Take a Load Off, Mona Jamborski Read online

  There is someone at my door.

  I am suddenly aware of myself, sitting on my sagging couch, deep in the cushion of it, my belly resting on my legs, my breasts resting on my belly, my neck rolls resting on my breasts, and realizing I am quite stuck. When I order a grocery delivery, or simply a pizza, or when I buzz in the mailman or the FedEx guy, I have some time to get myself upright to open the door, before they arrive at the third floor, where I am. And of course half the time I ask them to just leave it at my door, so I can grab whatever delivery invisibly after they've left. But this isn't the main condo doorbell ringing – it's my very own knocker, right at my door.

  I freeze, and I begin to sweat simultaneously.

  "Just a second!" I call out, and then curse myself for not asking who it is first. Why am I so worried about what this person's wait time might be? Why do I not demand that he identify himself? Why is my first instinct, always, to please, and not to defend? I take a deep breath, but not too deep, because the shifting fat as I attempt to stand will fight for some of that lung space too.

  I rock back and forth until momentum allows me to grab the edge of the coffee table in front of the sofa – the sturdiest, heaviest coffee table ever made, and of course you are picturing This End Up furniture. And of course you would be right. What else could possibly hold its ground while I use it for leverage? Solid wood, looks like it was built by Pa Ingalls out of the biggest oak tree near the prairie, square and squatty and at the moment, my best friend. I grip the edge as I shift my weight from my rear end to my feet and slowly stand, still bending over enough to hold on to the wood, until I can let go and carefully rise the rest of the way, sweat pouring down my face, breathing heavily. I grab a tissue from the Kleenex box while I can still reach it and blot my forehead once I am standing.

  And, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, repeat, repeat, repeat … and I am at the door, wishing my belly would allow my face to get close to the peephole. I control my breathing and force myself to say, "Who is it, please?"

  "Food Mart," says a male voice, not one I recognize. "Delivery, online order."

  I hesitate, wondering for a second if I've lost my mind. Did I order groceries for today? Javier just came yesterday, Monday, which is my usual day for deliveries, unless I order something mid-week. Then, I usually do it on Thursdays, to be sure of getting Javier again. Not that he is special, just that he is used to me, and I despise having to deal with someone new and watch them disguise their horror and revulsion when they take me in for the first time. So, for better or for worse, Javier is my guy, because he's been my guy for three years now, seeing me often enough to, possibly, not notice how much weight I've gained even since I stopped going out. I'm sure I was shocking enough in the beginning of my hermitude, but now, a new delivery guy is definitely not on my list of things I can handle.

  "I … don't think I placed an order for today?" I hate how hesitant I sound, and how fast my heart is beating. I hear the bags rustling outside the door, and then the sound of papers flipping.

  He doesn't speak for a minute. Then: "Mona Jamborski, online order, July 17, placed at 10:15 a.m. Five pounds of pasta store brand, three frozen pizzas Tombstone, ten jars of marinara sauce store brand, frozen cakes Pepperidge Farm one each flavor: vanilla, chocolate, coconut, cust—"

  I desperately interrupt him to stop the litany of my shame.

  "Stop!" I say. "Stop. That was delivered yesterday, by Javier. I have all that. I'm … having a party."

  I close my eyes and bite my lip, wishing the floor would just swallow me up, which is something, actually, that could very well happen one of these days. I don't know who lives underneath of me but they must be painfully aware of who I am, at times.

  "Mrs. Jamborski?"

  "Yes," I said, not bothering to correct him about my title. "Yes, there must have been a duplicate order placed, I am very sorry. A computer glitch or something, maybe. Can … you return these items to the store? I hate that you've come out here for nothing."

  I hear him sigh, loudly.

  "Look, ma'am," he says, not sounding annoyed as much as practical. He sounds younger than I first thought he was. Maybe just a teenager. His voice is very deep but he doesn't speak with any polish, or any real inflection. "A lot of this stuff is frozen – by the time I get it back to the store, they won't restock it. You won't be charged for it twice. If you already got a delivery, then this is just free food."

  I think, casting around in my head for options, while the silence grows.

