Happy 4th of July!

This post is completely unrelated to its title, I simply thought a remembrance of Independence was decidedly appropriate.

HELPED 1
The fat family of father, daughters and son moved to a little east coast town, Cordage, soon after World War II. In an effort for the daughters to exercise their entrepreneurial spirit while maintaining their girth, they opened a donut shop. Business boomed. Profits were astronomical. Really. Cordage’s kiddies and grown-ups alike dreamed of the daughters’ powdered, glazed, and jam-filled varieties. High and low society townspeople found common ground in that little shop. The educated teacher and the learning student, the holy minister and the depraved lawbreaker, the respected judge and the seedy drunk: all entered the same threshold, experienced the same wholesome (well, comparatively) delights, and exited in a similar fashion (namely: with mouth full of lovely, malice/prejudice-melting softness, eyes rolled upward in ecstasy, and hand clutching bags of however-many-dozens more of the sweet distractions.) Donuts became representational of simple pleasures; they made the banalities of everyday post-war life less humdrum, more bearable, somehow. The town’s maxims were soon doughnut related: A donut in the hand is worth a bag behind the counter, Sometimes a bit of time in the frying pan can do a world of good… now just look at this donut, Don‘t put all of your donut holes in one bag, Don‘t measure your donuts before they‘re fried, Don‘t judge a donut by its appearance - you can never tell if it‘ll have jam or custard filling, The early customer gets the hot donut, and so forth. The donut shop became a sort of coalescent town center. Cordage thrived. But soon, Lawry-father, retired army cook and proprietor of the town gas station, ordered his daughters to close in jealous protection of his family’s status as obese. He had noticed that the people in the town had begun to soften; their paunchiness rivaling the paunchiness of his own family. “We don’t need to turn the whole world into fatsos! Everyone don‘t need to get fat little tummies!” he roared, when demanding that the “closed” sign remain permanently in the window, the neon pink flash of “Fresh! Hot! Donuts!” never to flicker in its ridiculously enticing, irresistibly mouth-watering way again. His demand could possibly be mistaken as benevolence towards Cordage‘s citizens (although they didn‘t view it as such), but in all reality it was just selfishness. If everyone in the town became fat, his carefully, consistently, constantly plumped and growing family would not be special anymore. Everyone else would be like they were: flabby. Grossly or otherwise (which ended up happening 50 years later anyway, despite this father’s vigilance). The donut shop closed. The town returned to its relative slimness. The family remained fat.
Until one day, the single son among four daughters, for reasons of his own, stopped eating. He became waif-like, defying his family’s identity, refusing any of the would-be successful multitude of leftover sugared crullers, apple fritters, or, his mammoth sister Ciciona’s favorite: chocolate sprinkled rings, with the sprinkles congruent with the seasons and holidays. Months passed, the donut stash soon diminished… then disappeared. Brownies became the family’s new donut. Finally, Ciciona made a special batch of triple-chocolate fudge brownies solely for her skeletal sibling (Which was quite a sacrifice, considering triple-chocolate fudge brownies were her new favorite. But, to her everlasting credit, she did not sneak one bite, not one lick of the spoon or the bowl.) He succumbed beautifully, eating the entire plate of good-cause, good-turn, good-Samaritan gooiness. He even licked the bowl and spoon. Like any self-respecting brownie consumer, he was left with a halo of brown scrumptiousness around his mouth. (But from that day, he could never rid himself of a brown, mouth-shadow in similitude of that eating-habit-changing brownie crumb mustache.) With his renewed education in the art of eating, he even grew, a bit.
But the single son always remained the thin one, the anomalous black sheep brown-shadow-mouthed skinny. Lawry-father kept cooking, dishing out military meals in large portions, letting the calorific food enlarge his soldier-children’s navel (or, as the father chuckled to himself: naval) capacities. The single son somehow continued to remain scrawny. The father, while his four daughters expanded satisfactorily, was bewildered. He gave the lean son double helpings, but to no visible avail.
