Gabby McClellan

From where she sits on the veranda overlooking the narrow shoreline she can see a whole group of them, their stomachs stretched and shiny in the sun, waddling over deflated-looking dunes towards the water. She counts three, maybe four (with the fourth she can’t be certain). One of them looks as if she is about to burst. How can she be allowed out like that?

Val imagines the whole thing: the heaviest of the pregnant mothers leading her flock into the lake, the neckline of her bathing suit low enough to promise a dreadful sunburn, her sturdy calves and thighs and hips disappearing under the green water; she’d maybe turn onto her back, float out a bit, and forget herself, her belly protruding like an iceberg; maybe her eyes would close for a moment as if she were asleep.

And then her eyes would fly open, white and frantic, and she’d start wailing and thrashing her limbs. Like a shark attack.

Val turns. After staring at the bright sun she only sees dark. She blinks a few times. Dave, her brother-in-law, emerges from the inside of the café in a pair of worn-down espadrilles, polka-dotted swim trunks, and a straw hat. He isn’t from here; he borrowed the hat from Val’s father. It doesn’t make sense because his home is in Richmond and there is no need to blend in with the men here. He and Val’s sister Rachel are only visiting. He will sunburn instantly too. Doesn’t have the Ginley skin.

Val never imagined Dave as the husband-type. Maybe she is too bent on disliking people. When her sister Rachel first introduced him to Val and her parents, he said he’d never met such a happy loving family, such warm and kind people. This baffled Val because she had always imagined her family as the depressed kind: her father has reread the same Westerns on the same recliner since the day he retired; her mother fixates on a recurring urinary tract infection. And both her parents go on about Val’s failed marriage. Dave is too energetic, too excited about the world; when he first met Val he asked her too many questions about her work at the library, pretending to be interested in Marion, Virginia.

He said: “It’s a beautiful town, isn’t it?”

And she said: “I’ve never heard someone describe it like that.”

“All the trees, the mountains, the little houses.” He must’ve not heard her.

“The population goes down every year,” she said. “Only the old people are staying.” She looked past him and into the kitchen. She and Dave were sitting in the living room, perpendicular to each other on the sectional couch. “Rachel might need help with dinner.”

He said fine, he understood, but he had just one more question. What was it about Marion?

Val is certain her sister will get divorced. After she met Dave she told Rachel as much: this is the type who will leave you for someone else, she had said, and don’t you think otherwise. He is just too happy. Only miserable people stay together.

Once her sister and Dave get divorced, Val will finally be able to say something to Rachel like: you don’t have to stay friends, or: you don’t have to remind yourself that you once loved him. You can move as far away from him as you want, you don’t have to stay in the same town, you don’t have to run into him at the supermarket. Val knows a thing or two about divorce.

She frowns to shoo away remnants of the sun. Dave stands in front of her, feet pointing outwards, waiting to hear if she wants to get in the water. “I’ll stay in the shade,” Val says. “I don’t know if I’m meant to get any sort of exercise yet. Besides,” she wrinkles her nose, “better for my skin.” She thinks he’ll understand. Neither Dave nor Rachel have pressed her on her condition. If she keeps saying that she’s in a little pain, there’s still a bit of blood, they’ll believe her. If she says that the doctor said no exercise, they’ll believe her. She can remain inactive as long as she likes.

“Okay,” he says. He peers down in her canvas bag by her foot. “What are you reading?”

She looks beyond him, eyeing the white reflections on the balloon-like stomachs across the sand. They should cover up. Such a large surface area for sunburning. “It’s pretty good.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to go swimming?” he asks.

She says yes, she is sure. Dave bows his head and steps down from the veranda onto the sand. Tufts of cattails line the rocky edges of either side of the beach; the sandy shore itself can’t be more than a hundred yards across. Beyond the rocks a few fishermen cast their lines. Beyond the fishermen the winding mountain road leads to and away from Hungry Mother State Park. Beyond the road there are dark pines and a flat periwinkle sky.

Earlier Rachel asked Val the same thing: as they were packing their beach totes, her sister busy shoving a change of clothes into a diaper bag, Rachel asked whether Val could swim yet in her condition, if the physical activity would be too much. Val knew she was perfectly able to swim. To run, to jump. But she said she wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know,” she had said, “since I’m still having a touch of spotting. It’s mostly rust-colored, now, like the last day of a period. Maybe it’s fine, I don’t know.”

