Weight Loss Surgery

She moved onto the street long after my husband moved out and away.

The real estate crash must have busted up the fortunes of the folks who lived at the top of the street. One house was equipped with an elaborate wood post and wire fence. The other boasted large white cameras bolted above each entrance. Each house sat empty for a few months, and then a couple moved into one and a single man moved into the other. The single man immediately started ripping out the weird fence. The couple kept the cameras.

I heard her before I ever saw her. She had a thick Appalachian accent and a temper toward the single man across the street. They fought. A lot. I sometimes saw her husband walking back from the single man's house. Then I'd hear yelling. I would sit in my living room and listen to it escalate. I started calling her "Weight Loss Surgery" because I never learned her name, but I knew she'd had weight loss surgery. I knew it because she told me she was going to have it. She told me she went to Mexico to have it. She told the single man she had it. She yelled it at him regularly when they fought over who-knows-what.

I think I know what. The what was probably drugs.

But I heard him call her names: ugly, loose-skinned, skinny bitch, fat bitch. And I heard her defend herself. She screamed, time and again, "I had weight loss surgery!" She yelled it after telling him she hated him and she yelled it after telling him to stay off her property. She slurred it sometimes, but she yelled it often.

My own interactions with Weight Loss Surgery were few and far between. Once, she came up to me as my father and I were getting out of my car. My dad was in town to install motion lights in the driveway and under the back deck after my house had been broken into. Weight Loss Surgery was standing in the middle of the street when we pulled up. She was carrying a red plastic cup. She came over and asked me, "Is that your husband?"

"That's my Dad," I answered.

"Hmph," she said. "My Daddy is my husband."

Then there was the time I was working in the front yard, making the flower beds presentable since the For Sale sign was already stuck in the ground. She wanted to see the house.

"Come on in," I said.

She swayed and stumbled and slurred her words as she told me which color to paint each room. The hallway should be green, but not dark green, lime green. "Almose ne-uhn," she said. The living room should've been turquoise instead of the "boring gray" I'd painted it.

"I had weight loss surgery," she said.

"You do look thinner," I responded.

Maybe with every pound she lost, her voice got louder. She kept yelling at the neighbor. He kept yelling back. And I had another Cincinnati story to tell. I loved that city for the stories it gave me, and my neighborhood always delivered.