Jamais Vu
Such a fucking coward.
Almost daily, to the mirror, Lilia says this. All her reasons are excuses in this moment; she doesn’t want to hear her own voice. She cannot look her image in the eye.
You talk so much shit, but then you let them. And you keep going back. And you’re silent.
She looks at her mouth and she hates it. Her crooked right cheek from sleeping on her face. Her droopy jowls from too much smiling; smiling for them. Her nose that’s plumper compared to younger photos, widened over time. But the eyes that call to look upwards, she just won’t.
When are you going to stick up for us? Never, right? Fucking never. Right?
She readies herself for another round of treatment at the chiropractor. Dr. X, the one from which her mother-in-law recently retired as a medical assistant, off the books for twenty years.
Plastic-tan Man, Lilia calls him in her head, because he looks like someone put a prosthetic face on him. His skin is leathery, the color of manufactured red clay at construction sites in suburbs voluminously emerging new subdivisions until the air is starving for trees. She hates those places and Dr. X feels like those places. Everything about him is fake to Lilia.
Lilia is there for her neck and shoulders. Gina, the assistant on staff that day, takes Lilia into the main exam room, has her lie on her belly as she sets her up with heat and TENS and leaves her for 15 minutes.
Enter Dr. X.
Before she can respond to his hello and pleasantries, her shirt is up, modules detached. He moves swiftly down her spine and pulls at the waistband of her jeans. He lingers.
How’s Justice doing? That’s good. I’ve known him since he was really young. He’s a good kid — I mean man. He’s a good man.
He tucks the sheet that covers her lower half, holds the waistband away from her skin exposing ass dimples above magenta thongs, then lets them go. He travels back to her shoulders, ointment and massage, hands under and over bra straps, neck adjustments CRACK! shoulder adjustments POP! spine alignment SNAP!
You know, you can take your bra off before the appointment. This way we don’t get ointment on it.
He applies an ice pad (although Lilia is thinking that maybe that should have been done first) and leaves it to work, leaves Lilia to travel back to a time when big fingers groped tiny thighs and she froze for her life.
She wants it to be a fluke. Even after he comes back and rolls the vibrating massager over her ass repeatedly — her ass so far from her neck and shoulders. She wants to believe it is somehow all connected and necessary.
Her mother-in-law left the room before Dr. X began. She insisted on accompanying her to every appointment instead of Lilia’s husband Justice, who thought she and Mom were bonding. Lilia knew by week two that Mommy-in-Love was pimping.
You know who you look like? Megan from that Key & Peele episode? Only you’re much prettier. Such a beautiful face.
This line drops before Dr. X puts his hands on her lower back. This time, he is the one to set up the heat and TENS. This time he rolls her pants down slightly, ass dimples and panties and goose bumps open to the artificial air in the exam room, Dr. X’s bulging eyes behind her head. She imagines where they rest, how they climb and descend.
The sheet is tucked, Lilia’s ass is semi-out and in her fifteen minutes alone, she lies there under the heat and pulsation hoping the female attendant returns instead, hoping her mother-in-law will finish the treatment like she used to when she worked there and Lilia would come with Justice, hoping she is not in her old street bag, hustling Lilia’s body for favors instead of her own.
Lilia gets none of those wishes.
Why the fuck didn’t you say something? To Mom? To Justice?
Those mirror eyes speak the answer once she finally finds the courage to look into them.
Because Mom set this shit up and will try to convince you you’re imagining things. Because Justice will stomp that white man to shattered bones and you will lose him to metal bars. Because you’re a middle-aged woman and maybe it IS all in your head. Because maybe there is a good explanation that makes this all go away.
Treatment number three. Lilia wears granny panties and a snug sports bra that prove no deterrent to her mildly gropy chiropractic session. The room is smaller this time and his breath is closer, the smell of shellac in his hair, cologne she did not notice at treatments one and two. All of it putrid. Her stomach bubbles, a hurl ready in her throat.
You have pretty hands.
Crinkly and veiny from lupus and weight loss, the part of her body of which she’s most self-conscious, he’s rubbing them. Not in a chiropractor-ish way. She is not even sure that’s a thing. Those aren’t even in her x-rays.
Oh, this motherfucker.
Lilia lifts herself to sit, swinging her legs over the table, startling Dr. X. and knocking away the hands that had just rolled down her granny panties. Staring him dead, fear retreating behind exhaustion, mind weighing words and scenarios and consequences, for him, for Mom, for Justice, for her. She could blow all this shit up.
Is everything ok?
Lilia stares. His face is a nervous smile, perplexed eyes. Frightened eyes. Fake leathery smile emerging, fleeing.
I’m saving a life today. Two lives. I’m saving mine.
Dr. X’s perplexity is gone. He might have picked the wrong one. He knows Justice’s history. He had banked on silence. Fear. Lilia had run out of at least one of those.
She stands, brushes past him, her shoulder bumping his chest as he rises from his stool.
Tell Justice I said hello.
Lilia swings her head around, firing a glare to melt his stupid smiling plastic-tan face.
Yeah, I might tell him something else.
It’s ok. Forgive me for being so hard on you. You haven’t failed us. You have much to contend with. Much to live through. You are reclaiming your power, your way. You did more than was expected of you, considering. I love you, I trust you, we are not what we once were, and no one could blame us if that were not so. I am proud of you.
Lilia looks into her mirror eyes, no flinch. Her tears have an audience with her, finally. No pressure behind her eyes, abundant the fall, they kiss her face with love and freedom, clean and full of fire.