The French Revolution Read online

  After hitting four hundred pounds, Esmerelda had pretty much written off sex for the rest of her life, so, when she foundered halfway up the concrete pool steps—leaving Jasper to raise her up in the portable winch borrowed from his longshoreman roommate, Sven—she ran her fingers between her legs to check for evidence, to make sure this was real and not some Zooginduced fantasy. The chlorinated water had washed her clean, and she couldn’t find any physical residue to speak of, but when she looked at Jasper standing next to her in a worn cotton robe, she detected a soft pheromonal glow over his skin, which combined with his shining brown eyes and giddy lip licking for overwhelming evidence of virginity lost.

  “Jasper, you devil,” Esmerelda drawled, stepping into the sail-sized tunic he held open for her. “I never knew you had it in you.” She settled into the Gargantuan with a series of heavy squishes.

  “There’s a lot to me you don’t know about.”

  This was true. Although she’d known Jasper for nearly four years, the first three and a half of those had been indirect, more knowing of than actually knowing. For a long while Jasper had simply been the freaky black guy pushing a wheelbarrow full of coupons who kindly halted his march up and down Market Street to let Esmerelda palpitate across the sidewalk. Even by San Francisco-weirdo standards he was an unforgettable sight, what with the clown shoes, the soda jerk cap, the extra-extra-large overalls, and the everpresent doofus smile. Music crackled steadily from the transistor radio in his front pocket, mostly rock and soul, sometimes classical early in the morning. Many of Esmerelda’s customers were put off by Jasper’s dippy uniform and grin; nobody who looked so goofy could be trusted, they groused inside the copy shop, and he was probably on drugs to boot. But Esmerelda appreciated his gentlemanly patience—most people never waited for her, just walked on by as though large people didn’t deserve eye contact—and after two years of crossing the sidewalk in front of him, she began acknowledging his deferential pause with a slight flick of her fingers. A major breakthrough occurred in the spring of 1988, when he offered, and she accepted, one of the heart-shaped balloons he attached to his wheelbarrow on Fridays. Jasper, a slow learner at best, eventually witnessed enough of Esmerelda’s hourly feeding frenzies to recognize that a woman of her dimensions enjoyed a solid meal for a good price. He started funneling her the best of his dining coupons: two plain pizza slices for the price of one, value meal upgrades, three dollars off any entrée (with pickup), free dessert with purchase of a main course. These were much appreciated by Esmerelda, who drafted Lakshmi into buzzing up and down the Market Street corridor on her behalf, retrieving free sodas and upgraded value meals and three-dollars-off entrées, often burning through several loads of Jasper’s coupons in a week. The discounts shaved hundreds off Esmerelda’s meal budget and freed up funds for makeup and trips to the hairdresser and new muumuus for each season—little feminine touches that Jasper always noticed and commented on, thus endearing himself to Esmerelda even more.

  Jasper largely did this out of his kind disposition, and there was an obvious courtship aspect as well—yet an important financial incentive was also at play: Jasper’s salary was contingent upon the number of coupons actually used, not distributed. He was hauling it in if 3 percent of his coupons were redeemed, the scanned UPC barcodes transmitted to the payroll database, tacking associated incentives on to his paycheck. With Esmerelda hitting a personal redemption rate of 82 percent, Jasper’s overall numbers jolted into the low double digits, a shift that sent his income soaring, roused the attention of his supervisors, and made him the odds-on favorite for Employee of the Year honors.

  Yet despite the modest accoutrements he came to enjoy with his salary jump—a longer antenna for his radio, an assortment of rock band insignias sewn onto his overalls, heavy-duty tires for his wheelbarrow—Jasper mentioned none of this to Ezzie. Throughout their friendship and low-level flirtation, even after Jasper presented the Gargantuan to her as a gift—his sister was disabled and he had access to the mechanized wheelchair parts, cushions, and reinforced metals which his mother had used to build the thing—they had never discussed deep personal questions, relationship builders: how Esmerelda had grown so large, why Jasper had fallen into such an inane profession, their respective salary structures. Emboldened by their sexual union, Jasper strolled over to initiate this conversation as Esmerelda piloted the Gargantuan through the pool parking lot. But before he could squeeze out two words, Esmerelda swiped the cake box from his grip and flash-gobbled another slice of Zoog, staying sober just long enough for Jasper to load the Gargantuan into his mother’s minivan and coax her onto the middle-row bench seat.

