Hysterectomy

Tamara tapped her coffee mug nervously with her pointer finger. The matte black nail polish on her fingers were chipped and her nail edges were jagged, sharp from repetitive biting. Her foot tapped the linoleum floor the way a woodpecker hammers a tree. The kitchen was dim, only a single bulb on the three-bulb ceiling fan was lit, and the light was weak but reflected off the lavender colored walls shone like gold. Tamara could hear the cat’s water fountain echoing sound fading into the distance. Her mind was far from easy. “I never wanted kids anyway,” she silently reminded herself as she read over the procedure guidelines for her upcoming hysterectomy. “1. Read and follow all pre-operative instructions. 2. Drink plenty of water and fluids. 3. Get all your prescriptions filled. 4. Shop for any necessary food. (Try to get prepared meals that just need to be placed in the oven.) 5. Choose an advocate.” Choose an advocate, it says. Well Tamara knew right away who that advocate would be. Her younger sister, Lottie. The Skelling sisters were best friends, and they were always each other's advocates. Her tapping stopped and a slight, momentary smile came to her face. Almost like a smirk but without sarcasm. Tamara was looking forward to spending the few days with her. And as if summoned by her sister's thoughts, Lottie’s car pulled into the driveway. She grabbed her gym bag, water bottle and keys then walked out of her house, locking the door behind her.

Tamara’s house on Brigham Road is about six minutes from the nearest Planet Fitness. Tamara had bought a plot of land, and had her own house built. The home was a small, and modest two bedroom, two-bathroom ranch style with sage green siding.

“Hey!” Tamara said with excitement as she climbed into the car.

“Hey!” Lottie replied with the same amount of enthusiasm. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“Ha. No.” Tamara said dryly. Is anyone ever ready at four thirty in the morning? Tamara thought to herself. When they pulled up to the gym, there was a cop sitting outside surveying the surroundings.

“What’s with the piggly-wiggly?” Tamara asked with a chuckle.

“Some creep has been stalking women from the gym and attacking them. Three assaults have been reported so far. It was on the Observer’s Facebook page this morning.” Lottie stated.

“Oh, I haven’t looked at any of my notifications yet.” Tamara replied with a half-smile and a shrug. Tamara and Lottie didn’t take too long in the locker room; they slipped on their sneakers and stuffed their belongings into lockers then went to the treadmills to continue their conversation. “So how are you feeling about surgery tomorrow?” Lottie asked as she fiddled with the treadmill settings.

“Eh. Alright. I’m not thrilled about being cut open but it’s better than ending up with cancer.” Tamara replied before taking a big gulp of water.

“Or pregnant!” Lottie added with a laugh. Tamara laughed with a snort.

“You’re not wrong.” Tamara said. “I am looking forward to some time away from the school. These kids are wearing me out.”

“I hear ya.” Lottie said in agreement. “Yesterday, Emil bit a chunk out of one of my teaching assistants' arms, Miss Riker. She had to go to the emergency room for stitches.” Lottie was a special education teacher at a local elementary school, and Tamara, the librarian at the very same school.

“Jesus Christ! That sucks so bad!” Tamara said sympathetically. “Last week, I had to report cigarette burns on a kid to the social workers. He told me his mom burns him when he doesn’t listen or won’t shut up.”

Lottie shuddered. “I hate seeing what some of these parents do to their children. That’s why I believe in a woman’s right to choose. Some people should just not have kids. It’s not a bad thing to not want kids, it’s a bad thing to not want kids and then have them anyway.”

“Truth! I wish mom had aborted me. Now I’m stuck going to work, and paying bills, and shit.” Tamara laughed.

“Yo. For real though.” Lottie replied, her eyes beaming with familiarity. “I’m glad I don’t have kids. I want my life to be about me, I love my students, they are the only kids I need or want in my life.”

“Same.” Tamara replied flatly. Tamara didn’t view herself as mom material. She lived her life for herself and that was how she liked it. Plus, her mom sucked so what would she know about properly raising a child? “Ugh I think have to go clean mom’s today.” she continued almost whining.

