by Jan Carson
‘WhatareyoudoingSorry?’ he asked, the sentence tumbling out of his mouth as a single, hysterically pitched word.
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Sorry fired back, already grabbing around for a door latch.
‘You can’t break into Emily’s house.’
‘Why not? You got me curious about the fat bitch. I wanted to see what sort of house a sixty-ton woman lived in. Maybe raid her deep freeze if I got a chance.’
‘Don’t talk about Emily like that.’
‘Why not? You said you were terrified she was going to squash you. You said she was so fat she couldn’t sit up properly.’
‘She’s a nice lady,’ Malcolm argued half-heartedly. ‘She’s really kind.’
‘It’s disgusting to let yourself go like that; eating ’til you’re too fat to stand up. My dad says people like her make America look bad.’
Malcolm could think of no suitable comeback. Good people, people like Jesus, Martin Luther King and Wolverine, always spoke out against injustice. Good people did not stand on the edge of a bad thing, chewing a thumbnail and wondering what to do next. Good people got involved, or at very least called the police.
‘Coming, Malcolm?’ she asked, hesitating with one foot inside the chalet, already committed to the act of burglary.
‘No,’ said Malcolm Orange with great determination and took three Judas steps towards her. Deep inside the bones and sinews of his legs, which wished to retreat yet drew, like dumb magnets, towards the back doorstep, Malcolm understood that he was not entirely a good person. Malcolm was a mess of good intentions and disappearing resolve. It was not his fault, he reasoned. One half of his whole belonged to his father and the other, maternal slice, was more inclined to weep and mumble Spanish curses than take a stand on anything important. With such a complicated genetic make-up, it was no surprise that Malcolm had begun to disappear.
‘I’m only coming because someone needs to stop you,’ he whispered. It was a prayer of supplication.
Malcolm took an enormous breath and followed Soren James Blue into the kitchen of Chalet 5. Mr Fluff stood guard by the recycling bin and, when both were safely inside, picked her way through the glass shards to join them. The kitchen was gloomy. On the cul-de-sac a rumor had lately circulated that ordinary beds could no longer contain Emily Fox’s massive bulk and consequently the entire bedroom had been padded to cushion her, forming a room-sized sleeping compartment. This rumor was entirely untrue, as was the rumor about the cement mixer she used to blend her meals and the nurse who came to hose her down twice weekly. However, Emily Fox suspected the other residents of the cul-de-sac were spying on her, peering through the air conditioning vents and keyholes in the hope of confirming these grotesque myths.
Emily Fox had never invited her neighbors round to visit.
It was not embarrassment which kept the blinds drawn but rather the understanding that life had more than enough compulsory nuisances without inviting the neighbors’ attention. Healthcare professionals visited twice weekly, as did the official representatives of the Baptist Retirement Village; regular supervision was one of the prescribed ‘perks’ for cul-de-sac residents. A Vancouver-based nephew faithfully delivered the weekend papers each Sunday morning, lingering on the stoop until Emily stumbled to the front door, confirming she had not yet wobbled off the mortal coil. Meals on Wheels arrived three times daily, depositing sealed trays of steaming gloop on the welcome mat and pinging the doorbell for attention. The Vietnamese hairdresser made a bimonthly pilgrimage to the cul-de-sac and, in anticipation of a good, close trim, Emily Fox raised the blinds in the back bedroom and bid eight inches of sunlight permission to enter her home.
Emily Fox had never invited her neighbors round to visit and yet she was not an unsociable lady.
She left the chalet at every given opportunity, waddling slowly to Bill and Irene’s for the People’s Committee, vacationing every time an out-of-state relative invited, and wedging herself into the Center’s minibus for annual outings to the Rose Parade, the Zoo Lights and the casino at Lincoln City. Emily Fox enjoyed people immensely. She ate them up in conversation, replaying their quirks and foibles for company as she fell asleep in her absolutely ordinary bed. She enjoyed children, particularly best of all. Children demanded nothing of her. Emily Fox had never appreciated demanding people.
Emily Fox had not always been a larger lady. On the eve of her debutante cotillion, her mother had laced her into a teal green frock and, taking her hands, spanned the entire breadth of young Emily’s waist between fingers and thumbs.
