Zigzagging down the interstate, Tom mutters sick fuck and little prick to the windshield. Between the summer storm and the shots, he can barely see the broken yellow line dividing the lanes, but thanks to Dickie, he can see the ass of the fat girl clear as a full moon on a winter night.
Tom lives with his wife in an apartment complex he hates just off the highway. On top of it being largely filled with douche-bag executives, he got tricked into paying ninety-five extra dollars a month for what he was told would be a mountain view but what is in fact only a sliver of the foothills eclipsed by the gawdy lights of the steak house across the street. Normally he would never agree to live in the sort of place that gives you a complimentary Frappuccino and a biscotti upon signing your lease, but Beth no, Elizabeth—he must remember she wants to be called Elizabeth now—was keen because it was one of the few complexes in town with a fitness center. That two dusty treadmills, a StairMaster that makes the sound of a dying coyote when you step on it, and a rack of ancient weights were what stood between him and a nice floor of a house somewhere is something he still finds difficult to accept. “Just because you don’t want to drive five minutes to Gold’s Gym down the road, I’m supposed to live with a bunch of assholes?” is what he wanted to say, but didn’t because he was being supportive.
He comes home to find Beth in the kitchen, surrounded by little piles of julienned vegetables, angrily grating jicama on a mandolin. She is wearing a dark, very tight cocktail dress. Probably new. Purchased during her break at work or perhaps online at night. A few months after she reached her goal and hit what she called a plateau, she started buying these sorts of dresses with an alarming greed and regularity. He is convinced she would devour them, these dark, tailored dresses, if she could, like the chips or ice cream she allows herself once every two weeks. Seeing her in one now still makes him think she’ll want to go out somewhere, but he’s starting to get used to the fact that this is just how she dresses now. Always. Am I overdressed? she always asks. Yes, he wants to say. You look great, is what he says. Does she look great? She does. Of course she does—look at her. She is a sleek, beautiful young woman, younger looking even than her twenty-eight years, except maybe around the eyes. Even though he himself has borne witness to her transformation over the past three years, he is still getting used to the severely pared-down point of her chin, the now visible web of bones in her throat, how all the once-soft edges of her have suddenly grown knife sharp. How they seem pointed at him in perpetual, quiet accusation.
Like it has been every night for more than a year now, the kitchen is thick with the scent of boiled barn and burnt vegetable, like Mother Nature on fire.
“Something smells good, Beth,” he says, in the overly jolly voice he speaks in when he’s been hanging around Hot Pocket all day.
She looks at him.
“What?”
“I told you not to call me that anymore, remember?”
“Sorry.” He puts his hands up like she’s holding a gun. “Something smells good, Elizabeth.”
“Nearly ready,” she says. She pulls out of the oven a tray of what looks to him like burnt turds. Every night, she sullenly exercises this form of torture upon a green in the cabbage family. It used to be she would offer to make things for him—ham and cheese scones, potato leek soup—on top of whatever punishing concoctions of grain, bean curd, and sprout she’d cooked up for herself. Recently, though, she’s been on what she calls “a slippery slope.” He doesn’t know what this means, exactly, but he promised to “be more supportive.”
“Looks great,” he murmurs now, watching her pile a maggoty-looking grain that smells like hoof onto his plate. He pokes tentatively at the mound with the tines of his fork.
“What are these little wormy things called again?”
“Quinoa.”
“What-wa?”
She takes a sip of Chilean white, which she first poured in a measuring cup before pouring it into a glass, and watches him push the larval beads around with his fork. “I could just make you a grilled cheese,” she says.
“I eat what you eat, remember? That another new dress?”
“This? Yes.”
“Looks good.”
“You think so? It isn’t too much?”
He gazes at the odd bows on the sleeves, the asymmetrical neckline, the thin little belt around the severely tailored middle.
“Um, too much how?”
“I don’t know. Too tight?”
He looks at her sitting eerily straight opposite him. It is so extraordinarily tight that she has to sit rigid in her chair.
“No.” And he quickly shoves in a forkful of the larvae. The face he makes when he swallows happens without him meaning it to.
“Jesus, Tom. Let me just make the sandwich, okay?”
“No, this is interesting. Really.” He takes another bite, this time quickly chasing it with the Fat Tire he brought to the table.
She snorts something into her wine.
“What was that?”