Becky

a very sad woman endures the results of divorce

Becky

 

      Pulling her legs over the footstool, she leaned herself forward and stood up to step over to the window to open the shades. It had been raining all night, and the weatherman on TV had mentioned storm activity in the western part of the state. As difficult as it was for her to walk, let alone stand up from her chair, she slowly walked towards the window when her bare foot pushed into the box of books that had been left in the center of the floor. Her three hundred fifty pound frame fell to the floor with a painful crash. Her tattered robe fell open, and disgusting folds of flesh fell out to her squinting gaze, reminding her youthful figure had been replaced with the fatty deposits on her belly, hips, arms, and legs. Bile rose up in her throat as a result of her huge belly absorbing the shock of her fall to the floor, the heavy volume of her body’s weight too full of herself to bear itself up. Agony shot to her chest as acidic bile pushed up into her throat, spilling onto her bare skin.

      Audibly sobbing, she rolled over onto her side and emptied her belly onto the floor next to the box of books that had tripped her. Moving up onto her hands and knees, she maneuvered  out of her robe and wrapped it around the fresh vomit on the floor in attempt to mop it up. Using the box as a makeshift stool to help her to stand up, she pushed the heavy weight of her body up on her feet, almost wading through the trash and broken toys on the floor towards the bathroom. They hadn't turned the electricity off yet, so there still should be some hot water.  The bottom of the bathtub still showed white through the dark scum along its rim, and even though the bath water would rinse some of the dark mess off the tub a partially dirty bath was better than no bath at all , her skin burning from the acids her stomach had delivered. Steam began to rise from the tub and Becky grasped some dirty clothes from the huge pile leaning against the pockmarked bathroom wall that she neither had the energy to haul to the laundry mat nor the money to put into the washing machines.  Adding to the stains on the clothes with the vomit off her stomach and breasts, she wiped herself again with the filthy rag of her youngest niece’s small dress. How lovely the young girl looked in it when she was first presented with it. The little five year old had paraded it for all to see in church, like she was sitting in her dream sports car instead of finally being able to wear a brand new dress instead of the hand-me-downs she'd worn all her young life.

      The water level in the tub began to rise, and Becky swished her pudgy hand and wrist in the rising water. Adjusting the cold to make the hot water tolerable to her skin, she tossed the ruined garment back onto the tall pile of smelly laundry that towered from the floor halfway up to the ceiling. Eventually the water cooled to an adequate level,and she maneuvered her huge body into the tub by rolling herself over the rim of the old tub. The warm water washed over her in a soothing blanket of wetness. 

       Jerry, oh how she missed her Jerry with his strong shoulders and beautiful green eyes. It had been so long since he held her in his powerful arms and made love to her. As she'd always been a big girl and had two small babies, she still convinced him that her love was the best he could get. He'd proven to be not only a generous man but a wonderful lover. A Navy man with high enough rank to support her and her small family, their marriage was wonderful from the start. She also loved living in military housing and all the medical benefits, shopping privileges, and having literally everything provide for her by her military dependant status.

       Then he'd gone to sea, leaving her by herself in the busy goings on of the San Diego Navy community. He'd left her standing on the pier, watching the enormous aircraft carrier slowly pull away from the dock and head out of the harbor with pomp, fanfare, and circumstance. That night she was in the enlisted club with a few of her newly made friends, leaving her babies with a sitter and wearing her sexiest dress to catch herself a new lover that Jerry would never find out about. Jamal had been young, built like a Roman god in dark marble, very virile, and hung like a horse. He had also been carrying a mean dose of gonorrhea which he delivered to her body as effectively as he brought her  slim body to climax. She discovered the continual flow the venereal disease caused a mere two months before Jerry and his enormous ship returned home,and was able to conceal it from him by strictly following the doctor's directions and refraining from alcohol while taking the antibiotics they provided to her. When Jerry finally arrived after a seven month deployment he was merely happy to be having sex with his wife again, just as Becky was delighted to be finally getting laid after her bout with the clap and the absence of the wine that she loved to drink.

        The rigors of active duty didn't suit Jerry very well. He took a discharge from the Navy at his first opportunity and a semi-truck driving course, and moved her and her children back to Iowa as soon as he could. Their marriage lasted three more years. He spent more time on the road hauling freight than he did going to sea and standing duty in the Navy. Becky's eyes overflowed as she recalled Jerry coming home unexpectedly one night and changing her life forever.

       He walked into their small house in the middle of the night while she and young Sammy, the bartender from the lounge around the corner, were sound asleep in bed after a night of mundane and rather unsatisfying sex. Jerry turned the light on long enough to see and smell what had been going on and then he had turned it off. All she remembered from that night, besides seeing his bearded face's surprised look as she groggily woke up from the light in the bedroom's ceiling, was hearing his big truck starting up, idling for a few minutes, and driving away.