Rachel had made a face. It was her effort at pity, though Val knew she was disgusted. Her sister had trouble with bodily things; the fact that she possessed a body herself, no less a female

body, drove her mad: before she gave birth she’d said she had a vision that a monster was growing inside her, that she would give birth to a dog or cat or curled-up snake, and she couldn’t bear the idea of having to face what she’d made. Dave called Val from Rachel’s phone and begged her to calm his wife down. He said that Rachel wouldn’t stop talking about the stupid vision. So Val spoke to her sister on the phone and reminded her that visions and things were all bogus. Later, once Rachel had given birth to Henry, she was forced to remain in diapers following the delivery, and she could hardly stand the sight of herself. “Look at me,” she cried, gesturing to the towel-thick underwear, “look how disgusting this is. It’s worse than a snake.” She lifted her shirt and pinched the flabby layers of fat. “This will never go away.”

“Don’t worry,” Val had said, “I’m sure it’ll deflate over time.”

Rachel dropped her shirt. “How would you know?”

This was a fair question: how would Val know?

A boy, just shy of three feet tall, emerges from the slip in the sliding café door with a popsicle in his hand. Red juice drips down his wrist. His legs and arms still retain the gentle padding of infants, skin like leavened dough, and his hair is sun-bleached and wispy. He surveys the shoreline. His gaze fixes on the pregnant women.

Val asks, “What do they have in there?”

“Vee!” Red droplets fling onto her legs. He smiles and shows a row of neat baby teeth, square and even like floor tiles. “Vee,” he says again, “I missed you.”

She says that she was right here. She never left Marion.

He wraps his arms around her neck and the cold popsicle juice runs between her shoulder blades. She inhales, refamiliarizing herself with a scent that is now mixed with spray-on sunscreen and the dry, dusty smell of sand, and asks him what he thinks of the beach. He still clings to her. If she holds her breath she can hear his heartbeat.

“The beach,” she says, gently pulling him away, “do you like it?”

He watches the pregnant women. The largest one has squatted down and rolls into a seated position, a book splayed across her thighs. She rubs sunscreen over her face.

“Very busy.” She leans closer. “What’re you looking at?”

“What do they have in there?” she asks.

After a pause she says yes, they have babies in there. She watches them. For a moment she wonders how it feels to grow something so large all by yourself. It must be nice. Like a sense of accomplishment.

Dave’s father fell severely ill after Henry had turned one. Rachel had asked Val if she could stay with the boy for a few days while she flew out to join her husband at the hospital. Val hadn’t wanted to say yes. She had just finalized divorce proceedings from her husband and was determined to lie in bed for the coming weeks, curtains drawn, Styrofoam cups of Instant Noodles lining the bamboo settee and side table that her husband had purchased, testing how long she could go without washing or combing her hair. (The fancy shampoo and conditioner had been purchased by her husband.) She was a librarian at the public library. He was a personal injury lawyer. By the time her sister had called, she hadn’t showered for three-and-a-half days. Her first thought was that she would have to shave. Her armpit hair had developed into a thick, wiry layer, and in a few more days it would soften. As soon as she knew she’d have to leave the house, make herself presentable, remove the accumulation of body odor, she thought of the pink razor handle lying dormant on the lip of her bathtub.

Val had first asked if Dave’s father was okay. Rachel said she wasn’t sure, he was having heart attack-like symptoms. Then Val asked how long she would need to babysit.

“Just for a few days,” Rachel had said. “It would mean the world to Henry.”

Val agreed to babysit. She doubted her presence would mean anything to Henry: she had no desire to speak more than a few words and couldn’t be bothered playing any sort of games. In all likelihood she’d slouch before the television and watch children’s cartoons. But she agreed to come.

Rachel and Dave lived in a beautiful colonial style house outside Richmond. She drove up from Marion that afternoon and listened to John Prine and John Denver and Johnny Cash on the way. A little bit of Bonnie Wright too. Traffic was bad.

Their house had one of those dark brick facades with painted gables and heavyset dormer windows along the attic. A lovely family home. When she arrived with her small suitcase and backpack she felt as if she were a cleaning lady or a hired house-sitter. (She could only guess because she’d never hired any sort of help.) There was a note left for her on the counter: “It has everything,” Rachel said as she flew through the hallways, grabbing various books and magazines and then toiletries from the bathroom, “laundry, cooking, Henry’s schedule, when to water the plants. Oh,” she emerged from the office, “and Henry’s favorite bedtime stories. He’ll ask you to read them three or four times, but you can always – well, it says everything in the note.”

Rachel spoke as if she had settled into everything: the new house, the new husband, the new child. It hadn’t taken long for her to get comfortable. As soon as the sisters’ fortunes had reversed, she threw herself into her new life as if she had been expecting it all along. As if she had forgotten all about Marion and her sister and her mother and father. She would ask Val questions like, “Are you doing a Christmas card this year?” and, “Do you think Newport or Martha’s Vineyard would be better for vacation?” Val didn’t know a thing about Shutterstock photos or New England. When she looked at the note she realized she didn’t know a thing about diaper rash cream or organic fruit snacks either.

