THE FAT MINDER

As a result of that painful evening, Rosalind the Fat Minder injected herself into the private life of Paige Wetherhead’s eating.  She was about thirty, with long dark hair and a sharp, handsome face.  She had a dancer’s body, muscular, stretched out but thin, and she arrived in a black leotard with a sweater thrown over her shoulders.  “Hi, Mrs. Wetherhead.  I’m Rosalind.  Where's the food?”
“In the refrigerator.  But aren’t we supposed to avoid that?”
“Not now.  I have to see what you’ve got in there, to know what we’re up against.”
“You’re up against a hell of a lot of prune Danish,” was what Paige wanted to say, but she resisted.  There was something funny about this whole business, but Andy wouldn’t think so, and she wanted to make a good impression.
Rosalind opened the door and started grabbing the butter, cheese, sour cream - everything Paige needed to make her luscious dishes, now a thing of the past.  “This is loaded, just loaded,” she barked as she tossed all the containers into the trash compactor.  Then she hit the cupboard in the pantry.  First to go was the tomato aspic, which Paige loved to have for lunch, then the pineapple in syrup, next the Bing cherries, finally the cans of stew that were to protect them in an earthquake.  “Loaded, what can I say?”  When she found Paige’s stash of peanut butter, stars shot through her eyes.  “We’ve hit pay dirt.”
Obviously this young woman was going to introduce Paige to an alternative set of food wonders.  Rosalind lifted out one jar of the nutty, natural peanut butter that Paige loved.  She pulled off a long piece of paper towel and drove it straight down the center of the bottle, like a flying wedge.  She pulled it out just as dramatically, holding it up before Paige's face.  Now it was infused with disgusting brownish oil, like something that might emerge from a car engine.  “You see,” Rosalind said triumphantly.  “Loaded!  This fat is what clogs your arteries until you die.”  Ah, the lowly fate of peanut butter.  Killer of human beings, death to hordes of school children who had never met Rosalind Fine.  Paige could see their grisly future writ large in twenty million sandwich bags.