Wallflowers (13 page)

 

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One day I sliced eggplant for a stir-fry. I had walked home from the market as it started to pour. The clouds blocked the sun like the pelt of a lint trap, and in the kitchen horizontal rain smacked the window glass. Irina opened the front door with her pale hair slick to her cheeks. She walked past the kitchen and switched off the light. She continued into her room. I paused. I could not see the eggplant well enough to guide my knife. I walked to the light switch and flicked it back on, then returned to my cutting board. I sliced eggplant. I would fry it with the garlic, ginger, and
cèpe
mushrooms I found at the market. Irina entered the kitchen with her hair in a towel. She turned off the light. She opened the fridge and removed a pot of yogurt and set it on the counter with a spoon from her coffee can. She left the kitchen. I flicked on the light. She returned in a bathrobe. She sighed and turned off the light and switched on the kettle. I sliced my eggplant in the dark until the kettle boiled and she poured her tea and left with her yogurt.

 

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I think I started to hate her. She is the only person I ever started to hate. The internet jack was in her room, and she turned off the router at night. I bought her black electric tape to cover the lights, but that didn't work. I suggested she cover the router with a blanket. She said the router was loud. I said routers don't get loud. She said: This router is loud. She turned the internet off at ten thirty every night, which was her bedtime, and the time I wrote my emails. I lost approximately four emails.

Sometimes I came home and played music in the kitchen because there was no light in her window. But then I heard her voice on the phone, and realized she was sitting in the dark. Not to save bills. She showered three times a day, and every morning it rained she turned on the heat. Even though the temperature was thirty degrees outside. I would turn off the heat and go to my room. She would come out and turn it on. I would turn it off and stand behind my bedroom door and listen for her feet in the hall.

 

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I do not know how the slugs got into the sink. I visited Marrakech for two weeks, and when I came home, the gastropods had harvested. I couldn't distinguish them from the peels: the skins plump and waterlogged, mired in gelatinous slime. The slugs narrow and orange like yam fries. Pan grease beaded the water that had not drained, and threads of chicken. A hard shell plugged the centre of the basin. It was either a snail or a peach pit.

The kitchen window was open. I had planted geraniums in the flower box on the sill. Perhaps the slugs came from there. But they wouldn't have mated if Irina had not clogged the sink with warm, organic matter. She must have been at school—I could not hear Beyoncé. So I opened Irina's cupboard. My eyes shifted from her spoon can to her sponge, her dish detergent to her chestnut spread. I considered what to do.

First, the sink. I emptied her utensils and scraped the slugs into the coffee can. I scrubbed the basin with her sponge. I wanted to dump the slugs on her bed, but she had locked her bedroom door. Instead, I opened her chestnut spread. I pinched a slug with my fingers and released it into the jar. When the body uncurled, I pressed it to the bottom. I added a second slug. I smoothed the paste over their eyespots.

 

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She came home around six. I turned my music down so I could listen to her movements. I heard her set grocery bags on the counter and switch the kettle on. While the water boiled, she went to the bathroom. The hooks of the shower curtain clinked across the rod. She ran the taps.

I had tossed the other slugs outside, in the mulch of the palm tree planted in the courtyard. It was tempting to leave them in the can, with her forks and her soup spoons, but I did not want to kill so many. After her shower ended, she returned to the kitchen and opened her cupboard. I stood against my wall. I could almost gauge the weight of items she set down, but she restarted the kettle. The steam chortled too loudly. It was all I could hear. When the door tapped beside me, I jumped.

I waited until my pulse had calmed, then opened the door. She stood in the hall in bare feet, her bathrobe clutched around her waist. Pimples lit over her forehead where she had removed her makeup. Normally her skin was smooth as wax.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

Her fist trembled where she clenched her robe. I opened the door wider and she stepped inside. She sat on my computer chair. I did not know what to do. The sash of her robe dragged on the floor and I lifted it for her, but she did not see. It dangled off my palm like a braid of hair.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She gazed at my computer screen, though the monitor had blacked.

“I think I found a lump.”

“What?”

“On my breast.”

I stared at her.

“Can you look?”

She stood and opened her bathrobe. I did not look down.

“There,” she said, though she did not point.

I lowered my eyes, but did not know what to look for. Her breasts were larger than mine. That is all I saw. Two large breasts.

“Which one?” I asked.

She nodded to her right breast. I could not see a lump.

“I don't see anything,” I said.

“Touch it.”

“Touch it?”

“Underneath.”

She gathered her hair to one shoulder, though it only fell to her collarbone and was not long enough to block my view. I leaned in and touched her breast with two fingers. I pressed gently. I could feel how cold my hands were.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know how a lump feels.”

“Lumpy,” she said. She stared hard out the window like she might cry.

I continued to probe her breast, then felt it under her skin. The lump was small but firm, wimpled like the shell of a walnut. I lowered my hand.

“You feel it,” she said.

“I'm really not an expert.”

“But you feel it.”

I nodded. She nodded too. She left her robe untied and walked out of the room.

 

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In the morning, I cycled to Carrefour for a new jar of chestnut spread. I arrived fifteen minutes before the store opened, so I continued to the
pâtisserie
. I bought two
pains au chocolat
while I waited. When I got home, I cracked the seal. I removed spoonfuls of the new spread until its level matched the original jar. I tapped the spoonfuls into a bowl, then licked the paste off my fingers. From Irina's room, I could hear the furniture shift across her floor. It sounded like she was cleaning. I did not know if I should knock on her door with the
pains au chocolat
or wait for her to emerge. I did not know if we were friends yet.

