When I first meet Theresa, she’s just signed the papers.
“Yeah, it was a force of habit,” she says, explaining the way her name appears on the online registration. Whenever I open the patient portal and see an unfamiliar name bound in its itty bitty blue text box, I can’t help but panic; the tenderness that warms my hands does not translate into the small talk new clients often expect from me, so I have to remind myself how to behave when meeting strangers. The person’s well-being and the weather are the only topics of conversation on the table. Questions are okay, comments are not. Answers are okay, but only if they do not lead to further questioning. Instruction is a must. Keep things short, keep things simple, and don’t confuse anyone.
“My last name isn’t Luettgen anymore,” Theresa says with a chuckle. She doesn’t tell me her maiden name or whatever else she now goes by and it, to my eventual frustration, is not something I will learn during the lifespan of our relationship. In fact, she signs in under Theresa Luettgen for each future appointment she makes. Every month, she tries out a new excuse.
It was mine for so, so long, you know?
I’m just so used to writing it down.
It’s fun hearing people mispronounce it, ha ha!
Quickly and excitedly, she regularly takes the time to explain her divorce to The Girl Working Front Desk when she inevitably refers to her as “Mrs. Luettgen.” Some days, it’s aggravating how unwilling Theresa is to introduce herself properly, but I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to know yourself by one name for so long, then find yourself unable to escape it once it’s tainted. If I got married, then divorced due to lying or cheating or one of us getting ugly, I’d want to lose my ex-spouse’s name with the ease of slipping out of an oversized T-shirt.
“Okay, Theresa,” I begin with a click of my favorite pen, “have you been to a massage therapist before?”
“Nope, but I’ve got more money now than I know what to do with, so might as well get some fun out of it, you know what I’m saying?”
As I record her lack of experience, she continues and tells me all about how she’s turning over a new leaf, about how she’s reinventing herself, about how this is going to be her year.
“Do you have any areas you’d like to focus on today?”
“Really just my back. It’s been extra sore.” She pauses and purses her lips.
“You know. Because I carried, cared for, swaddled, and raised my grown ex-husband for ten years.”
“So we’re focusing on your back?”
“Yeah, we’re focusing on my back.”
Walking Theresa to the treatment room, I’m excited that it’s divorce. People often come in for arthritis, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel, tendonitis, anxiety, and Mother’s Day, but no one’s ever come to me for divorce. I wonder where any unknown pain lies, if any repressed memories will manifest in the form of aches, cramps, or pangs. I wonder if Theresa will request that I redirect my focus, and if so, where that focus will be. Maybe she’ll plop her heart down on the table and ask that I massage it in all its mucusy, membraney goodness until it’s ready to beat again1. The woman formerly (and also right now) known as Theresa Luettgen has only requested a 60-Minute Swedish Massage, though, so I likely won’t have to worry about making such a drastic change.
1. This is something I would love to do, but unfortunately, we haven’t offered the Heartbreak massage since the year we opened. The clean-up time gets in the way of following appointments.
Olive-green walls, patchouli, and low-volume, royalty free piano music greet us as we enter the room. I tell Theresa to remove however much clothing she is comfortable with and, before I can let her know I’m going to give her some privacy, her sweatpants are already puddled around her ankles.
“Whoa.” Not a question, instruction, or response. It escapes me less like a word and more like a cluck.
“Oh. Oh! You were going to leave, weren’t you? Ha ha!” She laughs with the ornateness of a bird, not at all embarrassed. She stands in nothing but a tank top and flamingo pink briefs, smiling politely as if I’ve walked in on her wearing a bathing suit. I step backwards into the hall, careful not to expose her to those it may contain. The world belongs to her now.
Theresa lies face-down on the massage table, nestled comfortably under not one, not two, but three separate white towels. She must have snuck into the linen closest and snagged two more, because I only gave her the one. What a weirdo. What a warm, comfy weirdo. She stretches her legs and hums pleasantly, enjoying the experience before I’ve laid even a finger on her.
“Ready when you are,” she says, the headrest warping her speech and bending her voice into a yawn-shaped garble. A pile of her belongings lurks in the corner. Her underwear matches her phone case.
I take a look at what I’m working with. Around her shoulders, her back suffers from sun damage that marbles her skin into all sorts of pretty colors. One mole rests near her armpit and another lays lower down, close to the small of her back. A constellation of freckles travels down the left side of her spine. Acne—or “bacne,” I guess—blankets a portion of her skin. Her hair, dishwater blonde and peppered with dandruff, sways back and forth in a messy bun. I have no idea what her face looks like.
