Cedar Rapids near New Holland

Cedar Rapids serves as both a reference point for judging bodies and a landscape of familiar landmarks that cannot quite make a homecoming feel like home. The city’s apparent normality is shaped by size, memory, and the practical pressures of housing discrimination and a weight-loss effort.

A Local Standard of Size

At Westdale Mall, the narrator sees a population whose broad, stout bodies make large size seem ordinary. Before Edison’s arrival, she had used this visible comparison to reassure herself that she was not overweight: if nearly everyone around her seemed heavier, her own size appeared unremarkable. The thought exposes how an idea of normality can be made relative to the bodies most often encountered in public.

The narrator likens the region’s prevailing proportions to the figures in a Fernando Botero painting, and describes giantism as a recognizable local style. Yet that apparently expanded standard does not free people from assumptions about weight. She observes that even those considered average are presumed to want to be thinner and to feel shame or anxiety about mirrors, clothing sizes, and being weighed. The city’s everyday standard therefore offers both a temporary reprieve from feeling exceptional and a continuing culture of body judgment.

Landmarks on the Search for a Home

During the search for an apartment in New Holland, the narrator drives with Edison past places that might connect him with childhood visits to their grandparents: the town-center wooden windmill, De Vries Bakery and its Dutch Letters, Norman Borlaug Park, and the white silo associated with the long drive from Los Angeles. These landmarks are close enough to Cedar Rapids’s regional world to form part of the siblings’ remembered Iowa landscape, but recognition does not restore a settled sense of belonging.

The familiar sights have changed or feel diminished. Edison finds the windmill jarringly small; the bakery, which still sells its S-shaped almond-paste pastries, will become a source of temptation during their food-restricted plan. The retired fire engine that once stood in the park as a playground attraction is gone, and Himmel’s Meatpacking Plant no longer has its signature pink plaster pig on the roof. The details make the landscape a measure of the distance between remembered childhood and the present, rather than a simple route back to it.

Housing and Public Encounters

The apartment search is constrained by the siblings’ effort to remain within a half-hour walk of Solomon Drive. New Holland has about 16,000 residents but sprawls at its edges, so that limit makes the available options feel uncertain. Elsewhere in the search, three landlords first sound receptive over the phone, then say an apartment has been taken after seeing Edison. The narrator suspects they fear he will damage a property and finds that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not cover obesity, leaving such refusals legal.

At Walmart, the narrator’s purchase of a heavy-duty scale prompts remarks from other shoppers. A man behind her jokes about not wanting to know his weight, and a woman ahead agrees; the narrator distinguishes such ignorance from self-deception. The scale turns weighing from an abstract element of the siblings’ plan into a public object that invites familiar jokes and reveals how readily body size becomes shared, casual conversation.

A Place That Does Not Become Home

The landmarks fail to settle Edison. Crossing town, he appears unable to understand what he is doing there, while the wide skies and open spaces seem to intensify his unease. It is early December: the fields are bare and the skies gray. The remembered region offers recognizability, but the present-day town does not provide the reassurance the narrator hoped its familiar sights might bring.

Cedar Rapids and its surrounding Iowa landscape thus hold two competing standards in view: bodies that seem ordinary by local comparison, and the persistent judgments attached to weight. For the siblings, the same regional setting is also practical and intimate—a place of housing searches, errands, remembered landmarks, and a scale—without becoming an uncomplicated refuge.