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H. MEL MALTON

Peter loved my shape for nine of the ten years we were married.

“I love the way your little belly pooches out like that,” he’d say, cupping my stomach in his big hands and jiggling it in a friendly way. He’d nuzzle underneath my chin, where the skin was beginning to take on a soft roundness, and he’d take my upper arms between his fingers and gently squeeze. “Mmmmm,” he’d say, “like warm bread.” It wasn’t as if I was running to fat. Just spreading is all, the way you do past forty, if you’re not a health Nazi. I like my food, I’ll admit that. So did he.

We’d met at a gourmet dinner club. Each month a group of us would get together at someone’s house and revel in the glories of food, cream sauces and fresh, tender vegetables drenched in butter. Exquisite pork tenderloin marinaded in port and thyme, robust red wines and dazzling desserts glazed in syrup. We’d fallen in love over a coulis of raspberries and praline ice cream, and our wedding feast was to die for.

Everything changed in the spring of the last year of our marriage. Something got into him, I don’t know what it was. Fever, maybe, or a mid-life crisis. All of a sudden he was passing up my Dijon Chicken with apricot-basil sauce and asking for tofu instead. On his birthday in June he had a token bite of my famous Chocolate Death Cake and then pushed the rest away, saying he was full. He’d started jogging in July, and by August he had dropped fifteen pounds and was pumping iron.

“Peter,” I said one night, “are you having an affair?”

“Of course not, Pumpkin,” he said. He called me that, but my real name’s Phyllis. “I’m just trying to improve my lifestyle so I’ll live longer,” he said. “I wish you’d join me.” It was then that he cupped my belly with his hands, and he didn’t say he loved the way it pooched out. He jiggled it, but it wasn’t very friendly. “You could stand to lose some of this, you know,” he said. I smacked him with my pillow and started spending more time in my garden and less time with him.

Not long after that, he started trying to get me involved in his “improved lifestyle”. First, he volunteered to do the grocery shopping, a thing he had never done before. He totally ignored the list I sent him off with, and instead came back with organic vegetables, a fifty pound bag of rice, a bunch of dried peas, beans in bulk and a vegetarian cookbook.

“Give it a shot…for me,” he said.

Oh, I tried. I soaked and boiled legumes until the bed sheets billowed with his new found flatulence. I concocted salads and pilafs, soy cakes and falafels and did my level best to acquire a taste for them. But secretly, late at night, when Peter was snoring and farting and perhaps, losing weight in his sleep, I would sneak down to the kitchen, take my stash of farmer’s spiced sausages from the back of the freezer and fry ’em up. Sometimes I’d add some garlic glazed potatoes and top it off with a sticky homemade Chelsea bun.

I went jogging with him once, finally giving in after he promised to take me out to dinner afterwards.

“What’ll I wear?” I said. He was standing at the door stretching like an Olympic triathlete, bending this way and that and breathing through his nose. His newly minted hard body was already encased in skintight running gear, like a muscular sausage. He wore a tank top with “Just Do It!” screaming across the front of it, his chest hair bristling up out of the scooped neck, a patch of moss on a hunk of granite. He’d recently booked time on one of those tanning beds. and his skin had turned an interesting orangey-bronze colour that I guess he considered attractive. I yearned for the pale soft doughboy I’d married.

“I don’t know what you want to wear, for gosh sakes,” Peter said. “Something loose and comfortable, if you still have anything like that.” That was unkind, although it was true that I had gained a pound or two since Peter had started working out. It was almost as if every little lump of fat that Peter banished from his own body had hidden itself secretly in the walls of the house, leaped out suddenly when I wasn’t looking and fastened itself onto my thighs. Not many of my clothes fit any more, and there was no way I was going to try to squeeze into a pair of shorts, no matter what kind of activity I was letting myself in for. I eventually settled on a pair of Peter’s own pre-workout sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt.

“You look great,” he said, half-heartedly, but I knew I looked grotesque. I laced up the new running shoes he had bought me at Fitness World, and we moved out onto the front lawn.

“Now,” Peter said, “I’ll just guide you through a few basic stretching exercises, okay?” I grimaced. Suddenly, I was back in Grade Six, standing in front of Miss Featherstone, our gym teacher at Mumford Public School. Miss Featherstone had weighed us, measured us and put us through our paces like a drill sergeant, getting us ready to take the province-wide Participaction tests which would yield, for some, a handsome achievement badge in bronze, silver or gold. For the also-rans, there were mingy little plastic “Good Effort” pins. I had several of them rattling around in a cardboard box somewhere, relics of a thankfully denied past. I had hated Miss Featherstone with all my childish heart. As Peter went into fitness trainer mode, showing me how easy it was to flop over like a rag doll and touch his toes (I couldn’t quite see mine), I felt all those Featherstone feelings well up in my throat again.