        The divorce was long and ugly. He filed on the grounds of her single adultery, and she pleaded for the support of her two children. Jerry didn't even want to try to get visitation or any of the furniture he had borrowed so much money to buy it all with. After the stressful court hearing, she had been awarded the house, which he would pay for, and he was awarded his freedom. She watched him drive away in the company semi-tractor after it was all over. He just stepped up into it and drove away; she never saw or heard from him again. She was crying as she watched him drive away that day and she continued to cry for the next six months.

     Having barely graduated high school, finding work was next to impossible for her. Welfare, the only option she had after a year and a half, paid for her utilities and her children's clothes, and food stamps were a source of snack cakes, chips, and cereal that her two daughters grew up on. Now, after five years, Cindy and Elizabeth were growing into pretty little girls and Becky had grown into the disgusting tub of lard that soaked in the filthy bathtub surrounded with piles of stinky laundry she couldn't wash. The girls spent most of their time at school and with her sister's children. The embarrassment in their eyes was as apparent as the condition of the used clothing they wore on the streets. The last time that Becky had taken them to church little 'Lizzie began to cry as the services ended because she had to take her mother's fat hand, follow her enormous body down the walkway of the church to the nasty used car that would take her back home. Soon Becky entered an eating binge that ballooned her body to massive proportions and left the two little girls skinny, hungry, and with the appearance of being homeless amongst the children they played with that were so much better off.

       Eventually Becky never left the house except for one purpose, to use her friend Janice's computer and the internet. After not having any contact with Jerry at all for so long, she had become very bitter in the condition he'd left her in. Using his social security number that she’d memorized, she took out two credit cards that enabled her to buy toys and clothing for her growing children, and allowed her to buy food and wine for her own growing belly. Jerry finally got the bad news in the form of surprise credit card bills that threatened to garnish his wages, and he filed charges against her but dropped them for some reason. The one thing that made her happy about the whole affair was that Jerry would receive more bills, specifically from the state of Iowa when the taxes he would have to pay on Becky's house would finally catch up to him. After narrowly escaping incarceration by filing bankruptcy she began to attend AA meetings that the state and county required her to do.

        It was in these meetings that Becky discovered other women just like her, women who would do whatever they could to make ends meet, and conceal their illegal endeavors to make money, just like they did whatever it took to conceal their huge, gluttonous bodies. She had lost custody of the girls until she could prove she could properly care for them and that she could earn a living. An internet home business was the perfect cover for buying and selling stolen goods, arranging for out of town men to find solace in some of the lesser intelligent women in town that loved to put out for a standard fee, and using the names and numbers of people over the internet to gain lines of credit that were much easier to hide than her ex-husband's. In time, Becky and two other women of similar social conditions and girth had developed a lucrative money flow, and Becky was able to prove her ability to financially provide for her children, just as she was able to drive them around in the used car that she purchased with her illegal but apparent honest money. She was so happy to cruise around with her embarrassing body concealed by the old sedan's doors that life almost seemed to become tolerable for her again.

         But lucrative endeavors shared by dishonest women with no other purpose in life than their own personal gratification don't always last . When three people share knowledge and evidence of felony fraud and identity theft, options tend to run out. There came a day when the authorities came very close to catching all three red handed with credit cards, stolen VCRs, and a list of nymphomaniacs that were no longer willing to sell themselves for peanuts, peanuts that could land the women in prison where sitting in an armchair in front of a TV or a computer would not be an alternative for their livelihood. They sold out, cheaply, and Becky got the raw end of the deal and a stern warning to keep her big mouth shut. The gas tank of the car became empty and Becky's children began to go hungry again in lieu of her voracious appetite.

         The old car sat in her driveway as Becky sat in her bathtub. The girls would be home from school soon, hungry, and it took incredible physical effort for Becky to pull herself out the tub and rummage through the various piles of laundry to find something appropriate to wear that didn't smell too bad, at least not to her. As difficult it was for her to even walk, she strained against her own weight to wade through the huge mess on the living room floor. Waddling into the nauseating kitchen and opening the refrigerator, she discovered a half empty bag of corn chips that Cindy had hidden behind a large bowl of leftover stroganoff from last week. Munching on a couple of chips, she looked into the freezer and found some frozen hot dogs that Cindy could cook up for supper later that night. Clutching the bag of chips, she stumbled back to her rocker chair in front of the television. Shifting her body and finding a comfortable position in the chair, she turned on the shows that she lived for, soaps. Watching the slim, beautiful people on the TV, she methodically began to eat every crumb in the dwindling bag of corn chips, mesmerized by the story she was watching.

         A particularly handsome young character came on the TV screen with big muscles and a strong jaw line that captivated Becky through the crunching of the salty chips she consumed. The last crumb was licked from the bottom of the bag from her fingers, and the gorgeous hunk walked out of the door, as per the script. Becky tossed the empty bag on the living room floor with the rest of the trash, leaned back into the squeaking rocker chair and closed her overflowing eyes.

        "Jerry." she whispered to herself as she began to fall back to sleep. "God, how I miss you, baby."

 

SR Urie