The worst thing you could tell Maria to do was relax. She thrived on her tension. She held herself tightly, like a cord had been pulled taut in her spine and if you introduced any slack, her whole body would collapse. She talked fast, she moved fast, she acted fast. She was like a caricature of the uptight career woman, all well-cut suits and clicking heels. She was one of those women who seemed to be carrying a clipboard, even when she wasn’t, like she was checking everything off on some sort of list that only she could see. Her eyes scanned every room quickly, her movements were precise and she kept her arms pressed tightly to her sides, like her elbows were sewn on to her ribs.

The contrast here in the waiting room was almost unbearable. Here, Maria’s cord seemed to have been cut. She was slumped in a corner on one of those peculiar yellow chairs that seem to exist only in hospitals – you know the kind, a sort of mustard-y vinyl with chrome arms with a chunk of wood stuck on as a handle? The square edge of the handle looked to be digging into the side of her bicep but she didn’t notice. Her suit was rumpled, her high heels were under the chair – one stood up and one on its side. She seemed to have misplaced the inner clipboard. There was no movement at all, fast or otherwise. Looking at her gave me a pain like something jammed up under my ribs.

It was one of those times where you know you have to say something but you have no idea where to start. I figure though, that if you don’t know where to start then the beginning doesn’t matter that much.

“I guess the Doctor has been out?”

She turned her head toward me so slowly that I couldn’t be certain she was actually moving. Her eyes didn’t seem to be focused on me at all.

“Oh, Mandy. Uh, no the Doctor hasn’t been out. We still don’t know anything.” She spoke like her audio had been slowed down for effect. Hearing her was worse than seeing her, it made it all seem too real. My Dad was in the operating room, they weren’t sure he was going to make it, and the Doctor was still in the trenches. I had held it together throughout the phone call, and the flight, and the taxi ride to the hospital, but seeing my step-mom like a puddle in the corner of the hospital waiting room was the thing that tightened my chest and brought the tears down. If Maria couldn’t keep it together then I was lost.

She knew that it was supposed to make her feel bad, the way they talked about her, but really there was a sort of power in it. If people couldn’t help but talk about you it was probably worth it no matter what they had to say. And if her legs drew the eye, if her breasts held attention, then she had them for those few minutes, didn’t she?

It seemed like it would be worse not to be noticed at all. The thought lurched her stomach like she was hitting turbulence. What would it be like to just be there? To not be noticed? To blend in with the walls, with the desks? To be just one of the girls, curlers and make-up testing on a Friday night. Or worse, to be just one of the guys, drinking beer and stirring up girly belches to make her guy friends laugh.

She was more than that, she was bigger, she was better. The guys might have thought they were using her, rolling off and hurrying home, but they were fools. She had drawn them in to her web, and they were helpless – when she was done, she just cut the threads loose and let them drop.

She wasn’t stuck with some loser boyfriend that way. No one told her what to wear or how to cut her hair, or expected her to laugh at their jokes. They didn’t joke with her at all, and that was how she liked it. She didn’t have to be coy or play any games, there was no one to please but herself and that pleased her just fine.

The mothers talked, and the teachers gave her warnings of increasing sharpness, but she wasn’t buying into it. The guys tried to brag, and the girls tried to shame her, but they were missing something. Guys can only brag when they get one over on someone, but she was in charge all along. Girls can only shame you if you feel ashamed. She had been tired, bored, excited and satisfied by the guys she drew into her web, but she never once felt ashamed.

She slipped into her heels in front of the mirror, tugged down the hem of her skirt and the neckline of her shirt. She fluffed the sides of her hair, and put another layer of red on her lips. She nodded at her reflection, grinned and winked.

She had the web ready, it was time to draw a few pathetic creatures in.

(slight trigger warning for descriptions of aggressive behaviour)

       “I can’t believe he hasn’t left yet.” Her voice was soft, with a sort of apology in it. The way she was curled around the pillow at the end of the worn grey couch meant I could barely hear her. It wasn’t the first thing that I had to get her to repeat today, but this one had taken the most repetitions to be coherent. It wasn’t the volume, it was the content that my ears wouldn’t wrap around.

“Cara, I don’t want to tell you what to do…Wait, no.” I took a breath, I wanted to get this just right. “I do want to tell you what to do. You need to kick him out.”

“I’m not kicking him out. I love him! He loves me.” She was looking up at me now, the mascara smeared under her eyes made her look like a football player. “We’re just having a bit of a bad patch. I just need to try a little harder. If I could just stay on top of things, we would be fine..”

I bit the end of my tongue to keep my first words in.

“You don’t understand, Diane. He works so hard, all he wants when he comes home is some peace and quiet. And maybe to have his supper ready at a decent time. That’s not a big deal, I should be able to do that. Why can’t I just do that?” She drew in one of those ragged breaths that we all do when we want to stop crying. “He’s not asking much.”

