“Oh, just experimenting, mostly. Though I did make this bourbon bundt cake that turned out pretty good.”
That wasn’t me but my sadist coworker Eve. I bake and give everything away, Eve tells everyone, like it’s a baking tip she’s offering, like how you should add salt to chocolate. Eve always comes to work bearing a tin of some thickly iced treat, her wrist tendons visibly straining under the weight of her confection. She’ll leave whatever she’s made in the back room for all the fat and middling women we work with to cut thick slices out of.
“Oh, Eve, so delicious!”
“Oh, good!” Eve beams. When Eve beams, the corners of her mouth turn downward, her eyes crinkle almost closed, and the hollow in her throat gets disconcertingly deeper.
By the end of the shift, the tin’s more or less empty except for crumbs. And Eve’s over the sink, rinsing it with steaming hot water, smug. Often, she forgets to rinse the tin and I have to do it. Even though I’ve told her time and time again she can’t leave leftovers on the counter like that overnight. Because of ants.
We’re on to the elbow-to-fingertip yogurt massage. When Cassie kneads my bony palm like it’s a ball of dough, grabbing hold of each long finger and pulling it gently between her plump ones, I never know where to look. She never knows where to look either. What we both end up doing is looking at the space just past our respective left ears.
“A bourbon bundt,” Cassie repeats, calling me back. And I watch her try to picture it with the hungry eye of her mind. “Sounds yum. I’ll have to make it for my husband. He loves that Southern rustic stuff.”
Cassie got married recently. I couldn’t believe it when she first told me. At first, I thought it might have to do with the fact that she’s part of a very small religious community, people who see each other with the eyes of Jesus first. Then I found out Cassie isn’t really part of this community anymore, at least not hard-core, and that the guy just happened to be a friend of her brother’s who thought she was cute. And the thing is he’s cute. At least according to the picture Cassie showed me once on her iPhone.
She shows me another picture of him now.
I take the phone and stare at the picture like it’s a pot of water I’m trying to boil, waiting for any latent sign of his freakdom to surface. A yellowish tinge to the skin, maybe? Some pervert shading under the eyes? A weird nose kink, but no. As far as I can see, he’s the stuff of the earth. Its handsome salt. I’m still looking when at last she takes the phone from my hands and says, “He’s pretty cute, huh?”
“He is. How did—well, congratulations.”
I ask if they’re still in their honeymoon period and she blushes.
Yes, yes they are. It’s sort of wonderful.
“That’s great,” I say. “Really, great.” It is.
“It is,” she says. She’s very lucky. “How are things with your husband?”
I look at her, eyes wide at her innocent question, and that’s when a video clip of two fat girls in ill-fitting bondage gear flogging one another on the floor of a fake-looking dungeon, the one I found in my husband’s recent web history last year, comes back to me in full graphic detail. I found others that night: fat girls dressed as French maids, Ukrainian lesbians, hopeful cheerleaders. Fat girls who always seem to be smirking or looking surprised that their clothes are too tight. Fat girls who, along with a few sites about trance music and conspiracy theories, had been worming their way into his web history for several months.
I say things are great, and feel the corner of my mouth do one of those spastic quivers.
“That’s so great,” she says. “How long have you guys been married again?”
“Going on three years in July.”
“Ooh, so big anniversary coming up.”
“Yeah.”
“We could do a shimmery color for that. Maybe something peach.”
By then she’s painting Amuse Bouche on my fingernails and she’s all hunched over me, frowning in her effort to be precise. But she isn’t precise. She makes all these mistakes, which she has to keep fixing with a sharp little wooden stick she keeps dipping into acetone. It’s at this moment that I want to wrench my fingers back from her hot hands. For I cannot bear the weight of her any longer. Her warm, fat touch becomes the opposite of comfort, it becomes oppressive. I need to be free of her. Now.
“We done?” I ask her. Underneath the table, I’m tapping my foot.
“Just need to do the topcoat,” she smiles.