by Ashley Ream
“Can I call Dr. Gothenburg?”
“I fired him.”
“Are you seeing another therapist?”
“Nope.”
A small blob of cheese had leaked out the edge and started to solidify. I picked it off and ate it. American. It was the flavor of childhoods and picnics and then it was dust on my tongue. I wanted to spit it out. I heard Carla gathering her patience, or maybe I felt it. I don’t think I saw it, but maybe I did.
“What time is Jenny going to come?”
“I fired her, too.”
“Clementine.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against my headboard. It felt cool and hard against my back. All of me felt cool. Goose bumps came up on my arms and legs.
“I don’t feel right leaving you alone,” Carla said.
“I wish you would. Why did you come?”
“To talk about your show. To discuss how we were going to handle it after the incident.” Her voice got tight on that last bit.
“I’m not having a show. I told you.”
“I don’t think you should at the Taylor.”
“Elaine showed first. Even though she stole from me, it won’t look that way. It’ll look like I’m copying.”
“It could hurt sales,” she admitted.
“And the gallery isn’t going to defend me.”
Carla didn’t respond to that. “Eat the sandwich. You’ve lost weight since I saw you last. No one earns points with me looking like an African famine victim.”
She got up from the bed and walked back to the kitchen. She picked up the phone and started pushing buttons, flipping through my caller ID history. She pushed another button and put it to her ear. I made a note to be offended tomorrow or the next day. That was an invasion of privacy. I looked down at the sandwich on my lap and realized my underpants were still pulled down under my butt. That was an invasion of privacy, too. I pulled them up.
Carla talked to someone on my phone. Told them I was sick. Asked them to come over. I set the plate on the nightstand and slid back down onto my back. I found the corner of a sheet and pulled it up to my chin. I thought about the drugs I’d flushed. Goodnight, Thorazine. Goodnight, lithium.
That’s the last thing I remembered.
22 Days
When I woke up, the light in the apartment was pink and orange. I blinked and wondered if it was sunrise or sunset. Jenny was on the blue stool pulled up to the worktable. She was sorting the stack of magazines and papers. The ones Chuckles had kicked off were no longer on the floor. I rolled onto my side and pushed up to sitting.
Jenny looked up.
“Are you going to work?”
“I’m thinking about underpants,” I said.
“Okay. Do you need to put some on?”
“I need to get rid of some.”
I got up and shuffled to my dresser. I had to pee again. I made a note to deal with that later. I opened the top drawer and started digging through my lingerie. I was wearing cotton briefs. They’d been black, but too many hot washes had turned them dark gray. I liked them. They were comfortable. I pulled out the underwear I didn’t like. I pulled out the ones that were binding and made of silky, non-natural fabrics that didn’t breathe and gave you yeast infections. The underwear I’d bought for the men I’d dated. The sexy underwear I hated to wear. I pulled out the thongs. All the thongs. The thongs were the worst offenders. I dropped them all in a pile on the floor, and when there was nothing left in the drawer but cotton briefs that had gone through too many hot washes, I scooped up the pile and carried it over to the loveseat.
“Bring me some scissors, please,” I said.
“What do you want with them?”
“Just do it.”
The corners of her mouth turned down, but she did what I asked. “I put the sandwich Carla made in the fridge,” she said. “Do you want me to heat it up for you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t touch it.”
I picked out a hot pink thong and started cutting.
“Clementine.”
I made long strips and put them in another pile on the other side of my lap.
“Clementine, why are you doing that? I can go buy you underwear to cut up if you want. You don’t have to use your own.”
I picked up a black satin pair next.
She came at me another way. “Carla said she would move your show to the Contemporary. She called while you were asleep. It’s all set. It’ll matter less about Elaine’s show if you have yours there.”
“It’ll matter exactly the same amount.”
“Maybe not quite as much.”
I put the strips into a pile.
“I wrote the dates down,” Jenny said. “They’re expecting your call.”
I kept cutting, and Jenny went into the kitchen. People were always going into my kitchen. A few minutes later, she set a bottle of sparkling water by my feet. “Are you going to cut up the rest of your clothes?” she asked.
I really hadn’t thought about it. One project at a time.
By ten o’clock that night, the television was on, and the sandwich crusts were on a plate by the sink. Jenny had gone off to meet her new boyfriend, and I was weaving my strips into four-inch squares.
The phone had rung three times before Jenny left. I’d told her not to answer it. I could see the red light blinking on the machine. I didn’t need to listen to the messages. I knew what they said. I’d heard them when he left them. Dr. Gothenburg wanted to come over. Carla had called him when she got back to the gallery. That seemed like an invasion of privacy, too. I was going to have to do something about that.
I put a loop in the corner of the square I’d just finished and held it up—one perfectly functional potholder. It was far more functional than the underpants. If I hung them on a gallery wall, critics would talk about the sexual symbolism, the conversion to a homemaker’s tool, the whore-to-mother business. Bullshit. I hated those underpants, and everyone needed potholders. Even Carla.
