My wife’s under the gas right now, and when she comes out of it she’ll
have them in. I don’t know what they said to her, or how much longer this
kind of thing is supposed to take. I’m in the waiting room, my feet on the
magazine table, looking out the window. It seems I’ve been waiting awhile.
This whole thing has been my fault. I’m drinking a cheap and bad coffee out
of a styrofoam cup. I’m the only one around.
I’m thinking about beauty, and it’s all kind of sad, the time and
money she has to spend just so she can walk down the street without feeling
ashamed. But what am I to say against it? I encouraged her. I wanted it.
Hell, I helped to pay for it. What kind of message does that send?
We’re all just trapped in the continuum of what we’re supposed to look
like, and now the man tells me that my wife is done and she’s waking up. I
follow him into the white room where she’s resting on the bed. She’s still
pretty loopy from the gas, but she sees me and she smiles.
“How’s it look?” she asks.
I lean over her. “It’s great. They look absolutely real,” I say. I
kiss her on the lips.
I drive her home because she’s still out of it, and she falls asleep
on the way. I sigh; there’s nothing to worry about anymore. We can forget
the whole thing. I approach the four-way intersection where the wreck was,
and they’ve put up a new automated traffic light. They’ve repaired the front
lawn and the curb from the where the cars screeched and slid. They’ve somehow
taken the black rubber marks off the road, and the smoke from the busted
engine exhaust has long ago drifted away into the air. And my wife’s snoring
now, her procedure complete, her head leaning against the cool side of the
glass.
I look over, and it is about perfect. The man’s done a flawless job. That’s
what we wanted. That’s why we came to him. The first plastic surgeon had to
leave the slight ridge of a scar from where her chin hit the dashboard, but
everything this one has touched is right on cue with magazine standard.
There’s no little chip from when we were pretend-wrestling when we were kids,
and the back of my head accidentally bumped against her mouth. There’s no
overbite anymore. The back rows are no longer slightly misshapen from all her
years of orthopedic neglect. There’s no stains left from all the cups of
coffee we drank, and all the cigarettes we used to split. We have erased the
little blemishes and marks.
I look back and get the green arrow at the new traffic light, but there’s
still all these people in the way.
***
Noah was born in Boone, IA, and grew up around the area. He’s been a student
for fifteen years running, and is three credits away from a B.A. at Iowa State
University. He’s been working on short stories for the last four or five
years, in between the classes and the jobs.