“Eww. Good luck with that.” Lottie replied as she stopped her treadmill. They wiped down the machines then Lottie went to the tanning booth while Tamara went for the Hydromassage.

Tamara closed her eyes and allowed her mind to wonder. She envisioned rolling gentle waves and the sun’s warm kiss on her body. She felt herself float upon what she imagined as the tropical white she sandy beach she remembered from St. Petersburg, Florida. Tamara listened to the squawking of the seagulls and the smell of freshly cut grass pollinated the air around her. The hummingbirds sang, and the mockingbirds whistled then the timer began to buzz. Aaa! Aaa! Aaa! Tamara’s eye snapped open and she sat up in a flash. Startled, and hyperventilating she began to caress her face and tug at her hair. She needed to ground herself, to remind herself of where she was and that she was safe. Tamara took a deep breath and sighed. Just talking about their mom can trigger her sometimes.

The drive home was quicker than the drive to the gym.

“I will see you in the morning.” Lottie said as Tamara popped open the car door to get out.

“You sure will. Bright and early! Thanks again for being my driver for surgery!” Tamara replied. “Love you!”

“Love you too!” Lottie spats back, then takes off. Tamara drops her bag to the floor and as she tosses her keys onto the kitchen counter, her phone goes off.

Ring, Ring. Tamara pulls her phone out of her hoodie pocket and answers a call from her mother.

“Hey sweetie! What ‘Re you up to?” Diana’s voice was peppy and childlike, almost infantile.

“Hey mum, nothing much. Just getting some last-minute errand done with Lottie before my surgery. What’s up?” Tamara replied superfluously. She knew what her mother was calling her for; she called every week for the same thing.

“I- I’m sorry to bother you, a-and I know th-that you are busy, but can you come help me clean up a little bit before your surgery? I want to make sure the house is manageable while you’re healing.” Tamara rolled her eyes and shook her head; an amused smile stretched across her face.

“Sure thing, mum. I will be up there in about half an hour Is that okay?”

Diane replied instantaneously, her voice shaky and submissive, “Oh, oh thank you. I- I appreciate you s-so much. I- I d-don't know what I would do with you.”

“I know, and no worries. It’s no problem.” Tamara replied emphatically. “I’ll see you soon. Bye bye.” Tamara went down to the basement and came back up with a pair of dirty, ratty, foul-smelling sneakers, changed into her crocs then got in her car to drive up to her mother’s brutalized double-wide trailer in Brocton. Twenty minutes away from where Tamara lived in Dunkirk.

Tamara pulled into the winding driveway and parked. When she shut the car off, she threw her head back into the car seat and let out a deflating sigh. She pulled her emergency cigarettes from the glove compartment and lights one. Tamara leans forward looking up at the trailer.

“Oof, I am so not in the fucking mood for this today.” Tamara says aloud to herself, and she flicks her cigarette out the window.

The trailer had two doors, the way some houses do. One glass and behind it, another of a sturdier material, usually wood but Diane’s, was aluminum with a crudely done bright white paint job, covered with dog scratches and at the bottom, the right corner had begun to bend upward. The glass door was embedded with insect remains, muddy paw marks, and streaks of dog urine and feces. Tamara took a deep breath then replaced her look of disgust with a convincing fake smile, opened the door and stepped inside. She was greeted immediately by Diane’s three dogs. Salem, the 12-year-old Black Lab waited in the background while the Basset pups, aged 1.5 and 8 months, pawed at her legs while trying to push each other out of the way, so that they might be the first to get some pats and ear scratches.

The living area was large but separated by Diane’s brown sectional which formed an L shape. One half of the sectional placed horizontally beneath the living room window, the other, vertically coming out towards the door. The 65-inch flatscreen Samsung rested lopsided across an unsanded homemade TV stand. On the left-hand side of the couch, there was Diane, all 4 feet 11 inches and 364 pounds of her.

