breath.” The whistle.

“Twenty-five yards. Anyone hear me say all out? No breaths. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, we're almost there.” The whistle. Oxygen debt approaches bankruptcy.

“Twenty-five yards. No breaths. Flip your turn and come back as far as you can. Last one, people. If darkness closes in or you hear the voice of God, come up.” We hyperventilate so hard we can barely hear her instructions, though any of the twenty of us could recite them rote.

I hit the water almost full bore, backed off enough to keep from thrashing. At fifteen yards I feel the tightness
in my lungs, and I back off the cadence maybe a half-beat, swallowing to give my body the illusion of breathing. I reach the far wall, tucking tight for maximum pushoff, blowing out only enough air to keep a chlorinated flash flood out of my sinuses, and go for it. In three years, no one on the team has outdistanced me at this drill. Mark Brittain says it's because I have a blowhole, but Mark is often intentionally unkind. It's because I
know
how to be mean to myself. I swim distance freestyle.

I'm within three strokes of the wall when my head pops out of the water like a marker buoy and a reverberation erupts out of me that would normally bring paramedics. Darkness crowds the edges of my peripheral vision, but I clutch the lane rope and suck air like an industrial-strength shop vac. Someday I'll make the full fifty yards. I can do it easily fresh, but not at the end of a three-hour workout.

“Good job, Mobe,” Coach hollers from across the pool. “You'll never be extinct with that attitude.”

I stand in front of the huge double doors at the entrance to Sacred Heart Hospital and breathe deep, my frozen hair hugging my head like a bicycle helmet and my breath shooting from my mouth like exhaust
from a truck. I wear only a light jacket; my internal heating system boils for hours after workout. Coach forever tells me to cover up when I go outside, but when I cover up I sweat like a walrus in a sauna. I threaten Coach with my laundry.

Sarah Byrnes is inside. Eighth floor. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. I've put this off, thought she'd be out in a couple of days, but it's been a full week. Sarah Byrnes. Toughest kid I know, and she just slipped away.

I don't want to go inside. I was here once about four years ago when my third cousin got drunk and attempted suicide. Not much of an attempt, really. He OD'd on Flintstone vitamins, but he was wigged out so bad they stuck him in for seventy-two-hour observation. What they observed was extremely yellow pee. I hated visiting him. The place itself was niceâthick carpeting and comfortable chairs, plenty of books to read and games to play. It felt safe in a strange way, not for me, but for the people in there. But they all had a look, as if something important had been peeled away. And you got the feeling it could happen to you.

Now Sarah Byrnes is here. My best friend. I stayed fat a whole year for her.

I push through the double-door entrance, passing
the information desk on my left, following the carpeted corridors to the bank of elevators, where one stands open and empty. I push eight and turn to lean against the back wall when I hear “Hold!” and see a familiar faceâa nameless kid from schoolâpushing a cart of linens toward me. I lunge for the row of buttons on the wall, intentionally pushing
CLOSE DOOR,
but appearing for all the world as if I'm trying to hold it open. “Oops,” I say as the doors come together. I don't want company; don't want to explain who I'm here to see, or what happened to her.

After checking in, I spot Sarah Byrnes sitting on an overstuffed couch, gazing at that space-out spot three or four inches in front of her nose.

I say hi to no response and sit, lightly touching her forearm. Without her spirit behind her eyes, Sarah Byrnes is truly one of the ugliest human beings outside the circus. When she was three, as she tells it, she pulled a pot of boiling spaghetti off the stove onto herself, leaving horrible burn scars covering her face and hands. Her father, maybe the cruelest and certainly the most insensitive man I have had the misfortune to know, allowed only the medical attention required to keep her out of danger. Almost nothing reconstructive was done. He said it would serve as a good lesson to her in the future.

A woman approaches. “You must be Eric,” she says.

I nod. “Is she going to be okay?”

“I'm Laurel,” she says, extending her hand. “Sarah's counselor.” She's a big woman, not fat, but strong and solid, maybe in her early thirties, with those earthy kind of features that require no makeup. She's not so much attractive as she is warm. “I don't know, to tell the truth,” she says to my question. “She hasn't responded to much, though her doctor says she has all the proper physical reactions.”

