Sad-Looking Inflatable Stick People
by Andrew Battershill
The fact that Sylvia, the only woman he’d ever really
loved (not just in a –
you’re actually letting me near you
– sort of way), was happily married to someone else was just one of a number of
things that Harold Swim said was totally fine with him.
His forehead pressed heavily against the thick plastic of the window, Harold
began to empathize, distantly but respectfully, with the cars parked along the
side of the road. They had to sit there, quiet and cold and sad, until someone
opened them up and stuck a key in them and expected them to start. And if (after
all the days and weeks and months of sitting by the side of the road quietly and
coldly and sadly), they weren’t ready to start or just didn’t feel like it, the
person would bang the steering wheel and curse and grind the key into the
ignition several more times.
A few more of the number of things that Harold Swim said were totally fine with
him: the long-impending coastally devastating earthquake, mosquito bites,
consumer capitalism, taking vitamins, a demyelinating spinal lesion on his C7
vertebrae, the fact that he’d been sexually molested by a man who worked at the
comic shop seventeen years prior, haircuts, pickles, and having to shave and
floss every day.
After he got off the street car, Harold was careful to kick whatever pebbles he
saw in at least the vague direction of the sea, still harboring a vague
childhood belief that rocks really love water.
He arrived at the market and saw Sylvia sitting by the entrance reading a
paperback Penguin Classic. She was wearing a bland-colored sweater with long,
loose sleeves. The wind played happily through her wide-open sleeves and was
glad at the chance to tenderly move the thin, white hairs of her upper arm.
“Haroooold!”
Sylvia looked up from her book and ran to hug him, incautiously leaving her
purse resting against a leg of the bench.
An important fact about Sylvia: every once in a while, when she was happy or
excited, she would – with only a gentle movement of her neck and a hushed “bleh”
sound – vomit several dry, shiny, stylized tinfoil hearts into her hands.
The two of them talked easily and wittily as they walked through the market. The
booths were packed tightly together, each underneath a dark green overhanging
rain-shield. The street was half-full of people, and they moved around with a
sort of organic order that charmed Harold, who hadn’t been to a street market in
years. Occasionally a booth would catch Sylvia’s eye, and they would stop and
she would bend over the table, touching the items with only her index finger
while complimenting the vendors. Harold would stand slightly back and try not to
look at her legs or rear.
Sylvia replaced the lid on her water bottle and
allowed three drops of water to fall on the sidewalk, which the pavement
joyfully mistook the drops for the beginning of rain. She then got back to
supporting her point that bad things can happen if you love craft supplies too
much: “When I was a kid, and I mean a
kid,
like five or six or seven or eight, I used to really love the sound scissors
made when they cut hair, y’know?” She made exactly the sound scissors make when
they cut hair, using her lungs, lips, and teeth. “And I knew that my mom would
be so mad at me if I cut my hair, or even my bangs, so I just cut off my
eyebrows—both of them.”
“Was it worth it?”
“It did sound amazing the whole time. And my mom had
to draw on my eyebrows every morning for a while, but they grew back,” she
rubbed along the length of her eyebrow. “People tell you they don’t, but that’s
bullshit. And, yeah man, it just sounded
awesome.”
The night before Harold had a long, slow dream that
went as follows:
You, you, you, maple bacon, you, you, you, you, fresh cranberries, you, you,
you, you, baby commando platoon, you, you, you, you, impossibly huge Boston
Terrier chewing a tug-boat, you, you, beautiful woman falling gracefully into
the sea, you, you, the ripples in the water, you, you, you (me).
The dream had been talking to Sylvia.
On a related note, there was a small but significant part of Harold that
couldn’t help believing that he should weigh more with an erection, no matter
how many times he’d woken up, stepped on his scale, and been proven wrong.
They walked forward a little more. Harold almost bought a hand carved wooden
pipe that was shaped like a beluga whale, and then he didn’t because he was
supposed to be quitting smoking, and just switching to a better-smelling
delivery system probably didn’t count. As he turned around, Sylvia was twisting
the toe of her shoe into the ground like a very ineffective corkscrew.
“So, I had an ulterior motive for bringing you here today.”
“Ulterior to what?”
“Don’t laugh at me, but be on the lookout for a two-headed sweater, if you know
what those are. I’ve been after one for years. And I got some intel that one
might be here at this exact market.” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously and
swept them across the row of booths.
Harold made a dismissive gesture with his left hand as his heartbeat
accelerated. “To whom do you think you’re speaking? Of course I know what a
two-headed
sweater is.”
“Really!?”
“Of course, who wouldn’t?”
“Everyone! Everybody I’ve told about two-headed sweaters has called me a crazy
person, and….”
