My Friend Andrea, Part 2

“Any technology, significantly advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

Any woman, presented with far too little time on her hands to clean her filthy-ass 700-square-foot apartment, is capable of some magical fucking shit.” — Heather Beck

I had been sweaty, but managed to afford myself a few moments to take a rinse in the shower I hadn’t scrubbed, because shower curtains mask all manner of sin. But now, I was clean-ish. My hair was still wet, tied in a loose ponytail. I didn’t have time to do laundry (or to heft the basket up and down the stairs, and even then, the dryers in the communal laundry room were shit), but I managed to find a top that made me look somewhat presentable. I didn’t want to look pretty — just not like the absolute “dear God, what have I become” mess I had presented myself as being over the phone. 

The kitchen sink was solid. I felt a little guilty, as the colony of microbes that had taken root was, from my estimation, on the verge of discovering intergalactic travel (definitely a Type 1 on the Heather’s Sink Kardashev scale). While I was using a spatula to scrape off the nasty bits, I imagined that a sentient clump of schmutz that had evolved to the point where it developed sentient capabilities, was lecturing a fungal hall on the virtues of exploring the farthest reaches of the known universe. Perhaps, over there by the desk in the other room, deep within the pile of discarded panties and tops that didn’t pass the sniff test, there was another race of beings, with their own stories, traditions, experiences. And then, in the blink of an eye, that specie was swept away, down the literal drain, thanks in part to an old Windex bottle, filled with a 10% bleach solution. There’s a somber moment that occurs when you realize you might have been directly responsible for your very own mini-mass extinction. 

I stashed the two garbage bags into the unusually large-for-the-square-footage closet, being careful to maintain a barrier between any semi-clean clothing and whatever might seep through. Ew. 

I had done the math in my head. I remembered that getting out of the office early wasn’t really kosher (especially when you made it a habit to roll in at 10 and take a long lunch break, as was Andrea’s practice), but I also recalled Andrea’s propensity to not give a fuck.

So, I kept an eye on the clock. I knew that even if she left at 10-after-4, she’d still not be here until 5 at the earliest. Throw in traffic, any stops she had to make, and the earliest I was anticipating was about 5:13.20.

When the clock hit 5:14, I entered any-minute-mode, which, it turned out, bought me enough time to dawdle around, crack open a bottle of wine, and take a breather. Maybe let my hair dry out a little. I even got a chance to go through what was left of my not offensively smelly laundry, and managed to track down a top that made me look somewhat put together (that blue one from my Instagram account that I posted back in July, the one next to the window, for those of you who are keeping track.)

Giving myself one final look in the bathroom mirror, I found a morbid curiosity in the person who looked back at me. The last bra I owned was hopelessly small at this point, and I hadn’t gotten around to getting one (nor did I have the $$$ to even get a cheap-o off Amazon), so I still had, as a base layer, the same tight shirt on that I had been wearing during the brunt of my apartment cleaning. The blue top clung to me, and with my breasts squished as flat as their new fullness would allow, I looked a bit like a blueberry with arms, and legs, and a head. 

I ran my hands down the sides, cupping them underneath. Part of me was tempted to squish them in as best I could in some vain attempt to press them back into my body. But I didn’t. That would be useless. They were here to stay. And after all, after more moving around in the last short period of time than I was used to, they were kind of sore. I wanted to leave them alone.

I turned to the side. As usual, my relative lack of an ass juxtaposed things just that much more. My good jeans still fit well enough (though I had put on a few pounds in the meanwhile, so definitely some muffin-toppage going on), but I didn’t think anyone would notice the few pounds I had gained all over from sheer lethargy, compared to the brunt of where the weight had collected. 

It’s funny. As much as I had tried not to glance at my own reflection over the last several weeks, I was incapable of seeing myself in any sort of objective, broad-picture way. Not the way someone would see me out on the street as they did one glance, then a double-take, as they tried to figure out exactly what they were looking at. Instead, I could only get hold of the minutia — the way my swollen figure caused the seams in the blue blouse to protrude outward; the level they hung, relative to my waist (practically even with it); the smallish (by comparison) fingertip-sized nubs of my nipples that, even un-erect, still managed to create noticeable bumps under the two constricting layers if the light hit them just right. But I couldn’t see the whole me. I think it’s difficult for women — in a way, we’re trained to focus on the minutia. It’s like that scene in Mean Girls, where they’re standing in front of the mirror, and one is complaining about man shoulders (which I unfortunately have); one is complaining about having giant pores (I dodged that bullet, thanks to my grandma and her amazing skin, which I inherited)... we don’t often take a moment to step back in a forest-for-the-trees kind of way. 

For a moment, I fancied that, if I were dressed just right, I might be able to pass as being pregnant. At least from the side, anyway. It was a flicker of a thought, something that went in one ear and left through the other before I had too much time to dwell on it. Ironically (is it ironically? I still have a hard time figuring out what’s ironic and what’s not, despite my career), I didn’t know how quickly that consideration would return. 

I flicked the light switch, and went back to my glass of wine, giving the apartment one final survey. As pissed as I had been when Andrea had announced her iron-clad plans to pay a visit, I was (as I’m sure she had predicted I would be, and which I told myself I wouldn’t divulge), kind of excited for, well, any sort of human contact. 

By the time there was a knock on the door, two hours had passed since our phone call, more or less. I hoisted myself up from the couch, walked to the front door on the other side of the living room, took a deep breath, undid the latch, and turned the knob.

“Shitballs, Heather,” Andrea said, standing in the hallway. “You weren’t kidding.” I felt deflated for an instant, but it didn’t take too long to remind myself that I would have been even more off-put if she would have just ignored it, or even worse, gone into any sort of “hey, girl, how you been, no, you look great, I can hardly tell, what the hell are you so worried about” chain of platitudes. Lying wasn’t her style, and neither was sugarcoating; again, I liked her for that. 

