Orientation: And Other Stories

Hunger Tales

I.

She went grocery shopping three times a week, after aerobics class, stopping at a market that was on her route from the fitness center to her apartment. It was a tiny family-owned place, with a splintered wood floor and two checkout stands, dimly lit and narrow-aisled and very popular with urban professionals. They carried microbrews and power bars and arugula, plus all the staples. So when she needed bread, bananas, carrots, milk — the usual things — she stopped there.

But when she felt she deserved a treat, then a special trip — a cookie run — was in order. For such trips she preferred to go to the biggest supermarkets she could find, places that employed so many checkers and rotated them so frequently that she could never become a regular to any of them. She always went late at night, when there were fewer people. And she liked to make the rounds, to zero in on the cookie aisle by switchbacking up and down all the other aisles, from one end of the store to the other. She did not linger on the perimeters of a supermarket. Seafood and Meat, Bakery, Produce, Deli, Dairy — these areas did not sustain her interest at all. The aisles drew her, and specifically, a particular effect of her passage through them: with each turn she took, a gallery of foods unfolded before her, glutting her field of view in a visual engorgement that made her skin tingle and her innards twitch and pucker, a kind of pre-cookie jitters that never failed to arouse her in an unsettlingly erotic way. The cookies would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home — sooner if she opened the package in the car and started in on them while driving. Afterward, she would lie groggy on the sofa in front of the TV, sugar levels plunging, euphoria slipping away, feeling bloated and guilty and alone until she nodded off to sleep.

One night she drove to her favorite spot, a twenty-four-hour mega-market located at a mall just past the airport. It was the newly opened flagship store of a regional chain. It had twenty-six aisles, an all-night pharmacy and café, a video store, and a lounge with sofas and reading lamps and a fireplace with imitation logs burning in it. She scooped up a handbasket just inside the automatic doors, skirted the lounge, and headed directly for aisle 1A. These could be long nights for her. She could browse for hours, reveling not just in the sheer quantity of products but in their ever-expanding variety: there were ice creams with chocolate-covered pretzels or fudge brownie chunks or real vanilla bean specks in them, and made with organic strawberries or kosher cream or nuts not grown in a rain forest; there were white, yellow, blue, and red corn tortilla chips, and brown-, black-, green-, and orange-colored pastas; there were breakfast cereals shaped like peanuts, like raspberries, like doughnuts and cinnamon rolls, like waffles, like tiny slices of French toast; there were fifteen kinds of pasta sauce, ten flavors of rice cakes, and a dozen different flavors of carbonated water; there were eight varieties of something as simple as mustard. She felt immersed in abundance, gliding along like a love-drunk paramour, idly tossing items into her handbasket: brown sugar from aisle 2A, a can of sliced peaches from 7B, a box of raisins from 9B. At the end of the evening she would return most of these selections to their shelves, retaining only one or two benign items as counterbalance to the cookies. She never bought just the cookies. Nobody, she felt, needed to know that much about her.

But tonight, something was wrong. Although it was well past midnight, the supermarket was crowded. She had to squeeze past double-parked carts and around clusters of chatty shoppers blocking her path. Other late-night browsers began to loiter annoyingly on the periphery of her own late-night browsing. They sidled up next to her, perusing the same shelves she was perusing, their hands reaching for the jam jar next to the jam jar she had her hand on. One fellow trailed her all the way down the cereal aisle — inadvertently, she was sure — but persistently enough to compel her to move on. And worse, there were employees everywhere. They were crawling all over the place in their clip-on bow ties and starched blue aprons with name tags on them, briskly restocking shelves, trucking out head-high pallets of more boxed goods and taking box cutters to them with the panache of sushi chefs. They kept asking her if she needed help finding anything, and she kept saying “No, thank you.” She felt so rushed and prodded, so frustrated at losing the rhythm of the evening, that she curtailed her usual route. She skipped aisles 12 through 21 and headed directly for 22B, the bull’s-eye of her desire’s meandering arrow — Cookies and Crackers. Once there, she never varied in her selection — it was always either the Nabisco Chunky Chips Ahoy or the Keebler Chocolate Lovers’ Chips Deluxe. Yet she liked to mull over this choice, to savor the pretense of having to decide between one cookie or the other from the panoply before her: Which of you comes home with me tonight?

