Part 1: Meet Nadine
by Swati Sudarsan
Michel O’Hara, Figure 2: Paris, 2016, digital photograph, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Part 1: Meet Nadine
Swati Sudarsan | APR 2024 | Issue 32
If Nadine had known that the tyranny of normalcy could unravel over the course of just one day, she might have savored this last morning of illness.
She woke up with a throat full of phlegm. The run-down feeling in her seemed to have settled deeper into her body over the course of the night. She had been recovering from a cold for weeks now, and her skin had turned ashen from the illness. Dev thought the best remedy was bedrest and no social interaction. Something about the passiveness of his remedy irked her, but he was a Very Important Surgeon so she considered his advice with great weight. For now she’d taken to copiously ordering new moisturizers online. It was a good middle ground, because she could just sit in bed and let the packages arrive while still feeling she was using her brain toward something.
Her other thought had been to get some natural sunlight. Just a quick soak outside her door. Unfortunately, it had been gray skies for weeks. She checked the weather app daily in case it let up, but the only colorful thing lately had been the app itself. It had been saying the strangest things. The first time she noticed it, she had been in the middle of a raging fever, so she chalked it up to a hallucination. When the strange reports continued, she deleted and redownloaded the app, scoured her bills for scam activity, and even gave her phone a few smacks. In the end, she decided the weather station must have hired one of those melodramatic subway poets to write beta reports, and she had gotten an early rollout.
Today the app said: Flurrious cloud cover will succumb to histrionics by the end of the day. Shafts of shy sunbeam may sporadically prickle through, depending on lunar regressions.
Nadine went to the door, hoping the lunar regression was aligned favorably, but instead she saw a woman standing on her lawn, peering up at the histrionic cloud cover. There was something familiar about her that made Nadine shudder. Maybe she was one of those women who sold CutCo knives around the neighborhood, like a sadistic adult girl scout. That thought spooked Nadine. She quickly shut the door and traipsed back up.
+
Upstairs was where Nadine spent most of her time, stowed away like some brittle Venetian doll. Despite the wide windows and open floor plan, the bedroom felt stifling. It had come to represent the pinnacle of domestic drudgery, a place where chores compounded here as if satanically summoned. Nadine didn’t understand how it could be so constant. There were the regular chores, like wiping countertops and cleaning toothpaste off the mirrors. Then there were “Dev’s specials.”. This week he had spontaneously started to leave black hills of his boxers around the room, some clean and some soiled. The only way to figure out which was which was to stick her nose right into the crotch and take a whiff. While the endless permutations of inane tasks he could create for her was impressive, this one pushed against her dignity, which was too far. But what to do? Even if she told him gently, blamelessly, to clean up, he would call her ungrateful. She had even thought of a compromise: if he could just put all his dirty underwear into the hamper, then he could toss the clean ones onto the floors as he pleased. He would say that she just wanted to avoid work, thus she was not only a bad liar, but an even worse truth-teller. Then he would accuse her of being incapable of confrontation without blubbering tears, an allegation which would make her cry. Why all this humiliation and resentment, just to walk in a circle? It was best to keep quiet and scuttle after him like the owner of an overgrown, hubristic puppy.
Besides, it wasn’t the nature of the chores that truly bothered her. The problem was the sheer amount of them. The only reason they had such a nice home was because of Dev’s singular dedication to his career, so there was no way he could help out. Nadine wanted to be supportive, given Dev was at the zenith of his career. He had just opened up a new surgical practice, and clients were flushing themselves through the door to get Dev’s hands on them. He was staying later and later at work and Nadine was increasingly left alone at home. Actually, the abundant personal freedom was perfect, given that Nadine was a creative. She needed lots of mental space and a free conscience to focus. Her daily hours were bounded though, because when Dev came home, he needed dinner served, his scrubs pressed, and her company offered to him like a sacrificial lamb. With the chores now encroaching into her free time, Nadine would have had less to complain about if Dev’s frontal lobes had been deteriorating.
The only solution to all this that she could think of was to hire house help. Yet the suggestion had caused him great personal outrage.
“You probably want house help because all your vapid friends have one. Here’s a real solution—why don’t you try cleaning out the bathroom cabinets? It’s like a pharmacy in there, with all those creams. You’d have more time and less to clean if you weren’t always thinking about yourself and shopping!”
Dev had beat his arms around like a demented gorilla.
“None of my friends have house help. They have partners who help them!” Nadine had countered.
“You’re so ungrateful toward the sacrifices of my career, it hurts me. Can’t you see I work hard? For you? Of course this seems to have created a monster obsessed with spoiling herself!”
“I’m just asking for a break.”
“Housework would make you useful for once,” Dev snarled, which made Nadine burst into tears. This softened Dev. He couldn’t stand it when she wept and got her makeup everywhere.
When she calmed down, he explained that he hadn’t meant to call her useless. It was just that the conversation had triggered his feminist convictions. This was a moral line he had to draw.
“It just breaks my heart to imagine paying some woman minimum wage to clean up after us, when we could just save her the trouble and do it ourselves,” Dev reasoned, and that was that.
