(Originally published in No Trouble At All.)
It’s February when I realize my legs are made of wax. It’s not the month that comes as a surprise to me—nothing good ever happens in February—but it’s a shock somehow to discover the season has changed. The last I noticed, it was November, the season of things dying brittle and gone to grey. Now the world is salt slush and nothing has ever lived. Only the grey and the gone remain the same.
I am melting into the floor in front of the battered washer that reigns over our basement like the figurehead of a ship. A moth sizzles black on the bare bulb hanging overhead. My flatmate is on the stairs, talking. I am pretending to take what she says to heart.
“You should report him,” Andromeda says. “Really, Valerie. He shouldn’t get away with it.”
I nod, but we both know I won’t. My faded red overalls peel off my unwashed body like the skin of a spoiled fruit. I stuff them into the washer’s discoloured porthole, shove the stiff hatch shut, imagine wintering aboard a seafaring vessel—swaying across oceans of salt water instead of slogging through grit-scattered streets.
My soft knees are stained from the potting soil that was ground through the work-worn denim. Their caps are dented and deformed. I shed my sweater, then everything else I am wearing.
His smell lingers on my skin. Sour musk, printer toner, sweet floral soap—that last, his wife’s choice, I imagine.He isn’t the type to pay attention to the details that make life pretty. He has us to do that for him. Her and me and anyone else who lets him take whatever keeps him afloat throughout this season of saline corrosion. I push my thumbs into my knees, deepening the dents. The washer sputters on with a tidal slosh.
The shower’s intense heat softens my paraffin bones. I slide down the tiled soap scum wall and crumple into the tub. The beer Andromeda fetched from the freezer as I walked naked from the basement through the kitchen feels like an icicle in my grasp, but the cold solidifies my too-yielding fingers. I drink it half down in a single dizzying pull. It’s only Wednesday. Three more shifts until my week is over. My phone dings, muffled in the bathmat. I swipe a soapy finger to see what Kevin has to say. I know it’s Kevin before I read the text. No one else texts when I get home from work to check if I managed to evade the manager again.
He caught me as I was clocking out. I wish Kevin worked as late as I do, but we can’t persuade the owners to align our schedules. They claim there aren’t enough customers late in the day to justify keeping two employees on the floor. That hasn’t been my experience, but there’s no arguing with people who know how much they own.
The text says, Valerie! You get out ok? I drop the phone back to the mat so I don’t have to tell him not this time. Andromeda always knows these things without me having to say. It’s one of the reasons I don’t think I could live with anyone else. Not after her.
I’d managed to avoid letting him catch my eye for weeks. I hadn’t looked him in the face since the last time. I’m not perfect, though. I got careless. I forgot to be on the store phone, tidying a display, buried in my work—any work—when he came out of his office. He smiled when he saw me looking at him. He asked if I had a minute. He said my name wrong. No one else ever calls me Val.
I followed him into the back room and dutifully listened. I’m a good listener. He told me all of his problems, again. They weren’t my problems, or problems with me. I’ve been employee of the month six months in a row.
The bath is shimmering with soap and melted skin. The water builds up in our tub because we still haven’t fixed the drain. The stopper falls down on its own. You have to hold it up with a bottle cap if you don’t want to stew.Andromeda opened my beer for me. The cap must be in the kitchen. The bottle is empty. I don’t remember swallowing. My legs waver under the surface, bending like light refracted through lightning-struck sand. Underwater, they look more oceanic—like coral, or kelp—than human. I wonder how they will look if I ever emerge.
I could have said no. I could have gone home. His problems weren’t special. I’d heard them before—the dull job, the crying baby, the wife with no time for him. The necessity of something just for himself. Oh, you understand, Val. You’re such a good pal. Such a great gal. Maybe that’s why. I’m nothing special, either. Maybe people who aren’t special are supposed to stick together.
Andromeda doesn’t understand things like that. She’s never been anything but special. Andromeda could never be unspecial enough to let her manager at the garden centre, where she would never be unspecial enough to work at in the first place, take most of her clothes off, one article at a time, until the straps of her overalls dangled down her thighs and the potting soil heaps on the cool cement floor were obscured by clumps of thrift-store merino and the type of little crocheted accessories he said drove men so far out of their minds they couldn’t be blamed for their actions. She wouldn’t be so invested in keeping people happy—employee of the month, after all—that she wouldn’t have known what else to do but let it happen. She wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t really all that bad.