Peering out just above where the third towel lies, right where what many of my clients refer to as “love handles” are, she has the name “Bo” tattooed on her. The tattoo isn’t anything big or special, just “Bo” written in what I’m guessing is Garamond. Whoever this Bo guy is, he must be a big deal. Tattooed on someone’s body forever and in a font not only more poetic than Times New Roman, but with infinitely more sex appeal than Comic Sans, as well? Hubba hubba.
I start working with Theresa’s trapezius muscles and recognize a tightness. She sucks in her teeth at first, but lets me continue kneading the area until it promises to loosen up. Massages sometimes hurt at the beginning, so I admire her patience and appreciate her willingness to let me help a girl out.
The massage continues and, when I gauge her tension, I find that much of it extends across the length of her back. As my hands move further down her body in an effleurage, they get closer and closer to that tattoo. As I gently increase pressure in response to her tissue’s hardness, “Bo” sprawls into an oblong shape, stretching longer and longer with each movement. Out loud, I want to read the name slowly and deeply like a ghost. In this moment, more than anything, I’m tempted to ask Theresa if Bo is her ex-husband or an old boyfriend or son. Or if she started getting a tattoo that was supposed to say “Bouleversement” or “Boondoggler,” but had to stop because it hurt too badly. I repeat “inappropriate, inappropriate, inappropriate” in my head to drown out the impulse.
Similarly to most of my other Swedish massages, the hour goes by quickly and wordlessly. Generic piano music written by contemporary, unknown, possibly AI-generated composers continues to play quietly over the radio and the incense burns nicely and all is well and all is good. When we finish, I face the wall, because I have a feeling Theresa is going to roll over without warning.
“Thanks so much,” she says, fulfilling my fear and walking nakedly to the other side of the room. Her bare feet tap softly against the carpet.
“What was your name again?” she asks the back of my head.
“Avi. And you’re welcome.”
“Avi. Avi-ously!” We both laugh at her stupid pun and I actually don’t think I’m faking it. I also don’t fake it when I tell her I hope to see her again soon.
Twenty-four days go by before I see “Theresa Luettgen” appear again on my work computer. Once more, she’s requested a 60–minute Swedish massage and I’m surprised because there’s a Groupon right now for a 40-Minute Thing massage2, so that’s what I’ve been up to all week. The second I read her name, I grab a compact mirror out of my purse to make sure my hair’s not too messy and that there isn’t any Berry Baby No. 8 on my teeth. I have three other appointments before Theresa’s and I run this routine at the end of each of them, ensuring neither my appearance nor cleanliness has been devastated mid-session.
2. Some people like to bring in their things and watch their things be massaged for forty minutes.
In the lobby, I know I’m set for success when The Girl Working Front Desk compliments my skin.
“It’s so beautiful and clear and clean!”
I thank her.
“I could eat food off of it! It’s just so clean!”
I thank her even though I don’t know what that means.
It seems our receptionists don’t have a very long shelf life, because we are constantly on the hunt for a new one. We tend to hire shiny pretty babydolls fresh out of high school that need a job to bridge the gap between one school and the next. They move on when their gap has been bridged or when they discover that being an employee at a massage parlor isn’t as soothing as being a client. Things start off great, but the second they have to answer an angry phone call regarding a client’s 5-Minute ectotherapy3 session or newfound dislike of tea light candles and jojoba oil, they progress to something more relaxing like working the counter at a children’s library or doing Instagram. Due to how little time I get to know any of our desk girls, I’ve given up on learning any of their names and am totally unsurprised when I walk into work and there’s a new shiny pretty babydoll fresh out of high school manning the ship. This particular The Girl Working The Front Desk is the first to boost my ego though, so I might actually read her name tag if she moves her braids out of the way.
3. Method in which the client’s soul is exorcised from their body and gently massaged. Time-slots are very brief, because souls tend to become phantoms when earthbound for too long and phantoms tend to grow sentient and envelope the world in shadow.
Theresa’s hair is hot pink now. Not just hot pink, but beaten and battered by box dye. Likely, the assault took place the previous night considering the color’s gruesome vibrancy and splotchiness on her temples. “Good afternoon” is my choice of greeting when she walks in, but what I want to say is “Why did you do that? Go back! Go back! Go back!” When we enter the treatment room, she comments on the weather, which helps me calm down over the whole hair thing.
