Perhaps I mislead you, calling myself a stinky girl. I am not a girl in the commonly held chronological sense of time. I’ve existed outside my mother’s body for three and thirty years. Some might even go as far as to say that I’m an emotionally crippled and mutually dependent member of a dysfunctional family. Let’s not quibble. In the measure of myself, and my sense of who I am, I am definitely a girl. Albeit, a stinky one.
When people see obesity, they are amazed. Fascinated. Attracted and repulsed simultaneously. Now if we could harness all the emotions my scale inspires, who knows how many homes it would heat, how many trains it would move? People always think there is a reason behind being grand. That there must be some sort of glandular problem, or an eating disorder, a symptom of some childhood trauma. All I can say is: not to my knowledge. I have always been fat, and, if I must say so myself, I eat a lot less than my tiny mother. I wasn’t adopted, either. Mother is always bringing up how painful her labour was as she ejected me from her body. How she had to be tied down and how she pushed and screamed and pushed and cursed for three days running. Perhaps that’s the reason for her slightly antagonistic demeanour. She didn’t have any more children after I was born, and I must say, this birthing thing sounds like an unpleasant business. What with all the tying down and screaming.
Oh, yes. I do have siblings but they are much older than I. Three sisters and a brother who became women and a man long before their due. Cherry was born in the Year of the Rabbit; Ginger, the Year of the Dragon; Sushi, the Year of the Horse; Bonus, the Year of the Sheep. Mother was feeling quite tired of the whole affair by the time her second to last child was born. Bonus was so named because he came out of her body with such ease she couldn’t believe her luck. There was a seventeen-year stretch with no other pregnancies, and she must have thought that her cycles were finished. And what better way than to end on a bonus?
But Mother wasn’t fated to an easy existence. She wasn’t going to inhabit the autumn years of her life without considerable trials and tribulations. At the age of fifty-one, she became pregnant with me and promptly thereafter, my father died and she was left in a trailer, huge and growing, her children all moved away. A tragic life, really, but no. I shouldn’t romanticize. One is easily led toward a tragic conclusion, and one must fight the natural human tendency to dramaticize the conditions of one’s life. One must be level-headed. A fat girl especially. When one is fat, one is seldom seen as a stable and steadying force in an otherwise chaotic world. Fat people embody the disruptive forces in action and this inspires people to lay blame. Where else to point their fingers, but at the fat girl in striped trousers?
Did I mention I am also coloured?
I can’t remember my very first memory. No one can, of course. But I must remember what others have told me before I could remember on my own. Of my living father I have no recollections. But his ghost is all too present in my daily life. I wouldn’t be one to complain if he was a helpful and cheerful ghost, prone to telling me where there are hidden crocks of gold or if the weather will be fine for the picnic. But no. He is a dreadfully doleful one, following me around the small spaces in our trailer, leaning mournfully on my shoulder and telling me to watch my step after I’ve stepped in a pile of dog excrement. And such a pitiful apparition! All that there is of him is his sad and sorry face. Just his head, bobbing around in the air, sometimes at the level of a man walking, but more often than not down around the ankles, weaving heavily around one’s steps. It’s enough to make one want to kick him, but I am not one who is compelled to exhibit unseemly aggressive behaviour.
Mother, on the other hand, is not above a swift “kick in the can,” as she calls it, or a sudden cuff to the back of the head. I would not be exaggerating if I said I had no idea how she can reach my buttocks, let alone reach high enough to cuff my head, for I am not only very fat, but big and tall all around. Well, tall might be misleading. It would make one imagine that length is greater than girth. Let there be no doubt as to my being rounder than I would ever be considered tall. Only that I am at least a foot and a half taller than my mother, who stands four foot eight. Medically speaking, she is not a dwarf, and I am not a giant. But we are not normal in the commonly held sense of the word.
No, my mother is not a dwarf, but she is the centre of the universe. Well, at least the centre of this trailer park, and she leaves no doubt as to who “kicks the cabbage around this joint,” as she is so fond of reminding me. It gives me quite a chuckle on occasion, because father’s ghost often looks much like a cabbage, rolling around the gritty floor of our trailer, and even though Mother cannot see him, she has booted his head many times, when she punctuates her sayings with savage kicks to what she can only see as empty air. It doesn’t hurt him, of course, but it does seem uncomfortable. He rolls his sorry eyes as he is tha-klunked tha-klunked across the kitchen.