“They’re not available on the internet.”
“Yeah man! Google told me I was stupid and crazy.”
“ ‘Did you mean two-headed dragon?’ No, I fucking didn’t, Google, I meant tandem
sweater, or conjoined sweater, maybe, if you want to get term-correctey about
it.”
“Oh thank God, I knew if anybody would get it…but yeah, I’m going to buy one in
secret and make Gordon wear it with me.”
Harold remembered how, when he met Sylvia at that
conference, he told her about the man who’d sat down on the same subway bench as
him and started masturbating under his blue housecoat.
Harold had thought it would be rude to leave
because the public masturbator would know Harold was leaving because of
him.
And he remembered sitting with her on the street outside the bar that night, the
cobblestones cold under his hands, reassuring her that she hadn’t been leading
anyone on, even though she didn’t believe in wedding rings. And he remembered
the six and a half foot tall economist whose name he could never pronounce
stumbling out of the bar and leaning against a street sign, and the way the sign
moved stiffly back and forth against the line of the sky. He remembered the
sound of her quick gathering of breath before she stood.
The cement underneath the flea market was more than a
little bored as Harold spoke, hoping to stop himself from remembering so many
things at the same time. “Yeah, the two-headed sweater is also a sex act.
I
don’t know if you knew that.”
“Is it? Pray tell.” She hurried her pace a little and caught up to him, their
hands not touching but hanging close together.
“Well, once you have all the components together it’s
pretty basic, but the ingredients are very specific. Sort of a special
occasioner, is the two-headed sweater. So, first up, you need a very small, very
dark, very hot room, then you need an unusually wide-set woman and two men, and
it really helps if one of the dudes has an exceptionally small, exceptionally
well shaved head. Then you need a
healthy glug of
olive oil, now when I say glug….”
She had stopped walking and was silent-laughing and waving her hands in front of
her. “Stop it, stop... bleh.” And she vomited a half-dozen lovely looking
tin-foil hearts into her cupped hands. She then stood up straight and finished
laughing and threw the hearts in Harold’s face; they bounced off him and spread
out on the ground around his feet.
She shrugged and wiped her mouth and three, quick, uneven steps later she was
standing over a table making friends with the lecherous older gentleman behind
the booth.
Harold decided to be slightly more pro-active in his futile and ongoing effort
not to leer at Sylvia, and he walked over to the next booth. The stand seemed
abandoned, with no customers and no vendor. When he got closer he saw an old
woman sitting in a camping chair that seemed absurdly low compared to the table.
The woman was wearing a knit sweater that was far too thick for the day, and she
was so thin that the sweater seemed empty. The dents where her thumbs met the
rest of her hand were so deep that they reminded both Harold and the pavement of
manholes. She was knitting with two incredibly long needles, and as he
approached, she looked up at him and nodded but didn’t say anything.
Clouds were just starting to gather in the sky, and the pavement’s desire was
slowly stirring.
The table had a tall, disorganized pile of knitting on it. There were small,
hand-drawn price tags hanging from ridiculously long strings on everything. None
of the items were knit with only a single colour, and they all showed their
consistent and totally tasteless patterns. Harold reached into the pile and
began to push through, not really distinguishing between items but enjoying the
feel of the wool. As his hands reached the bottom he felt the head-hole of a
sweater and he stopped, closed his eyes, and pulled it out. The rest of the pile
spread out enthusiastically over the table. The sweater seemed impossibly large,
and Harold stretched it out to its full width, laughed, and put the sweater and
his hands down on the table.
It was a two-headed sweater: a good old-fashioned, pink and yellow and green and
mostly red, two-headed sweater. Harold moved the sweater aside and roughly
re-grouped the knitting pile he’d destroyed. The old woman had still not looked
up, with her sad brown eyes and the giant swollen bags underneath them, and
Harold briefly considered asking the price before emptying the one hundred and
eighty dollars in his wallet onto the table.
During the eleven steps it took to reach Sylvia, Harold remembered how a week
after the conference she’d come to his house for coffee in the afternoon, and
how they’d just kept talking until she’d wanted to go for a walk down to the
sea-wall. He remembered that he’d only worn a tee-shirt, and he remembered
fighting the shivers, the hair of his arms standing up, and the way she was
using her left hand to hold her right elbow, and the sort of sad way she’d
talked about turning a certain age and loving babies for the first time. What he
remembered most of all was reaching the end of the sea-wall and sitting with her
and how there had been a light above them and how all he could see was their
feet dangling over the edge and bouncing off the concrete. It had been so dark
that the sky and ocean were indistinct, both just a part of the stretching
darkness. He remembered hearing the waves, and the way she’d let her shoe slip
half-off and get pushed back into place by the concrete, and the way her smile
had seemed crooked, and how close together their legs had been, and he
remembered the small, black knot at the toe of her shoe.