  "Ma'am, can you just open the door," he says, not making the sentence a question. "I'll just put the bags down, you can sign, and I'll go. Maybe," he adds, after a beat, "you can invite extra people to your party."

  I can tell he's being a little sarcastic. Not from his tone – he has no tone of voice. He speaks very flatly. Definitely a teenager. He just knows he's dealing with a crazy woman now, and he's called my bluff, without even knowing why. I almost snort. But I've lost. I cannot salvage this situation and my pride at the same time – one of the two will have to give. I know which one it will be – it will be the one that always gives.

  I open the door, but leave the chain bolt in place, so he can only see a sliver. He's a kid alright, probably 18 or 19, and I can see him searching around eye level, higher and lower, to find my eye, not locating whatever those subconscious locators must be, that our brains use to help us identify our own species – a jaw line, a division between head and body, a chin maybe. Finally after a moment of obvious confusion, he meets my eye, but he isn't shocked yet – he still hasn't processed what he's seeing. I can see him just fine, though. Small build, athletic but standing with an awkward stance, as if he's favoring a knee. His hair is almost black, tightly curled, and his brows are heavy. His eyes look very dark, but if I am guessing correctly, they are a dark blue, not brown. Overbite, acne scars, and a really interesting bone structure under his face. I'd liked to have tried to draw him, once, when I was into portraiture. High cheekbones and a rounder nose than the heaviness of his chin would suggest. He looks ethnic of some sort, but his skin couldn't be paler.

  I realize that he has looked away from me as I am studying him. Imagine that – someone else with eye contact issues. I am still fairly anonymous behind my door here, but he's standing in the hallway, in plain sight, aware of the scrutiny. How momentarily delicious to turn the tables for just that half second, since it's all about to come crashing down.

  "Are you able to leave the bags in the hallway, and hand me the papers through the door to sign?" I already know the answer to this. Javier has done it, when he knows I am too indisposed to get to the door, which has happened on occasion. But this guy is new.

  "Sorry," he says gruffly, staring at the floor. "Food Mart policy, they have to at least cross the door jambs."

  So, it's to be one of those days. I say goodbye to whatever sliver of pride I had left today, unbolt the chain, and open the door.

  Chapter 4

  I cannot enjoy how his facial expression froze, because I am too exposed to enjoy anything now with the door open. If I could be a voyeur of myself, I would definitely be intrigued by the fleeting reactions that people have, how quickly they try to rearrange their faces to hide their shock, or how deeply they let the disgust settle into their curling lip and wrinkled nose, just to show me.

  I can see his face become still, and I can see his eyes bounce around and he tries to find someplace to settle them without being rude, but he doesn't want to look into my eyes either. That's too intimate. Plus, this is a kid with issues of his own anyway, it seems.

  He settles for focusing on the bags, lifting them up and taking a single step to place them over the threshold of my door at my feet, as I take a step backwards to allow him, which is not my best direction. I am now not supporting my balance by gripping the door frame, but merely by swaying on my own two, swollen, overtaxed feet. I watch him fuss over the papers he's holding, on a clipboard, and he extends it to me with a pen dangling on a
chain from the clip.

  "Just sign please," he says, his eyes fixed on the clipboard, and his throat bobs as he swallows. He's as awkward right now as I am. No scene in his life has educated him how to behave when he delivers erroneous groceries to third-floor condos of 528-pound women who don't want to open their doors. That situation was not covered in Food Mart's training. "Unless, um, you want me to take these into the kitchen for you."

  Please say no, please say no, please say no is the refrain running clearly through his head, printed across his features like subtitles, and yet I am touched that he offered, even if only out of practiced politeness. He doesn't strike me as a real boy-scout type of kid, so maybe he's not offering to be polite, but rather because he sees a practical reason why I might need help.

  And I do. It will take me the entire rest of the day to get this food into the kitchen and stored away, especially since I won't have enough freezer space for everything, and I will have to rearrange the cakes, thaw out some bags of dinner rolls ahead of when I thought I'd want them, and maybe even toss a few things.

