At their dentist’s office, people called to schedule or cancel appointments, and Claudia and Kate would add or remove their names from the appointment book. When patients arrived, Kate and Claudia gave them forms to fill out, then collected the forms and ushered the patients to an examination room. People came back out on wobbly knees, their eyes glassy, their cheeks packed with cotton. Claudia and Kate would collect their money, and if the patients were children, let them choose a treasure from the treasure chest—which was really just a beer cooler painted black and filled with small, crappy toys.
Holly, the dental hygienist, was thirty-four and had moved here from Cincinnati with her husband — not her current husband, but the one before, a real mistake, she told Claudia and Kate, but an understandable one given she’d been so young when she married him, eighteen if they could believe it, and pregnant too, but just barely. Had Claudia and Kate ever been to Cincinnati?
They told her they had not, and she said they shouldn’t bother. It was a crap-hole.
Holly had stringy hair and a high, squeaky voice. When Holly married her first husband, she told them, she weighed ninety-three pounds. Ninety-three pounds! Of course, she’d been much, much, much too thin back then. Dangerously thin, really. Everyone thought she looked prettier now. More like a woman.
Claudia and Kate hated Holly.
“Her fucking voice!” Claudia would wail as they drove home at night. “It makes me want to drive a pair of scissors through my temple.”
The more they disliked Holly, the friendlier Holly became with them. She said she hoped she hadn’t given them the wrong idea by telling them about her first marriage. She wanted them to know that she’d been happily married to her second husband for nearly twelve years, had given him three healthy children of his own, and also, she was Mormon now.
“She’s lying,” Claudia told Kate later.
“About being Mormon?” Kate asked.
“About being happy.”
There were often long gaps of time between phone calls or appointments, and then Claudia and Kate would take turns making runs to the vending machines on the third floor, bringing back sodas and chocolate bars and little bags of gummy bears. They sat on the counter and painted their fingernails with Wite-Out, eating candy and planning what Kate would tell Claudia’s psychologist the next time they met.
Some afternoons, Holly lingered around their counter, nibbling at their candy and asking Claudia and Kate questions about their lives, then telling them about her own before they had a chance to answer.
“Are you virgins?” she asked, and Claudia snorted while Kate tried to look busy organizing that morning’s charts — there were only two, and she stacked one on top of the other, then switched the top one to the bottom, then switched them again.
Holly had lost her virginity when she was thirteen to a boy who was seventeen and working at her stepfather’s auto shop. They’d done it in the backseat of a 1977 Crown Vic that had been brought into the shop for faulty steering, and afterward, the boy had bought Holly a root beer from the vending machine. When she thought about it now, Holly said, it made her kind of sad. But she tried to remind herself that she’d had low self-esteem back then, and that it was Cincinnati.
At the office, their dentist often bought them lunch and let them go home early, and though he had given up cigarettes several years ago, he let them use his key to the roof when they took smoke breaks, which, he told them, could get him in a lot of trouble if anyone found out. During one of their smoke breaks on the roof, Holly told Claudia and Kate that their dentist had been treated very poorly by his former business partner when something private was discovered about his personal life. But their dentist had handled the situation with dignity and grace. “He could have made a fuss,” Holly told them. “He could have fought for his rights. But he walked away, left like a gentleman.”
“Why?” Claudia asked, and Holly’s gaze drifted over the parking lot below, across the small, silver roofs of the doctors’ sports cars and luxury sedans, the canvas tops of convertibles.
Things hadn’t been easy for Holly either, she said. She’d worked in that office for a long time, been friends with the other women who worked there. Thought she’d been friends with them, anyway.
“You’re not friends now?” Kate asked, and Holly stubbed her cigarette out with the toe of her shoe.
Sometimes friendships were difficult in offices, Holly said. “You know how women can be,” she told Kate, and her eyes darted sideways at Claudia. “Mean.”
Claudia stared down at Holly’s cigarette butt and her mouth crept back into a slanted half-smile. “I didn’t know Mormons were allowed to smoke.”
That afternoon, Claudia and Kate paused beside Holly’s minivan as they crossed the parking lot to their car. The van was rusty and covered with dents and scratches and drawings her children had made in the dirt with their fingers. Claudia glanced around the parking lot to see that she and Kate were alone, then made a gash along the driver’s door with her car key.
Kate clamped her hands over her mouth to silence the cry she felt rising inside. The mark was five or six inches long — sizable, significant, not an accident. But it blended in with the existing wounds of the car, and there was a good chance Holly, or anyone else, wouldn’t notice.
Still, Kate felt the panic rolling across her like waves, the unsteadiness of what Claudia had just done, the door she had opened. And when nothing happened, no sirens went off and no men in uniforms came to drag them away, the panic brightened into a giddiness that Kate felt rushing through her joints like champagne bubbles.
“Why?” she asked, and Claudia shrugged.
“We hate her.”
* * *
Claudia’s psychologist thought they needed to work on impulse control. Five times a day, they were supposed to tell themselves no. They were supposed to say no to things they really wanted. They were supposed to say no and mean it.
“That’s stupid,” Claudia said. “I don’t want to.”
Their dentist had given them permission to come in late on Thursdays so that Kate could meet with Claudia’s psychologist, though he thought that he had given them permission to come in late so that they could tutor slow readers at the YMCA. This week, Kate had told Claudia’s psychologist about gashing Holly’s van in the parking lot. She also told Claudia’s psychologist about driving by their dentist’s house at night, because she and Claudia had done this several times.
Claudia wanted to get a look at his family, so they’d found his house — they were pretty sure it was his house — but they couldn’t see inside. At first, Kate had wondered if this might not be a good idea, but Claudia assured her that it was only natural to be curious about the personal lives of their coworkers, and Kate really did want to see where their dentist lived.
The neighborhood was nice enough, but the gutters on their dentist’s house were swollen and sagging with rotting leaves, and the yard was brown and weedy. “Guess things are a little slow-going at the new practice,” Claudia said.
From Holly they’d learned that their dentist had a wife and three children, though he worked very hard and didn’t get to spend much time with them.
“He doesn’t wear a ring,” Claudia said.
“Lots of men don’t wear rings,” Kate said — their father didn’t wear a ring.
“Does your husband wear a ring?” Claudia asked Holly, who blinked at the floor then said that he did. “You see?” Claudia told Kate. “Holly’s husband wears a ring and our dentist doesn’t. He hates his wife.”
After her session with Claudia’s psychologist, Kate peeled the fake bandage off her hand while she explained to Claudia: It was important for their development as human beings to tell themselves no. No damage to property. No candy for breakfast. No drive-bys. Five times a day: No, no, no, no, no.
Claudia was holding an unlit cigarette in one hand, and when she reached for a lighter with the other, Kate pointed back and forth between them. “No.”
Claudia paused for a moment, then pointed back and forth between herself and Kate. “Um…No,” she said and lit her cigarette.
