ODD? (9 page)

STINKY GIRL

Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto’s first novel,
Chorus of Mushrooms
(1994), received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region and was co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her YA/Crossover novel,
Half World
(2009), was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received the 2010 Sunburst Award and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award.

One is never certain when one becomes a stinky girl. I am almost positive I wasn’t stinky when I slid out from between my mother’s legs, fresh as blood and just as sweet. What could be stinkier, messier, grosser than that? one might be asked. But I’m certain I must have smelled rich, like yeast and liver. Not the stink of I-don’t-know-what which pervades me now.

Mother has looked over my shoulder to see what I am trying to cover up with my hand and arm, while I meditatively write at the kitchen table.

“Jesus!” she rolls her eyes like a whale. “Jesus Christ!” she yells. “Don’t talk about yourself as ‘one’! One what, for God’s sake? One asshole? One snivelling stinky girl?” She stomps off. Thank goodness. It’s very difficult having a mother. It’s even more difficult having a loud and coarse one.

Where was I? Oh yes. I am not troubled by many things. My size, my mother, my dead father’s ghost, and a pet dog that despises me do not bother me so very much. Well, perhaps on an off day, they might bring a few tears to my eyes, but no one will notice a fat stinky mall rat weeping. People generally believe that fatties secrete all sorts of noxious substances from their bodies. But regardless. The one bane of my life, the one cloud of doom which circumscribes my life is the odour of myself.

There’s no trying to pinpoint it. The usual sniff under the armpits or cupping of palms in front of my mouth to catch the smell of my breath is like trying to scoop an iceberg with a goldfish net. And it’s not a simple condition of typical body odour. I mean, everybody has natural scents and even the prettiest cover girls wear deodorant and perfume. It’s not the fact that I am fat that foul odours are trapped in the folds of my body. No, my problem is not a causal phenomenon and there are no simple answers.

Perhaps I am misleading, calling myself a mall rat. It’s true I spend much of my time wandering in the subculture of gross material consumerism. I meander from store to store in the wake of my odour, but I seldom purchase anything I see inside the malls. Think, if you will, upon the word “rat.” Instantly, you’ll see a sharp-whiskered nose, beady black eyes, and an unsavoury disposition. Grubby hands with dirty fingernails, perhaps, and a waxy tail. You never actually think, FAT RAT. No, I’m sure what comes to mind is a more sneaky and thinner rodent. If I am a rat, think of, perhaps, the queen of all rats in the sewer of her dreams, being fed the most tender morsels of garbage flesh her minions bring her. Think of a well-fed rat with three mighty chins and smooth, smooth skin, pink and fine. No need for a fur covering when all your needs are met. A mighty rodent with more belly than breath, more girth than the diameter of the septic drains. If you think of such a rat, then I am that mighty beast.

Actually, I had always thought of myself more in terms of a vole or perhaps a wise fat toad, or maybe even a manatee, mistaken by superstitious sailors as a bewitching mermaid. But, no. My mother tells me I was born in the Year of the Rat and that is that. No choice there, I’m afraid, and I can’t argue with what I can’t remember. Mother isn’t one for prolonged arguments and contemplative discussions. More often than not, all I’ll get is a “Jesus Christ!” for all my intellectual and moral efforts. I hope I don’t sound judgmental. Mother is a creature unto herself and there is no ground for arbitrary comparison. Each to their own is a common phrase, but not without a tidbit of truth.

Perhaps I mislead you, calling myself a stinky girl. I am not a girl in the commonly held chronological sense of time. I’ve existed outside my mother’s body for three and thirty years. Some might even go as far as to say that I’m an emotionally crippled and mutually dependent member of a dysfunctional family. Let’s not quibble. In the measure of myself, and my sense of who I am, I am definitely a girl. Albeit, a stinky one.

When people see obesity, they are amazed. Fascinated. Attracted and repulsed simultaneously. Now if we could harness all the emotions my scale inspires, who knows how many homes it would heat, how many trains it would move? People always think there is a reason behind being grand. That there must be some sort of glandular problem, or an eating disorder, a symptom of some childhood trauma. All I can say is: not to my knowledge. I have always been fat, and, if I must say so myself, I eat a lot less than my tiny mother. I wasn’t adopted, either. Mother is always bringing up how painful her labour was as she ejected me from her body. How she had to be tied down and how she pushed and screamed and pushed and cursed for three days running. Perhaps that’s the reason for her slightly antagonistic demeanour. She didn’t have any more children after I was born, and I must say, this birthing thing sounds like an unpleasant business. What with all the tying down and screaming.

