And Also Sharks, page 16
She asks him, “Why did you become a florist if you don’t like flowers?”
“I just fell into it. You know how people can fall into things.”
Across the room, a device similar to a walkie-talkie hisses and crackles.
Nancy sees the florist looking over. “I bought that baby monitor when I still thought I was going to have a baby, to test it out. I kept it because it picks up my neighbours having sex.”
The florist nods, listening for moans in the static.
“I have this theory that babies are plotting to take over the world,” she says. “There’s this one baby, and over on the next block there’s another baby, and another and another, and they all send telepathic messages to each other over their baby monitors. It’s creepy, I know.”
The florist has pancake nipples. They lie flat and brown and smooth, and he is ashamed that they haven’t puckered into arrowheads because of being here.
Nancy slaps her knees and stands up. She walks over to her window, which holds a badly fitting air conditioner. “Okay, so I have tried to figure out, to the best of my ability, how to secure this air conditioning unit in my window. But it’s very precarious and I’m running out of ideas. I tried to shim it with wood, mostly because I love the word shim. I ripped pages out of the newspaper with the intention of balling them up to stuff in the crevices, but the articles were all interesting or horrifying so I read them instead. I squeezed glue around the edges of the unit and pushed it farther back so the glued parts would stick to the window ledge. Then I closed my eyes and wished for the glue to set, and while I was at it, I wished for all of my dreams to come true, which include working somewhere I’d like to work and meeting someone I’d like to know, and maybe someday moving somewhere I’d like to be, and then staying there for a while, but not too long because then I’d be stagnating, and that is the exact opposite of what I’m trying to do here, the way I’m trying to live my life.”
The florist wants to applaud, but instead he stands up and goes to the window and puts her air conditioner in place. Afterwards, when it’s cooler, he puts his shirt back on.
NANCY CALLS THE FLORIST at home the next day and tells him that she had her faults too. She was jealous and insecure. It got in the way of the good things in her marriage.
The florist is happy to listen because he doesn’t have to go to work, because there is no work to go to. He isn’t a florist anymore. He is an ex-florist with an insurance cheque in the mail.
Nancy’s husband had a female friend at his office and he talked about her all the time. The three of them went for dinner one night so the two women could meet each other.
Nancy smiled through the meal and made polite conversation, but the whole time she was comparing herself to the female friend. Like how Nancy was wearing a nice enough sweater and jeans, and the female friend was wearing a similar sweater and jeans, yet she had somehow put the whole outfit together in an effortless way that looked incredibly polished and pretty, and how Nancy had never been able to pull off a look like that. She wanted to ask the female friend where she shopped, but she was afraid to. The stores would either be out of her price range, or they would be the same places Nancy shopped, which would mean that Nancy really didn’t have a clue about fashion at all.
After dinner, the three of them went to a bookstore, and Nancy immediately lost sight of her husband. The store was huge and the shelves were tall and there was a main floor and an upstairs and a basement. He could have been anywhere, running his fingers along book spines with his female friend.
She didn’t want to look for him, to see if he was with her. She didn’t want to crane her neck or stand on her tiptoes to peer over shelves because then it would look like she didn’t trust him. Because she did. It was more the nagging feeling that he would rather be with anyone but her. The books held millions of other possible lives that he could be leading, without her.
Then he appeared at the end of her row, grinning and alone, and asked if she’d found anything she liked.
NANCY AND THE FLORIST have sex. She removes her wig for him, and without it, her short-haired head is very small. Beneath the camisole that she said she preferred to keep on, her breasts are two perfect globes. He thinks how wonderful it is that cosmetic surgery has come so far these days. He also worries about puncturing them.
Afterwards, Nancy tells him that if there’s one thing she’s gotten good at, it’s goodbyes. She has become an expert at them. She just goes to that place where she doesn’t need the person in her life anymore, and she says goodbye, or maybe she’ll only think it, and then it will be easy to stop returning that person’s phone calls or emails. She’ll almost forget that person ever played a part in her life, though of course not entirely. She files them away and they became clutter, and she knows how to deal with clutter now.
