The Girl Who Smelled Bad
May. 24th, 2017 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
The day before I left for Chicago was the most beautiful day in the history of the planet. Just unbelievable. I saw a horse chestnut! Horse chestnuts were everywhere in Central Park when I was growing up. Then they all got wiped out by some pathogenic Asian fungus. So seeing one felt like a gift.
Got back from my run, and there was Cassie, sitting on the couch looking miserable.
###
Every weekend, Linda’s boyfriend Chris comes down from Albany, and they play house for 36 hours. “That’s as much as I can stand,” L tells me with a chuckle.
Although, really, since they’re on the phone at least five times a day, I don’t know what the point is to living 100 miles apart.
L is fond of C but complains about him incessantly. According to L, C is a grumpy old man with an irritatingly negative attitude toward life.
So far as I can tell, C comes by his negative attitude honestly. At this point, I could write his biography, and that biography is filled with tragedies. The two biggest tragedies: Approximately five years into his marriage, his beautiful young wife, an artist, had a complete psychotic break; 20 years afterwards, at the exact same age as her mother, his beautiful daughter – Cassie, also an artist – had a complete psychotic break.
“Cassie wants to come down this weekend,” L told me yesterday morning. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. We’re going out.”
(L belongs to a local Sherlock Holmes society. This is actually pretty weird because L does not read at all, and I doubt very much she’s aware of any of the trendy, post-modern Sherlock interpretations that have seeped into other media. I suspect L likes the meetings because they give her the opportunity to dress C up and to eat exotic hors d'oeuvres.)
“I’ll come down and keep her company,” I promised L.
I like Cassie.
And I feel also feel dreadfully, dreadfully sorry for Cassie who is an intelligent young woman and was fairly attractive before her antipsychotic medications blimped her into morbid obesity – she’s 5’5” and veering up past the 300 pound mark. She’s a pretty talented artist, too: I framed one of her watercolor sketches of a Blakean angel; I have it hanging on my wall.
But there’s no denying it’s awfully hard to be around Cassie for very long. Her destiny is just so soul-crushingly horrible, and there’s absolutely nothing to be done about it. She suffers. And suffers. And suffers. And you can’t even fantasize about throwing her a life rope.
###
“So how’s it going, Cass?” I asked when the grownups have fussed their way out the door.
“Not well,” Cassie said. “Not well at all.”
Time for me to weigh in with some portentious Delphic Oracle remark! I thought. You know the ones! About singular destinies. About how there must be a cosmic reason. Yada, yada, yada.
“I had a panic attack Thursday,” Cassie continued. “At my job.”
Cassie’s “job” is actually a volunteer gig at the local hospital. She runs errands, provides directions to rooms for the families of patients. Sometimes the graphic arts person in the PR department nabs her for special assignments – as I say, Cassie is a talented artist.
“They had me running up and down the stairs looking for this room number. I didn’t know where it was. I sat in the stairwell and cried for 20 minutes.”
“Well,” I said mildly. “You know, you don’t have to take assignments you don’t want to take, Cassie. It is a volunteer gig.”
“I’m so afraid I’m going to lose this job.”
“They’re lucky to have you, Cass,” I said softly. “I’m sure they know that. You know your Dad is dealing with that cancer thing. Maybe – I don’t know. Could you be projecting your anxiety about your Dad’s illness on to the hospital gig?”
“No,” said Cassie. “No. It’s not that. I’m going to tell you something, Patrizia, that I haven’t told anyone. Not my family. Not my counselor. On Tuesday, my supervisor took me aside and said, ‘Cassie, you smell bad.’”
“Wow,” I said.
Cassie does smell bad. It’s sweat, and it’s that yeasty smell obese people get because it’s difficult to wash beneath folds of skin. She also douses herself liberally with patchouli oil, which has never been a scent I’ve been particularly fond of: Patchouli oil reminds me of grave mold.
“Well,” I said gently. “She probably could have chosen better words to say that to you. But you know. The rules for hygiene when you’re dealing with the public are different than the rules when you’re sitting around your living room. Do they know about your, um, illness at the hospital?”
“No,” said Cassie. “No. They know I have ‘panic attacks.’” She laughed.
Good, I thought. No need to stigmatize Cassie any further than she’s already stigmatized.
“I felt like I wanted to die, Patrizia,” Cassie went on. “I felt like the biggest heap of shit on the planet. Worthless. Just utterly worthless.”
Right, I thought. Well, of course, one would: You smell bad.
Instead, I said, “Well, it’s hard, Cassie, but you’ve got to view it as a practical problem with a solution. Do you use deodorant?”
She flushed. “I don’t like deodorant. I’m a hippie at heart, Patrizia. I don’t like all that chemical stuff.”
“Right. Well, I’m afraid if you want to keep volunteering at the hospital, you’re going to have to start wearing deodorant. And not just under your arms. Any place where you’re likely to sweat. And, you know, Cass, it’s summer, so you should probably think about showering every day.”
“But I don’t like showering every day!”
“I know,” I said. “And never wearing the same set of clothing more than one day in a row without washing it.”
“I brought my dirty clothes down,” Cassie said. “Because Linda has a washing machine. But I can’t figure out how to use it.”
“I’ll do your laundry for you, Cassie,” I said. One of the side effects of the anti-psychotics Cassie’s on is that she sleeps something like 14 hours a day, and she was laying on the couch now practically comatose.
“You know, Patrizia, nobody ever taught me how to do any of those things,” she said before she got up to go to bed, and I thought, Well, nobody ever taught me either. It’s one of those things you figure out for yourself if you want to be a Real Human Child.
Though, of course, Cassie is never going to be a Real Human Child.
###
Next day, I went to CVS and bought Cassie fifty bucks worth of heavy-duty clinical strength deodorant. Shoved it at her in a plastic bag as discreetly as I could before she and her father left for Albany.
Not my tragedy.
And chances are she won’t even use the stuff. She speaks sanely, but her illness an insidious one. Cassie, Cas-s-s-s-ssie, the voices whisper. They are trying to poison you…
Still. Ya gotta try, right?
Sad, sad. Very sad.
###
Here in Chicago, it is raining. Huge terrorism incident in the UK while I was off the grid.
One processes these things quite differently when one is not beseiged by the 24/7 news cycle.
I'm still in the midst of processing the Manchester incident.
I guess the perp was radicalized and trained on a trip to Syria.
If you can trust news sources.
(Can you trust news sources?)
That is worrisome. Sigh...
no subject
Date: 2017-06-05 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-05 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 03:18 pm (UTC)Personally, I think all writers should keep journals (though they needn't keep them online, of course.) They serve the same purpose as practicing scales does for musicians.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-08 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 12:37 pm (UTC)And haven't missed it much either, truth be told.
Possibly a generative stage? :-)
no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-06-08 01:23 pm (UTC)