I stood up from the loveseat and almost fell down. I’d been sitting cross-legged for so long I couldn’t feel my feet. I was numb from the knees down. I waited for the pricking and stinging and tingling to start as the blood opened the veins up and the flesh came back to life.
Yep, there it went. I curled my toes. That never stopped hurting no matter how old you got. It hurt when you were a kid and hurt when you were an old lady in her underpants. That reminded me I should probably change my clothes. I might smell.
I gathered up the potholders I’d made and found a large manila envelope in Jenny’s desk. I picked up a Sharpie marker from the cup of pens and wrote the Taylor Gallery’s address on the front, shoved the potholders inside, sealed it, and set it by the door to go out, right next to the overnight bag I had never unpacked.
I unzipped the bag and pushed around dirty laundry until I found the small bag of coffee and carried it to the kitchen sink. I slipped a paring knife out of the block and used it to slice through the tape holding the coffee closed. It split, and the smell of mornings and cafés and an ex-boyfriend with a serious espresso addiction came rolling out. I upended the grounds into the sink until I heard the ka-chink of glass on metal. I stopped pouring, picked up the small bottle, and dusted it off.
Dropping the half-empty bag in the trash, I carried the vial of liquid to the bathroom, rolling it between my palms, heating up the glass, appreciating how open to transference the material was. I flipped on the light, knocked a few stray grains of coffee off my palms and the bottle, and moved my toothbrush holder to the left. There was a small shelf above the pedestal sink and below the mirrored medicine cabinet. I slid two bottles of perfume over a few inches and placed the tranquilizer right in the middle, spinning the vial around so the label was facing forward. Then I looked at it. The display was calming. I could feel my blood pressure dropping and my shoulders relaxing just standing there. This, I thought, is how some people feel about fish tanks.
I gave it a few more minut
es, and when I was as relaxed as I was going to be, I flipped off the light and went to bed.
21 Days
“Well, that could’ve gone better.”
Chuckles was in his carrier licking the pouf of fur on his chest. He was refueling. All the reserve hair in his stomach had been yacked up on the carpet of the only people who had responded to our ad. They were going to “think it over” and “call me,” which I was pretty sure was code for “leave the state” and “never speak of this again.”
The yowling hadn’t helped either.
“Is he always this vocal?” the young couple had asked.
They were newly married, newly moved in together, both with jobs that involved cubicles and their own extensions. The husband had given me his business card when I arrived. I assumed that was new, too. The condo looked like they’d robbed the showroom of a Pottery Barn. I suspected Chuckles was to have been their practice baby. They’d given me a tour of the place when I arrived, and there was a suspiciously underdecorated spare room that seemed to be waiting for something to happen. “Why buy decorative throw pillows,” it seemed to say, “when you’re just going to have to pick out a crib?” And I was okay with that. They were nice enough, unlikely to use Chuckles for dogfighting bait, and had brought out the good cookies for guests.
We were seated on the sofa, which was upholstered in pale green chenille. Chuckles was newly freed from his portable jail cell and sniffing all the furniture for signs of poodle. I had finished chewing my dark chocolate Milano and was eyeing another. I hadn’t eaten breakfast.
“He’s very quiet most of the time,” I said. “He just doesn’t like the carrier.”
That’s when he’d heaved and convulsed and yacked all over the floor.
“Oh,” the woman had said, putting a hand to her chest and fiddling with her diamond solitaire pendant. “Oh.”
Once the ball of fur was out, Chuckles shook himself off and rubbed his face on the man’s bare ankle. He’d stopped yowling, but it was too late.
“We’re sorry about your illness,” the man had said as he ushered me toward the door, past a Taiwanese-made urn full of tall fake grass. “Maybe you’ll get better.”
“It’s terminal,” I assured him.
“Well, you never know,” he chirped and shut the door.
Shit.
I started the car and pulled away from the curb.
“I have another appointment,” I told Chuckles. “Behave yourself.”
Forty minutes later, I parked at a meter on Lincoln Boulevard. Palm trees lined the east/west streets that veered toward the beach a mile away, but the doctor’s office was crammed between a liquor emporium and a gas station advertising two-for-one candy bars and a sale on cigarettes.
I took Chuckles inside with me because 20/20 had warned me about leaving pets in the car. His fur could catch on fire even if the temperature was a good ten degrees cooler this close to the ocean. A bell tinkled over the door, and the receptionist looked up. A small fan was pointed at her and another whirred and oscillated in the waiting room.
“I have an appointment,” I said.
She pointed to a sign-in sheet on the other side of the bulletproof glass. She didn’t mention the cat, and I didn’t, either. The rest of the room was lined with green plastic lawn chairs. Maybe they’d been two-for-one next door along with the candy bars. I signed my name.
“A consultation is a hundred dollars. That’s not refundable whether the doctor makes a recommendation or not.”
I slid a credit card through the slot in the glass, signed the receipt, and took the new patient sheet she shoved through. It was short, and once it was filled in, there wasn’t much to do. There were no magazines and no television, but someone had left the classified section of the Times. I checked the date. It was a week old. An elderly woman with a footed metal cane sat four chairs down and didn’t look at me. I figured that was proper etiquette and didn’t look at her, either.