“What are you sniggling at, Mall Rat?” Mother snaps at me.
“Nothing,” I say, sniggling so hard that my body ripples like tides.
Mother kicks me in the can for lying and stomps off to her bedroom to smoke her cigars. I feel sorry for my father and right his head, brush off some ghostly dust.
“See what happens when you inhabit this worldly prison? Why don’t you float up to the heavens or at least a waiting room,” I scold. “There’s nothing left for you here except kicks in the head and a daughter who doesn’t want to hear your depressing talk of dog excrement and all the pains you still feel in your phantom body that isn’t there.”
“As if I’m here by choice!” he moans. “As if any ghost would choose to remain in this purgatory excuse of a trailer! Finally dead and I get the nice light show, the tunnel thing, and a lovely floating body. I think that I might be hearing a chorus of singing mermaids when an unsympathetic voice bellows, ‘You have not finished your time,’ and I find my head bobbing in a yellow-stained toilet bowl. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out it’s my own toilet bowl in my old washroom, because I’d never seen the bathroom from that perspective before. Imagine my shock! What’s a poor ghost to do? Oh woe, oh woe,” he sobs. Because ghosts have ghostly license to say things like that.
Frankly, his lamenting and woeing is terribly depressing, and I have plenty of my own woes without having to deal with his. I might not give in to excessive displays of violence, but I am not above stuffing him in the flour bin to make my escape.
I suppose calling oneself a rat might seem gender-specific. “Rat,” I’ll say, and instantly a man or a nasty boy is conjured up. There are female rats as well, don’t you know. His and hers rat towels. Rat breasts and rat wombs. Rat washrooms where you squat instead of peeing standing. A girl can grow up to become a doctor or a lawyer now. Why not become a rat? Albeit, a stinky one.
Yes, yes, the odour of my life. It is large as myth and uglier than truth.
There are many unpleasant scents as you twiddle twaddle down the gray felt tunnels of life. Actually, smells hinge the past to the clutter of present memory. Nothing is comparable to the olfactory in terms of distorting your life. To jar a missing thought. Or transmute into an obsession. The dog excrement smell that’s trapped in the runnels of the bottom of a sneaker, following you around all day no matter how fast you flee. That high-pitched whine of dog shit, pardon my language. Mother is a terrible influence and one must always guard against common usage and base displays of aggression. Yes, there is nothing like stepping in a pile of doggy dung to ruin your entire day. It is especially bad when the dog is supposedly your own.
Mother found the dog in the trailer park dumpster and as it was close to my “sorry birthday,” as she called it, she brought the dirt-coloured, wall-eyed creature as a gift to me. I was touched, really, because she had forgotten to give me a gift for the last twenty-seven years and I had always wanted a dog as a devoted friend.
The dog started whining as soon as Mother dragged it into the trailer by the scruff of its mangy neck. It cringed on the floor, curling its lip back three times over. The d
og started chasing itself, tried to catch up with its stumpy tail so it could eat itself out of existence. I was concerned.
“Mother, perhaps the dog has rabies.”
“Arrghh.” (This is the closest I can get in writing to the sound of my mother’s laughter.) “Damn dog’s not rabid, it’s going crazy from your infernal stink. Lookit! It’s hyperventilating! Aaaaaarrggghhh!”
The poor beast was frothing, chest heaving, smearing itself into the kitchen linoleum. It gave a sudden convulsive shake, then fainted. It was the first time I ever saw a dog faint. Needless to say, my “sorry birthday” was ruined. I actually thought the dog would die, or at least flee from my home as soon as it regained consciousness. But surprisingly, the animal stayed. There is no accounting for dog sense. Perhaps it’s a puerile addiction to horrible smells. Like after one has cut up some slightly-going-off ocean fish and raises one’s fishy fingers to one’s nostrils throughout the day and night until the smell has been totally inhaled. Or sitting down in a chair and crossing an ankle over the knee, clutching the ankle with a hand, twisting so the bottom of the runner is facing upward. The nose descends to sniff, sniff, sniff again. There is an unborn addict in all of us, and it often reveals itself in the things we choose to smell.
