She descended into my
life like a great swirling cloud—swerving figure eights in and out
of the Poulet Frites
The next time I saw her was in July. I was lounging on
the stoop outside, watching traffic: packed up cars and moving vans
down the avenue, beeping at each other in hot frustration. She pulled
up in the bus lane, and her hair was different. Not that I’d really
seen it before, but from the first glance I would’ve guessed it a
short, messy crop. In fact, it was long, deep red, and wavy. A silk
scarf wrapped around her neck. She looked at me from under enormous
sunglasses, gleaming black bug eyes that covered half of her face.
Her skin was sleek, and highly polished.
“Look at you, all cool on
a stoop with your drink,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You just look relaxed
is all, while us suckers are stuck in traffic.”
“That’s right,” I said,
smiling and nodding, taking a sip of tepid beer. “What’s your name?”
“Sordidia.”
“Like the island nation?”
“No, Sordidia. Like sordid. You’re thinking
of
“Oh,” I said, scratching
my head.
A bus honked behind her and she skidded away.
One cool night at the end of August, when the sky was still a bluish-purple,
I saw her flip-flopping down the avenue. Bottle blond hair piled up
high and messy, her bright red nails holding a glass bottle of Coke.
I had taken to sitting on the stoop that summer. I wasn’t hoping for
her to pass again, so much as people watching. She still wore
enormous sunglasses. That’s how I knew it was her.
“What’s the good
word?” I asked her as she passed. She wore those shorts with the writing
on the bum. Juicy. Sordidia shuffled and turned to me, looking over
her sunglasses and holding her pop with two-fingered disdain. A pink
patent leather handbag dangled in the crook of her arm.
“Hi,” she
said, a little perplexed.
“Remember me?”
“Um…no, not really.”
“Moving
Day? You said, ‘You look so cool’?”
“It sounds like something I might
say,” she said, shifting her weight and sticking out a hip. The letter
J so beautiful in its distortion. She turned to leave. The hair on
my toes prickled.
“Wait!” I said as she started to lurch forward.
She
turned back.
“What?”
“My name’s Henry.”
“Oh, “ she said, shifting her
weight to the other side. “Nice to meet you. Bye, Henry.”
I sighed.
She said my name.
Suddenly, I didn’t just see her in Mile End,
I felt her all over
I was infected
with her for the entire winter.
In March, the excruciating thaw.
Gray ice melts down to puddles exposing bits of garbage that had been
encased in clean, January snow.
And that’s when she rang my doorbell, her car parked at the now
boarded up PFK, a baby ferret sitting in her pink handbag.
“Hi,” she
said, crossing the threshold. “Mind if I come in?” She sat on the
metal chair by the picture window, lit a cigarette, and crossed her
legs. She wore a straight, dark bob, and held a long cigarette holder
between her fingers.
“Sure,” I said, slowly scratching the back of
my head.
“Do you like…bagels?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Yes?” I
shrugged.
She leaned back, puffed smoke.
“Me too.” She looked at the
window dreamily, almost forlorn. “It’s not what it used to be,” she
sighed.
“What?”
She gestured toward the window. Sighed again.
“
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Yeah.”
Sordidia stayed for almost two days. We talked about city politics,
anthropology, cars, and the weather—she had a keen interest in meteorology.
We ate Kraft dinner by candlelight and the ferret curled up between
the cushions of my gray, tattered sofa. Took long walks and could
smell flowers ready to burst from the naked trees. On the thirty-sixth
hour she kissed me and left, ferret and all.
Sordidia disappeared again for months. I thought of her lips turned
purple by blue Slurpies. I picked out the bits of hair the ferret
had shed on the futon and placed them in a neat pile on an empty bookshelf.
Began my stoop vigil as the city warmed.
September arrived and no Sordidia. Every sticky day, I thought she’d
drive up, and say those words. “You look so cool. You’ve always looked
so cool.” But she eluded me. One night in October a woman in a black
sequined floor-length evening gown knocked on my door. She held a
pair of enormous sunglasses in her hands.
“Sordidia,” I said.
She did not answer, but smiled her sly smile. We walked north, toward
an industrial section of the neighborhood, wet orange and yellow leaves
carpeting the way. We sat by the train tracks in the grass and talked
about the purported death of irony.
On the other side of the tracks I noticed a rusting green Corvair.
“I like decay,” she said. She leaned back, resting on her elbows.
“I look forward to a post-apocalyptic world.”
I kissed her there, on the mulch, as a freight train clanged its heft
through the city’s scars. I fell in love, and she moved in on a Thursday.
By Friday it began. She was gaining weight rapidly. More to love,
I shrugged. Her skin maintained the high sheen of enamel that I so
adored. A lovely laquer.
We lived on Cheetohs and Kraft, May West and soymilk. I assumed she
was independently wealthy. She apparently didn’t have a job, yet she
bought groceries and contributed to the rent. This was handy when
work was spotty. So I never questioned it.
