Thin Women
By Adam Scott.
Roger loved thin women with big breasts and Jenny had the rare combination of the two. She had just gone through chemotherapy for a large tumor in her uterus. The radiation had made her so sick she lost 25 pounds. As a naturally busty girl, her breasts had shrunk, but they still maintained a pendulous fullness to them. Roger sat behind Jenny in his MCAT course. That first day, he had trouble listening to the pudgy lady who was explaining the company’s “Eliminate and Guess” strategy. Instead, Roger was mesmerized by Jenny’s vertebrae. They reminded him of the plates on a stegosaurus. During the fifteen-minute smoke/water/snack break, he approached her. “So, you want to be a doctor?” he asked.
She told him how she used to study finance because she had wanted to be the CEO of a company. She explained how she used to crave power, but that her cancer made her understand how small and petty humans were. She said she wanted to be an oncologist to help people who were in the same terrifying position. Roger was new to medicine so he wasn’t sure what oncology was, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with the vagina. The truth was, he found her pinched cheeks and dark orbits terribly attractive. He couldn’t imagine somebody more perfectly engineered to fit his ideal woman. In fact, because of Jenny’s appearance, he had trouble keeping up with her sob story, though he knew to show his admiration. “That’s amazing,” he kept saying. When Roger told her that she should write a book about her experience, so she could “you know, inspire the world with a message of hope,” Jenny blushed. To Roger, this was a terrific sign. She was interested.
Roger waited until the next MCAT session before asking if she could help him study. They met at Starbucks, where his unfamiliarity with the material offered many opportunities for Jenny to hover over his shoulder to explain a difficult concept. At these moments, he wanted to reach down and trace her ribs from her spinal column down around to her sternum. Roger told Jenny he wasn’t sure what he’d specialize in. “Probably family medicine,” he explained. “I like the idea of being part of the community like doctors used to be back in the day.” In reality, he wanted to become a plastic surgeon because of his dissatisfaction with the current state of breast implants. His previous girlfriend—who weighed just under 90 pounds—had breasts that looked like water balloons grafted to her chest. “A guy could make a fortune if he figured out how to make fake tits look real,” Roger had mentioned to his friend Barry over Irish cream margaritas at Pedro Fitzgerald’s Mexi-Irish Cantina. That’s when he decided to change his life, transfer out of leisure studies and focus on getting into medical school.
After a night of studying blood chemistry, Roger asked Jenny, in a joking way, if they should stop studying together because her beauty was too distracting. He was aware of it being a risky thing to say since he was not particularly attractive. He was of below-average height with the kind of face that women often described as “doughy.” He did his best to show off his “melting” (his ex’s words) brown eyes by blinking as little as possible. It was always risky to expose your feelings to a girl, but it was even worse to leave it ambiguous. When he complimented her, Jenny laughed nervously, touched her pale sunken cheeks, but she didn’t leave. She waited for the follow up. “I’m really attracted to you,” he told her. “You are like such a fox.”
The first night they slept together, as they lay in the nest of gold pillows on her bed, she told him he was the first man she’d been with since the chemotherapy. “Now I have hair,” she said, running her hand through her short, boyish bob, “but before that, when I was bald and sick and even thinner than I am now—if you can imagine—I thought I’d never be good looking again. I know it’s shallow to say, but the thought of not being attractive to a man was so depressing I wanted to die.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Roger said, slowly tracing the bone between her breasts with his pinky, “you’re crazy hot.” The end of Jenny’s sternum was so pronounced it looked like the arrowhead he’d once found as a boy, digging through his backyard. He wanted to reach his hand around and cup her breast, to feel its natural weight, to understand its dimensions, partly out of curiosity, partly as research for his future business aspirations, but he didn’t.
It was less than a week before Jenny told him their study/sex sessions weren’t productive. She needed to score high on the MCAT to get into a good school. Roger went along with her plan, though each night away from her, he stared blankly into his textbook wishing he hadn’t. He wanted to call her, to hear her voice. The only time he could focus was while studying the skeletal system. He’d read the name of a bone, close his eyes, and imagine touching it on Jenny’s body. Of course, he couldn’t do this with all 206 bones, but he was surprised how effective the method was.
The morning of the MCATs, Roger called Jenny to make sure she didn’t oversleep. “Hey girl,” he said. “You ready?”
“I guess.” She sounded like she was talking with her mouth closed.
“Something wrong?”
“I’m just tired.”
“I wanted to tell you,” Roger said, speaking quickly, his mind suddenly trying to remember the parts of the female reproductive system. “That I… I love you, girl.”
“Oh,” she said. There was a long pause after which she coughed. “Also,” he said. “I mostly wanted to say that’s your fucking smart as balls and you’re going to do great.”
“Sure,” she said. Then she hung up.
