Pink Clog Fantasy
by Meg Pickarski
Helen sat on the toilet in her workplace bathroom with her black denim jeans pulled down to her ankles, checking her oxygen with an oximeter she had purchased over the pandemic. There was no reason for her to be checking her oxygen this early in the morning, except for the incessant worry that she could drop dead at any moment. The oxygen reading of 98% assured her that that moment would not be right now, which was a good thing, considering she was wearing her period underwear today and hadn’t yet done anything remarkable in her 35 years of life.
Helen threw the oximeter back into her bag and flushed. She pulled out her phone and started to scroll, while still perched on the toilet with her pants down at her ankles. Sam had posted another picture of her dog, this time with the caption “Cutie with a bone to pick lol.” Her dog, a tiny black and golden-brown dachshund with a snaggle tooth, stared aggressively into the camera, baring his old, broken teeth, while Sam blew a kiss and held up the peace sign. Very mixed messages, Helen thought. She scrolled down and hovered over an ad for fluorescent pink wooden clogs. She imagined herself throwing her head back in laughter while she drank margaritas with the girls. “Omg I just love your shoes! Where did you get them?” Sam would ask. Erin would gasp, “Ah I’ve been looking for a pair just like them!” Barely containing her pride, Helen would breath out, “Thrifting, can you believe it?” She would lie, because no one in their right mind would spend $465 on a pair of fluorescent pink wooden clogs, especially not Helen, who typically draped herself in different variations of black.
Just then, the toilet flushed automatically and cold, recycled water splashed up into her asshole, sending Helen sputtering out of her pink clog fantasy. She jumped off the toilet and dabbed at her bottom with a wad of scratchy tissue paper, quickly pulled up her jeans, and exited the stall.
Back in her office, or what one might call a cubicle, Helen drummed her fingers against the sanitized dark wood veneer of her desk. She felt depressed when she looked at the clock and it said 9:33 a.m. She considered banging her head against the wall behind her or throwing her laptop out the window. From eleven stories up: what a spectacle that would be. But then, she thought, that would just create a mess that someone else would have to clean up. Not worth it. Helen raised her left hand to her throat and checked her pulse. Heart still beating, that’s good. Her phone shuddered on her desk, pulling Helen back into the present. She leaned over to look. A text from Sam:
I made a reservation for
us tonight at that new wine bar
I was telling you about. See
you at 7:)
Helen wished she could be more like Sam. Sam was self-assured. She did things like make a reservation without consulting the group and always knew about the next up and coming, but understatedly hip spot. Sam was the type of person who paused dramatically after saying things like, “No one makes you feel small, you…make you feel small, you know?” At a dinner party full of their city friends–women they had met bartending at a shitty sports bar in the Lower East Side when they had first moved to the city all those years ago–something like this would elicit a lot of head nodding and mmmms and sometimes even snaps. Helen thought that Sam would probably make a great cult leader one day. She wasn’t sure if this was a nice thing to think about someone who was supposed to be your best friend, so she kept that to herself. She was meeting Sam tonight for a drink after work. The other day she had texted Helen, “I miss you!” which made Helen’s chest warm, even though she was pretty sure this was something Sam just said. She had once witnessed her say the very same thing to the USPS guy, and Helen was pretty sure that Sam didn’t actually miss him. Regardless, she was pleased that Sam had reached out.
Helen rarely initiated things. This was the biggest complaint of her last boyfriend, who declared on one particularly rainy Sunday after two years of being together, “I won’t be initiating sex anymore.” Great was Helen’s first thought, which was probably something that needed to be further investigated. But what it really was, was that Helen didn’t know how to say to him, “That kind of pressure makes me want to claw a hole into the soft spot right below my sternum, climb inside and disappear from the face of this earth forever.” Helen didn’t want to, couldn’t even bear the thought of trying. So she said and did nothing. And eventually, he left her, just as she had known he would and she held on to this satisfaction of knowing as if it were the truth.
At 9:47 a.m., Helen got up from her cubicle and made her way towards the kitchen. She had remembered to bring her self-heating smart mug today, and figured she could get some mileage out of that. She pictured herself going up to Deborah at reception later in the afternoon and asking her to guess how long ago she had put hot coffee in her mug. Five hours ago, can you believe it? And it’s still hot?! People were always impressed. Helen smiled to herself as she thought about the small joy of this future interaction.
“Helen! Rhymes with melon!” Helen concentrated on pouring her coffee, feeling the back of her neck begin to burn. Tim. Tim was a decade or two older than Helen and loved to give her restaurant recommendations and talk about how miserable he was, which he always delivered in such a peculiar upbeat fashion. Helen was never quite sure if he was being facetious or mocking her, and she often found herself paralyzed with discomfort when they spoke.