Val then wondered if Dave’s father would have to die to pay for Rachel’s new life. The rest of the Ginleys were too indifferent to their lives to make good enough offerings. Their payment wouldn’t be worth much in the way of life. Someone else had to be sacrificed.

“Do you need help with anything?” Val asked. Henry was nowhere in sight.

There was a muffled response. Val was fairly certain that Rachel had said no.

There are no waves at Hungry Mother: the lake sweeps flat and clean over the sand. The water is warm along the shoreline and only cool enough if you swim out far or dive deep. There is a diving board too, just beyond the buoy-roped fence. But mostly the swimmers stay near the shoreline.

There is no breeze to shoo away the humidity or to cool the sweat on your back or clear the air of that slightly sulfuric stench. That is what Val thinks about as she watches the three-and-a-half pregnant women: all the sweating, all the stink. On the chair she can feel her thighs sticking to the woven wicker. Henry finishes his popsicle and sits crisscross on the ground in front of her. The women on the beach are spreading sunscreen like cream cheese over their massive stomachs, sometimes flinging loose globs onto the sand, other times letting the thick lotion remain like markings on their skin. Val is relieved.

Val thinks about the misery of the summer heat, the stagnant air rising over the asphalt in the driveway at home, the mosquitoes sucking enough blood from your limbs to leave quarter-sized welts. Sweat bees and horseflies on the lake especially, and copperheads on the banks and hornet nests hidden in drybrush all up the hillside through the woods. And the humidity: even in the mountains, Virginia’s swamp breath creeps like one long belch over the foothills, settling low and sticky along Hungry Mother Lake. The humidity churns up sweat and resentment like a plague.

The second-largest pregnant woman unravels some foil wrappings from a cooler. Val sits forward in her chair. The woman begins biting into a piece of cake under the foil. She chews with her mouth open and laughs and talks with her friends. Another woman, the woman who may or may not be pregnant, waves at the cooler. The first woman hands her a foil wrapping. Soon all four of them are eating cake and laughing.

Rachel is easily recognizable across the sand: dark, curly hair, wide hips, narrow shoulders. A grape-colored bathing suit that cuts her pear shape against the white dunes like a bloodstain. Her skin is tanned and freckled. Rachel inherited the Ginley skin better than Val.

The sisters really look nothing alike: Val keeps her hair cut short because she doesn’t like that the color can’t decide between brown or blonde. It’s a flat, in-between sort of color. It looks poor against her skin since she’s pale and will sunburn if she isn’t careful. Her short legs and long torso make her look as if she’d once been a swimmer, but she was never a swimmer. As she has gotten older her hips have narrowed and her stomach has rounded. Sometimes she worries she’s turning into a man.

Rachel walks through the side fence between the parking lot and the outdoor seating area at the café. She picks Henry up once she walks up the steps of the veranda and kisses him all over the face. He wriggles in his mother’s arms and whines.

“It’s so hot today,” Rachel says. “I’ve been in a meeting since eleven and I swear the air conditioning in the car isn’t working. I’m still not used to the constant phone calls. You’d think I’d be used to my new bosses by now.” She wipes her forehead. “God, it’s so hot.”

“It’s as hot as it always is,” Val says. 

 “We’ll just have to go swimming to cool off, won’t we?”

Val doesn’t say anything because she isn’t certain whether Rachel is speaking to her or Henry.

“Are you excited for the beach?” Rachel asks. She brushes Henry’s nose with her finger.

He shrugs. He wriggles around in her arms.

Rachel turns with Henry still on her hip so that they can face the beach. Henry mumbles something. Val guesses that he is still looking at the pregnant women. Their group of four has acquired a pair of men, maybe husbands. They are like growths on lumps of skin, emerging as if born from their wives, as if their entire existence relies on the existence of the pregnant women. They are slightly overweight and sunburned on their shoulders. Farther down from their encampment of strewn beach towels, Styrofoam coolers, woven beach bags, and crooked umbrellas, Dave unfolds rented beach chairs in the sand. 

“Let’s go meet Dada,” Rachel says, bouncing Henry on her hip. She starts down the stairs. The precise outline of Rachel’s former physique, the body she had prior to giving birth, is clear: where the cellulite started forming along her thighs, where her skin pokes out from her bathing suit along her upper back, where her ankles merge with her calves. Rachel was very skinny in high school. She had detested the idea of ever gaining weight; in college Val suspected her sister of being anorexic. She watched Rachel get skinnier and skinnier while she herself grew fatter and fatter. Val gained nearly twenty pounds in college and, after years of dieting and exercise, found depression the most effective means at weight loss. Time has the opposite effect on either sister: it drains one and weighs down the other.

