The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  Esmerelda could never cry for her mother’s death. But she wound up weeping anyway, for something less definable, a vague sense of her life heading in a new and harder direction like all the rest of the fish. It was her first good bawl since Jasper’s wretched face popped into her hospital room, way back on the day the kids were born. She cried silently, her hands in her lap, her shoulders hopping like a girl skipping rope.

  Ten minutes later she was done. She placed a call to the local taqueria for lunch delivery and used the travel time to reposition herself in the foyer and undo the locks so she could open the front door mere minutes after the delivery guy rang the bell.

  “I’ll get my purse in a sec,” she said, grabbing the delivery guy’s bag and peeling the foil off the business end of a carne asada super burrito, which she polished off, with the accompanying handful of chips, in under a minute. “Want to make some extra money?”

  She led the guy back to the kitchen. “You want me to cut the lock?” he asked.

  “No point,” she responded. “They’ll just put in another one. What I could use, however, is my own stash.” The sentiment required significant further discussion to translate effectively, but a combination of pantomime, napkin diagrams, and busboy Spanish got the point across: she wanted a battery-powered minifridge that fit in her closet, was camouflaged as a shoe rack, made as little noise as possible, and could store a side of ham in a pinch.

  “OK,” he agreed. “I need some money.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, “let me check my purse.” Unfortunately, poking around her room for fifteen minutes didn’t uncover her great wool bag, and by the time she figured out the kids were probably holding the thing hostage upstairs the delivery guy was gone. She used the rest of the day to fold her clothes, set her alarm clock to an energetic-but-not-disorienting radio station, and work out a system involving preselected clothing and strategically placed rest stations to get dressed and out the door in under an hour. She was reviewing an Emily Post book left on her bedside table when the front door jangled, the kids filed in, and the house warmed with the smell of a supermarket roast chicken.

  “Hey, Ma,” Robespierre called. “How you feeling?”

  “Hungry!” she croaked, though in truth she was unusually satiated and comfortable, her soul somewhat at rest.

  “Well, we’ve got dinner. Come on, and we’ll eat.”

  “Have a good day off?” Marat asked.

  “Wise asses!” she shouted, shoving herself out of bed. “You know perfectly well what kind of day I had.”

  “It’ll get harder before it gets easier,” Marat warned.

  “I’m sure it’ll pay off in beach vacations and miniskirts and hunky boyfriends who wash my car in their undies. Now pass me some damn dinner and let me feast in peace.” They sat back as Esmerelda ripped the bird apart, draining meat off each drumstick and wing, scooping handfuls of flesh from the breasts, gobbling glazed skin scraps, sucking on bones. For the first time in a while she noticed the grease coagulating on her throat, the chemical taste paving the roof of her mouth, the low-grade quality of the meat, the pizzazz of a truck-stop restroom. The familiar ritual of chewing and swallowing imparted some small joy, but overall she felt burned and nasty and hardheaded and dumb. To complete the Pyrrhic victory, she finished off the chicken by herself, then sat back and absorbed a surfing frenzy in her stomach—cutbacks and hard snaps and whistling tube shoots—while the kids mouthed off about taxes and accounting and other tedious financial terms that shut down every last functional cell in her brain. She just barely made it to the sofa before she was out hard as nightfall, sitting upright in a pose not unlike the nightly position she’d taken on Stillwell Road, nesting on the couch with the kids on her lap. She stayed down through after-dinner dishes and homework, Marat’s bedtime toke and Robespierre’s nightly self-assessment, clear on through the night until she awoke early to the upbeat tunes of classic soul squawking on her clock radio. With a thumping fearful focus, she raced into fresh clothes and saw to her personal toilet, then munched on the apple lying on the kitchen counter and read her Emily Post book by the front door until she heard the familiar double-honk of the special services van.

  “Coming!” she called, and pushed out into the day. Without her walker she proceeded in a series of miniature shuffles, her hands held out like a sleepwalker for balance, her eyes firmly affixed to the six inches in front of her feet. By the time she made it to the street she was cooking, her head a puffy old tomato, her pits sopped with sweat, her toes crammed in painful bunches against the tips of her specialty-fit plastic shoes. She looked up to find her way onto the van’s electric lift only to discover the street empty as the dark side of the moon.