“My whole life I have been either underestimated or overestimated because I look younger than I am,” says the florist.
“In the summer, I hear kids playing all day in that big park across the street,” she says. “In the winter, I hear the squeals of kids going down the hill on their sleds all day.”
A woman’s magazine is lying open on her bedside table, and the florist reads to himself, Some of the hottest things to do to a man are things he will not expect, and will not see coming.
Nancy gets out of bed and comes back with an empty beige sack that she lays on the florist’s belly. She smoothes her hand over it and him and says, “This was my colostomy bag.”
“Oh,” he says, “I guess I figured breasts because of the fundraising.”
“People don’t want to run for colon cancer,” she tells him. “They think it’s gross.”
NANCY AND THE FLORIST walk to the florist’s house later that night because Nancy says she wants a change of scenery. On their way past the park, a parade of pre-teen girls appears and encircles them like a cell membrane with ponytails and lip gloss.
The tallest girl extends her slender arm to show them something tiny crawling on it, and says, “Want to pet my mouse?”
The other girls giggle in an uproarious way, and the smallest girl of the group says, “She means our mouse.”
“We have two!” shouts a round-faced girl, and her hand shoots forward with another mouse perched on it.
“We’re going to take turns looking after them,” says the tall girl.
“We love them!” says the round-faced girl, who has a big spray of Queen Anne’s lace tucked behind one ear. The florist thinks, She thinks that’s a flower, but it’s actually a weed.
The tall girl bends her head to kiss her mouse, and her long hair covers it like a lush curtain. “We’re too young to buy pets from the pet store on our own, so we asked a mechanic in the auto shop to buy them for us.”
“He thought we were sexy!” shrieks the smallest girl, and they all laugh in a high-pitched, wheezing way.
“We have named our mice Mrs. Lady Horatio Duncecap and Mr. Lord and Lady Pickle Pie,” says the tall girl.
“You can’t call him ‘Lord and Lady,’ that’s stupid.” The round-faced girl tugs the Queen Anne’s lace free and offers it to her mouse to sniff. “It should just be ‘Lord’."
“Which one do you think is cuter?” the tall one asks the florist, and both girls hold out their squirming friends for his inspection. “We’re having a competition.”
He looks for a while and then says, “They’re both equally cute.”
“Liar!” the smallest girl yells, hopping up and down.
“Really, they’re both very nice.”
“But mine is the cutest.”
“No way! Mine is the cutest!”
The florist hears a sound, and realizes that Nancy has started to cry.
“What’s wrong with her?” says the tall girl.
The round-faced girl drop-kicks her weed onto the sidewalk. “She’s just jealous.”
THE FLORIST SLEEPS IN the next morning. When he wakes up to sunlight flooding his bedroom, he reaches out for Nancy but she’s not there.
He looks around for a note or anything she might have left behind. The room is tidier than he remembers it ever being, even though they messed everything up when they arrived last night — an overturned wastebasket now righted and emptied, her clothes gone from the floor and his clothes folded and placed on the chair by his bed, the previously rumpled sheets tucked in neatly around him.
The florist takes a deep breath and stretches out under the millions of dust motes spotlit overhead. A wasp buzzes outside his window screen, trying to find a way in.
He feels a tickle at the back of his throat, and he coughs, then sneezes. His eyes start to water and his nose starts to run. His ankle itches, and he reaches down to scratch it. He lets out a long sigh while he digs red furrows into his skin with his fingernails, which still have a stubborn layer of dirt under them.
He lies there and waits while the itch travels up his legs and spreads to his groin, his torso, his chest, his neck, to the crown of his head and out along his arms to his fingertips, until all of him is on fire.
Ear, Nose, and Throat
JODY'S POLYP IS RUINING her life.
