Each time I quit Prineville Insurance I tell them to stuff it. Each time they choke on the office philodendron, the dry erase markers, and the reams of useless memos waiting for the shredder as I walk out the door. 

The cost of my mother’s Ensure, dentures, bath railings, diapers — well, I can’t quit anytime soon. Get along to get a paycheck I keep telling myself, however much I resent this lousy mantra. On Tuesday Delores’s doctor downgraded her to bedridden, so now I have to find the money for a decent wheelchair, not the crappy kind Medicare pays for. Meanwhile, Delores keeps insisting she’s seven months pregnant with a kitty named Festoon. She gets weepy and mean if I look the tiniest bit doubtful. That’s no picnic either — her dementia. Searching for a new job just isn’t possible. Besides, what else could I do? 

Billy Schlemming had the answer. “You’re the fat lady in the circus!” he yelled at the end of every school day throughout second grade the minute we were out of our teacher’s reach. He repeated it until it became a song that none of the kids within earshot could resist.

“Drive your fist hard into the gut and pedal off like a motherfucker,” was the advice my father gave me when I couldn’t stand listening to Billy anymore. Dad’s wind-chapped hands nearly crushed mine as he showed me how to throw a punch with my left and protect my face with my right. He didn’t stick around long enough to see that his advice was shit. 

His words gave me courage the day I rode my bike in circles, looping the cracked blacktop, waiting in the fast-approaching dusk for Billy. I spotted him coming out of the gym. Determined that third grade would be different, I slammed my fist into Billy Schlemming’s stomach as soon as he came near enough, as instructed. My thumb got stuck on his denim waistband, just for an instant, and that was all he needed to get his bearings. He gave an ugly, sour-smelling snort. Next thing I knew, before I could ride off like a motherfucker, I was face down on top of my bike with a broken nose and a vicious rip in my new Husky Girls Christmas tights. 

This is what comes to mind whenever I think about a job change. 

 

*

 

Ashley, head of sales at Prineville, has called me Office Judi Dench for the past five years. Her inspiration came from a James Bond movie co-starring my supposed twin. I guess Judi and I have the same taste in caftans. At first, I was more confused than offended because Dame Judi is old enough to be my grandmother, plus she’s half my size. The rest of Ashley’s sales team, three guys I call Jim, began calling me Judi, too. They line up behind her like crows on a wire, waiting for crumbs. Whenever she gushes about her husband Lloyd who is “so hot and kind” and “who is going to be the world’s best daddy, someday,” they crowd together, jostling to be the one who might replace him, should things go south. Don’t think she doesn’t know it. 

“The mortality projections, please?” Ashley’s voice cuts. I hesitate before I delete an entire day’s work. Yesterday I’d slipped her name, Ashley Mincun, into the spreadsheet every time I heard her shard-of-glass fake laugh. Under the column “Cause of Death” I typed things like “Strangled with her headband” and “Bludgeoned with her nameplate.”

Ashley says to one of the Jims, “Does she hear me? Go ask her.” 

I enter random things like dog breeds, types of fruit, famous quotes, anything that pops into my head. Why bother? She barely looks at the quarterly projections ever since she started in with the whole baby thing.

“Did you sit on something brown?” Ashley says as a Jim walks away from her desk. 

He contorts himself to look at the seat of his pants. His face goes red. “My son dropped Nutella on the kitchen chair.”

Ashley bestows a smile. “Oh, he’s so, so, so adorable!” She cocks her head to one side. Jim is beaming, almost shimmering. “You’d never know he’s a Down’s kid,” she adds. The muscles in his jaw clamp and shift, but he can’t say one word. Jim’s slavish crush on her and the fact that his son, Derek, doesn’t have Down’s Syndrome complicates any possible reaction.

“Projections?” Ashley swivels towards me. “Can you hear me?” 

I stand, muttering.

Ashley half-swivels to face the Jims seated behind her. She whispers, “I heard about a show on TLC. The obese sometimes can’t find their you-know-whats!” 

The Jims titter. Why is it that the bigger a person is, the more invisible she becomes? How’s that for twisted logic? Charles, our boss, is another one who confuses fat with deaf or dead. I stood two feet from him to avoid his moist coffee breath curling towards me, when he picked up the phone and called his lawyer to say he wanted to send his mail order bride back to the Philippines. Asked all about annulment like I was a goddamn statue. 

When Ashley weeps in the restroom, she drowns her unhappiness by snapping the lid of the ladies’ intimates waste can and flushing the toilet over and over. You’d think that when she sees my clogs in the next stall over, she’d try to rein it in. 