  Sobs contracted her lungs, and she was seriously considering plopping down on the spot for the rest of the day when another double-honk got her attention. The van was idling on the corner, four houses down. “Back up!” Esmerelda called weakly, flapping an arm. “Reverse!” But all she heard was the crank of the parking brake.

  Hell if she was going to burn another vacation day for this bullshit.

  She pushed into her shuffling routine but quickly lost patience with the careful steps and geared up into aggressive half-steps, even catching a glimpse of air between her soles and the ground. Not so bad when you get the hang of it, she thought, and loaded herself onto the electric lift in such good spirits that she let the driver off with a couple jibes about his clip-on tie and preference for glam pop rather than the red-carpet aerial assault she’d planned in response to his dastardly parking job.

  She conked out for the ride downtown, but when the driver shook her awake she felt oddly refreshed, her legs burning comfortably, a small but righteous hunger in her belly. After descending on the lift, she strode out across the sidewalk at her new rambling gait, enjoying the feel of flexing more muscles, the slight decrease in nauseated stares she received without the use of her walker, a significant influx of pride. When Lakshmi arrived with the Gargantuan, she started to wave it off, until her knees started twisting inward and her vision blanked for a second and she realized that was enough freelancing for day one.

  “You OK?” Lakshmi asked.

  “Pushing it a little,” she grunted.

  “I could tell. I’ve never seen you walk around on your own power before.”

  And even kooky with a light-headed wonder-tipped sensation that bordered on happiness, Esmerelda remembered that Lakshmi’s stint on the job was at least as long as she’d been there herself, seventeen years and counting. Enough time for her kids to grow up without ever seeing Esmerelda at a reasonable weight, or able to support herself without assistance, or being an independent person by any conceivable metric.

  “Get used to it,” she retorted. “The kids have me on some kind of plan.”

  “Oh, I know about the plan.”

  “You do?” Esmerelda pulled her head sideways and took another look at Lakshmi, her simple scrunched face, pellet eyes behind pint-sized wire-framed glasses, a forehead long enough to land planes on. Faint hairs on her upper lip. The long gray switching ponytail, the brown cotton skirt and cheese-colored blouse. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to conjure up an image of vermin.

  “Nothing,” Lakshmi said, and Esmerelda could’ve sworn she saw her nose twitch.

  She motored the Gargantuan to the cash register and turned to her prework snack. While she wasn’t any hungrier than usual her muscles were on tape delay, her thoughts took two or three pings to process, her body temperature was sinking fast. Sugar withdrawal, she suspected, and plotted a course for packaged strudels, a liter of orange juice, maybe a fro-yo for dessert. She kind of expected that her usual store of treats under the desk would be missing and the staff room fridge cleaned out; far more impressive was how her great wool bag had been messed with, her emergency stores of hard candy, leftover pasta, ham, cheese strips, and breath mints replaced with a ten-pound bag of Valencia oranges.

  Esmerelda fished out an orange and lo
bbed it across the room underhand, a high gentle arc that playfully smacked Lakshmi in the buttocks, dead center. “Need you to go on a quick breakfast run. Couple of Hostess pies and a peanut butter-based confection, whatever’s on sale. You know what I like.”

  Lakshmi aimed the twin dots of her pupils back at Esmerelda and picked the orange off the ground. “Can’t do it, Esmerelda.”

  “Bull-oney. Always have, always will. Now get going fast before I have to call Slippy.”

  Lakshmi looked away from Ezzie and turned on her toes, her left paw windmilling, a tiny kick from her furry legs, the orange released at the top of her rotation and zipping like a laser beam six inches above Esmerelda’s head. A gory splatter moved the room to silence.

  “Slipped,” Lakshmi said, and flexed her bicep like a champion powerlifter.

  Inside Esmerelda’s head castles crumbled, palaces burned, royal rouge carpets rolled up, the imperial court dispersed. Nothing, she had nothing, she was a beggar headed for street crime, her kingdom a shopping cart loaded with stolen bottles.