Oh, yes. I do have siblings but they are much older than I. Three sisters and a brother who became women and a man long before their due. Cherry was born in the Year of the Rabbit; Ginger, the Year of the Dragon; Sushi, the Year of the Horse; Bonus, the Year of the Sheep. Mother was feeling quite tired of the whole affair by the time her second to last child was born. Bonus was so named because he came out of her body with such ease she couldn’t believe her luck. There was a seventeen-year stretch with no other pregnancies, and she must have thought that her cycles were finished. And what better way than to end on a bonus?

But Mother wasn’t fated to an easy existence. She wasn’t going to inhabit the autumn years of her life without considerable trials and tribulations. At the age of fifty-one, she became pregnant with me and promptly thereafter, my father died and she was left in a trailer, huge and growing, her children all moved away. A tragic life, really, but no. I shouldn’t romanticize. One is easily led toward a tragic conclusion, and one must fight the natural human tendency to dramaticize the conditions of one’s life. One must be level-headed. A fat girl especially. When one is fat, one is seldom seen as a stable and steadying force in an otherwise chaotic world. Fat people embody the disruptive forces in action and this inspires people to lay blame. Where else to point their fingers, but at the fat girl in striped trousers?

Did I mention I am also coloured?

I can’t remember my very first memory. No one can, of course. But I must remember what others have told me before I could remember on my own. Of my living father I have no recollections. But his ghost is all too present in my daily life. I wouldn’t be one to complain if he was a helpful and cheerful ghost, prone to telling me where there are hidden crocks of gold or if the weather will be fine for the picnic. But no. He is a dreadfully doleful one, following me around the small spaces in our trailer, leaning mournfully on my shoulder and telling me to watch my step
after
I’ve stepped in a pile of dog excrement. And such a pitiful apparition! All that there is of him is his sad and sorry face. Just his head, bobbing around in the air, sometimes at the level of a man walking, but more often than not down around the ankles, weaving heavily around one’s steps. It’s enough to make one want to kick him, but I am not one who is compelled to exhibit unseemly aggressive behaviour.

Mother, on the other hand, is not above a swift “kick in the can,” as she calls it, or a sudden cuff to the back of the head. I would not be exaggerating if I said I had no idea how she can reach my buttocks, let alone reach high enough to cuff my head, for I am not only very fat, but big and tall all around. Well, tall might be misleading. It would make one imagine that length is greater than girth. Let there be no doubt as to my being rounder than I would ever be considered tall. Only that I am at least a foot and a half taller than my mother, who stands four foot eight. Medically speaking, she is not a dwarf, and I am not a giant. But we are not normal in the commonly held sense of the word.

No, my mother is not a dwarf, but she is the centre of the universe. Well, at least the centre of this trailer park, and she leaves no doubt as to who “kicks the cabbage around this joint,” as she is so fond of reminding me. It gives me quite a chuckle on occasion, because father’s ghost often looks much like a cabbage, rolling around the gritty floor of our trailer, and even though Mother cannot see him, she has booted his head many times, when she punctuates her sayings with savage kicks to what she can only see as empty air. It doesn’t hurt him, of course, but it does seem uncomfortable. He rolls his sorry eyes as he is tha-klunked tha-klunked across the kitchen.

“What are you sniggling at, Mall Rat?” Mother snaps at me.

“Nothing,” I say, sniggling so hard that my body ripples like tides.

Mother kicks me in the can for lying and stomps off to her bedroom to smoke her cigars. I feel sorry for my father and right his head, brush off some ghostly dust.

“See what happens when you inhabit this worldly prison? Why don’t you float up to the heavens or at least a waiting room,” I scold. “There’s nothing left for you here except kicks in the head and a daughter who doesn’t want to hear your depressing talk of dog excrement and all the pains you still feel in your phantom body that isn’t there.”

