Three-Week Checkup by Michelle Ross
The exam room had one window, and on the other side a roadrunner looked in at Deena and the baby and the orange walls and the cushioned bench and the crate of toys and books that the nurse had assured Deena months ago got cleaned between each family’s visit. Red, white, and blue stripes showed so bright along the side of the roadrunner’s head that Deena wondered if the bird’s feathers concealed fifty tiny white stars. Deena felt that the roadrunner was not only watching her, but listening. This feeling of being monitored always was not new exactly. In the last couple months of pregnancy, twice she’d had to collect all of her urine for a 24‑hour period into a thick plastic pouch that had resembled a Camelback hydration pack, otherwise known as a bladder. During the labor, when she’d done some of the pushing in a warm tub, a nurse had, without a word, scooped escaped turds with a small aquarium net designed for transferring goldfish. Also, the midwife had checked the baby’s heart rate over and over again to make sure he was “coping with” Deena’s “long labor.” The midwife’s words had made Deena feel like a child told that her prolonged piano practice time was her own fault, because she kept getting distracted, doing shit other than playing piano. And the way the midwife scolded her as the baby was finally crowning: “You’ve got to push harder than that, Deena. Stop holding back.”
A show Deena watched sometimes on television, a show about human psychology, often showed video clips of adults and children both caught through a one-way mirror doing the thing they’d been instructed not to do: getting up from the chair, checking the cell phone, sneaking frosting from the cake. This is what Deena thought of when the nurse entered the exam room and began her cross-examination with the question, “Are you breastfeeding?” Of course, Deena knew the correct answer. She was grateful she didn’t have to think about this one, make a decision about whether to lie or embellish. A breast pad was stuck to her left nipple. She could smell the sweet funk of her milk, a scent something like a halved cantaloupe that had been left inside a parked car on a hot day. The nurse could probably smell it too. As if this weren’t evidence enough, the baby was asleep at her right breast, his mouth still clasped around her nipple. She thought of her friend Hazel’s online shop, Bootyque, on which Hazel sold pretty beaded nipple clamps she made by hand. Compared to Deena’s baby’s latch, Hazel’s clamps were like umbrellaed pink drinks to a straight shot of whiskey.
When the nurse asked Deena if she breastfed at night, Deena said, “Does a cow – ” Then she stopped. What she had meant to say about cows and what it had to do with breastfeeding at night, she wasn’t sure. Her words rarely came out right anymore. When she’d spoken to her mother-in‑law on the phone that morning, she’d felt as conspicuously incoherent as when she’d shown up to work for her grocery cashier job in high school still tripping on acid she’d taken the night before.
The nurse looked confused.
Deena said, “Yes, yes. I breastfeed at night.” She smiled. The nurse smiled.
But Deena’s smile was weak, self-conscious. Because the nurse seemed to Deena like an interviewer, the way she sat above Deena on that red swivel stool, typing words Deena couldn’t see into a laptop. In the fluorescent lights of the pediatrician’s office, Deena felt wholly unqualified for the position for which she was applying.
In the privacy of her home, when it was just Deena and the baby, she was comfortable enough, certainly not inadequate. The only serious hindrance was her exhaustion. She felt undone by her exhaustion, as though her body were a disassembled pile of pieces that a student was tasked with putting back together again to assess her mastery of anatomy and physiology. The student in question had not paid close attention in class, had not read her textbooks or studied the diagrams. Deena could hardly walk without bumping into things. It was a wonder she hadn’t dropped the baby or smashed his head into a door.
The nurse asked, “How many times in a given night do you breastfeed?”
This was an example of the other type of question the pediatrician and pediatric nurses asked: ridiculous questions that were impossible to answer.
Deena stared stupidly at the nurse. “You want a count?”
“It doesn’t have to be exact,” the nurse said. “How many times approximately?”
“What constitutes night?” Deena asked.
The nurse stared at her. “How about this: What is the maximum number of hours you’d say the baby goes without breastfeeding?”
“Hours?” Deena said. “Whole hours?”
The nurse seemed satisfied and asked no more questions about breastfeeding.
