Christine Ma-Kellams
Schadenfreude

<< continued from Part 1

Vicky doesn't look up when they enter, because she is the world's most insouciant housewife whose love for children starts and stops with their capacity to make her home-which Dad bought her, by the way-look more human, because the key to the effortless, highbrow cottage look is the ever-so-slight suggestion that real people's body parts have touched those distressed wood chairs, that they're distressed from the steady friction of children playing and not, say, a two-hour paint-then-sand session in some middle-aged woman's garage. At this precise moment in time she is re-adjusting the mercury glass planters atop the kitchen hutch, turning them in thirty-degree angles to see how to make the spider plants they carried less organic and more intentional, like pencil shavings in a toilet. Her butt is nonexistent, as is the case with virtually all White-and Asian [5]-women, a moderate expanse of skin draped on pelvic bone, but her breasts, by God her breasts-they are enormous enough for a gay man to look twice and forcibly refrain from a casual fondle. Over the years they've retreated back into her ribcage, like enemy soldiers who've changed their minds, and us kids have always wondered if that is merely a liability of age-which was an even bigger bitch than Vicky herself, much to our own sense of schadenfreude-or something more premeditated, like a boob reduction. Why on earth a White woman would commit a boob reduction-reduction!-was beyond us. We knew Black women did it because their bodies were a force of nature; their bodies were inaccessible, beyond rationality, and this would be both their triumph and their fukú [6]. We knew-we figured, or were told on dusty nights in the changing rooms of the Spearmint Rhino over the exchange of tampons and Natty Lights-that there comes a point in every well-endowed woman's life where her breasts are no longer tits and just one engorged mammary gland, an ungainly pocket of chest fat whose vertical placement has the foreseen liability of pulling her constantly forward, like a Babushka doll with a crystal paper weight duct-taped to its head. And it hurt like a mother-and not a nice White one who made you cookies on Christmas Eve in the name of all that is holy about Santa and called your friends sweetie when they came over on school nights in the name of group projects-but a minority one, one who clawed at sinewy Red Soldiers when they slashed open her mattress in search of opium and books and stepped on her tin pencil case like they were recycling old coke cans, one that wielded violence like it was a fucking dowry, like she was doing you a favor when she was beating your ass, because at least that meant she cared, she was around and not gone, like the other whores who could've, should've, been your mother.

Yes, we knew about breasts-the dark, unapologetic kind that could shame Jenna Jameson herself into priesthood, that could inspire all sorts of postmodernist analyses about the nature of slavery and desire [7]; knew that they could be one enormous pain in the lower back, but we also knew that White woman breasts, Vicky's breasts, could always be restrained with the right amount of sports-bra-ing or underwiring, built-in cami support or a really high empire waist, and that to command a boob reduction under such circumstances would be like giving P.'s wife a facelift [8]. You could, of course, no one would stop you, but what a waste of Christmas money and two month's wages and a surgeon's tee-off time.

Vicky descends from her poised, ass-less position atop the kitchen hutch and saunters over to the laundry room-her crown and her redemption, her eyes fondling every household object like a lesbian Tyra Banks on Project Runway. Twenty-seven years later, over spinach egg-white omelets and those green bottles of sparkling water that my to-be-wife despised-it tastes like ass-juice, she would declare, but without the flavor-Vicky would say, very seriously, in response to the always innocent, always pointed question, "So what do you do with your days?" "Well, gosh, I manage Will's household." My wife would look back at her and half-smile, her right eye and the right corner of her upper lip curling upwards, dragging the rest of her face North, as if to say, that is the biggest line of shit I've ever heard, but alright, go at it, let's see you try to unpack that for me. She would say nothing-I've never loved her more until now, this moment-just holds that asymmetrical smile like she was waiting for the camera's flash to signal its permission to release, waiting, waiting, until Vicky would interrupt the silence by looking down at her lap and saying to her thighs, "Well, the laundry alone, you see."

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

>> Back to Issue 21, 2018