I shake spruce-scented salts into the bath and think about the road salt spattering the glossy steel of my nearly-new bicycle’s frame. Its paint is midnight blue. The hot girl at the bike shop promised that if I took care of my new ride, it would last the rest of my life. I’ve been riding it all winter and still haven’t oiled the chain. It squeaked like a mouse in a glue trap all the way home. The blue has vanished under layers of street-streaked grey.
As I slunk out the employees only door, something shifted inside my left knee. A shock of unseasonable heat swelling weakness into my pumping calves. I coasted most of the way home, but the feeling grew even after I eased up on the pedals. I didn’t know what it meant until I saw what my knees looked like under the soil-stained overalls. “I’ll wash you tomorrow,” I promise. The bike is in the hall and there’s no way it can hear me, but I have to fix something.
“I think that creep from the art college is stalking me again,” Andromeda says when I finally make it out of the bath. My legs refuse to straighten. Thank goodness it’s Andromeda’s turn to cook. All I have to do is put on music. My flatmate likes to dance while she dishes. I collapse into my chair, plug my phone into the speakers some trust-fund painter traded for a loaf of Andromeda’s homemade bread, stab my finger into the pixels of a random playlist.
A thin furrow delves between her perfect brows. “Will you come meet me after class? I’m modelling at seven.”
I went to one of the drop-in drawing sessions she models for at the community centre in between classes at the college once, after she suggested I might need an artistic outlet. She stopped suggesting it after she saw what I drew.
“I would,” I say, “But—” I pull up the edge of the towel and gesture at my knees.
One of Andromeda’s other strays once said her knees looked like the knees of a victorious angel in a Renaissance painting. I don’t know what that means, but everything about her looks like a painting to me. I’ve never been completely sure she’s real. She’s never worked a real job, anyway. In summer, when the art classes aren’t in session, she makes her living off tourists. She paints herself bronze and stands on a pedestal down by the scenic end of the waterfront, changing poses in imperceptibly slow motion. She’s never cooked what I would call real food. On my nights we eat lasagne and lentil soup. On her nights we eat nettles, glass noodles, raindrop cakes in which she’s suspended flowers and berries she found in some forest she asked some painter to drive her to when they should have been painting her again.
She looks at my malformed kneecaps. “Oh. I’ll ask Luka. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll make you a salve for those when we get home. Here, try this and tell me how it is.” She sets a red bowl of black rice with black beans, black sesame, black garlic, and papaya seeds added for spicy black crunch in front of me. I guess tonight is goth night. Must be Luka is the goth one. There’s always a goth one. Andromeda likes a dark backdrop to bring out her shine.
Painters and sculptors and singers flow through our flat like a river of tithes and fantastical tributes. They bring her strange herbal spirits, metallic pigments, vintage silk robes. I don’t know if they’re more invested in persuading her to sleep with them or pose for the work that they hope will make them famous. I guess it doesn’t have to be one or the other. I wonder if she knows I’ve tried to hate her and failed.
The flat is too quiet once Andromeda leaves. I sit in my towel and shiver against the table. My empty bowl is stained with black crumbs I should wash before they harden and have to be soaked. My knees are still too warm. I push a finger into the left one. It leaves a smooth-edged hole. I hope Andromeda’s salve gets me back on my feet. I can’t afford to take a day off.
•••
“No worries,” Kevin says when I ask him to arrange the new potting mix display. “It’s fine, Valerie, stop apologizing.”
I can’t tell him the real reason I’m not able to lift the heavy bags. Reliable coworkers don’t say things like my legs turned into wax, and now they’re not great at bearing weight. I adjust the drugstore braces that imply there is something normal wrong with my knees. I rode the bus to work, even though I worried I would melt all over the seat and blister the stranger sitting beside me. I still haven’t washed my bike. Six hours until I get off. I see the manager lurking in his office, but he doesn’t come out. I give Kevin half of my sandwich. He gives me a wink.
Andromeda is waiting when I lurch out the employee entrance. “Thought you might need a shoulder to lean on,” she says. “This is Luka. He’s strong! Use him as you like.”
