We continued on like that through the rest of the school year, working, going to classes, studying, making love and eating. By the time summer came around, Joellen weighed one-hundred and fifty-one pounds, nearly twenty pounds heavier than she'd been when we moved in together. I, meanwhile, had ballooned up to one-hundred and fifty-nine pounds and was shoe-horning my double-wide butt into a pair of thirty-five waisted jeans. Neither one of us cared: we were heavy and happy in our insular little world, self-contained and content.

A week after school ended, though, everything got very strange. Joellen's father, a professor of anthropology, had disappeared and was presumed dead on an expedition in Romania. We had planned to spend the summer together, free from the demands of school, using the time to get to know each other better and to try to figure out where we were going with our lives and our relation-ship, but all that quickly changed. Jo left almost immediately to be with her mother and her family. There was a lot of confusion and bureaucratic red tape since her father's body wasn't actually found.

Suddenly, I found myself alone and lonely, quickly deciding to register for a course -- any course -- to occupy my time. As luck would have it, there was a course available on baking in the Hotel and Restaurant school. Although I wasn't enrolled in that school and I had none of the official prerequisites, Luanne's recommendation carried a lot of weight, and I was soon immersed in the science and art of baking. Luanne was a great tutor, letting me in on tricks and tips in her spare time that had taken her years of hard work to discover, and as a result, I was the top student in my class.

Of course, being around such culinary temptation for so much of the time only made it easier for my weight to continue its inexorable climb upward. Instead of feeling horrified at the thought of each new bulge and roll, however, I felt a great happiness, imagining Joellen's helpless passion when she once again fell into my embrace. We talked on the phone often and I never tired of telling her of everything I'd eaten and how much weight I'd gained. She apologized for not coming up to visit and for losing some weight; she said that her mom was a fat-hater, somewhat neurotic about food anyway, but totally nuts about everything ever since Jo's father had disappeared.

Doesn't matter if she's losing weight, I told myself, I'm having fun anyway. And I was: class was great, work was fun, I had time to read everything I wanted; I even adopted a kitten to keep me company. I ate whenever I wanted and however much I wanted and felt sexier and sexier with each pound I gained. I joked with Luanne, telling her that my hours working as cashier supervisor were the only hours I wasn't stuffing my face. "Basically," I said, "I'm spending three days a week working at the store's front end, and the rest of the week working on my rear end!" By the beginning of August, I was a hair shy of one-hundred and seventy pounds and happier than I'd ever been. Luanne, who had been caught up in my infectious, devil-may-care mood, had herself been putting on weight again, and confessed to me that she was only a couple of pounds away from hitting two-eighty and her Jimmy was in a continuous state of erotic distraction!

But the first two weeks in August suddenly brought me crashing down from those lofty peaks of happiness. In quick succession, I found out that Joellen wasn't coming back to Corngate that fall, Mr. Walters had suffered a mild heart attack and wouldn't be coming back to work for a while, and that his son, a business school graduate, would be taking over the reins of the store. Luanne and I visited Mr. W in the hospital and he seemed very glad to see us, thanking us for com-ing, and asking us to help his son out in acclimating himself to the store.

When we left the hospital, realizing how frail the formerly indomitable man had seemed, and how uncertain was his return to the daily life of the store, Luanne was shaking her head and saying, "I just don't know how I'm going to deal with this." "With the son? How bad can it be?" She looked at me and shook her head, saying, "Y'know how Mr. W looks at the store and sees it in rela-tion to all the people who work there and shop there -- and live there? Well, Scott looks at the place and sees nothing but dollars and cents. When he worked here the summer before you started, it was a nightmare.

"First thing he did," she continued, "was to fire all the baggers. Then, he got rid of the store accounts -- sent letters to people who've been shopping here for twenty years, telling them that their accounts were due in ten days. Next, he had all the stock people shift their work hours so they were working from eleven at night until seven in the morning. He put in a time clock, made name badges for all of us and gave us these silly white smocks to wear as uniforms.

"The changes in the atmosphere of the place occurred instantly -- and for the worse. Sud-denly, lines became unbearably long because the cashiers were responsible for ringing and bagging. Dozens of good, long-time customers were leaving the store in embarrassment when they didn't have any cash on them and we weren't taking charges anymore. All the old people who used to come in and have the baggers carry their stuff out to their cars started going to the IGC. Half the stock staff quit, so the ones who were left weren't able to keep the shelves from looking bare, and the rest of the employees started talking to a union organizer.

"I was amazed that Mr. W let it go as long as he did -- it was maybe a month -- but he must've looked at the books or something and noticed that cash drawers that had been overflowing with thousands of dollars were now barely breaking into the hundreds. He must've had all he could take because, suddenly we came in one day and the time-clock was gone, the baggers were back, and pretty soon the customers were flowing in again. We were lucky to get them back once -- I don't know what's going to happen if he starts the same stuff again..."

