Definitely Cheese

This morning dawned smoggy & sunny. I took my bus, with the guy at my busstop who not only says hi to me every morning but now has a girlfriend! She is very pretty. She has long, shapely legs. Today she was wearing a very short white pleated skirt, like a cheerleader skirt, and a thong. Plus she was wearing a white, low cut blouse. And black sandals with high heels. Just one thing: she wears open-toed shoes every day, with her lovely short skirts and spangly tops. But over her toes she has, like, toe socks or something. There is a fishnet covering on her toes. Just her toes. She does not wear stockings.

Also, when she talks, she sounds like a cartoon. Squeaky.

She’s pretty high-maintenance. The boy always used to sit just wherever on the bus but now it takes them 2 minutes to choose a seat because some of them are not to Ms. Toe Socks’ liking. I like to imagine that at home, the squeaky voice goes away and she beats him with her Hello Kitty plastic ruler. But mostly I imagine it for his benefit, a sort of hope that it’s all worthwhile for him, you know?

Anyway. On the bus; the usual people. The woman with the spiky hair is gone. There is still duffel bag man.

And we get to the skytrain station. And a train arrives. And I get on it.

And it smells like cheese. Weird, yes? I mean, on a skytrain you can smell many things, but cheese? I looked around but there didn’t seem to be any cheese farmers on board. Just the usual crowd of businesspeople. It was hot, but not so hot that anyone would start to smell like cheese.

I noticed that there were 50 of us crowded around the one door and no one at the other end of the train. So I moved to the other end of the train and that’s when I saw it. All over the floor, in the crannies next to the sliding door mechanism, sticky footprints nearby where people had stepped into it, unwittingly, and run off in horror: cottage cheese.

I already hated cottage cheese. It’s slimy, lumpy and people use it to describe their thighs and to diet, alternately. What’s up with that? I have matured to the point where I will eat lasagna if it has cottage cheese (or, the polite term, “Ricotta cheese” – newsflash, it’s the same travesty, different plastic container) in it, but it’s not my favourite. But there are people who love it; eat it with pepper, salt, oregano, pineapple, peaches, or plain. Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. Those people are not wrong, just different.

OK and when cottage cheese spills out of someone’s lunch on the floor of the skytrain and then sits there for possibly half an hour while people walk on it, sweat near it, swear at it, etc., I’ll tell you this for free (thanks Domenic Da Vinci) it’s really disgusting and will put you off your food for, well, hours, if you’re me.

The door where the cottage cheese was would not open. Everyone who got off and on the train had to get out the one door at the other end. This meant a lot of crowding and a lot of bodies close together and the smell just got stronger and more like a bucket of sheep’s feta left to fester in the noonday sun. And trust me, I know of what I speak.

At the end of the line, a cleaning man with a mop and a can of Lysol got on the train. We all wished him luck.

So that was disgusting. Yes, and for the rest of my day, I regaled my lucky co-workers with stories about the cottage cheese, the train, the general evils of cheese with the texture of cellulite and my own personal trauma, from which I might need a paid day off to recover. What do they call them? Mental Health Days? Yeah. Get me one of those.

I left work at the same time as always and traipsed down to the train. I mentioned to my co-worker, with whom I train homeward, that I hoped the cheese was gone. We got on the train and it smelled fine. It was me, co-worker and three other similar women; officey types, knee-length skirts, printed blouses, tan coloured pumps. And then one of them farted.

Now I have smelled a lot of farts. Farts smell bad. But this fart? This fart was nuclear. This fart was like this morning’s train had been bottled up inside her for 8 hours and she had eaten rotten eggs for lunch and washed them down with diesel fuel. Holy-do I-Ever-Understand-Where-the-expression-Cutting-the-Cheese-comes-from did it smell. It lasted for two stops! The windows were all open and we all looked at each other with that “hey it wasn’t me, I eat daisies 3x a day!” look and hoped it would dissipate. But it didn’t and when the more people got on at each stop, they got through the doors and made terrible faces at us. One woman even held her nose.

I had to laugh because I thought it might be a terrorist attack and I wanted to die, if I had to die on the Skytrain of Poisonous Cheese Fart, with laughter in my eyes even as my horror-struck, wrenched-mouth grimace betrayed the truth.

And another thing. There was a woman reading The (Goddamn) Da Vinci Code. And she was underlining things with a blue pen. For some reason, this really chafed my nards.