Chapter 1
March 17, 1969
Suffering From Nervous Headaches? Ask Your Doctor About Anacin Fast Pain Relief!
Claire sighs. Nervous headaches—not even close to her biggest problem today.
She squints at the poster, tilting her head. It’s been here in the waiting room of the doctor’s office since she was a child, with the same pretty cartoon nurse holding a bottle of medicine on a faded pink background. Back then, Claire had looked at it as a kind of role model. Her own mother trained as a nurse, though she stayed home to raise Claire and keep house rather than working as one. She’s now happily retired, having never worked a day in her life.
Today, the well-kept woman on the poster looks down at Claire judgmentally.
Swallowing down the pang of anxiety, Claire casts her eyes around for a distraction. The waiting room is busier than usual—almost every seat is full. There’s a man dozing off in a chair near the door, wearing perhaps the most obvious toupee Claire has ever seen. It looks like he’s skinned a small Yorkshire terrier and glued it to his head. A person to her left is coughing wetly. There’s a very unhappy toddler somewhere behind her. Cold and flu season is just winding down.
Claire would normally have waited until her birthday in July for her yearly check-up, but she has something important to ask today. Though she’s been dreading it since she made the appointment, she just couldn’t stomach waiting another four months.
“Mrs.Davis?” a nurse calls from the front desk.
As the sleeping man starts to snore, Claire wonders whether he realizes that his toupee is two different shades of brown. Is it only Claire who sees it? Nobody else is giving it a second look. Is she the odd one out? It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Mrs.Claire Davis?” the nurse repeats, with a note of annoyance.
With a jolt, Claire finally recognizes her name being called. She stands so abruptly that she jostles the woman to her left with an elbow, sending the woman’s magazine tumbling to the floor.
The woman tuts quietly, glaring at Claire as she bends down to pick the magazine up.
“Sorry,” Claire says, gripping her purse with all her strength. The nurse who called her name has her eyes on a clipboard, flipping through it with a harried look. “I’m Claire Davis?”
“Dr.Martin is running late today. He appreciates your patience, but it’s going to be a while longer,” the nurse says. Her smile is kind, but tired.
“Oh,” Claire says. The bubble of dread in her chest doesn’t deflate—it only grows bigger. “Of course. No problem at all.”
The blue plastic chair creaks as Claire sits back down. The woman to her left opens her magazine again, muttering disapproving words under her breath.
Claire tangles her fingers in her pearl necklace, tapping it against her front teeth. It helps to quell the restlessness, the constanttap tap tap tapmatching the frantic energy in her body, but soon the woman to Claire’s left clears her throat pointedly, looking at the source of the tapping with a disapproving frown.
Claire quickly sets her hands in her lap.
The woman goes back to her magazine. Bereft of anything else to fidget with, Claire grabs a magazine of her own.VOGUE, the cover proudly proclaims.American Fashion Issue.
Claire gnaws on her lower lip. Her husband doesn’t approve of having fashion magazines in the house. His mother makes most of Claire’s clothes to spare him the cost of dress shopping, so there’s no need for Vogue.
But Pete isn’t here right now.
The woman on the cover of the magazine is beautiful. She’s a blonde bombshell, with her hair styled long and straight to frame her face and a chic neck-scarf under a stylish jacket. She’s sophisticated. Modern. She’s everything Claire isn’t, really. Claire’s hair is a mousy brown, and a bit unruly—by the end of any given day, curly strands of it have usually escaped from whatever style she’s wrestled it into. She’s too tall for her own good, leaning towards gangly and thin, never quite fitting properly into her dresses. Sometimes she thinks it’s a miracle that she managed to get a husband at all.
Claire turns to the first page.Beauty That Works For You!
New hairstyles. New makeup trends. Everything up and coming for the modern woman at the turn of the decade. Claire flips page after page, taking in woman after beautiful woman showing off clothes that look terribly uncomfortable. Claire can’t imagine herself wearing them—how ludicrous would she look doing dishes in a draping black cape over wool pants? Planting tulips in the garden, caked with dirt, while sporting that colorful and expensive floral pantsuit? She can practically hear what Pete’s opinion would be:Too revealing. Too tight. Pants are for floozies. Hippie clothes.
The next set of pages advertises something called the Mark Eden Developer—guaranteed to increase your bust in eight weeks or less. Claire scoffs as she flips the page over. As much as Pete would probably love for her small bust to grow, she doesn’t have the time for that kind of silliness. Next is a two-page spread where a model shows off what she can only assume is some kind of fancy lingerie. It’s a mess of tiny straps, hardlyany actual fabric at all to cover her, and Claire has no earthly idea how the woman got into the thing in the first place. She tilts her head, twisting the magazine back and forth to puzzle it out. Is there some kind of mechanism at the back, or did she somehow maneuver her legs through the labyrinth? And how on earth could the woman have gottenoutof it?
Claire is holding the magazine fully upside down when she hears her name again.
“Mrs.Davis? If you’ll follow me?”
Claire almost rips the magazine in two. She fumbles it, catching it with a bent cover, and the woman beside her tuts disapprovingly again. Claire swallows down the urge to tell her to mind her own business. No need to cause even more of a scene.
The transfer to the doctor’s small private office is just an opportunity for more waiting. Claire sits gingerly in the second plastic chair, and lets her gaze wander over more posters on the walls. The one that catches her eye features cartoon renditions of various fruits and vegetables, dancing around an energetic-looking couple.