“Hi Sweetheart!” Diane blurted out in her toddler voice as she grabbed the remote and began flipping through channels. Diane’s hair was streaks of grays, browns, and whites and you could tell she had a hair loss problem going on. It would have been more pleasant if she were missing all her teeth, because the nine that she had left were scattered across her gingivitis riddled mouth were brown and yellow, either chipped or had holes, and when she smiled. She was plopped there with her fingers interlocked the way students in school do to let the teacher know that they are paying attention.

“How’s it going?” She continued in an almost sing-song fashion. “Oh, it’s going alright.” Tamara responded sardonically.

“How are you today?” Tamara continued pretending to be interested so she didn’t have to hear her mother cry again.

“Ooooh I’m gooood. Hubby bought me a new pair of slippers today. He spoils me so much.” Diane spoke as if struck by child-like wonderment.

“Aw, well that’s nice. I'm glad.” Tamara replied sympathetically as she walked into the kitchen being careful not to step in the puddles of urine or piles of dung that were flopped about randomly throughout the trailer.

Tamara unloaded the dishes she placed in the dishwasher last week and put them away. Then she began to work on this week's piles of dirty dishes. Five-day old lasagna crusted onto the baking dish and loaded with rodent feces from mice nibbling at the leftovers Diane and her family left out every night. The au gratin potatoes were molding and had half dead flies wiggling with all their might to break free of their gooey trap.

“I-I know it doesn’t look like it, but I have been trying to keep up.” Diane said, her voice trembling. The counters were greased with butter and slime, and a poisonous mouse trap sat perched on the stove.

“I know mom, it’s okay. I know it’s hard for you. Has anyone else been helping, Norbert? Louise?” Tamara asked intently while maintaining her can-do demeanor.

“No, hubby is too tired when he gets home from work, Louise is too. And they yell at me if I ask them for help.” Diane twiddled her fingers and kicked her feet. Tamara loaded the small dishes and utensils into the dishwasher and polished the large ones like pots and pans by hand.

“Do you need me to talk to them about cleaning up after themselves at least? It won’t kill them to walk ten feet to the trash can to throw out their food wrappers.” Tamara grabbed a roll of paper towels and cascaded about the trailer scooping up and wiping down the dog mess covered damn near every square inch of the building's interior.

“No, it’s okay. They’re not doing it to be mean to me; they’re just trying to teach me to take better care of things.” Diane recited confidently as Tamara collected the trash that made its home on the floor. Then she went to start the laundry. Consequently, there was dirty laundry spread everywhere in the filthy trailer, including dirty socks stuffed into holes in the walls caused by the damage done by their untrained pets. The dogs were sweet enough, but they were not house broken and were extremely hyperactive. In some spots, you could follow the electrical cords with your eyes. However. Tamara’s focus was to keep up with the laundry that actually gets used and so she made her way to the bathroom on the other side of Diane and Norbert’s bedroom; she took extra care while walking over the flat, 2 inch thick piece of plywood being used to cover the large hole in the floor between the kitchen and bedroom. Tamara started scooping armfuls of laundry and as she lifted the clothes into the basket, she felt a warm, chunky fluid brush onto her forearms and started trickling down to her elbow. She looked down as she dropped the clothes and realized they were covered in a thick, yellow diarrhea. Tamara’s eyes glared with furious disgust, and she rushed to the mildew covered bathroom sink and gagged ferociously as she scrubbed her arms red with the Vanilla Lavender anti-bacterial hand soap.

Tamara faded into her memories; she was seven, Lottie was four. Thunder rumbled the windows as lightning cracked across the sky and rain pelted the house on the Lake. Lottie squealed.

“Shh. It’s okay.” little Tamara said. “It’s just a storm it won’t last forever.” The air was putrid, stained with animal waste; feces, urine, blood. The walls had been plastered with kitten blood earlier that day when Diane’s Black Lab, Shaggy, got a hold of one of Laney’s, the family cats kitten and treated it like a squeak toy, tossing it around, biting into it to see if it would make a noise, it did. The small, raggedy girls were covered in flea bites head to toe.

