False Spring
by Laura Freudig
The woman’s hair should have registered as a sort of warning. It was as red as a monarch butterfly, as red as berries. She stood in the doorway of the office, shaking an umbrella on the checkerboard tiles before propping it in an empty chair. She wore a belted black raincoat and high heels and carried a patent leather purse large enough to conceal an infant.
She walked to the receptionist’s desk, glancing over her shoulder and smiling slightly as if making sure something was following her, and had left the door open, despite the rain. She lifted each foot precisely and set it down in front of the other without shuffling; perhaps that was how she had managed to keep her pumps clean despite the slush miring the parking lot.
“Could you shut that please?” said the receptionist. The temperature outside was a grim 40 degrees, and the rain slicked and compacted the six inches of snow that had fallen the week before.
The woman’s eyes—an odd greenish-yellow—widened slightly, but she made no move toward the door, so the receptionist pushed back her chair and walked over to close it herself, perhaps harder than strictly necessary. She smoothed her skirt against the hump of her hips as she returned to her desk, though the other woman hadn’t turned to watch her and was easily thirty years younger.
“May I help you?” asked the receptionist when she was settled back in her chair. That was what she always said when she didn’t recognize the patient or their owner.
“Is…”—the woman glanced at the framed diploma on the wall behind the desk— “…Doctor Brown good with cats?” Her voice was low and silky.
“Yes,” said the receptionist. “He’s very gentle, takes his time.” That was quite true. She had seen him coax feral cats from Hav-a-Hart traps with liver treats, sitting cross-legged on the tile for an hour. The receptionist would have turned the contraption upside down and shook it after five minutes.
“Do you have any openings?”
“Now?” She flipped through a notebook.
“If it’s convenient,” the woman purred.
“Actually, yes. There was a cancellation.” The receptionist handed her a clipboard with paperwork. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The red-haired woman smoothed the back of her raincoat before she sat down, placed her handbag on the floor, and crossed her ankles. She held the pen, balanced between her thumb and first finger, the other fingers extended as though the bright red polish was still wet.
After a few minutes, the woman stood again and crossed the floor with the clipboard, still walking as though she was being followed. The receptionist took the paperwork without looking at it.
“Doctor Brown?” she called.
The two women heard the roll of a desk chair across linoleum. A dark-haired man in wire-framed glasses came to the doorway and stood with one hand on the frame: he had taken off his wedding ring while expressing the anal glands of a cocker spaniel earlier that afternoon and hadn’t replaced it.
“This way,” he said, taking the proffered clipboard.
The woman picked up her patent leather bag and preceded him into the examining room. The receptionist returned to her desk and began typing quickly and forcefully; every few seconds she would glance at the closed door and exhale sharply through her nose as though she were trying to dislodge something.
After about twenty minutes the woman emerged with her bag, retrieved her umbrella, and left. It had stopped raining. The doctor came out with his street jacket under his arm.
He glanced out the front window, then fixed his eyes on the receptionist, shifting his weight back and forth as though his shoes or his pants chafed him. He had not replaced his wedding ring, but he fiddled with it in his pocket.
“I’m going to, ah, cut out a few minutes early today,” he said. “You can, too, whenever you’re finished.”
The receptionist nodded and continued typing.
His hand was on the doorknob when she said, “What was wrong with her cat?”
He started slightly. “She didn’t have a cat.”
“Oh, I had assumed the cat was in her handbag. A little cat.”
“No.” He looked out the window again.
“Well, what then? She asked me if you were good with cats.”
“What did you tell her?” His right eye twitched.
“I don’t remember, but it seemed to satisfy her.” She did remember what she had said but now wanted to retract her statement about the doctor’s patience. She wished she had said something else, but what she wasn’t quite sure. Maybe about his fidgetiness or how troublesome his children were or his habit of fiddling in his pocket in that unbecoming way, something that would have made the red-haired woman with no cat think twice about going into the examining room with him.
“Did she have a pet of some sort?”
“Not with her.”
“Does she have a cat, somewhere?”
“I have no idea. It didn’t come up.”
“Well, what did you do in there?” They had been in the examining room for a remarkable length of time if no actual animal was involved.
He took a deep breath and glanced from side to side as though he were thinking of making a run for it. “She had a problem with her tail.” He spoke very quickly.
She stopped typing. “Whose tail?”
“Her tail.”
“The woman’s tail?”
“Yes.” He stared at her though that exchange, smiling slightly, as though daring her to laugh, daring her to continue.
The receptionist wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh. The corners of her mouth twitched. She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “But what was in the bag? It was quite large. Large enough for a cat.”
“I don’t know. Apparently not a cat.” He made a short, apologetic noise.
“Did you examine her. . .tail?”
He looked away, then nodded once.
“I see.” She paused. “Did you see?”