‘That’s what a nice young man goes for, Emily,’ she’d announced to her daughter, ‘a waist like an egg timer and breasts like a pair of ripe cantaloupes.’
It was with a kind of suppressed, stammering horror that the seventeen-year-old Emily stood fast in her stockinged soles whilst her mother cupped a hand beneath each breast and jiggled them for weight, like a greengrocer deliberating between a pair of honeydews.
‘Those will do very nicely, darling,’ she’d said. ‘You’re not as well-endowed as I was but the fashion is for flatter girls these days. Be sure to dance with the Anderson boy. Your father is terribly keen for a match with the Anderson boy. You’ll make a wonderful wife for him if you keep the weight off. No respectable man wants a piglet for a bride.’
Slapping her daughter firmly on the backside, Mrs Fox had ushered Emily out the bedroom door, down the swooping staircase and straight into the embrace of the dessert cart. She’d spent the evening surreptitiously downing chocolate eclairs and French fancies, doing her best to avoid making an accidental match with any of the young, or not so young, Nashville gentlemen in attendance.
The next five years were war.
Emily Fox was horrified by the possibility of marrying into a lifetime of dietary restriction and further devastated to admit that the wispy blonde debutantes who primped and powdered, assisting with her corset strings in the dressing rooms of Nashville’s mansion homes, had stirred something shocking and illicit within her. Emily knew well enough to say nothing of the desire to press her palms flat against the peached blush of their naked backs or the joy of watching them dress and undress, reflected in conspiratorial mirrors. She placed a silent wall around the afternoon when she’d turned purposefully into a school friend’s kiss, feeling their lipstick catch and pucker like crème brûlée cracking in anticipation. She kept all these things secret inside her, gooey sweet and sinful as a fondant crème. She knew her parents would not permit such a shameful thing in Nashville.
Emily ate to keep the brute boys away from her door.
Emily ate in secret, stealing down to the pantry in the early hours of the morning to stuff her puffing face full of devil’s food cake and corn bread. Emily expanded. Mrs Fox, horrified by her daughter’s creeping middle, starved her at the dining table; tied her with ropes and made her run for miles, up and down the driveway, behind the family’s creeping sedan; weighed her nightly on a set of butcher’s scales and could not understand why the needle continued to bear due southwest. Determined to be rid of the girl before she was too heavy to shift, Mrs Fox kept a steady circuit of increasingly elderly gentleman suitors trundling through the front parlor.
‘We’ll have to lower our standards, darling,’ she’d explained, her voice thick with end-of-season disappointment. ‘An older gentleman is probably our best bet. They’re less likely to be able to see you clearly.’
Emily Fox did not care for gentlemen suitors. She could not stand their summer suits, their well-oiled mustaches and cologne, their tall tales of boats and cars and business advances. She ate sandwiches and cream cakes by the handful and watched their faces curdle in disgust. By the age of twenty-five Emily Fox weighed more than the all-state quarterback. Mrs Fox gave up. She was a sensible woman, capable of admitting her own limitations. She put the butcher’s scales out to retire and shifted her attentions to the next daughter down; a docile girl of sixteen, blessed with slipstream legs and eyes like a ne
wborn donkey.
Emily Fox watched all of her sisters court and marry, their middles expanding and contracting as they squeezed nineteen little nieces and nephews into the Nashville sun. She grew in girth annually, bursting like a split sausage from a series of pastel-colored bridesmaids dresses until the sister before last pronounced Emily a family embarrassment and she was no longer subjected to such pageantry. She passed her adult life in the guest bedroom at her parents’ house, ghost-writing romance novels for a publishing company which specialized in Civil War-era love stories. She ventured out for church on Sundays and twice weekly for her Bridge class. She took three vacations a year, accompanying various elderly relatives to various seaside resorts designed for the safe accommodation of older ladies and gentlemen. This lifestyle provided quite enough people for Emily Fox. She remained terrified that some man would see through the glutinous layers of flab now stuck to her face and arms, and find there a beauty still deserving of pursuit.
