[Editor's note: this is the conclusion of V is for Tandy. It's important that you read the first, second, and third sections before reading this one.]
After throwing the Alphabits cereal into the milk bowl, Tandy peers inside for any messages. Her mother heaves herself down the stairs. The bowl shakes. Tandy swallows. Something goes down the wrong pipe causing Tandy to alternatively gag and sputter. The cereal floats like little shipwrecks spelling GET OUT. Tandy’s mother takes the kitchen chair that she always takes and sits spreading herself out so that her bottom feels the full expanse of the vinyl cushioned seat. Tandy nervously spoons cereal and milk back into one another until the drip in the bowl becomes as familiar as the one in the kitchen sink — just one more inanimate thing’s expression of itself.
“What do you want?” Tandy asks. The voice is timid but the question is there. “I mean really already. What?”
The vagina laughs which Tandy finds disconcerting. “It’s like this, see, “ the vagina goes, “I don’t like you.” The vagina explains that it never forgave Tandy for stretching it all out at birth. “Beyond recognition,” it adds. “You were like a bowling ball coming out. I was never the same. I got so big and loose that things could get lost in me. Remember that dog we had?”
Lucky. Lucky the dog. Tandy remembered him well. They found him somehow all shoved up inside their locked shed one particularly bad rainstorm. They could never figure out how he got himself in there. Tandy always said Lucky had the key to their hearts, and that shed.
“You came home from school one day to find that he was gone. Disappeared. I told you he went to live on a farm where they had pastures for him to run in. I said the suburbs was no place proper for a dog. I lied. Your father couldn’t stand that dog — his nails tapping all over the house. Your father loves his linoleum. He shoved Lucky right up me, yelping and crying all the way,” says the vagina.
Tandy is understandably incredulous. “You’re joking, right? A dog shoved up you ... ? You’re not kidding, are you? A dog went up you ... my dog went up you ... ?”
“Didn’t you wonder why I still bought dog biscuits if there was no more Lucky? When the damn dog made too much noise I shoved a dog biscuit up to shut him up. I even bought the dental kind so he’d have good teeth.”
“Wouldn’t he have died?” Tandy asks. “I mean, being shoved up a vagina and all?”
The vagina becomes indignant. “What are you saying — that I am a killer vagina? Is this some kind of crack about my vaginal acids?”
Tandy is afraid she won’t ever be able to stop shaking her head. “Come on. A dog in a vagina? You expect me to believe ... okay, I’m sorry. A dog in a vagina. I have to say it a few times to let it sink in. I’m sorry, but a dog in a vagina — it’s just wrong on so many levels.”
“Well,” hisses the vagina. “I guess it all depends on how in touch you are with your own vagina. Your mother is very in touch with me.”
Tandy says that she is in touch with her vagina thank you very much, though she stammers on the words vagina and in touch.
“Remember the goldfish that wouldn’t die?” reminisces the vagina. “No matter how much we overfed the damn thing that fucker just wouldn’t belly up and explode.”
“Oh my god,” Tandy goes. “You didn’t put the goldfish up ...?”
“Goodness no. The irony though, fish and vagina. Well that’s what men say anyway. We flushed the damn thing. I don’t think the toilet worked right after that. I only bring the goldfish up because we are talking about dead pets here. Remember that hamster?”
Tandy’s jaw drops, coming seriously close to splashing in her bowl of soggy cereal.
“That hamster mysteriously disappeared,’ the vagina confesses. “It was like a ghost town in its cage — woodchips and ferris wheel. Up the old vagina — that’s me.”
“No,” Tandy wants to shout but it comes out as a hoarse rendering of the word.
“Lucky needed company,” says the vagina.
Tandy tells the vagina that this is insane.
“Remember we had that piano? Your father insisted on music lessons for the kids. Played all sorts of classical when you were just a fetus. Total bullshit. I could have been listening to soft rock for all the good it did. You were about as musical as a garbage truck. Piano’s up the old twat too,” the vagina says smugly.
Tandy questions the validity of the conversation here. “A dog and a piano and a gerbil?”
“It was a hamster,” the vagina corrects. “See? You promised you’d take care of it and you don’t even know what it was that you promised to take care of. Shame on you.”
“You can’t have all of these things up you,” Tandy exclaims.
“Oh Miss Bowling Ball Head doesn’t believe me. When they were in the mood, the dog and the rodent used to play chopsticks. Total cramps from that. The hysterectomy I got? It was to get rid of the whole lot of them. Worked too.”
“I’m sorry?” Tandy apologizes. “I’m sorry my bowling ball head blew you out on the way to my being born. I hardly think, however, that I am responsible for the stretched-out shape you are in. You could have done those Kegel exercises. You could have had reconstructive surgery. Vagina - ectomies or something.”
“We didn’t have the money,” the vagina quips. “You needed braces.”
The two are silent. Then —
“I’m too old for this,” the vagina says. “I can hardly stand myself. I used to be pink. Amber waves of grain. Now, I’m the color of a day full of umbrellas and galoshes. Puddles and earthworms. The day the weatherman gets blamed for — too many gray days and they fire him because there’s a new weatherman out there who will bring with him sweet forecasts in a different baritone. The hope of a new day with no seams. I am an angry vagina okay? I’m good and angry and all I do is pee and leak and then pee some more. And I’m dry. Crackling dry. I’m not even half of the vagina that I once was. And I see you in this house and you stink like youth and I can smell your newness still. And I can’t stand it anymore. You need to get out of this place. I can see you at holidays maybe, disguising myself festive in tinsel and ribbon. Maybe I’ll try spandex. I could try therapy though I’d probably stick to the couch. I could seek out a vagina support group — but in the end, you would always be younger than me and I can’t stand how old that makes me feel.”
‘She said that?” Christoph says. He goes to run his hand through his hair, but remembers that he had used a new hair spray that morning called Brew and he can’t run a steam roller through it, let alone his fingers.
“I’m nonplussed,” Marlys says, having always wanted to use that word out loud in a sentence. Everything else will fail to impress her this day as much as she has just impressed herself. “We should have figured this out — your mother the old vagina feeling threatened by you, the younger vagina. This one went right over our heads.”
“Phantom jelly — for the spookier craving,” boos Christoph.
Marlys is only too happy to correct him even though he knows it’s really phantom jealousy. “Your mom’s got one crazy bitch vagina.’
Tandy and Marlys look at one another and then down toward their laps. They don’t hear anything now, but time will tell. Christoph, relieved that he is not of the vaginally clad, tap dances down the hall.
Sharon Goldner is the author of numerous fiction pieces, including George Stories over at dispatch litareview.