If it was just supper and some quiet, I could maybe see some room for compromise between her and Dean, but I knew that it didn’t end there. The house was spotless because of the cleaning schedule she was supposed to keep. His shirts had to be ironed and hung a specific way or they’d be torn down and thrown in a pile to be re-ironed. Her outfits were closely inspected to ensure that she was ‘decent’ before she could go out.

It was a dangerous road she was on. So far he hadn’t hit her, he was apparently wearing her spirit down first. I felt it was coming though and this might be her last easy chance to get out. She could probably feel the danger, too, but once you get stuck trying to please a person like that, you lose all perspective. There are so many details to manage that you forget how to move your mental camera back and get a better view.

“You’re right, Cara, either of those isn’t asking too much, but you work, too. When’s the last time he made supper?”

Before she answered, I realized that I had asked the wrong question.

“Hang on. First, tell me when you get off work.”

“Six o’clock, but I don’t get home until about twenty after.” Her eyebrows were practically meeting as she tried to figure out why I was asking.

“What time does Dean finish?”

“Four-thirty. He’s home around 4:45.”

“And he doesn’t make supper because?”

“Well, he needs to relax a bit after work, take some downtime. He works so hard.”

“What time does he like to eat supper?”

“Well, we’ve compromised. He’d prefer to eat at six, but if I make sure to take out something the night before I can usually have something ready by 6:45 or

7:00. I couldn’t manage tonight though, work ran late and there was an accident on the crosstown so I was caught in traffic.”

“So, he gets almost two hours to relax after work and you get to rush in, whip supper together and get it on the table? And tonight he got super mad because he

had three hours after work to relax but you were being too chatty while preparing his supper a little later than usual?” I deliberately kept my tone neutral, just presenting the facts as I heard them.

I practically heard the switch as she pulled the camera back and got the wide view.

“Yes. That’s exactly right.” She let go of the pillow and sat up, swinging her legs down off the couch to put her feet flat on the floor. “And there was a pile of shirts on the closet floor for me to re-iron after supper, too.”

I smiled at her realization. “So, tell me Cara, when is your time to relax after work?”

She smiled back. “I guess that would be now, Diane.” She took the crumpled tissue from her fist and wiped the mascara from under her eyes. “Can you maybe pour us a glass of wine?”

When I came back in with the wine, she looked like herself again, leaning back on the couch, her feet on the coffee table. Dean hated when people did that, but it was her table, in the house that she had bought long before he was in the picture, and she was obviously remembering everything she owned. I handed her the wine and we raised our glasses and nodded to each other before taking a sip.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t left…yet.” Her eyes held a dare this time and she was grinning. “I wonder what else I need to do to get him to go?”

(60 minutes total – writing and editing)

And then as he moved his hand closer to her leg where it rested on the bus seat, she pulled the pencil she was clutching out of her purse and jammed it into the fleshy space between his thumb and index finger. She felt the corners of her mouth rise as he screamed.

Maribeth would like to carry out all of the revenge fantasies she lived in her head. If she could do it without consequences. She didn’t want to go to jail or anything, she just wanted some justice, no matter how small. Her daily rounds were a death by paper cut – not one fatal blow but hundreds of tiny slashes. She was tired of the pain.

Like the man on the bus this morning who kept ‘accidentally’ touching her leg. Nothing adding up to an actual assault of course but it was no accident. She knew better and so did he, and his tilted head and smirk showed that he knew there was nothing she could do about him touching her.

Karen at the front desk let the coffee boil dry again. She always took the last cup, leaving just enough at the bottom to cling to a sliver of truth in the phrase ‘it wasn’t empty.’ Maribeth found herself soaking and washing the coffeepot for what had to be the thousandth time since she started working there.

Sherry stepped ahead of her in the lunch line, Mike had taken all the pens off her desk again, a client belched in her ear. The doctor kept her waiting while he chatted in the hallway about the hockey game, the grocery store clerk put the bread on the bottom of the bag of tinned food.

None of these things were significant in themselves but they made up the avalanche of tiny indignities that would have crushed her if she didn’t imagine her revenge.

In her mind, she was much more assertive. She wore red heels, and maybe a pair of those enormous sunglasses. She carried a great purse, she had a brain full of witty comebacks, and she took action immediately. She didn’t shuffle like she did in real life, revenge fantasy Maribeth had a bit of a strut. No one got one over on that Maribeth.

Lecherous men found themselves extracting pencils, coffee bandits got ex-laxed, line skippers and pen stealers were featured in Wanted posters on the company bulletin boards. Nasty clients got accidentally left on hold. Disrespectful doctors encountered a wall of rage in red heels, and grocery clerks found themselves in long meetings with their managers. Revenge fantasy Maribeth did not fool around.

Real-life Maribeth looked out the window on the bus and pretended nothing was happening. She washed a coffeepot, waited longer for her lunch, bought more pens, and ignored the belch. She slouched in the chair in the doctor’s office, and then went home to make sandwiches out of oddly-shaped bread.

She chewed quietly, sipped some tea and browsed online for red heels, enormous sunglasses and a great purse that she’d never buy.

 

 

(30 minutes writing, 5 minutes editing)