Her boyfriend Teddy doesn’t think it’s a big deal, but Teddy doesn’t think anything is a big deal. Before they slept together for the first time, Jody told him that she had never had an orgasm, and Teddy said, “That’s cool.”
“It’s not, actually,” she said, but they slept together anyway.
Jody and Teddy are lying in bed, listening to the roofers. The pounding and swearing has been going on for days now. It wakes them up in the morning.
“Yesterday I heard them comparing prison experiences,” Teddy whispers. “They’ve all been in prison.”
A shadow appears against their blinds, and Jody says, “Shh.”
Bang! “So my buddy’s wife is all into that organic shit, right? I was over one time and I ask her does she have any coffee, and she says no, but do I want a cup of hot water. I said, ‘Are you fucking serious?’ She says it’s good for your insides, it’s the best thing you can do for yourself. So she gave me the hot water, and I fucking drank it.”
Bang! Bang! “I’ll give her something to warm up her insides with!”
Teddy puts his mouth against Jody’s ear. “There are criminals on our roof.”
“Shh!” She blows her nose quietly and pulls the covers up to her neck. On the other side of the window, the dark shapes wield their big tools.
TEDDY IS THROWING A surprise 43rd anniversary party for his parents in a few months. “It’s their 43rd,” he says. “Why shouldn’t they have a party? They made it this far.”
They’re making the save-the-date calls now, which Teddy asked Jody to do because she has the better phone voice.
Most of the people she calls have no idea who she is, and she has to explain to Teddy’s parents’ friends and relatives and neighbours and former co-workers that she is Teddy’s girlfriend. Yes, Teddy has a girlfriend. Eight years. Oh, no, ha, no ring yet. We live together, yes. We’re saving up money to buy a condo. Oh, sure, a wedding before then. The date is May 5th. Make sure you park out of sight of the house. Another street is perfect. No gifts, please. If you’d really like to bring something, you could bring a bottle of wine, that would be nice. No, I haven’t been crying, I’m just stuffed up. I’m sure he will, yes, one of these days. Great, we’ll see you there. No, I don’t have a cold. Yes, I’m looking forward to meeting you, as well. No, ha ha, no kids. It’s not allergies. I have a nasal polyp. No, it’s not cancer. It’s a fleshy swelling on my sinus lining. May 5th, that’s right. It was nice talking with you too.
Jody carries a potted plant around the apartment while she makes the calls.
All of their plants are dying, but Jody is convinced that if she keeps moving them around until they find a place they like, everything will be okay.
When Teddy’s mother comes to visit, she caresses the drooping yellow leaves and winks at Jody and says, “When you have my grandchildren, will you kill them too?”
Jody forces a laugh and shakes her head, but sometimes she waits an extra day or two to water the plants, just to make a point. She has heard that over-watering is worse than under-watering, anyway.
When Jody hangs up on the last guest, Teddy says, “We should do tapas for the party, like a whole bunch of miniature finger foods.”
“Hmm. That could get expensive, couldn’t it?”
“I’m just talking a shitload of President’s Choice appetizers here. Nothing fancy. But it should be stuff you heat up in the oven. People like the hot stuff.”
“It might get pretty warm in May with the oven on.”
“Stop being so negative,” he says. “It’s a party.”
Teddy is studying hospitality at George Brown, and whenever he cooks at home, he wants Jody to call him “Chef.”
“How about I call you that in bed?” she’ll say to him with wiggling eyebrows, and he’ll say, “Why would you do that?”
IN LINE AT THE grocery store, Jody blows her nose and says to Teddy, “I hate this. I’m stuffed up all the time, or else my nose is constantly running.”
Teddy says, “Then why don’t you catch it?”
They load their items onto the conveyor belt — radicchio, arugula, Belgian endive, Romaine hearts, baby spinach, shredded cabbage in a bag. Teddy has a test on salad this week.
“I bet roofers would know how to build a tree house,” he says.
