Page 23 of So This Isn't Love
"You'll feel a slight resistance," she says, gloving up and nodding at the second pair, "and then expression."
I swallow the bilge that suddenly rises in the back of my throat. "Please never use that sentence again."
Cathy continues without breaking stride. "Position your thumb and forefinger at four and eight o'clock?—"
"Or that one."
Winston stands on the steel table, wheezing gently, resigned. He has clearly done this before. Thank God one of us has.
Darcy slips out of the room to watch from behind the safety of a window in the hallway. Then Cathy lifts Winston’s stubby stump of a tail, guides my gloved hand into position, and the first gland expresses.
The smell arrives like a verdict.
I have smelled glacier-camp latrines at the end of a three-week season. I have smelled durian on a hot ferry, a two-weekold bear carcass in August, the inside of my own boots after Patagonia, and none of it—not one entry in thirty-two years of terrible smells—prepares me. My eyes flood. My throat executes a maneuver I have no name for and want no name for. The room tilts a few degrees toward the drain in the floor, which I am suddenly, vividly aware was installed on purpose.
"Breathe through your mouth," Cathy says, serene.
"That makes it a flavor."
"There's a bin to your left if you need it. No shame. You wouldn't be the first."
And that's what saves me, honestly. Not grit.Spite.
Because I will not fold myself over the drain in the floor and surrender. Darcy orchestrated this weekend—and this hideous finale—as some kind of retribution, and I won’t go down without a fight. Even if I deserve every moment of the odiferous hell I currently find myself living.
I swallow hard enough to hear it. I blink my eyes clear. I ask Winston, out loud, to bear with me, and Winston sighs like he's heard it all before, and I do the job.
Both glands. Properly expressed. To clinical standard, per the diagram, while my stomach files formal objections and the sweat runs down the inside of the kitten scrubs. There's no showmanship available in this room. There's just the work, and the dog, and a man discovering that pride is located considerably lower in the body than advertised.
"Adequate," Cathy pronounces when it's over. "Honestly, better than most first-timers. You didn't even use the bin."
"I want that on a plaque."
Winston forgives me instantly, because dogs are better than people, and licks my wrist above the glove line, in apology or thanks, I’ll never know.
When I come out of the staff restroom several minutes later, peeled out of the scrubs and back in my own clothes, my hands scoured to the elbow, Darcy doesn’t say a word.
No joke. No jab. Even though I’m sure I deserve it.
We walk out of the clinic under the noonday sun in silence and get into my car.
The road back into town feels endless. We don’t talk the entire way. When we reach her place, I park at the curb and sit there for a minute. Trying not to ask the question that’s been circling in my mind since I put my fingers on that bulldog’s anus and started to squeeze. Longer than that. Since the auction Friday.
"Do you really hate me that much, Darcy?"
The silence changes. I feel it change, the way weather announces itself through a tent wall.
She’s quiet at first. Utterly silent. Then she draws in a soft breath. "You want to know what I hate? I hate that you need to ask that question. Like you don’t have any idea… Like you don’t even realize what your words meant back then, what they did to me?—"
A falling sensation grips me at the hurt I hear in her voice. I glance over at her and find her eyes glassy with hurt. "Shit. Darcy, I didn't mean..."
"Dictionary Darcy." She says it like she's setting something heavy on a table between us. "Do you know I still hear it? I am thirty years old. I have a master's degree. I have taught four hundred students, and there are still mornings I walk into my own classroom—my classroom—and some part of me is suddenly thirteen years old and bracing." The precision in her voice is cracking now, and what's underneath is worse. "You think it was just a nickname. It wasn't a nickname, Finn, it was a license. You made me a punchline, and punchlines are public property. Everyone got to take a swing. And then my father left,and they had a whole vocabulary ready for me, and where do you think they learned that I was fair game?"
Ah, fuck. Every system I have goes quiet. No jokes. No exits. Just her voice and nothing else.
"The girl who ate lunch in the library wasn't there because she loved books." Her hand is already on the door handle, ready to make her escape. "She was there because it was the one room you and your friends never came into."
"Darcy."
