The French Revolution (3 page)

She woke up seated behind her cash register at work, her midday milkshake waiting on the counter. After a quick taste from the pink bendy straw, she caught sight of the wall clock, the hour hand onto early afternoon, impossible. Probably a dying battery, she reassured herself, Lakshmi letting things slide as usual.

“Slippy’s mad at you, Ezzie.”

“Haronk!” Milkshake shooting from Esmerelda’s nose was a common Tuesday afternoon occurrence, and Lakshmi had prepared for the likelihood by standing well out of range. “What for?”

“You just took off this morning. He had to mind the register. Missed a lunch appointment. And”—Lakshmi’s voice turned nasal—“you peed all over the floor.”

“Shucks. It’s my birthday, you know.” Esmerelda turned to busy herself with the reorganization of papers or pencils, but found none on the counter. She slurped boisterously on her milkshake instead.

“Yeah, well, happy birthday. But you can’t go running off like that, Ezzie. This is a business. Sometimes you have to work.”

Esmerelda slammed down her cup as purple tinted her face. “Have to work? Hello! Little miss booty girl, I’ve been working here for five years and have never once taken a vacation. I don’t take lunch breaks. I don’t run out for tea and crumpets, or whatever you do all afternoon with those freakazoid friends I see you fooling around with on the sidewalk. Haronk! Now a sandwich please! This discussion is over.”

Lakshmi sucked in her lips and retreated to the workroom. Esmerelda’s invective was technically accurate but had conveniently overlooked Lakshmi’s unofficial duties as comestible gatherer that frequently took her out to the sidewalk, where she paid off her freakazoid friend delivery persons with wadded cash
from Esmerelda’s great wool bag. The vacation claim was a slippery one too, for while Esmerelda had not officially taken any vacation leave from the CopySmart flagship store, she had used up more than one hundred sick days in her five years on the job, often in sequential order, supported by flimsy excuses of unpinpointable cramps and general anxiety and long-out-of-vogue mental health problems authenticated with obviously forged doctor’s notes and counselor’s reports. But Lakshmi knew better than to confront Esmerelda with facts when she was all riled up, and resolved instead to give her incorrect change on food orders for the remainder of her CopySmart career.

Slippy arrived ten minutes later, fresh off his afternoon tour of the CopySmart satellite outlets. “Ezzie!” he shouted from the entrance. “You’ve gotta stop the pissing!” The secretary Esmerelda was servicing bunched an eyebrow. “I haven’t the mops or the time to clean up after you. Get some diapers or a grip, I don’t care which—but if you ruin my floor again, you’re out on the street.”

“Slippy,” Esmerelda said with ominous calm, “today’s my birthday.”

“I don’t care if it’s your wedding day, Christmas, or Chinese New Year—your bladder never gets a holiday so long as you work for me. Control yourself, for Christ’s sake. Just because you’re fat doesn’t mean you have to be gross.”

Slippy’s wrinkly bald head approached the Gargantuan, and Esmerelda hoped with all her heart he’d bumble into milkshake range.

“Happy birthday, Esmerelda,” he said softly. Her throwing arm relaxed. “I gave you the morning off retroactively. How did everything go?”

“Oh—swimmingly,” she coughed. “Just swimmingly.”

“Good!” Slippy slapped his ring-riddled hand against the counter. “Now, let’s make some money. And remember: no accidents.”

That wasn’t an issue, as Esmerelda’s conditioning was fully reinstated and she was holding it in like the time-tested urine
vault that she was. And soon everything else seemed to be back on track too: her milkshake demolished, her hot-dog fingers bounding precisely over her oversized cash register buttons, her interaction with Jasper back to limited friendly banter. But amid the apparent return of normality, the day’s critical turn went undetected: Jasper’s aged semen secretly navigating the billowed folds of Esmerelda’s uterus and slipping inside two of her ripened ova. Weeks dripped by, and the pair of eggs quietly developed into dizygotic embryos and later fetuses that kicked and squirmed anonymously, inflicting daily bouts of indigestion and internal discomfort. But these classic pregnancy tip-offs were missed, as Esmerelda chalked up the tummy trouble and bodily unease to her steady consumption of fiery tamales, greasy hamburgers, and cheap pizza that Lakshmi delivered to her counter at reduced price. The absence of menstruation went unnoticed too, for Esmerelda had stopped worrying about her cycle and the insertion of absorbent devices years ago, seeing that the leakage didn’t get very far before crusting off against her leg to be hosed off at the end of the day, and all the aerobics required to manage the process just weren’t worth it. The most obvious clue to her condition—major weight gain—was cancelled out by Esmerelda’s prolific profile, as whatever change in stomach diameter wrought by her unborn children could not be isolated from Esmerelda’s normal rate of fat increase.