I must admit, I cannot smell myself because I have smelled my scent into normality. I only know that I still emit a tremendous odour because my mother tells me so, I have no friends, and people give me a wide berth when I take my trips to the mall. There is a certain look people cannot control when they smell an awful stink. The lips curl back, the nose wrinkles toward the forehead, trying to close itself. (Actually, if one thinks about it, the nostrils seem more greatly exposed when in this position than at rest, but I needn’t linger on that thought just now. Later, I’ll ponder it at my leisure.) People cannot control this reaction. I have seen it the whole of my life and can interpret the fine sneer in the corner of an eye, a cheek twitching with the sudden sour bile rising from the bottom of the tongue.
Let me reassure you, I am not some obsessive fecal compulsive who is actually pleasured by excrement and foul odours. I am not in the league of people who get perverted thrills from the filth of metabolic processes. I bathe twice a day, despite the discomfort of squeezing my body into a tiny shower stall. Not to mention all the commotion Mother makes about how much hot water I use. I must say, though, that Mother would be wise to take greater care with her personal hygiene, what with her cigars and her general disregard for appearance and decorum.
In the summertime, I can bathe myself in my shower garden. I planted a hedge of caragana for some privacy and I only clip it width-wise, so it doesn’t invade the yard. The foliage stands over ten feet in height and inside the scratchy walls, when it is heady with yellow blossoms, I can stand beneath an icy stream of hose water and almost feel beautiful. Mother always threatens to burn my beautiful bush to the ground.
“Like a damn scrub prison in here! Get no bloody sunlight in the yard. Nothing grows. Just mud and fungus and you muck it up with water and wallow there like some kind of pig. Burn the thing to the ground,” he smacks me with her words. But Mother isn’t as cruel as her words may sometimes seem. She does not reveal her inner spirit to those who are looking. Instead, she heaps verbal daggers in order not to be seen. Regardless, I know she will never burn down my summer shower, because sometimes I catch her standing inside the bower of caragana. All summer long. When the days are summer long into night and the heat is unbearable, the humble yellow blossoms turn into brittle brown pods. The shells crack with tiny explosions of minute seeds that bounce and scatter on the parched ground. They roll to where my mother douses herself with icy water. I catch her when she thinks I’m still at the mall. I catch her hosing her scrawny old woman body, a smile on her scowl face, cigar burning between her lips. I never let on I see her in these moments. She is more vulnerable than I.
The dog decided to remain in the confines of our trailer and I realized one can never foretell the life choices that others will enact. Mother called him Rabies, and dragged his floppy body outside. She hosed him off in the caragana shower and he came to, shook himself off as dogs will do, slunk into the kitchen, and hunkered beneath the table. Mother laughed once: “Aaarrrrrgh,” and threw him the first thing her hand came in contact with inside the refrigerator.
It was Father’s head.
I had tucked him there to keep him from being underfoot, and he must have fallen asleep. The starving dog clamped down on an ear and gnawed with stumpy teeth. Father screamed with outrage.
“What you say, Stink-O? Speak up. Fat girls shouldn’t whisper.”
“Nothing, Mother. I think you tossed Rabies a cabbage. I’ll just take it back and feed him something more suitable. Perhaps that beef knuckle we used to make soup yesterday.”
“Suit yourself. But don’t say, ‘perhaps’.” Mother stomped off “to sit on the can,” as she calls it.
“A dog,” Father moaned. “Your mother fed me to a dog. Haven’t I been tormented enough? When will this suffering end?” He started weeping, the dog keening. I sighed. I am not one who gives in easily to the woes of this world. Sighing is an expression of defeat, or at least weakness, which reveals a lack of worldly toughness or a certain get-up-and-go attitude. But Father is a sorry shade, a cloud of perpetual doom and defeat. I don’t even want to know what sort of man he was before he had fallen to this. It would only make a tragic comedy out of what was probably a pathetic life. I swooped down, scooped Father’s head from between Rabies’ paws, and set him on the table, right side up. Dug through the garbage for the dry soup bone and tossed it to the dog.