“I hate the cold, but all this sun has got me sweating! I’m out of breath!” Finally, something I know.
“Yes.” What.
Without another word, I run into the hall. I do it because she’s going to take all of her clothes off and wrap herself in a towel torta, but I also do it because I need a second to remember how to talk to people. Questions, answers, instructions, and normalcy. Be a person and act like a person.
When I return, as expected, Theresa is lying on the table in her cotton fiber heaven cocoon. Did she take four towels this time? I think she took four towels this time. Maybe I should start locking the linen closet before I leave the room, but who am I to deny a divorced woman her emotional support rags?
I turn on the piano slop that helps clients fall asleep, light some nag champa, get ready for business as usual, and then notice something: it says “Ben.” The “Bo” tattoo now says “Ben.” Whoever did Theresa’s tattoo carved a line through the middle of the O and added an N to the end of the name, seamlessly morphing it into a whole new piece. Someone who has not seen her bare back before wouldn’t even question it. To them, Ben is her immortal lover and always has been.
Like last time, I start by rubbing her trapezius muscles and noting their stiffness, like maybe she has a knot in her back. When she begins to soften, I swap effleurage for petrissage, which favors a firmer touch, and I know that it’s okay to continue when she nods, her bun wobbling in the opposite direction of her head.
I can’t help myself. Deep down, I’m sure I can. I absolutely can. I’m a grown woman, after all. My job has been communicating physically with customers for years. Communicating verbally really can’t be that much more difficult, right? I know it’s wrong and I know it’s crazy and I do it anyways:
“Have you met someone?” I ask Theresa when my hands have slid down to the middle of her back, right where I’ve noticed she’s the least tense and murmurs the most pleasure. She laughs a brief, spitting sort of laugh, like the ones you have when you’re mid-drink and one of your friends does something stupid. Then she clears her throat.
“I feel like a virgin again!” she says, the headrest echoing her excitement and making her sound tipsy. She goes on to tell me about her new man, about Ben, about how she met him through Facebook, about how they met up in person a mere three hours later. During the rest of our 60-Minute session, I learn all there is to know about Ben: he’s roguishly handsome, has an awesome mouth that does everything right, works downtown at the ostrich zoo4, and devoured his unborn twin in the womb, which is why he’s twice the guy any other guy is and why every room he enters is a little too small for him.
4. It used to be an all animals zoo, but the ostriches ate everything else.
“He’s a real man, you know? He makes me feel like a woman.”
According to her, he is leagues above Bo, who can’t grow a beard and needs help using the microwave. He is leagues above all of her other exes5 as well, so much so that she worries for the welfare of lesser mankind. She doesn’t mention the tattoo.
5. These include (but are not limited to) a coworker who burned his clothes whenever he drove past a police officer, as well as a guy she dumped once she unearthed his obsessive habit of watching videos of women crying.
Theresa talks so much and I listen so much. Her voice is raspy and every word comes out a cough, but it’s very sexy. I make a mental note to double-check exactly how dangerous they say smoking is now because I might have to give cigarettes a try. At one point, I even start responding to some of what she says. “Oh yeah?” and “No way!” are nothing phrases, but she just loves them, so I use them like I’m depositing quarters into a fortune teller machine, hoping that she never stops talking and also that she starts talking about something other than Ben because I’m not nearly as interested in him as I am in her.
We talk for so long that, eventually, my coworker Sarah with an H knocks on the door.
“Avi? Avi, are you and Mrs.—”
“Miss!” Theresa calls.
“Sorry. Are you and the hot pink lady still in there?”
I nod. Then I say “yes” out loud because she probably can’t see through walls. Sarah with an H then informs me that we have gone past our 60-Minute time slot and that I already have someone waiting in the lobby for their monthly 30-Minute Lead Pipe6. Shoot. Embarrassed, I turn around and cover my eyes.
6. For our more bent up patrons, this procedure consists of being whacked in the spine with a lead pipe until things start feeling better and looking straighter.
“Theresa, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? About what?” she asks, sitting up and tossing her collection of towels to the floor. She pitter-patters to the corner and gets dressed. Today, she’s wearing athletic shorts with UGGs and it looks atrocious. Same flamingo pink underwear as last time.
“There’s never any need to apologize for girl talk, especially when it’s so much fun,” she claims, tapping me gently on the shoulder to let me know she’s fully clothed. I open my eyes and whip my head in her direction, smiling uncontrollably and with more teeth than I usually allow.
