The Full Catastrophe by Méira Cook

Author:Méira Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2022-04-14T15:20:40+00:00

Make-up Assignment

What Home Means to Me

by Charlie Minkoff

My mom and I have always lived in the gnc. I was practically born in the lobby, but Weeza got there just in time and whisked us away to St. B where I was actually born. gnc stands for Glutt’s Nuts and Cocktail Sauce, and it used to be the distributing centre and national offices for, you guessed it, Glutt’s Nuts and Cocktail Sauce. You’d recognize the building from the dancing bottle of cocktail sauce painted on the side facing the railway yard. There’s a loading dock out back and a freight elevator with quilted padding. The Glutt family was a big deal in this city on the basis of their toffee brittle and their secret recipe for Glutt’s Seafood Cocktail sauce. They sold other sauces, sure, but ask anybody about Glutt’s and they go all misty eyed about this magical cocktail sauce that just isn’t the same anymore.

About thirty years ago, when the Glutt family moved east and Glutt’s Nutco closed down their factories, some developer came over from the States, took one look at the gnc, and bought the whole deal for twenty cents on the dollar. He paid a local counsellor to rezone the area, bribed a guy at city hall to produce a bunch of phony planning permits, and ran an illegal gas line off the main circuit. Then he knocked down some walls, put up a whole lot more, and slapped magnolia gloss over everything.

The apartments are on the first three floors. The developer ran out of money by the time he got to the fourth and left it as it was. Which is perfect for us because Jules needs light, can’t stand magnolia gloss, and thrills to the industrial vibe of exposed pipes, unfinished brick walls, and concrete floors. It’s pretty cold in winter but where else are you going to find floor-to-ceiling windows, or a claw-footed bathtub, or those pneumatic tubes they stuffed mail in when the place was an office? We can’t use the tubes because they turned off the suction, but you can still see the river and the tub is epic even if it didn’t come with the building.

Actually, Jules found it on some demolition site. She got Weeza to load it into her pickup and haul it to the gnc even though it was cracked and one of the claws was loose. There was no place in the Gents so she installed it in the kitchen, running a set of hoses from the sink. She patched it up, tightened the foot and painted the claws with nail polish. It’s a pain to fill and an even worse pain to drain, but she loves that bathtub. Mostly we use it for storage but sometimes, when I’m alone, I fill it with hot water then fire up the tea lights. You can lie in there forever, looking at the shadows moving across the original pressed-tin ceiling. You just don’t get ceilings like that anymore.

—

Mikayla screeched when she saw the bathtub.

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