What He's Poised to Do

SHE HATES THE WAY HE WEIGHS HIMSELF EACH DAY. SHE HAS turned this into a kind of jingle. “She hates the way / He weighs himself / Each day.” It has the same melody as a commercial on television for a local car-repair shop. The repair shop’s song is “When something breaks / Just take your car / To Lake’s.” Sophie is thinking about the repair shop jingle while she drives along. Something has been rattling in the corners of the dashboard. Joe rarely rides in her car, and he won’t let her drive his truck, so the noise is her problem. “I’ll take a look at it,” he had said the night before, without a shred of conviction. Then he went into the bathroom to weigh himself.

He thinks that she doesn’t notice that he’s vain about his weight. She does notice, because when she was younger, she had a close friend named Peter who always used to complain about men who weighed themselves. “A man should only know what he weighs within five pounds,” Peter said. “And if he lies about his weight, he should lie on the high side. Being a man is about being a mass, at least in part.” Peter communicated his theories to her in rambling monologues that he wrote up longhand and sent as if they were love letters, which she supposed they were. He was uncertain about some of his theories, like the one about the faked moon landing or the one about feline telepathy. But he was sure about men and weight. “Look at me,” Peter said. “I’m two-twenty. You don’t hear me crying about my weight.” Peter was one-ninety, tops. She took his point.

Joe was two-twenty, most days. That morning he had come out of the bathroom with a smile on his face. “Down a pound,” he had said. Sophie was still in bed. She smiled back at his smile without thinking about why she was doing it. Since Joe had started weighing himself incessantly, Sophie had stopped weighing herself. There was some advantage to his compulsion and his weakness. Maybe that’s why she was smiling back at him.

Back when she was friends with Peter, he had wanted to date her, which was not something he had ever expressed in his letters. The implication was there, but he worked the edges and the margins, waited until they were together, at a movie, and just as it started, he touched her arm. “I want to be with you, you know,” he said. Peter was a very aggressive man, but when he told her that he wanted to date, he did not sound very aggressive. He sounded like he was holding an eggshell in his hand. During the movie, his hand dangled over the armrest and brushed against her thigh with a heartbreaking timidity. Sophie waited until the movie was over, and then she said no to Peter. She told him that he was just a friend, that she could not imagine them in a more romantic relationship. That was a lie. She imagined it often, and most of the times her imagination carried her through to a time when Peter would recognize that he did not care about her as much as he thought he did. Under the influence of that new epiphany, he would slowly drift away, or run off with another woman, and Sophie would be left behind to feel hollow or, more precisely, filled with nothing. That was her thinking as she told him no. He looked at her without blinking, then blinked, and that blink returned everything to normal, such as it was. The next day he sent her a letter in which he told her that plastic was a living organism hell-bent on populating the planet to the point where it crowded out all other species. “Frogs, toads, all,” he wrote, in large looping letters.

Joe has said that if Sophie ever left him, he would feel bereft. Joe does not know what the word means. Joe has also apologized for being aggressive. He does not know what that word means either. In fact, one of the reasons he was selected over someone like Peter was that he was not very aggressive. He was selected? She is removing herself from the equation even when she is the subject of the sentence. She hits herself with a nun’s ruler, mentally.