Well, it looked like he was. She was irritated. The pirate had had to leave early. She’d been stuck watching me for once.
What the hell happened to you? my mother asked me when I came home.
Fell, I told her.
Knock knock from outside the fitting room. Her voice trying for easy breezy: “Are we okay in there?”
We. Why always we? What am I?
“We’re fine, thanks,” I tell her.
Later, years later, when I’d shrunk, I saw him standing on the corner of Queen and Spadina, waiting for a streetcar. No more blond spikes or metallic shirts. He had brown thinning hair now. Just a man waiting for a streetcar in tan corduroy. I was in my car, waiting for the light to change. There was no way I could’ve got out then, but it felt like I had to say something. But then the light changed, and even though I searched for him in my rearview mirror I didn’t see him.
The saleslady’s voice is shrill when she calls to me again.
“Okay, well? We’re about to close?”
“Yeah,” I say, fingering the rhinestone buckles. Just a minute.
I’d forgotten how heavy the material was. All the lining underneath.
Slipping it over my head, I’m temporarily blinded. And when I come out of the wide neckhole, I’m still blinded. The track lights, I realize, have gone off above my head. The muzak has abruptly ceased, cutting off Michael Bolton in mid-croon. They’re getting serious.
They knock and knock and the dress hangs heavy on me in the dark. They call, ma’am, ma’am, and I’d say something, but I’m voiceless. Because I thought for sure I’d be swimming in it. Drowning in it, even. That the space between where I ended and the dress began would be miles and miles and miles. But even in the dark, I feel how it’s closer than I thought. Dangerously close. And if I wait until my eyes adjust, I’ll be able to maybe make out my silhouette in the mirror, I’ll be able to measure how much.
Beyond the Sea
Living in the South Tower of Phase One in the Beyond the Sea complex, my bedroom window overlooks the Malibu Club Spa and Fitness Centre, which means the first thing I see when I wake up each morning is my neighbor Char’s triumph over the ineptitudes of the flesh. Depending on how many times I hit snooze, I’ll see her doing leg lifts or thigh abductions or this weird hip jiggle move where she’ll stand in front of the mirror, put her hands on her protruding hip bones, and wiggle from side to side in a way that, even though I’m barely awake, profoundly embarrasses me. Most of the time, though, my eyes will open to the sight of her hunched over Lifecycle One, literally all of her bones from the waist up draped over the handlebars in submission to The Task, which, I can only assume, from this vantage point, is the obliteration of the Body Mass Index.
After I wake, I’ll stand there looking down at her from the window a long time, even though it exhausts me—physically, spiritually—to watch her. Oddly, from this distance, I find I feel no hatred even though she is my sworn enemy, even though I know a showdown regarding the time slot issue is inevitable. Sometimes a pity will even bloom in my heart for that small, hunched, pedaling figure. But not for long. Looking down upon her from six floors up, I enjoy a moment of something close to clarity before I shrug on my gym clothes and prepare to dethrone her.
As I make my way to the Malibu Club, which sits between Phase One and Phase Two of Beyond the Sea, a gated community that has nothing to do with California (we are nowhere near California), I brace myself for the inevitable confrontation. I enter the gym, which smells, as it always does, of stale sweat and rancid mop fronds, and eye the Cardio Equipment Booking Sheet, where I’ve purposefully printed my name for the 7:00 to 7:30 slot for Lifecycle One in big block letters, pressing deep into the page. I see her name sitting above mine in cursive for the 6:30 to 7:00 slot. Mine in unsharpened pencil. Hers in irrefutable ink. Though her handwriting seems easy breezy, I’m not fooled by those lackadaisical loops. I know from experience that she will not go gently into the time slot change.