“I do believe he cared for you,” Miss Emily said, pressing Nellie’s hand. “Even if he has turned out to be a base fellow, I am sure he cared for you. He—”
“I must go,” Nellie had said, and without another word she left. Once on the street she started toward home. If people snubbed her, she didn’t notice.
But she didn’t make it home. Instead, she stopped in the bakery and bought doughnuts, fried pies, cookies, cupcakes, cream-filled pastries, and a large chocolate cake. She ignored the look of the woman behind the counter, took the two large bags, and left the store. She didn’t think about what she was doing or where she was going; she just started walking.
When at last she stopped walking she was in Fenton Park, in the exact spot where she and Jace had sat and he’d put his head in her lap. She sat on the ground, opened the bags, and began to eat. She tasted nothing, chewed very little, but slowly and systematically ate her way through the first bag.
The tears began when the first bag was emptied. She wasn’t really crying; it was just that tears were streaming down her face.
By the middle of the second bag she was so stuffed with food that she had to stretch out on the grass in order to be able to continue eating.
Carrying his child, she thought. No, she wasn’t carrying his child. He hadn’t quite been able to force himself to go that far to get her father’s business. He’d only been able to bring himself to kiss her, to touch her now and then, and to lie to her.
No, she wasn’t carrying a child, but Nellie knew she was a woman. She was a woman who had been used by a man, had been used and discarded. She thought of the way she’d believed in him, trusted him, the way she’d given him her love, and again hunger overwhelmed her.
She remembered the night of the Harvest Ball. Miss Emily had said that Jace kissed Terel that night, and he’d kissed Mae and Louisa that night also. Nellie pictured herself with Jace. “Twice as wide,” Terel had said. Everyone in town must have been laughing at her as she waltzed with him, he so tall and handsome, she so fat and dumpy. Everyone must have enjoyed the joke greatly. They all must have known why Jace had been courting her. Everyone except Nellie knew. Her father and Terel had tried to warn her, but Nellie hadn’t listened. Instead of listening she’d been defiant, believing she knew more about the man than anyone else did.
It was nearly sunset when she picked up her empty bags and started home. On the way she stopped in Randolph’s and placed a grocery order for enough food to feed six families for four months.
“Having company?” Mr. Randolph asked, but Nellie didn’t answer. She didn’t feel like talking or thinking or even living. The only thing she was aware of was a deep, insatiable hunger.
At home her father complained about dinner being late, and Terel wanted to know where Nellie had been, but Nellie didn’t answer. She went to the kitchen and began to cook, and for every one thing she cooked and served she cooked two others and ate them. Perhaps her father and Terel talked to her, but she didn’t hear them. Her thoughts were completely, totally, absolutely concerned with feeding the hunger that engulfed her.
Nellie ate for three weeks. She didn’t care what she ate, when she ate, or how much she ate. Her only concern was in trying to fill up the hunger that ravaged her. Yet no matter how much she ate she still felt empty. It was as though no amount of food in the world could make the hunger go away.
If she stepped into the pantry, where Jace had kissed her and held her, her stomach contracted with hunger. If she looked outside, where the season’s first snow now covered her garden, she remembered Jace saying he liked her flowers and she felt ravenous with hunger. If she heard a man laugh, a man speak, if she even saw a man, she was overcome with hunger.
It was Terel who first noticed Nellie’s weight loss.
“It can’t be because she isn’t eating me into bankruptcy,” Charles said. “Nellie, this month’s grocery bill was enough to break me.”
Nellie didn’t comment, and her next grocery order was even larger.
“I can’t have you looking like this,” Charles said after Jace had been gone for four weeks. “You look like a scarecrow. Go get a new dress.”
Nellie hadn’t bothered to look at herself in a mirror for a long time, but now she did, and she saw that her body was a shadow of its former self. She could hold handfuls of her dress bodice away from her. Reluctantly, not caring what she wore, she went to her dressmaker’s.
The dressmaker took one look at Nellie’s ravaged face and said not a word. She’d heard all the gossip, of course, and Terel had said that Nellie did nothing but stay home and eat, that she refused to step out of the house, and that her long face was very annoying.
If she’s eating, she isn’t eating very much, the dressmaker thought as she undressed Nellie down to her smalls. She was amazed that anyone could lose as much weight as Nellie had in such a short time. She went to her workroom to get her tape, but she halted as she looked at a finished gown hanging from a peg in the wall. It was a winter costume she’d just finished for Mrs. Kane Taggert. It was made of dark blue velvet with satin lapels of a lighter blue, and there was a lovely matching cape to the dress.
The dressmaker looked at that velvet gown, knowing that Mr. and Mrs. Taggert would be out of town until after Christmas, and she thought of the way that man had betrayed poor, sweet Nellie. With resolve, she took the dress from its peg, then snatched one of her own corsets from a drawer.
“Now, Nellie, we’re going to make you smile.”
It took an hour’s work to ready Nellie. The dressmaker arranged her hair; since it was dirty, she had to powder it twice to absorb all the oil. She put Nellie into the corset, then hauled on the cords until Nellie’s waist was a respectable twenty-one inches, leaving her bosom and hips to swell out above and below her little waist.
Through all of this Nellie stood or sat as commanded, taking very little interest in the proceedings.
The dressmaker got on the telephone and called the milliner. “I want you to bring the blue toque you made for Mrs. Taggert over here. No, she hasn’t returned yet, but someone else is here. You’d better come yourself because I don’t think you’re going to believe this.”
When the milliner arrived, indeed, she didn’t believe what she saw. She’d known Nellie since she was a pretty little girl, but at twelve, after her mother had died, Nellie had started putting on weight, and her pretty face had been lost atop her big body.
The milliner pushed up her sleeves. “The hair is wrong. Get a curling iron and call Miss Emily. She should see this.”
Thirty minutes later a new Nellie stood before them, hair softly arranged, a fat blue velvet toque jauntily on one side of her head, her hourglass figure encased in a stunning velvet
dress. Her beautiful face, with its haunted eyes, looked back at the milliner and seamstress.