Today she wears a powder blue blazer and her usual pencil skirt. She’s a pencil, I think, sharp, begging to be bitten. As I round the edge of her desk, she tips her computer screen and what greets me is a seventeen-by-fourteen screen shot of me. Specifically, of my big ass. In the photo, my head is buried deep in the break room’s fridge. 

“You can’t do that.” 

Ashley taps a key and I pixelate and die, replaced by a stock image of a waterfall. “Can’t do what?”

“That picture of me. It was just there.”

“A picture of you on my screen? Hilarious.”

“I’ll report you.”

“For what? And to whom?” She picks at a cuticle. “Charles?” Charles believes everything she says. She could get any one of us fired by snapping her little claw fingers.

“Problem here, ladies?” Charles appears, eyes glued to his Fitbit. Ever since he started wearing those sneakers with extra puffy soles for problem feet, he skoshes his way around the office, popping up out of nowhere, making us jump and drop whatever is in our hands.

Ashley flutters a sigh. He stares harder at his Fitbit. Human resources would fire her for this. For so much else. Only we don’t have an HR department. Guess who’s in charge of office policy and keeps the binder in her desk? 

“Oh Charles,” she says. Then, behind his back she mouths, “Thief.”

Yes. And no. Delores costs. I took one hundred eighty-two dollars from petty cash to buy a case of latex gloves and other emergency supplies. A normal coworker would have had the decency to turn a blind eye if she caught me putting the cash into my fanny pack. After an hour of begging, Ashley promised she wouldn’t tell Charles. I was drained and initially grateful. Since the petty cash incident, two years ago, she’s found new ways to twist the knife, especially lately. Her calculation relies on my need to keep my job and my mother drugged.

Charles is paranoid, always suspecting one of us (usually me) of eating his disgusting bison bars from the break room’s fridge or accuses someone (usually not me) of moving the autographed baseball on his desk. He’d sack me immediately for an actual theft. 

“All good?” Charles calls over his shoulder as he skoshes away from us.

Just then I see Skip, my secret Skip, skidding to a stop on his skateboard, stumbling against the strip mall curb, and knocking his Sandwich Express visor down over his fern green eyes.

One day last month he mistakenly delivered a peanut butter sandwich to me, triggering a minor anaphylactic shock, and everything changed. He insists he fell in love right then. I thought he was crazy, but I don’t fish for details. What if I pressed him and he turned cold? 

Every night since, after I’ve tucked the chenille bedspread under Delores’s chin and locked her bedroom door, I wait for Skip to arrive, counting my heartbeats. He always climbs the tree to get into my bedroom, though I’ve told him to ring the bell, especially now that the branches are icy, but he loves a dramatic entrance. I’ve got to admit, it’s thrilling. Some nights we even make the faded day-glow stars my father once affixed to the swath of ceiling over my bed rain down on us. 

Technically, we’re having illegal sex, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Skip’s seventeen, eleven years my junior. Who else would want us? My genes are cruel comedians; I was born fat and stayed that way. He’s skinny with acne and ADHD. “There’s someone for everyone,” he likes to say. Then he buries his head in my neck and I breathe him in fast, afraid he’ll disappear. His hair doesn’t smell like Suave or any shampoo. He smells real. 

“Four turkeys on white,” Skip says, dropping a paper bag on the plaid couch that is the Prineville Insurance waiting area. “And one chef’s special.” He winks and brushes against me on his way out the door. My skin ignites. 

“Get out of the kid’s way,” Ashley says.

“If you can,” a Jim adds, perfectly capturing Ashley’s syrupy, vicious tone. He waits, eager for Ashley’s reaction.

“What did I tell you about mimicking me?” Ashley turns away before he can reply. “My appetite is ruined.” She thrusts her sandwich at me. “You look like you want it.” 

Skip frowns. I warn him off with a shake of my head. I can’t afford for Skip to go berserk. I’ve earmarked next month’s salary for Delores’s wheelchair. 

Charles bolts at the stroke of five to make sure his wife hasn’t pawned his fake diamond chip cuff links. Ashley has her one thousandth appointment at the fertility clinic. She chewed Lloyd out earlier when he phoned to say he was too busy to go with her. 

After everyone leaves, I turn off the Mr. Coffee. I prepare four hundred collated fire exclusion reports. With a full stapler in my hand, I can finally relax. Stapling is cause and effect and nothing more. There’s no cruelty waiting to blindside me. 