+
By the time Nadine finished picking up Dev’s underwear, she had a raging headache. She went downstairs to take an Excedrin, but the bottle was expired. She took a couple of them anyway, and thought she should also have a coffee too, in case the caffeine in the pills had become impotent or something. She would need to go out to get coffee, so she might as well stop by Ikeda’s, where they had the fancy gummy fish she liked to suck on while she did her elliptical, and Manny’s, where they had her favorite smoky orange wine. She would need to go and come back before Dev got home. He didn’t like her going out of the house much (“I’m not trying to trap you here, but you spend money like it’s a sport when you’re out.”), and certainly not when she had this cold (“you’ll spiral into chronic fatigue syndrome if you don’t focus on recovery, and then how will you ever be useful?”). She kept her wine hidden under the sink, next to all the cleaning ingredients. Dev might even call her an alcoholic for drinking alone, but who was she to deny herself this one small pleasure?
At Manny’s, she was reaching for a wine bottle when someone dropped three more into her basket, causing her to lose her balance.
“Shame that didn’t make you fall on your head, you look like you could use a lobotomy,” said a voice from behind her.
Nadine turned around and broke into her first grin for the day. It was Athena, her best friend.
“I think I need full-on euthanasia,” Nadine giggled, and hit Athena with the basket. The glasses clinked loudly, and the woman at the counter narrowed her eyes at them.
“You’ll need expert guidance. Come over tomorrow?”
Athena studied neurology, something about how the peripheral circuitry was intricately tied to the outcomes of the parasympathetic nervous system. Nadine didn’t understand a word of it.
“I can’t. Dev’s gone totally authoritarian because of this cold. It’s made me slow and languid and miserable, and I have to keep it that way in case he finally takes some pity on me and lets me leave the house.”
“God, you’d think you were one of his patients, the way he prescribes you misery,” Athena shook her head.
“Yeah, plus he’s been in one of his moods since you last saw him.”
Athena gave a knowing look, “Ah, so I can’t come over?”
“No. We’ve got to cool it after the argument you two had about your commune idea.”
“I still can’t understand why he is personally offended by my dream of owning acres and acres of land filled with wild horses. Is it because I want my only real responsibility to be to feed them little butter biscuits?”
“Well he told me later that your monologue on cauterizing women’s sexual drive with daily horse riding was deeply unsettling to him.”
“Men can’t bear that we might prize our brain function over their virulence,” Athena said darkly, and shook her head.
The face made Nadine laugh, which made Athena laugh too. They giggled until the lady at the counter asked them to please leave.
+
It was already noon by the time Nadine made it to Ikeda’s. Time always went by faster when she was out. She was almost to the candy aisle when she heard a voice behind her.
“Hey! Hey you!”
It was a man wearing an employee tag, huffing after her with a red-face.
“Weren’t you in here earlier?” He walked menacingly toward her.
“No?”
Nadine hadn’t left her house in over a week.
“Don’t lie to me. I know your face.”
Speckles of his spit landed on the planes of her cheekbones. For a moment, she almost wondered if Dev had set this man on her to scare from going out again.
“Stop lying. I have you on video. You stole fifteen bags of gummy fish. I am calling the cops.”
Nadine wasn’t sure if she was more scared of getting caught by the cops, or of Dev’s reaction when he came to get her from the cops. Either was enough to send her heart up her throat. She dropped her groceries and ran out of the building straight into her car. She took off.
When she was far enough away, Nadine checked her rearview mirror. When she was sure the road was empty, she pulled over, afraid she would crash if she kept driving in her state.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she whispered to herself, through violent sobs. “That man is a lunatic. He probably can’t tell his left from his right.”
She wiped her tears and waited until her hands stopped shaking. She thought she could drive to the health food store, and get some of their off-brand sugar-free gummy fish, but it would be cardboard compared to the ones she wanted. Besides, it was almost time for Dev to leave work. She needed to be home first.
+
Nadine had gotten through half a bottle of wine when the doorbell rang, which sent her jumping, until she remembered she had a moisturizer delivery due that day. It was probably just the mailman. Nadine made her way to the door and opened it.
For the second time that afternoon, her heart went into her throat. Standing there was not a mailman, or a cop, or even Dev. It was a woman, and not just any woman. It was her, down to the scar under her left nostril and the freckle buried in her sideburns. Nadine wondered if she was looking into a mirror.
Nadine blinked, but the woman didn’t. Nadine noticed the woman held bags and bags of her favorite gummy fish in her arms. Suddenly she felt faint. She wondered if the expired Excedrin had mixed poorly with the wine. Despite her shock, she couldn't help but to notice that the woman had really excellent bone structure.
The woman stared at her, and Nadine wasn’t sure what to do. She couldn’t call the cops. They’d both get arrested. And Dev would somehow make this her fault. It was best to handle this herself.
“Can I help you?” Nadine asked.
The woman shook her head slowly.
“Who are you?” Nadine tried again.
This time, the woman’s face broke into a smile, brutally whitened, just like Nadine’s own.
“I’m Nadine,” she said. “I’m here to help.”
Swati Sudarsan is an Indian-American writer who grew up in the Midwest. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published in The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, and The Spectacle, amongst others. She was the 2023 recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction, and has also received funding and support from the Tin House Workshop, the Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal, and more. She now lives in Brooklyn with her black cat Toothless.
Michel O’Hara is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her most recent poetry can be found in One Art Poetry, The Rising Phoenix Review, The Blue Route, and The Sucarnochee Review. Her photography has been included in exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Los Angeles Center of Photography, Lightbox Photographic Gallery, The Curated Fridge and PhotoPlace Gallery. Michel is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles.