Silicone

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.

How long?

Three months.

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.

Okay, see you tonight.

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 days since confession 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 Dr. Swanson, Women’s Clinic or Dr. Hirsch, Cancer Clinic.

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 – slept – 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.

The black shirt, the see-through one?

Weren’t you wearing white?

No, that was the white-out at the co-op.

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.

Did we talk that night at all?

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.

I remember. You said you didn’t.

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.

Tom, would you come here and get the flowers?

When the door opened he looked at her and gasped and switched his eyes from the ceiling to the mattress and back again. He apologized and said he didn’t know how it had happened. When he was finished she asked him if he thought they should stay together after all.

She pulls the Mercedes into the garage and stares at the stacked boxes of La Croix and the bins and bins of empty wine bottles. The Malbec and cabernet that had been consumed the most by their party guests made green and black stains out of greasy lightbulb reflections. The party had begun like any party, with the steady syrup-flow of guests gaining momentum only once music and food officiated the whole affair, sometime far past the eight o’clock start time. Not a dinner party but a party of overindulgence, of overconsumption, of overcompensation; she tried making up for a year’s worth of losses, of uneaten food, undanced dances, and unhugged friends in six hours, beginning with a twelve-ounce pour of cabernet and ending with four turkey clubs, half a dozen pigs in blankets, and the entire belly’s worth of a female sturgeon. At some point or another Tom had started to make a toast, thanking everyone for coming. Denise hadn’t heard any of it because she had wandered off the deck and onto the patio, where the dancing had thinned and let up dazzling views of the lake.

She stood by the water for a long time, not minding the sulfuric smell. The whole bottom of the lake had been dredged only a few days before the party and all the dirt and debris perfumed the entire neighborhood around the banks. Tina and George were sitting on the floating dock, drinks in hand, whispering things she couldn’t hear, oblivious to Denise’s presence, maybe even to the smell, too.

She turned and looked at the house. The lanterns on the deck made long, ovular shadows over the patio. She could hear Tom’s voice rattle and dip as it combatted the effects of his and the crowd’s wine-filled blood vessels from the kitchen. There was cake, she heard him say, there was cake for everyone. A three-layer lemon poppyseed cake with ricotta filling and vanilla buttercream frosting, berries and sugar flowers dotting the edges, lacy words spelling out their happy news. He would start cutting the cake soon, he said, but maybe they should sing a song first.

She wondered if he remembered to light the candles. She had paid so much for the cake, the beautiful lemon poppyseed layers, the crystal-glint of sugar roses and daisies, the delicate cursive of a milestone. Was he lighting candles, she thought, growing feverish, had he forgotten to light the candles? In a sudden panic she started towards the house, desperate to know if he had lit the candles, but she was stopped, cut short but Tina’s cutting scream.

A copperhead!

Copperhead?

On the dock!

On the dock?

Copperhead? Copperhead! Copperheads? On the dock? Where’s the copperhead? There’s a copperhead on the dock!

Drunk men and women spilled down from the house in a wave of stumbling and awkward attempts at running, many of them repeating copperhead, copperhead, get away from the copperhead, chanting in a slur. Denise slid out of her heels and ran, leading the pack, feeling the sweaty surface of the wood underfoot as she bounded towards the squealing husband and wife at the water’s edge.

Where is it?

Right there!

The squirming thing was hard to see: it wound its body slowly, injured by the leg of George’s Adirondack, and hid well against the wooden dock. A deadly snake, poisonous enough to kill your dog or kid quickly and your husband or wife slowly. A baby snake, though; maybe as long as her torso, skinny and frail-looking. It probably hadn’t killed anyone before.

She knelt down a few feet from the snake and squinted at its skin, searching until she recognized the familiar diamond pattern on its head. The copper would be dull and difficult to see at this time of night. Tina whimpered. George told Denise to be careful. The couple, together, looked weak, trembling like conjoined twins from the edge of the dock, and their bodies, burdened by middle-aged fat, were made small-looking.

What are you going to do?

Denise stood and walked back to the banks of the lake, aware of the moonlike faces of forty or fifty men and women watching her, holding their breath. She didn’t see Tom in the crowd.

Can someone hand me my shoe?

The man she had dated in high school held up the white heel, asking if this was the one she meant, shaking the thing in the air. She said yes, that was her shoe, and the high heel was passed forward until someone she didn’t recognize placed it in her hand.

She slapped the heel on her foot. The sole sucked at her damp skin once the shoe covered her toes and a few times she nearly slipped as she strode towards the snake in the center of the dock. The crowd started murmuring, frenzied. They were sweating profusely, the glands in their armpits engaged in a collective suspense. Their pheromones mixed unpleasantly with the smell from the lake.

The snake was limp-looking, no longer writhing slowly. She sighed and swiftly kicked the thing off the dock and into the murky water below.

After a moment of quiet, a peace that rang in her beleaguered ears, the whispering in the crowd resumed, slowly but steadily, until voices piqued at their previous crescendo and the party guests trickled back to the house. Tom lit the candles, cut the cake, and passed slices on small paper plates.

She thinks of the cake, how delicious it was, how hungry she is. With the swift pressing of a button she turns the car off and sits back against the seat. She could sleep for a long time.

The door to the garage opens. Tom steps out, setting a bag of trash on the ground by the filled bins. Seeing her in the driver’s seat, he smiles and waves. He didn’t work today but she had told him not to come to the appointment. He watches her as she slouches forward from the car and shuffles into the kitchen.

How was it?

She unwraps wrinkled cellophane coating from a mushed-in triangle of cake. Plastic utensils and plates splay across every surface in the kitchen and vases of slightly wilting flowers fill their house with a soggy cologne. So he hasn’t cleaned.

There’s saline and silicone gel, she says, but she doesn’t know which would be better. Some are filled during the operation itself, others are pre-filled. She doesn’t know if that makes a difference.

I’m sure the doctor can help you decide.

She says yes, she is sure he would. She sets the cake on the plate, feeling warm saliva fill her mouth. Fishing for a fork from the kitchen drawer, she takes a moment to look at the slice, the deformed lemon poppyseed layers and now-solid frosting, the three letters C-O-N crumbling in hardened icing along the top. But something black, a flicker in the white, catches her eye. She frowns.

What’s this?

He leans forward, narrowing his eyes.

Oh, he tells her, she shouldn’t eat this one. This one fell on the grass last night.

Her frown deepens as she peels the spider’s body back from the frosting, spreading its legs and thorax over the plate in a smudge of buttercream. He takes the plate, throws the cake away, and opens the fridge, searching for another slice. He mumbles that he didn’t think to throw it away last night, probably from all the drinking. She wipes tears from her eyes.

I really don’t know what to do.

There’s more cake, don’t worry.

No, she tells him, she doesn’t know whether to get silicone or saline.

Sliding a new piece of cake across the counter, he shrugs, saying sorry, he doesn’t know which one is better.