We had some pretty colorful friends in upstate New York: poets, writers, and intellectuals, even a couple listed in the New York Social Register -- all enjoying a simpler small-town existence, with sunny summers, rich falls, and thigh-high winters.
My mom and her twin sisters had long left the Mormon church. She tried to get us to go to the Unitarian church in town, as unitarianism was becoming popular as kind of a catch-all faith. Being so young, I went along with the Sunday School thing, but my brother was instinctively opposed to the idea and was not afraid to voice this. One time our minister was caught streaking through town and arrested. This absurd hypocrisy effectively proved our case and she finally threw up her hands about church.
Weekends were often spent with our mom's friends. She had met a woman named Netta who lived in a neighboring town. Netta was the largest woman I had ever seen and probably weighed over 300 pounds. We all loved her. She lived in a capacious old Victorian home that had many interesting things in it, not the least of which was one of those contraptions that had a band which went around your waist or hips and then supposedly vibrated the fat off. That was our first stop when we went to Netta's. We would spend hours down at the creek catching crayfish.
Netta's boyfriend was named Mead, and he was probably a third of her size. Netta's husband had died and she had sued the negligent doctor, winning a huge settlement. She had a rich life in many ways, but always wanted to lose weight. One time my sister went downstairs in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and saw Netta eating a stick of butter in front of the refrigerator.
We would sometimes sleep over at Netta's...while the parents had wild late-night poker games with drinks and bags of real money by their sides. There was something mysterious and intriguing about those poker games and I always wished I was old enough to join in.
This bohemian country life didn't last long, as we soon made our next move into the big city of Utica.
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Re: Stick of butter eating
ReplyDeleteI'm working on a story about Ambien, and this detail (one of many from your splendidly evocative writings) caught my eye.
There are a couple interesting diagnoses in the medical literature.
NES, or night-eating syndrome, is pretty common, with most of the victims being conscious of their ingestion
then there is SRED, or sleep-related eating disorder, where people get up within 3 hours of going to sleep and kind of eat on autopilot, usually highly caloric foods. About half the patients have no or little memory of these episodes.
Drugs like Ambien appear to trigger SRED in some people, as well as increase amnesia in formerly semi-aware SRED'ers.
I think poor Netta may have been a pre-Ambien victim of some form of this disorder...
Wonderful memoir writing -- keep it up!
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