Henry wails in his mother’s arms. He starts kicking and slapping the popsicle stick against his mother’s breastbone. Rachel stops in the sand and turns to look at her sister just so that she can offer a cold, silent gaze, something to cut the heat and humidity between them, as if to say, look at what you’ve done. 

Val likes the feeling of sand between her toes. Rachel doesn’t understand this because she says that your toes are only the start of it; the sand will get into your shorts and bathing suit and hair and ears and nose and mouth. Rachel wears water shoes so that she doesn’t have to feel the sand. Or the bottom of the lake. She’ll do anything to avoid the feeling of the sand or mud or anything dirty and low to the ground.

Val scrunches her toes in the sand. Rachel is out swimming laps along the inside of the buoy-lined fence. Her hips rotate back and forth in the water in a rhythmic way. Dave crouches down with Henry in the sand and works on a sandcastle, cheering Henry on, saying that he’s doing a wonderful job. Six or eight yards to the left the pregnant women chat and eat their cake and drink their Gatorades and sparkling waters and juice pouches. Their husbands are in the water. Val listens.

“You can’t let them nurse for longer than a year. It’s unnatural.”

“It’s all the same, don’t you see? It doesn’t really matter.”

“I don’t want it chewing on my nipples any longer than necessary.”

Val retrieves her poetry book from her bag. She already finished it but she’s thinking of rereading it. In the margins there are notes and check marks. Her husband left them there. 

“Vee,” Henry says, waving a red bucket in the air, “come play!”

She smiles and shakes her head. “Not now,” she says. “In a little bit.”

When Rachel had first left Val alone with Henry before leaving to join her husband and father-in-law, Val stood in the doorframe between the kitchen and living room, suddenly aware of how large the house was. If she looked around she got dizzy: her feet were much farther down than she thought they should be. The walls were slipping away from her. She was shrinking.

Val had felt this way when she was first dropped off at college. Alone in her dorm room, she squatted down, put her face in her hands, and held her breath. She had hoped the room would return to its normal size once she opened her eyes. 

She looked up. Her eyes stung because she had been rubbing them with her hands. She was squatting on the herringbone hardwood. Her calves were throbbing.

Spring Summer 2022

Fiction

Picnic At Hungry Mother

Goldfish bags in her hands, the kinds won at carnivals, shifting all at once like sand. How long has it been, she wonders, gripping the jelly-like sacks, how long has she missed the feeling. Laminated posters on nondescript beige walls advertise buttock enhancements and tummy tucks and something called the Mommy Makeover. Labiaplasty, liposuction, a whole slew of lifts, adjustments, and removals painted in violent fleshy inks: skin as an artistic palette, bodies to be revised and refined with glinting silver scalpels by square-jawed doctors. Does he think he is an artist, she wonders, staring at the pentagonal face of her surgeon, does reshaping a nipple or labia count as art. Her palms are sweating. Have these been inside someone, sliced and fished from the shallows of an armpit incision before they were handed to her?

The room is unlike any doctor’s office she has ever seen before: dim lighting, vague and purple, maybe for minimizing pores and smoothing cellulite. She was up late the night before, throwing a party she didn’t want to host. Deep bags under her eyes darken beneath smeared mascara and blue eyeliner. The unfamiliarity of heaviness and stickiness stretches her skin like overworked taffy. She hasn’t worn makeup in over a year.

She asks which one is better, which one is more popular. Two different things. Her breath is hot and she burps cabernet-soaked lemon cake. Self-disregard and shabbiness must be common in this office: here she has come to the doctor of the human aspect, the artist whose palette is flesh.

The doctor wheels around in his leather stool and tells her about saline, something that can pop and leak into the chest if not properly inserted, while she looks back and forth from either implant. This one is more structured, the doctor says, holding his hand over the firmer jellyfish head, and this one, the silicone mushroom cap, is said to feel more like natural breast tissue. Usually women go for the round implants, but there’s also the smooth kind, and if you want I can show you the gummy bear one too, maybe another option if you’re looking for something more form-stable.