“I’m scared.” Lottie whined. Tears welling up in her tiny brown eyes.

“Shh. I know but you’re gonna wake mommy up and she’ll be mad. Come on, Let’s go to bed. You can sleep in my bed.” Tamara assured her. Then the two of them crept hand in hand down the hallway with the blood trail and opened their bedroom door. They flicked the light switch, but the power was out and they heard a vicious low-pitched growl rise from the abysmal room, the wind howled and that’s when they saw that the bedroom window was broken, the slammed the door and ran back down the bloody hall and burst into Diane’s bedroom.

“Mommy!” The girls screamed. “There’s a monster in our bedroom. It was growling at us.”

“There is no monster.” Diane said authoritatively. “Go back to your room.”

“Mommy! Please we heard it! Come look!” Lottie wailed.

“Go to bed!” Diane howled as she turned over flinging a hard slipper in their direction. The girls ran out of the room, slamming the door behind them.

“It’s okay. We’ll be okay. I’ll see what I can do.” Tamara told her sister protectively then she tiptoed back down to their mom’s room and came back with Diane’s cell phone. Tamara found her dad’s number and called it repeatedly until finally they got an answer.

“Hello?” Ralph answered the phone sounding confused.

“Daddy. You need to come get us.” Tamara explained to her father. “Our bedroom window is broken and there’s a storm and there’s a scary animal in our room.”

“Did you wake your mom up?” Ralph asked.

“We did but she got mad and told us to go back to bed. Please daddy, we’re scared, and we can’t sleep. And we’re itchy, there’s fleas everywhere, they keep jumping on us." Tamara recanted.

“I’ll see what I can do baby. I love you,” Ralph said before ending the call.

“We love you too daddy.” The girls said in unison. Ralph requested a welfare check be done by the county sheriff’s department. Nothing came of it, the investigating officers were friends of Diane’s and left without setting foot in the house. When they had gone, Diane shot a ferocious look at the girls, shrank and crawled back to the kitchen table where they would cry until they fell asleep. Curled up like two more helpless kittens in the jaws of a beast, with tear-stained cheeks, they snored and whimpered in the night. The lightning cracked.

“Tammy! Where’d you go?” Diane shouted from the living room.

“Cleaning up the laundry in the bathroom mum.” Tamara forced a reply through gagging.

Tamara snapped back to reality and rushed through the rest of the housework, sweeping and mopping up as best as she could and then started towards the door.

“Thank you! It looks so much better in here now” Diane stated gleefully. Tamara looked around at the smoke-stained furniture and the floors slick from being mopped with wastewater and then back at her mom who was staring from the couch with her hands folded in her lap kicking her feet to and fro. “You’re so sweet. I appreciate you so much.”

“Yeah. I know mom. I’m glad I can help you out. I must get going though, I need a few more things to do before bed tonight.” Tamara replied nonchalantly. “I’ll see you in about three weeks. Love you.”

The drive home seemed longer than the drive there and Tamara’s tics began. Her body flinched; her heart raced, and her mind played back long-lost memories in flashes. Phantom fingers dill-dallied threateningly about her thighs, eerie whispers echoed through her ear canals.

