MARY BIDDINGER / 2 FICTIONS
These works and others by Mary Biddinger appear in Always Crashing Issue Five, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and White Whale Books in Pittsburgh).
LADY OF THE CANAL
We’re on Lake Shore Drive, in one of those SUV taxis with flames painted on the sides. Next stop: every museum, followed by the architectural boat tour only booked by tourists with zero knowledge of architecture. Under the blue awning, riverside, I crack a joke about “Wacker Drive.” My outfit a cross between accidental soft butch and academic drifter. Overalls pocket stuffed with food co-op receipts. Boots a little too industrial. My roommate is dressed as a French nanny who smokes Djarums and speaks shockingly proficient English. We leer at couples redeeming coupons torn from the Entertainment Book. It’s probably a two-drink minimum. Back then nobody looks at their phone unless placing a call. I worry that I forgot to wear deodorant, then brace myself against a bench, laughing. My roommate pesters the captain with targeted questions about the SS Eastland Disaster. He’s disquieted, but into it. A waterlogged pair of sweatpants licks the gangway. We’re code switching into French, then heading to the bathroom, which is more like an ice fishing shanty. I’m peeling off my corset while guarding the door. My roommate and I swap wigs, and I become a silver blonde who owns a speedboat named Lady of the Canal. In the distance: hairy thigh of the Swissôtel, where someone’s husband drops his watch into an ashtray, unbuckles his belt while thinking of me. We’ve exceeded the two-drink minimum and I order a cider, having no knowledge of which kind fits my persona except hard.
A VERY DECENT LIFE
A cat can have a very decent life in an apartment, especially with roommates who compose regular fan letters to the wild salmon vendor. I was hogging the bathtub again, so my roommate ran downstairs to the restaurant to use their outlets. We were heading to Venetian Night to see the illuminated boats and talk tourists out of being patriotic. Did they think it was a festival of mini blinds? Did they reckon the El was short for elephant? My roommate had been to Italy so many times that the anecdotes blurred into one psychedelic slideshow of tangling with strangers on the subway and shopping for antique shoes at dawn.
A cat can have a favorite roommate, and technically ours did not, but she only bathed with one of us. When I first moved to Chicago I was really concerned about things like grout coloration and sharpness of my pedagogy. Two years in, and I was letting students dig through my purse for entertainment while we spatter-painted some flocked wallpaper and called it multimodal discourse. One day I was really down: somebody had called me “dizzy” as an insult, and I started sobbing right there in the seminar room. But then my roommate ordered an assortment of balloons delivered by “singing cow” to the main office, where I was second-guessing the firmness with which I’d filled out my final grades triplicate form.
I felt like an incomplete bubble pressed with a dull pencil as I made excuses into the phone to prevent my stupid boyfriend from meeting us at Venetian Night. Impromptu shellfish allergies, gnat warning, premonition of pickpockets who targeted former quarterbacks turned literary theorists. It was rough out there. My roommate finished buckling our cat’s sequined peacoat, and we stomped out the door with our dignity.
Mary Biddinger’s stories have appeared in DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, On the Seawall, and West Trestle Review. Her current project is a flash fiction novella that chronicles the adventures of two graduate school roommates living in Chicago in the late 1990s. Her most recent book is Department of Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). She teaches at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program.