I look up. There’s plenty of Luka. He’s definitely the current goth one, but he hits the gym more than the previous goth one. I pretend not to see that his smile reveals a point of implanted fang. He feels steady like a boulder as he helps me across the icy lot and into the matte black leather interior of his flat black car.
•••
“It’s actually quite common,” Dorothea says at dinner. She rests her plate on the mossy arm of our emerald velvet couch so she can talk with her hands. I see now why Luka has been assigned to me. He’s being displaced. They can never bear to leave Andromeda’s orbit, so she gives them little jobs. That way they can feel like they still matter. He settles his big arm around my shoulders and stares at Dorothea. I wonder if the heat I feel is coming from him or from the burning thing inside me.
Andromeda rustles across the room in layers of silk and dry leaves, her nacreous hands curled around the crossed stems of a quartet of slender wine glasses. “What’s common, Dora?”
“Women turning to wax. I’ve heard about it before. It’s got something to do with eternal girlhood. Internalized sense of the necessity of idealized malleability. Caving to social pressures. That sort of thing. They call it Cire Perdue Syndrome. Apparently it’s quite a normal response in women who don’t know how to—”
Andromeda presses a glass into one of Dorothea’s floating hands. She takes the other hand and places it on her own waist, distracting Dorothea into silence before she says what I might be so commonly reacting to. What I don’t know. What kind of woman I am. Luka’s arm tightens. Something in my blazing shoulder gives.
On Thursday, Kevin is always between me and the office. I make myself meet his eyes and laugh at his jokes. I make myself smile at him after the manager cruises past my register, sees Kevin nearby, and returns to the office. He gives me a look that says I know something’s up, but don’t take it out on me. He’s right. It isn’t his fault. I give him my whole sandwich. I can’t eat it myself—my fingers bent sideways when I tried to pry open the container.
Luka takes me home again. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, when I try to thank him. “I was driving past anyway.” The stereo in his car is playing glitchy electronic echoes that sound like something Andromeda would have cooked to before she met Dorothea and switched to classical piano. I wonder if she remembers our bluegrass phase, back when we first moved to the city and wanted to play up our rural charms for the North End hipsters. When we slept in the same bed and held hands everywhere we went. I wonder if she remembers that my red overalls used to be hers, before she met Robin and traded overalls and bluegrass and me for Child Ballads and velvet gowns. I wonder if she remembers how things were with any of us. I wonder if she remembers Robin at all. She’s so good at moving on.
Kevin texts me a sandwich emoji and a cat face with hearts for eyes. It was a good sandwich. I tell myself that’s all he means. I reply with the plainest smiley. I don’t know how to discourage him without being mean.
Friday evening, Andromeda says we’re going out to celebrate surviving the week.
“We did good,” she says. “No one murdered us! Let’s live a little.” She bends me into one of her vintage dresses. It wouldn’t have fit a week ago—the boned and beaded midsection is stiff, unforgiving—but now my body gives. She gently moulds my waist to curve with the seams. “Gorgeous,” she says, turning me to the mirror. “Look!”
Dorothea, standing in the doorway of my flatmate’s tapestried bedroom, looks at Andromeda. “Yes,” she agrees. “Gorgeous.” Andromeda whirls me out of the bedroom, and Dorothea follows.
It starts to snow while we stand on the stoop, waiting for Luka to pick us up. The fleeting whiteness adorns Andromeda’s hair with intricate constellations. It melts where it touches my skin. I think I hear it hiss into steam. Dorothea brushes Andromeda’s starflakes away. I tilt my head back and open my mouth. I want the chilly sky to crawl inside me.
Luka half-carries me down the steps to the car. He opens my door, tucks me into the passenger seat. “Shotgun’s for someone who likes me,” he says, when Dorothea protests. She slinks into the back. I don’t know why she even wants shotgun. Andromeda always sits in the back. I wonder if I do like him, or if I just understand him. They’re not quite the same thing.