“Thanks again,” she says. Her eyes are blue.
A month later, I have my annual performance review with my boss, Caroline. Caroline has only been my boss for like two weeks because my old boss, Diana, died from something and can no longer come to work but, in spite of this, Caroline still has a lot to say about my work ethic over the last twelve months.
“Alright . . . Avi,” she begins. I nod so she knows she got my name right and she giggles. She is such a good manager for knowing the names of those who work for her.
“I have both seen and heard really great things about you! You come into work early every day, your workspace is always so nice and clean, a majority of our positive reviewers online name you specifically,” she trails off a little bit and I’m upset because I love hearing people say nice stuff about me.
“You are an incredible employee and a valuable member of the team. However . . . ”
Uh-oh.
“I heard that you recently ended an hour-long appointment late. Sarath with a silent T told me.”
“But did you both see and hear that?”
“No.”
“Okay. Also it was Sarah with an H working with me that day, not Sarath with a silent T.”
“Oh, right. Thank you for reminding me. I’m really starting to feel like part of the family here!” She shuffles a stack of papers but doesn’t flip through or read any of them. Her office smells like tires and is covered from floor to ceiling with framed photos of masseuse clipart. There’s a jar of round things on her desk and they are probably malted milk balls but I’m too scared to ask for one because what if they’re something more sinister?
“I want this team to succeed, Avi, so I’m going to need you to take charge during your sessions and finish them as quickly as you can, okay? I want to see you get those Swedish massages done in thirty minutes starting next week.”
“Swedish massages are offered in 60-minute intervals.”
“That’s right! Thank you! This place really is starting to feel like home. I guess what I mean to say is that you shouldn’t be spending time with customers once their allotted time has run out, does that make sense?”
I nod and nod and nod until she starts talking again.
“Great! You really are doing great. I just love all of you. Don’t do that again or I’ll be mad, okay? Don’t do it again. I love you. I love you, bye.” She ends the very much in-person meeting like it’s a phone call. Caroline makes me think I’d be okay never working here again. That changes when I go back to the workroom and see Theresa’s name light up my sign-in list once again.
To my surprise, our next session feels less like our last one and more like our first one; Theresa comes in and does her whole getting naked and stealing towels thing, but then she doesn’t talk very much. She didn’t even seem all that thrilled to remind everyone in the lobby that her last name isn’t Luettgen, but actually another name. Her hair is half brown, half pink, and dead all over and she’s got a pyrite nose ring now. She says hi to me, but the connection I assume we had seems to have been lost in translation.
“How are things going?” I ask her. This is only the third time we’ve met, but I’ve decided Theresa is a safe person to exercise being more sociable around. During our setup, I ditch the overly produced piano garbage in favor of a motivational self-help CD I found in the back; anything is better than the joy of music being robbed from me all over again every single day. It’s called I’m Possible and has a photo of a woman swimming in a pool alongside sunglasses-wearing golden retrievers on the cover.
Hi. I’m Pat Moosallini-Hilton. Let’s start off with some guided meditation.
“Oh, I’m alright,” Theresa says. “The house is a disaster and I don’t have the time or the energy to clean it, you know?” She goes on for a little while, telling me about how she and Bo used to live in a big, beautiful farmhouse in the country and now she’s confined to her mom’s barely-any-square-feet doublewide, about how she wants to get her own place, but she’s scared to start all over on her own. I light the candles and, when I come over to continue our ritual, I freeze.
“Who the fuck is Evan?”
I cover my mouth with both my hands and close my eyes. I can already hear Theresa flipping over to face me.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The backs of my eyelids get redder and redder as embarrassment flashes hotly through my body. My feet are glued to the floor and my skin is on fire. I’m so humiliated, I could cry. I could throw up. The B in “Ben” has been massacred into a V, the E further brutalized to take on the shape of an A, and a lower-case E has been crammed at the front of the name, morphing “Ben” into a remarkably messier “eVan” and causing the tattoo to droop more towards the left side of Theresa’s person.
“It’s okay, Avi,” she says through a sigh. She faces away from me, assuming proper massaging position. I open my eyes and wipe away tears, but they come too eagerly for me to stop them. I cry as I rub her back, tears landing all over her moles and freckles and acne, pooling around her beauty in gross, globby splashes.
You are strong, you are unbreakable, you are woman. We are woman!
“Things didn’t work out with Ben,” Theresa begins. She inhales deeply and I slow my movements, giving her space to breathe more comfortably.
