“How long’s it been in there?” he asks, more amused than accusatory. He looks different in a way she can’t quite put her finger on. More grown-up? Less Griff-like? No, that can’t be it, but she has the strangest feeling she hasn’t gotten a proper look at him in a while. That day, that day on which Miss Ollie died, seems to have permanently messed with her mind.
She rips a paper towel off the roll and begins swiping it over the glass-top stove. She made a chicken and quinoa concoction she learned about on TikTok that didn’t come out right or, if it did, wasn’t very good. “About a year so far,” she says. “I’m thinking of making that my next New Year’s resolution. What do you think?”
“I think it’s prudent not to try to take on too much, yeah,” he teases, though, truth be told, she can’t guarantee the next eight months will proceed any differently from the last twelve, so it’s entirely possible that stock photo image will still be there, waiting for her, come January.
“She had this whole backstory about the woman,” Griff says. “She has a mean little daughter who steals things from Lola and won’t give them back. She was getting really worked up about it. I had to take the picture down and put it on our dresser.”
“She’s pretending.” Darby considers. “And stalling.”
“I don’t know. It’s weirder than that, though. It’s like she doesn’t know the difference sometimes between real and imaginary. It’s just—”
She stops wiping the stove. “What?” Her heart stomps around in her rib cage.
“I don’t want to say it.” He shakes his head.
“Say it,” she insists. The not saying it is worse, obviously.
“Creepy,” he mumbles.
“Don’t say that,” she snaps at him, and he gives her this look like, Have you lost your mind, woman? “We’re her parents.” As if that settles it. Game over. Sorry, she just doesn’t understand what he’s after, what point he needs to prove.
Lola is quirky, maybe even a tiny bit weird. So what if she makes up elaborate histories for strange photographs. And has tantrums that are maybe on the more aggressive end of the spectrum. And fibs on occasion. You know who else was probably a tiny bit weird? Mozart. Picasso. Bobby Fischer, if he’s even real. Though so far no signs point to Lola being a genius. Jeffrey Dahmer probably wasn’t the most normal four-year-old either and he likely hadn’t even started eating people yet, so in that regard, Lola does happen to have a head start.
Oh god, here they go again. He hasn’t gotten on his soapbox about the counselor evaluation for Lola in a while and it’s not as if she hasn’t noticed. She has certainly, certainly noticed. But she’s not up to the challenge tonight. She needs to change the subject before they spiral.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She picks up the broom and begins to sweep, gently, keeping her eyes diverted. “Does my vagina feel different to you?”
Griff guffaws as if the question is hilarious, as if Darby is being Darby again. Oh, Darby. “You’ve been meaning to ask me? That sounds like you’ve been meaning to ask me if we could have lunch with your parents this weekend. Not your … vagina.” He half mouths the word, half says it out loud.
She smiles benevolently at her husband. At just over forty, she’s never been confident that he has a firm grasp on female anatomy. Not the parts that matter for satisfying sex, those he gets, but ovaries and menstrual cycles and what have you. She once asked him how he thought a woman went to the bathroom when wearing a sanitary pad and after considering it with the concentration he might dedicate to an eighth-grade math problem, he answered that he imagined they just peed on it. Like a small dog.
“That’s not an answer. I want to know for real. Like, you know, is it looser? We’ve never truly discussed it.”
“I’m not sure it’s something that really requires discussion.”
“I’m just curious,” she persists. Doesn’t she have a right to know about her own vagina? It’s just—well, it’s just this thing that she’s been having with her body lately. She doesn’t have words for it other than that she hates it. Only, haven’t you heard? Women aren’t allowed to hate their bodies anymore, so she knows there must be another, better word for it. If she’s being honest, it’s not just the diastasis recti situation and the tummy that will not be tamed. It’s the whole kit and caboodle, all of it. She is constantly sore from carrying twenty-five to thirty pounds of extra weight on her hip or in front of her when her children decide their legs don’t work, which is pretty much always, unless there’s a moving vehicle available to run in front of. She feels slimy and touched the way she does after getting off an airplane, except somehow it’s become her permanent state. People wipe boogers on her. And now her daughter wants to wrap her mouth around her skin and feed and, maybe, perhaps, Darby thinks it’s time to take a survey, assess the extent of the damage. How bad is it?
Griff leans his annoyingly flat stomach against the countertop. “It’s hard to remember a time before kids. I don’t know. It feels a little different. I guess. Wider, maybe?”
“Oh.” She pauses over the sink. “Is it less, you know, tactile for you?”
“No. Darby. It’s plenty tactile.”
Darby glances down at her fully dressed crotch as if she might be able to discern some visible difference there. “Do you know what I think? I think penises—or is it penii?—should have to change after kids.” She can never decide what to call his penis. None of the words she knows seem to fit. Penis sounds too scientific for something with such a personality. Dick sounds rude and cock pornographic. “I know. Right after a man has a baby, that’s when he should get circumcised.”
“For the love of—you want to cut the skin off a grown man’s penis? That’s horrifying. We would remember that. People do it to babies so that they won’t know better. Otherwise, it’d be too traumatic.”
Darby wipes her hands on a dish towel and tosses it aside. “I had a third-degree tear when I gave birth to Lola and nobody thought twice about that.” Except for Darby. She thought about it every time she felt the stitches pull even when she sat on soft cushions. She thought about it every time she visited the toilet with a trusty squirt bottle to spray up into her nether regions just to keep her own urine from stinging her stupid. She watches her husband. “See, you don’t even remember. You probably don’t even know what a perineum is. I’m right. I can tell!” She huffs. “Well, that’s settled. If I run for president that will be my platform.”
“An eye for an eye,” Griff says. “Got it.”
“A touch of foreskin for a bit of labia.”
They actually do have sex that night, which is a pleasant surprise given they haven’t been keeping up their usual routine as of late. Not that they have a routine-routine. But there’s a certain expectation, a rhythm they’ve fallen into over the years, and that rhythm has been disrupted.
It wasn’t good sex and for that, she must admit, she was the one to blame. His hands on her body. Everywhere he touched, like he was shining a flashlight on all the parts that have been troubling her lately. Her wrecked breasts. Her dry nipples. Her butt cheeks that resemble the surface of the moon. Her stomach, didn’t he know better than to touch her stomach? She kept thinking: That’s rude of him; he shouldn’t do that. And then she wanted to cry. Wanted to cry at her husband’s touch. She couldn’t think of anything more depressing. She should have showered. He shouldn’t have sprung it on her. He shouldn’t have looked so sexy.