The Illustrated Woman, Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Woman

When a new patient wanders into the office and stretches out to stutter forth a compendious ticker tape of free association, it is up to the psychiatrist immediately beyond, behind-and above to decide at just which points of the anatomy the client is in touch with the couch.

In other words, where does the patient make contact with reality?

Some people seem to float half an inch above any surface whatsoever. They have not seen earth in so long, they have become somewhat airsick.

Still others so firmly weight themselves down, clutch, thrust, heave their bodies toward reality, that long after they are gone you find their tiger shapes and claw marks in the upholstery.

In the case of Emma Fleet, Dr. George C. George was a long time deciding which was furniture and which was woman and where what touched which. For, to begin with, Emma Fleet resembled a couch.

“Mrs. Emma Fleet, Doctor,” announced his receptionist.

Dr. George C. George gasped.

For it was a traumatic experience, seeing this woman shunt herself through the door without benefit of railroad switchman or the ground crews who rush about under Macy’s Easter balloons, heaving on lines, guiding the massive images to some eternal hangar off beyond.

In came Emma Fleet, as quick as her name, the floor shifting like a huge scales under her weight.

Dr. George must have gasped again, guessing her at four hundred on the hoof, for Emma Fleet smiled as if reading his mind. “Four hundred two and a half pounds, to be exact,” she said.

He found himself staring at his furniture.

“Oh, it’ll hold all right,” said Mrs. Fleet intuitively. She sat down. The couch yelped like a cur. Dr. George cleared his throat.

“Before you make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I feel I should say immediately and honestly that we in the psychiatrical field have had little success in inhibiting appetites.

The whole problem of weight and food has so far eluded our ability for coping. A strange admission, perhaps, but unless we put our frailties forth, we might be in danger of fooling ourselves and thus taking money under false pretenses. So, if you are here seeking help for your figure, I must list myself among the nonplussed.”

“Thank you for your honesty, Doctor,” said Emma Fleet. “However, I don’t wish to lose. I’d prefer your helping me gain another one hundred or two hundred pounds.”

“Oh, no!” Dr. George exclaimed.

“Oh, yes. But my heart will not allow what my deep dear soul would most gladly endure. My physical heart might fail at what my loving heart and mind would ask of it.”

She sighed. The couch sighed. “Well, let me brief you. I’m married to Willy Fleet. We work for the Dillbeck-Horsemann Traveling Shows. I’m known as Lady Bountiful. And Willy…”

She swooned up out of the couch and glided or rather escorted her shadow across the floor. She opened the door.

Beyond, in the waiting room, a cane in one hand, a straw hat in the other, seated rigidly, staring at the wall, was a tiny man with tiny feet and tiny hands and tiny bright-blue eyes in a tiny head.

He was, at the most, one would guess, three feet high, and probably weighed sixty pounds in the rain. But there was a proud, gloomy, almost violent look of genius blazing in that small but craggy face.

“That’s Willy Fleet,” said Emma lovingly, and shut the door.

The couch, sat on, cried again. Emma beamed at the psychiatrist, who was still staring, in shock, at the door.

“No children, of course,” he heard himself say.

“No children.” Her smile lingered. “But that’s not my problem, either. Willy, in a way, is my child. And I, in a way, besides being his wife, am his mother. It all has to do with size, I imagine, and we’re happy with the way we’ve balanced things off.”

“Well, if your problem isn’t children, or your size or his, or controlling weight, then what … ?”

Emma Fleet laughed lightly, tolerantly. It was a nice laugh, like a girl’s somehow caught in that great body and throat. “Patience, Doctor. Mustn’t we go back down the road to where Willy and I first met?”

The doctor shrugged, laughed quietly himself and relaxed, nodding. “You must.”

“During high school,” said Emma Fleet. “I weighed one-eighty and tipped the scales at two-fifty when I was twenty-one. Needless to say, I went on few summer excursions. Most of the time I was left in drydock.

I had many girl friends, however, who liked to be seen with me. They weighed one-fifty, most of them, and I made them feel svelte. But that’s a long time ago. I don’t worry over it any more. Willy changed all that.”

“Willy sounds like a remarkable man,” Dr. George found himself saying, against all the rules.