“Come on, Phyllis, you’re hardly trying,” he said, annoyed because I was sort of rolling my eyes as he bent sideways like a piece of overcooked spaghetti, demonstrating a move that, for me, was a physical impossibility. “Think of your body as a set of steel cables. Strength though stretching. At least give it a shot.” I gave it a shot and felt something go sproing in my neck.

“Uh, Peter,” I said.

“What?”

“I think one of my steel cables just snapped.”

“Nonsense,” he said, coming over to me and vigorously kneading my shoulders. “You just need to loosen up is all.”

By the end of the warm-up session I was ready to call it quits. I was sweating like a racehorse and aching all over. Peter’s teaching technique, which he must have learned at that awful private school his parents sent him to, was horribly patronizing. Every time I managed to execute a bendy-thing, he was right in there with a “gooood work!” remark that made my hair stand on end.

“Okay, you seem to be limbered up enough now,” he said, finally. “We’ll just take it easy the first time out. Usually I go a couple of kilometres, up to the reservoir and back, but we’ll just go a little way—enough so that you get a chance to feel the runner’s high. I tell you, Pumpkin, there’s nothing like it!” He leaped away like a demented hare, turning around once and running backwards to encourage me to follow.

Remember that scene in Walt Disney’s Fantasia where the hippos do that ballet number? That was me, in my mind’s eye, not dressed in a tutu, but a dancing hippo nonetheless. I swear I saw the curtains twitch at neighbouring windows as I plodded past—people peeking out to see why the china in their cabinets was rattling.

I made it halfway around the block. By that time, he had pulled far ahead, perhaps forgetting about me, or perhaps made oblivious by his “runner’s high”. The only runner’s high I felt was the one I manufactured artificially back at the house with a couple of stale Tim Hortons donuts I found at the back of the fridge.

Peter returned, glistening with vibrant health and righteous indignation.

“What the hell happened to you?” he said.

I swiped at the sugar on my chin and smiled sweetly. “I don’t think running’s for me, my love,” I said. “Your body may be made of steel cables, but mine’s butter cake.” I thought I heard him mutter something like “lard-ass” as he stumped off to the shower, but I couldn’t be sure.

I put the running shoes back in their Fitness World box and took them back to the store for a refund. Luckily, Peter had kept the receipt. The shoes had cost $149.99, and there was a friendly note scrawled at the bottom of it, “Have a nice day. Lori,” with a little smiley face. Well, Lori, whoever she was, would just have to give back the commission and move on, that was all. I spent the cash at Foodland, splurging on prime rib, tender new potatoes, a carton of double cream and some California strawberries.

A couple of weeks later when I pulled into the driveway after grocery shopping, Peter was waiting for me on the porch with an eager, little boy “I’ve got a secret” look on his face. He helped unload the car without being asked and acted like he had to pee, which was a dead giveaway. For a while, I pretended I didn’t notice, but his tension was getting to me so I finally gave in.

“Okay, Peter. What is it?”

“Promise me you won’t be mad,” he said.

What kind of bargain is that? I wanted to ask but didn’t. He had been so disappointed with the jogging fiasco, and it had taken a while to smooth his ruffled feathers, so I just nodded and let him lead me into the living room.

There, taking pride of place in front of the TV, was a contraption straight out of a medieval torture chamber, metallic and menacing.

“I bought you a present—a rowing machine,” Peter said, holding tightly onto my hand as if he were worried I’d haul off and clobber him. I almost did. This “I bought you a present” line was completely transparent and not a little annoying. The running shoes had been okay, a mistake, maybe, but not a huge one. The rowing machine was another thing entirely. How would he have reacted if I had picked up an extension ladder and a couple of cans of paint for the upstairs windows at Canadian Tire and told him I’d bought him a present? Or if I’d bought him a present of nose-hair clippers or a bottle of that stuff men spray on their bald spots? Present—schmesent.

Still, being a loving and forgiving wife, I allowed Peter to strap me in and show me how the monster worked. I felt like I was at the gynecology clinic, my feet guided into stirrups and my private parts waving in the wind.