I study Sarah Byrnes's eyes while Sarah Byrnes studies the cosmos. “What should I say to her? I mean, can she understand me?”

“I don't know. Assume she can. Talk to her like you would if she were answering,” Laurel says. “Make things as normal as possible.”

I nod.

The nurse takes Sarah Byrnes's hand. “Sarah? Sarah. You have a visitor.”

“If you want things to be normal,” I say, “you have to call her by her whole name.”

“What?”

“You have to call her by her whole name. Sarah Byrnes. She only answers to Sarah Byrnes.”

Laurel stares at me blankly.

“When we were in junior high,” I tell her, “Sarah Byrnes got sick of every new Einstein at school thinking he was the only genius in the world to figure out this great pun about her last name and her condition. She hated waiting for them to get it, so she made everyone call her Sarah Byrnes. If you just call her Sarah, she won't answer.”

Laurel nods. “I'll tell the others. That's important. Is there anything else?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, I'll leave you two alone. Just talk with her about things that might jar her.”

“Remember
Crispy Pork Rinds?
” I whisper into her ear when Laurel is out of sight. If anything should get a reaction, that should.

Sarah Byrnes stares ahead, while I remember.

I dropped onto the hard wooden chair outside Mr. Mautz's office, contemplating the conversation we were about to have. The chair creaked desperately under the pressure of my considerable bulk, the seat all but eclipsed by my beefy thighs. My mission, once that office door opened, was to not lie. I didn't want to tell the truth, exactly, I just wanted to not lie. There is a difference, I told myself. I was armed with information
from Sarah Byrnes's report on the Bill of Rights that I would use if necessary.

Ms. Barker smiled from behind her secretary's desk, and I detected a hint of compassion. Ms. Barker had seen a lot of kids in this seatâprobably none more than meâand knew well we needed all the compassion we could get, though it would be of little help once that door opened.

Her phone beeped and she spoke quietly into the handset, looked up and said, “You can go in now, Eric.”

I grimaced, slowly lifting my carcass from the chair. Ms. Barker smiled again. “Remember, it's against the law for him to do what he wants to do to you.”

“Eric, have a seat,” Mautz said, waving his hand toward another hard wooden chair, a twin to that in the outer office.

I sat, closing my eyes as I recognized the folded makeshift newspaper on his desk, forcing back the dread climbing through the top of my stomach and into my throat like a slow stream of burning lava.
Crispy Pork Rinds.
Rivulets of perspiration, a Calhounian trademark, began to run down my well-padded rib cage toward my belt. Soon my shirt would be soaked and Mautz, a true psychological mercenary, would have me. Think dry.

Mautz spread the paper deliberately across his expansive glass-covered desk surface. It looks at least as good as the regular school paper that comes out every two weeks, I thought. Maybe better.

Mautz glared at me, his light blue eyes penetrating my hopeless defenses like a laser through cotton candy, and I remember wondering if there's a graduate class principals takeâSteely Gaze 501 or somethingâwhere they learn that.

“Have you lost some weight, Eric?” Mautz asked, his tone conversational, almost friendly.

I was not to be tricked. “No sir.”

He squinted, cocking his head to one side. “Maybe you're just growing into your body.”

“I doubt it, sir. I'll probably always be a fat kid.”

“You shouldn't put yourself down, Eric,” Mautz said. “It can't be good for your self-esteem.”

Sarah Byrnes will be elected Miss America on the day Mautz cares one bit about my self-esteem. “I wasn't putting myself down, sir. I was just telling the truth.” As was often the case under extreme pressure in those days, my mind ran nonsensically with his last words. Next to the steam room at my mom's fitness club was the self es-steam room. You go in after a hard workout and clouds of self es-steam roll out of the pipes to make you magi
cally feel better. And if you used to stutter, you step forward from the watery mist, flawlessly booming out the Gettysburg Address, or if you had your face burned, like Sarah Byrnes, you emerge as a porcelain-skinned china doll. Or if you were fatâ¦

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