But first, I phone Delores, promising that I’ll be home before the final round of Wheel of Fortune. She hangs up on me (mistake or on purpose, who knows?) before I can tell her to stay in bed, before I can beg her to keep out of the kitchen, at the very least. Tomorrow I’ll have to put an ad in the Advocate for an aide. Our neighbors used to be cloyingly helpful. They gave me soppy looks and pat-pat-pats on the back of my hand. Now they stare at their feet and mutter excuses for why they can’t look in on her. I guess there are only so many times a person is willing to be slapped, shoved, or kicked when all they’re trying to do is land a neighborly bit of Jell-O in an invalid’s mouth.

When I arrive home to our overgrown yard brittle and bright with frost, the house is dark, save for a weak yellow light straining in the back of the bathroom where I find my mother dead on the floor. Her vacant face is centered in a dark pool of blood. 

Maybe she tried to make it to the toilet when her weak legs gave out and she cracked her head. Maybe not. She’d planned a water birth for Festoon. Maybe she’d tried to make it to the tub. Either way, I’ll never get to meet my little kitty sister. 

 

*

 

The office sends me a basket of overripe, weeping fruit. Skip holds me as I choose between cremation or burial, marble urn or teak. He sorts through lipsticks with names like Hooligan Red and Pink Assertion, long desiccated. When I was small, she caught me playing with her lipsticks and slapped me across the face. From then on, I snuck her ashtrays filled with lipstick-kissed cigarette butts into my room and rubbed the leftover color on my lips until I felt beautiful. 

Later, Skip finds me sitting in a pile of musty housecoats. They’re so worn that my touch tears the shiny material. He takes my hand and leads me to the couch abutting the rattling bay window I should have replaced years ago. Cold air settles on the back of my neck. Weak winter light illuminates the dust hanging in the air.

“Don’t you have to go to school?” I ask. “It’s been days. Aren’t you missing some pop quizzes? Book reports?”

Skip shrugs, “I’ll take the GED.”

“Doesn’t your mother want you home? Sometimes, at least?” 

“That’s funny,” he says, though he doesn’t crack a smile. Skip cranks up the volume to the Hamilton soundtrack. He knows all the lyrics and, from the PBS special, most of the dance moves.

“I should try to contact my father.”

“No,” Skip says.

“But she’s dead.” 

“He chose his life.” Skip break dances over to me. “You choose yours.”

The sagging furniture and threadbare carpets, bins of my mother’s medications piled on the nicked coffee table, faded curtains, each is a stone in my heart. “This house is filled with junk. What should I do with it?”

Skip holds my face in his freckled hands and speaks to me like I’m a small child. “Take the house. Do anything you want with it. It’s a free country.” He waits. I pretend to let something profound and exciting dawn on me. He nods, happy. 

Skip thinks the house is haunted, but I think it’s suffering. Memories trespass, like the one where my father’s advice gets me the broken nose for Christmas. My usual go-to foods taste bitter, give me no comfort. As I pack up the thirty-nine pairs of salt-and-pepper shakers Delores collected, another memory intrudes: Delores whips the Space Needle saltshaker at my father, shouting, “You bastard! You didn’t even try the casserole before you put pepper all over it!” He hits her just hard enough to get her to stop and wipes the thin line of blood from his forehead where the Space Needle nailed him. “What are you looking at? Huh?” she says, turning towards me, her eyes slits. “Get me another beer. Holy Christ, you could use the exercise.” 

A stubborn ache reaches up from my stomach and seizes my jaw. I’m afraid to open my mouth and speak. I’m sickened by its corrosive taste. 

Skip goes back to work only after I agree that I’ll pick up when he calls at noon. My phone’s been ringing nonstop. I figure it’s a medical supply company calling for overdue payment or worse, a volunteer from the Our Lady of the Sacrament Bereavement Center. But a promise is a promise and I answer when he rings at noon. 

“Skip.” 

“Judi, hey!”

A ceramic cactus dusts my lap with decades-old salt. “Charles?”

“We’re sorry for your loss. You ready to come back to work?” 

I look around my mother’s kitchen, the sagging cabinets full of expired canned goods, the linoleum pounded into defeat. 

“You sure this is a good idea?” Charles’s hand over the receiver muddies his voice, but I can still hear him. “Can’t we get someone else, Ash? Why didn’t I fire her after she stole that petty cash?” 

I forget all about my aching jaw. 

Ashley says, “Stop being so dramatic, Charles. Poor Judi needed the money for her mental case mother.”

“Judi should have asked me.” 

