A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
and patchy pubic beards. Despite the countless hardware stores on the Upper West Side, it was this hardware store—half an hour from her apartment if there were no delays, but of course there were always delays—that Lady decided to patronize.
She had a reason for traveling that distance when she didn’t really have to: she wasn’t at ease inside hardware stores, and at least she’d been in this one before. Not often, but sometimes the dentist sent her there to pick up some Windex or a three-way plug adaptor or an extension cord. She would feel less unnerved in the somewhat familiar surroundings.
On this summer morning no one in the store paid her any attention or asked if they could help her or gave any indication that they’d seen her before, or, for that matter, were seeing her now. She didn’t care. In stores, as in most places and situations, she preferred to be left to herself. This was particularly true now, consumed as she was with the switch-plate crisis.
Before leaving home, she’d unscrewed the plate completely, using her fingers to turn the bottom screw, which was also on the brink of falling out. She’d put the plate and the screw inside a baggie and put the baggie in her purse. This had turned out to be smart. In an aisle filled with, surely, over a hundred bins of over a million screws, she was able to find the one she needed.
Buoyed, she continued to the next aisle with its multiple bins of screwdrivers, but here she was at a loss. She wasn’t sure how to choose among screwdrivers, didn’t know which characteristics of a screwdriver were determinant. She decided to go by color.
She considered one with a rubbery blue handle, rejected it, picked up another, cherry red, put it back. She walked up and down the aisle, then snatched up a model with a handle of translucent plastic, acid green, a hue she’d once experimented with, borrowing an Indian tunic in that shade from Delph. “It makes you look dead,” Joe Hopper said, and she returned it unworn.
So—fuck you, Joe Hopper—she took the acid-green screwdriver by the shaft and made her way to the register. She imagined him watching all this, frustrated by his inability to criticize a thing she’d done. She fantasized Walter Matthau sidling up to her, asking for local restaurant advice. The two of them would chat a bit, amusing each other, hitting it off; then they’d go to the Terminal Bar for a couple of vodka tonics, some chicken parm and spaghetti, and, after a couple of self-deprecating jokes about expanding waistlines, a shared slice of pie. What Walter Matthau would be doing in a Riverdale hardware store, she’d work out another time.
After she left the store, she put the bag with the screwdriver in her purse. She thought about her dungeon of an apartment. She decided to take a walk. Van Cortlandt Park was right across the street, summer green and lush. She stood on the corner, waiting for the Walk signal.
But as she waited, the idea of crossing the street became overwhelming. It was such a vast street, this section of Broadway, and the thought of traversing it, of sprinting from cement island to cement island as cars and taxis whipped by, discouraged her, depressed her, filled her with a fear that, she immediately registered, would not serve a New Yorker well. But what could she do? The new fear was upon her, and she changed her mind and decided to admit defeat and just go home.
Instead she pivoted and went into the building where she worked. She climbed the two flights of stairs. She tried to peer through the opaque window set in the office door, the dentist’s name painted on that glass in an arc like a rainbow. She saw nothing, just the wires threaded through the safety glass.
She rummaged through her purse for her keys. She unlocked the door. Inside, she turned off the alarm, turned on the lights.
Everything in the reception area was as she left it. The magazines and brochures were undisturbed, the gray dustcover over her Selectric untouched. Something was off, though, and she figured out what it was when she poked a finger into the soil of the leggy philodendron on the windowsill. Someone had been here and watered the plant—someone had done her job for her.
The door to the dentist’s private office was shut. She crossed the room, put her hand on the round knob. She didn’t turn it, just held it. She put her ear to the hollow wood. Although she heard nothing but the loud ticking of his desk clock, she felt uneasy. She found herself picturing the dentist on the other side of that door, splayed on the floor where she and he had their trysts, his wife standing over him just a little ashamed of herself, holding a bloody Huber probe. It was a premonition, she later realized, not of an actual murder but of something gone terribly wrong in there. Or maybe it was a wish.
She held her breath as she turned the knob, but she didn’t take the next step of pushing open the door. She was annoyed by how jittery she felt. Her reaction was inexplicable, really. Stupid, if she were being honest. She went in and out of that office all the time. True, the door was almost never shut as it was today, but still … Fear of picking up a ringing telephone’s receiver was bad enough. Then there’d been the anxiety over crossing the street. Was her fear generalizing; was she now going to become unable to open doors as well?
But no, she thought. Her hesitancy wasn’t a sign of neuroses—or not only that. She was hesitating because she was not supposed to be there that day. She was feeling like a trespasser, like a vandal. She had to give herself a stern talking-to. Entering that office was allowed. It was part of her job; it was something she did all the time. The dentist went out for lunch, and Lady went in to do the filing or find an invoice or sit in his comfortable chair and work the crossword. She didn’t need to ask permission. “Mi office es su office,” he’d say, and why not? He was lucky to have someone like her, a self-starter, diligent and devoted.
An example of that diligence: she would do the filing right now. She’d straighten up some of the mess that had been left on his desk when they closed in late June. It would be good to get that work done, good to get a jump on things before the office reopened on Tuesday.
Yet even as she opened the door, she couldn’t shake her apprehension. Now she imagined finding not a body on the carpet—still life with slit throat—but two bodies, much alive, naked, sparkling with perspiration. Giddy husband and naughty wife. If this were a TV show, a movie, isn’t that exactly what would happen next? Music swelling, the receptionist gasping, then rushing to the street below, pressing her hand to her heart, the tears welling, as she cries out his name—
Or no. Because the receptionist would be the villain in the movie, wouldn’t she? She’d be the housebreaker, the slut, the brunette. The camera wouldn’t think to follow her once she left. It would be the dentist’s wife the camera would care about, the dentist’s wife who’d be the heroine. That would be the name of the movie, in fact. The Dentist’s Wife.
The door was slightly ajar now, but Lady still didn’t peek inside. She only listened again, listened harder. All she could hear were the clicks of the passing seconds. She took one more of those seconds to inform herself that she was an idiot. Then she pushed the door fully open and flicked on the light.
No swelling music, but she couldn’t help herself—she gasped anyway. It wasn’t just that the soil of the ficus tree inside the dentist’s office had also been watered. It was that the walls, for the past five years the same grayed white as the plaster of paris dentition molds in the prostheses closet, had been painted a feminine mauve. It was that an ornately framed O’Keeffe had been hung by his desk. The flower in the poster was meant, of course, to evoke a receptive vagina, pink and clitoral—Joe’s work and O’Keeffe’s had that in common—but Lady suspected it had been viewed instead as the pink gums and beckoning uvula of the wide-open mouth of the dentist’s dreams.
His desk had been cleared too. Gone, the stack of unfiled insurance forms, the stack of unfiled patient info, even the stack of pink While You Were Out messages, those little notes from her to him. “Mr. Bonfiglio’s temp fell off,” followed by two exclamation points with a caret underneath:
Sad bunny, she called it. (It’s true. She invented the whole emoticon thing.)
She also had a happy bunny and a confused bunny, and then there was the one he’d made up, the one he’d draw on the back