* * *
When the pediatrician entered the examination room, he sat on the stool and rolled over toward Deena. He said, “Let’s take a look at those ears, little man.” She held the baby out toward him, but he said, “Just hold him up for me.” Then he leaned in so close that she felt self-conscious about the sound of her own breathing. The pediatrician was handsome – not her type, but handsome all the same. His hair was longish, fluffy, and she had to restrain the urge to reach out and touch it.
When the pediatrician was done with his examination, he rolled over to the same laptop the nurse had typed into. He said, “How often does he have bowel movements?”
Deena felt sure she was blushing. The pediatrician didn’t beat around the bush.
She wanted to point out that it wasn’t a fair question, that she didn’t change all the diapers – most, yes, but not all. Did the pediatrician assume that because Jeff couldn’t make the appointment Deena was the sort of woman who did everything while her partner relaxed in front of the television with a beer?
Deena wondered if she’d chosen her pediatrician poorly. The books had said she ought to interview a bunch of doctors, but there’d been so much to do already to get ready for the baby without driving around town in a car with a faulty air conditioner to interview doctors. And really, what questions would she have asked? How different could pediatricians be? Now she thought that the good pediatricians would not ask a woman with a three-week-old infant to try to remember something so ridiculous as the number of times her infant’s bowels moved each day when she couldn’t even remember to brush her teeth.
Deena said, “Six maybe? Two? I’m not sure.”
The pediatrician typed something into the laptop. Then he looked back up and asked, “What are the baby’s sleeping arrangements?”
“Sleeping arrangements?” Deena said, not comprehending.
“Does the baby sleep in a crib or a bassinet?” the pediatrician said.
Of course, the answer was that the baby slept on Deena’s breast. Deena looked down at the baby, back up at the doctor. Was he gaslighting her? Where else would the baby sleep when the baby had one of her nipples in his mouth 24 hours a day?
There was a right answer to this question, and Deena sensed that “on my breast” was not it. But saying anything else seemed preposterous given the visible evidence. Like swearing she’d brushed her teeth that morning though she’d been eating mints at the rate she did popcorn at a movie and trying to open her mouth as little as possible because her teeth felt like moss-covered stones in a stagnant pond.
* * *
On the phone, Jeff said, “You should have lied.”
“Lying comes easily for you, doesn’t it?” she said from their bed, the baby asleep on her nipple again. The nipple that wasn’t currently in use was cracked and bleeding. She’d received nipple cream as a shower gift, petroleum jelly glorified by the elegant, pink pump that dispensed it, but the baby would spit her nipple out and howl if she didn’t wash the cream off before presenting said nipple.
“Lying about where our baby sleeps is inconsequential,” Jeff said. “Who cares what he thinks anyway?”
“Why do I bother going to these appointments if we don’t care what he thinks?”
“Because it’s illegal not to take a baby to the pediatrician for check‑ups?” Jeff said.
“Is it?” she said. One more question to which she didn’t know the correct answer. “And here I thought we took the baby to the pediatrician because we care about his welfare.”
Jeff sighed.
“And what if I lied and the doctor could tell?” Deena said.
“How would he know?” Jeff said.
“I’m not a good liar,” Deena said. She wanted to say something more, something about this feeling of always being watched, like even at this very moment, reclining on her bed with the baby asleep at her breast. Another roadrunner – or the same one? – stood on top of the wall at the edge of their backyard. The paranoid sensation that the animal could hear and comprehend her words was, even more than the shame at how crazy she’d sound, what kept Deena from saying more to Jeff.
“Everybody knows that plenty of people sleep with their babies,” Jeff said. “Put the baby in the bassinet if this bothers you. I don’t care.”
Jeff had been sleeping on the guest bed since the day they’d come home from the hospital. He’d lasted maybe two hours in their bed that first night before he took his pillow and left. On their honeymoon, when they got stuck in traffic on the way out of town because of an accident on the highway, she’d said, “We’re in this together. Relax. Let’s make the best of it.” But after a few minutes at a standstill, he’d slammed the dashboard with his fist.
“I’m so tired, I feel like I’m going to die,” she said now.
“I hear you. If I don’t get a good night’s sleep, I’m a wreck,” he said.
Once early in their relationship, she’d woken in the middle of the night, wrapped her arms around Jeff from behind and started kissing his ear; he’d swatted her like she was a giant fly. This is what she wanted to do to Jeff now. Swat him against a countertop. Watch his disfigured legs twitch.