  His humiliation cannot touch my own, however, so I say quickly, "Of course not, this is fine."

  I sign and return the clipboard to him and he meets my eyes for a fraction of a second. I was right, they are a dark blue, heavily ringed with lashes. He'll be a hairy beast before he's 25, I know. I wonder where his parents are from.

  He nods his head once, skips backwards into the hallway, and says, "You might get me again instead of Javier, just so you know. His shifts might be … changing."

  He hesitates for just a second, nods his head once again, and disappears down the hallway, as I shuffle forward to close my door. I see him just leaving my field of vision. He does walk oddly – not quite a limp but different somehow. His arms are a little too long for his body. "Thank you," I call quietly after him, and I wonder about his overbite. I think his two front teeth are crowns. Odd for a kid so young.

  So Javier's shifts are changing. As much as I am dependent upon the reliability of his schedule, I am not surprised that something might have been shaken up between Javier and Food Mart. He's no charmer, Javier, though he thinks he is. I saw him once in the parking lot, where my windows face, walking back to his car after a delivery and making a gesture to a girl who couldn't have been 14 yet – he spread two fingers in front of his mouth and wiggled his tongue between them. From the height of my windows, I couldn't make out details, but I saw well enough. He's a letch and she was, happily for her, clueless, having no idea what he was signifying. She just stared back at him as she followed her mom to my building, the question mark over her head nearly visible. He took her eye contact as an opportunity to perform his maneuver again, and I felt my stomach roil. "God," I exclaimed at the window, wishing I could telepathically smite him on the head, and smack the mother into attention, but she was focused on getting her keys out of her purse. Javier was practically jaunty as he got into his car and peeled off. I wasn't all that surprised. I imagine anything that had hit puberty would be considered woman enough for him – one of the reasons I was comfortable having him as my delivery man was because he never bothered to be particularly polite so I never bothered to worry much about his opinion of me. I didn't count as human, let alone female, I'm sure, and I had heard him wolf-whistle at other neighbors, further down my hall, where I know some single ladies live. And married ones. Javier has too much grease in his hair and his trimmed little moustache just doesn't cut it in this decade as a sign of manliness or virility or whatever it is he's going for.

  I wonder if someone complained.

  Well, I won't worry about that now – I have a solid week before I will need to order anything else, and, quite a task ahead of me now. I took down the art that hung on the wall between the front door and the kitchen specifically for days like this – so I can keep one hand on the wall for support, while I lug groceries along, without knocking the frames to the floor. The wall has been bare for at least two years now, but there's a horizontal stripe of discolored smudge running directly to the kitchen door, where my palm has made its mark.

  And here I go. Bend, grab a bag, lift, walk, carefully, carefully, into the kitchen. Deep breath, lift harder, land bag on the countertop. Stop and grasp countertop and wheeze, eyes closed. Slowly remove items from bag, slowly shuffle from fridge to cabinet to freezer (I have a second freezer of course, placed where my mother's baker's rack used to be), stop and breathe a while longer, head bent over the counter, a bead of sweat rolling down my temple, my back drenched, then take a step at a time back to the living room. Bend, grab a bag, lift, walk. Add to the darkening stripe along the wall, as I lean enough weight into the drywall that I wonder if I'll pop a hole right on through one day. I cannot sit down to rest – sitting down is a several hour commitment, as getting back up is so difficult. It's a herculean effort to lift the bags onto the counter. I am a herculean effort. You must be wondering, by now, how I shower. How I use the bathroom.

  You'll just have to wonder. I do the best I can, but there are things I necessarily must miss and cannot reach, and I am capable of being creative with long towels soaked in cleanser, held like a thick twisted jump rope from hand to hand. I am sure if someone got close enough they would learn about some unique smells, but I am not as of yet offending any noses during the brief and arms-length visits of the delivery men.

  I have a small stackable washer and dryer, which is fine for my long, tent-like housedresses and panties and a few towels at a time, but I cannot launder my bedding in the small washer's drum. I can, with enough time and huge efforts, strip my bed clothes from the mattress and stuff them into plastic bags, once a month, where I have them picked up at my door by a laundry service: a teeny Asian man who also drops off clean bedding at the same time and scurries away before I inevitably ask for help remaking my bed.