“Oh, he is, he is! He smoulders-with ability, with talent as yet undiscovered, untapped!” she said, quickening warmly. “God bless him, he leaped into my life like summer lightning! Eight years ago I went with my girl friends to the visiting Labor Day carnival.

By the end of the evening, the girls had all been seized away from me by the running boys who, rushing by, grabbed and took them off into the night. There I was alone with three Kewpie Dolls, a fake alligator handbag and nothing to do but make the Guess Your Weight man nervous by looking at him every time I went by and pretending like at any moment I might pay my money and dare him to guess.”

“But the Guess Your Weight man wasn’t nervous! After I had passed three times I saw him staring at me. With awe, yes, with admiration! And who was this Guess Your Weight man? Willy Fleet, of course. The fourth time I passed he called to me and said I could get a prize free if only I’d let him guess my weight. He was all feverish and excited.

He danced around. I’d never been made over so much in my life. I blushed. I felt good. So I sat in the scales chair. I heard the pointer whizz up around and I heard Willy whistle with honest delight.

“Two hundred and eighty-nine pounds!” he cried. “Oh boy oh boy, you’re lovely!”

“I’m what?” I said.

“You’re the loveliest woman in the whole world,” said Willy, looking me right in the eye.

I blushed again. I laughed. We both laughed. Then I must have cried, for the next thing, sitting there, I felt him touch my elbow with concern. He was gazing into my face, faintly alarmed. “I haven’t said the wrong thing?” he asked.

“No,” I sobbed, and then grew quiet. “The right thing, only the right thing. It’s the first time anyone ever … “

“What?” he said.

“Ever put up with my fat,” I said.

“You’re not fat,” he said. “You’re large, you’re big, you’re wonderful. Michelangelo would have loved you. Titian would have loved you. Da Vinci would have loved you. They knew what they were doing in those days. Size. Size is everything.

I should know. Look at me. I traveled with Singer’s Midgets for six seasons, known as Jack Thimble. And oh my God, dear lady, you’re right out of the most glorious part of the Renaissance. Bernini, who built those colonnades around the front of St. Peter’s and inside at the altar, would have lost his everlasting soul just to know someone like you.”

“Don’t!” I cried. “I wasn’t meant to feel this happy. It’ll hurt so much when you stop.”

“I won’t stop, then,” he said. “Miss . . .”

“Emma Gertz.”

“Emma,” he said, “are you married?”

“Are you kidding?” I said.

“Emma, do you like to travel?”

“I’ve never traveled!”
“Emma,” he said, “this old carnival’s going to be in your town one more week. Come down every night, every day, why not? Talk to me, know me. At the end of the week, who can tell, maybe you’ll travel with me.”

“What are you suggesting?” I said, not really angry or irritated or anything, but fascinated and intrigued that anyone would offer anything to Moby Dick’s daughter.

“I mean marriage!” Willy Fleet looked at me, breathing hard, and I had the feeling that he was dressed in a mountaineer’s rig, alpine hat, climbing boots, spikes, and a rope slung over his baby shoulder. And if I should ask him, “Why are you saying this?” he might well answer, “Because you’re there.”

“But I didn’t ask, so he didn’t answer. We stood there in the night, at the center of the carnival, until at last I started off down the midway, swaying.

“I’m drunk!” I cried. “Oh, so very drunk, and I’ve had nothing to drink.”

“Now that I’ve found you,” called Willy Fleet after me, “you’ll never escape me, remember!”

Stunned and reeling, blinded by his large man’s words sung out in his soprano voice, I somehow blundered from the carnival grounds and trekked home. The next week we were married.”

Emma Fleet paused and looked at her hands.

“Would it bother you if I told about the honeymoon?” she asked shyly.

“No,” said the doctor, then lowered his voice, for he was responding all too quickly to the details. “Please do go on.”

“The honeymoon.” Emma sounded her vox humana. The response from all the chambers of her body vibrated the touch, the room, the doctor, the dear bones within the doctor.

“The honeymoon … was not usual.”

The doctor’s eyebrows lifted the faintest touch. He looked from the woman to the door beyond which, in miniature, sat the image of Edmund Hillary, he of Everest.

“You have never seen such a rush as Willy spirited me off to his home, a lovely dollhouse, really, with one large normal-sized room that was