Turn 79 of 228

Walk home with Diane and chrash at her place. Weigh yourself there. Its up to 340

They walk. The night is warm and the sidewalk is rough and two barefoot women — one 313 pounds with long yellow nails clicking on the concrete, one heavier and hairier with a beard and a smell that precedes her — walk side by side through the Charleswood's empty lobby and out onto Garfield. The streetlights are orange and the blocks pass and neither of them speaks. The silence isn't managed. It isn't awkward. It's the silence of two bodies that have laughed themselves empty and have nothing left to perform. Lena's thighs press together with each step and the belly sways and the piss-soaked seat has dried against her skin and the night air is cool on it and the toenails click and the walk is long and slow and good.

Diane's apartment is four blocks past Lena's — a small building with a buzzer that doesn't work and a stairwell that smells like mildew. Diane pushes the door open and the stairs are narrow and the two of them climb and the steps creak under their combined weight and the hallway is dark and the door opens and the apartment is there. Lena has been here before — she saw it once, the night Diane took off her pants and left them at the Charleswood — but being inside it now, at midnight, with the smell of the theater still on both of them, is different. The apartment is small. A studio with a bed and a desk and a kitchen counter and a bathroom with a dry shower. The carpet is stained. The bed is unmade and the sheets are yellow and the food wrappers are everywhere — chip bags and candy wrappers and empty bottles stacked on the desk and the floor and the kitchen counter. The air is thick. It smells like Diane the way Lena's apartment smells like Lena — unwashed skin and old food and piss and something under it that is just body, just the warm animal fact of a person who stopped managing.

Diane drops the empty bag on the counter and sits on the bed and the frame creaks and the belly spreads across her thighs and she reaches for a bag of peanut butter cups on the nightstand and opens it and eats one and offers the bag to Lena. Lena takes it. The bed is small and the two of them are large and the bed holds them and the springs protest and the wrappers crinkle and the night is quiet. There's a scale in the bathroom — a small digital scale, dust on the display, pushed against the wall under the sink. Lena sees it when she stands to piss in the shower drain. She steps on it the way she steps on her own scale — without ceremony, without bracing. The display flickers. The numbers climb. They settle. Three hundred and forty.

Lena stands on the scale and the number is there — 340, twenty-seven pounds more than this morning, the belly hanging over the display, the body heavier than it was twelve hours ago — and the wish hums and the apartment is warm and the scale holds the number and the number holds her. She steps off and the display goes dark and she squats over the drain and the piss comes warm and steady and it runs across the tile and into the drain and the smell joins the apartment smell and she walks back to the bed and sits and the bed creaks and Diane is eating peanut butter cups and the wrappers are on the sheets and the night is dark and the window is open and the streetlight is orange and the body is 340 pounds and growing.

"You're bigger," Diane says. Not a question. The beard is dark along her jaw and the belly is round and the breasts are heavy and the stretch marks catch the streetlight through the window and the bed is small and the two of them are pressed together — thigh against thigh, belly against belly, the warm soft weight of two bodies that have stopped performing.

"I can feel it," Diane says. "The bed is different."

"Three forty," Lena says. The number sits in the room. Diane doesn't react. She eats another peanut butter cup and the wrapper falls on the sheets and the bed holds them and the streetlight is orange and the apartment is quiet and the night is long and the wish hums and the body grows and the two of them sleep.