Yes, a fat girl can swoop. I am remarkably light on my feet, I almost float on the tips of my toes. Certainly, one may be fat and stinky, but it doesn’t necessitate stumbling awkwardness. I never drag my feet and I never stomp, fit to bring down the roof. It is Mother who is the stomper in this house and many a time I have whipped up the ladder to tap another layer of tarry paper on the rusty roof. I may be grand, stink, and be hated by dogs, but I have a dancer’s feet and the endurance of a rice-planter’s thighs.
Did I mention that I’m also coloured? One is led to say “also” in a long list of things I am that are not commonly perceived as complimentary. One cannot say, “I’m coloured,” and expect, “You know, I’ve always wanted to be coloured myself,” as a standard reaction. Not that I would rather be a stinky, fat, white girl. Perhaps, mauve or plum. Plum . . . now that’s a colour!
A fat coloured rat girl has to look out for herself and never reveal her cards. Lucky for me, I must say I’m blessed with a certain higher intelligence, a certain sensitivity which enables me to more than endure the trials of this existence. On my better days, I can leap and soar above the tarry roof of the trailer house. On my better days, the stars sing closer to my ears. I may be fat, I may stink larger than life, I may be a coloured mall rat in striped trousers, but I am coyly so.
Ah, yes, the mall. Now why would such a clever girl as myself bother to habit such a gross manifestation of consumer greed? Is it some puerile addiction, a dysfunction I cannot control? Many a time I’ve pondered on this, but it is not as an active consumer I return to the mall as I oft do. My forays there are part of an ongoing study of the plight of human existence in a modern colonized country. A mall is the microcosm, the centrifugal force in a cold country where much of the year is sub-zero in temperature. The mall reveals the dynamics of the surrounding inhabitants. Yes, the habits of the masses can be revealed in the Hudson’s Bay department store and in the vast expanses of a Toys ‘R’ Us where hideously greedy children manipulate TV dinner divorcees into making purchases with the monetary equivalence of feeding a small village for a week.
When I have fully understood the human mall condition, it will become a doorway to a higher level of existence. One must understand one’s limitations, the shackles of social norms, in order to overcome them. And when I have accomplished this, I will cast aside my mantle of foul odour and float
to the outer limits of time and space. Alas, one must always have a care not to steep oneself too deeply in theoretical thought. It would only lead to the sin created by the Greeks and taught in every Western educational institution today. Hubris, dreaded hubris.
Luckily for me, my father’s pale and pathetic head is confined to the parameters of our trailer lot. Imagine what a hindrance he’d be in my pursuit of higher consciousness! I slip into my gymnast’s slippers and chasse through my caragana bowers and out the tattered gate. Father’s head rolls down the walk after me as far as the last concrete slab, then teeters back and forth in what I assume is a head wave. Feeling extra generous, I throw back a kiss. And he levitates a few feet in pleasure. There is no sight nor sound of Rabies, much to my father’s relief.
“Arrrr! Stink-O!” Mother snarls from the tiny bathroom window. “Pick me up a box of cigars. Don’t cheap out on me and buy those candy-flavoured Colts, you hear!” I blow kisses, five, six, seven, and flutter down the sidewalk. Mother, or her bowels, growl from the dark recesses of our tinny home.
As I traipse between the rows of identical rectangular homes festooned with painted plywood butterflies and plastic petunias, I hear the slamming of doors and the snap of windows being closed. My odour precedes me and I never need an introduction. My signature prevails. Alas, a thought. If one smells a smell and was never taught to like it, would one not find it distasteful as a result of ignorance? Let me pursue the opposite line of thought. If one were taught as a very small child that roses were disgusting, that they were vilely noxious and ugly to boot, would one not despise the very thought of their scent? It may be that I smell beautiful beyond the capacity of human recognition. The scent of angels and salamanders. And no one to appreciate the loveliness before their very senses.
The mall. The mall. The Saturday mall is a virtual hub of hustle and bustle. Crying infants and old women smoking. Unisex teens sprouting rings from every inch of revealed skin and the mind boggles thinking about what’s not revealed. Fake and real potatoes French fried into greasy sticks, stand-in-line Chinese food, trendy cafe au laits and iced coffees. It is crowded but I always have a wide path to myself. A minimum three-metre radius circumscribes my epicentre. No one dares breach this space, I’m afraid. Like a diver in a shark cage. No, that’s not quite right. Regardless.
ODD? Page 9