Never once, in sixty years, did it occur to Emily Fox that she could simply say no to such advances. She was a Nashville girl, raised on the notion that any gentleman who asked politely deserved her acquiescence. Even now, seventy-eight and suffering from protruding veins and cholesterol and diabetic episodes, Emily Fox kept herself well insulated against the advances of the outside world. She would have liked a child, possibly two, but such things were not possible without a man.
Malcolm Orange, as he advanced towards the sitting room of Chalet 5, knew nothing of Emily Fox’s upbringing. His memories of Miss Fox were entirely sensory: the talcum and rose scent of her carefully folded hair, the press of her arms, like overblown water wings constraining his lungs each time they came in for a hug, the oil and chocolate sound of her laughter, Tennessee South leaking through the gaps in her words.
Malcolm Orange prided himself on observing people but he wasn’t the best with places or spaces. Meanwhile his mother could recall, with searing exactitude, the cut and clash of every room she’d ever entered. Beginning with the hospital room in which she’d spent her first huffering moments, and concluding with the five squat rooms of Chalet 13, Martha Orange could remember hundreds and thousands of individually specific rooms. This number was notwithstanding waiting rooms, offices, stationery closets and hotel rooms, which were religiously uniform in their placement of beds, trouser presses and replica Van Gogh prints. Her parents’ bedroom provided a backdrop for dreaming. The kindergarten classroom in which she’d first learnt to curl her 8s, rose in her nostrils, gingerbread warm. Her grandmother’s good room with its wood-stacked hearth laughed long and rollicking loud inside her ribcage.
Malcolm Orange was not his mother. He was barely aware of his own bedroom closet and yet Emily Fox’s sitting room sang to him; a long, sad song, morose as a church hymn. The carpet was lonely for friendly feet. The sofa cried out for a brace of wellpadded elderly backsides. The curtains could barely contain their own unhappiness. The room was sad. Malcolm Orange felt reluctant to bring it any further sorrow.
‘Let’s go, Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel so good.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ she fired back sarcastically, ‘you’re disappearing. I’ll bet you feel like shit.’
‘We need to go now, before the police get here.’
For the first time since the disappearing started, Malcolm Orange felt actual, hurting pain. The holes in his back and belly began to throb as if contracting and dilating. He let his gaze drop and noted, to his horror, the gaps finally gaining the advantage. From such a height Malcolm Orange appeared less boy and more space. He placed one hand behind his back, one on his belly and pressed firmly, trying to hold himself together. The gaps in his torso were enormous now, merging with other gaps to form caverns and tunnels. Light gushed from his middle in bold, blond beams.
There was little left to lose and yet the thought of robbing Emily Fox felt like an enormous soup spoon scooping out his insides.
‘Sorry,’ he shouted, panicking, ‘I’m going NOW!’
‘Hold your horses Malcolm, I’m looking for something that might help.’
Abandoning the television cabinet which was now splayed wide open, video cassettes, magazines and remote controls scattered across the rug, Sorry leapt to her feet and made a mad dash for the bathroom cupboard. From his position, frozen in the doorway between sitting room and kitchen, Malcolm could hear her pop the medicine cabinet’s glass-fronted door and begin rifling through Emily Fox’s toiletries. A half minute later her head appeared suddenly, peeking round the door frame.
‘Try these,’ she said. ‘My mom used to take them all the time when she was on a downer. Two of these and you won’t even remember you’re disappearing.’
A plastic tube of pills came sailing towards Malcolm’s head. He missed the catch. He almost always missed the catch. Malcolm, his father repeatedly told him, had hands like a pair of peeled bananas. Conversely, Jimmy Orange had been blessed with a pair of perfect pitch and catch mitts. In the almost twelve years of their mutual existence, Malcolm Orange had seen his father single-handedly dominate speeding frisbees, footballs and misguided hockey pucks. Full-grown families, Malcolm had lately come to conclude, were obviously much harder to hold on to.
Malcolm Orange dropped to his knees and groped around in the gray light. The pill container had spilled its shiny guts across the living room carpet. He scooped handfuls of the little blue capsules back into the tube, and sealed the lid.
‘Knock them back, kid,’ said Sorry, appearing behind his shoulder. ‘You won’t be so boring once you’ve got a couple of those bad boys in you.’
‘No way,’ said Malcolm bluntly, pushing the happy pills into Sorry’s hand. ‘I don’t do drugs. I’m probably not even doing cigarettes seriously until I’m about thirty.’
