Ladee Hubbard Trash New Orleans, Louisiana – December 15, 2005
Raymond Brown sits in the easy chair, staring at a large water stain on his living room ceiling. He lowers his gaze, smiles at the young couple seated across from him on the couch and says, “she’ll be out in a minute. Now, please—don’t tell her I told you. Act like you don’t even notice.” The young couple stares back and nods stiffly. They glance toward the bathroom door, expecting the worst and wondering what that might be. “It was never really a problem before,” Raymond confides. “But now it’s like an obsession with her—ever since she had the baby.” He sips his glass of wine and thinks about his wife Mathilda’s smiles and frowns. For the past year he’s watched her moods rise and fall in irrational surges, as if keyed to some internal tide pattern. When she was still pregnant there was something endearing about it, like she was channeling the voice of the child inside her, preparing him for things to come. “But she’s so thin,” says the woman on the couch. “You’d never even know she had a baby.” “Just try telling her that. I mean it: just try.” After the drugs wore off the first thing Mathilda asked him to do was escort her to the bathroom and hold her arm as she eased onto the scale. He knew she just wanted her “old self” back. But did she really think that “baby weight” meant the weight of an actual child? No, no, Mathilda shook her head sadly as she stared at the numbers ticking on the scale. Of course not. But there was all that other stuff too: after birth, placenta and whatever else, the accumulated weight of which she somehow expected to come rushing out of her in a flood. When she was still pregnant Raymond might have encouraged such delusions, might have thought it best to humor her. But now that the baby is born there is no way to dance around or sugarcoat it anymore. Really, it’s all just fat. “Might be hormones,” the man on the couch says. “From what I’ve heard they can hit pretty hard. Maybe she’s post-partum.” 92 u Crab Orchard Review