The test was administered in a large lecture hall at the university. Roger sat at a little desk, four sharpened number-2 pencils in front of him, watching every face that entered, waiting for Jenny. Actually, he watched bodies more than faces. Each body that entered seemed monstrously obese. It was as if everyone was weighted down by fat deposits, like sacks of cottage cheese tied to their bodies. When Jenny entered, wearing a blouse that showed off the dramatic curve of her clavicles and a skirt short enough that her knee joints protruded daringly, Roger touched his chest to make sure he hadn’t stopped breathing (of course, he knew that respiration was an involuntary process.) He half stood, waving her over, but she took a seat at the other side of the room. It was probably the stress. She wanted more than anything to go to a good medical school for her whole oncology thing, and seeing him was too distracting. During the three hour morning session, Roger kept thinking about the break. Jenny would be worried that she hadn’t done well, which would be his chance to comfort her. He was so concerned with what he’d say that he found himself searching for answers in the multiple choice options like A) I’m sure you’re doing 10 times better than you think or B) You’ve got more brains than all the jokers in this room or C) This test is a crock. It couldn’t possibly tell what a fantastic doctor you’re going to be, Jenny. Yet, when the proctor called for lunch break, Roger didn’t see Jenny anywhere, not in the foyer where people were eating sandwiches, nor outside, where people smoked and talked about the difficult questions. Roger went and sat in his seat with his eyes closed, imagining making gentle love to Jenny. When Jenny entered the room at the last moment possible for the afternoon session, Roger watched her, waiting for eye contact so he could give her a comforting smile. It never came. Jenny took her seat and stared straight ahead. During the next three hours, Roger thought about asking Jenny to dinner to celebrate. He imagined that after a few stiff drinks, she’d throw her arms around his neck and nuzzle the point of her head against his neck. Roger looked over at Jenny whenever the proctor came in her vicinity. When she raised her hand suddenly, handing in her test, Roger shut his test book and called out, “Finished! Over here!” The other proctor, an elderly woman with crooked yellow teeth, scolded him. “If you aren’t quiet young man, your exam will not be counted.” Roger apologized and handed in his exam. Jenny was just getting into her car when he appeared in the parking lot, sweat soaking the armpits of his shirt.
“Hey girl,” he said. “How’d you do on your test?”
“Listen Roger,” she said with a sigh. “You’re a nice guy, but we’re really different, you know?”
“Of course we’re different,” he said, walking casually toward her car. “But that’s what makes the two of us, ‘we’ so great.”
“Us,” she said. “That’s what makes us so great.”
“Exactly.”
“No,” she told him. “I’m not agreeing with you. I’m correcting your grammar.”
“Oh,” he said, flashing a smile. “See. You’re smart and I’m a dumb ass. We’re perfect together.”
She looked at her watch. “Look, I’m going to Baltimore next week. I’ve got an internship at Children’s Hospital. I have so much business to take care of. I can’t deal with having a boyfriend at this point in my life.”
He knew she was talking, but had trouble understanding her words. How badly he wanted to feel her clavicle, follow it to where it met the humorous and then slide his fingers along the outer edge of her ulna. Oh her ulna! And the lovely metacarpals! He wanted to take her hand and put it to his lips and kiss the tips of her phalanges, but when he made the slightest gesture to touch her, she flinched as if he’d just poked her with a hot iron. “Okay, it’s your choice,” he said angrily, “I respect that. We all have choices we have to make in life, but let me warn you. There aren’t many men who’ll worship you like I would.”
Jenny nodded, accepting the sacrifice she was making, then drove out of the lot, leaving him to watch her head, impossibly balanced on her stork-like neck, until her car disappeared behind a passing beer truck.
Roger missed Jenny, especially when he received his MCAT scores and he was in the 2nd percentile. He transferred into advertising, which suited him anyway since he wanted to influence how generations of women think about their bodies. His got back with his ex-girlfriend, who had lost ten pounds and upgraded to more natural-looking implants. Of course, they weren’t anything like Jenny’s; they were still fake. And there was the problem of having to accompany her to the hospital whenever she passed out from low caloric intake. Roger did miss Jenny, so much that every time he drank with Barry he wanted to call her and tell him how much he loved her. Luckily Barry was a good friend and kept him from calling. Roger often daydreamed about dumping his girlfriend and getting back together with Jenny until he saw her at Pasta Pamplona, the Spanish-Italian joint downtown. He was eating sardines and olives and his girlfriend was sucking down her sixth Diet Coke when Jenny walked in, hand-and-hand with a well-dressed Latin man. Roger hardly recognized her. She had put on at least twenty pounds. Roger’s first thought was that she’d gotten reverse liposuction. Then he remembered that she wasn’t naturally skinny. It had been the cancer. To his great disappointment, he realized she would never again be underweight.
“What’s going on?” his girlfriend said, turning around. “Are you checking out that fat girl?”
“It amazes me,” he said, nodding sadly, “how some girls let themselves go. I mean, how hard is it to diet?” His girlfriend smiled, showing off her freshly bleached teeth. “I work hard to look good for you, don’t I?” Roger took her fragile wrist, leaned in and kissed her in the exact place where, had she more flesh, would have constituted a dimple. “That’s why I love you, baby.”
# # # # #
AS: I wrote this story during one caffeine-fueled afternoon when I should have been working on my novel. I started thinking about a guy who liked emaciated women with enormous breasts and the story took off from there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Before Adam Scott started teaching English in the Midwest, he went to film school and worked on such memorable projects as Super Sucker (Daft as a Brush for UK audiences), 13 Conversations About One Thing and Strangers with Candy. He studied creative writing at the University of California, Davis and is currently working on a novel about the 1000th suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge and has a short story coming out in Fence.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Saturday, February 23rd, 2008.