‘I’ll hold you to that, son,’ cried the booming voice of Cunningham Holt; an odd phenomenon, for the old man was nowhere to be seen.
Malcolm Orange fumbled to the wall and flicked the lights on. The room was suddenly unfiltered; muted, crimson carpet blooming a furious pink, wallpaper flowering in shameless, shocking mauves and limes. Malcolm made a quick scan of all the places capable of concealing an adult person. There was no sign of Cunningham Holt anywhere.
‘Turn the lights out before someone sees them, Malcolm!’ shouted Sorry, depositing an armful of toiletries and medication on the living room sofa.
‘I’m looking for Cunningham Holt.’
‘Is your brain disappearing now too? It’s not like he’s going to be hiding under the sofa. The old fart’s at the front door.’
Malcolm Orange felt a wave of lukewarm relief, liberating as the first breath after a coughing fit. It was a joy of sorts to be caught red-handed, to be intercepted before things could get any worse, to defer consequences to a responsible adult.
‘Cunningham,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’
‘I know you didn’t, Malcolm. We all know you’re a bit out of sorts these days.’
‘I’m all muddled up in my middle, Cunningham.’
‘And the girl’s making you even more muddled I imagine.’
Malcolm Orange blushed fuchsia pink with embarrassment. Sorry had not heard. She was preoccupied with stuffing Emily Fox’s medication into a grocery sack for later consumption.
‘I wish things would just be normal again,’ whispered Malcolm and came to a halt at Chalet 5’s front door.
‘Me too,’ answered Cunningham Holt, shouting, as he had been, through the letterbox. ‘But I don’t remember what normal looks like anymore.’
Malcolm Orange opened the front door of Chalet 5 and threw his arms around Cunningham Holt’s diminishing middle. To his great embarrassment he began to cry, salted tears soaking into the old man’s corduroy thighs. Sensitive to the sobbing oscillations of the boy’s grief, the old man placed a reassuring hand on Malcolm’s head and muttered a selection of comforting sentiments. ‘There, there, son.’ ‘Things will look better in the
morning.’ ‘It’s not the end of the world.’ None of these platitudes rang true for either party but the pronouncement of such sentiment seemed part of the ritual, like English breakfast tea in the face of a natural disaster.
Whilst the two men embraced on the front step, the younger raised on tippy toes for leverage, the elder bent double like a garlic press, their minds wandered round and round the cul-de-sac’s turn circle, searching for a good spot to unravel. Malcolm, as he hugged, kept one eye on his own clasped wrists, examining through the empty holes the Fair Isle yarn of the older man’s sweater. Concerned as he was with Malcolm’s spiraling break-down, Cunningham Holt’s immediate thoughts were preoccupied by the sensation of damp warmth emanating from the area of his groin and spreading across the uppermost section of his left thigh. Lately the old man had noticed the need to empty his bladder no longer came upon him gradually like the progressive twitch of a headache, but rather rushed him, siren-like, allowing little or no time to locate a bathroom.
He removed Malcolm, unclasping his hands like a belt buckle and held him at arm’s length.
‘Sorry, son,’ he said, head bent in shame. ‘I think I’ve pissed myself. I don’t want to get it on you.’
Malcolm Orange risked a small laugh. It stuck in his throat like a mouthful of soda. ‘It wasn’t you, Cunningham. It was me.’
‘You pissed yourself?’
‘No, no, I cried on your leg. Sorry.’
Cunningham Holt laughed. Malcolm Orange laughed. For a moment they forgot themselves and all their latest disappearings. Soren James Blue brought them back to earth with a grounding thump.
‘How’d you know we’d be here?’ she asked, appearing over Malcolm’s shoulder to stab an accusatory finger into Cunningham Holt’s shoulder. ‘It’s really friggin’ creepy to have a blind dude stalking us.’
Malcolm Orange stepped back to deliver his customary chiding slap and in doing so left Cunningham Holt open to attack. Sorry instantly noticed the wet patch on his pants, spreading now towards the knee and, rolling her eyes to the streetlamps, inserted two fingers into her mouth and made the sign for vomit-inducing disgust.