"And what about the Guests?" I asked. "If he's just looking to do some cost-justification, there's no way that's going to last." "Well, actually," Luanne replied, "that was the one thing that they wound up in a shouting match about. Scott wanted to dump the whole program, calling it 'social-ism' and Mr. W practically ripped his head off, telling him that he wouldn't know socialism from good old neighborly responsibility if it jumped up and bit him in the ass. He told Scott that if he ever messed with the Guests -- financially or personally -- he would find himself disinherited. So... I don't think Scott's going to mess with that."

And he didn't, but he messed with plenty of other things anyway. The baggers weren't fired this time, instead, their duties were expanded to include putting out the throwbacks, mopping up spills, helping to unload trucks, straightening out the produce and more, so that it was extremely unlikely that you'd actually have a bagger up front when you needed one. Then, because the baggers had become unofficial stock assistants, the regular stock people -- higher paid than the baggers -- had their hours cut. They protested the "fairness" of the cut and Scott, in order to be "fair", cut all the full-timers' hours by one shift.

Next, he told all the full-timers that he was changing the insurance plan from an open plan where you go to any doctor you want, to a closed plan with a couple of understaffed, overcrowded centers, despite the news stories all over the TV and papers about the fiscal mismanagement of this particular low-cost plan. To add further insult to injury, he told us that while the new plan would cost the company less, our co-payment at the center would be higher, there'd be no drug plan, and we'd have to start contributing fifteen dollars a week for individuals and twenty-five dollars for families. "I wish there was some alternative," he said in his obviously fake sympathetic voice, "but health care costs just keep rising."

The time clock came back, too, and suddenly we were noticing that we were getting docked for being five minutes late, but that no one was paying us for the ten or twenty minutes we'd been used to staying while finishing up a project, or helping to whittle down a particularly long line of customers. Suddenly, work had become a decidedly less happy place.

He didn't touch the Guests, though -- or so we thought. Actually, he had just learned some subtlety in the past two years. There were little things, like having Luanne actually count how many rolls and bagels and donuts we were selling and how many we were giving away. She wasn't oblivi-ous to his nasty ways, so she inflated all her figures by one hundred percent, and when he told her to cut her production by half, we were still okay. It was only a matter of time, we knew, before he had the computerized inventory and sales system working properly after years of half-hearted utiliza-tion, and he'd know that her figures were way off.

The deli department was less prepared for an assault on their charitable donations and other giveaways, so the cuts mandated there were real cuts. That meant less for the Guests and, since we'd always been able to get lunch from the deli for free, it also meant less for the employees. In-stead, he instituted an employee "lunch-ticket" program, where we were each given one ticket for each shift we worked and with that ticket, we could buy one sandwich, one serving of salad and one beverage at fifty-percent off retail. I know that there are plenty of companies where this would seem very generous, but Mr. W had always said that his employees are like his family and, "If a man can't feed his family, what good is he?"

All this took its toll on me, especially after losing my lover and my roommate. Joellen had been hit pretty hard by the news about her father's disappearance -- especially when she found out that by the time her mother told her, he'd been presumed dead for two weeks. And when she'd got-ten home, she discovered that her already-neurotic mother had gone completely over the edge, al-ternating between uncontrollable crying and uncontrollable anger at the bureaucrats who couldn't tell her anything; she'd directed so much verbal anger at the embassy staff that she was denied a visa to travel to Romania! Jo's mom hadn't eaten since she heard the news and was dehydrated, anemic and finally admitted to the hospital and placed under sedation. It wasn't anything that was going to go away any time soon, so Jo determined that she had to transfer to the school near home where her mother taught. We cried when she told me of her decision, but we knew that there was really no other choice and that -- being only three hours apart -- we would still see each other frequently.

Of course, without her contributing half of the rent, I knew there was no way I could keep up the apartment, so I used one of the few privileges accorded a junior and secured myself a single room in the dorms on campus. I also signed up for the meal plan, discovering that the food, pre-pared by the students of the Hotel and Restaurant school, was surprisingly good and -- even better -- it was all-you-can-eat. My particular favorite was the fried provolone sandwich: a thick wheel of provolone cheese, breaded with seasoned bread-crumbs, deep-fried and served on a big roll with lots of dijon mustard. The dining hall on the north campus was enormous, surrounding four serv-ing stations which shared a central kitchen. I made a habit of ordering one of my favorite sand-wiches from each of the kitchens, so I'd never have to be thought of as the pig I was.

It was obvious, though to anyone who looked at me, that I was still putting on the weight, so that by the end of October, I had hit one-hundred and seventy-five pounds. I kept thinking that I should be bothered by my growing body, but instead, I was fascinated by it. I couldn't help looking at myself in every mirror I passed, trying to get a glimpse of my extra big butt squeezed into a pair of jeans so tight they made a sausage-casing look roomy. I kept my belly full every minute I was awake, and whenever I was home in the dorm, I spent my time completely naked, my hands caress-ing every bit of blubber, and imagining how Joellen would react the next time she saw me.

