ODD? (10 page)

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.

I have a daily route I take and even if my eyes were put out, I could wind my way through the blind corners and dead end halls of this mall. Like the tragic Shakespearean kings, I would prevail with an uncanny sense of despair and enlightenment. The merchants all know me by smell, and sometimes a wave or a brief nod of a head is offered. There was a time when most of the merchants had convened to try to put an end to my forays. To banish me from my chosen road of human contemplation. But legally there was nothing they could do as long as I bought an item now and again, like Mother’s cigars, or a soup bone from the butcher. They couldn’t evict me for the way I smell, or how I look in my striped trousers. There was a time when I could have been evicted for being coloured, but at this present time in history, and in this geographical location, I am lawfully tolerated.

Alas, no one wants to be merely tolerated, like a whining child or an ugly dog. Such human arrogance. We dare assume that some are meant to be merely tolerated while others are sought out to be idolized, glorified, even to wipe their dainty asses. Have a care! I mustn’t fall into the pit of baseness like my mother before me! The utter unfairness of it all is enough to make one want to bite one’s own tongue off, a mute supplication to the evils of this world, but that’s the other end of the stick. Father’s end of misery and woe. It is my chosen path to seek another. . .

I glide into Holy Smoke to pick out a box of cigars for Mother. If I wait until I have done my daily study of the machinations of mall existence, I may very well forget and Mother would be sorely vexed. In a manner which would be audible for several square kilometres.

“Good afternoon,” Adib nods politely from behind his pastel handkerchief.

“Lovely,” I breezily smile. Step up to the marble counter.

“A box of the usual for you?” He backs up a pace, crinkling his eyes into smiles, to make up for his instinctual retreat.

“Please,” I bob and lean my arm against the cool grey rock slab that runs the length of the entire store. Men on stools on either side of me hop off, stuff burning pipes in trouser pockets in their haste to escape me. Adib sighs, even though he has his back to the mass exodus. He turns around with a box filled with cigars as thick as my thumb, individually wrapped and sealed with a red sticker. He has thrown five extra ones on top, so my return will take a little longer.

“Your generosity is so greatly appreciated,” I bow, clicking my heels like some military personage and pay him with bills sweating wetly from the pocket of my striped pants.

Adib accepts them as graciously as a man extending a pair of tweezers can. No, I am not angered by his reticence to come into direct contact with me. Indeed, I find his manner refreshingly honest and he never hurls abuse like some opt to do.

“My best to your mother,” Adib nods, handing me my change via tweezers. “By the way,” he adds, “you might want to take in the new children’s play area in the western wing of the mall. I hear that it’s quite the development.”

“Why, thank you,” I beam. Then frown. “But how is it that I am not acquainted with this wonder of childish bliss?”

Adib just shrugs, breathing shallowly from behind his scented lavender hanky. I thank him again.
Glissande en avant
through the door and, toes pointed, leap excitedly to the west wing.

The sign reads: FRIENDZIES!

It’s one of those obscure word conflations that mean almost nothing at all. Like a joke told with a punch line from another, one realizes there is an attempt at humour, but there is nothing to get. It does not bode well.

Grand opening balloons, limp and wrinkled, dangle from pastel walls. Streamers trail limply from golden pillars, curling in the dust on the cold floor. A table with free coffee and donuts and Coke-flavoured pop made out of syrup. I walk up to the gate, disheartened, but must enter for study purposes. One must not let first impressions alter one’s methodology, one’s code of conduct.

“One adult, please,” I smile courteously.

“Where’s your kid?” a girl asks, chewing an unseemly quantity of gum.

I am amazed. She does not curl her nose in disgust from the stench that permeates from my being. Her eyes do not water and she doesn’t gape at my size.

“I have no children,” I say, “I just want to view the newly constructed premises.” How is it that she doesn’t seem to notice? Perhaps her nose has been decimated from smoking or, perhaps, lines of cocaine.

“Ya can’t go in without a kid, because adults go in free, but a kid costs eight bucks.”The girl tips forward on her stool to rest her chin in her hands, elbows sloppily on the countertop before me.

“My goodness! Eight dollars for a child!” I am shocked. Who could afford to entertain their children here?

“What if one were to tell you that the child is inside already, that one has only to come to join her?”

The young woman kicks a button with her foot and the gate swings open. “Don’t forget to take off your shoes and keep valuables on your person,” she intones, rote and bored to insensibility.

She is from a generation where nothing seems to matter. She is so bored of the world and of herself that even my anomalous presence doesn’t measure on her radar. Is there no hope for our next generation? Will the non-starving members of our species perish from ennui even before we’ve polluted our environment to the point of no return?

This turn of thought does nothing to advance my research. It only makes me weary. Ever weary. I adjust my mental clipboard and focus on the task at hand.

Plastic tubing runs crazily throughout the room, like a diseased mind twisting, turning back on itself with no end, no beginning. Plastic balls fill a pit of doom, three toddlers drowning to the chorus of their parents’ snap-shotting delight. Primary reds, blues, and yellows clash horribly with khaki, lavender, and peach. Children, fat children, skinny children, coloured children pale from too much TV, run half-heartedly through the plastic pipes, their stocking feet pad-padding in the tubes above my head. They squeal listlessly from expectation rather than delight. A playground for children constructed from a culture of decay. There is enough plastic here to make Tupperware for an entire continent and I am too stunned to gape in horrified dismay.