  I would never ask for help like that – I would sooner sleep on a bare mattress than have someone enter that deeply into my apartment and work that closely over my bed. I can only imagine what secrets he would discover, what smells have seeped into the collapsed springs that my own nose has long grown blind to. No, the teeny Asian man is quite safe from me and my fat white-woman ways. I will struggle heroically each time to remake my own bed before sinking into it, reassuring myself that a full month can pass before I have to expend such efforts again.

  Taking the trash out was a situation that daunted me, when I realized three years ago that I had gone down the condo stairs for the last time, through the glass front doors, and across the parking lot to the dumpster. How would I get a bag of garbage every two or three days to a spot that looked impossibly far away as I see it from my windows, that boxy green unattainable mecca of a dumpster, which requires its bagged sacrifice into a fixedly hungry mouth? – that much I identify with. Getting there was officially now impossible, as I barely survived my last trip, welcoming the heart attack that doubtless was coming on when I heaved myself up the stairs for the last time.

  So I did the easiest thing to do, when a few bags piled up and I had no ideas: I firmly embraced denial. I put the bags into the hallway outside my door, carefully looking left and right to make sure no one saw me, and closed my door.

  And waited.

  I never heard commotion outside my door, but I did keep the television on at a higher-than-usual volume, intentionally to drown out anything I might have otherwise picked up on – harrumphing neighbors or the like. I watched television, loudly, for three solid days, not cracking a book once, such was the extent of my denial.

  Finally on day three, I had a UPS delivery scheduled for bath towels that I ordered online – I can only wash mine so many times before they give up the ghost, considering what they are asked to perform, so I do go through quite a few of them. UPS has always dropped packages right at my door, not down by the mailboxes, so that was no issue. The mailman, however, I must say, has been a gift from God, taking it upon himself to bring me my mail when it became evident that I was no longer attending t
o my box in the lobby. Even after days when he has substitutes, who put mail where they should, he opens my mailbox, collects what has accumulated, and brings everything up. He knocks once, gently, and is gone by the time I open the door. I've only seen his face a few times in the five years I have lived here, but I have often blown his departing mail truck a kiss through my windows. I do not know the man's name but I might love him.

  Anyway, when the UPS guy brought my towels, there was nothing in the hallway but the box with the Amazon logo – I might have cheered, jumped, and done a cartwheel … mentally. No trash bags, no nastygrams taped to my door, no evidence of my cowardice and desperation.

  So I put out another bag.

  Mr. Warrington lived in the apartment directly across from mine – Bruce, I think his first name was. He and I had greeted each other civilly enough when I was still getting around like a normal person, passing each other in the hallway or in the lobby. He was a weekend triathlete, which I only knew from some of his louder conversations he had on the phone, a cordless phone that sometimes transmitted directly into mine. Sometimes, when I could hear his muffled voice across the hall, I would dial information, the automated kind, not the kind that staffed a live operator, and would just keep using the voice menu to look up random businesses, to hear Mr. Warrington's conversations. I swear I am not usually such a nosy neighbor, but he was going through an absolutely fascinating divorce, and I hung on the details like I was watching a soap opera. His ex-wife was a dentist, and she was a dentist simply because her grades had not been good enough for medical school, apparently, and she had kept the house and was trying hard to keep his three kids, the youngest just a baby, out of spite, it seemed to me, since she wasn't accusing him of being anything other than the most generic asshole. He countered that his contributions were more significant than hers, since he had worked while she went to dentistry school, paying the bills as well as her steep tuitions, and then he sacrificed his career to raise the kids so she could go "play with teeth." So he was a Mr. Mom who had gotten unceremoniously kicked out of his house when the dentist got tired of hearing his booming, self-important voice, and maybe she got tired of cheering on his over-treadmilled butt at races. Or, maybe she was a cold career woman who had children simply as trophies, and decided the only way to be the preferred parent was to vilify their dad. Or, they were both kind of nasty people who deserved each other.