“As if I’m here by choice!” he moans. “As if any ghost would choose to remain in this purgatory excuse of a trailer! Finally dead and I get the nice light show, the tunnel thing, and a lovely floating body. I think that I might be hearing a chorus of singing mermaids when an unsympathetic voice bellows, ‘You have not finished your time,’ and I find my head bobbing in a yellow-stained toilet bowl. It takes me a couple of minutes to figure out it’s my own toilet bowl in my old washroom, because I’d never seen the bathroom from that perspective before. Imagine my shock! What’s a poor ghost to do? Oh woe, oh woe,” he sobs. Because ghosts have ghostly license to say things like that.

Frankly, his lamenting and woeing is terribly depressing, and I have plenty of my own woes without having to deal with his. I might not give in to excessive displays of violence, but I am not above stuffing him in the flour bin to make my escape.

I suppose calling oneself a rat might seem gender-specific. “Rat,” I’ll say, and instantly a man or a nasty boy is conjured up. There are female rats as well, don’t you know. His and hers rat towels. Rat breasts and rat wombs. Rat washrooms where you squat instead of peeing standing. A girl can grow up to become a doctor or a lawyer now. Why not become a rat? Albeit, a stinky one.

Yes, yes, the odour of my life. It is large as myth and uglier than truth.

There are many unpleasant scents as you twiddle twaddle down the gray felt tunnels of life. Actually, smells hinge the past to the clutter of present memory. Nothing is comparable to the olfactory in terms of distorting your life. To jar a missing thought. Or transmute into an obsession. The dog excrement smell that’s trapped in the runnels of the bottom of a sneaker, following you around all day no matter how fast you flee. That high-pitched whine of dog shit, pardon my language. Mother is a terrible influence and one must always guard against common usage and base displays of aggression. Yes, there is nothing like stepping in a pile of doggy dung to ruin your entire day. It is especially bad when the dog is supposedly your own.

Mother found the dog in the trailer park dumpster and as it was close to my “sorry birthday,” as she called it, she brought the dirt-coloured, wall-eyed creature as a gift to me. I was touched, really, because she had forgotten to give me a gift for the last twenty-seven years and I had always wanted a dog as a devoted friend.

The dog started whining as soon as Mother dragged it into the trailer by the scruff of its mangy neck. It cringed on the floor, curling its lip back three times over. The dog started chasing itself, tried to catch up with its stumpy tail so it could eat itself out of existence. I was concerned.

“Mother, perhaps the dog has rabies.”

“Arrghh.” (This is the closest I can get in writing to the sound of my mother’s laughter.) “Damn dog’s not rabid, it’s going crazy from your infernal stink. Lookit! It’s hyperventilating! Aaaaaarrggghhh!”

The poor beast was frothing, chest heaving, smearing itself into the kitchen linoleum. It gave a sudden convulsive shake, then fainted. It was the first time I ever saw a dog faint. Needless to say, my “sorry birthday” was ruined. I actually thought the dog would die, or at least flee from my home as soon as it regained consciousness. But surprisingly, the animal stayed. There is no accounting for dog sense. Perhaps it’s a puerile addiction to horrible smells. Like after one has cut up some slightly-going-off ocean fish and raises one’s fishy fingers to one’s nostrils throughout the day and night until the smell has been totally inhaled. Or sitting down in a chair and crossing an ankle over the knee, clutching the ankle with a hand, twisting so the bottom of the runner is facing upward. The nose descends to sniff, sniff, sniff again. There is an unborn addict in all of us, and it often reveals itself in the things we choose to smell.

I must admit, I cannot smell myself because I have smelled my scent into normality. I only know that I still emit a tremendous odour because my mother tells me so, I have no friends, and people give me a wide berth when I take my trips to the mall. There is a certain look people cannot control when they smell an awful stink. The lips curl back, the nose wrinkles toward the forehead, trying to close itself. (Actually, if one thinks about it, the nostrils seem more greatly exposed when in this position than at rest, but I needn’t linger on that thought just now. Later, I’ll ponder it at my leisure.) People cannot control this reaction. I have seen it the whole of my life and can interpret the fine sneer in the corner of an eye, a cheek twitching with the sudden sour bile rising from the bottom of the tongue.