My husband returned with a huge stack of papers attached to a clipboard, and I wondered if they were multiple choice or essay questions. You can never get away from schoolwork in your life. They are always going to get you. He sighed as he looked at it, and said, “It’s like they want your life story.” I gave him a little smirk out of the side of my mouth, and part of me hoped he saw it, and part of me hoped he did not.
Next to me was a girl, different from the girls across from us, even though she, too, had the same outfit, and also had long blond hair. Hers was parted in the middle and fell down below her shoulders, almost to her elbows. It was a pale, pale blond, as if the sun had been bleaching it for years. And her top was the color of an army tank, and it hung loosely around her. There were sprouts of dusty brown hair peeking out from her armpits. Her denim skirt had little drawings all over it in black ink. Little animals, birds mainly, and crazy swirls. I wondered what was wrong with her that could be fixed here, and I looked at her face, but she did not look any different from anyone else, personal grooming problems aside.
She pulled a notebook out from a dark green backpack that rested near her feet, and then I heard a woman say, “Must you do that here?” There was a woman sitting next to her, with her own gigantic stack of paperwork. It was her mother, I supposed. They looked enough alike—same flat nose, same smooth brown eyes with olive-shaped centers—though from the older woman’s clothes I thought she might make a better match with the girl with the shiny brown hair sitting across from us. She was all strapped into place: tight pink T-shirt with little metallic stars sewn across the collar, skinny blue jeans tucked tight around her thighs, long hair brushed neatly and curled at the ends. Her nails were painted the same pink as the pink that was on her T-shirt, and then I looked down and saw matching pink cowboy boots. Head to toe, she was ready to go.
The girl turned to her and stuck her tongue out and then slowly, deliberately, pulled her hands up to her hair and pulled it back behind her ears. When she faced forward, I could see the full effect of her act: holy mama, were those big ears. They started by her mouth and went up almost near her eyebrows. The girl had pierced them at least a dozen times, with hoops of all different sizes and crazy stones with little symbols all over them. I bet her mother hated that. But if you are going to have big ears, might as well do it up. A minute later I realized I was still looking at her ears. I could not stop myself. I wanted to tell her that I liked them, that if she was here to fix them, she was headed on the wrong path, that she was already going the right way, that she should get more earrings. I wanted to free her. Free her ears.
Thomas flipped another page and shook his writing hand, stretched and squeezed his fingers. I put my head on his shoulder and tried to take a peek at what he was writing, but Thomas covered it up with his forearm.
“There’s magazines on a table up near the front desk,” he said. “All the kinds you like.”
“There is not one thing about you I don’t know,” I said, but I got up anyway, straightened out my skirt, and walked toward the front desk. It was a strange feeling knowing I was probably the only person in the room who did not want to change something about themselves, on the outside anyway. And yet I did not feel superior in the slightest. I knew I was not perfect. I could write a long list of things about myself that could probably be fixed. But even if I fixed them all, another list would probably crop up in no time at all. And where would it end? How would I know when I was all fixed?
“WELL, THAT’S THE TRUTH,” said Valka. “You could keep on fixing forever.”
I PASSED A MAN with a gigantic nose—there was a hook and then a bump. His face was long and narrow and he had a sour look to him, spoiled and pinched. There was a man with gigantic folds of flesh around his chest, the rest of his body skinny and waiting for the top half to catch up. A woman with bright red hair in short spikes in sunglasses, ripples of lines waving out from around her narrow lips, which were dry and wrinkled. The aisle before the magazine rack I passed an older woman with a red scar down the side of her face, little digits of darkness around the edges. A slash mark, I thought. After that I stopped looking and kept my head down till I got to the magazine rack. I could no longer bear witness to these human frailties.
I walked back to my husband and said, “I’m going to sit in the car.” My voice was husky and dark. As much as I loved him, what he was doing did not feel right to me. I just could not be a part of it. He did not look up at first; he finished the last line of what he was writing. Finally he turned up his head and nodded, then threw himself back into his confession.