Always Happy Hour: Stories(43)
Darcie takes Terry’s hand and sets it on her leg, feels the heat and roughness through her thin dress.
The man in the pink shirt stands before she sees the bus rounding the corner; it pulls up right in front of her, right on time. It’s her favorite driver, the friendly black man who waits when he sees her running and lets her off at red lights. The black women yell a lot and get mad if she asks questions and the old white men don’t even turn to look at her when she gets on.
In the waiting room, Terry reads a magazine while she drinks water and fills out paperwork. Her bladder has to be full. She drank 32 ounces an hour before, just like the instructions said, but she peed. She wasn’t supposed to pee, and now they’re waiting for her bladder to fill back up again.
She takes her insurance card out of her purse, a private policy her parents pay too much money for every month. They used to pay her Chevron bill, too, but they stopped because there’s a Chevron two blocks from their apartment and they were going there three times a day to buy cigarettes and condoms and wine and toilet paper and plastic containers of flavored noodles. It is an exceptional Chevron, filled with locally made sandwich wraps and this fancy chocolate she likes, a gold sticker sealing the box.
She leans over and looks at the magazine Terry’s reading: it’s for men who want to discover the six things they don’t know about women. Terry is a good boyfriend in most ways but he doesn’t ask her questions about herself. He doesn’t seem curious about who she is and this bothers her when she thinks about it, when she wonders if he remembers her sister’s name, or what city her parents live in. When he asks her something, it’s about the immediate future: Does she want to ride bikes? Go to the pool? Yellow Jacket? There’s a barbeque at Boone’s house. Has she met Boone yet? She would like him. He’s good people.
Darcie turns in her paperwork and gets another refill. Then she sits back down and drinks: the water sloshing in her stomach. Terry puts his hand on her thigh and squeezes down it in increments until he gets to her knee. She knocks it off and elbows him as a pissed-off woman approaches the desk. The pissed-off woman tells them she’s late because the place was hard to find and she’s never been here before, and asks why she has to pay to park in the garage. The woman is well dressed, with careful hair and makeup. Darcie thinks she must have been beautiful once, the kind of formerly beautiful woman who had to find a different way of being in the world; she probably imagines she’s standing up for herself when really she’s just making everyone’s day less pleasant.
“What if I always bleed during sex?” Darcie asks, leaning forward to sort through the fan of magazines on the table.
“It would be okay,” he says. “We’ll buy red sheets and red towels.”
“No it wouldn’t be okay. We’d have to fuck in the shower every time we wanted to do it.” She locks eyes with the pissed-off woman’s husband, who sets his magazine on his lap and looks at her.
“I bleed every day,” Terry says.
“Are you being metaphorical? Please don’t be metaphorical right now.”
“No, I’m serious—I bleed every day. I fall off my skateboard or bike or cut myself shaving.” They both know this isn’t usually how he bleeds, that it’s much less romantic—the ingrown hairs that fester and leak, the acne scabs she accidentally scratches open on his back. She looks at her breasts and adjusts her dress, her black lace bra peeking out. There is still plenty of time to fuck up and begin again before she has to figure out a different way of being in the world.
“What if something’s actually wrong with me?”
“Then we’d deal with it.” He waits a moment and says, “I’d never leave you.”
It makes her want to prove him wrong. Of course he would leave; men aren’t expected to stay. Her hair would fall out and she wouldn’t be pretty anymore and he would leave, or he’d stay and hate her and she’d be forced to leave him. He pats her leg and says he thinks it’s the condoms, which he’s told her a dozen times already, and goes back to his magazine. She also thinks it might be the condoms. She’s never really used them before, not consistently, and finds them strange and horrible.
Darcie watches two little girls run around while their mother rests her head against the wall. One of the girls is about six and so fat she has breasts. She has a violent look about her: a flop of hair covering one eye and a jerkiness like it’s difficult for her to stop moving once she’s started, or to start once she’s stopped. One of the straps of her sundress slips off and Darcie waits for the girl’s mother to open her eyes and set the strap back on her shoulder, brush the mop of hair out of her eyes. The younger girl is delicate and pretty, but neither of them is aware of it yet—how they are different, how their paths will diverge.
When Darcie’s bladder is full, she tells the one in scrubs, and the woman leads her back to the sonogram room. She lifts Darcie’s dress and tucks a sheet into her panties, squeezes warm gel onto her stomach.
“Have you ever been pregnant?” the woman asks.
“Yeah but it didn’t take,” Darcie says.
The woman waits for her to say more so she explains that she miscarried very early, that the doctor said most women wouldn’t have even known they were pregnant. The woman asks a few more questions as she presses the wand to her bladder and then the clicking begins.