  She woke up seated behind her cash register at work, her midday milkshake waiting on the counter. After a quick taste from the pink bendy straw, she caught sight of the wall clock, the hour hand onto early afternoon, impossible. Probably a dying battery, she reassured herself, Lakshmi letting things slide as usual.

  “Slippy’s mad at you, Ezzie.”

  “Haronk!” Milkshake shooting from Esmerelda’s nose was a common Tuesday afternoon occurrence, and Lakshmi had prepared for the likelihood by standing well out of range. “What for?”

  “You just took off this morning. He had to mind the register. Missed a lunch appointment. And”—Lakshmi’s voice turned nasal—“you peed all over the floor.”

  “Shucks. It’s my birthday, you know.” Esmerelda turned to busy herself with the reorganization of papers or pencils, but found none on the counter. She slurped boisterously on her milkshake instead.

  “Yeah, well, happy birthday. But you can’t go running off like that, Ezzie. This is a business. Sometimes you have to work.”

  Esmerelda slammed down her cup as purple tinted her face. “Have to work? Hello! Little miss booty girl, I’ve been working here for five years and have never once taken a vacation. I don’t take lunch breaks. I don’t run out for tea and crumpets, or whatever you do all afternoon with those freakazoid friends I see you fooling around with on the sidewalk. Haronk! Now a sandwich please! This discussion is over.”

  Lakshmi sucked in her lips and retreated to the workroom. Esmerelda’s invective was technically accurate but had conveniently overlooked Lakshmi’s unofficial duties as comestible gatherer that frequently took her out to the sidewalk, where she paid off her freakazoid friend delivery persons with wadded cash from Esmerelda’s great wool bag. The vacation claim was a slippery one too, for while Esmerelda had not officially taken any vacation leave from the CopySmart flagship store, she had used up more than one hundred sick days in her five years on the job, often in sequential order, supported by flimsy excuses of unpinpointable cramps and general anxiety and long-out-of-vogue mental health problems authenticated with obviously forged doctor’s notes and counselor’s reports. But Lakshmi knew better than to confront Esmerelda with facts when she was all riled up, and resolved instead to give her incorrect change on food orders for the remainder of her CopySmart career.

  Slippy arrived ten minutes later, fresh off his afternoon tour of the CopySmart satellite outlets. “Ezzie!” he shouted from the entrance. “You’ve gotta stop the pissing!” The secretary Esmerelda was servicing bunched an eyebrow. “I haven’t the mops or the time to clean up after you. Get some diapers or a grip, I don’t care which—but if you ruin my floor again, you’re out on the street.”

  “Slippy,” Esmerelda said with ominous calm, “today’s my birthday.”

  “I don’t care if it’s your wedding day, Christmas, or Chinese New Year—your bladder never gets a holiday so long as you work for me. Control yourself, for Christ’s sake. Just because you’re fat doesn’t mean you have to be gross.”

  Slippy’s wrinkly bald head approached the Gargantuan, and Esmerelda hoped with all her heart he’d bumble into milkshake range.

  “Happy birthday, Esmerelda,” he said softly. Her throwing arm relaxed. “I gave you the morning off retroactively. How did everything go?”

  “Oh—swimmingly,” she coughed. “Ju
st swimmingly.”

  “Good!” Slippy slapped his ring-riddled hand against the counter. “Now, let’s make some money. And remember: no accidents.”