But even here she was hampered. There were people in the aisle — a couple, a man and a woman standing not just at the cookie shelves, but planted right in front of the Nabisco-Keebler array. She stopped a few yards up from them and pretended to scan the cracker shelves, waiting for them to leave. They both had shoulder-length hair and wore stylish black trench coats that made them look long and lean. They were young — in their mid-twenties, she guessed — and very attractive. They were standing there, hands deep in their coat pockets, talking intently, not leaving. She went back to Dairy and exchanged her two percent cottage cheese for one percent, then to aisle 6A to put back the sliced peaches. She returned to 22B. They were still there, in the exact same spot, slouching comfortably and murmuring to each other in that enticing and arrogant way couples in public do, inviting our exclusion from their intimacy. See how we can hear each other, they seemed to be letting the rest of us know. See how what we share is just out of your range.

She walked stiffly past them and went down the adjacent aisle, Pastas and Grains. She stood at the shelves, blindly running her hand over the packages. She heard the man’s voice rise in pitch, heard the woman laugh. What could she be laughing about, for Christ’s sake? She listened to their low, muffled tones, the thrum of their voices languid and melodic. There was more laughter, until finally — finally! — she heard them moving away. She trailed along, paralleling their slow progress out of the aisle, when suddenly a blue-aproned employee appeared before her, a tall, boyish, rawboned man with a big smile and a receding hairline and a name tag that read BRAD IS HAPPY TO SERVE YOU! He asked if he could help her find anything tonight. “No!” she thundered, rushing past him only to barrel into the cookie aisle couple. She muttered an apology as she plowed between them, then took the turn into aisle 22B.

It was empty, at last. “Yes,” she said, reaching the cookie shelves. And she was standing before them for just a few seconds — she had hardly taken them all in, still adjusting her position so that they would fill as much of her peripheral vision as possible — she had just gotten to the cookie shelves when a woman moving past the end of the aisle turned to look at her. She, too, wore running shoes and tights and a big, fleecy sweater. Her dark hair was pulled taut into a ponytail that highlighted an unblemished face. The woman’s gaze moved idly over her, then to the cookies she’d been looking at, then back to her. And just before gliding out of view beyond the end-aisle display, the woman’s impassive face registered a barely discernible smile. It was a small and intimate grin, the tiniest check mark of a smile, but in its tininess was laden a knowledge of her so large — so complete an understanding of her evenings alone in these supermarkets, her enthrallment before these cookies, and the aftermath of it all — that she fled. She ran. She raced out the other end of the aisle and along the back of the market, loping past Seafood and Meat to the far end of the store, to take refuge in Produce. She paced among the bins, between homely mounds of polished fruit, breathing heavily, her eyes stinging, acutely aware of her own ridiculousness. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Stupid!” she hissed. “Stupid, stupid!” Yet back and forth she went, hemmed in by her desolate longing, blinking and pacing amid the shine and sparkle of mirrors and the reflected abundance of freshly misted vegetables.

II.

It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was sitting on a love seat that had one arm sawed off to accommodate his girth. The rear legs were raised on four-by-sixes, so that he was positioned on a forward incline. A rope was within reach, one end looped loosely around a nearby floor lamp, the other bound to an anchor bolt drilled into a ceiling joist. He used this rope to pull himself out of the seat when he had to go to the bathroom, an operation that could take forty-five minutes — hauling himself up, teetering toward the wall and groping along it for balance, squeezing through the doorframe (the door had been removed long ago), shitting or pissing into the tarp-lined tub, then moving carefully back toward his seat, sliding along the tracks sanded into the wood floor by his thickly callused feet. He did not want to fall. The last time, the fire department had been called to get him back up, and a TV news crew had tagged along to cover the story.

