Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches creative writing. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. She is also an internationally collected visual artist, and her lifelong passion for art history fuels most of her stories and poems. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions anthologies.
Gavage
By Lorette C. Luzajic
Everyone knew about the fat woman on the fourth floor. Few of us had ever seen her, but we knew she was there.
Every tenant had been in the elevator with a delivery guy, toppling under a tower of pizzas or bag after bag of moo shu pork and fried rice. We knew he was headed to suite 409.
And we saw her husband coming from his car with multiple supersize packs of Lucky Charms and Oreos and Pepsi.
I’d been in the building for a decade and had only laid eyes on her a handful of times. Roberta seldom went anywhere, but once or twice a year there was a sighting. They were painful occasions to witness. The walker she needed could barely support her frame. She shuffled and heaved, inching laboriously along the corridor, in real danger of toppling over. Henry was the skinny sort, wiry and small. She was a giantess, with rolls upon rolls, and hanging fat lobules. It was tragic and grotesque, something best hidden behind closed doors.
Of course, most of the residents were busy with their manufacturing or custodial jobs, their commutes and their families, and we didn’t think about Roberta and Henry often. There was laundromat gossip among tenants, smart remarks about the recycling bins overflowing with take-out refuse. There were muffled sympathies for Henry.
I had myself felt quite sorry for Henry for many years, imagining the stigma he bravely shouldered while enduring his wife’s gluttony. But one day I ran into him in the convenience store, and something about the demanding way he spoke to the young clerk changed my mind. He berated her for something inconsequential like she was the help, and his controlling tone took me by surprise. I did my best after that to steer clear of Henry.
It was on a weekend that Roberta fell in the parking lot, trying to get to a van taxi. There was no sign of Henry, just her and the walker that teetered and veered dangerously under her meaty paws. Everyone saw her then: it was sunny and folks were walking their dogs or kicking a ball around the grass with the kids, and the laundromat was always busy on Saturdays. We watched, compelled by the accident that could so easily happen, as she heaved herself toward the van. No one, not even the beefy construction workers, would be able to help her up.
And then the accident happened. Roberta fell.
It was terrible to watch, an excruciating, slow-motion film. The heft of her, pushing forward, with just a few more metres to the vehicle. She slipped, and the walker moved away from her, and her ankle turned, and there was a terrible cracking sound, and then there was a deep, guttural wail, like all the air being let out of balloon, or a life. And she went down, the mountain of her, rolling and rolling down onto the tarmac like an avalanche.
We all froze for several moments, and then everyone rushed over all at once. The cab driver got out. We all looked down at the woman we lived beside and never spoke to. The pinhole eyes behind her swollen face stared out at us unblinking. Her mouth was greasy as it opened and closed soundlessly, and something about that made me sadder than I’d ever been.
It took another few moments of confusion and commotion to figure out that we would need to call someone. One lady leaned over and asked if Henry could come out to help her. Roberta’s walrus-body shook some then, and a sound like a belch rang from her. The mechanic with his beagle eventually tapped 911 into his mobile. Mrs. Xi was on her way to find Henry, but decided to fetch some water for Roberta instead, so I was appointed to go up. Oola, the big and colourful lady from West Africa lived on the fourth floor, so she came along, too. In the elevator, adjusting her many scarves, she told me something that chilled me to the core. “That girl is a victim of leblouh, like I was,” she said.
I had no idea what she meant, but by the time we knocked on Henry’s door and found no one there, and returned to the parking lot empty-handed, I learned how young girls from Nigeria and Mauritania were chained down for months and force-fed mountains of grains and animal fat by their mothers, fattening them up for marriage.
She explained that it was an old custom, still practiced in remote rural regions, and compared it to the way geese are force-fed in factories for the French supposed-delicacy of foie-gras. Gavage.
Roberta was probably born and raised right here in Scarborough. But just as I started to protest Oola’s declaration, I recalled skimming a tabloid article about a girl whose boyfriend wanted her to eat obscene amounts of food. The couple called it “erotic feeding.” The boyfriend said it was a humiliation and submission thing. He wanted her to get so fat she couldn’t move and had to depend on him completely. I was disgusted with the story and turned the page. I never thought about it again, until now.
The paramedics were working with Roberta when we returned and the tenants were all gathered to one side of the lot. Oola asked me how they would get her into the ambulance, and I said they were probably trained to hoist a pulley of some kind. But it turned out to be too late anyways. I couldn’t stay outside to gawk then, it just wasn’t right, and there was nothing more I could do to help, so I went inside.
Henry didn’t turn up until later. Mr. Xi drove him to the morgue.
It turned out Roberta had had a massive stroke.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been trying to get away.
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