“Can I get you anything from the store?” Jeff said.
“Homemade chicken parmesan. Or spaghetti and meatballs. Or a lasagna.”
Hazel had dropped off a loaf of zucchini bread the previous afternoon. Deena had screeched at Jeff when he’d started to cut a slice for himself. “That’s mine,” she’d said. “I’m practically starving to death. Hazel’s the only person feeding me.” He’d opened the pantry and motioned to the carton soup, then opened the freezer and pointed to the frozen meals stacked like lumber. She’d cried. He’d abandoned the zucchini bread.
“I can’t cook. But I love you. And because I love you, I’ll pick you up something from that Italian place on the way home,” Jeff said.
“I’m starving now,” Deena said.
“So eat the zucchini bread,” Jeff said.
“I already finished it,” she said.
“The entire loaf?”
“I told you I’m starving. I’m using up a good 500 calories or more a day feeding him.”
“Text me your dinner order,” he said. “I want a written record should you think you ordered something you didn’t.”
“I definitely said tomato basil,” she said as she hung up.
What she didn’t tell Jeff was that after she’d told the pediatrician that the baby slept on her breast, and after the pediatrician had said that this sleeping arrangement wasn’t safe for the baby, that she might roll over onto the baby in her sleep and smother it, the pediatrician had then asked her whether Jeff was supporting her. He’d said, “Is your husband supporting you and the baby?”
Deena had said, “I work full time too. I’m just on maternity leave.”
The pediatrician had squinted his eyes at her, then said, “I mean, when he’s home, is he helping care for the baby? Is he helping care for you so that you are able to care for the baby?”
“Define ‘care,’ ” Deena had said and laughed.
The pediatrician hadn’t laughed.
Neither did Deena tell Jeff about how outside the pediatrician’s office, in the parking lot, the baby strapped into his car seat, she had covered her eyes and cried. Or how when she took her hands from her eyes, she’d had the strange sensation that it was not noon but midnight and that, in fact, the sun was here to stay. And how she thought that because there would be no more darkness ever again, the criminals would have to adapt to committing their crimes in the light, and how once they made this adaptation, no part of the human world would even present the illusion of being safe again.
* * *
In the afternoon, after the baby had woken and nursed on the cracked and bleeding nipple, Deena took the baby outside to sit on the front porch swing. He seemed to enjoy being outside, and she did too. It was early April, not yet hot. The euphorbias were in bloom, each tiny green flower like a fanged throat. Butterflies and hummingbirds hovered. The baby looked out at the world with the kind of intensity Deena’s nephew and niece reserved for television and video games, only the baby’s expression was deadpan because he wasn’t able to smile or laugh yet.
A roadrunner crossed the street from Deena’s yard toward the bright, lavender-colored sage in the yard across the street. Was it the same roadrunner?
She said to the baby, “See the big bird running across the street? That’s a roadrunner.”
The elderly woman who lived next door, her name was Phyllis, came out then to water a potted aloe. She commented on the roadrunner too – to Deena, not the baby. Deena wondered if Phyllis could even see the baby, if her eyesight wasn’t so good. Most people couldn’t seem to resist commenting on the baby.
“I never get tired of seeing them,” Phyllis said of the roadrunner, and Deena thought about what a strange phrase this was. The real risk of the commonplace was that you might stop seeing the thing at all.
Deena said, “They’re funny birds.”
Also ruthless, she thought. Roadrunners were one of the few animals that could go head to head with a rattlesnake and prevail. She’d watched this in a video once. The roadrunner had walked right up to the rattlesnake, no fear. The animals had gone back and forth nipping at each other. Blood had spotted the roadrunner’s leg. But the roadrunner didn’t give a shit. He (or she?) eventually grabbed hold of the snake’s head, bashed it against the earth three times, and then devoured the snake whole. The video clip had ended with the snake’s rattle hanging out of the roadrunner’s mouth like a strange tongue.
Phyllis noted that Deena’s yard looked nice since Jeff had uprooted a couple of shrubs. “It’s less crowded,” Phyllis said.
Deena agreed with Phyllis, but she prickled at the woman feeling at ease expressing her judgment of their yard, which right now had quite a few weeds. Normally, Deena would have gone out and pulled them by now, but she didn’t have the strength.
