appeasement

Yesterday morning I caught sight of my rear view in the mirror while getting dressed and it caused me to reel back in horror. I know it’s basic physics – without something in back to anchor the rapid expansion out front, I’d just topple over like a faulty Weeble. It was the same way last time, and much to my relief the Brobdignagian proportions shuffled back to something like their former selves. And yet, today, I am not relieved. I am convinced that this latest incursion is a malevolent relapse, a gathering of forces for a secondary assault. It’s like that horror movie where the evil hand tries to kill the rest of the body (after first killing a lot of other people). Not personification, exactly, but more like synecdoche’s evil cousin, where instead of the part coming to symbolize the whole (and we won’t even go there), it secedes instead and stages a revolution.

It wants to take over the world.

S must have heard me whimpering in front of the mirror – or noticed the furrowed brow – because he interrupted his own toilette to ask what was wrong.

“It’s huge,” I said. “It’s revolting.”

He looked for himself. “It’s definitely bigger,” he said, and then added, catching my facial expression, “but it’s cute.”

I burst into tears, which no patchy assertions of “beautiful,” “natural,” or “necessary” could contain. S slunk out and went to work. I’ve been feeling a little sensitive since my last doctor’s appointment, when Dr. Napoleon indicated that I had “un peu trop grossie.” It didn’t help that he followed it with a “c’est pas grave,” or that I know that French doctors seem to expect women to gain exactly nine pounds and for their babies to emerge smoking Gauloises and quoting Sartre. Instead I’ve been watching, with growing alarm, the host of tiny pregnant women in my neighborhood, who appear simply to be escorting a smallish basketball out front, like a chic handbag. And not a sign, not a hint from the back that anything is going on.

I might as well strap on a sandwich board. It feels like the final physical betrayal of my Americanness – no matter how much I try to blend in, speak correctly, swathe myself in ever-increasing yards of “slimming” and anonymous black and decorous scarves, there is still the unstoppable urge to enlarge, envelop, and advertise. (That’s not a flag I’m waving, sir, it’s just my - - -).

S called, midday, cautiously, to check in on the state of things.

“How’s the world domination coming?” he asked.

“Still actively plotting,” I said. “Still huge.”

He thought a minute.

“Maybe you could just give it the Sudetenland."