She was just putting her wallet away and saying
goodbye to the vendor as Harold grabbed the tips of both sleeves and hoped that
his arms were long enough to show the full breadth of the sweater. They were
not.
The sweater sagged appreciably in the middle, and the
second head hole caved tragically in on itself, but Sylvia still understood, and
before he could say anything she had wrapped her arms around the both the
sweater and Harold’s waist.
“Oh my goodness, it’s everything I thought it would be! Harold, let’s try it on,
let’s try it on now. What a find!”
They re-positioned themselves side-by-side and pulled the sweater over both of
their heads, and Harold emerged from his head hole slightly before she did, and
he could see her smile broaden as her head popped out the top, the sweater
gaping slightly at the neck.
“Yay! High five! Thank you so much Harold.” And they slapped hands across their
shared front.
Inside the sweater their hands, and whole arms, were touching, and Harold could
feel her torso listing slightly from side to side with excitement. They walked
in tandem towards a bench between the booths and sat down. Sylvia used her free
hand to scratch the side of her head, and they both laughed. Then Harold rested
his closed fist on her knee.
“Here, have a thought.”
She nodded seriously, consciously wrinkled her brow, and placed her chin neatly
on his fist in the thinker’s pose. They sat in that way for a time, and then
Harold told her where he’d found it, and she thanked him again seven times
before she looked at her watch (she was occupying the left sleeve) and said that
she needed to get home.
Sylvia pulled out of the sweater first, and as she left her head brushed against
the point of his hip. She emerged from the bottom and hopped in place twice,
bringing her hands together as if to clap and instead stopping them soundlessly
as they touched. Both Harold and the lonely tree planted in the pavement next to
her found it objectively charming.
“Isn’t it great?!”
Harold paused after the sweater was over his head, and the world seemed very
small, and it was coloured a sort of translucent red and smelled like Sylvia.
After he felt himself hoist the sweater over his shoulders and hand it, loose
and large and unfolded, back to her, he remembered suddenly how big and
blue-grey and full of loose, random air the world usually was.
“Oh Harold, isn’t it wonderful? I just, oh, I’m just so glad you were here.
There’s nothing sadder than an ecstatic woman with an empty head hole in her
sweater.”
“Nothing sadder.” He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her
head, and she leaned back into him and used one hand to squeeze the sweater to
her chest, and the other to grab a firm hold on his armpit.
Sylvia rocked her weight from one foot to the other before stopping and turning
her back to him slightly, her hands jumping quickly and gingerly to her face.
“Excuse me… bleh.” She kept the tin foil hearts in her hand and smiled at him
sheepishly. “Well, I would be embarrassed, but you’re here, you see this
two-…bleh.” The second volley of hearts exploded from her mouth, and some of
them bounced discretely off her hands onto the sidewalk. Harold stepped forward
and took the sweater from her, and she thanked him with her eyes as she crouched
down to the ground and made a more concerted effort to catch the small, glinting
hearts. “Well, I never…bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh.” The tin-foil hearts
continued to come, piling up in her hands until her hands were full, and then
the hearts just flowed off the top of her hands and fell to the sidewalk, and
the only other sounds she made were breathy laughs between her soft, rocking
spasms.
Harold took a step closer, crouched down beside her and rubbed her back with his
palm. And with one last, gentle “bleh” and the slight, familiar tilt forward of
her jaw, a large, non-stylized heart (the shape of the muscle) rolled out of her
mouth. It had long, shiny veins snaking around the outside and a truncated aorta
rising up from the top.
The two stared at it for a second before they stood. Sylvia kicked the heart
into the gutter, and Harold reached vainly forward as it skipped twice along the
concrete and fell into the grate.
“Hey! That was really cool. Why’d you throw it away?”
Sylvia shoved the top of his shoulder and took back the sweater. She looked at
him with an affectionate and quizzical tilt of her head. “You didn’t want that,
did you? I puked it, that’s so gross!”
Harold looked at the grate for a second more, then back to Sylvia, and he felt
his sadness slowly dissipate as he caught sight of a tiny bead of sweat rolling
gently down her temple and along the smooth, slow curve of her cheek. “Yes.
Yeah, totally. Gross.”
She wiped her dry, lovely, somewhat chapped mouth and dipped her shoulder into
his chest with an instinctive laugh.
Harold tucked his hands into his pockets and walked with her out of the market,
determined as ever to keep the small, hopeless room he occupied in the house of
her happiness tidy and cheerful.