A Children’s Game
By A.C.
On the way to the clinic, they listen to a figure skating podcast and Radiohead. The drive takes an hour and a half, and only one of them cares about figure skating, but it’s not as awkward as they both feared it to be. It’s early December; Wanda’s favorite time of year has just ended, and she is having a hysteroscopy. Elliot is driving her, mostly because it’s the first thing she’s ever asked of him. He’s twenty-eight. She, though she doesn’t feel like it, is thirty-three.
They sit and let “Coke Babies” end before leaving the car. Elliot wallows in guilt, though his Hilbert-trained brain can’t prove his contribution to this medical affair. He hasn’t slept with Wanda’s husband for weeks. He’s always been vigilant about his check-ups, too. Clean as a whistle, he was told after his last STD testing. That did not help him, however, when Richard called him amid hysteria. “I hurt Wanda. She might be dying.”
“What do you mean you hurt her?”
“During sex.” Just like that, Elliot’s hurt too. “Now she’s locked in the bathroom. Crying.”
The only crying Elliot heard, however, as Richard pressed the phone against the bathroom door, was Richard’s. He sounded like a humpback whale. “Are you alright, Wanda?”
“I think – I’m – Yes. I’m fine, now.”
“Would you like me to come?”
“There’s no need.”
“Would you like me to come?”
“No. I have no pie ready.”
For Wanda, that incident was an exotic excursion into an alternative reality. She was drunk for the first time in a year, and so she was having sex with her husband for the first time in a year. According to Dick, it was the tenth anniversary of something they’d once done. She tried to remember as he fucked her, but the red wine soon made her confused, as it had always done since she was twelve. Curtain with butterflies. A bit of nausea. Oh, this feels nice. No pie ready, what if Elliot comes over. Fuck that fucker.
Then the pain.
Wanda had navigated a labyrinth of misery all her life yet was no worse for it. A collision of an ambulance with a UPS truck – following a collision of an Audi with a Jeep – left her a two-year-old orphan with a severe vitamin C deficiency. Surely, it meant a childhood in the system, among rape and bedbugs? Instead, Wanda’s hair grew back and she was adopted by a millionaire. Admittedly, it eventually led to this radically toxic attachment to Dick, but every Bounty has coconut in it. Whenever there were issues in her marital purgatory, in the eyes of all of Dick’s friends – including Elliot – she was never the wrong-doer. Though that, truly, was often a provable fact.
Having an abundantly re-used disposable razor pushed up her pelvis was an experience without precedence in Wanda’s life. Her tongue retreated into her throat. She travelled back to that fateful collision for the first time ever. She let acidic heat rise from her stomach. She screamed.
They are now seated among many others in the clinic’s waiting room. For Wanda, the novelty of suffering has worn off. She now feels rather contemptuous of the continuous theatrics surrounding a simple procedure. They nearly convince her she is in more pain than she actually is.
“Can you see that woman by the vending machine?” she asks. “No, don’t look now.”
“I can’t see her then, no.”
Elliot is unnerved by the number of women present in this waiting room. They chose this clinic because it was highly recommended and offered follow-up procedures on-site, should they be necessary. He wonders how many of these women are here for hysteroscopy; how many for something far more serious; how many are trembling under their fancy woolen coats over the suspiciously dentist-like soundscape of the next room. He’s also saddened by not being unnerved by the absence of any other men. He remembers the quiet surprise on the line when he said “yes” to Wanda’s request to pick her up from a parking lot behind a bodega half an hour away from her house.
“Did Richard not want to come with you?” he asked as she sneaked into the passenger seat.
“Obviously, he did, but I’m a tad sick of him at the moment.” She sighed. “Well, been for a while now, but you know that.”
Neither of them considered that to be truly true. After the first few years of their marriage, Wanda grew tired of Dick’s desperation to make her love him more than she already did. She could barely bring herself to feel vague annoyance when he spent his night with other girls. Boys did push her further – potentially giving Dick something she never could – but by the time Elliot appeared, it was long clear it was just another ploy. A children’s game.
For Elliot, meeting Wanda was something he will never forget, and he knows that already. He followed Richard to his adopted father’s house party because they were slightly high and making his wife jealous felt deliciously out of character. He also thought the relationship wouldn’t last. Then he met a dark-eyed woman who wouldn’t shake his hand but fed him a very good cherry pie. He told her about the neighbors killing his childhood dog and his father impregnating their teenage daughter in revenge. She listened, looking him in the eye. “You should have more pie,” she said afterwards. As she walked away, he wanted to whimper. He blamed it on the ketamine.
