Love Object. Sally Cooper

glasses and rubs his eyes.

      “It looks like a giant Elastoplast,” Nicky says.

      Vi laughs as Sam edges himself out of the room. “One thing I’ve always liked about you, Nicky, is your spontaneity. You say what is natural to say, what makes a person feel good and human. Not like your father and sister, skulking around the fringes of things, grunting instead of conversing.”

      I open my mouth to respond as Nicky smiles but I decide against it. Why spoil her image of me?

      Vi stuck with Effie’s Diner in the years since that summer I sat twirling on the red vinyl and chrome stools, reading Alice and eating grilled cheese, but the combination of this operation and a new owner who’s turned the BP station into a self-serve Texaco have forced her to give it up. She can’t walk without pain, let alone bend over to get coffee cups and napkins from beneath the counter where Dan Smothers, the new owner, insists on keeping them. Dan is young and bullish, with a dark thatch of hair on his upper lip that matches what is on his head. Before the operation, when the gas was a thick rubber stopper rising like bread dough against her diaphragm, she would watch Dan outside at the pumps and imagine where else that hair appeared on his body. When she reached the thick fur that surely sprouted between his legs, her sex reminded her that the world did not sit inside this firm bubble of her stomach.

      “Dan’s pubes were on my mind as he was giving me the ‘you’re fired’ speech,” Vi says. “I pictured the hair taking territory, shooting tendrils up his abdomen, sliding down around the curve of his thighs. Even as he talked about how my surgery stories were losing him customers, my mind was running my fingers through that luxuriant pile.”

      Nicky looks at me with his eyebrows raised. I bite my bottom lip and shrug. What does he expect when he encourages her with his questions and “spontaneous” comments?

      Vi returns to her operation: “Four feet of intestine. How many things in this world are four feet long? Steamer trunks. Nine year old children. Dogs on their hind legs. The back seat of a Cutlass Supreme. I picture my guts as a living length of sausage-links, stretched out behind me wherever I walk, measuring themselves against the world. In terms of distance, four feet doesn’t go far.”

      The summer I stayed with her, Vi told me a story about my grandfather, Earl. His father farmed pigs before the war. The first time he brought her home, Earl took Vi straight to the barn to show her off to his daddy. She wore a fashionable brown wool dress with patent leather pumps and a brown velvet hat holding her red hair in place. By the time they reached the barn, the black mud had ruined her pumps and stockings. She was in the middle of telling this to Earl when he opened the door — and there it was, strung up to the ceiling, legs laced together, a long, intimate slit bisecting it from throat to anus. The pig’s mouth gaped and its forehooves arched toward a steaming bundle of lavender and red entrails. Earl’s father approached Vi, rubber boots squelching, his hands coated with a pink soapy mixture. His grin was proud and she remembered his first words clear as day:

      “What do you think of her?”

      His teeth gleamed in the filtered barn light. He looked first at Earl, who nodded. Then he smiled down at Vi.

      It was a long time before Vi realized he was talking about the swine.