By Noelle Rose
I’m on the Blue Line with my mother and brother heading to O’Hare. My mother is on her way home after a week-long visit to Chicago. My brother and I are bookending her in our seats, punctuated by her luggage, and still I think she resents the fact that both her children live in studio apartments that couldn’t accommodate her and all her stuff for the week. She insisted in staying in a hotel downtown, only going to restaurants within a two-block radius. My mother closes her eyes and hums and while she isn’t looking my brother and I share a mental where the hell are we? Any platform sign will suffice, but we are underground somewhere between Clark and Damen and the jarring flight of concrete is our only haven. My mother opens her eyes and we are above ground now. The blue sign on the platform melts into the sky.
I love my mother but it is the end of her visit and her looks have transformed from saying I’m so happy to see you to those of you’ve put on some weight and you’re biting your nails again. Indeed, when she dropped me off in July, my jeans were looser around my hips and my nails were smooth and long. On the train, I feel the top button of my jeans press into my stomach like a booster shot. I’m staring out the window into the sky, chewing my thumbnail without realizing, tearing the nail into flakes and blowing them off the tip. My mother is giving me the look she never gives my brother.
The train stops somewhere out west and two women in uniforms board. They waddle onto the train, hands gripping the straps on their backpacks. They plop into the seats behind us, laughing.
Their conversation fills the train car, jarring the three of us awake.
“So, if I gain seven more pounds, I’ll officially be overweight,” one woman announces.
“How’s that?” the other woman asks. She sounds fatter than her friend.
“It’s according to my height,” she declares. “Saw it in a magazine.”
“That magazine’s shit,” her friend snarls as if she’s taking a verbal dump on science.
An East-Bound train whizzes by. Its windows are stamped with McDonald’s ads. They are glamour shots of skinny models posing seductively with various McDonald’s products. Cups of coffee caressing cheeks, curvy French fries dangling from fingers above open mouths. These models faces are muscled, as if these products provide equal parts nourishment and sex appeal.
I stare at the ads, smiling. I feel poppy seeds populating the spaces between my teeth like ants. I ate a bagel an hour earlier, slathering on the cream cheese like oil paint on a canvas, letting globs drop Pollock-like from the knife.
My mother glares at me as I move from chewing my nails to prying out the seeds, one-by-one.
After I drop my mother off at the airport, I’m going to buy a Big Mac. I will dangle the bun seductively above my mouth and let the special sauce drip Pollock-like onto my jeans.