The only thing Wanda would remember about meeting Elliot was a strong sense of unfairness. She made that one decent pie by accident and now she must continuously live up to this mirage of an attractive woman who can dress, dance and bake. Unlike him, she knew all three of them were to stick around.
“She has a very nice tan. No older than a week old, too.”
“As good a time for an exotic holiday as any, I suppose.”
“Where would you go?”
“Nowhere special. You don’t really want to know.”
An expectant look. Elliot pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger. What is he doing this for? Wanda’s one to judge people quickly, but also one to keep those judgements to herself. Love or hate, you will never know. If you’re fucking her husband, you might have a good guess, but you’ll still never know.
“You don’t seem very trusting. Is it an issue you have with me or women in general?”
“Can I have a moment to think about it?”
“Mrs. Clifford?”
Wanda rises with an elegance unnecessary for their circumstance. A small ripple cuts the flesh between her eyebrows. “Is that a child?”
There is a child, a small boy, hidden behind the last chair, with a notebook in his lap. He’s paying no attention to the minor commotion he has caused.
“Ma’am…”
Elliot has seen this look in Wanda’s eyes once before when she refused to leave for Hamilton before the very end of Strictly Dancing. He gets up now and follows her gaze, to then shamelessly loom over the boy and his notebook. “He’s trying to spell “skedaddle,” he says after a few unsuccessful attempts to mouth it back at her.
“I see,” Wanda says. “Well, good luck to him.” She then follows the nurse into the examination room.
Elliot gets back to his designated seat and tries to google how to spell “skedaddle.” There is no signal in the waiting room, which explains all the women’s stiff backs and idle fingers. He’s left with no other prospects but to listen for the whirring sounds and imagine what they mean. Whatever was the best method of dissociation that Buzzfeed listed in that one article, he can’t remember.
It is roughly three minutes before Wanda stands in the doorway. She has nothing to shield her from the judging eyes but a shapeless white gown and for a moment, Elliot at last feels the possessiveness that in his father’s mind made a man. He then feels a little bit special because he’s the only one here who’s seen her truly naked. She’s a bit skinnier than she should be, perhaps, and he knows that her scapulae protrude from her back like angel wings.
“Elliot.”
“Yes.”
“They’re about to stick a needle into my vulva.”
“Surely that’s not true.”
“You paid for the deluxe package, ma’am,” a nurse chimes in. “It includes a local anesthesia.”
“I’d like to give it up, then.”
“I’m afraid the packages are non-refundable.”
“That’s absolutely fine,” says Elliot.
“Ma’am—"
“We’re not in Utah, darling.”
There were two other things that, according to Elliot’s father, made a man. One was a high tolerance to alcohol. The other was taking the suffering of others upon yourself.
Elliot places his hand between those bony wings. He never noticed how short she was, and he doesn’t quite know how. Too focused on that other body between them, probably. Now, though, he can hear his fifth-grade teacher telling him it’s time to leave the playground.
“Come on. Let’s go back in.”
“I’m scared.”
“I’m not.”
“This sucks.”
“Maybe we’ll get a sticker afterwards.”
Elliot might be the first man in this examination room but there is a space between the chair and the tool stand that fits him perfectly. He’s glad the nurse is too busy demonstrating how much of a New Yorker she is to notice how unsanitarily sweaty he’s becoming. His palms are getting sticky in Wanda’s feverish grasp. She’s never been an enthusiastic receiver of needle pricks, even at the best of times. Now, the times are far from the best, and all she can think about is please, don’t let it be leiomyosarcoma. Elliot thinks of the list of places he’d rather be, the top spot being Snowdonia.
“Elliot.”
“Yes.”
“If it’s something… I put all my recipes in a Google Doc.”
“I saw a bakery on the way here. We should go. For comparative purposes.”
“I think my pies are probably better.”
“I think so too.”
On the way back, Wanda feels a little sore but certain she cheated fate again. He’s the one to choose the podcast this time. They listen to an interview with a conservative MP and laugh at the very same answers.
THE END
Author Bio: A.C. has writing published in Litro, Close To The Bone, Oranges Journal, and others. She is a notorious hobbyist, Cluedo winner, and an occasional ballet dancer.