Phyllis shared that a landscaper was coming soon to take out their mesquite tree. “The pods are too much work for me. I can’t keep up with them.”
Phyllis’ husband, Lee, could hardly walk anymore. Deena didn’t know much about it, only that for several months now Phyllis has been driving around with a wheelchair lift on the back of her SUV. Deena didn’t feel she knew her neighbors well enough to ask questions about their health. Or maybe she just didn’t want to hear the answers. Deena hadn’t even asked questions when her supervisor at work had taken a couple weeks off for brain surgery. She’d just said to her after she returned, “Welcome back.”
Even when Phyllis and Lee had first moved in about two years earlier, Lee hadn’t been in great shape. When Deena had introduced herself to them, he’d started to put out his hand, but Phyllis had quickly yelled, “Don’t shake his hand! He has shingles!” He’d pulled his hand back. “Oops,” he’d said. “Close one.”
Since that introduction, Deena had never seen him outside the house other than in the window of the SUV. In contrast, Phyllis was outside every morning and afternoon watering something, and, in late summer and in the fall, picking up mesquite pods.
The mesquite tree was a scapegoat, Deena thought. Phyllis seemed cheerful enough, but her decision to uproot the mesquite tree was like a small bulbous top of a root vegetable that showed at the soil surface, portending something more hidden beneath. Deena knew this: the thought of Jeff being incapacitated horrified her. She pictured him as a nearly two-hundred-pound infant slurping the marrow out of her bones.
Now Phyllis said, “Good mother. Breastfeeding that baby.”
Deena looked down to check that she hadn’t inadvertently left a breast exposed, but no, her breasts were properly tucked away. She looked across the street for the roadrunner. It was standing so still that it looked like a yard decoration.
* * *
Deena’s friend Hazel was always conducting experiments with the men she dated. Like when she’d dated Gerald, the guy who brewed beer in his kitchen and couldn’t shut up about his chocolate coffee brew, Hazel had once simulated giving a blowjob to an empty bottle of beer while Gerald was on the phone with his mother. The question prompting the experiment: was Gerald sexually repressed? The conclusion: yes. Evidence: the mean faces he made at her during the phone call and what he said after about how she’d disrespected his mother. Real-world application of the results of her research: she promptly broke up with him.
Deena decided she would conduct an experiment of her own.
Hazel said, “I don’t think this is such a good idea. What are you going to do if you don’t like the results of the experiment? Have you thought about that?”
“You seem rather certain Jeff will fail,” Deena said.
“It’s the poor experimental design I take issue with,” Hazel said. “Being conked out on Ambien and wine seems as good as leaving the baby home alone.”
But wasn’t prioritizing her own rest the correct thing to do? The way that making the baby sleep in a crib was the correct thing to do, according to the pediatrician, even though intuitively it felt wrong.
Deena had expected her friend to laugh devilishly on the other end of the phone, to give pointers.
“Whose side are you on?” Deena said.
“The baby’s?” Hazel said.
Deena sighed. Disturbed by the movement, the baby opened his eyes briefly, but soon closed them again. They were still out on the porch, the baby having lasted nearly forty minutes before passing out again.
Hazel said, “What if Jeff comes home late? What if he doesn’t come home at all?”
“The pediatrician said the safest place for the baby is a crib,” Deena said.
Hazel was silent for a while. Deena felt that Hazel was considering her the way one might a pot of hot soup that needed to be transferred to a storage container: considering whether energy and time saved was worth the risk of lifting the heavy pot and pouring instead of taking the slower, more cautious route of using a ladle.
Deena said, “The baby won’t die from a little interruption to his non-stop feeding frenzy.”
“You’re exhausted. Your logic is out of tune. You’re like a wonky guitar,” Hazel said.
“Hence the Ambien,” Deena said.
“I could come over and help,” Hazel said. She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic, though.
“That would tarnish the experiment,” Deena said.
“You already knew Jeff was the lovee in the relationship,” Hazel said then.
“The what?” Deena said.
“In every relationship, one person doles out more love than the other. That person is the lover. The other is the lovee. I don’t mean Jeff doesn’t love you, of course. But he’s not exactly a relationship nurturer. You know that. You’ve always known that.”
Deena pictured Phyllis picking up pods and driving around that wheelchair lift.
“I don’t want to be the lover,” she said.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Hazel said.
