Excerpts from
Shut Up and Be Beautiful
By Vita Andersen
From "Joy"
What, it suddenly occurs to Joy, if the scales are wrong and they´re old anyway, and maybe she doesn´t weigh 58.3 kg, but only 57, or maybe even 59. She rummages around for something heavy to check if the scales are right. The heaviest thing she can find is her encyclopaedia and she´s got 17 volumes. She begins hauling them out of the bookcase and they´re dusty and she blows the dust off them. God, I´m so stupid, thinks Joy. How much does an encyclopaedia weigh, I wonder if you can ring the publisher. Good afternoon, how much do your encyclopaedias weigh. Joy looks at the clock, 5 minutes have passed. She´s just got time to buy something heavy to weigh.
In the supermarket, the first thing Joy buys is 4 kg of washing powder for 19 kroner. But she´s not sure that 4 kg will be enough to check the scales. Maybe she should buy a completely new set of scales, but she wouldn´t be sure if they weighed accurately either. She buys a litre of pear juice and a litre of prune juice and that´s two kilos. A jar of curried herrings, that´s 800g, and then of course she´ll have to buy something that´s 200g otherwise it´ll be too difficult to work out. She buys 200g of fudge. Now she´s got 7 kg. She wanders round a bit and what should she do now. She considers buying 10 tins of mackerel in tomato sauce and they´re on offer and they´re not fattening, but each tin weighs 127g and that´s too difficult to work out. She can see from the supermarket clock that she´ll have to hurry up. She stops bothering about the cost. Joy just needs something heavy and it´s got to be here and now. A whole kilo of farmhouse cheese and two litres of plain yoghurt, now she´s up to 8 kg. But having left the dairy section it occurs to her that yoghurt doesn´t keep very long. She´d better buy some sugar to put on it. Then she can live off the yoghurt over the weekend and start losing weight properly from Monday. 200g soft brown sugar and then she needs something of 750g and 4 kilos. If she gets that, she quickly works out, then she´ll have 15 kg and that must be enough to check the scales with. Joy promptly buys two bags of mini-rissoles at half a kilo each. Now she´s sweating all over and the arithmetic´s getting complicated. At the cold counter she takes two 300g tubs of Italian salad and 4 bags of prawns on offer and they´re certainly not fattening. If she buys 250g of mayonnaise then she needs two more kilos. But two kilos. What the hell weighs two kilos. She thinks about buying some white wine, but what does white wine weigh. Maybe she should weigh the white wine first and find out what it weighs on her scales. But if the scales are wrong, then the weight of the white wine will be wrong too. She could always go on a white wine diet. I must be going mad, thinks Joy. She quickly buys two litres of ice cream on offer. One litre vanilla and one litre nougat. True enough it doesn´t keep very long in the ice-cube box, as she remembers when she sees that it´s already beginning to defrost a bit in the trolley. And ice cream´s fattening, but surely she can eat a little ice cream even though she´s got to lose weight.
Translated by Gaye Kynoch
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