David Norwood
I was fourteen the summer of 1947 when my cousins Pearleen and Ginny came to visit us in Louisiana.
The day they drove up, I was on the front porch with old Felix, cleaning out the white, gummy stuff that gathered in the corner of his eyes. The black sedan crept along the gravel road like its driver was lost. When the car reached our driveway, it stopped, backed up, then turned in, the tires crunching on the gravel.
Old Felix tore his head away from me and gave a muffled bark. The car was tilted way over on the passenger side, so I figured it had a broken spring, which was maybe why the driver had come off the road. The man drove right up to the yard gate and stopped and blew the horn. A woman sat on the passenger side, the side that tilted.
For us who live out in the country, visitors usually tooted their horns when they came to visit, kind of like a warning, maybe. But if someone was sitting out on the porch in plain sight like I was, well, there wasn’t no need to toot. Old Felix, he let loose a real bark this time and ran off the porch to the yard gate and kept barking.
The man stuck his head out. “This the LeDoux place?”
I said yes and went to the gate and told old Felix to shut up.
Daddy was out in the barn doing something, and Momma was in the garden back of the house picking greens for dinner. Just so you’ll understand, around here we say ‘dinner’ for the noon meal, or as some call it, lunch.
“Y’all get down,” I said. Of course, I didn’t know who these people were, but Momma had taught me to be polite. I heard the man say to the woman that this here must be their boy, Rufus, meaning me, I suppose, since that was my name. The man got out and walked around the front of the car to the other side. He had on this blue, short-sleeved shirt with these dark sweat rings under his arms and around his collar. In his shirt pocket was this little white handkerchief peeking out and folded like an upside-down Vee. I don’t think it had ever been used, cause it looked so white and stiff. Later I saw it was sewed to the pocket and had the initials ‘G. M.’ embroidered on it.
About this time the car started squeaking and rocking from side to side as the woman opened her door and worked herself to get out. Once she got herself turned around and had her feet on the ground, the man pulled on her arms until he got her to standing up. As soon as she did, the car straightened up like it didn’t have a broken spring after all, just made funny clicking noises as everything settled back into place. Old Felix went out the gate to snuffle the tires.
“He doesn’t bite,” I said, but I knew he’d pee on the tires. I never understood why dogs did that.
The woman stood there like a bale of cotton. She was about the same width and height as one, and wore a tight, yellow-brown dress the color of burlap, which I guess was why she reminded me of a cotton bale in the first place. Her belt was thin like one of those black metal straps that holds the bale together. She didn’t have a waist.
“You Rufus?” the man asked. When I nodded, he said, “Your momma and daddy home?” He stood there looking around, like maybe he was fixing to buy the place. About this time Momma came around the side of the house with her apron full of greens. She stopped and gave a little cry.
“Pearleen and Ginny! My goodness! Ya’ll get down. Rufus, go get your daddy.”
I did, and when all the handshaking and hugging and stuff was over, he told me these were my cousins Pearleen and Ginny Meriwether, all the way from Gulfport, Mississippi.
I had no trouble associating the name Pearleen with a woman, but ‘Ginny’ stopped me cold. I had always thought Ginny was a girl’s name, short for Jennifer for something. It was also the name for a she-mule, although I learned later on that a she-mule’s name was spelled J-e-n-n-y and not G-i-n-n-y, although they were both pronounced the same way. It turned out that Ginny was a nickname. His real name was George.
Because cousin Pearleen couldn’t get up the porch steps to get into the house, daddy went to the barn and dragged a work bench under the china ball tree for her to sit on. Then we all sat in the backyard under the china ball tree to get out of the sun.
At some point in the conversation, cousin Pearleen announced with some excitement that she was on this diet and wished with all her heart she could get weighed to see how many pounds she had lost since she started it.
“Ginny went and bought me one of the largest scales he could find, but when I got on it, the needle spun around a couple times, then something inside made a funny sound and the scale stopped working.”
I figured it was a death cry but I kept my mouth shut.
Ginny went on to say the scale indicated his sister weighed over the 500 pounds limit it measured up to, and at the moment she was in a heat to get weighed.
“I know I’ve lost at least a hundred pounds since I started my new diet,” Pearleen announced with a slight flush to her face.
“She could hardly walk a lick before she got on her diet, but now she walks just fine, excepting for maybe climbing steps.”
I tried not to stare at her feet, but I swear they were the tiniest things I had ever seen. And she had the clearest blue eyes, kind of like what you see on one of those glass-eyed porcelain dolls, eyes that closed when you lay the doll down.
“What are you dieting on?” Momma asked, a question I was dying to ask myself.
“Vegetables. Lots of turnips and such. Only thing, turnips tend to give me gas,” Pearleen admitted, her face turning even pinker. “But passing all that gas does make me feel smaller.”
Momma didn’t comment on that, but went on to say she was planning to cook a chicken and being she didn’t have turnips in her garden, would collard greens be all right?
Pearleen livened up. “That would be fine. We brought along a sack of turnips with us. Maybe you could cook some of them with the greens?”
Daddy had been quiet during all this conversation, but then spoke up.
“There’s this cotton gin over in town, and if you don’t mind going there to get weighed, I’ll be happy to take you.”
Momma said she didn’t think that was appropriate, going to a cotton gin to get weighed, but Pearleen said she didn’t care. She just wanted to see how well her new diet was working.
“So we’ll go into town, then,” said daddy, “while Momma starts dinner.”
Pearleen sent Ginny to get some turnips from the car for Momma to cook.