  She shot out of her cash register station and onto the street, the Gargantuan whizzing at top rpm, veering up the sidewalk until she saw the first store opening up, the corner deli accepting a pallet of Gatorades. She broke for it in a near-blind delirium, zipping within sight of pink-frosted cupcakes on the counter, then felt her spirits shrivel as the Gargantuan’s engine-whir rose, the chair decelerated, puttered, stopped, and rolled backward until she yanked the emergency brake and swiveled around stupidly on a dew-slick manhole. The battery had been drained, clearly an act of sabotage. She heated the morning with scalding profanity and haltingly wheeled the Gargantuan back to the store.

  Entrenched in her bunker she hit the phones, ordering delivery from her five most-frequented breakfast joints, all of which regretted to inform her that they’d redrawn their delivery zones such that her office was no longer within range. “Bullshit!” she screamed at the waitress of the pizza shop four doors up the street, “who’s paying you off?” She got the dial tone back but did not mind it—the cool electronic ring provided a baseline of calm, a soothing psychic vanishing point that helped her concentration reset.

  She hung up when distress beeps took over the line, putting her head down on her desk and falling into a devil-doused half-sleep fever. It took a line ten-deep of gym-goers, executives, students, and teachers to rouse her from this daze, caws and cackles slipping from her lips, her stomach squeaking like a chemistry experiment. “Yeah, sorry,” she muttered, typing extra slow and making several uncharacteristic billing errors, drooling a little, her face albino-white, generally appearing as if she’d escaped from the morgue. Impatient from the backed-up line, customers challenged her mistakes, then grew ever more irritated as Esmerelda slogged through the intentionally convoluted refund process aimed at inducing customers into giving up: completing a double-sided form in triplicate and turning four sets of keys simultaneously and inputting a random twenty-digit code that changed on the hour. Ticked-off customers withheld their usual tips and seriously considered moving their work to CopyTown, a rival shop that had opened up down the street a few months back and already established a reputation for runny ink and improper collating and an exploitative billing system riddled with overcharges and hidden fees. But at least service was brisk, and the staff, a set of slim Vietnamese sisters, looked a lot less lame.

  Slippy rolled in around eleven, using his briefcase to plow through the steamy line. “What’s the holdup?” he barked. “Ezzie, you’ve got to get it moving. I don’t keep you around because of your charm or good looks. And by the way, something blew up on the wall.” He raised his head and sniffed the aging orange guts. “Have we switched away from Pine-Sol?”

  “Give me a cookie,” Esmerelda mewed, then remembering Emily Post added: “please.”

  Slippy set his briefcase on the counter, flicked open the latches, and withdrew a wide Tupperware bin. “How about a fruit salad,” he offered.

  “So you’re in on it too,” Esmerelda said, grabbing the Tupperware bin and digging in with the pair of serving spoons she kept under her desk. She cleared out the container in fifteen seconds flat, which had the dual effect of rousing her spirits—more from the spirit of victory than satiating her exercise-shrunken hunger—and ruining the appetite of every customer in line.

  “Feel better?” Slippy asked.

  “No,” Esmerelda growled, though in truth she felt clear-eyed and morning-fresh and at least three months younger.

  “You will,” he said. “Come see me in my office in ten minutes.”

  Visions of a professional life beyond the cash register station flooded her skull: corner offices and honest-to-god lunch breaks, a bank-busting pay bump, even a shower-enabled bathroom. She went back to work with renewed vigor, and in ten minutes had the roomful of customers on their way with correct change and completed projects in hand, with time left over for a quick run of her industrial hairbrush through her bunned-up hair and a backup application of air freshener.

  She made the walk across the office on her own two feet, an intentional display of her newfound independence. “You wanted to see me?” she puffed.

  Slippy looked up from his newspaper, swirled the coffee in his silver mug. “Take a seat.” Slippy’s office was outfitted with two low-slung, impossible-to-climb-out-of armchairs and a pair of cheap metal stools set against a sideboard bar where Slippy took his 5 PM vodka. She leaned against the wall instead.