Jody smiles at the toddler squirming in his father’s arms behind them. The little boy is wearing a toque made to look like a monkey’s head, with big eyes goggling on top of his own eyebrows, and the chinstrap consisting of two simian arms, strangling him.
“Why do you want a tree house so badly?” she says.
“I need a man cave. Our place is too small for me to have one inside, so I was thinking I could have one in a tree.”
The monkey boy forms his tiny hand into a gun and aims it at Jody. “Pow, pow, pow!” he says. “You’re dead! Now I’m going to rape your dead body!”
His father’s mouth drops open and he steps out of line with his son, mumbling apologies.
Jody presses herself against Teddy while he pays for their greens.
JODY HAS STILL NOT had an orgasm. She borrowed a book of sex tips from the library a while ago, for ideas on new moves and things. She wanted Teddy to read it with her, but he said why rock the boat when the boat’s a-rockin’?
She took things into her own hands and went to a women-centred sex shop. She said she wanted something that would make her feel good, and the multi-pierced clerk held out her small hands to indicate the shelves full of bottles and tubes and ovals and cylinders and pyramids and trapezoids, and told her she needed to be more specific.
Then at Jody’s yearly physical, two weeks ago, her family doctor asked if she had any specific complaints, and Jody took a deep breath to steel herself to ask what was normal, in terms of what a normal woman should expect to experience during, say, an average session of common intercourse?
In the quiet examination room, the air whistled and squeaked through Jody’s nostrils, and Jody’s doctor said, “Ooh, let me take a look in there.” She peered up Jody’s nose with a tiny bright light and announced, “You have a small polyp on the right side.”
“Oh my God.” Jody shivered in her paper gown, and the unasked orgasm question flew out of her head and down the hall. “Is it cancer?”
“No, no, not cancer. A nasal polyp is just a fleshy swelling on your sinus lining. It can interfere with things, that’s all.”
Her doctor sent a referral to an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist, who would be contacting Jody with an appointment any day now.
JODY WORKS AT THE engraved-metal-plate kiosk in the mall, and Teddy wants her to engrave a bunch of stuff for his parents’ anniversary party, mostly because he saw the engraved metal plate on the metal-plate display case that reads, “Adding a metal plate to any gift adds personality.”
“Like what kind of stuff?” she says.
They’re making love to “Moonlight Desires” by Gowan again, and Teddy says, “Damn, this is a good song,” between thrusts. “I thought maybe a trophy.”
“A trophy would be nice.”
“A Criminal Mind” comes on next, and Jody thinks of rough hands slapping down shingles, ladders slapped up against the side of their house.
“Are you feeling it?” says Teddy.
She is experiencing a low thrumming somewhere she can’t quite place. “I’m not sure.”
“But it feels good, right?”
She looks past his bare shoulders at their bare walls. They have lived in this apartment for three years and they still haven’t decorated.
Teddy’s mother says it’s because Jody is scared to put down roots.
“Why would I be scared of that?” Jody asked her.
“You tell me,” said his mother.
JODY STARES AT HER face in the brass doorknob, far away and then close-up and bulging. When she reaches for herself, the hand coming toward her that is her hand but looks like a monster hand gets bigger and bigger until it eclipses her small form. She takes the monster hand away and there she is again, tiny and alone on the toilet.
She can hear Teddy moving around downstairs. He says he wants her to keep the door open when she’s in there. He wants her to feel free and easy with her body. He says maybe that will help things in the “Big O” department, if she knows what he means. But it gets in the way of the sexiness, she tells him. That stuff gets in the way. And Teddy says, “Not in a million years.”
There is a scraping sound at the window, and Jody looks over. Roofers. She can make out a bulky form through the gauzy bathroom curtain, and wonders what he can make out from the other side.
Jody finishes and flushes and closes the lid because it’s good feng shui. She washes her hands and dries them and goes downstairs.
Teddy is wrapping a present for his parents. The present is a mystery to Jody. He bought it without her, and when he brought the medium-sized bag home, he said, “I want you to be surprised right along with them.”
