The Happy Treatment

by Teri Carter

    For the past few months you’ve been seeing Ned in the basement of his ex-wife’s house. While you’ve never seen this ex, you often hear her soft-shoed footsteps overhead as you strip to your black bra and black panties then pull up the gauzy white sheet to cover yourself. Today, a December frost bleeds through the basement’s concrete so a thermal blanket tops the sheet. You bury your arms deep underneath and draw the covers up to your neck like a shroud.
    A white poinsettia, new since your last visit, anchors the edge of a desk. A space heater hums and whirrs in the corner. In the next room, water gushes from a bathroom faucet and you know Ned is there, washing his hands, warming them. You wait. When Ned appears he sits between you and the desk in a black leather chair, manila folder on his lap, pen in hand. He leans back, his chair creaking more like a door than a chair. He props one foot up on your bed-like table. You feel the tug of the sheet.
     "How’s your back?" he asks.
     "Better. Still tight in the shoulder, but my lower back is better."
     "And your stomach?" He opens the folder and scans his notes with the pen. When he finds what he’s looking for he taps the nib. "Time before last, your stomach thing was back. I wrote here ‘nervous stomach, some diarrhea, nauseous, trouble sleeping.’"
     "Same, I guess. Sleeping better."
     Ned’s pen darts back and forth, back and forth across the page like the needle of a polygraph. "How’s Jason?"
     "We’re fighting over cereal. Cereal. Can you believe it?" Your voice makes light of it, but your once-cold arms feel hot and heavy now. You lift the sheet to free them. It billows. Once the sheet settles your hands clench the hem, you hold it hostage between your breasts.
     "Who’s doing the fighting?"
     "We are. Jason and me."
     "Whose fight is it, I mean. Yours, or his? A fight always belongs to somebody."
     "Mine, I guess. I don’t know. Am I a failure if I pick fights with an eleven-year-old?"
     "Listen to your words. In our first five minutes I’ve heard ‘fight’ and ‘failure.’"
     "Come on. December has already been a long month and it’s not even Christmas yet. I hate Christmas. All that fake cheer and unrealistic expectation."
     "Fake," he repeats. "Expectation."
     You decide not to share the rest of the words circling the drain in your head: childish, mean, vindictive, hateful.
     Ned stands up, lays the folder and pen on the seat of his chair. He opens a desk drawer where he takes out a packet of acupuncture needles, then looks down at you, hovers, and rips open the rice paper packet. "How about the Happy Treatment today?"
     The lower rims of your eyes retain a pool of unfallen tears, so you hold your head still and stare straight ahead, unblinking, at the ceiling. Footsteps. Ned’s ex-wife, the woman of the house, drifts overhead. It’s after three, you think. Her kids must be on their way home from school. You imagine her in the kitchen, baking cookies, pouring tall glasses of milk, perhaps wearing a dainty strand of pearls.
     Ned’s hand pats your sore shoulder, rests itself there. "The Happy Treatment it is." He tap-tap-taps in the first needle.