  “Right. Well. Esmerelda. I got your packet.” He pulled a manila envelope from the top drawer of his desk and extracted a pile of binder-clipped papers. He flipped through the pages nervously, revealing pie charts and 3-D graphs and inscrutable digits organized into tables. Esmerelda searched his off-brown eyes, newly dimmed and drained of confidence, rewired with a passionless, servile timidity. “Did you print this somewhere else?” he blurted.

  She shook her head slowly, a speck of awareness in the swirling recesses of her mind advising her to leave the talking to him.

  “Good. Well.” He withdrew a balled handkerchief from his blazer’s inside pocket and passed it over his reddening forehead. “I can’t agree to this.”

  She shrugged, but even underinformed she didn’t believe him. He looked like he’d agree to just about anything.

  “That kind of money doesn’t just fall into your lap. We’d have to drastically reconfigure our business model. And the mile-stones you set are extremely ambitious. I haven’t seen anything that demonstrates you can accomplish even half of what you promise.”

  She met his grasping glance with malaise, dismissal, impatience.

  “Now, I’m going along with the plan Robespierre laid out as a favor, to demonstrate my goodwill,” he continued. “I do hope you take that into account. Along with our long history. How I’ve helped you out. Et cetera.” He scanned her empty face for a response. “Well? Say something.”

  But she couldn’t even bring herself to shrug.

  The phone went off, and he scooped it up on the first ring. “Slippy. Yeah? No, she’s right here. Unh-huh. No. Really. Huh. How much?” A nod too calm to trust. “I see. Yeah. Thanks.”

  His hand settling on the switch hook, pointing the handset at her like a gun: “Have you been talking to anyone?”

  She walked out without answering, took a seat at her station, and worked the rest of the afternoon with her eyes shut. Even blind she processed orders and handled transactions as speedily as always, every penny and project accounted for, the entire experiment accomplished without a single junk food snack. When she arrived home—the special services van dropped her off at the corner again, now officially the new bus stop, the driver explained—Robespierre was putting the finishing touches on a dinner of broiled salmon and grilled vegetables, and Marat was setting the table. “Guys,” she said calmly, eyeing their industrious behavior suspiciously, and with a heavy dose of regret. “Siddown.”

  They sat. “I get the diet and exercise thing,” she said, “and w
hile I don’t like the sneak attack I appreciate the sentiment. It’s not atrocious so far, actually doing it. I’m willing to stick it out for a while, see where it goes.” She palmed her belly, rubbed her fingers over musty fabrics and the familiar scaly softness underneath, this mattress wrapped around her waist, the sheer surface area of it, how exposed she was. So much to manage, it made living so much work.

  “The job’s a different animal. There’s stuff here from way before you were born. You don’t know. And you cannot send me in there naked. I need to be ready, to know where I stand.” She tickled her tummy fast, miming a saxophone scale. “What exactly did you give him? Some papers and charts?”

  And something else: “Did you call him today?”

  Robespierre got up and left the room, leaving Esmerelda and her son, her red-eyed son, her son who was developing poser dreadlock stubs and smelled like a marijuana dispensary. Taller than she ever was, a fake-feeling maturity forced onto his face. Adult features of bunched skin and trouble-ridden forehead and weak, distrusting eyes. Carrying water, carrying weight. “How’s school?” she asked.

  “Fine.” Amazed she never read the mail, or listened to the messages, or showed up for the dozens of one-on-one meetings his guidance counselor claimed to have scheduled.

  “You starting up a band?” Lately she’d been hearing a lot of music upstairs, mellow bass beats and men singing out poetry like they were within an inch of death. “Sweet tunes coming out of your room.”

  “No,” he said softly, and then she was out of material; she didn’t know what he liked to do or what he was good at, his aspirations and fears, his favorite sport, his can’t-miss TV shows, any girls he was into. She reached for food, found her plate empty, and gnawed on her fingernails with maniacal focus until Robespierre returned with a packet just like the one she’d seen on Slippy’s desk.