The waitress sets us in a distressed leather booth. It’s a very Andromeda place. The decor is half landfill, half forest, familiar objects made alien by unsettling juxtapositions. Luka and Dorothea face each other at the outer ends of the horseshoe. Neither one smiles. The candles in the middle of the table burn high. The heat from Luka’s body makes it impossible to ignore the magma inside mine. My hands go soft at the ends of my drooping arms. I drop a forkful of kale salad down the neckline of Andromeda’s castoff dress. The heat from the candles follows the leaf down into the tight recesses between steel-boned brocade and deliquescing flesh. I am burning all over now. My legs grow so hot that my stockings begin to melt and run down my calves. I will not survive if I do not touch cold water.
“Excuse me.” No one is looking. Luka slides out and allows me past, but his eyes never leave the spot on the table where Dorothea’s hand is clawed across Andromeda’s. I wobble to the ladies’ room. I do not dare look down to see if I am dripping onto the floor. It feels as though every eye in the restaurant—even the flat dead eye of the plated fish waltzing by in a waiter’s arms—has come to rest on the ruins of my borrowed finery. I don’t actually think anyone is looking at all. I lean against the sink, running the cold tap over my wrists. My cell phone dings.
•••
On Monday, the manager leans on my counter while Kevin gets ready to leave. Kevin comes out of the washroom and says that he must have dropped his wallet somewhere in the store. We spend the rest of my shift looking.
“Thanks,” I say, when we finally flip the sign and lock the back door from outside.
“No problem,” he says. “You’d do the same for me.”
I wonder if I would. He gives me a quick hug before his bus rolls up. I can’t be rude. I hug him back.
On Wednesday—Kevin’s day off—I sit on a bale of peat during lunch and feel the manager staring at my naked feet. I kicked my clogs off to cool my toes in a perlite spill while I drink the smoothie Andromeda packed for my lunch. “Val, you can stay late tonight? I could really use some help.” He explains about an order I know was placed last week. I wonder if he can tell that, under my sweater, my torso has slid a few degrees to the right. I wonder if he would ever look again if he saw my nakedness now, the lumps and drips, the indentations from everything I touch. The vein of ice from the smoothie sits crookedly inside me. I wonder how long Andromeda will keep reshaping me. I text her an S.O.S. but first I have to chill my fingertips against the frosted window, so they don’t just squish across my phone’s cracked screen.
“So sorry,” I tell the manager when I leave. “I feel awful about the order, it’s just my flatmate, she’s having—well, it’s personal. Lady stuff.” The manager looks up at Luka and doesn’t protest.
•••
On Thursday, Kevin asks if I want to get Friday drinks. “I’ll hang around until after your shift,” he says. “We’ll get out of here together. Blow off some steam.” I don’t want to get Friday drinks. I don’t want to see Kevin outside work, but I know I owe him.
“Oh, I say. “I don’t really drink, but maybe just one?”
He winks. “Don’t worry. I’m not a creep.”
I don’t know why Dorothea has to be at the other end of the bar. I try to drown in my flight, grateful for the chilliness of these tiny glasses of weird experimental beers. I used to come here with Andromeda. Kevin talks about work. I nod as he recalls all the times he came between me and the manager. I wonder how quickly I can leave without being a bitch.
“I’ll be sure to tell Luka I ran into you,” Dorothea says when I pass by her on my way out. “Just, ah, chilling? With your…”
“Coworker,” I say. “From the garden centre.”
She gives me a knowing look. She doesn’t know me. “Do you know why they call it Cire Perdue?” she says, “Lost wax—if you don’t know any French.” She does a thing with her eyebrow, which I interpret as certainty that I would not know any French. “Look it up. Maybe warn your date not to get too attached.”
I don’t understand what Andromeda sees in her. I don’t usually hate the painters this much. They’re usually nicer to me, though. I think the observant ones see me as a second-best-case scenario and they want to figure out my secrets. She kept me around. She doesn’t always do that.
•••
“Dorothea says she saw you on a date,” Andromeda says. She flips an amaranth waffle onto my plate. We always have waffles for Sunday brunch when it’s just the two of us without any hangers-on. She tops it with a fan of mandarin slices, a drizzle of pomegranate molasses. “You didn’t tell me you were seeing anyone! Did you have a good time?”
My hands feel too weird to steer the fork and knife. I break off pieces with my fingers. Andromeda eats with her hands to keep me company. She makes it look correct. The mandarin rind bites my tongue with oily spray.