“Which are you?” Deena asked.
“It’s not a hard and fast rule. It can depend on the pairing. But lovee, almost always.”
“Fuck this shit,” Deena said.
“Except with Nigel,” Hazel said. “I would have had a dozen babies with that man.”
“Giving birth is evidence that I’m the lover?”
“Well, giving birth voluntarily,” Hazel said, “yes.”
* * *
There was a man Deena looked out for every day at about nine a.m. and later at about a quarter ‘til four, pushing a baby stroller. The man dressed like Deena did these days, in wrinkled and/or stained T‑shirts. His beard seemed to get more unruly by the day. The predictability of his schedule combined with the slovenliness of his appearance meant, she was fairly certain, he was at home with his baby all day long, like Deena. She imagined he cared for the baby while the mother was at an office, like Jeff. She imagined other things too, like that he danced with his baby the way that Deena danced with her baby, twirling the baby around her living room to the dark, smoky music of Tom Waits. And that he sat on his porch with his baby and pointed out flora and fauna.
She’d constructed a fantasy involving this man. In it, one morning (or afternoon, either one) the man pushes the baby stroller up Deena’s driveway and to her porch. He doesn’t say a word, just joins her on the porch with his baby. They sit there a while, the sun making them all incredibly sleepy. Then he takes her hand, and they go inside the house. He places the babies together in the crib, kisses their heads, a magic spell that makes the babies sleep for hours. Then he takes Deena’s hand, leads her to the bed and cuddles with her and casts the same sleep spell on her head. They sleep and sleep and sleep, and she is so grateful, she thinks she would do anything for this man.
It’s Sleeping Beauty in reverse. Funny because Deena had always hated how passive women are in so many fairy tales, Sleeping Beauty worst of all because the princess does absolutely nothing but sleep throughout nearly the entire tale. And that was just the clean Disney version. In an older version of the story, the sleeping beauty is raped in her sleep by a married king and carries to term twin babies, even giving birth to them without waking. “Bullshit,” she’d said when Hazel told her that some years ago. Now that she’d experienced birth herself, Deena found the tale even more ridiculous.
However, it did make a certain sense as a kind of parable, Deena thought. It had long seemed to her that there were two kinds of women – women who embraced being ogled, who felt empowered somehow by it, and women who did whatever they could to avoid being ogled. Or maybe it was more correct to say every woman was a bit of both types, but typically far more one than the other. A few times in her life Deena had experimented with trying to be the first type, like when she’d worn an extremely low-cut green top paired with tight, pale green leggings to one of Hazel’s Halloween parties. She’d been “sexy celery stalks.” But she’d been so uncomfortable, she’d eventually covered up with a sweater from Hazel’s closet. Deena had a theory that women who were comfortable being objectified put themselves to sleep. In other words, they were walking sleeping beauties.
When, predictably, the guy who pushed the stroller appeared a few minutes before four that afternoon, not long after Deena got off the phone with Hazel, Deena tried to casually but pointedly look at him so as to catch his eye. When that didn’t work, she called out, “Good afternoon!” He startled. When he saw her, he just put his hand up briefly in answer. Then he looked straight ahead again. It seemed to her he pushed the stroller a little faster.
The man’s slovenliness was what made him attractive to her. Deena saw his appearance as indication of his mutual suffering. It made him endearing. But she understood that her own slovenliness had the opposite effect. She was undesirable, a woman to be avoided. Even if she were to offer, say, a blowjob in return for several hours of uninterrupted sleep, she doubted there was a man, other than a scurvy creep with whom she wouldn’t dare leave her baby, who would take her up on the offer in her current state.
She thought of Shannon Rourke, a woman she’d gone to college with, who now had five kids, was a Ph.D. student, and who boasted on her blog about how she read a minimum of three books a week, mopped the kitchen twice a day, made her own cleaning products and deodorant, and was at work on a novel and a memoir both on top of her dissertation. Is that what it took to earn some damn sleep? You had to be a fucking superhero during your waking hours?
Phyllis came back outside. She waved to Deena.
“Yes?” Deena said, half afraid Phyllis was about to offer some further judgment about her mothering.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?” Phyllis said.