  That wasn’t an issue, as Esmerelda’s conditioning was fully reinstated and she was holding it in like the time-tested urine vault that she was. And soon everything else seemed to be back on track too: her milkshake demolished, her hot-dog fingers bounding precisely over her oversized cash register buttons, her interaction with Jasper back to limited friendly banter. But amid the apparent return of normality, the day’s critical turn went undetected: Jasper’s aged semen secretly navigating the billowed folds of Esmerelda’s uterus and slipping inside two of her ripened ova. Weeks dripped by, and the pair of eggs quietly developed into dizygotic embryos and later fetuses that kicked and squirmed anonymously, inflicting daily bouts of indigestion and internal discomfort. But these classic pregnancy tip-offs were missed, as Esmerelda chalked up the tummy trouble and bodily unease to her steady consumption of fiery tamales, greasy hamburgers, and cheap pizza that Lakshmi delivered to her counter at reduced price. The absence of menstruation went unnoticed too, for Esmerelda had stopped worrying about her cycle and the insertion of absorbent devices years ago, seeing that the leakage didn’t get very far before crusting off against her leg to be hosed off at the end of the day, and all the aerobics required to manage the process just weren’t worth it. The most obvious clue to her condition—major weight gain—was cancelled out by Esmerelda’s prolific profile, as whatever change in stomach diameter wrought by her unborn children could not be isolated from Esmerelda’s normal rate of fat increase.

  Jasper cared for her throughout her stealthy enlargement, offering coupons for heartburn tablets and gas-reducing pills, a buck off the latest belly calmer from Johnson & Johnson, a free Alka-Seltzer package with the purchase of two others. He gave her shiny foil balloons to lift her spirits and stopped by during his lunch break to massage her gelatinous back with his long needle fingers. Esmerelda appreciated the back rubs—she was often tender from her eight dips across the sidewalk—and while the most penetrating of deep-tissue kneading could not directly prod the sore muscles buried beneath, the manipulation of her skin was still quite soothing. Jasper smiled and hummed along with the radio in his pocket, and Esmerelda, more often than not, joined in. Their off-key, raggedy duet filled the store until complaints came in, sometimes as long as five minutes.

  Occasionally, after Jasper had given Ezzie a lengthy rubdown or presented her with a particularly large balloon, he asked if he could see her after work. Maybe, he posited, they could go for a dip. Hunger edged into his eyes, hinting at something furtive and unsettled, but it faded into his gentle smile as he waited for her response. Not that it was long in coming; he had only to wait for the laughter to die down, the haronking snorts to quit, the jiggling belly and bobbling of all seven chins to settle and stop.

  “Are you crazy, Jasper? The last thing I need is another round with that eraser dick of yours. I’d rather watch bowling reruns, or even eat fruit.” She looked up to see his face collapse, his posture melt to mush. “Aw, come on there, fella. Don’t be so grim. You had your shot, and a good one too. You shouldn’t be messing with ogres like me anyway. Go on, find yourself some fresh meat.”

  “I like you, Ezzie,” he invariably responded.

  “Sorry, bud. Not gonna happen. But thanks for the massage.” His hands had stopped. “Felt nice.”

  An hour or so later, after Lakshmi reported that Jasper was stumbling through traffic, or ramming his head against a telephone pole, or lying prostrate on the median strip, his wheelbarrow uncovered and his coupons shimmering in the downdraft like ticker tape, she gave in. Jasper was summoned, a halfhearted apology was delivered, a date was suggested and greedily accepted. After closing time on the appointed day, they rode through the city together in a minivan piloted by Jasper’s mother, Karen Winslow, a small, white-haired secretary at the machinists’ union who listened to gospel at high volume. The dates weren’t going very far, sexwise, even if they hadn’t been chaperoned by Jasper’s half-deaf mother, as Esmerelda kept her mouth shut and her eyes out the window, radiating misery and bristling at Jasper’s touch. Undeterred, Jasper stroked her gritty hair and rubbed her tree-trunk neck and tried to pry her gloopy hands from their death grip on her great wool bag, all the while informing her of the best tidbits he’d learned from the radio: the day’s most popular songs, leading news items, traffic patterns and street closures, weather forecasts, celebrity birthdays. Together they gazed upon the fractured streets and the wild people and the eucalyptus trees and later on at the ocean twisting beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, until they arrived at Esmerelda’s mother’s house at nine o’clock sharp and Esmerelda concluded the evening with a handshake and a curt good-night.