Tamara took her shoes off while she was outside on the porch and then rushed to the shower. She doused her sage green loofa in anti-bacterial coconut scented body washed and scrubbed until her entire body, her face included, was a brilliant shade of red. Tamara nuzzled herself into a cozy pair of velvety black pajamas with comical cartoon cat characters plastered all over them. Tamara brewed a cup of Foldger’s coffee using her Keurig, poured in three tablespoons of Snickerdoodle flavored Coffee Mate creamer and set up at her painting station located in the enclosed back patio with a magnificent view of the forest of maple and oak trees that engulfed her back yard. Tamara painted as she listened to soft piano music and the twittering of the birds, there was a sluggish fat blob monster, painted in shades of black and gray sitting plopped onto a sinking shit colored couch. That blob took up most of the canvas space, then shrank to a morbidly obese woman with scraggily hair standing legs apart, arms reaching up with fingers hooked like talons, mouth agape, silently screaming in agony with tears trickling down her cheeks. The figure of the woman shrank into herself, the image distorting and becoming new. Her legs collapsed in on themselves until the painting woman was on her knees, shrinking in both size and age until in the center of the canvas, there was a little girl with curly pigtails, her body flat upon the floor with her knees in crouched in a feeble position. She stepped outside and lit a cigarette. Tamara paced back and forth on her front porch for twenty minutes until she realized she was lighting her fifth cigarette. She shook her head as if to rattle her brain and give it a jump start, smooshed the butt into the ash tray and then cuddled up on the couch with Persephone, Lucian, and Medusa. Tamara went to sleep so quickly that night, she did not realize until she awoke in fright due to a nightmare and noticed she had fallen asleep on the couch.

Tamara’s mouth was dry and cotton-like, she rubbed her eyes and let out a long, loud sigh then scurried off to the kitchen for a glass of water. She made a quick stop at the bathroom to relieve herself, mostly out of fear of wetting the bed. Tiptoeing, she made her way to her bedroom and peaked out the window as she cuddled into her blankets. Thunder rattled the windows and lightning cracked across the sky like a whip, the wind groaned in agony, and she pulled the covers over her head. Tamara trembled and sweat dripped from her brow and soaked the pillowcases. Her heart pounded like a Comanche war drum, and she was sure even the neighbor's might hear it the whole half mile down the road. Tamara began to count. 1. Name a type of domesticated animal. Cat. That’s easy. 2. Name two types of sour fruit. A lime and a Kiwi. 3. Name three things you can see right now. Medusa. Lamp shaped like a tree. And a 4-foot-tall stuffed velociraptor. 4. Name four celebrities you hate. Donald Trump. Elon Musk. Mel Gibson. And Dan Schnieder. Tamara had spent time in therapy to cope with her PTSD, and she learned some coping techniques to help ground herself when her anxiety begins to take over. Once Tamara mellowed out, she quickly drifted back to sleep.

At 6 a.m. Tamara’s alarm began to blare, and she began to groan. She reached her arms up over her head, stretched her feet and legs flat out, and yawned over. She sat up in bed, her joints squealing like rusted bolts. Restless nights can take a toll on the body. At 6:15 a.m. Lottie was pulling into the driveway. Tamara grabbed her already packed overnight bag and slumped out the door. Her footsteps her heavy on the dewy, spring ground. The air was thick with fog.

“Good morning!” Lottie blurts out. “Are you ready to get fixed?” Tamara laughed at that.

“Yup. Sure am.” Tamara replied with a smile. “Did you sleep okay last night?”

“Actually, I had a nightmare. About when we were kids.” Lottie said.

“Huh. Me too.” Tamara replied.

“How’s mom doing?” Lottie asked.

“Eh. She’s fine. I guess. I got covered in her diarrhea yesterday.” Tamara told her. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep doing this for her. I don’t even like her.” The girls both laughed. “I thought of accidentally burning her house down while I’m there cleaning.” Tamara used air quotes over the word accidentally.

“Haha. I bet.” Lottie replied. “I won’t even set foot in there. I can’t take it. It triggers me.”

“Dawg, me too!” Tamara said. “Dude, if I ever end up like her please just put me down.”

“Yo same!” Lottie shot back.

Tamara came out of surgery as quickly as she went in. The doctor came in once she was moved back to her room from recovery to go over post-op instructions, dos, and don'ts.

“Are you clear on all the instructions?” Doctor Askar asks.

“Yup. Got it all covered. Thanks doc.” Tamara said drowsily as she flipped the doctor a thumbs up. Doctor Askar nodded and turned to leave the room but paused to say one last thing to her.

“For the record, I am deeply sorry that it had to come down to this. If you ever want to explore options for growing a family, I can refer you-” Tamara interrupted him abruptly. “It’s all good Doc. I didn’t want kids anyway