The roadrunner was back, this time a few houses down, standing in the shadows of a palo verde trunk. Deena thought of the roadrunner and coyote cartoons, how no matter what Wile E. Coyote tried – dynamite, a wrecking ball, a boxing glove attached to a spring – the plan failed him. He was fated to fail, and the cruelest part was that every time he died, he was resurrected so that he could live out the same damn story again. And again and again ad infinitum. That must be what hell is, Deena remembered thinking as a kid – not so much the failure part as the repetition, the monotony.
She said to Phyllis, “I’m not going anywhere for at least two and a half months.”
Phyllis asked if Deena would keep her eye out for a package that was supposed to be delivered that day. “We’ll be gone for only about forty minutes, but of course it will probably be delivered the minute I leave. It’s really important, and I worry about someone stealing it, you know?”
Deena didn’t know, but she agreed to watch for the package. Then she watched Phyllis’ SUV back out of the garage. From the passenger seat, Lee looked straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to Deena watching him. Then they were gone.
Just as Phyllis had predicted, a UPS truck pulled up in between their houses about five minutes after Phyllis and Lee drove away. That damn UPS truck pulled up in between their houses nearly every single day, but always his deliveries were for Phyllis and Lee.
Deena hoped as she had every day for the last few weeks that today the UPS guy would have a package for her too. Even after he walked up Phyllis’ driveway with a box so large she could probably curl herself up inside it, then returned to the truck emptyhanded, Deena held out hope that there was something in that Santa bag for her.
She’d received zero packages since giving birth. Not even flowers from her employer, whom she knew had sent flowers to coworkers when they’d had babies because she’d seen the thank-you notes pinned to the corkboard in the office breakroom. An oversight, Hazel claimed. “You know how disorganized your company is.”
Before Deena had given birth, there’d been plenty of gifts, albeit for the baby. Onesies, hand-knitted booties, pastel blankets mysteriously labeled “receiving blankets.” Deena had pictured people holding these blankets out like baskets in church, in which she was to place the baby like a ten-dollar bill. The only gift that had really been for Deena had been a bottle of whiskey and that had been from Hazel. Now that the baby was no longer inside her, Deena felt like discarded wrapping paper at a birthday party.
The UPS guy climbed back into the truck, his only delivery for Deena a head nod.
She felt like hurling something, only the thing strapped to her chest was not a stone or a stick of TNT, it was her baby, and he wasn’t to blame for her giftlessness. Or as many people would point out, he was her damn gift. A treasure. A miracle. What more did she want?
Well, chicken parmesan, for starters.
Deena need not retrieve Phyllis’ package as long as she remained on the porch to monitor the situation, but after several minutes of wondering what the hell was in that huge package – a television, a wine fridge – her curiosity got the best of her. She could peek inside, then re-tape the box. It’s not like Phyllis would accuse her of opening the package for which she’d asked Deena to keep an eye out.
So she stood up ever so slowly so as not to wake the baby inside its detachable uterus, and she gathered scissors and packaging tape from her kitchen and stuffed these things into the smaller of her two diaper bags, this one intended to look like a fashionable purse. A shower gift from a ditzy cousin. She looked about the street to see if anyone was around. Then she crossed the invisible divide between her yard and Phyllis’.
* * *
The box was not the first thing that caught Deena’s attention when she came face to face with Phyllis’ front door; it was the key in the lock. A dull, copper-colored key seemingly identical to the key Deena carried around on her keyring.
She’d seen the inside of this house before, but not since Phyllis and Lee had occupied it. They were the third couple to live in the house since Deena and Jeff had moved in. The previous couples had both been young. Even so, visiting this house back then, Deena had been struck by how different her adult decorating aesthetic was from her slightly younger neighbors. In the hands of both the previous couples, the house had reminded Deena of the homes of her aunts and uncles when she was a kid. Clean, uncluttered, yes, but also sterile and fake, like a department store display. Take the big glass bowl of decorative balls made of silver wire that Brie and John, the first couple, had placed on the console table. Or the mass-produced signs hung about by Leanne and Marcus, signs that read “Love,” “Family,” “Joy,” and “Hope.” Deena had joked to Jeff after that they ought to put up word signs of their own – “Hate,” “Greed,” “Corpses,” “Decapitation.” Then invite Leanne and Marcus over for dinner just to see the looks on their faces.
