David A. Schwinghammer
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· Soldier's Gap
· Soldier's Gap
· Soldier's Gap
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Short Stories
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 12
· Fisher of Men, Chapter 11
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 11
· Honest Thief, Tender Murderer, Chapter 11.
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 10
· Honest Thief, Tender Murderer, Chapter 10
· Fisher of Men, Chapter 10
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 9
· Seminary Boy, a memoir
· Fisher of Men, Chapter Nine
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· Auschwitz (Always Remember Your Name), book review
· Fahrenheit 2021-22
· Biden's Approval Rate Plummeting
· Mr. Trump, have you no sense of decency?
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Poetry
· Should I Take Ballet?
· Caboose
· The Girl Next Door
· Llama, Llama (dedicated to William Blake)
· The Terminal Booger
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· Widow's Peak
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· Alumni Game
· Stradivarius
More poetry...
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David A. Schwinghammer, click here
to update your web pages on AuthorsDen.
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A young nurse goes out on a date with
a grossly overweight doctor.
Polly was a slender blond girl who had often been told she resembled Britney Spears. She had just begun a new job working as a nurse’s aide at the Veteran’s hospital. It was her job to take people’s pulse and temperatures with the new equipment that you stuck in people’s ears. Lots of older men would joke about “sticking that thing in her ear,” and she would always laugh as if she’d never heard that one before.
Then, one day after she’d been at the hospital for six months or so, she was assigned to assist the new doctor. All the preceding night she had dreamed about what he might be like. Her mother and her aunt had joked about how lucky she was to be working in a hospital and about all the eligible doctors she’d meet. She’d argued that she wasn’t interested and that she expected to make her own way in life. Yet, she had to admit that she was intrigued by this new doctor.
She’d been shocked when she met him. You see, Dr. Gordon Weeks weighed over three hundred pounds and mostly sat at a table in the examining room pretending to work on reports. How could anyone so obviously out of shape get to be a doctor? she wondered.
They worked together for a week. He would treat old men for arthritis, and administer medicine to lower blood pressure, and even sometimes dispense advise to ulcer patients who were having trouble with their wives. She was dying to ask him if, through some chance, he was married. Could it be he’d gained all that weight while he’d been in medical school? But she didn’t know how to get started. It would be too disrepectful. She needed this job. Her mother was widowed and her brother was studying to be a cardiologist.
Finally he brought the matter up himself. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “And I know what you’re thinking. You never look me in the eye. You think I’m obscenely fat, don’t you?”
She’d been wondering that very minute where in the world he’d found a smock big enough to fit him. “I do not,” she said. “You must think I’m some ditzy little teenager like Britney Spears. People do have glandular conditions.”
“I just like food. Lots of it. I have a loaf of toast for breakfast and a dozen eggs. That’s not a glandular condition.”
“But how did you, you . . .?”
“How did I get this job? They can’t hold my weight against me. That would be discriminatory. I could sue.”
“But the patients. Don’t you think it’s rather like a doctor who smokes?”
“I’ve seen you watching me when you thought I wasn’t looking. I’m wondering if you would . . . if you would consider . . . if you could find your way clear . . .”
“You’re asking if I’ll go out with you? But I’m only eighteen. You must be at least twenty-seven if you’re a doctor.”
“Twenty-nine. My father is fifteen years older than my mother. Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
They went to see “The Lord of the Rings.” He knew all about it, had read the books and ever gave her a bio of the director, Peter Jackson.
They had dinner afterwards at a French restaurant. She’d never been to one before. He didn’t make a pig of himself that night, which she thought showed her a lot of consideration.
The next day he showed up at work with a dozen roses. When a nurse asked her where they came from, she said they were from a distant admirer.
“Why didn’t you tell her they were from me?” he said when they were alone. Are you ashamed?”
“Company policy,” she lied. “I could lose my job.”
That seemed to satisfy him for the moment.
The next week they went to a Billy Joel concert down in the Twin Cities. He knew all about Billy Joel, went on and on about his relationship with Christy Brinkley and how “Uptown Girl” was about her. Polly was thinking, “He should be on Jeopardy.”
She was beginning to like him a little bit when he asked her to marry him. She felt like the girl whose boyfriend had asked her to marry him at a baseball game on national television. She must not have liked him because she completely freaked and ran out into the aisle, yelling, “No, no way!”
She didn’t say no; she said she’d think about it. Her imagination ran away with her. How long would it take before she stopped being a novelty and he reverted to his old style of eating a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs for breakfast?
Finally, she told him that if he lost fifty pounds she would agree.
He spent the next six weeks running and working out at the gym. He wasn’t a bad looking dude under all that flab. When they weighed him on the date agreed he was down to 253.
He was three pounds off. It was a definite way out, but she didn’t want to be a nitpicker, so they set the date for Christmas. She was still revolted by the possibility of having children with him. She could see her portly children asking her why nobody ever wanted to go out with them.
If push came to shove she’d quit her job and move to another city where he’d never be able to find her.
Surprise, surprise. He kept right on running and going to the gym religiously. At the end of September he was down to 225 pounds and had begun to show some definition in his muscles. And the other girls were starting to pay attention. She couldn’t believe it. She was jealous.
Then one day they were at her apartment watching TV. She was addicted to soap operas.
He said, “Do we have to watch this? There’s a Steve McQueen movie on I haven’t seen in a coon’s age.”
“I never miss this show,” she said. “If you don’t like soap operas you don’t like me.”
That was when he spilled the beans. He’d been seeing Doctor Gloria Billingham, a dermatologist, and they had a lot more in common than we did. She was a fantasy nut; she went to Star Wars conventions; she knew all the answers on Jeopardy. “Besides,” he said. “I’ve noticed you’ve been putting on a little weight lately.”
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Web Site:
Mystery Writer
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| Reviewed by Ronald Hull |
3/9/2022 |
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I went right to the prologue rather than read Chapter 11, because I always like to start a book at the beginning.
Unfortunately, the book started out quite flat for me. There was no sense of adventure, intrigue or anything else in a young nurse's aide dating an overweight doctor.
I will read a couple of chapters to see if it gets any better.
Ron |
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