Like shopping at a car dealership. She closes her eyes and tightens her hands around both. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown the party the night before her consult. A massive celebration of her continuing marriage, a self-congratulations for her and her husband for their white-knuckled grit and determination. Denise and Tom, look, you’ve made it! Something akin to a middle-aged participation trophy, if those could be offered with dancing: a gelatinous squirming of aging bodies on the patio-turned-dancefloor, most of those bodies on the verge of sexual dysfunctions, cardiovascular issues, and various organ collapses, likely livers or kidneys. Blood vessels pumping diuretics, beta blockers, alpha blockers, atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, sildenafil, tadalafil, maybe a trace amount of benzodiazepines or expired barbiturates. Anything to keep their bodies going.

The party had been loud and sweaty and sickening. An excess of jubilance. George and Tina, a couple from the neighborhood, wore cable knits and khaki pants that quickly stained from sweat. Wicker deck chairs and Adirondacks from the lawn adapted permanent sheens from the many guests very soon after the party started. A massive undertaking, the party: forty or fifty people, all shoved side-by-side like sardines in their narrow townhouse on the lake, making heat waves that consumed their neighbors’ houses. Many of the guests were secondary or tertiary friends of the couple, which, at their age, meant they were no better than strangers. Most brought flowers or bottles of wine or cheese plates. Denise had worn a short strappy dress that hugged her chest and she made sure to drink two heaping glasses of wine before anything had really picked up because she didn’t want to feel self-conscious. The dress hadn’t been worn in a long time. She spent her night floating in a pleasant drunkenness, accepting compliments from friends and strangers on the hydrangea arrangements lining the patio tables and the hanging paper lanterns along the deck. She didn’t speak to her husband once. A man she had dated in high school chatted her up, telling her she looked healthy, something she hadn’t believed in a while for various reasons. He also said the food was good. Sitting in the doctor’s office now, bloat warming her belly like a curled-up chinchilla, she wonders if she went overboard; the guests didn’t eat all the food. Surely she put out too much food.

She had developed a fascination with feeding people in the wake of her illness. The offerings at the party were aplenty: punch in an assortment of vintage cut-glass bowls afforded by her husband’s high financier salary, fruit tarts filled with stiff cream from a local bakery, crackers assembled in an optical illusion around a blue dish of Ossetra Sturgeon caviar. Pigs in blankets, triple-decker clubs, pasta salad, egg salad, potato salad, cucumber salad. Red and blue Jell-O cut into stars to celebrate the Fourth of July even though they were a month out and there would be no fireworks. Malbec, cabernet, pinot, a finale of Perignon and Prosecco and anything fizzing they could fish from the coolers. And cake, a delicious three-decker. Cheers to Denise and Tom, whoopee for their endurance, how they must have clawed and cleaved their way here.

Her memory before the party is warm, too warm, because she preferred the thermostat at seventy-five in that year-long prison of her bedroom. She could have been lying dead in a tomb, allowed out only for doctor’s visits.

The party broke the comfort of her soporific haze. She had been counting time not by days but by the confinement of her illness: stage one, too weak to leave the bedroom; stage two, the steady deterioration of her muscles and sleep; stage three, occasional walks and arguments with her husband, which she claimed the capecitabine heightened, no matter what the doctors at the Women’s Clinic said.

The plastic surgeon now says Denise, do you have any questions, do you need me to go over everything again for you. She blinks, seeing not the doctor’s office but the swollen water pouch on the ceiling above her bed, the thing she had stared at for months on end. For a while she thought it looked like the belly of a pregnant snake, white with gray and yellow rings, before she determined it was more a spider’s egg sac. Something fertile that made her squirm on the mattress below in the somnolent fevers between hours-long naps.

She gives the implants one final squeeze. Part of her wants to pop one and let the saline spill over her hands. Maybe she’ll squeeze hard enough; all the dancing the night before had assured her that she had reclaimed some of her missing strength.

She tells the doctor she’ll have to think about it, she doesn’t want to be rash. Did people usually make these decisions in a day, she wonders, decisions regarding the shape and texture and filling of their breasts? The doctor says she is being reasonable. Waiting is always the reasonable thing to do. Somehow this comment makes her want to pick the saline one and shake it at him, tell him she’ll take it now, he could put her under now and slip this in the pear-skin layers of flesh, wrap the jelly in the blanket of her cut and recut chest.

At the receptionist’s desk she scrolls through her phone to schedule the follow-up and surgery. The waiting room, populated by sluggish bodies awaiting their surgical rebirth, is full of people without interesting faces. Maybe the patients in a plastic surgeon’s office ought to have their deformities and insecurities painted in their smiles. But their eyes, noses, lips – all of it is transitory.