“Ain’t no way of explaining it! Boy, (with cook-father’s ominously chubby forefinger pointing at the boy’s belligerently flat stomach) why aren’t you letting your Daddy’s food give you any nourishment?” The boy protested in his small way, for everything he did as a boy was small since he had stopped eating and then relearned. He made small mistakes in schoolwork. He said small prayers before bed. He read small books. He dreamed small dreams. He joked small jokes and laughed small, silent laughs. He complained small complaints. But worst of all, and maybe the worst worst of living small, he made small strokes in the blue ocean near their home. Which is why, when he begged his kind, brownie-making, gargantuan sister, Ciciona to go to the beach with him one day, and she was pulled out in a strong undertow and began to drown, he - in all of his ten-year old smallness- with his small strokes and frail muscles and general peewee being, could not save her. So Lawry, his father, asked again,
“Boy, (chubby finger, shaking in quiet grief, still pointing at the boy’s lean abdomen) why aren’t you a good, big soldier? I fed and gave grit to all of my boys through the war and none of them, cough, fell, cough, hurried wipe of eye, from being too puny. So why aren’t you, my own boy, more than a stinking runt? Huh? Why are you so puny you can‘t even save…cough, cover mouth with hand, look away?” The boy could only whisper in his smaller than small voice: something inaudible. A mouthed nothing, small workings of a small mouth trying to say something much too big for it. Which resulted in rage and the boy’s immediate erasure from a disappointed, disgusted, currently emotive and inconsolable, one-daughter deprived ex-military cook’s mind. The chubby finger shook, fell. Along with all of Lawry-father’s concerns for his only son. The man left the room.
His son remained for a few moments, crying a small cry to himself. Using small hands to wipe large, sad eyes, Sal, the single son, (named in fond remembrance of fellow-army cook Pascoal from Brazil who would always yell, in clarion call manner, for “Moh sal! Moh sal!” More salt) tasted his own name - his own salt. After this day, Sal, with the taste of salt always in his mouth and the faint brown shadow always around it, started to do some things big. Lawry-father, meanwhile, did not worry about his Living Remembrance of Pascoal, but devoted even more of his energy into fattening up his remaining three daughters and to adding more and more pumps to his beloved gas station. Sal grew, but not in the way his father had once hoped. (His father had no hopes for the boy now. He had in reality somehow removed the boy’s existence from his consciousness.) Sal still did small things most of the time. But he learned to swim big and to speak big when he wanted to. He could cry big as well, when he thought about Ciciona and brownies and donuts. His body, which had always been small, began to catch up with his large eyes, which had until then been the only big thing about him. He grew up. He towered over his elephantine sisters, who increased in size and favor with their father daily. He loomed over his father, who took no notice of his son or his son’s growth. Sal became pretty big. But not in the way his father had wanted. For, to Sal’s forever, perplexing shame, he could not become fat. Poor soul.
Sal was not ten years old any longer. He graduated from high school with letters in academics and swimming and was accepted on full scholarship to one of the west coast’s small colleges. His father remained oblivious. When one of Sal’s teachers congratulated Sal‘s father on the performance of such a fine young man of a son, the ex-army cook could only look at the Mrs. with puzzled eyebrows and ajar mouth. After a few seconds of silence, he answered with a perplexed grunt and professional smile, “Would you like unleaded or premium gas, ma’am?” Lawry-father has not acknowledged to anyone (even his three whales) the fact that he has any male children. Not even himself. The whales, prodded by the pudgy finger of a militant father, hardly recognize Sal as reality. Sal, still skinny, has yet to recover from this bizarre removal from his family’s tree.
Ciciona’s drowning - which Sal viewed as the source of his sudden erasure - led to his choice of occupation. He became a lifeguard. Soon he graduated from the west coast’s premier water safety school and married and raised a family of his own. Five children, in fact. He tried to reciprocate his family members’ forgetfulness, attempting to block out any childhood memories or hometown connections and repressing every thought of sisters or father. But just when he felt he had succeeded, he found himself one night, after a long day at the city pool, echoing his father’s enraged yell from so many years earlier: “Why did you buy ice-cream again, you guys? Everyone doesn’t need to get fat little tummies!” Mortified, he sought for help.