Meanwhile, Mr. Walters had been getting stronger and came back to work in the very be-ginning of November. Everyone figured that things would go back to the way they were before Scott had come on the scene, but it wasn't to be. Mr. W was still tired all the time and was reluctant to get involved in the day-to-day operations of the store. Then, barely a week after he came back, he had another heart attack, milder than the previous one, but enough to make him determine that work-ing wasn't going to help him to recover. When he was released from the hospital after two days, he immediately packed up his stuff and left for Florida on a one-way ticket.

Scott was now fully in charge of the place and set about dismantling its soul and replacing it with the bottom line. He cut out employee meals completely, sent the baggers back to the stock de-partment, fired some of the stock-people, eliminated the delivery service, hired more benefit-ineligible part-timers and cut hours again for full-timers. He gave Luanne a fixed budget and told her that she'd have to "trim the fat" from her department. "The bastard looked right at me when he said it," she told me. Worst of all, he told us that we'd be staying open for the day after Thanksgiv-ing, Christmas, New Year's and all other holidays.

That one took us over the line: in a remarkable act of solidarity, all the employees got to-gether one night and signed a letter stating that we would not be available to work on those days. When Luanne and I, as the senior employees, presented the letter to him, he read it, then tore it up, saying, "You people have been living off the fat of the land for way too long. If you're not going to work, you're going to be fired." It was a tough blow; we knew there was the chance we'd be rejected, but we didn't expect that it'd be so harsh and insulting. "Another 'fat' comment," Luanne said. "It's not a coincidence."

That night, I really didn't have any appetite, so I took a walk through campus, trying to fig-ure out my options. Life had been so good at the store that I hadn't spent even a second thinking about what other kinds of jobs there were or what I was qualified for. The other grocery stores in town would probably be just the way the Myrmi Market was becoming. The mall was probably out, too, since, at my current "overly-voluptuous" size, there weren't many of the fashion-oriented stores -- the majority of mall shops -- that would be able to look past the appearance I'd present to pro-spective customers. Dealing with the constant rejection in a telemarketing job was also out of the question for me, and there just weren't too many openings for jobs in the art history field -- my major.

My absent-minded walking took me out into Collegetown, down the street behind the mar-ket. The kerosene heaters were glowing orange through the chain-link fence and I heard a couple of radios playing softly. Suddenly there were a couple of raised voices, then yelling, then I heard some things crashing and I could see the silhouettes of two or three people fighting. I ran over to the se-curity guard's booth, but it was empty and unlocked. When I looked inside, there were a stack of newspapers tied up for recycling, a lot of dust and no other sign of human habitation. There was one newspaper opened on the little desk, but it was dated for the middle of September. Suddenly, it became obvious that, while Scott wasn't directly interfering with the Guests, he was taking advan-tage by cutting everything peripheral to them.

The argument was dying down when I walked over and when I asked what it was all about, a half-dozen voices told me about how there hadn't been too much food lately -- fewer baked things, fewer canned things -- and that some of the Guests were hoarding while others were hungry. An-other man told me that he'd used up all the kerosene he'd been given at the beginning of the week because it'd been cold a couple of nights and now tonight he was freezing. Some of the others agreed and one of the men who'd been fighting said that another had tried to take one of his two blankets because his blankets hadn't come back from the laundry.

I did what I could to settle things down, then hurried back to my room to call and see what I could find out about this from Luanne. It was late and the side entrances were locked, so I had to go through the main lobby of the dorm, an entrance I rarely used. Passing by the food and clothing donation barrels, located underneath the big poster of Mr. W and a caption of "Thank You", I no-ticed that they were overflowing with clothes and cans, so much so that some people had been put-ting paper bags around the barrels and filling them. There was also quite a bit of garbage in and around the cans, indicating that it had been a while since anyone had bothered to collect them.

When I got Luanne on the phone, I was steaming mad, but she cut me off by saying that af-ter our meeting that afternoon, she hadn't known what to do, until -- amazingly enough -- Mr. Walters called her to say that he'd gotten the box of low-fat pastries she'd sent him and that they were wonderful and he was feeling a lot better. She said that she didn't want to tell him anything, but he could sense in her voice that something was wrong; when she told him, he said, "Well, that's to be expected. It's not right, but it's to be expected from him. Don't worry about it, though: I'll take care of it." When I told Luanne about MY discoveries, her elation at solving one problem immediately turned right back to anger. "He's been starving them in our backyard! The bastard! I'm going to find out what else he's been doing and I'm going to let Mr. W know. This isn't right and he won't stand for it, I'm sure!"

If you've got any comments or criticisms, you can post them on the WeightBoard or e-mail me at: melaniebel@aol.com.

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