He rolled his eyes and sighed. “I’d really like to get going.”
“Well, you didn’t have to say anything. You can at least tell me if she had a tail. You were in there for an hour.” The receptionist knew that was an exaggeration.
The doctor’s face went a little slack. “She might. I think so.”
“Goodness,” she sniffed. “Did she, or didn’t she?”
The doctor looked up at the ceiling. “It’s complicated.”
“I don’t see how that is complicated.”
“Sure, then, yes.”
The receptionist stared at him for some seconds without blinking, taking in his fiddling hand, his restless feet, the way the fluorescent light made it hard for her to see his eyes, his twitching lips that were unable to fix on an expression. She wasn’t sure why he hadn’t left when he so clearly wanted to, wasn’t sure why he was answering her questions. She blew more dust out of her nose, leaned forward to switch off her computer, and swiveled her chair to grab her purse off the shelf behind her.
At the same moment, the doctor turned the doorknob and stepped outside.
“She didn’t pay,” the receptionist said after him.
She hooked her purse over her arm and heard him drive out of the parking lot. She would have said he peeled out, if he wasn’t nearing fifty with a tender, hidden bald spot and two teenage sons.
The next morning the doctor was thirty minutes late and arrived with the same noise and haste with which he had left the evening before. There were two German shepherd puppies and a scarlet macaw already in the waiting area. The parrot in its cage was under a quilted cover; still, it rustled and screamed and clanged its beak on the metal bars. The room was thick with the bitter scent of puppies, the dusty sweetness of birds.
Dr. Brown came in the back entrance and leaned out his office door—he was wearing his wedding ring—to call in the German shepherds while he was still putting a second arm through his white coat. The puppies skittered and slid across the floor.
The macaw’s owner reached under the cover and into the cage, then swore and pulled his hand back out, sucking on a finger.
“Bugger,” he said.
Dr. Brown’s voice, through the closed door, was heartier than normal, as though he had slept and eaten well, or was pretending he had. The receptionist, who lived alone, had not slept well and had gotten up at two in the morning to search for images of women with tails on the internet, which had shocked and disturbed her further.
The puppies and, eventually, the macaw left.
Dr. Brown made a pot of coffee in the supply room that opened off the reception area and brought the receptionist a mug and a handful of creamers. She pulled out an equal number of sugar packets from her desk drawer.
“My wife’s coming to pick me up for lunch,” he said.
The receptionist said, “You haven’t done that for a while.”
He paused, as if expecting her to say more, then nodded. He stared at the wall behind her head for a while, appearing to study the poster for dog food tacked there.
She waited just long enough for him to relax slightly. “Is today special?” she asked with a small bright smile.
He opened his mouth, shut it again, then sniffed twice. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly, as though he were unsure if that was the right answer. He nodded his head at her a few times as if the conversation was continuing pleasantly.
Suddenly, he tapped his coffee cup twice with the palm of one hand and his eyes brightened as though he’d had an idea sparked by dog food. “What’s that word?” he said. “I learned it in zoology—for an insect with warning coloration?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said, sliding her chair to the bank of file cabinets by her desk. She had taken a secretarial course at a community college in Massachusetts and had no special training in the veterinary field, had never kept a pet, though she had once watched her younger brother’s dog for a week. She had not liked the way the dog smelled or how its toenails clicked on her tiled floor or how it looked at her as though she could, if she chose, make it happy.
The receptionist was wearing a gray skirt and a beige sweater; her hair was a shade darker than the sweater, a shade poured from a bottle, as uniform as if the color had been drawn with markers by a careful child. She looked down at her lap, then along her arm to the tan filing cabinets and to the pale wall behind.
“Well, was she a cat or an insect?” she said.
“Oh!” He inhaled sharply. “I see what you mean.” Then, more slowly, “What you might mean.”
“Yes?”
“The woman last night.”
“Last night?”
He cleared his throat. “Yesterday.”
“I told you she didn’t pay.”
He shrugged. “I’ll take care of it. Pro bono, as they say.”
“Do they?”
They looked at each other. She felt a shocking desire to reach out and pull his nose but pretended to cough.
She took her time blotting her mouth with a tissue. “Did you get her name?”
“Katerina, I think.” He said her name as though she had left a bitter taste on his tongue. Then he snorted, belatedly, as though he had just that moment gotten a joke. “Perfect, for her.” He said that mostly to himself, in a different tone of voice than he used with clients or the receptionist.
He went into the supply room, and she could hear him moving boxes around, humming, but he came back out a few seconds later. He glanced at the door. “You know what she said? She said, ‘A tail could save your life someday.’”
“When?”
“When what? When could it save your life?”
“No. When did she say it?”
He smirked. “At some point.”
“Humph.” It was a word, not a sound. “How could a tail save someone’s life?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Was she being facetious?”