She looks at the calendar. Around this time last year Tom announced he was having an affair. She was pouring him coffee at the kitchen table and he cleared his throat, telling her thank you, she’d poured him enough, do we have any half and half left, also I’m having an affair. A woman at work. Denise stopped pouring the coffee and sat down and glanced at the oven clock. Eight-oh-five. A blink and her mind passed through faces from the holiday party six months or so before: the blond one with wide hips, the tall brunette with giraffe knobby knees, or that older one, the stoic beauty who wore silk tie-front blouses on the floor above his office – this one, she thought, this woman with white jets in her hair, this must be the one, she looked as if she wore expensive perfume.

Her husband said the affair was over in between bites of toast, it had only lasted a short while. Then he said the coffee, the dark, syrupy stuff Denise had made in the new Moka, this was the best coffee he’d ever had.

She nodded. Her toast was burnt so she scraped her knife until a pile of black ash formed on her plate. A fly was tapping against the window, an unacknowledged suicide attempt. The faucet dripped and she absentmindedly wondered if a pipe was leaking and if her husband had asked the woman to fuck him or if the woman asked him, or maybe everything happened naturally and he just found himself inside of her, as if by accident. By the time she finished spreading grape jam Tom pushed in his chair and said he would be late for work if he didn’t leave now, we can talk later if you like, although I might be home after dinner. Business meeting.

As she now flicks through her phone she imagines him with the older woman, maybe he’s in his office chair and she’s straddling him, her thighs boa-constrictor thick, her arms and belly plump and marshmallow-soft, her hair black and jolted by white, the same things she imagined over and over again while staring at the bulge in the ceiling in her bedroom. She tells the receptionist, Sandy, that a follow-up in August would be great, and maybe shoot for surgery in September. There is no need to rush, she says. Sandy seems relieved.

The night Tom had promised to discuss his infidelity had been humid, an amplified reminder of their swamp-borne D.C. suburb, and she fell asleep with sheets sticking to her legs. When Tom got home he watched her for a minute or two, standing at the foot of the bed in a charcoal suit from Bloomingdales and a cloud of Armani Eau du Toilette. They wouldn’t talk for three months.

His work got busy when her doctor’s appointments started. She tracked this time backwards, counting down from the morning in June in a calendar, writing 

 alongside reminders of appointments. The refrigerator broke a few times and yesterday before the party she reread old notes about spoiled milk and bad eggs next to 

Three months after his confession she learned there was something invasive in her skin and the woman sleeping with her husband was not a secretary but a boss. Her husband eventually corrected her – 

 – and said he understood if she didn’t want to stay with him, he could move out, they could unwind the knots of their marriage, maybe cut them if they were too tight. When he said these things his eyes widened and rolled around in their sockets like dinosaur eggs, marbled and stone-looking, heavy as if they might pop out and crack on the floor.

She told him she didn’t want a divorce. Would he come to the doctor with her?

Invasive ductal carcinoma, clumps of bad cells in the milk duct, something very common. Very common, she repeated back to the doctor, nothing too difficult, then. She listened to the diagnosis without blinking, absorbing osmotically words like cytotoxic and lymph nodes, never digesting anything. Her diagnosis lay under her skin. Very common, she thought, my life is very common. She never had children but she suspected that if she had been young and maternal she would have felt more devastated; this doctor must see lots of tears, she thought, maybe he thinks something’s wrong with me. She never had any of those maternal inklings, so this cancer of her milk ducts – both the right and the left – felt like an adaptation, as if her body had decided to pursue its own evolutionary track.

Four months passed since Tim’s confession and the refrigerator still hadn’t been replaced. Though her husband couldn’t miss too much work he did his best to go to the doctor’s appointments with her. She often rereads her diary, a habit she developed a few weeks ago; one morning slot tells of a thrown-away chemise nightgown, a lovely lace thing ruined by vomit. A few days before the party she traced her fingers fondly over the written memory, recalling how Tom had walked her to the shower and thrown the comforter by her feet as warm water stuck thin fabric to her skin, how he made scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast after she’d been sick. She hadn’t felt so close to him in a long time.

She can’t remember when she started asking him to keep flowers in her bedroom because she didn’t write this in her diary. Driving home from the plastic surgeon’s appointment, she thinks maybe it was then, in that narrow slip of time between her first chemo treatment and the day she asked her husband if his boss had a better body than her, that she gently suggested he keep flowers in the celadon vase sitting on the old credenza and move the vase to their bedroom. The walls in their room were gray and the comforter was eggshell-colored and she thought flowers would help. He never answered her question about his boss but he took the Mercedes to the Whole Foods on Maple Avenue, not the one on Sunrise Valley because it wasn’t as nice, and returned with a large bouquet of hyacinths and tulips and chrysanthemums. And so began a new era of her illness: the era of flowers. She smiles now, turning the car onto the Toll Road West, thinking of all the flowers people brought to the party last night. As if all the dead flowers accrued over eight or nine months had to be replaced at once.