“Let it go, Charles. She’s a thief. Fire her next month. But all this filing? Needs to be done now.”

I close my eyes, but the room won’t stop spinning. For two years of my life, she’s threatened me with telling Charles I took the petty cash even though she’d already told him long ago.

“I need more time,” I manage to say.

“I’ve already given you four days paid leave.” 

“Things are a mess.” 

“What? You’re mumbling.”

“Sorry.” It’s hard to digest the news. “I said I have to clean my mother’s house,” I hear myself say. “I’ve just inherited my mother’s house.”

“That’s what weekends are for.”

I clear my throat, dislodging a layer of dust that’s settled there. “I need to do it now. So it can be mine.” 

“Judi,” he says, exasperated. “You already said it was your house.”

“Right. Yes, sorry. Sorry.” Then it occurs to me, hits me like a comic book thunderbolt: Why am I sorry? This is what my brilliant Skippy was getting at! I own this run-down house. It’s not much, but it’s worth something, and it’s mine. Fuck them all.

“Judi?”

“Don’t call me Judi. You know it’s not my name.”

“How about you come in this afternoon?” I hear him ask Ashley, “What’s Office Judi’s name?”

“Who knows? Just get her to come in and file these 2019 claims.” 

“Look up Judi Dench’s name in the personnel records.”

“Call her Betty or whatever,” Ashley says. “That’s not the point.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I tell Charles, eyeing the bologna sandwich Skip left for me.

“What about today?” 

“Tomorrow, Charles. Tomorrow’s perfect.”

 

*

 

My father is beside me. Not in the flesh of course, but a sort of butterfly-kiss him. I can feel my blood looping through my veins as we walk slowly across the yard. The snow has melted, and my feet squish into the new mud. He smells of gasoline and motor oil from his last job at Lucky’s garage on Route 10. If it’s true that history is destined to repeat itself, then whatever he has in mind will end badly. But I’m an adult now; I have a boyfriend, assets, and my mother is dead. I’ll catch any flaws in his plan.

The rotted door to the shed gives way like it’s been expecting us. I stumble over an old lawn mower. Rat droppings crunch under my slippers. Spider webs shiver against my face. There. My old bike is lodged behind a wheelbarrow full of rusted gardening tools. “Delores,” my father says from his maroon recliner opposite the TV, “Forget the diets. She’s a real big gal. Might as well let her make a real big splash.” The tires on my bike are flat; one silver tinsel lace is all that’s left hanging from the right handlebar, and the sissy bar is loose. But the horn still honks. 

 

*

 

Admittedly, I’m stuck. I fall sideways, sliding against the exterior of the plate glass window, leaving a lipstick skid over the “I” in Insurance. A dangerous smile lights up Ashley’s face. “Come in,” she says from the doorway. She waves me in from the sidewalk. 

“Is this some kind of joke?” Charles asks.

I ride my banana bike across the threshold and herky-jerky myself towards the copy machine. 

“What is Office Judi Dench doing?” Ashley claps and dances on tiptoe.

“I quit.” I veer hard to the left and honk my horn for emphasis. “I quit!” I wobble towards Ashley’s desk, slowly mastering the pedals. I grab her sack lunch and put it in the bike’s frayed basket. I manage a sloppy figure eight around one of the Jims. 

“Should someone grab her?” Charles wonders.

“Are you kidding?” Ashley hoots and slaps her knees.

I pedal into the break room and pull her coffee mug from the dish drainer. 

“Lloyd gave me that mug for Valentine’s Day. Put it down. Don’t you dare break it!” Ashley says. I ride towards her desk. She clatters after me. “I mean it. I’ll get you fired.”

“I already quit. Are you deaf?” There’s just one more thing to say. “My name is Monica.” 

“Who cares?”

“Monica McFadden.”

“Enough, Monica. You’re fired,” Charles says.

“I already QUIT.” 

Ashley rolls her eyes. For five years I’ve envisioned a Moses-parts-the-Red-Sea-type departure. I take her Yoplait from my basket and throw it against the wall, expecting a splatter big enough to meet the moment. It lands with a mocking thud in the wastebasket. 

“Can’t we escort her out?” Ashley asks.

This whole plan with my phantom father at my side suddenly feels wrong. To staunch my growing panic and choking shame, I blurt the first thing that pops into my head, “I know everything, you guys, everything.”  

Ashley shoots Charles a look that would make a Jim crumble.

