So I was at a conference in DC and there was a buffet for lunch. Of the thirty or so people at the conference I was the first in the hall so the whole setup of salad/tortellini/assorted meats was untouched and preserved in their de novo symmetry. In the hall there were about six round tables, each with about eight chairs on them. My plan was this: since I didn’t know anyone I figured I would get my food and be the first one to sit down and that way, rather than having to choose an arbitrary clique to sit with (the cliques: surgeons, who happened to be the most casually dressed at the conference, which at first you might thing exudes a refreshing down-to-earthiness, but which actually is a fuck-you-I’m-important-enough-that-I-don’t-have-to-dress-upiness. Then there are the coordinators – I am a coordinator, but a sort of second tier coordinator, so this really isn’t my clique. Finally there are the statisticians – Midwestern mamas of mediocrity, full with [what any NYer would see as a] drawl and an irritating niceness) I will have the clique choose me, thus relieving me of any risk of sitting in a socially inappropriate spot (God forbid I sit between two quarreling surgeons, and have to duck below their shouts on whether or not hypotension is ever “planned” during a surgery or if it is merely the “undesired, but foreseen result of certain surgical techniques”).
As it turns out, the Midwestern mamas chose me. If you care how this came to be the case: one of the MWMs was an alum from my alma mater, a similarity we had acknowledged during an exchange of e-mails between my NY office and her AA office, and that and that fact that I was new, and the sad site of me sitting at an empty table picking at tepid tortellini, gave her the (perhaps unwanted) obligation of joining me. When she sat, she made sure to leave a one seat buffer. She was a typical MWM: pink, bloated and blonde. I asked her when she graduated school, and she answered: “he [sic.] graduated in ’04.” I later pieced together that she was talking about her husband; she must have misheard me for some reason.
Directly in tow was the 2nd MWM, who chose to sit directly on my left (leaving two seats between her and the 1st MWM, one of the seats having me in it). She started talking to MWM no. 1 w/o acknowledging me, which made it a little awkward since not only was I right next to her but I was 2/3s of the way between their line of conversation (that’s why, folks, when in doubt, always leave a buffer zone!). Finally I unnaturally interjected an introduction. What I found out was that MWM no. 2 was born in Kansas, and through a bunch of boring twists and turns somehow ended up with her husband in Philli. Her features were not as typically MWMish as no. 1’s: while her skin was pale, it wasn’t pink, and her hair was brunette and a little less than shoulder length ( basically, the length of hair that, when a girl lets it down from ponytail position, it is not long enough to produce any sexy bounce or swing, not that any MWM has ever possessed any sexy bounce or swing in any shape or form with their hair or otherwise) and she wasn’t fat, but to be fair she certainly wasn’t toned.
Then came the final MWM. The mama of the mamas. It was like in the movie Independence Day, when at first you think that the ships hovering over NYC and DC are the Mother-ships to the little fighter spacecrafts that Will Smith commandeers, but then you later found out that actually, the real mother ship is in outer space and it’s like ten times as big. There she was, draped in a cloth that fell off the max r of her distended belly to form what looked like a hoop skirt. She was an amorphous monster, the product of a lipophagic lifestyle characterized by chicken mcnuggets and bacon and salads smothered in ranch dressing. She was that degree of obese when the obesity is what defines you. Where, when anyone looks at you, whether it is a colleague or a teller at the bank, no matter what the purpose for looking at you, when they look at you, what they are thinking is, “Jesus Christ what the hell did she do to herself?” Your fatness, is and always will be, for you my dear MWM no. 3, your defining characteristic, no matter your IQ or ambition or creativity, no one will think of that, it is (here comes the double entendre) the enduring elephant in the room.
When she sat down at the table, a feeling somewhere between sadness and disgust ripped through me. To think that somewhere under the layers of fat, perhaps in a nice warm spot next to her diseased and struggling heart, there is some semblance of a soul, a soul whose machine has be abused into terrible forms. In retrospect, the overwhelming sadness produced by her enormity was not only sad because her life was clearly defined by it, but because it represented something horrible about humanity: that, despite what we think, self-control can slip away and when it does it can produce some twisted things. It made me think of an article I read a few days ago about child prostitution, and how when I read it I wondered how there can exist people who are not only incomprehensibly cruel, but incomprehensibly cruel for not that good a reason, incomprehensibly cruel just to collect a little commission, which is a little puzzling to me b/c by undercutting any ethical obligation (i.e. by forcing prepubescent girls into the sex business) it seems to strip away any value you could get from the world anyway and so would be a self-defeating enterprise (I realize that, as I’ve couched it thus far, this idea of mine is a little abstract, but in order to completely unpack it, it would take a while and I’m already going on a tangent and I don’t want to convolute the essay even more so just bear with me here, okay ya bastards?). My point is that after seeing that No. 3 could walk around and go about her life with such a perverse and festering corporeal condition, it makes me understand how child sex slavery is something that exists.
No. 3 sat down to the right of No. 1, leaving a one seat buffer between them (the buffer between them, though, was a geometric necessity) leaving her three seats to my right and about a 90 degree arc between us. Now I don’t remember exactly how the conversation came to this, but all of a sudden the MWMs started talking about their (eponymous) motherhood, first more benign topics but finally came a conversation on breastfeeding.
Interpolation: I (i.e. the author) am a twenty-something, post-collegiate, angst-ridden, undersexed male, with little plan and high aspirations, living with my parents, working at a job I don’t like with people I don’t get, with a crippling morning-misanthropy, an afternoon anhedonia and a severe distaste for the over-courteous. My point: fatherhood, motherhood, marriage, family, or anything thereof is a decidedly fantastical concept to me, one which I know little about and which I understand not-at-all.
What the hell was I supposed to say? How could I contribute to a conversation about breast feeding – what a foreign concept. I slowly picked at my tepid tortellini as the MWMs shot back and forth anecdotes. I was visibly uncomfortable and at one point No. 3 asked: “I hope you don’t mind that we’re talking about this?” and I laughed back, “Not at all.” (but I was really thinking “Jesus Christ…”). The conversation continued and I did the only thing I could do, which was remain silent and act busy eating my food. Once I scooped up the last twisted circle of tortellini I was put in a quandary: I had no food left with which to focus my attention. I resorted to scraping the bottom of my plate for residual sauces/debris from the food so as to remain busy-looking and thus not conversationally challenged. Then came the horrifying reality that No. 3 is talking about breastfeeding, and that entails that she has breast fed. First of all, when you are as fat as she is, breasts cease to take on any real meaning besides as yet another fat-filled lump on a torso full of ‘em. If she didn’t have nipples, I bet her baby wouldn’t know her tits from her tummy. Second, to have a child, coitus presumably had taken place at some point in her pathologically distended past. For a while I tried to calculate the mechanics and kinematics of it, but I had little success. You would need an experienced engineer in order to draw a blue print of how that would work.
In the end, my boss, a first-tier coordinator, came over to the table and saved me from my awkward position amongst the lacto-babbling MWMs. That gave me the chance to abruptly and fully divert the topic of conversation and so I was home free. I then left the MWM table ASAP (I could have said, “I need to use the restroom” or “Would you excuse me” but I just got the hell out of that ring spitfire without saying anything) walked outside and shook the heebie-jeebies out of me.
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