Because he could no longer dress himself, he wore caftans, which were easy to slip on and off. They were immense garments, handmade, beautifully embroidered, donated by a television sitcom star with a weight problem who had heard about him on the news. (I want, the sitcom star had said, to express my solidarity with him — with big people everywhere — by contributing to his comfort in this small way.) In addition, a big-and-tall men’s store had paid several tailors to make him a full suit coat, trousers, vest, a pima cotton button-down shirt, and a red and blue silk tie that was a yard and a half long. (We feel, the big-and-tall people had said, that no one — whatever their circumstances — should be deprived of a fine ensemble of clothing.) He wore this suit only once a year, when the local newspapers and TV news shows sent reporters to do their holiday stories about him, stories in which they would pity his confined existence and marvel at the tenacity of the human spirit. He didn’t like doing these interviews at first. They asked the same questions every year: What is your typical breakfast? What diets have you tried? What do you do for fun? Are you happy? Are you lonely? He learned to give the answers they wanted to hear, and he played along because the publicity was good for freebies. One donor paid for his subscription to the daily paper; another took up a collection at her office to pay his utility bills; a chef at a local bistro brought him fabulous meals every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which prompted a chef at another restaurant to prepare an annual birthday buffet. So the interviews he got used to. But he hated wearing the suit, which the TV people insisted on. It took four volunteers two sweaty hours to get it on him, then another hour afterward to strip it off without damaging it. Mostly he wore his caftans. Once a month, a Filipina on the second floor took them to the laundromat. She and her two daughters would need most of a day to transport and launder these vast garments.

It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was flipping distractedly through the channels with the remote. He got free cable. (We believe, the cable people had said, that no American should be deprived of TV-viewing options.) He lived alone. He was forty-two years old. He had been honorably discharged two decades ago, returning from Southeast Asia with a medal of valor, an addiction to alcohol, and an inability to answer the question: What now? When he’d stopped drinking, he could not stop eating. He had found a kind of answer within his insatiable appetite. At the age of twenty-five he weighed 380 pounds, and he reached the 500 mark — joining the quarter-ton club — by his thirtieth birthday. He currently weighed just over 600 pounds. And he was at this moment very, very hungry.

He looked at the clock in the kitchenette. That bastard had left with his money over two hours ago. He had asked a neighbor, a fellow vet who lived two doors down, to go to the market for him, to buy as many packages of hot dogs — cheap, filling, and quick to eat raw — as he could with a ten-dollar bill. He knew he should not have trusted this man, a chronic boozer who’d lost his legs just below the knee and who, several times a year, would lose his prostheses as well, and could on these occasions be heard returning predawn from an all-night bender — filthy and bruised and penniless — scuttling and grunting in the stairwell, violently refusing any assistance as he made his lone and legless way five flights up.

The apartment window was open, and the curtains eddied with the onset of a breeze. He pulled up his caftan to expose himself to it, wadding yards of cloth and gathering the rolled wad onto his forearms to pinion it against his neck and shoulders. This took some work, and he was breathing hard when he was done. It was a hot one today. Days like this made him keenly aware of how badly it smelled in his apartment, much of the stink wafting from the bathroom, which the volunteers cleaned for him three times a week. Years ago, when he had finally gotten too big to leave his apartment, the members of a local church banded together and made him their special project. They deposited his monthly VA checks, shopped for his groceries, cooked him an occasional hot meal. Toward the end of the month, when he frequently ran out of food, they urged him to call. “Just give us a jingle,” they chided, amused at his reluctance to summon them. They were reliable and earnest and devoutly generous, completely committed to their good works, and he could not stand having them around. They said “Howdy!” upon arrival and punctuated everything they said thereafter with either “Okey-dokey!” or “Alrighty!” When they gave him his sponge bath, or when they applied the ointments and powders prescribed for his lesions and fungal infections, they undertook these tasks with the glee of schoolchildren working a charity car wash. And they proselytized incessantly, paraphrasing biblical passages that warned against gluttony and submitting too readily to the appetites; they spoke of hunger and desire as one would speak of disreputable kin. They had given him a Bible, and reading through it — reading the whole damn book — he had found only a handful of references that warned against eating too much, but hundreds that celebrated eating and appetite. God rewarded his children with bountiful harvests, and the tribes of Israel, when not slaughtering each other, were always breaking bread. Jesus was the metaphysical short-order cook, serving up fishes and loaves and wine to multitudes wherever they gathered. And what about the Last Supper? Nobody was counting calories in the Bible. Everybody had their fill. But he did not engage this issue with them. He did not want to antagonize the people he hated needing to cook his meals and wipe his ass and offer the only companionship he had. So when he ran out of food, he did not want to give them a jingle. He tried to manage on his own, asking various transient tenants in the building to buy things for him.

He was surrounded by empty tortilla-chip bags, the partial remains of yesterday’s dinner — the last time he ate. Hunger cut into his guts like a razor. He sat with his head thrown back, panting through his open mouth, waiting for another breeze. His thoughts drifted to a memory of the last time he used a bathtub as a bathtub instead of as a toilet. He thought about the last shower he ever took, and the needle-spray of water on his skin. He thought about other things he missed. Driving, with the window down. Sex. Friends. His feet. His dick. He thought about the last beach he ever saw — the smell of the ocean, its tug and surge around his calves, and the suck of wet sand under his heels. He loved the beach. He thought about his dick again. He had neither seen nor been able to touch his penis in over ten years, and he missed that.

A breeze came. He heaved the caftan roll aloft, against his face. It was a good breeze, a sudden gusty one that sent empty chip bags fluttering and was cool against his damp skin. His skin was always damp. He never stopped sweating. He lifted one tit, then the other, then let the caftan drop about him. He halfheartedly reached for an empty tortilla-chip bag, sighed, and looked from the TV screen to the clock in the kitchenette, then back to the TV. The inside of his head beat like a heart. He would have to call the church people.

He turned to look out the window. From where he sat, he could see the tops of the trees of a downtown plaza that he used to walk to and sit in, years ago. He could see the skeleton of a skyscraper that was going up. He could see the sun reflecting from an apartment tower in the distance, its light flaring in the westerly windows, then winking out as the sun moved on.

He threw the remote at the TV. A blizzard of white erupted on the screen. He reached frantically for empty tortilla-chip bags. He ripped two bags flat, licked them clean, and tossed them aside. He rocked to get at more bags. The room groaned and creaked. The love seat lurched to the left and slipped off its four-by-sixes, and he fell. Pots and plates in the kitchenette clattered. The windows shuddered in their casements when he hit the floor. He was stranded on his back. Another bag was within reach. He tore it open and licked off the oil and salt. He tossed it aside, made fists of his hands, and hit himself in the face five times.

There was activity in the apartment below, movement in the corridor outside, pounding on the door. He lay still. He did not answer. The footsteps retreated. They would be calling 911.

He sighed, wiped the blood from his face. He looked up at the window. From the floor he could see no buildings at all, only a rectangle of sky. It was cloudless and intensely blue, and he stared up into it for a long while. Emergency personnel were soon crawling over him, cutting his caftan off, lifting and pushing at his naked body, rocking it into position over their slings. It is always the same engine company that comes to his rescue, the firefighters all chatty and familiar. “How you doing, Hector?” He ignores them. He keeps his rectangle of sky in view. He sees a man on a beach ambling barefoot along the surf’s edge. When the TV people arrive, with their spotlights and their boom mikes, the man on the beach breaks into a trot, angling up toward hard-packed sand. And then he turns, jogs backward for a moment, and waves goodbye — an insolent waggle of his fingers — to the people lurching through the surf behind him. He turns again without breaking stride, and he runs. He laughs. The firemen lift on three. A reporter asks why he’s laughing. He doesn’t hear the question. There is only the wind whistling in his ears and the sting of grit on his face and the ocean’s salt taste inside his mouth. He runs, fleet and swift, the balls of his feet barely disturbing the sand and leaving no trail for anyone to follow.

III.

They were on a blind date, arranged by a friend she worked with whose husband knew him. They had been chatting in the wine bar, waiting for a table at a popular Italian café that did not take reservations. They had been waiting over an hour, but neither of them seemed to mind, and their patience was rewarded with an intimate table, tucked into an alcove whose windows looked out on a lovely lantern-lit garden. There were long waits between menus and ordering, between salads and entrées, but they both seemed to relish the leisurely pace, which allowed the conversation to carom pleasantly from subject to subject. This was her favorite part of a date, its first few hours, when the pretense of best behavior held sway and the blemishes of individual personality had yet to appear. So things were going well. But after they ordered dessert, the subject of movies came up.

She told him about an old western she had just seen. The previous week she had been laid up with a stomach flu, unable to move or eat for days, and she watched TV the whole time. The hero was a cavalry officer, and throughout the movie he had been shooting Indians out of their saddles without batting an eye. But when he had to kill his lame horse, the hero — one of those archetypal western stoics — became hesitant and dewy-eyed.

“His name was Ol’ Blue,” she said. “Or Ol’ Buck. The horse, I mean. And damn if I didn’t start crying. It’s nothing to watch people in a movie die, but when the horse gets it, I’m all weepy. Isn’t that awful?”

“Not so awful,” her date said. “The Indians were the bad guys. You were supposed to not care. That’s how they made movies back then.”

She nodded. “It still bothers me, though. People can die by the dozen, but it only gets to me when a horse or a dog is caught in the cross fire. You know what I mean?”

“I do.” He leaned toward her. “I do know what you mean. But you see, dogs are innocent. People deserve to get it. The bad ones, anyway.”

“I know,” she said. The flame of a candle flickered on the table between them. She watched the light play on his face. “Sometimes I worry that I’m hardened to it. Watching human beings die while munching on popcorn.”

“I don’t think that would be possible with you,” he said. “To be hardened, I mean.”

She twirled her wineglass, looked into it, and smiled. A comfy silence arose. Dinnerware clattered quietly around them. A siren in the distance rose and fell, rose and fell.

“But then,” he said, “that would depend on the human being, wouldn’t it?”

She asked him what he meant. Before answering, he reached for the wine bottle, topped off her glass, and refilled his own. He leaned back in his chair.

“Let’s say you’re in a room,” he said. “In one corner there’s a dog, and in the other corner a man. A man who has killed without remorse.” He sipped from his glass. She waited, her mouth slightly open.

“You have a gun,” he said. “Which one do you kill? The dog? Or the man?”

She thought a moment. “That would depend on the dog,” she said. “If it was one of those yippy little lapdogs? I’d plug the pooch!” She laughed.

Her blind date smiled. He carefully set his wineglass on the table. “Seriously, though. Which one would you shoot?”

She sipped from her glass, held it close. “Well, then. I wouldn’t shoot either one. I would … abstain. That’s it! I would abstain.”

“But you have to shoot one.” He leaned forward. “That’s the scenario. You have the gun. One of them has to die.”

“I see,” she said. Here we go, she thought. The fork in the road. The diverging path. She looked out the alcove window. Moths pitched madly at the lanterns outside.

“In that case,” she said, “if we have an animal and a human being, I would have to shoot the animal. That’s the only choice, really.” She turned to him. “Isn’t it?”

He was still smiling, but blinking rapidly. “This man is a killer. He’ll kill again. He has vowed to kill again.” He leveled a finger at her. “You have to stop him from killing again.”

She shook her head. “I know, but I can’t point a gun at a human being and shoot him. I just can’t do it.” She brightened. “Say, we’re both in this scenario, aren’t we? Why don’t I hand the gun to you?” She batted her eyes. “You’d kill him for me, wouldn’t you?”

His smile widened for one second and settled into a thin line.

“All right,” he said, shifting in his chair. “What’s your favorite breed of dog?”

She hesitated. She had no favorite breed. She didn’t like dogs, and she was about to tell him this when he snapped his fingers.

“Favorite breed,” he said. “Come on, come on.”

She selected a breed at random.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He cleared a spot on the table. Near the wine bottle, a yellow Lab pup mewled adorably, gnawing on a bedroom slipper. Slouched against the candlestick, a man watched indifferently. He was, of course, a child killer, slack-jawed and cruel, with cracked lips and stains on his pants and evil in his black, greasy heart. He was the Last Child Killer. Shoot him, and all children would be safe, but let him live and he would somehow breed and multiply. Shoot the dog, and beloved Labs everywhere would vanish, never to return. Her blind date elaborated on the dire hypothetical consequences, his hands slicing the air and disturbing the candle flame. A fat moth thudded against the window glass next to his head. She watched the moth, the guttering flame, the sheen of flop sweat on her blind date’s forehead.

And then dessert arrived.

It was the house specialty. They called it Cuore Inverno — a ball of hazelnut gelato inside a dark chocolate shell, drizzled with syrup of pomegranate and positioned within an immense cut-glass goblet dolloped with crème fraîche and dotted with champagne grapes. This was why she had suggested meeting at this café. She picked up her spoon and leaned forward. The man across from her had fallen silent. “Of course, it’s just a game,” he was saying now. “No biggie.”

“Right,” she said, gazing into the goblet before her. She gave the ball a sharp whack with the flat of her spoon. Ice cream oozed sweetly from the wound, and she pried into it.

“It’s just interesting,” he was saying. “What people would do, I mean.”

She put the spoon into her mouth, sucked on it, and swallowed. She closed her eyes and groaned: “Oh. My. God.” They had figured out a way to keep the gelato cold and soft while encasing it in hard chocolate. She’d been hungry all week, coming off the stomach flu. She had starved herself all day, looking forward to this evening, and it was worth it.

The man across from her touched his spoon on the table, then left it alone. “Well,” he said. He looked around the café, then back at her. “This was nice,” he said. “Wasn’t it?” She didn’t answer. He watched his blind date work intently on the dessert, watched her finish it, chattering all the while about their dinner together, speaking of it in the past tense, as if this evening had already entered their common memory, as if it had become the story they would tell their friends — the story that he imagined they would both look back upon and laugh about, years from now.

IV.

She was buried on a sun-dappled slope of lawn at the edge of the cemetery grounds, near a thin stand of cypress trees. There were five men present: her husband, her grown son, the mortician from the funeral home, the limousine driver, and a Catholic priest recommended by the cemetery people. They all wore dark suits and ties, even the priest, for some reason. And they all had on sunglasses that glinted in the midafternoon sun. They could have been mistaken for Secret Service agents discreetly burying one of their own. The cemetery bordered a county golf course, and a boisterous round could be heard in progress just over a tall hedge. When the priest closed his book and blessed the deceased’s eternal soul, the limousine driver stepped forward and flipped a switch that engaged a pulley. As the casket descended into the ground, father and son made their silent farewells, and hereafter would recall this moment of departure and loss with such ambient details as the smell of mown grass, the twitter of a bird or two, the irregular screak of a pulley motor, and the hoots and high fives of golfers in triumph.

In the backseat of the limousine, father and son loosened their ties. They gazed out the windows, watching the cemetery grounds roll away and the terrain of strip malls and auto dealerships along the highway unreel past them. As their neighborhood glided into view, the father turned away from the window, pressed his fist between his knees, and let out a small sigh. It was a tiny, restrained exhalation, a brief leak of air that nonetheless seemed to deflate him completely and leave him shrunken inside his suit. The mortician, watching in the side-view mirror, casually wiped the corner of his eye. And even the veteran limousine driver — a mortuary science student in his third summer with the funeral home — even he got weepy and had to stop chewing his gum to blink back a tear.

They pulled up in front of a small yellow house with a gabled roof and a single dormer window that faced the street. The stucco was chipped and patched, but the shrubs and lawn were neatly trimmed. The mortician opened the passenger door, and as the father and son climbed out, he asked them to wait a moment. He went around to the trunk and hefted out a roundish, foil-wrapped package in an open cardboard box. The mortician was a beefy, red-faced man. He looked more like a plumber than a mortician. He stood cradling the box like an infant. Seeing as it was Thanksgiving tomorrow, he was saying, he hoped they would find use for a complimentary fifteen-pound cooked turkey, with his condolences and all the trimmings. He handed them the box, solemnly squeezed their shoulders, then climbed back into the limousine. The two of them watched the vehicle pull away from the curb, ease down the street, turn left without signaling, and disappear from view.

