40 for 40, Chapter 5: Blind

Chapter 5 of 15 of my new weight gain/stuck story, 40 for 40.

CHAPTER 5: BLIND

Marion stepped into the old pharmacy. She had to go to the historic district of town to find what she was looking for and there it was in the back corner: an old coin operated scale. 

It looked like something out of an old carnival. 

Put in a coin, get a slip of paper with your weight on it. 

She didn’t want to pull their scale out of storage. Roger didn’t want a scale in the house, he thought they encouraged disordered thinking. But when Marion and Roger first moved in together, Marion felt like she needed it to help keep Roger’s fattening tendencies under control. Though really, all it did was show her the dial slowly moving upward. She never could get it to go the other direction. After the pregnancies, when she wanted to track her weight for the doc, she packed it away, content to never know her weight again. She’d even taken on the fat acceptance practice of telling her doctor she didn’t want to know and refusing to let the nurses weigh her at appointments.

To meet her 40 pound goal she needed to know what she weighed at the start. But she didn’t actually want to know yet. The last time she remembered being weighed was at the end of her third pregnancy, she was 235 pounds then and felt enormous. Though carrying a tiny person inside you is no comparison to carrying fat. Since then she relied on clothing fitting or not fitting to get a sense of her weight changing. 

So her plan was to put in a coin, and then hide the slip of paper in her purse unseen.

Maybe in a few months she’d be able to look at it. Looking back at what she weighed a few months ago when she was “thinner” wouldn’t be as shocking as looking at her weight in the fat moment. 

Marion dug out a quarter and went to put it in the machine.

“Max Weight 250lbs.”

The pharmacist had assured her the antique scale was still accurate, but he didn’t warn her that people had a difference sense of maximum weight 100 years ago. Most scales today went well over 300. 

She wondered if she exceeded the scale’s maximum. 

She weighed 235 pounds two years ago. By all other metrics, she knew that she weighed more now than she did at her pregnancy peak, but she didn’t know if that meant 240, 250, more?

She didn’t want to ask the pharmacist what would happen if she exceeded the scale’s weight.

Certain there was no one nearby who could see her, Marion dropped in the coin, closed her eyes and stepped on the scale. 

She heard the scale clank down with her weight and the needle spin. She worried she’d broken it but didn’t want to open her eyes.

A bell ding’d and Marion peeked down, seeing a tiny card of paper popped out for her to take.

Marion quickly stepped off the scale and turned around so she wouldn’t noticed the spinning needle. She put the card behind her library card in her purse. Her heart was racing. She felt like she should run from the store.  

Halfheartedly she strolled the isles, as if she had some other reason to be there, she bought a candy bar and then hurried out to her car.

She stared at her purse on the passenger seat.

She wanted to know. 

She opened the candy bar and took a bite to take her mind off of it.

She worried if she knew, that her plan would be over before it even started.