A middle-aged man in a button-down shirt tucked into his jeans stepped out of a door at the end of the room. “Mrs. Shipley?”
The woman rose up, leaning heavily on her cane, and shuffled toward the open door. I spent my time using the toe of my work boot to clean scuff marks off the floor. No one else came in. The receptionist read a magazine she didn’t offer to share. I leaned down to look in Chuckles’s carrier. He was lying flat with his squished-up face on his front paws. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. He was either asleep or moving toward the light.
Five minutes later, Mrs. Shipley came shuffling out of the room and headed for the door. She left a trail of skid marks on the floor with her footed cane. Old people. You can’t take them anywhere.
The same middle-aged head came out. “Ms. Pritchard?”
I picked up Chuckles, who woke up and started pacing around, throwing off the balance of the carrier and making it rock like ocean waves. It was hard to hold and made me walk funny. I was trying to look sober and responsible, and this wasn’t helping. The doctor didn’t mention the cat, and I didn’t, either. I gave him my new patient sheet, and he scanned it.
“Have a seat.”
He was made of various shades of beige. His skin was oatmeal and his hair khaki. His eyes were a light brown, and he used them to avoid looking at mine. He had a metal desk shoved all the way to one side and a guest chair next to that. There wasn’t room for anything else. Someone had sent him flowers, and they sat next to his laptop, which was open and playing a fractal screensaver.
“What brings you here today?” he asked my collarbone.
“I’m anxious,” I said. “I have anxiety.”
“I see.”
I waited a beat and nothing happened.
“I’d like to be able to control that without prescription pharmaceuticals.”
He nodded and used his toes to push himself forward and back a little in his rolling chair. “Do you have any allergies?”
“No.”
“Are you taking any other medications?”
“No.”
He was reading the questions off the form I’d filled out and handed to him.
“Any other medical conditions?”
“Healthy as a horse,” I said. “Except for the anxiety.”
“Right.”
He sniffed. I imagined this was not how he’d pictured himself in medical school. He probably hadn’t been very good at it, just good enough to get by but not enough for a good specialty. It was the worst kind of smart, just barely smart enough. No oncology or surgery or even gynecology for him.
“Okay, I’m going to write your recommendation. You can present it to any dispensary. It is not a prescription, and they may choose not to fill it at any time.”
“Got it,” I said.
He pulled out a piece of cream-colored paper the size of a paperback book and embellished with more scrollwork than my high school diploma. He filled in the blanks, slipped it into a black envelope made of equally nice stock, and handed it over. I didn’t know whether to use it or frame it.
“Thank you.”
“Use it responsibly.”
Chuckles and I walked out into the offensively bright sunshine and down half a block. I could smell french fries bubbling in grease somewhere nearby. A Hispanic woman my age and wearing a Bebe T-shirt pushed a shopping cart loaded with recyclable bottles past me, and Chuckles let out a hiss.
“Can it,” I told him and opened the door.
The dispensary was air-conditioned and quiet with a mild herbal smell. A long wooden counter stained a dark walnut stretched from one end of the small space to the other. On the other side of the shop, tables and shelves displayed natural soaps and shampoos alongside bottles of vitamins and supplements for which you did not need a doctor’s recommendation.
A young woman with blond hair pulled into a loose knot stood behind the counter reading a book. She had a hoop inserted into her earlobe that stretched the skin around it. She looked up.
“Is that a cat
?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
“I have a recommendation from my doctor,” I said.
By “my doctor,” of course, I meant “a guy I looked up in the Yellow Pages whom I’d never see again.” She didn’t care. I wondered if anyone ever tried shooting spitballs through her stretched earlobe hole.
“Cool. What do you want?”
She looked behind her, and I followed her gaze. Large glass apothecary jars were displayed on the shelves behind her. Dozens and dozens of jars, each with a carefully hand-lettered label on the front. Some were more full than others. Inside, each batch was a slightly different shade of green. Together the jars formed a subtle, mossy rainbow of forest colors. All pharmacies should be that beautiful.
“What do you recommend?”
She slid off her stool and pulled down three jars, lining them up on the polished counter in front of me. She opened each in turn, announced its name, and held up some for me to smell and inspect. It was like a tasting at a good wine bar. I started to really like this girl, even if the book she’d flipped over and laid spread out to hold her place was by Ayn Rand.
I chose weed number two, and she filled a small glass jar with a screw-on lid for me, the way department stores package custom-blended cosmetics. I showed her my recommendation, and she rang up the purchase. The whole thing was very civilized, much better than anything I did to score in high school. For one thing, I didn’t have to drive to the Valley and end up in some kid’s basement bedroom with a fistful of small bills and a cold sweat.
“Do you take your cat everywhere now?”
“Yes. Didn’t I fire you?”
“Disturbingly, that’s so, but I felt a duty to my fellow man to make sure you didn’t starve to death.”
Miles, who was sitting in front of my door with his unnaturally long legs stretched out in front of him, held up a paper grocery sack by the top loop handles. Something green and leafy was sticking out the top. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something with leaves, and Miles was the sort of cook who knew what a béarnaise sauce was.