I catch my reflection in the window: an obese woman in a paisley caftan, pumping the pedals of a little girl’s banana bike. There’s nothing heroic or biblically righteous about me. I want to dissolve, slink away, die, when my father’s voice cuts through my desperation. “You look like a real pro on that bike, Monica. A natural.”  To my amazement, he still has power, though it’s feeble, to inspire. My destiny is what I make it. “Don’t let those motherfuckers mess with your head,” he adds. 

“Hellllooooo?” Ashley says.

The smirk on her face kills me, fires me up, emboldens me. I think about every shitty comment I’ve had to put up with over the past two years. Shifting my weight forward, I lean my belly against the handlebars. “Are you and Charles having an affair?” 

“Oh, god,” Charles says in a small voice.

Suddenly, it seems, I possess the power of second sight. Is that even possible? The sheer thought of it fills me with radiant hope. “But try as he might,” I continue, pedaling slowly and expanding my consciousness to greet the spirit’s wisdom, “Charles can’t get you pregnant either. Like Lloyd told you, it’s the hand you’ve been dealt.”

I don’t see it coming. Ashley shoves a letter opener in my wheel’s spokes, and I launch into the philodendron. My head rams the clay pot. 

“What kind of sicko are you?” Ashley says. “Answer me!”

I struggle to stand. Behind me, Jim says, “Who’s Monica?”

“Are you deaf?” Ashley asks in a loud voice.

I pull a waxy leaf from my hair. “I am not deaf.” I seethe and crumple the leaf in my hand.

“And how can you be this fat?” 

“I’m hungry, ravenous.” I lean towards her and the next thing I know, I’ve licked her face from chin to forehead. There’s a stunned silence before Ashley starts screaming, like my saliva is acid on her skin. Her fingers dance across the desk in search of a tissue. Grasping the base of the main office phone, Ashley rips it from the wall and hurls it at me.

It slams me in my gut. The air trumpets out of me. I collapse. Laughter bubbles around me. Is that Skip I see pulling into the parking lot in the LeSabre? Has it started to snow or is it glitter? I can’t breathe. Have I died? 

This final plan, my kick-ass exit from the insurance sector, is no different from the one my father devised for me when I was eight: a flop. Delores always said, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” She was brutal and cruel but clear-eyed. She saw the endless humiliations I would endure.

“Is Judi crying?” someone asks.

“Get her off the floor. It’s pathetic.” Hands slide under my armpits.

“Jesus, she’s heavy.”

My breath is a scrape. My stomach hurts; it has been aching forever.

“You,” Ashley points at me, “are disgusting.”

I turn towards Ashley and emit a harsh and unexpected burp. My hand flies up, but it’s too late. Torrents of last night’s blueberry pie shoot out of my mouth. Streusel chunks and smudged, inky blueberry skins splatter my feet, splatter Ashley’s linen blazer. Masticated red pepper clots and jagged bits of drowned lettuce follow. I recognize them as dinner from weeks ago. There’s no time to wonder at this impossibility. Lo mein noodles I slurped last Chinese New Year spew from my lips, transforming into stringy epaulettes on her thin shoulders. My insides grind on. Hot dogs in their entirety, from the contest I won when I was twelve, heave out of me in unforgiving waves. Someone trying to contain my mess hands me Lloyd’s valentine mug, but I drop it, transfixed by hundreds, no thousands, of dainty emerald peas and bright corn niblets flying out of my mouth in perfect militaristic rows. They’ve held their distinctive shape over many, many years. When I finally finish, the Jims stare, a swirling mix of fear and excitement on their faces. Charles skoshes back and forth on his puffy sneakers. He repeats, “Oh, oh, oh,” as if that means anything. Soon the Jims, without their leader and not knowing what else to do, join in. Against this verbal backdrop of nonsense, a shrouded Ashley is silenced.

Skip waits by my LeSabre, dancing to his tunes. A light snow begins to fall. He looks up when he hears the bell tinkling on Prineville Insurance’s door and sees me rolling my wounded bike in his direction. He whoops, leaps up on the car’s roof, and sings at the top of his lungs “You Gotta Rise Up!” 

I pedal home, riding in the middle of the two-lane road. Skip follows in the car at a wingman’s distance. The music blares from the car stereo. Snow muffles all other sound. The whole way home, we flip off drivers who want us to move over.

---

 

Marci Pliskin’s fiction has appeared in The Cottonwood Journal (University of Kansas) and in Orca: A Literary Review. She is a 2019 New Millennium Writers Award Finalist in the Non-Fiction category. She recently joined the staff at Orca. A New England native, she now lives and writes in Seattle.