The doorknob turned with the same stiffness as Deena’s own front door. When she pushed open the door, the first thing she noticed was the smell – acidic and sweet, but a little off, like a moldy lemon. Shannon Rourke had written an entire blog post once about uses for a moldy lemon, a list that had included making your own penicillin.
Deena quickly saw that the house was no longer reminiscent of a department store display. The house, in fact, made Deena’s house seem tidy, in contrast, even though neither she nor Jeff had yet to put away the pantry items he’d brought home several days earlier – spaghetti, oatmeal, cans of beans, etc. Cardboard boxes were stacked about the foyer – many of them empty. The boxes that weren’t empty contained items such as a 40‑pack bag of adult diapers, a 24‑roll pack of toilet paper, a handicap toilet seat.
Moving further into the house, Deena saw that one of the recliners in their living area was littered with crumbs, like a child’s car seat. Next to the recliner on the floor was a donut-shaped pillow in a red tartan plaid print.
Even the walls and the curtain covering the sliding glass door were sad in their matching taupe, the color of a stick of concealer.
Phyllis had made a small effort to make the house nice by placing a vase of flowers on the bar, but within the surrounding environment the gladiolas seemed to Deena like a small, injured fawn in a nature video, a fawn that had gotten abandoned by its group. It was only a matter of time before something, whether a predator or simply the harshness of the elements, ravaged the animal.
Deena realized she no longer envied Phyllis the box on her porch, nor was she curious to see what was inside. No, Phyllis was not someone to be envied. Phyllis was, in fact, a tragic character. Like Wile E. Coyote, for whom the normal laws of nature didn’t apply. This had perhaps been most clearly illustrated when he placed a painting of a continuous cliff road to conceal that the real road ended, crumbled into an abyss. Fantastically, the roadrunner enters the painting, runs on untarnished. As if that weren’t impossible enough, as the roadrunner disappears in the distance, a huge semi comes roaring out of the painting. Yet when Wile E. Coyote tries to enter the painting himself, he rips through the canvas, plummets to another death.
This is what Deena was thinking when she spotted the box of chocolates next to the coffee maker. She opened the box to survey what was inside. Meatball-sized truffles that smelled of cinnamon. She started to reach for one and then stopped herself. The chocolates belonged to Phyllis, and the woman deserved whatever small pleasure she could rake up from life.
But then Deena pictured Jeff sitting in the Italian restaurant with a drink, waiting on the food he ordered in the restaurant rather than on the phone so that he could have a reason to order that drink and then another. By the time the food was ready, he’d be tipsy enough to not care if the food got cold while he had a third drink.
She decided that she deserved a truffle as much as Phyllis did and that taking just one truffle wasn’t so terrible. Maybe Phyllis wouldn’t even remember how many she’d already eaten, the way that Deena had been confused that afternoon when she went to the kitchen for another piece of zucchini bread only to find that the bread was gone, its crumpled foil wrapper in the wastebasket.
But Deena didn’t stop at one truffle. She ate a second and a third. When the roadrunner appeared on the wall outside Phyllis’ kitchen window, the wall that separated their two yards, Deena thought of the little girl on that television show who had taken the cake, literally. Before the researcher left her alone in the room with the slice of pink-frosted cake, he had shown her a dolly and said to her, “Would you like to have this dolly?” The girl had smiled and nodded. The researcher had said that if the girl could resist eating the cake for fifteen minutes, then she could have the dolly and the cake both. “Does that sound good?” he’d said. “Can you do that?” The girl had nodded.
The researcher wasn’t even gone for thirty seconds when the girl dipped her pinky finger into the cake’s frosting. A few seconds later, she pinched crumbs from the cake. Then she grabbed fistfuls of the cake and shoved them into her mouth, one after another, until there was nothing left but a pink smear on the white plate.
Deena had thought at the time that the girl must have imagined she could get away with it somehow, claim that the cake just disappeared, that she had nothing to do with it. That the girl believed the researcher would not possibly deny her the dolly. But now, as Deena placed a fourth truffle into her mouth, she concluded that no, the girl had been smarter than that. The girl had understood that life didn’t play out the way you were told it would. She’d understood that you better take what you could get while you had the chance.
Michelle Ross is the author of the short story collection There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press 2017). Her stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Nashville Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Cream City Review, and The Common.