"I'm trying to locate a girl named Cindy Waskowitz who graduated from Hillston High in nineteen forty-seven. Is this her home?"
"Hold it a minute," the woman said. I could hear her talking to someone else in the room. I couldn't make out what she was saying. She came back on the line. "You want to know about Cindy."
"That's right. Please."
"This wasn't her home. But I can tell you about her. I'm her aunt. You want to know about her?"
"Please."
"It was the glands. I couldn't remember the word. My daughter just told me. The glands. When she got out from high school she weighed two hundred. From there she went up like balloons. Two hundred, two fifty, three hundred. When she died in the hospital she was nearly four hundred. She'd been over four hundred once, just before she went in the hospital. Glands, it was."
I remembered the rebellious eyes. Girl trapped inside the prison of white, soft flesh. A dancing girl, a lithe, quick-moving girl forever lost inside that slow inevitable encroachment. Stilled finally, and buried inside her suet prison.
"Is your daughter about the same age Cindy would have been?"
"A year older. She's married and three kids already." The woman chuckled warmly.
"Could I talk to your daughter?"