Higher Ed

THE OPPOSITE
OF THIRTEEN

Sayonara, sucker! Francine swipes the back of her hand across her mouth, pushes the handle, straightens up, and watches the water swirl in the bowl. Air alone will do; she can live on air. Sometimes breath puffs her up so much that she feels like she will explode.

She pushes the handle once more so that there is not a shred of pizza left in the bowl, leaves the staff washroom and returns to her office, the door clicking open but needing a hip shove before it budges. Everything in this building is swelling. She smells barf. She picks up the cup of cold tea from her desk and sips, washing it over her teeth. There are fifteen course specifications and twenty external examiners’ reports on her desk, which need to be checked by her and passed back to programme leaders before she leaves today. She sits. Buck up, get yer ass in gear; pull yer finger out, as they say in this country. It’s unlikely that the whole department will go, isn’t it? Surely Quality Assurance and Enhancement is key to any university. She has to admit, though, that her department, like her, is a little fat. There are times when, if she wanted to, she could spend the rest of the afternoon sitting blankly in front of her screen and still get her job done.

She sees her reflection in the screen saver’s swirling shapes, which dice up her features and blend them back again in hexagonals of eye, nose, mouth.

A raisin Danish and some Mentos before lunch are also now gone. It’s only two in the afternoon, 1400 hours, and she’s thrown up everything she’s eaten so far. Excellent. She sits up straighter, pleased with herself for her conversion to the twenty-four-hour clock. Time stretches out with the higher numbers. Calories, they say, should be consumed in the early hours.

She is beautiful today.

Running her hand over her belly (okay, but …), her hips (a bit, sure), and along her thighs (yes, still!) doesn’t change her mind. All her friends back in Philly regularly told her she had a pretty face, after all. And it’s not that she doesn’t want to hold on to this confidence that normally scurries off like a startled mouse; it’s just that at fifty-three this big ass and slackening skin are not about to disappear.

“Men like big butts,” Cindy from Philly always says, but Cindy has a black girl’s perfect ramp of a rump, which men like to rest their heads on after fucking. Stop. Francine Johnson (good, honest name) will feel beautiful today, all day, she promises, or she will expire in the trying.

She does one last Google search for John Clarke. Stupid name. John-ordinary-everybody Clarke. There’s the one who is the minister, there’s the poet, the trader, the actor, the leader of the Church of Latter Day Saints. There’s even a marathon runner named John Clarke. But there’s no IT director who by now has surely procreated with the young IT star at his office, who was oh so smart and jaunty and you-would-really-like-her too—she’s
kind of like a guy; we talk about sports—while Francine went to England for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for her accounting firm in its new British office. There’s no John-the-prick Clarke who led her on for eleven years, past the last days of her fertility, into the promise of a peaceful, childless life where adventures like the English one were just the beginning. And since the accounting firm’s European demise, there has been no John Clarke, supreme asshole, cuntface, cocksucking bastard, with the guts to upload an internet page that would explain himself or just say a simple, fucking sorry.