Sarah C. Baldwin: PIETÀ • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Sarah C. Baldwin
PIETÀ

I wanted to be thin, thin like Earlene. College food and a middle-class life had left me doughy, but decades had whittled her into something edgy and lean—a slash of charcoal, a licorice Twizzler: black turtleneck, black polyester pants, black hair hanging straight between her bony shoulders. Skin the color of skim-milked coffee, cheekbones like fossils in a dried riverbed. The strings of the black pouch where she kept her waitressing tips had to orbit her waist several times before being short enough to tie. Only her shoes were heavy—black, thick soled, manly.

Unlike me, she wasn’t scared of the cook, a scrawny marionette jumpy from coke, Adam’s apple bobbing as he flipped steaks and flung profanities. She was tough, scolding me after a man came to the register and said Gimme two twenties for a ten and I did before realizing what I’d done. And she was kind, helping me with my tables when I got behind, whispering I’ll water your customers, you get their food. She lived on cigarettes and Tab—out of poverty, I think, and an indifference to eating that I envied.

Then one night after closing she crumpled, weeping, and I found myself sitting on the curb holding the husk of her across my lap. Every wail seemed to leave her lighter. I was unforgivably young. I did not understand that a woman like Earlene could have her heart broken. I whispered consolations, but even holding her I craved her thinness, ached for it, would have stolen it if I could, because I somehow knew my life was too soft to chisel me into anything so slender, anything so sharp.

Sarah C. Baldwin is a Rhode Island-based writer whose work has appeared in Salon, Pangyrus, In Short, The Rumpus, OxMag, Autofocus, and elsewhere, as well as in numerous university magazines. Two of her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her articles have received recognition from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Association of American Medical Colleges. Links to her work can be found at sarahcbaldwin.com.