The father followed his son into the house, then into the kitchen. “Are you hungry, Pop?” the young man asked. He slid the heavy box onto the table in the breakfast nook and examined its contents.

“I could eat, I guess.”

In addition to the turkey, there were two cans of cranberry sauce, two cans of candied yams, a quart of mashed potatoes, a loaf of soft white bread, and a pint of gravy. The son peeled back several layers of foil from the turkey to reveal a patch of crisp browned flesh, which he probed with his finger. It was still warm.

“Smells good, huh?” he said. He moved the box to the kitchen counter, lifted the turkey out, and put it back on the table. His father pulled plates and silverware out of cupboards and drawers. The boy took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He unwrapped the turkey until it sat brown and glistening on a bed of shredded foil. He gingerly grasped a drumstick and tugged. The turkey had been steaming in its wrapping for some time, so the leg came off easily. He set this on his father’s plate and pulled the other drumstick off for himself.

The older man had since removed his coat and now sat opposite his son. “I’m really not that hungry,” he said. But he began to eat anyway. He used his knife and fork to slice off small pieces, which he chewed thoroughly. His son meanwhile was holding the drumstick with both hands, biting off hunks of meat that hung out of his mouth. While the younger man appeared to be eating faster, it was the father who finished first. He ate at an unceasing pace, methodically cutting and chewing and swallowing until only a naked bone remained on his plate. He sighed and pushed it away. He patted his belly thoughtfully as he watched his son gnawing on his own drumstick. Then he got up and peered into the box on the counter.

“Do you want any of this other stuff?”

His son looked at him and grunted. So he took an opener to the cranberry sauce and candied yams, opened the mashed potatoes and gravy, and dumped their contents into separate plastic containers, microwaving each until they bubbled and steamed. The boy had gotten up and pulled two sodas from the refrigerator. He had difficulty popping the tabs with his greasy hands, and he grappled with these as his father brought all the trimmings to the table. They both began working on the turkey now. They peeled off strips of meat with their fingers and dipped them into the gravy. They spooned sauce and yams and mashed potatoes. They sopped up turkey grease from their plates with hunks of bread. They discovered a mother lode of stuffing within the turkey’s cavity. “Jackpot!” the boy cried. They both lit into it, excavating with serving spoons, then abandoning decorum and reaching into the bird with their hands to pull out the stuffing in gray-brown glutinous masses. They finished two more sodas apiece, then started in on the milk, passing the half-gallon container back and forth. They stripped the bird of its meat, broke its carcass apart, and gnawed and sucked at its bones until only splinters remained scattered on the table and floor.

The window at the breakfast nook was misted from the heat of their activity. Their white dress shirts were spattered with cranberry sauce and gravy. The cuffs of their rolled-up sleeves were dark with grease. Their eyeglasses were flecked with bits of food. Their chins were shiny. They both sat dazed, gaping at each other. “Jesus H. Christ,” the father gasped.

The boy scraped his chair toward the open refrigerator, seated himself in front of it, and proceeded to rifle its contents. His father hobbled over and joined him. They found a foil-wrapped package in the freezer, hairy with ice. “Brownies!” they cried. They threw the slab into the microwave and ate it hot, with milk. They found leftover lasagna in a Tupperware container and ate it cold. They found a fried pork chop and ate it immediately, one bite each. They licked out a mixing bowl of leftover cake frosting. They ate the gluey remnants of an indeterminate pie, the dregs of a congealing ham-and-bean soup, the desiccated remains of a forgotten noodle-cheese casserole. They pushed whatever they could find down their gullets until — engorged at last — they dropped to the floor and undid their belts and waistbands and rolled carefully onto their backs, breathing shallowly through their mouths like wounded animals. A square of sunlight moved over them and slipped up the wall and disappeared into the kitchen ceiling. They gazed for some time into the corner where the light had gone, cradling and stroking their englobed bellies — their comfort against the gathering dark of a new and alien evening.