Jasper cared for her throughout her stealthy enlargement, offering coupons for heartburn tablets and gas-reducing pills, a buck off the latest belly calmer from Johnson & Johnson, a free Alka-Seltzer package with the purchase of two others. He gave her shiny foil balloons to lift her spirits and stopped by during his lunch break to massage her gelatinous back with his long needle fingers. Esmerelda appreciated the back rubs—she was often tender from her eight dips across the sidewalk—and while the most penetrating of deep-tissue kneading could not directly prod the sore muscles buried beneath, the manipulation of her skin was still quite soothing. Jasper smiled and hummed along
with the radio in his pocket, and Esmerelda, more often than not, joined in. Their off-key, raggedy duet filled the store until complaints came in, sometimes as long as five minutes.

Occasionally, after Jasper had given Ezzie a lengthy rubdown or presented her with a particularly large balloon, he asked if he could see her after work. Maybe, he posited, they could go for a dip. Hunger edged into his eyes, hinting at something furtive and unsettled, but it faded into his gentle smile as he waited for her response. Not that it was long in coming; he had only to wait for the laughter to die down, the haronking snorts to quit, the jiggling belly and bobbling of all seven chins to settle and stop.

“Are you crazy, Jasper? The last thing I need is another round with that eraser dick of yours. I’d rather watch bowling reruns, or even eat fruit.” She looked up to see his face collapse, his posture melt to mush. “Aw, come on there, fella. Don’t be so grim. You had your shot, and a good one too. You shouldn’t be messing with ogres like me anyway. Go on, find yourself some fresh meat.”

“I like you, Ezzie,” he invariably responded.

“Sorry, bud. Not gonna happen. But thanks for the massage.” His hands had stopped. “Felt nice.”

An hour or so later, after Lakshmi reported that Jasper was stumbling through traffic, or ramming his head against a telephone pole, or lying prostrate on the median strip, his wheelbarrow uncovered and his coupons shimmering in the downdraft like ticker tape, she gave in. Jasper was summoned, a halfhearted apology was delivered, a date was suggested and greedily accepted. After closing time on the appointed day, they rode through the city together in a minivan piloted by Jasper’s mother, Karen Winslow, a small, white-haired secretary at the machinists’ union who listened to gospel at high volume. The dates weren’t going very far, sexwise, even if they hadn’t been chaperoned by Jasper’s half-deaf mother, as Esmerelda kept her mouth shut and her eyes out the window, radiating misery and bristling at Jasper’s touch. Undeterred, Jasper stroked her gritty hair and rubbed her tree-trunk neck and tried to pry her gloopy hands
from their death grip on her great wool bag, all the while informing her of the best tidbits he’d learned from the radio: the day’s most popular songs, leading news items, traffic patterns and street closures, weather forecasts, celebrity birthdays. Together they gazed upon the fractured streets and the wild people and the eucalyptus trees and later on at the ocean twisting beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, until they arrived at Esmerelda’s mother’s house at nine o’clock sharp and Esmerelda concluded the evening with a handshake and a curt good-night.

In the summer of 1990, they were on an evening tour out where Golden Gate Park meets the sea when Esmerelda felt a punch in the stomach. She tried to pinch it, then stalled for time by impressing the heel of her palm against her belly and chewing a fistful of herbal antinausea pills from her wool bag, but all the tea in China couldn’t hold back a gastrointestinal surge of this magnitude for long.

“Jasper, I need to use the facilities. Tell your mom to pull over.”

“But it’s not bedtime yet. What’s going on?”

“Look, I don’t have details. But unless you want a mess in the car, we better find a bathroom, pronto.”

