False Bingo by Jac Jemc

Author:Jac Jemc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Bernadette went home and read her advice columns, not for the advice, but to linger in the pity she felt for the people feeling the need to ask for it.

Bernadette listened to her answering machine. She had one message from a charity that called her at least twice a week. Somehow it worked out that she was never home for these calls. If she were, she would pick up the phone and ask them to stop calling, but in the meantime, she spent seconds identifying the message and deleting it only once it reached its end.

Bernadette marked the date of the surgery on the calendar on her fridge. She had picked the date because she had no plans immediately following it. Her social obligations dropped off the night before the surgery, so that afterward she could sequester her bandaged self until the wound had healed. It was not vanity she worried about post-operation, but rather the inevitable questions and obligatory concern she sought to avoid. She looked at those white, square days following the surgery and felt no trepidation.

Bernadette thought of the man from the waiting room. She sat down at her kitchen table and picked up a pen. She began to draw him on the back of an envelope. She was no artist. What she drew was little better than what a child might do. His eyes were at the top of his head. His mouth stretched nearly to the edges of his face. She had no idea how to re-create the swoop and start of his hair, and drew more lines than such a caricature required. When she finished, she placed the picture on her fridge with a realty magnet that had been stuck to her mailbox outside. The realty magnet showed the face of a blond woman in a suit, and Bernadette didn’t like the way the placement suggested that the drawing of the man from the doctor’s office knew the realtor, that they might be together, so she swapped in a giraffe magnet that was currently holding down a coupon for toilet paper, and gazed at her work, satisfied. There were three faces on the fridge now: the newly drawn portrait, the realtor magnet, and her niece’s school picture. She made eye contact with all three and then went about her regular evening business.

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