“She seemed sincere.” Well, sincere wasn’t perhaps the right word, but he was going to stick with it. He thought about what she had been doing when she had said that and wondered if there was a chance she was right and whose life would be—or had been—saved. His heart beat harder; it was a hamster trapped under his skin. He was unsure if it was excitement or panic.
The receptionist blew more dust out her nose. “I think a tail seems like a liability.”
He nodded, suddenly serious. “You’d think so. It’s not even prehensile.”
She leaned closer. She knew she could ask this in all her wide-eyed, middle-aged, unmarried innocence. “Was the tail more like a cat’s or a rat’s?”
He choked on his last sip of coffee.
Just then the door opened and an older woman with a small pet carrier pushed her way in. Dr. Brown retreated to the examining room, and the receptionist glanced at the appointment book.
“Morning, Brenda. How’s Bob?” she said.
“Poorly. There’s a tick on his tail the size of a grape. I can’t bring myself to touch it.”
“Don’t worry,” said the receptionist. “Dr. Brown will take care of it for you.” She pitched her voice louder than usual and tilted her head toward the door. “He loves tails.”
“Why?” said the woman, puzzled.
She beamed. “Go on in. You can ask him yourself.”
The woman went in, but she clutched the carrier that held her miniature Pomeranian tightly, as though Bob’s little tail was somehow in danger.
The tick came off; a parakeet arrived for a beak trimming; a retriever with hip dysplasia came in for a follow-up x-ray and a cortisone shot; a poodle (the receptionist hated poodles—something about their stiff fussy heads and their beady eyes) needed a rabies shot. There were no cats at all. On most days, hardly an hour went by without a cat of some color or stripe.
The receptionist was unwrapping her tuna sandwich when she heard an exclamation from the other room.
“Aposematic!” he shouted. “That’s the word!”
He leaned out the door. “It’s from the Latin apo, which means away from and sematic, which means to signal. You know, like semaphore. A signal which means stay away.” He seemed pleased with his explanation.
She mistrusted his translation on principle. She thought maybe her internet search the previous night had made her suspicious.
“That’s not really a mammalian characteristic, is it?” she asked, proud of her phraseology.
He rolled his eyes. “Not generally, no.”
The veterinarian’s wife arrived a few minutes later. Like the receptionist, she did not have aposematic coloration, though she was not as well camouflaged in the office environment. Her black hair and tired dark brown eyes would have blended into a birch forest. She was quiet, too—a woman given to sighing and leaning the direction the wind was blowing.
“Doctor Brown invited me for lunch,” she said apologetically.
The receptionist had often wondered if she called him “Doctor Brown” in the bedroom and looked down at her lap as the thought crossed her mind again. They both turned to look at the examining room door, which was closed.
“Is he alone?”
“I think he is finished for the morning,” said the receptionist. “Shall I let him know you’re here?”
The doctor’s wife paused. Her half-smile migrated upward to become a furrow above her nose. She had managed the office for the first five years of his practice, until the birth of their oldest child, and had left the files and the stock room in a state that took months to reorder. Her handwriting had been difficult to decipher as well, her l’s and e’s a similar height, her 5’s and S’s practically indistinguishable, and her i’s almost universally undotted. After a few weeks, the doctor was impatient at being asked to assist with transcription. The current receptionist prided herself on accuracy and was not comfortable guessing about product numbers or invoice totals or the spelling of surnames and streets.
“Where are you going for lunch?” the receptionist asked, hoping direct any conversation to neutral topics.
“I don’t know.” The doctor’s wife spoke with a flat tone of voice, as though what she did not know encompassed much more than the name of a restaurant. She looked around the room, her eyes resting on the hard plastic chairs, the dog food posters, the rainbow bridge light on the counter—which warned those in the waiting room that another client was in the process of saying a final goodbye to a beloved companion—the box of tissues beside it.
“Is it warming up outside?” The receptionist tried again.
She shook her head slightly.
The receptionist sighed dramatically and said something about last week’s false spring, which she couldn’t remember five seconds after she had uttered it. Silence felt like a spill that needed to be mopped up before it ran under shelves and into heating ducts.
The doctor’s wife seemed to be studying the framed diploma on the wall; her eyes narrowed, and she exhaled sharply. “Did you and Doctor Brown work late last night?” she asked.
The receptionist had been on hold with their sales rep at Synerpet earlier that day, and the song that played through the receiver while she was waiting suddenly popped into her head again. She allowed the tune to continue for a few moments.
“No, he left early,” she said. She thought she and Doctor Brown were getting along rather well today, which was enjoyable—but what else could she say? Women without tails ought to stick together. During her internet search last night she had also come across a list of collective nouns for cats: a clowder, a clutter, a glaring, a dout, a destruction of cats. She thought those words might also apply to women with tails, and hoped there was no localized gathering—or perhaps migration—of such creatures, some late winter phenomenon,
The wife’s head jerked up as though someone had tugged on her leash.
