The Monkeyface Chronicles (21 page)

I sit down across from her. “What happened to your glasses?”

“Contact lenses,” she says. “Dad got them for me as a present. Nice spot, eh? That triangular building in front of you is the Flatiron Building. They built the office towers behind it to look symmetrical when you stand in front of it.”

I'm having a difficult time concentrating on the surroundings, since I can't keep my eyes off of Adeline. Nobody back in classroom 8-C at Faireville Elementary would recognize her now. She's lost even more weight, and she looks like one of those pin-up girls from the 1950s. Her hair is no longer braided in the style of the Tabernacle faithful; it flows down her back and over her shoulders in loose auburn waves. She's wearing a sheer salmon-pink tank top, and doesn't seem to mind that I've been gazing at her breasts for an impolite amount of time; in fact, she arches her back a little every time the eyes of a passing male fixate on her cleavage.

“Wow. You look great, Adeline.”

“Thanks, Philip. It's amazing what time away from Boringville and the Fascist Tabernacle can do for a person. I've still got a long way to go, though. Ten more pounds at least.”

“You look perfect the way you are.”

“Philip, you would have said that when I was still a cow.”

Two women in trim-fitting business attire scurry past on the sidewalk beside us, their heels clicking in unison against the concrete. Both resemble stick figures drawn by a five-year-old. The taller one's open jacket reveals a pair of enormous breast implants, reminding me of two tetherballs hanging from a pole. Both women puff aggressively on cigarettes.

“Maybe I should take up smoking,” Adeline muses. “All the skinny girls do it.”

I shoot an incredulous look at her.

“Kidding!” She laughs. “I'm kidding! I want to fit into smaller clothes, not into an iron lung.”

“You look perfect the way you are,” I reiterate.

“Ten more pounds and I'll be perfect,” she says. “Thin is in.”

To emphasize this, she points to a billboard on a roof across the street, which features a semi-nude, skeletally-thin model.

“That woman is emaciated,” I protest. “She looks like an insect! You're telling me you would rather look like a Praying Mantis than a human female?”

“Ten more pounds,” she says and raises two fingers in the air as a waitress scurries past, and the server returns with a couple of menus. “I'll have a white wine,” Adeline says.

“Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc?” the waitress wonders.

“The Sauvignon,” Adeline says. “Less calories.”

I'm a bit reluctant to have any wine after projectile-vomiting all over the entrance to the Tabernacle of God's Will. “Um, I'll have a Tankhouse Ale,” I say with authority.

“I'll be right back with your drinks,” the waitress says.

“Jeez,” Adeline says, “she didn't even ask us for ID. I suppose my boobs and hips are helpful in that respect. We don't look like children anymore, Philip.”

Adeline certainly doesn't. The middle-aged businessmen at the adjacent table keep glancing admiringly in her direction. She leans back, closes her eyes and inhales deeply, as if the exhaust fumes from a passing garbage truck smell as sweet as the flowers that hang from the gas-well streetlights back home. She turns sideways in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. Her already short skirt slides back, revealing a tapered, suntanned thigh. She rocks her high-heeled sandal back and forth on the end of her delicately painted toenails, flexing her shapely calf muscles.

“Philip,” she says in a flirtatious way, “are you looking at my legs?”

“Yes,” I admit. “Your Tabernacle dress always covered them before.”

“Well,” she says, “I'm not hiding my legs or my breasts or anything else anymore.”

Whew. Clearly not.

“On the day I arrived here in the city, I bagged up my Tabernacle uniform and dropped it off at the Salvation Army on Jarvis Street. What a great feeling
that
was.”

The waitress places our drinks and a round loaf of steaming sourdough bread on the table. “Ready to order lunch?” she asks.

“I'll have a small Caesar salad,” Adeline says. “No croutons or cheese, with the dressing on the side, please.”

The waitress nods empathetically.

“Why don't you get the Il Diavolo pizza, Philip?” Adeline says to me. “That way, I can have one bite.”

“Sounds good,” I say, and the waitress scurries away. “You can have more than one bite though.”

“My dietician says that one bite tastes the same as ten.”

“Your dietician?”

“Dad bought me a year's worth of diet consultations. Barbie's great — she's got this system for counting proteins, starches, and fats. Until I reach my optimum weight, I get ten proteins, seven starches, five sugars and five fats a day.”

“Your dietician's name is
Barbie
? Like the anatomically impossible fashion doll?”

“Pretty much the opposite — she's fifty years old, five-foot-nothing, grey hair, and she
never
wears pink clothing or high heels. But she
is
thin.” She takes a sip of her wine. “This is going to cost me two of my sugars for the day, but we're celebrating, right? And I'll work the calories off when we go out exploring the city this afternoon.”

“You think a few leaves of lettuce and a cocktail will give you enough energy to go walking? Have a piece of bread.”

“Barbie says that bread is Waistline Enemy Number One.”

I roll my eyes.

Adeline sighs. “Okay, okay, I'll have one piece, with no butter. I'll just do some extra cardio at the gym tomorrow.”

“The gym.”

“Dad got me a membership at this great club just across the street from our condo. By next year, I'll look like a million bucks.”

“I think you look like a million bucks right now.”

“Says the guy with the empty wallet,” she giggles. “Compared to my Fat-a-line days, I look like about a hundred thousand dollars now, maybe
half
a million by Faireville standards. But soon I'll show you what a million looks like.”

“I don't know if my hormones will be able to take it,” I say.

“Sweet as always,” she says. “Not objective, but sweet.”