“You could do fifty reps on this while you’re watching that cooking show you like,” Peter said, a smug smile on his face. “You’ll hardly notice you’re doing it.” I rowed for a few minutes to make him happy, bellowing like a walrus for effect. “Gooood work,” he said. “Now let me get in there and show you how to make it burn.” I watched indulgently for a moment or two then went back to the kitchen to make lunch, salad for him and manicotti with cream sauce for me. He rowed through an entire afternoon of soap operas and eventually fell asleep strapped into the wretched thing, slumped over the fake oars like Silken Laumann after a race.

Over the next week or two, the machine acquired the status of a sort of secondary coffee table, a designation which I actively encouraged as I loaded it up with coffee cups, bowls of popcorn and magazines. Sometimes when we watched TV together, Peter would move all the stuff off it with a little sigh, clamber into the machine and row for a bit, which didn’t bother me very much, since it left more room for me on the couch. Then he’d stop and offer me a turn, but I’d always say, “maybe later,” which actually meant “I’d rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.”

I watched him like a hawk and finally, one evening, he put his empty coffee cup down on it and left it there. I knew I had won. The transformation was complete. The next morning I dragged the rowing machine into an obscure corner of the living room and returned the coffee table to its rightful place. I don’t think Peter noticed, or if he did, he knew better than to comment. When I was moving it, I found another receipt scotch taped to the underside of the seat. Fitness World again. Four hundred bucks. “Enjoy!” was scribbled on the back, along with “Lori” and the smiley face. I decided I would drop in at Fitness World some time and have a friendly little chat with Lori. The machine made a fairly decent rack for clean laundry, which I ironed while watching my favourite cooking show.

The rowing machine wasn’t the end of it, though. Peter kept on nagging me to get fit, lose some weight, “trim up”. Like a toddler, my reaction to the constant wave of exhortation was to do the opposite. I continued to cook rich, tempting meals, filling the house with the smell of fresh bread, cinnamon, roasting meat and savoury gravy. He continued to shun my offerings and started cooking for himself, putting together nasty looking, grey hued bean soups and drab green salads like mouldy lace, no dressing.

In bed one night, after he had turned his newly muscled back on me (I had put on my special nightie and some Eau de Hanky Panky, but it didn’t work), I grabbed his hand and played it over my belly. “You used to call these my love handles,” I said.

“I’ve got nothing against love handles,” Peter said. “I just care about your health, Pumpkin.” Pumpkin. Suddenly, I was reminded of that old nursery rhyme: Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater/ Had a wife and couldn’t keep her/ Put her in a pumpkin shell/ And there he kept her very well. I saw myself getting bigger and bigger, filling out the pumpkin shell that Peter had put me into with his fitness kick, and I just couldn’t stand it. I cried myself to sleep.

The next day, Peter came home with another present for me.

“Here’s a thing that we can do together that’ll be fun, I promise.” He handed over a bag with a large square box inside. Fitness World again. The receipt ($89.00 plus tax) was signed as usual by Lori, this time in purple ink. The smiley face looked vaguely erotic, and I noticed that Lori had dotted her “I” with a little heart.

“Remember how you used to figure skate?” my husband said.

“Peter, that was a long time ago. Anyway, it’s summer.”

“No, no. Open it.” I did. Nestled in the tissue was a brand new pair of in-line skates.

“I got some for me, too. We can take it easy, you know. Just skate around the neighbourhood. C’mon. Try them on.”

“We’re too old for roller-skates, Peter.”

“Oh, c’mon. Try them on.”

He was so enthusiastic, and the skates did look kind of alluring, purple plastic with sparkles, like grape-flavoured lollipops. I stroked them. They felt smooth and cool under my fingertips. I had a sudden image of myself skimming along the road, whippet-thin and graceful. I still had dreams about my figure skating days—dreams of freedom and power.

“We could go outside right now and try them out,” Peter said. He had already strapped his on. “It’ll be okay. There’s no traffic this late.”

I was tired. I’d spent a long day in the garden, and dinner was already in the oven—a succulent garden vegetable quiche that I’d taken some trouble over and a superior white wine that I was hoping to coax Peter into tasting.

“Okay,” I said. “Just a little turn in the driveway, then dinner.” I crammed the receipt from the box into my pocket for safekeeping and buckled up the skates. I decided I would take the skates back to Lori later with a thinly veiled threat attached. A threat that involved the words, “punch your lights out”, in a friendly kind of way.

