Cradled
By Lisa Mitchell
Sheila often thought about walking out to her mailbox naked. Would the neighbors call the cops? Would someone throw rotten tomatoes? Would anyone even care?
Instead, she wrapped her robe around her ample body and began her trek. No mail. Hadn’t come yet. I’m invisible.
Despite her applaudable pluck, her life was a study in being unseen. Picked last for Red Rover. Sat alone during lunch. Left in front of the middle school waiting for her mom to arrive, long after everyone had grown up and died. Then there was the teasing: Miss Piggy. Tub ‘o Lard. Fatty McFat Pants.
Bob, her husband, watched from the upstairs guest room, his office. Lately, he’d been distant, absorbed in his work. She peered up into the windows. His profile, unflinching, was as still as a brick.
Five weeks ago, she had a hysterectomy. Fibroids and hyperplasia. Time for her old rusty uterus to go. However, she was on the mend, almost back to normal, whatever that was.
When she informed her husband she needed the operation, he blinked, his eyes filling with inky darkness, a smoothed-over indifference. “How much will that cost, after insurance?” No, I’m so sorry. No, you must be scared. Instead, “Do you mind making more coffee?”
“I’m going out,” Sheila announced in the doorway of his office. “Do we need anything from the store?”
“Let’s see.” Bob ran his hand through his ancient, grey hair. “I could use some cereal.”
Sheila changed clothes and drove to the store in a Honda that had been a consolation prize for losing a primo job she’d had as head of marketing for a medical equipment company. The car ran better than she did—smooth, quiet.
Sailing along, thoughts of Hal curled into her frontal lobe, the place where maturity was supposed to have congealed. She lived for the adolescent thrill of romance, believed that a concentric circle of frenzy could exist between two people for time eternal. That’s what she felt when she met Hal at yoga last year. Something ineffable from him garroted her.
Now, a “For Rent” sign hung in the yoga center’s window, and Hal and his wife moved to another state. Hal’s wife knew—and so did Bob. After therapy, he claimed to forgive Sheila, but she could see his lingering resentment like an aura. It inched up between them, rustling the whisper-thin box that housed tableau of their lives.
She circled the block a few times, then on to a nearby convenience store, where she grabbed an over-priced box of Cheerios. Her husband would be miffed, but he’d never say so.
Back home, she slapped the cereal on a pantry shelf and then put on her Boot Camp DVD. She needed to slim down, tried for decades. Lying in the hospital, and recouping for six weeks had given her plenty of time to think about her broken and bloated body. She remembered 10 years ago, when she met Bob on a blind date and how she lost weight with Weight Watchers. When they’d decided to marry, they were both pushing 40. Marriage felt like the right thing to do.
Sheila shed her black leggings and oversized t-shirt. Her corpus was a war zone, pocked and puckered, a forgotten hinterland. She pawed her sallow face, smoothed the bags under her eyes, then placed her palms on her checks and pulled, creating the illusion of a facelift. She slipped into her tight, bulge-revealing workout gear and headed to her office. She rolled her desk chair out of the way and pressed “Play.”
When the DVD began, the music was peppier than she’d remembered: a pulsing synth track, booming base and shrill electric guitars. As the young, svelte blonde spokes-actress instructor bark-purred out the moves, Sheila gave it her all. Streeeetch, kick, streeeeetch, kick, burpee! She hit the floor, pain shotgunning through her body, then stumbled. Sweat pooled under her arms and breasts. I can do this. I am not old!
Halfway through, she stopped for a water break and heard a knock on her door.
“Hi, I have a Zoom meeting starting in a few. Can you please turn it down?” Bob’s shoulders seemed extra slumped, his body the shape of a question mark.
“Sure,” said Sheila, noticing his flat eyes as he closed the door. “Anything for you, dear.”
She turned down the volume, began again, jumping higher, stretching longer and harder, trying to exercise her way back into her youth, her salad days, during which, she hated salads. She stopped, her breath ragged, and caught her reflection in a mirror. She studied her wild, irregular landscape. Her hands found her folds and kneaded them. I can’t escape my flesh.
“Aaaaah.” Sheila’s stomach wambled. The stabs arrived in succession. I’m dying, please make it stop. Her head muzzy, she grabbed her pelvis and felt something wet between her thighs: her fingers were covered in blood. She ran to the bathroom, stripped naked, and grabbed toilet paper. The bleeding was relentless.
“BOB! HELP!”
She bounded up the stairs, blood waterfalling down her leg, and burst into his room. On his laptop screen was a checkerboard of faces. Tiny mouths opened. Jaws dropped. Murmurings commenced. Heads jiggled in spasms like minnows darting just under the water’s surface.
“What the—?” Bob scrambled to turn off Zoom.
“Help!” Sheila clutched her abdomen, jackknifed, and fell.
“Oh, god.” Bob slammed his computer shut. “What did you do? I’ve warned you about overdoing it.”
Sheila collapsed into a mess of tears. She buried her head in his sweatshirt. His pine aftershave filled her nostrils. The scent was from another time, when there was electricity between them, when passion took shape around them, when they tried to conceive, but after five miscarriages, they gave up.
“They saw me,” Sheila said, her eyes wide, urgent, lost in a weave of fresh truth.
“No they didn’t.” Bob cradled her as he thumbed 911. “But I’m here. I see you.”
THE END