Corpse Suzette

bore witness to the driver’s
extensive travels. According to the faded, torn banners, he had visited all of
the world’s great wonders: Old Faithful, the Stardust Casino, the Tuscaloosa
Rattlesnake Farm, and Joe’s Catfish Shack in the Heart of the Ozarks.
    But smack in the middle of
all the others, one of the bumper stickers was all the more obvious because it
was bright yellow and not as faded. Apparently a new addition to the montage, it
read: save a whale—harpoon a fat chick.
    Savannah cast a sideways
look at Abigail and was surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. It was a
disgusting sentiment, no doubt, but the world was full of such insults. She was
taken aback by Abigail’s sensitivity to such insensitivity.
    “It should be against the
law to put something like that on your car,” Abby said, her voice shaky. “Don’t
you agree?”
    Savannah shrugged. “I can
see why it upsets you, but I’ve always thought that a body should be able to say
whatever’s on their mind without it being illegal. How else are we going to be
able to tell the assholes from the good folks? That yahoo puts a thing like
that on his car, we know he’s an idiot from a block away. Forewarned and all
that.”
    But Abigail shook her head
vigorously and said, “No, it should be illegal. Can you imagine the uproar if,
instead of saying ‘Fat Chick’ it said ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Black Man?’ Somebody would
shoot his tires out. Somebody else would sue him for two-hundred and fifty
thousand dollars and win. The ACLU would be all over it. Because society has
decided not to tolerate that sort of thing. But you can bash a fat woman at
home, at work, on late-night talk shows, and people everywhere will laugh.”
    Tammy spoke up from the
backseat, her words soft and hesitant. “I guess it’s because society believes
that a lesbian is born a lesbian, and a black person is born black. But they
think a fat person chooses to be that way.”
    “Sure they think that,”
Abby said. “They think we’re all a bunch of lazy slobs who do nothing but lie
around all day, shoving junk food into our faces. They think a simple change of
lifestyle would just fix everything. Eat right and exercise! Yeah, right. That
works for most people, but not for all of us. It’s a lot more complicated than
that.”
    Savannah wasn’t going to
argue with her. Years ago, when she had been at war against her own body, she
had tried every diet in the world. But after months and months of counting
every calorie, exercising herself half to death, eating nothing but “wholesome”
food and still gaining weight, or going to bed hungry night after night and
losing next to nothing, she had decided her body had other plans.
    One morning she looked in
the mirror and saw a barely thinner, miserably unhappy, sallow woman whose hair
was falling out, who couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without nearly
fainting, who hated the world and everybody in it... and she had decided to
love her body and herself more than that.
    She had never dieted
again—in spite of the yahoos with insulting bumper stickers, late-night TV
comedians and their hurtful jokes, the constant barrage of commercial ads that
hawked one weight-loss solution or another, and fashion designers with their
stick-thin models.
    And she was fine with it.
    She only wished that young
women like Abigail could be fine with it, too.
    “It’s too bad,” Abigail was
saying, “that in this world there are more jerks like that one in front of us
than there are people like Jeremy.”
    “But you’re on your way to
see Jeremy,” Savannah reminded her. “You’re choosing to spend your time with
someone like him. And that guy in front of us... you can just chalk him up as
an idiot; give him the mental finger and keep walkin’.”
    Abigail gave her a long,
thoughtful look. “Is that what you do?”
    “No, I’m a Southerner. I
mentally lop his head off with a great big sword, watch it roll across the
ground, kick it into a ditch, and spit on it. Then I walk away. Us
Georgia gals are a little more mentally violent in the way we deal with people
who irritate us.” Abby laughed. “I love it! I think us Yankee gals might have
to follow your example. Maybe I’ll mentally push him onto a subway track and
watch the train run over him.”
    “Whatever it takes to get
the job done,” Savannah replied. “As long as you maintain your inner spiritual
tranquility.”
    “You guys are weird,” Tammy
said from the