Daddy and I got in back. I sat behind Pearleen, and after she arranged herself, there was hardly any leg room for me. As we drove down the road we passed a couple of my friends. They were throwing rocks at bottles they’d put up on fence posts. I shrank down as low as I could so they wouldn’t see me, because I didn’t want to have to answer their smart alecky questions about who was that fat woman in the car with me.
When I looked back, they were pointing at the car and laughing. They told me about it later, saying that sparks flew as the car dragged every now and then on the gravels. I guess I would have found that funny, too, if I had seen it.
Daddy knew the cotton gin man and went in to see him. Mr. Gauthreau came out and Pearleen started to shaking the car to get out, but he took one look and told her she didn’t have to.
“I can weigh the car with you in it, ma’am, just like I do the cotton wagons.”
He had Ginny drive the car up on the platform scale. By now some of the workers who were getting the gin ready for the cotton picking season came out to see what was going on. Ginny and me, we got out.
Mr. Gauthreau, after checking the inside door panel on the driver’s side, explained that the weight of the car was right there on the frame, and that if there was anything in the trunk, maybe we should take that out. Ginny said yes there was, and took out the sack of turnips.
“What about the spare?” Pearleen called.
That caused a bit of discussion, because no one was sure if the official registered weight of the car included the spare or not. A couple of the workers thought it did.
“Take the spare out,” Pearleen yelled. “And the jack, too.”
The gin scale with Pearleen in the car tipped out at 2,854 pounds. Mr. Gauthreau wrote down that number then subtracted the weight of the car from the door panel. The difference came to 532 pounds.
Pearleen gave a delighted squeal and clapped her hands together like two small quails flushed from a bush. The last time she’d weighed herself, she said, was on this vet’s scale–which I imagined weighed horses and cows and such–and she had weighed 610 pounds.
“That means I’ve lost seventy-eight pounds!” she said. She eyed Mr. Gauthreau and asked if he was sure the scales were right. He nodded and assured her they were.
“The parish man was here yesterday. We have to test them each year, so these scales are accurate pretty much right down to the ounce, ma’am.”
“How much gas you got in the tank?” one of the workmen asked, spitting out a stream of tobacco juice.
“That’s right!” cried Pearleen. “We have about a half tank of gas left. How much is that?”
“How many gallons o’ gas your tank holds?” asked the tobacco chewer.
Ginny said twenty.
“Well, then figure ten gallons in there at five pounds per gallon,” said the man. “That’s about fifty pounds more you can take off.”
The quails flew up again. “That comes to about 128 pounds!”
We loaded the turnips and spare tire and car jack back in the trunk and Daddy thanked Mr. Gauthreau for his trouble and offered to pay him, but he refused. We went home, the car dragging and throwing up sparks all the way back home. Cousin Ginny admitted he didn’t much care to drive on gravel roads, since they were so hard on mufflers.
When dinner was ready, Daddy fixed up a table with a couple of wide planks on two saw horses under the china ball tree. We had fried chicken along with rice, turnips and collard greens with bacon that Momma had put in for flavoring. Pearleen picked out the bacon, although I couldn’t see as how it mattered much. Yet, for all her size, she didn’t eat as much as I thought she would.
I learned a few other things that summer, like fat people don’t necessarily eat a lot. There were other reasons for being overweight.
Afterward we sat around the table talking. I was right across from Pearleen, who smiled at me a lot.
“You’re so skinny!” she said one time, reaching over to pinch my cheek. “I don’t know why God made me to be so fat.”
About that time I began hearing rumbling noises from Pearleen. Then I noticed from time to time she’d lean over to one side and give a little cough so we couldn’t hear what she was doing. She didn’t fool me and I was trying real hard not to laugh. The problem was, I could see Old Felix. He lay under the work bench right under Pearleen and each time she leaned over and coughed, he would prick up his ears, lift his head and look around with his rheumy old eyes. After one of her louder coughs, he got up and moved away. I couldn’t control myself anymore.
Pearleen turned pink and her eyes teared up. “Please don’t laugh at me, Rufus. I’m doing the best I can.”
Momma gave me that look she gave when I’d done something really bad in polite company. I guess my ears stayed red the rest of the afternoon and I didn’t have much to say about anything.
Before they got in the car to leave, Pearleen grabbed and hugged me. “I want you to be sure to come to Gulfport and visit us. Have you ever been swimming at a real beach?”
“No,” I said. “Closest thing to a beach I’ve ever been on is this old yellow sandbar along the Pearl River.”
“Shoot,” she said, “that’s no beach. You gotta come visit.”
She went on to say how white the beaches were, so white they would hurt your eyes, and I could go to the beach every day and swim in the Gulf until I was brown like old Felix there, who was peeing on the tires again. Momma said we’d try to visit as soon as we could, maybe after the cotton picking was over.
After they left, I finally got to explain why I had laughed. “It was old Felix’s fault,” I said. Daddy agreed it was kind of funny but Momma didn’t think so.
We got a letter from Pearleen about two weeks later, saying how much she and Ginny had enjoyed their visit and hoped we’d come soon, and that she thought she’d lost some more weight, only she didn’t know of any cotton gins in the area. Said she’d probably have to go see the vet again.
We did go to visit that fall after the cotton was picked.
Pearleen was right. The white glare of the sand at the beach could almost blind a person. We didn’t visit long enough for me to get a real tan, though. Mostly all I got was a sunburn on my nose and shoulders.
Two weeks later we got this real sad letter from cousin Ginny, announcing the death of his sister. He told us the doctor said her heart had burst, and that she’d just gotten weighed at the vet’s and was down to 475 pounds.
We went to the funeral. Looking at cousin Pearleen in her coffin, I thought she looked happy.