I nodded my head to the side in a Yeah, that’s kinda what I was saying motion of surrendering the idea to its own matter of fact. Yep. That’s me. Different than the last time you saw me, huh?

It didn’t take long before I noticed Andrea, and her own changes. “Hey,” I said. “You’ve lost some weight.”

She came through the door — she didn’t need to be invited in — and brushed past me. “Right? 23 pounds. Still fat as fuck, but not quite-so fat as fuck.”

“Nice,” I said, genuinely, as I closed the door and turned to face her. 

“Yoga!” She said. She had a few bags: one backpack and a couple of paper Trader Joe’s bags that she put down under the countertop that separated the kitchen from the living room. “It’s great shit. That sauna stuff, where they make the room hot as hell and force you to contort your body into all sorts of inhuman positions.”

She walked into the kitchen, recalling where I kept my wine glasses. “I brought some more,” she said, nodding toward the paper bags. “And a few goodies. Hope it’s okay, but I’m proooobably going to be crashing here for the night Probably tomorrow, too. I already told Chuck that I’m calling in sick tomorrow. Mental health day.” She winked, and I laughed. A few weeks before I quit, there was a bit of an issue at the office… not to name names, but one of our colleagues had a freakout that required the police to come. Nobody’s life was in danger, but it caused management to be a bit more lenient to the notion of people needing to take a day. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the morale in that place was shiiit. 

I felt myself pick up a little. I almost felt giddy about the idea of a slumber party. 

Andrea filled her glass and walked back into the living room. I was still standing next to the front door. She spotted my glass on the edge of the breakfast counter thingy, and handed it to me. 

“So. Tell me. What’s up with the tits.”

I caught my breath for a moment, half smile on my face. I wasn’t offended or taken aback. It was just a bit of (welcome) mental whiplash, going from my only human contact being my assorted and sundry TV families (the Bluths, the Always Sunny Gang, the Archer clan, et al.) to Andrea in all her whirling-dervish frenetic glory.

“Well,” I began, “...they’re bigger, aren’t they.”

“Same deal as before?”

“Same deal as before,” I confirmed. She knew about my history and had been there for almost all of it — my stints of growth over the previous few years; the awkward shopping trip when I realized that button-up blouses weren’t going to cut it anymore; my return to the office after taking some sick days, and the mumbled conversations that followed around the copier (she was a good spy); that one time when I was thiiiis close to filing a harassment report against the (wouldn’t you know it) HR guy (this was before #MeToo began instilling fear into the hearts of the more lascivious male members of the workforce). “Same deal as before, but this time, it was… really bad.” 

As forceful as Andrea can be, she has a thick tender streak. She furrowed her brow, set down her wine glass, and walked the three steps over to me. “Aw, shit, you bitch.” She gave me a big hug, and I felt her still-pronounced belly press into my distended breasts as we both awkwardly leaned forward, me trying not to slosh my glass around too much as we smushed.

From there, conversation went back and forth for a while. A lot of it wouldn't be too interesting to anyone reading this, because it has to do with a lot of the boring personal shoptalk that would be utterly grating to anyone not involved. But in short, there were a few things of note:

• She had been fucking a guy named Stefan, and he was great, but he was kind of a feeder, and she wasn’t into that, but the sex was amazing, so she was seeing where it was going;
• A week-or-so before, I had gotten into an altercation with a teenaged sonofabitch who was recording me on his phone at the supermarket — his mom made him delete the video, and a manager had to come and get involved, and it was awkward as shit, especially when I got back home and looked in the mirror, and didn’t know for sure whether one boob had been poking out the bottom of my top the whole time;
• HR guy got fired! Which was kind of amazing because he had it coming, but nobody was really sure of why he was fired;
• We made those spanakopitas they sell at Trader Joe’s. Have you ever had those? They’re freaking amazing. Especially when you wash them down with way too much of a box of Two-Buck Chuck, as we most certainly did;
• By the time 8:30 rolled around, and we were both well on our way to tipsy, Andrea announced that we were going to go out, to which I responded no, no way in hell, to which she said, “I thought you would feel that way,” at which point...
• ...she made a motion that instructed me to hold my thoughts and hear her out. 

She got up from the couch and went over to her backpack. “It took me a while to get here, because when I was halfway, I had a “no-duh” moment, and went home.” She carried her bag over to the armchair, unzipped it, and started emptying out the contents: handfuls of clothing. 

“See,” she continued, “now that I’m no longer a fatty, I’ve been treating myself to some new outfits, and there’s some stuff that just doesn’t work on me anymore.” She looked at me assuredly, “not to say that you’re fat — you just have giant tits, so let’s see what works.”

As she shoveled clothing out on the chair, I started to get an idea of what she was getting at, and I thought my heart was going to explode. I thought of my situation, with zero money and even less suitable clothing (read: anything that would fit), and I wanted to cry. I had ignored her for so long, and her first thought was to root through her closet and find a collection of lovingly used garb that, at the very least, would make me look intentional should I decide to wander into the wilderness. We should all be so lucky to have people in our lives who we can be out of touch with for God knows how long, until we reunite, and slide right back into where we left off.

I was about to get up off the couch and return her hug from earlier, when she finished emptying the bag. She turned to me. “But I might have a better idea,” she said, “because I think we have the technology.”

I was curious; there was an uncharacteristically hesitant look in her eye. A glint of mischief.

“We’re going out tonight, and there’s not a thing you can do about it,” she said. “So when we do… you think you can pull off dealing with people judging you?”

“Judging me for… what?” I asked with a tone of trepidation.

“For being pregnant and still getting wasted?”

To Be Continued.