When Tom went to the appointments with her she would talk about the first few months after they met, most of the time filling silence while they were in the car or waiting room. They met at a party at a school neither of them attended; they both went to expensive liberal arts colleges, the kinds where students walk across well-fertilized quads with chai tea lattes and copies of Marx under their arms, and the partying scene had been tepid, unfulfilling of their mild appetites. She had a cold at the party and kept wiping her runny nose on the hem of her mesh black shirt, a see-through thing her mother would’ve opposed. On the way to an appointment she asked him if he remembered her outfit that night.

He said sorry, he didn’t remember the outfit then, but he remembered asking his friends if any of them knew her. None of them did.

She thought for a moment. No, maybe they didn’t; maybe they just saw each other, maybe they danced a little. The music would’ve been too loud to talk.

The hospital housing the cancer clinic was close to a shopping mall, the largest shopping mall in the state, and each time they passed the Macy’s and Nordstrom, marble and obsidian tombs, she thought of the rows and rows of clothing and shoes and healthy people, everything an explosion of color, kaleidoscopes of light and shuffling feet and reflective tile floors and ruddy, blood-filled cheeks. As appointments progressed she started asking him about their first dates, where he took her, the food they ate, their mutual friends. Laura and Mike, another couple at their party the night before, had only recently gotten married, but Tom and Denise had been the ones to introduce them all those years ago.

I asked you if you liked kids on our second date.

She laughed. Yes, she told him, she had said that she didn’t like them. At the time they both agreed, laughing, neither weighing her words as a prophecy, both assuming, like most people, they would grow up, get married, pop out a few kids, and retire neatly and quietly. Even though she never wanted kids she pictured herself with children, as if having a family was something inescapable in the grayness of suburbia.

She latched herself onto Tom fairly quickly because her mother died a few months after they started dating and he was the only one who managed to comfort her without making her angrier. A bad car accident, a rear-end gone horribly wrong in a bitter twist of fate, and Denise had no mother; her father would die later, twenty years down the line, of a stroke. A year after her mother died Tom lost his first cousin, someone like a brother to him. His turn, the universe seemed to say. By the end of college she and Tom had embedded themselves like twin parasites inside each other, unable to conceive of a world where they and their grief were separate.

Driving down the Toll Road, flying at ninety-two in a fifty-five, she now wonders if she really wants breasts, if there is any reason to have the surgery. Her body rejected itself; her body made a decision. And she is not getting divorced. The party had assured her of this fact. Amid all the dancing she had fixated on the moving bodies, on the bobbing beer bellies in button-downs and pendulous breasts in thin satin camisoles, leather-loafered feet shuffling out of step to Funky Town and one-inch heels burrowing blisters into ankles like mole rats. Guests over and over again said she looked healthy, and she felt awkward and said they looked healthy too, not knowing what else to say. She wanted their skin, their sagging flesh, their adipose-coated organs, their year’s worth of soft pretzels on the National Mall and tagliatelle at Cooper’s Hawk and lamb gyros from the Persian kebab truck that parked outside their neighborhood. All of these things, she thought, watching husbands and wives, had been eaten together, couples united by food, each matching the other calorie-for-calorie. Only at a party celebrating a marital armistice would she notice how many of her friends were married and fat, two things that had felt alien for nearly a year.

The six months following Tom’s confession had passed faster than the first three months because she couldn’t track time properly while sick. At six months the doctor told her things were not getting better and they should try a more rigorous approach. This news was somehow the final cut, the final slice severing her from Tom after a slow scraping along in the same house. Everything had been painful and awkward, but she had made it that way: like skinning a snake with her bare hands, peeling back the diamond-patterned leather, exposing pale pink reptilian tenderloin; this was her doing. But the skin had snagged, catching at the neck, taking forever to let loose. The doctor’s news was quick, sharp: a shovel taken to the snake head. If anything Denise’s anger at the news was jealousy; she was jealous the doctor finished the job she had started. When she and Tom had gotten home from the appointment she floated through the house, detached as if she had been lobotomized, and eventually fell asleep on the couch, too weak to walk up the many flights of stairs to their bedroom. She dreamed of tabletops and boards and flat wooden spatulas.

A few days after the news she told Tom she would divorce him if he would just wait for this whole thing to be over. In her diary, scrawled underneath 

Refrigerator guy coming on the fourth of December

, red pen spells the impending doom of a marriage. She would make him wait, she would make him watch the hourglass suck itself dry.