“Or Evan.”
She doesn’t say anything else.
Before I know it, our time runs out. Instead of waiting in the room for her to put her clothes back on, I rush into the hallway and towards the lady’s room where I know it’s okay to cry. The door opens shortly after I enter, right when I’m ready to kick off my meltdown. Behind me, Theresa stands wearing one flip-flop and holding the other in her hand.
“It’s okay.” She reaches towards me and touches my hair that is my sister’s hair that is my mother’s hair that is my grandmother’s hair.
“I would kill to have a head of hair like yours, you know that?”
Through sniffles and cries and other sounds that lurch up my throat, I respond:
“Can I know more about you?”
Theresa’s eyebrows rise to the top of her head. This is the closest we’ve ever stood face-to-face, the most I’ve gotten to understand her composure, her stance, her smell. Sweet tobacco breath and sugar sweat. She smiles and leaves the restroom.
When I get home, I run upstairs, hop into bed, and look Theresa Luettgen up on Facebook. It takes only a couple of scrolls to find her and, as I expected, she still uses her married name online. It also turns out she’s a bit younger than I expected: twenty-eight, only a couple years older than me when I kind of thought she was in her forties. Is this the fault of smoking, of a marriage gone sour, or my poor understanding of aging? Whatever the case, she’s still someone whose back I wouldn’t mind looking at all day forever. Investigating her posts, I discover that she has a son and a daughter she’s never brought up, not even in passing. Her cover photo—a picture of her and her children dressed in matching llama-print pajamas and drinking hot apple cider—looms behind her profile photo—a picture of her wearing a tankini with her boobs all out and her face airbrushed to uncanny hell. In many of her posts, her daughter dons a huge camo hoodie that swallows her whole and her son is shaped like one of those telephone toys with the face and cord to pull. Their names are Destiny and Dawson and I wish that they were both named something else.
Most of Theresa’s posts are selfies she’s taken with different men, many of whom she has announced to her Facebook friends as her official partner shortly before making a break-up post and flaunting around a new guy. Some of them drive motorcycles, some of them only smile with their mouths closed, some of them are Facetuned more than she is, and none of them are good enough for her. One of her posts from a few weeks ago, the one parading her newfound love, Evan, has a comment from an old-looking lady that reads simply: “Take your time.”
Towards the end of Theresa’s post history, I find something glorious: a picture of herself alongside the infamous Bo Luettgen. It’s their wedding photo, and it’s so lovely I print it out so I can finally have some sort of decoration on my desk at work. My client stuns in her natural brunette glory and sheath dress. Bo wears a man outfit.
Self-control is something I’ve left far in the past, so I decide to just look him up too: Bo Luettgen. His profile is harder to find, because he shares a name with a German glockenspiel ensemble and also a retired porn actor. Aside from a low-quality PNG of what his face looked like fifteen years ago, he doesn’t have any posts, so I Google him and huzzah! Mugshots! He’s been arrested in my county and all of his dirty laundry is readily available for me to dive straight into. I click on his stupid, awful face and scroll past charge after charge: drug smuggling drug smuggling violation of parole vandalism violation of parole DUI drug smuggling economic espionage shoplifting failure to pay legal child support obligations drug smuggling shoplifting violation of parole. His hair looks greasier in every picture and that makes me laugh. Then I see the most recent charge, one recorded only a year and a half ago, around the time he and Theresa called it quits: strangulation and domestic violence. I choke back a shriek and try to crumple my laptop between my hands like it’s made of paper.
“Hey,” my sister, Maya, says, barging into my room with Theresa and Bo’s wedding photo in one hand and her henna cone in the other. She holds up the image.
“Did you print out a picture of two people getting married outside of Bass Pro Shops?”
Together, we sit on my bed. To soothe my agonized soul, Maya paints a mandala on my hand while I sob over the mistreatment of my friend and wonder when I’ll be good enough to help anyone.
At our next session, Theresa’s hair is fried blonde with blue tips. Her nose ring is now accompanied by an equally garish eyebrow piercing. Her tattoo says “Vance.” What ever happened to the e in “eVan,” might you ask? Why, it’s only obscured by an illustration of an arrow piercing a heart, of course! And why doesn’t Theresa just cover up her entire Bo Ben eVan Vance piece with the arrow piercing a heart? Your guess is as good as mine.