Jasper notified his mother with a series of piercing screeches, and inside of thirty seconds they were stopped at a gas station. With both hands he spotted Esmerelda as she pushed out of the minivan and wobbled across the parking lot, spitting gooey strings like an angry third-base coach. As soon as she was installed in a semistable position leaning against a braced stucco wall, Jasper ran down to the snack shop, bought a bag of sunflower seeds, and hopped back with a scuffed silver hubcap chained to a key. Esmerelda grabbed the snack, pried open the lavatory door, and speed-waddled to the commode, where she hiked up her muumuu, slid onto the seat, and relaxed her sphincter in a single, surprisingly limber motion. To her dismay her innards offered no immediate relief, but on the plus side she observed that the restroom had been recently cleaned and was handicapped accessible, such that the toilet was reinforced,
there were grab bars for gripping and stabilizing, and on the whole Esmerelda couldn’t have been more comfortable except perhaps with a recent feature film.

Or several. The wait turned out to be six hours long, a bathroom visit of historic proportions, marking a momentous shift in Esmerelda’s personal geopolitics.

“Everything OK? Need some water?” Jasper asked through the door after the first hour had passed.

“Of course not, Jasper. There’s water in here.”

“How bout some supper? I have coupons for the deli across the street.”

A pastrami sandwich was tempting, Esmerelda had to admit, and would keep up her strength better than a measly bag of sunflower seeds. She was on the verge of authorizing the purchase when a steel-toed-boot-kicking competition broke out in her breadbasket and she realized the addition of processed meats was sure to end in digestive pandemonium.

“Thanks, buckaroo,” she sighed, “but I’d better get back to concentrating.”

She made progress with ensuing sets of abdominal squeezing—splashes, periods of moderate gushing—but the obstruction’s bulk remained lodged in her midsection. Bolts of pain seared the rolling hills of her gut and trembled between her legs, shooting in white streaks from her statuesque brow to the lonely corners of her rarely seen feet. It got worse as the hours rolled by, splitting her insides from an unusual epicenter for a bowel movement, not the intestines or the anus or even the gut but somewhere more front and center, recognizable but noticeably different, like a lavatory in a foreign country. It dawned on Esmerelda that maybe whatever it was wasn’t coming out the traditional number two hole, but for whatever reason, due to a plumbing mix-up or some very garbled directions, out of number one. She remembered reading an article that described kidney stones as having similar symptoms and was reaching into her wool bag to search for the clipping when an incredible spike
broke through her eyelids and she knew it was far too late for a shred of newsprint to do any good.

This was it; it was happening.

Land mines and firebombs, rips and tears, six-legged kicks, teeth-piercing lips, self-imposed scratches and backhanded wall slaps, flagellation and mutilation, hand-to-hand field combat, daggers gouging out gallbladders. Remotely she felt barbed motion, inertia carpet-bombed and shattered. Fire streaked from her birth canal to her decomposing hair bun; her groans rang at such volume that even Jasper’s mother heard it over her gospel tunes. As the hullabaloo grew louder and louder, the gas station attendant realized this was no ordinary six-hour excretion and called the police.

“What’s going on? Ezzie!” Jasper’s voice was so kooky when he screamed, akin to that of a female dwarf, and Esmerelda almost found a way to laugh despite the earthquake in her loins. “Open this door or I’ll bust it down!”

It was silly to hear him say that, and not just because of his voice—even if Esmerelda hadn’t been experiencing the most belly-busting pain of her life, hauling her big butt over to let him in was a physical impossibility after her hours of exertion. But his energy was infectious, his resolve admirable, his conviction inspiring, if mildly frightening. As she listened to his puny shoulder thump feebly against the door, Esmerelda was moved to action: she forced her dipping muscles inward, compressed her stomach, strained her hidden abs, and bobbed up and down on the toilet to loosen things up. Jasper heard her travails and took on a fresh determination in his ramming just as the police arrived with weapons drawn and ordered him to freeze: his assault on the bathroom not only constituted the destruction of private property but also was a textbook sign of an abusive relationship what with the hysterical woman inside. Seconds later the gas station attendant dredged up the backup restroom key from under a pile of invoices and yelled over for everybody to cool down, he’d let them in, when the mother of all hollers rangout from inside
like agony incarnate, a dead dog on a doorstep. Jasper skidded to a stop and examined the door, assessing its breadth, its material construction, its hinges, possible weak spots. Another second tocked by and his head was down, he was charging, wild-man frenzy starring his eyes, snot foaming in his nostrils, legs churning smoke, glottal Hungarian consonants pouring from his throat, inducing the cops to panic and open fire. With a stiff crunch the restroom door gave way and Jasper barreled inside, falling at a fortunate angle that eluded the two bullets slicing after him and landing on the floor to get the first look of his daughter’s head peeking out from between Esmerelda’s legs, slick with blood and wailing like a walloped cat.