The surgery on the eleventh of February was pink and red. Not from blood or breast tissue or the pinkish stuff whistling up suction tubes held in body cavities; no, pink and red from the Valentine’s Day decorations in the outpatient center. Hearts cut out from construction paper and chocolate and lollipop-filled candy bowls and red roses, maybe fake or maybe real, and strings of pink garlands festooning every corner. People in the waiting room looked at Denise and Tom with the same look you give elderly dogs. Happy Valentine’s Day said over and over and over again, pouring from strangers’ mouths and eyes as they watched the brittle woman wearing the scarf shuffle across the off-white tile, leaning on her husband like a baby sloth clinging to its mother.

After the surgery she didn’t want to look at Tom, or maybe she didn’t want him to look at her. In her diary she wrote of the two removals with the same nonchalance she would use to describe the peeling of an orange: the smooth surface of her chest, wrapped in gauze like pith; her husband’s pale gaze after he started sleeping on the couch, leaving half the mattress flat as his body’s impression refilled with air and time.

She wanted the house cleaned every Sunday, a routine she had maintained for their near twenty-five years of marriage. While she lay in bed, recovering in a fuzzy bubble of Percocet and a new lavender comforter, she told him the house had to be spotless. Floors vacuumed, scrubbed, polished. Laundry folded in the linen closet. Marble countertops wiped with Windex and bathtubs and toilets soaked in bleach. She didn’t add things that hadn’t been done before. She was a meticulous person, maybe a germaphobe, and she had never trusted a cleaning lady to do everything for them. Eyes closed, chest heavy in gauze but not fat, she told him on the Wednesday after her surgery that the house would have to be cleaned every Sunday.

She pulls off the Toll Road and onto Sunset Hills. Exhaustion and hunger teeter back and forth while her hands clutch the leather steering wheel. Her bad dreams started within the last few months; if she forgets to swallow the handful of suggested benzodiazepines before bed she’ll dream of terrifying things. Shopping for bras with her dead mother, a strange amalgam of a torturous puberty and a rainy funeral, recurred with different twists, variations on a nightly theme. She and her mother as teenagers sifting through lace lingerie; she as an adult, her mother an old woman, each holding thongs and G-strings in mock fascination; she as she is now, with a shirt flapping forward and back, her mother a corpse, rotting skin peeling and leaving trails between 34C and D. After the party she had been too exhausted to remember anything, never mind wiping off her makeup or fully unzipping the dress or brushing her teeth, and she had forgotten to take the pills.

Through the remainder of winter and over the course of the wet and humid spring she had started speaking to Tom about plans moving forward. Did he want the townhouse or should she move into the one up the street, the pretty white brick one that had just gone on the market. Would he mind if she cut back the azaleas in the back garden because he had done a poor job of it. Maybe she would get a cat or a little dog, one of those barky things divorcees bought. He answered all of her questions by shrugging and apologizing. Eventually she stopped talking about the future. She did, after all, have cancer.

Soon friends started suspecting their marital rift, seeing the visible depression between the couple, something beyond, they thought, a side effect of invasive ductal carcinomas. Denise did little to suppress the rumors. Tom did little to stop Denise from discussing his infidelity. In fact he spoke to her infrequently, shuffling around the house with trays of food and orange juice like a hired caretaker. Any time he entered their bedroom – her bedroom – he averted his gaze, searching for something pleasant amid the moribund walls and slumped figure. On occasion he would apologize, and on occasion she would ask him for tea or magazines. If she was feeling well enough she would ask him to walk with her. These walks were painful, but not in any physical sense: usually the wind would push and sweep her shirt, which sometimes made her cry.

One morning in April, a day when the rain had stopped but the ground remained sodden and smelled of fertile soil, Denise was lying in bed when the bubble above the ceiling popped. Gray water fell in a single sheet. The new lavender comforter, the mattress, the Tempur-Pedic pillows — everything made dirty sponges in an instant. The single slice along the overstretched paint skin cut neatly like the letter C. She stared at the C for a few minutes while metallic-smelling water dripped from the split ends of her hair.

Tom came downstairs and said through the closed door that he couldn’t find whatever he had been looking for in the attic, there were too many boxes and none of them were labeled, the only labeled ones being their wedding photos and albums from the first ten years of their marriage. Then she answered and said that was fine, there was no rush. She looked at the celadon vase on the side table. Dead bearded irises with brown rotting heads like the faces of old beagles, clumpy and stinky, drooped over the lip of the vase.

Gabby McClellan

Gabby McClellan

Fiction

Spring Summer 2022

Picnic At Hungry Mother

Winter 2022 - Jellyfish

Silicone