We look at each other across the table, my tongue spiraling through a mouthful of beer. Adeline kisses the lip of her tall, slender wine glass, then swirls the stir stick, the ice clinking along to the chorus of screeching streetcar wheels, the plaintive echoed wailing of fire truck sirens blocks away, the roar of subway trains rumbling up through sidewalk grates.

It all surrounds me like rushing water, and I get a shivery feeling, like a little kid learning to swim.

Adeline aims her eyes skyward, like she's seen and heard this all a thousand times before, like she's always been this high-heeled city girl.

“You could have let me pay,” I say as we leave the Hot House patio.

“After all the shit my mother's put you through, the least I can do is buy you lunch,” she says. “Besides, Dad gave me a credit card.”

“Your father seems to have a lot of disposable income. What does he do?”

“Some kind of import-export business, I think.” She changes the subject. “Feel like seeing a bit of the city?”

“Sure.”

She walks in long, quick strides, not ambling along like she used to. Maybe that long, heavy Tabernacle skirt slowed her down more than I thought. She points up at a pair of office towers sheathed in rose-coloured marble. “There are more people inside BCE Place right now than the entire population of Faireville.”

I count the floors, multiply it by the number of windows on each floor, and concede that she is probably right — it's our whole hometown in a single building.

“That's what I love about living in a big city,” she says. “The
numbers
. In the middle of a couple million people, you're nearly anonymous. Men I will probably never see again check me out as I walk past, like maybe I'm
somebody
. But back in Faireville, even though I've lost weight and defected from the Tabernacle, people passing me on the sidewalk will still think to themselves,
there goes Fat-a-line Brown from the Weirdo
Church
. You can never get away from your past in a small town, but in the city there is only the present and the future.”

“Hardly anyone stares at my face,” I say.

“Because they're used to seeing thousands of faces with different colours and features every day. Your face isn't the big shock it is to people back home. Difference is part of the scenery. The only people gawking at everything are the dorky tourists from little hick towns.”

I had been staring up at the CN Tower and other buildings as we walked, but maybe this makes me look like a dorky tourist, so instead I watch Adeline's buttocks undulate as she strides along in front of me. I follow her along Front Street to Union Station, feeling a relaxed kind of happiness I've rarely felt before. Maybe it's the sunshine, or the fresh, gentle breeze. Maybe it's the rush of all these other people in motion around us. Maybe it's the buzz from the second beer Adeline ordered for me. Maybe it's something else.

Adeline points to an office tower across the street, and says, “The windows on that building are covered in about 2500 ounces of real gold film, but it didn't cost the builders a dime.”

“Huh?”

“My dad told me that they bought the original gold at about thitry-five dollars an ounce, just before the price skyrocketed in the eighties. They had about 250 ounces left over when the building was finished, which they sold for $850 an ounce. The leftover gold paid for all the gold they used in the building!”

“Dennis would like that story.”

“My father
loves
it.
Buy low, sell high
is his mantra. And he says the best things to buy low are not the things people
need
, like food and clothes, but the things they
want
, like gold and flashy cars.”

Or like dieticians and gym memberships.
I don't say this out loud.

“Then,” she continues, “you just have to convince them that they actually
need
these things, and you sell high.”

“No wonder your dad is hemorrhaging money,” I observe. Adeline's father and Dennis would get along
very
well, I think.

A grubby street beggar sits cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of Union Station. A couple of people toss small change into his upturned baseball cap, but hundreds more just weave around him like he's a fire hydrant. This might be me if I'd run away to the city to make my living as a street urchin. I see now that generating pity with my deformed face would not have been a very lucrative move.

Behind the beggar is an ad for a gymnasium, with a picture of a spandex-clad stick figure running on a treadmill, and the slogan “It's YOUR BODY.” Adeline glances at the poster, and then says, “Hey, Philip, you want to go walk up to Yonge and Eglinton? Burn some calories?”

Like she's got any calories to burn — all she had for lunch was a few leaves of Romaine lettuce, two tiny bites from the piece of bread I forced her to take, and two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc.

“How far is it?”

“A few kilometres, I guess. Good for the legs and ass. I want to stop at our condo on the way and change into my workout clothes. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure.”

I follow her as she weaves her way around pedestrians, street sign-posts, hot dog stands and sidewalk debris. She strides ahead with her head held high, her eyes fixed forward like the headlights of a sports car, oblivious to the appreciative glances she collects, like a real city girl.

It's as if the overweight, braided, bespectacled Adeline never existed.

Ten Pounds

A
deline's father's condo is on Queen's Quay, only a few blocks away from Dennis' bachelor pad, but it's five times bigger — it takes up the entire top floor of the slender skyscraper it occupies. It reminds me of a freshly unboxed stereo system, all chrome, flat black metal, and sand-coloured wood.

Over the fireplace in the sunken-floor living room is a flat television the size of a small movie screen. I click the red button on the elaborate remote control, and a commercial hollers “
Melt-A-Way is the number one weight loss product in
North America! Just look at these before and after photos! Have
the slim, fit, sexy body you've always dreamed of!”
I turn the TV off and pick up a
National Geographic
.

When I glance up from the article I'm reading, I can see into Adeline's room, courtesy of the full-length vanity mirror beyond her half-open bedroom door. She faces the mirror, which is surrounded by little spotlights like in a Hollywood dressing room, and undoes a couple of buttons, and her skirt falls to the floor. I see she has made good on her vow to wear “nothing but thongs” once she got out of her mother's house.