Page 2 of Counting the Days

Rhea had heard about the procedure in gory detail from friends, and she could not believe everyone casually suggested it to all women over thirty as if it were an eye exam. She would have to give herself a shot of synthetic hormones, with what was described as “a very large needle,” every night for weeks. Only to be eventually put under anesthesia so a doctor could stick another needle through her abdomen, into her ovaries, to extract an eerily high number of eggs. All the while putting herself at risk of twisting her ovaries and strangling all her unborn babies. She was not eager to be artificially milked for spawn in a procedure which one friend described as “more uncomfortable than pregnancyandlabor.”

However, it was not just the cost or the pain that prevented her from forcing her ovaries to spit out a carton of eggs; the other reason, which Rhea kept even from herself, was thatshe did not want to take the pressure off.

She wanted the clock ticking in the lower right-hand corner of her life; she wanted the motivation to keep swiping right, wearing makeup, and squeezing into high heels. She feared if she froze her eggs, she would relax, put on sweatpants, and never leave her house again, never meet the husband and have the children, never make her perfect future a reality.

To diversify her motherhood-obsessed vision board, Rhea decided to treat herself to a new nose. After scouring the pagesof an oldSeventeenmagazine, she was rewarded with a flawless example of the nasal ideal. Rhea delicately cut out her future nose and admired it. Although her face was almost four decades old, she believed a teenage nose was the thing that would best complement her other, more vintage features. She rubbed a little glue on the back of her future nose and was about to stick it to her vision board, but instead, she stood up.

She had been lying on her stomach on her brown living room carpet. She did a full-body sweep with both hands because the carpet had been installed, she guessed, sometime in the 1970s and ancient dust mites had inevitably crawled onto her cashmere sweater, underwear, and bare legs.

She entered her bathroom and stood in front of her smudged mirror. She held her dream nose over the one God had forced upon her and gently pressed down, gluing it in place. She scrutinized her reflection and wondered if this infantile nose could speed up the process of attracting a husband, since most men were alarmingly attracted to women who looked like children. She loathed brainstorming various ways to become a man magnet, as if she were writing a badCosmopolitanarticle, but men were an annoyingly pivotal part of her optimal life.

Rhea figured faces were like houses: One could create the illusion of an overall more attractive façade by simply installing a beautiful new front door. She imagined the baby nose was widening her eyes, elongating her forehead, and plumping her lips, none of which was true, and yet, she was convinced. Rhea’s birth nose was wide, long, and slightly crooked, a triple threat that she believed lowered her curb appeal.

However, her mother’s voice inside her head had thus far prevented her from going under the knife. When Rhea was a preteen and just beginning to hate her appearance, her mother insisted her unique nose was gorgeous and gave her “character,”and although Rhea could have just chalked that up as a thing mothers say, she worried she would wake up on the surgeon’s table with two adorable nostrils, one eerily straight nasal bone, and zero character.

Rhea admired the teenager’s nose from all angles, trying to convince herself that character was not all that important, until the jarring sound of knuckles on wood snapped her out of it. She ripped her cellphone out of her pocket and was aghast at the time. She had been creating her dream life forthree hours.

She frantically picked up scissors, glue sticks, dozens of magazines, all her hopes and dreams, and shoved them into a closet. She shuffled her socked feet across her tiny cottage as the knuckles got louder. Her house was a mess, and four loving yet judgmental eyes were about to take it all in.

“Ree Kee!” Ada yelled from outside the front door.

“Coming!” Rhea yelled back as she tossed dirty dishes into her sink, wincing at the sound of a cracking mug handle.

“Coming, coming, coming!” Rhea repeated as she put on jeans, yanked her poofy hair back into a ponytail, and, at the last second, remembered to pull the adolescent nose off her face. She opened the door, completely out of breath.

Ada and Tiny stared at her.

“What the hell was that?” Tiny asked.

“Sweetie, why did it take you so long to open the door?” Ada asked, looking at Rhea with concern as Tiny pushed past her.

“I gotta piss,” Tiny said and headed into Rhea’s lone bathroom.

Tiny sat on the toilet and peed with the door open as Ada dumped a box of party decorations on Rhea’s dining room table, which should have been called a living room table since Rhea did not technically have a dining room.

“Sorry, I was…sleeping.”

“You were sleeping? At noon? Are you sick?” Ada instinctively touched Rhea’s forehead.

“No, I was just napping—I’m fine. How are you? You lookamazing,” Rhea said, changing the subject and placing both of her hands on Ada’s protruding belly.

“I’m huge.”

“You’re huge.”

“No, you are not. I’m huge,” Tiny said, pulling up her maternity jeans and exiting the bathroom without washing her hands.

“Yeah,youare truly huge,” Rhea said as she placed her hands on Tiny’s larger belly.

“Can’t we both be huge?” Ada asked.

“Fine.” Tiny relented and turned to Rhea. “We need you to get the rest of the stuff. We can’t do it in our fragile state with all your fuckin’ stairs.”

Tiny handed Rhea the key fob to her Range Rover.

“I’m on it,” Rhea said and stepped out the front door.

Rhea walked down fifty-two steps to her driveway. Her cottage was on a narrow street off Topanga Canyon Boulevard, which was more of a highway than a boulevard. The entire town of Topanga Canyon was more of a highway than a town. Cars sped along the boulevard, yearning to get out of the valley and be closer to the beach, or desperate to get home to the valley and away from their unbearable job by the beach.