After half an hour, she came to collect her underwear from the rack in the courtyard. She walked in the kitchen while I sat at the breakfast bar with my empty bowl. She turned on the kettle.

“Hi,” I said.

She flinched at my voice and dropped the tea bag.

“Sorry,” I said.

She bent to pick up her tea bag. She blew it off, then tossed it in the trash anyway.

“Pain au chocolat?”
I offered. I slid the plate toward her on the table.

“No, thank you.”

She retrieved another bag from her box. I paused with my hand at the end of the table. After a moment, I drew the plate back.

“I don't eat sugar before noon,” she said.

“Oh.”

I tugged the plate closer to me. I felt nauseous from the chestnut spread, but did not want her to think I bought the croissants for her alone. I tore a leaf off one pastry and nibbled.

“Listen,” I said. “If you want someone to go with you to the doctor …”

She looked startled again, as if she forgot I knew.

“No, thank you,” she said again. She opened the fridge and studied the contents. She started to pull items off her shelf and set them onto the counter.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I wouldn't mind.”

“Would you like my
crème fraîche
?”

“What?”

“It's nice with soup.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

She set the container on the table, next to my plate.

“I fly home today,” she said.

“You're flying home?”

“Olives?” she said.

“Thank you. Why are you flying home?”

“I am sick.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

She shook her head.

“You should see a doctor before you fly home.”

“I see a doctor at home,” she said. “Plums?”

“Okay.”

“Chestnut spread?”

I paused.

“It's nice with
baguette
,” she said.

 

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She left me all her food. She set each item on the table while I watched, as if otherwise I would not see. After she went, I sat before the mountain and felt I needed to eat everything. Like if I didn't eat the
crème fraîche
and plums and chestnut spread then, they would spoil. So I did. I ate until I could not eat, and then I sat on the stool with lead in my stomach. I wanted to retch, but could not bring myself to try. I stared at the containers, half-full of their creams, and the windows darkened. By midnight I could not see the food on the table, or even my hips, the lap of my jeans. I stayed until morning. I never bothered to turn on the lights.

Electric Lady Rag

At Japanese restaurants, Ilsa always waited for the booth with the cushions, even if it was only the two of them. Sitting on cushions set the peace, like the bamboo flute music and the water feature. Shoes off, heels tucked under her thighs, a warm mug of tea. That was her calm nowadays. The tea was important—the clasping of the mug, the nutty undertones. She had peeked under the lid once. They brewed the leaves with toasted rice. That was the secret, she told Dex. Boxed tea always tasted so acrid.

Dex was her sushi partner. If they didn’t dine in, they ordered from Tokyo All-Nite on their work breaks. You didn’t eat the fish at Tokyo All-Nite, or the pickled mushrooms, but Dex liked the tempura, and she could buy a vat of rice with sesame sauce for a dollar fifty. He was a DJ then. Now he was an “able seaman” about to be deployed to the Mediterranean. To mourn his departure, they went out for Japanese. But the calm was off. This would be his first time at sea for so long—nine months. He was nervous. His eyes flicked around the restaurant as though he couldn’t remember why he was there. In response, Ilsa poured the tea before it had steeped. She burned her tongue. She poked the tip out and tried to suck air to it. Dex looked at her. She cleared her throat. She opened her menu and didn’t glance up until she had organized three of the items into a haiku.

Salmon sashimi.

Mackerel maki-mono.

Eel yosenabe.

And so on. In town, Dex lived in a condo by the sea. She would move in after he left: to walk his dog and check the mail, and to flee her own roommate, who used drugs and her underwear without asking. She knew both of them from the Shangri-LA, where she danced and where Dex had spun songs before he joined the navy. She was a, you know, dancer, but she wasn’t a, you know, dancer like her roommate, who traded extras for smack and left burned tinfoil on the toilet seat. Her shtick was vintage. Interwar grind house. Vargas girl sass, cute as a button, as a gal in a utility bra and silk stockings. She sewed her own costumes: feathers and rayon, sailor stripes sometimes, once a cigarette girl—tulle skirt and a pillbox hat. “Cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos,” she’d call, as she swayed under a wooden tray that hung from her neck. The music she danced to was mostly like heartbeats. Electric lady robo pulse. Strobe lights for optimal gyration. Anachronistic, but sometimes she’d soundtrack her own set. Droopy-sax jazz, maybe, or ragtime, if she wanted to bounce. “Louisiana Rag,” “Mockingbird Rag”—flea-fingered piano you could swing to.

She sipped her tea and watched him read the menu. He held it like a newspaper, in front of his face with both hands, his freshly shaved head doming out the top. He had thin wrists and feminine knuckles—long fingers, like someone who played cat’s cradle. Not someone who would report to work on a submarine for a nine-month game of all-or-nothing minesweeper.

“What if I break your leg,” she said, a joke she had made before, but she wanted to end the silence. “I know self-defence. I could break your leg.”

She sensed him pause, but he didn’t look at her. “You couldn’t break my leg.”

“I know people who could break your leg.”

“Ilsa.”

“What if I’m with child.” She slid her palm toward his elbow. “With your child.”