“It was just drinks with Kevin from work. He asked. I couldn’t say no.” She gives me a knowing look. It’s fine. She isn’t Dorothea. She really knows me.
“You can always say no.” Maybe she can. She doesn’t remember how ordinary people have to live.
My phone chimes. I ignore it until it chimes again and I turn to pick it up.
“No, let me.” She swipes it out of reach and squiggles my pattern across the screen. I would change the lock, but it’s easier to let her know. She scowls. “The nerve. Look, this is what happens when you let them make assumptions.” She slides it back across the table.
Dinner tonight. My place. I’ll make eggplant parm. My grandma’s recipe. You’ll like it.
I don’t like eggplant parmesan. I don’t want to see anyone from work when I’m not getting paid. Maybe it would have been okay if he hadn’t followed You’ll like it with an eggplant emoji and a winking smiley face. I wonder if it was the sandwiches. If I gave him ideas. My grandmother used to say that the fastest way to a man’s zipper was through his stomach. I used to cringe at that. I guess I should have listened. My phone keeps chiming all day. I lie on the floor while Andromeda does yoga, and let the battery die.
By dinnertime I am too soft to leave the flat. We eat at home. Dorothea fixes the salad. One of my teeth smears against an iron-sided pumpkin seed. I push the rest of my salad toward Luka. I’m grateful to Andromeda for decorating the flat with mirrors. I turn to the nearest one to fix my tooth.
We’re swigging Vinho Verde from the bottle. My wax is smeared across Luka’s lower lip. Andromeda declared everyone had to drink cold things in solidarity with me. Dorothea is sulking. She wanted mulled wine. I can see her point—it’s February, after all—but the disappointment doesn’t seem to stop her from drinking her share. The blaze of her lipstick on the glass threads burns when I taste it.
My phone keeps chiming. Dorothea’s smile becomes more caustic with every ding. I never charged the thing. I watch her snap a smug selfie and see that her phone takes the same cable as mine.
“Let me see that,” Andromeda says, when it becomes clear the chiming won’t stop. She swipes it open and frowns. “Wait, you have a date tonight? I thought you said you weren’t—oh. Gross.” She doesn’t turn the phone to show me, but I can see enough of the screen to know it’s not just an emoji this time. Dorothea smiles again. Her teeth are so bleached they almost glow a superheated blue. “Oh,” Andromeda says again. “You let him call you Val?”
When the doorbell rings, Dorothea is on her feet. “I’ll get it,” she says. She is in the hall before I have a chance to say please don’t. I think about how Andromeda and I always use the same screen lock pattern. I wonder how careful she is about swiping into her phone around Dorothea. I wonder what Kevin read that encouraged him so much. I know it wasn’t something I sent.
My legs radiate heat like smouldering fuses. I cower closer to Luka. He’s had a lot of chances, and he’s never taken them. He’s been helping me home all week. He’s never too busy. I know it’s for Andromeda’s sake, or maybe it’s solidarity, but still. I brace my hand on his solid thigh to push myself upright. He does not flinch at the squishing of my fingers.
Dorothea’s alkaline smile widens as she ushers Kevin into the room. I wonder why she hates me so much. Andromeda has so many others. We can never bear to let her go, even after she forgets. My hand smears across Luka’s creased wool slacks and I am so sorry because I have never seen him stained. The room is wavering in the heat and I know I never told Kevin where I live. He walks toward me and Luka stands up and I want to hide behind him because I know he understands enough to know why there will never be anyone else for me.
Andromeda is shouting from the bathroom. I hear the faucets burst on like opened sluice gates. “Luka, help me get her into the bath. Cold water, the cold will make everything okay. Everything is going to be okay.” It sounds like a prayer.
They try to lower me into the swelling seas as gently as a lifeboat. I am dripping between their hands and no one took the bottle cap from Andromeda’s last shower out from under the treacherous stopper. Whatever burns in my veins is all I am.
I need it out. I need me out.
Dorothea smiles from the doorway. Luka pushes her aside. Andromeda is yelling at him to fetch all the ice in the world. The water forms a whirlpool, swirling me down. Andromeda’s fingertips slip on the slick cap. The drain is inescapably close. The water in my mouth is brackish with residue from the salts we use in the bath. The tide rushes out the open porthole and I follow.