“Hello, love,” she’d say when I returned home from work. I kissed
her on her earlobe and we curled up on the futon. Watched the weather
forecast on each channel, English and French. She especially enjoyed
channel 35’s forecast.
“No hyperbole,” she said. “Just straight weather. I like that.” I
squinted at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering aloud where
she came from.
“
“I thought you grew up in the
“
“Oh,” I said.
We cuddled up for the winter and by March she
was triple the size of when I first met her. I began to worry, just
a wee bit. I feared saying anything that would trigger her departure.
But she’s so arbitrary, I reasoned. She could leave anytime, whether
I said anything or not. In my half-dreams this fear erupted. I would
turn to her, and clutch her shoulders.
“Don’t!” I would say.
Her reply was always muffled and confused.
I got home one afternoon and saw her moored on the bed, ensconced
in a gray jogging suit. She took up most of the bed, sprawled spread
eagle, her pet curled up on her stomach, rising and falling gently.
“Hullo,” I
said.
“Hullo.”
“Go for a jog?”
“Uh, no?” She sounded annoyed.
“Care to join me for one?”
“Since when do you exercise, skinny boy?” She propped herself up on
her elbows and grinned. I thought how good and strong her teeth looked.
“I don’t,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and opening a bag
of Doritos. The ferret looked up and skittered away to some dark corner
of the apartment. We dined on Cool Ranch and pop.
“It’s just---I’m a little worried,” I said later, crumpling the bag
and licking orange dust off my fingers.
“About?”
“Well,
you. Do you have any, uh, thyroid problems?”
“Thyroid problems? No…”
“It’s just that—well, you know--”
“That what? I’ve become morbidly obese?”
“Well, yes.”
“I’m aware of the change. Does it bother you?”
“Me? No, no, not me. But, aren’t you a little concerned? Shouldn’t
you see a doctor or something?” She looked at me with dull eyes and
rolled to her side, facing away.
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head,” she replied.
I shrugged and later we fell asleep spooning. I basked in her warmth.
She continued to grow. Soon there was no room for me in the bed and
I slept on the sofa. She no longer left the apartment. Indeed, she
could not. I thought about all those talk shows and headlines with
the very same subject. “Woman Dies Trying to Climb Stairs.” “Woman
Airlifted from Apartment.” “Man Crushed by Obese Girlfriend In Freak
Airlifting Accident.”
The air inside began to grow stale, as if she consumed it with a great
voracity and left nothing behind for me but carbon dioxide. No amount
of leaving the window open helped. She began to emit smells. Strange
smells that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I wanted to ask her
if she bathed herself in kerosene, but didn’t want to sound like a
lunatic. I looked forward to being assaulted by icy air every
time I left the building. And I started to go on lots of long walks.
I felt bad about it, because I really did love her, I just didn’t
know what to do. The thought cycles were the same on every walk: love
‘er, dunno what to do. Talk to her tomorrow: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
The smells only got worse.
One night the screen that separated the bedroom from the living room
toppled over. I was sleeping on the couch, as in the past few weeks.
Sordidia wheezed. Before my eyes, I saw her growing. Physically, she
was growing, and I, Henry, was witnessing this phenomenon. She wheezed
again, like an accordion. Then she groaned. My heart beat rapidly.
The streetlights glinted off her expanding skin, the high polish giving
way to faint sparkles. Her voice deepened.
“Henry,” she said.
“Yes, Sordidia?” I suddenly felt very small. The bed collapsed. Her
belly almost reached the ceiling. She took up half of the apartment.
I feared I would be pressed against the wall, and smothered. I wanted
to gag. “I’ll—I’ll get help,” I finally said. I ran out into the street,
but didn’t know where to go. I began running, I wasn’t sure where.
I stopped at a payphone and called 911, said there was an altercation
at my address. And then I didn’t go back. I feared the worst. Sordidia
was surely dead.
For a while,
I stayed with my parents in Ahuntsic. I told them the rent to my apartment
had become exorbitant and I began to look elsewhere. My lease would
be up soon, so I paid the remainder of the rent and hoped the landlord
would not contact me. I worked at the Call Center more regularly,
kept busy trying to stave off thoughts of her. Once, I heard her laughter
there again—maniacal giggles punctuated with popping bubble gum. But
when I looked outside my cubicle, it was not she. I sighed, and dialed
another number.
In the late spring I moved to St. Henri. I packed up my few possessions
from my parents’ house and took them on the metro. I stuck them in
the new apartment and sat out on the stoop. Cars veering around the
corner gave me goosebumps—little frissons of hope, and simultaneously,
dread and guilt, that she would be in that green convertible looking
for me, demanding an apology for abandonment. I had betrayed her,
left her for dead.
“Coward,” she might call me.
“Freak,” I might say.
And then she might curl a lip and look at me over her sunglasses perched
on her nose. And I would apologize profusely and take her hand, and
we’d explore my new neighborhood, Sordidia and I.
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