Just then the examining room door swung open, and the two women stepped apart even though the counter had been between them the whole time.
The doctor breezed past them both and went out the door as though his wife were an appendage that always followed behind. At the door she turned and looked back at the receptionist with an even deeper furrow in her brow but said nothing.
The receptionist ate her sandwich at her desk, drank two more cups of coffee, and wondered what that deep frown was trying to say and how she might reply. Dr. Brown arrived back sooner than she expected and rummaged in the office refrigerator as though his lunch had been insufficient.
The extra caffeine gave her a bravery she was usually lacking—or perhaps her tongue just started without her. “I’m wondering about something.”
He was spooning yogurt from a small white container into his mouth. “Okay.”
“How could a tail save your life?” It was the same question she had asked that morning.
He ate the yogurt in three bites and reached for another. “You’d have to ask her,” he said from inside the refrigerator, trying to sound unfazed.
“I am asking you. How could a tail save your life?”
The receptionist had never before met a woman with a tail—or any person, for that matter—who offered to save her life. She hadn’t gone to church as a child, had never had a religious experience, did not think of the future in terms of being saved or not saved. She rarely climbed ladders or exceeded the speed limit; she kept both feet on solid ground unless she was sitting.
His mouth was full of yogurt. He swallowed. “She needed money. The only person she was saving was herself.”
“But it has to mean something,” she persisted.
“No, it doesn’t,” he said.
It couldn’t simply be a question of coercion or sexual favors. (She blushed just thinking about such things.) It had to be bigger. It had to reach deeper into the furry heart of life. If someone’s life needed saving, that meant they—she—had to be in danger in some way: dangling, lost, threatened, pursued. What was following behind or lurking nearby that she had failed to notice? What was about to spring out?
“Where was she from?”
“She didn’t say. Away, somewhere.”
The receptionist had been born in Massachusetts and had only come to Maine a few years before starting this job. She had left a long series of secretarial jobs in ailing industrial towns along 495—Methuen, Haverhill, Lowell, Lawrence—each company quietly sinking out from under her. She stepped from one to the next, hardly wetting her feet, but still wondering if she wasn’t somehow to blame. She thought it was ridiculous that everyone who wasn’t born in Maine was from away. And the doctor had lived in New Jersey until he was ten.
She felt an irritation that bordered on hatred welling up in her even though she clearly did not have the coloration to be truly venomous. She brushed one of her beige hairs off her gray lap. Could a tail save your life? She felt a stirring at the base of her spine.
“So how was your lunch? Is the cat out of the bag?” she said. She knew she was walking a very fine line here.
He choked and abruptly went back into the supply room. She heard the plastic snap of a bottle of water being opened.
He came back out again, his eyes watering. She said, “Cat got your tongue?”
She had never been in a physical fight before, though her older sister had once pulled out a chunk of her hair, leaving a bald spot the size of a dime on the top of her head. It had been a light brown then, the color of milky coffee, as soft and fine as kitten fur. These questions felt like landing quick, hard jabs in the doctor’s soft midsection.
They stared at each other. She didn’t think she’d ever looked at him this directly before, certainly not while he was looking back at her. It was an odd kind of standoff, and after a few seconds they both laughed, louder than necessary since there was no one else in the room, as though they’d had a narrow escape from some foolish disaster of their own making.
The rest of the afternoon went quickly. Two lovebirds, another poodle, a hamster, a ferret, a litter of Labrador puppies. Still, no cats.
She left before the doctor and was surprised to see his wife’s car still in the parking lot. She peered in the front seat, then turned in a slow circle but could see no one. She imagined the doctor’s wife sitting in a birch tree, clutching narrow papery branches, swaying in the cold air, waiting to leap as soon as the doctor put his foot outside the door. Or curled up in a hollow, lapping silver water welling up from between rocks. Or standing—as she was—still under a gray sky with a seed swelling under her skin, despite the chill, despite the earth’s weak and darkling gyre, wondering what whorled and lavish tendril would soon unfurl.
She let out a very quiet “meow,” then a louder one.
The office sat at the end of a long dirt lane through a mixed forest of young spruces and birches. Purple shadows lined the snow, painted by a narrow brush. She saw it for a moment as a forest of odd-colored tails, all poised to spring, as she passed.
Laura Freudig was a 2019 PEN/Dau Emerging Writer Award winner and have had short stories published in or forthcoming from The Sun, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Prime Number Magazine _and The Exposition Review, the latter of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has written a children’s book called Halfway Wild (Islandport Press, 2016) as well as Prayers and Promises for a Hurting World and I Fall to My Knees (Barbour Books, 2019 and 2013). She lives on an island in Maine with my husband and six children (where she is currently working on a linked short story collection).