It was wonderful at first. Roller-skating isn’t like ice-skating, though. For one thing, ice has some give to it, though you’d never think it. But the other different thing is that you can’t stop on asphalt the way you can on ice.

“Wait up,” Peter called. He was never much of a skater, and I was getting a little carried away, I’ll admit. I was just flying along the sidewalk, the wind in my hair. Pavement is a lot bumpier than arena ice, too, and the rumbling shudder of the hard rubber wheels was making my glasses dance on the bridge of my nose, so that I wasn’t seeing quite as clearly as I should have. I didn’t see the car backing out of the driveway until I slammed into it. I tried to stop, but little rubber wheels aren’t the same as metal blades, and when I fell, a whole bunch of my personal parts snapped at once. Peter may have bought a couple of pairs of in-line skates at Fitness World, but Lori, damn her eyes, hadn’t bothered to sell him the necessary wrist guards, knee pads or helmets.

Hospital food didn’t agree with me at all. During the nine weeks that I lay in traction (strapped into another machine—an irony that was not lost on me) I dropped twenty pounds.

“You’re looking just terrific,” Peter said during a visit. He had brought Lori with him, because, he explained, she felt really guilty about the whole thing. He was careful to reassure me that they were just friends. They worked out together, he said, patting my hand and smiling in a slightly breathless kind of way, as if he’d been running. Lori, as I had expected, was impossibly young and sleek. She wore her gleaming mane of blonde hair in a ponytail, tied with one of those plastic bobbles you see on pre-teens. She seemed genuinely concerned, though, which was sweet of her.

“Thanks for the compliment, dear,” I said to Peter, smoothing my plaster encased arm across my diminished belly. “I feel just terrific, too. We should have thought of this sooner. If I’d done this in January, I’d look like a sixteen-year-old by now.” He didn’t get my point. Lori did, I think. She backed away from my hospital bed, her baby blue eyes going dark suddenly as her pupils dilated.

My love handles were gone, and when I was finally discharged from hospital, I discovered that none of my old clothes fit me any more, which necessitated a couple of trips to the mall. That’s where I discovered the Health Food shop and the interesting book on medicinal plants.

Peter was delighted with my newfound enthusiasm for healthy eating and gobbled up my veggie burgers and eggplant supreme. He especially liked the new green salad I’d invented, the one with a secret blend of herbs and spices. I encouraged him to invite Lori over, so I could get to know his “workout buddy” better.

“I can’t believe you’re being so generous. So understanding,” he said, and invited her at once. Over dinner, she explained that she was serious about retail and one day she would have a Fitness World store of her own.

“Go for it,” I said. “The future is yours, Lori.” In the kitchen, I was very careful to keep Peter’s plate separate from Lori’s and my own. Although he didn’t know it, my husband was on a special diet. When he started to get sick, Lori called me up and asked if I thought maybe Peter should cut down on his workouts a bit. She was really very concerned. So sweet of her. I told her he probably just needed more greens in his diet.

He died in his sleep. The doctor explained that he’d had a massive respiratory shutdown, probably owing to overexertion. “Too much running on an empty stomach,” he’d said, and I’d nodded in agreement. Nobody thought to test for aconite, or monkshood, the pretty flower I had been cultivating in the garden next to the vegetables.

At the funeral tea, I served sausage rolls wrapped with butter-heavy pastry, and smoked salmon on sour cream slathered toast. Horns of phyllo pastry, bursting with fresh berries and kirsch-laced whipped cream jostled for position with profiteroles and drizzled caramel. Everybody we knew came, and everybody said how sad it was that Peter, who was looking so good, had died so young.

Lori was there, dressed in black, her ponytail secured with a black bobble-thing.

“I just knew he was working out too much,” she sobbed. “I forgot how old he was. We were having so much fun together.” She was really so sweet. I patted her thin wrist and offered her an eclair. Over by the stove, Dr. Herb Foote, the fellow who hadn’t thought to test for aconite, stuffed a whole cream horn into his mouth and smiled at me. He had love handles.

H. MEL MALTON is the author of the Polly Deacon mystery series, published by RendezVous Press, including Down in the Dumps (1998), Cue the Dead Guy (1999) and Dead Cow in Aisle Three (2001). She has published numerous short stories, articles and poems in periodicals such as The Malahat Review, Grain and Chatelaine. She is a great believer in the healing power of rich, high-fat food and doesn’t indulge in exercise if she can possibly avoid it. Her two dogs, Ego and Karma, take her for a stagger in the bush twice a day and spend the rest of their time chewing on old manuscripts.