Fat Woman Seen

O why do you walk through the field in gloves

My hands are bad today.  The gloves are a necessity not a fashion statement, although I have to say, I do like them. Not many people do, these days, but my mother rarely left the house without putting on her hat and gloves and my grandmother never did. Not even to pop across the road to see her sister, half a dozen doors down. She said you weren’t dressed without them. You might as well be wearing no knickers.

The gloves, yes. I have to wear them. I’ve dispensed with the hat, though. It would have only got in the way. And it’s warm enough, with this nice little drop of sun. Pleasantly so, seeing how unseasonably grey and chilly it’s been these past couple of weeks. You don’t expect it somehow in June, although goodness knows why not. The triumph of hope over experience, as someone once said, although it wasn’t in that context, was it?

The grass is high and wavy, like a great sea of green touched with gleams of sunlit gold. Time was when I’d have run my hands over its silkiness as I walked, a bit like the beginning of Gladiator. Soft, it would be. Soft like a little bird, and the heads like that delicate fern they put in bouquets. Sweet and shivery under my fingers, but what’s the point? I wouldn’t be able to feel it through the cotton, although that was soft enough when I put them on.

But my hands are bad today.

Missing so much and so much
There’s a train stopped on the line over there. That’s not the station, so it must be at a signal. It’s unexpected and its presence is unwelcome but it’s too far away to see if anyone’s looking out of the window. They’d see me, that’s for sure, walking through the ryegrass, but they’re welcome. They won’t see anything that matters.

Let them look, my father always used to tell me, if I came home from school wailing that the other children wouldn’t stop staring. They won’t see anything that matters, he’d say, putting his arm around my shoulders. They won’t see you. They’ll see what they think they’ll see, that’s all. I loved my father. He never called me a beached whale or let his impatience boil over if I was clumsy. He never told me I was unlovable, that I was a disappointment, not worth the pain she went through. That wasn’t him. That was her.

O fat white woman whom nobody loves
I put on my best loose cotton top this morning, the white one with the square neckline and the broderie anglaise in a deep band around it. Why? Because I like it. And so does my lover. He likes to lift it over my head and bury his face in the deep plump pillows of my breasts, breathing me in as if I’m oxygen. It leaves me easily, sexily and floats to the ground when he lets it drop, like a swan fluffing up its feathers. He’s not struggling to get it past my nose while it catches in my ears and I stand there, blinded, with my arms in the air as though I’m surrendering. I don’t surrender. I give or I take away.

It probably wasn’t the best choice I could have made, come to think of it, but I wasn’t. Thinking of it, I mean. Not then.

I’d probably have worn different trousers, too. These are loose and wide and billowy. Almost like a long skirt. They’re comfortable across my tummy and they remind him of a harem. All I need is a yashmak, he says, although he wouldn’t want there to be anything between his lips and mine. Not even the moist-seeming fine slitheriness of silk. He hated it when I wore a mask during Covid. All the same, I have other trousers he likes and I have to admit – being white too, these are a bit difficult to keep clean. They were, earlier. But now I don’t care. And the stains wouldn’t be visible from the train.

It hasn’t moved as I reach the mid-point of the field. I think of the passengers and wonder what it is they imagine they’re seeing, as they sit there in that elongated tube of metal, waiting to get to wherever they hope someone is bouncing up and down with impatience for their arrival. But, even if they happen to glance up from their screens for a fleeting moment, they wouldn’t take any notice of a fat woman walking across a field.

I doubt they’re bothering to look out of the windows at this glorious day, in any case. What’s there to look at? Scenery? Trees and birds and hills and rivers and stuff? Not a patch on what they can see on whatever device they’re glued to.

I have a mobile but I don’t use it much, only for receiving messages from him and sending back my replies. It’s our secret, our way of feeling each other when we’re apart, as we too often are. But the time for secrets is past. Today I am walking to him, openly. If someone on the train should notice me, they won’t know I’m going to my lover. And if anyone else sees me, it’s entirely my business and nothing to do with them. They can’t stop me and there’s no one to tell.

I haven’t got my phone with me now. No pockets in these trousers. Besides, I don’t need it. It’s back in the kitchen where she saw the screen light up and looked at it. She shouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t dream of looking at her phone, if she had one. It would be like lifting someone’s skirt.

I should throw these gloves away. But, for the moment, I’ll keep them on. I like the feel of them against my skin, even though they’re getting a bit hard and unyielding, now the blood is drying.

“What do you look like?” she said this morning, when I came downstairs. “Can’t you make an effort to look like a lady and not a badly stuffed duvet? You can’t wonder that no decent man would look at you twice.”

So I put the gloves on. That would make me look more lady-like, wouldn’t it? Although, after I’d finished, they rather spoilt my colour scheme. To put them on, I had to lay my phone on the table. And it buzzed. And she picked it up. And she called him a common little tradesman who was so desperate he’d take any rubbish that was offered.

“Do you really think he’s in love with you, you silly girl? How could he be?”

Why do you walk through the field in gloves, missing so much and so much
I didn’t miss. My aim was true. But my hands have been bad today. They held the knife that killed my mother.

Valerie says: I get some cracking ideas  for stories when I’m running, walking the dog or digging the allotment, to find they’ve evaporated into the wide blue yonder by the time I get home.  But some stick around to be written down.

From the poem “To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train,” by Frances Cornford.