A couple weeks ago, Helen had left the office too close to when Tim had left the office and they ended up riding the elevator down from the eleventh floor together. And then, instead of pretending that he had to walk the other way to catch a different subway line than Helen, he, to Helen’s absolute horror, continued walking with her, right onto the platform and into the very same train car as her (the Uptown 1). She couldn’t believe it. Why would he do that to her? They stood next to one another, grasping onto the same pole for stability, and every time the subway car jerked this way or that, they would knock into one another in a way that reminded Helen about roller coasters and how much she hated them. Tim spoke the whole time about some, “Italian Restaurant on the Upper East Side, that you just have to try sometime. Asiago’s. Or was it Ceiro’s? No, I think it was called Asiago’s. Ceiro’s is another place I went to once, in the same neighborhood though. Anyway, I know the owner, so if you want to go, let me know and I’ll tell him to take care of you. You can bring your boyfriend too (Helen didn’t take the bait). The blanched olives are to die for.” Helen tried to imagine herself dying for a blanched olive. She got as far as picturing the olive, which began to grow and grow until suddenly it was attached to Tim’s body, right where his head should have been. Just Tim’s slight little man body attached to a big old green olive. She began to giggle. Tim laughed with her, as if he were in on the joke too. This made Helen feel sad and she wondered whether or not she had just been cruel. She smiled back at him, looking only at his nose, and told him she liked his shirt to try and make up for it.
Now here Tim was again, loitering in Helen’s personal space. Helen knew this wasn’t really a fair thought, because the kitchen was technically company space, but she couldn’t help but feel claustrophobic.
“Hey Tim, how was your weekend?
“Not bad. I had my kids this weekend and Brandon, my youngest, was really excited to see the city this time. I took them to the Empire State Building and then the nut shop–the one on the west side…I had to see my ex-wife which was a bit of a nightmare, but c’est la vie!” He smiled. Helen walked over to the fridge and pulled out the creamer, dumping a splash into her coffee. She watched it expand and swirl like the drop of paint on a watercolor, not looking up at Tim.
“Yeah, ex-wives never seem to be any good…” she trailed off, unsure how to proceed. “Anyway, I have to get started on this report so…”
There was a pause and then, “Yeah, alright Helen, well maybe I’ll see you later in the elevator!” he called after her as she walked out of the kitchen. Helen sighed, aware that she hadn’t done anything to improve the conversation either.
Helen sat back at her desk and stared at her dual monitors, which both displayed blank excel sheets. Miles and miles of empty white rectangles. Her eyes glazed over. This was the time in the day where she often wondered how she had gotten here. Typing numbers into a spreadsheet. Analyzing budgets. Saying things like, “We should be able to catch up by the second quarter,” and “Excellent!” or “Super!” Things were rarely ever super or excellent, and the faux enthusiasm gutted Helen. Was this what she was meant to be doing with her life? Shouting excitedly at the upward curve of a line on a graph?
Helen picked up her phone and started scrolling through her contacts. She thought about texting Sam, just to feel engaged in something. What she really wanted was to call her brother. This was the type of stuff he had been good at thinking about. Talking about. Big life questions. He was a ponderer. Always had been. She had recently been thinking about when her parents had brought him home from the hospital. She was only four at the time, but still remembers holding him. Clutching a little too hard, for fear of dropping him onto the faded brown carpet of their living room, this tiny little human (she couldn’t believe how small an actual person could be!) and him looking up at her with his big, gray eyes as if to say, “Why are you here?” (How are you here too?)
At exactly 12:13 p.m., Helen left the office to go get lunch. The security guard smiled in her direction on the way out, “Have a good time, Helen.” She jumped at the recognition of her own name and nodded back at him, giving what she hoped resembled a polite smile. She stepped through the revolving door and then out into The Battery, where she wandered around, almost stopping at the Waffle and Dinges truck, but then, against her better judgment, kept on walking. She looked down as she walked. Her long, slender feet were swallowed up by black, chunky loafers. Her ex had called them her “clunkers.” Clunk clunk clunk. Helen made her way into Battery Park, fighting a sea of tourists who weren’t fighting back, too in awe of the city to even notice her. She walked past the carousel. Large, angelic fish painted in earth tone metallics bobbing up and down on their steel poles as the carousel moved around on its axis. Children, she noticed, were riding on the backs of these fish, all giggling in improvised harmony while their mothers (and at least one father) held them up with tired, worried hands. Helen stopped and tried to imagine herself with tired, worried hands, but couldn’t. For some reason, this made her heart shift in her chest and she tried to catch it in her throat by sucking in the cool autumn air. She breathed out slowly as if to steady herself. Suddenly, Helen felt tired, exhausted actually, so she walked to the nearest bench and sat down. She thought about calling her brother again, but understood she couldn’t, so she closed her eyes instead, listening to the sounds of the city. She stayed there until the sun went down, relishing in the shivering of her own body. As the park’s street lamps turned on, Helen took in one last deep breath, and then, without looking at her phone, stood up and started walking towards the subway, unsure where she was headed next.