  In the summer of 1990, they were on an evening tour out where Golden Gate Park meets the sea when Esmerelda felt a punch in the stomach. She tried to pinch it, then stalled for time by impressing the heel of her palm against her belly and chewing a fistful of herbal antinausea pills from her wool bag, but all the tea in China couldn’t hold back a gastrointestinal surge of this magnitude for long.

  “Jasper, I need to use the facilities. Tell your mom to pull over.”

  “But it’s not bedtime yet. What’s going on?”

  “Look, I don’t have details. But unless you want a mess in the car, we better find a bathroom, pronto.”

  Jasper notified his mother with a series of piercing screeches, and inside of thirty seconds they were stopped at a gas station. With both hands he spotted Esmerelda as she pushed out of the minivan and wobbled across the parking lot, spitting gooey strings like an angry third-base coach. As soon as she was installed in a semistable position leaning against a braced stucco wall, Jasper ran down to the snack shop, bought a bag of sunflower seeds, and hopped back with a scuffed silver hubcap chained to a key. Esmerelda grabbed the snack, pried open the lavatory door, and speed-waddled to the commode, where she hiked up her muumuu, slid onto the seat, and relaxed her sphincter in a single, surprisingly limber motion. To her dismay her innards offered no immediate relief, but on the plus side she observed that the restroom had been recently cleaned and was handicapped accessible, such that the toilet was reinforced, there were grab bars for gripping and stabilizing, and on the whole Esmerelda couldn’t have been more comfortable except perhaps with a recent feature film.

  Or several. The wait turned out to be six hours long, a bathroom visit of historic proportions, marking a momentous shift in Esmerelda’s personal geopolitics.

  “Everything OK? Need some water?” Jasper asked through the door after the first hour had passed.

  “Of course not, Jasper. There’s water in here.”

  “How bout some supper? I have coupons for the deli across the street.”

  A pastrami sandwich was tempting, Esmerelda had to admit, and would keep up her strength better than a measly bag of sunflower seeds. She was on the verge of authorizing the purchase when a steel-toed-boot-kicking competition broke out in her breadbasket and she realized the addition of processed meats was sure to end in digestive pandemonium.

  “Thanks, buckaroo,” she sighed, “but I’d better get back to concentrating.”

  She made progress with ensuing sets of abdominal squeezing—splashes, periods of moderate gushing—but the obstruction’s bulk remained lodged in her midsection. Bolts of pain seared the rolling hills of her gut and trembled between her legs, shooting in white streaks from her statuesque brow to the lonely corners of her rarely seen feet. It got worse as the hours rolled by, splitting her insides from an unusual epicenter for a bowel movement, not the intestines or the anus or even the gut but somewhere more front and center, recognizable but noticeably different, like a lavatory in a foreign country. It dawned on Esmerelda that maybe whatever it was wasn’t coming out the traditional number two hole, but for whatever reason, due to a plumbing mix-up or some very garbled directions, out of number one. She remembe
red reading an article that described kidney stones as having similar symptoms and was reaching into her wool bag to search for the clipping when an incredible spike broke through her eyelids and she knew it was far too late for a shred of newsprint to do any good.

  This was it; it was happening.

  Land mines and firebombs, rips and tears, six-legged kicks, teeth-piercing lips, self-imposed scratches and backhanded wall slaps, flagellation and mutilation, hand-to-hand field combat, daggers gouging out gallbladders. Remotely she felt barbed motion, inertia carpet-bombed and shattered. Fire streaked from her birth canal to her decomposing hair bun; her groans rang at such volume that even Jasper’s mother heard it over her gospel tunes. As the hullabaloo grew louder and louder, the gas station attendant realized this was no ordinary six-hour excretion and called the police.