Theresa continues to request my help and I continue to massage her Swedishly for sixty minutes, but we no longer speak. It’s funny; she’s likely stopped talking to me because of my getting too invested in her during our last session and I’ve stopped talking to her because I don’t want to fall deeper into whatever spell she’s got me under. We’re both protecting me. She keeps things cordial and I keep things polite and we move on, but none of my other clients grant me the fulfillment Theresa so easily can. I’ve gotten sick of treating people with such smooth, unmarked backs, so even though things aren’t the same, I continue to look forward to my monthly hour with her. I crave skin that tells a story.
Over the course of only a few months, an encyclopedia of men is etched into her back: Vance becomes andy becomes greg becomes BryAn becomes BrAndon becomes — here’s the kicker — at our final session, she arrives with BArThoLomäus adorning her body. Who is Bartholomäus? There is no one named Bartholomäus.
Pressing my palms into her lower back, my fingers graze her tangle of tattoos, many of which have been distorted by arrows and hearts and skulls and roses. Her flesh, the square on her left flank, raw and red, is sensitive to touch. These past couple sessions, her body tenses at the slightest bit of contact. When she shivers under my careful hands and starts to whimper, I decide it’s time.
“Theresa,” I say. I don’t remember the last time I said her name out loud in this room.
“We’re offering a new massage, would you be interested in sampling it? It’s more gentle than the Swedish and I’d do it for free.”
“Uhm, absolutely, Avi, are you kidding me?”
“Okay. It’s called a Paint Massage, have you ever heard of it?”
“No, is it exactly what it sounds like?”
“It’s when someone paints your back and it feels really nice.”
“So it’s exactly what it sounds like.”
“Okay. I’m going to start where you have the most tension, is that okay?”
From the counter, I grab Maya’s henna cone—which she definitely gave me permission to take—and squeeze a dollop of its contents out onto Theresa’s back. Slowly, I drag the henna over the names of her past lovers, over labels I wish to see erased.5
————————————
5 Her body6 trembles as it blooms into a zentangle.
————————————
6 I want to lean over and kiss it, run my lips over what has been claimed7 by so many others.
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7 Nothing would satisfy me more than peeling the names right off of her with my teeth.8
————————————
8I want to return her autonomy, to at last release her from the control to which she is shackled.9
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9But I choose10 not to.
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10 A selfless decision? Or a decision I make out of fear?
With each motion of the cone, Theresa moans, stretching her arms and legs with more liveliness than I’ve seen her exhibit in ages. Since I opted for a session without music, her long-awaited cry and the soft hiss of the candles engage in their own song. Our time together ends as soon as my masterpiece is complete. Theresa sits up and asks if she can dress in front of me. I sit cross-legged on the floor and watch as she pulls her sweatshirt back on, her henna glistening wetly against her skin, her gathering of losers unrecognizable beneath her metamorphosis.
The next day, Caroline calls me into her office.
“Avi, I have never, ever been this angry. In my almost one years working here, I haven’t seen anything this bad. The Girl Working Front Desk told me when she answered her first phone call this morning, she heard a woman screaming your name at the top of her lungs.”
“Gulp,” I say. Then I actually gulp.
“The woman said that she accepted your offer of a paint massage, which is something we aren’t adding to our catalogue until Frida Kahlo’s birthday, so I don’t even know why you brought it up. But yeah, you painted her back, and she said when her boyfriend saw her in the shower that night —” Caroline takes a deep breath. She grabs a clipboard and reads from it.
“They saw that on her back, you wrote
Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa Theresa.”
Wow.
“What kind of paint did you use? Why didn’t it come off? Why did you make such a mess of that woman? You were like a daughter to me.” Caroline opens her jar of round things and pulls a handful out. She squeezes them with her fists and shakes her head angrily. Her whole desk quakes in anger. One of the frames falls off the wall and shatters, killing its tiny clipart lady in cold blood.
“Why did you do it?”
“Because we are woman.”
I don’t care to elaborate.
“This house is no longer a home. You’re fired.”
When I walk out into the parking lot, I stuff everything from my desk into my car and pull out my phone. What little I have means nothing to me and the same can now be said for my former place of work. I rush to Theresa’s Facebook page, eager to be reminded of what she looks like, to learn what color now floods her hair, to investigate her current relationship, to see if her kids have achieved any academic accomplishments or made her laugh, to check on her well-being, but I can’t. I’m already blocked. I’m already blocked and it’s funny how upset that makes me, because my name was never going to free hers, anyway.
