Pliancy
At first, I blamed her diet. All those pancakes and quesadillas, thin-crust pizzas and saltine crackers with sliced cheese. Foods that flat couldn’t be good for a person. A person ought to eat foods with dimension. You are what you eat, I told her. I took over dinner duty and made dish after dish of the fullest foods I could find: stuffed chicken, stuffed peppers, stuffed duck, great swollen loaves of bread, loaded baked potatoes. I switched out her glass of Pinot Noir for a fuller-bodied Shiraz.
Yet, still, she flattened. Her body deflated like one of our son’s pool toys.
She refused doctors, therapists. Said she liked how she could slide through cracked doors without touching the knobs. Said her clothes hung on her frame much better now that she was flat. It makes sense, she said, just look at the women in the catalogues. When our son’s teacher asked her to come into class to demonstrate objects in the first dimension, she was delighted. Mr. Hopkins says my profile is a perfect line, she said. Isn’t it incredible? She turned to the side for me then and vanished into the striped curtains behind her.
One evening, as summer waned to autumn, we slept with the window open. I tugged the corner of our blanket and pulled it up over my shoulder. Oof, she said, her breath on my cheek. Because I had actually grabbed her elbow, had yanked her flattened body up over mine. I’m so sorry, I said, a little embarrassed. But I didn’t let go. A crisp breeze came in through the window, and her body was warm, yielding. She let me pull her tighter around my body, let me tuck her up under my chin.
This is nice, I whispered.