Laughter Lines

Image courtesy of @reoutput on Unsplash.

After parking her Porsche Cayenne in the bowels of the mall, Mrs. Gupta journeys upward in a cold, marble-paneled elevator. A mirror confronts her as she enters, and she regards her reflection, washed out under the electric lights, with the sharp pang of disappointment she has become accustomed to. With a practiced eye she traces the crow’s feet arching up toward her eyebrows, and the firm lines at the corner of her mouth. She is lucky, she knows, that her forehead remains smooth—but it’s only a matter of time. She is as certain of this as she is of the fact that her husband has been cheating on her for the past four months.

She turns away to face the sliding doors of the elevator and presses the button for the fifth floor. Last night, she looked up the address to calculate her route and travel time and committed it to memory. Mrs. Gupta loathes Google Maps, just as she loathes laziness in domestic help and long wait times at walk-in restaurants. When she drives, her mind’s eye soars above her, the roads of the city laid out like tangled circles of unspooled thread—her mental maps have not once misled her. Mrs. Gupta has never been lost before, and today is no exception. She reached the mall in seventeen minutes, just as she had calculated, took precisely two-and-a-half minutes to park, and spent just under one minute searching for the elevator in the lobby. She stares at the closed elevator doors for the remaining nine seconds of her journey. There’s a vague outline of herself in brown-and-white on the silvery surface of the doors, amorphous and unrecognizable but for the slight halo of frizz at her crown, a constant reminder of her losing battle against Singapore’s crippling humidity percentage. She blinks at it once before the doors slide open.

Her formless self is replaced by a corridor. Mrs. Gupta hoists her handbag—understated Louis Vuitton—over her shoulder and steps out of the elevator. She doesn’t notice that the floor is carpeted until the heel of her shoe sinks into its plush shag, muffling the crisp click she so adores. Still, the corridor is so empty and silent that she is almost grateful for the carpeting. It seems like a good day to be inconspicuous, though Mrs. Gupta is proud of her shoes. They’re mid-heeled Ferragamos, strappy and tasteful, and though their deep blue coloring is a statement, it is one she is willing to make. Today she has worn them with wide-legged white linen pants and a billowy blouse. Her hair bobs in rhythm with her stride, jet-black strands rustling against one another, stiff with dye and soft with product. She thinks back to the glimpse of her reflection in the elevator—had her roots been showing? Is she due for a touch-up? Too late: she’s at the glass door, reading the gold-lettered name of the clinic engraved in pristine copperplate.

The door swings open at Mrs. Gupta’s delicate touch. She flicks her watch out from beneath the sleeve of her blouse as she does so, letting the diamond-studded dial catch the light as she hears a shrill, cloying jingle. She glances upwards—wind chimes. How tacky. There is nothing Mrs. Gupta hates more than wind chimes at an entryway. The ones poised above this door are pale orange, dented and curiously out of place in the white waiting room. She tears her eyes away from them and walks up to the receptionist with a practiced smile. Not too big—she doesn’t want the receptionist to get too comfortable, after all. The receptionist shoots a wide smile back at her as she finishes scribbling down appointment details, a telephone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. A second passes, and then another, and Mrs. Gupta is just beginning to get impatient when the receptionist puts her phone down and scribbles the last of her note.

“Hi, I have an appointment at four,” Mrs. Gupta says without preamble. “Under the name of Sandeepa Gupta.”

The receptionist glances up, wide-eyed for a moment before regaining her composure, and placing her pencil down neatly beside the sheet of paper. “Under which name?” she asks. She has a broad, eyebrowless face still untouched by cynicism and age. Once, Mrs. Gupta’s skin had been even smoother, free of wrinkles and even the slight pockmarks that dot the receptionist’s cheeks. The retroactive victory is not sweet. Mrs. Gupta places the receptionist at twenty-three years of age; exactly half of her own. The receptionist’s name tag reads Noor. Mr. Gupta’s assistant is also named Noor, Mrs. Gupta recalls. In fact, she believes the two women look quite similar—unless she is generalizing, again. Lately, her sons have been badgering her about this. Her eldest, especially, has taken to being something of an activist online. Mrs. Gupta was fine with it, supportive even, until he turned his gaze inward and started policing dinner-table talk. Why, last night alone... The memory of it sours her mood.

“Gupta,” repeats Mrs. Gupta, irritated.

The receptionist nods, one hand adjusting the edge of her yellow hijab nervously, the other tapping through the patient log on her computer. “Of course! The doctor will be ready for you in a moment. Take a seat.”

Mrs. Gupta retreats to the row of four seats in front of the receptionist’s counter. She sits on the second seat from the left, crossing her legs and placing her bag primly on the seat next to her. The seats are uncomfortable, but not any more uncomfortable than they look. Mrs. Gupta has to appreciate the stylistic choice at the very least—the chairs are curvaceous and upholstered in white leather. They go well with the stark whiteness of the office, although Mrs. Gupta herself would have chosen something slightly different, and added more chairs for a clinic of this size. Still, she knows the wait will not be too long, and for that reason alone she sinks into the chair, careful not to rumple the hair at the back of her head, and prepares to sit for five to seven minutes.

Three minutes pass. The tasteless wind chimes jingle again. A woman comes in with her young son, who is sporting a horrible pinkish rash on his skinny arms. They poke out from beneath his Incredible Hulk t-shirt, the color clashing horribly with the Hulk’s particular shade of green. He scratches at them until his mother smacks his hands away. “Bié nà yàng zuò,” the mother hisses, and the boy drops his hands to his side and hangs his head. Mrs. Gupta stifles a smile. His mannerisms are just like those of her youngest, Ajay. Ajay has always been a dramatic child and still has fits of volatility from day to day, but she is pleased that he has channelled his vivacious spirit into something more productive. Only last month, Ajay was named the captain of the school’s debate team. Mrs. Gupta is still filled with pride when she thinks about it. He had been competing against Mrs. Shah’s son, Vivek, and beat the boy by a respectable margin. Mrs. Gupta has never brought it up at their weekly tea—she is far too tactful for that—but allowed herself a slight air of smugness when Mrs. Datta congratulated her in front of Mrs. Shah. Her son is a hard worker and more than deserves his role. Why on earth should she not be proud of him?

The mother and son are told to wait, too, and converge on the row of seats. The mother directs her son to sit to the right of Mrs. Gupta, and she herself sits to the right of her son. The boy is suddenly less charming as he begins swinging his yellow-Croc’d feet and wriggling in his chair. Worst of all, his pink, flaky arm comes dangerously close to brushing up against Mrs. Gupta’s sleeve. She leans as far away from him as she can without appearing rude, but does not move to the seat to her left. After all, she should only be seated for another few minutes.

Two more minutes pass. The wind chimes sound again. A pimply teenager enters the clinic and murmurs a few words to the receptionist. Her face is red, inflamed and a little repulsive, and she whispers embarrassed words about acne treatments, flushing an unsightly puce. She then turns and surveys the row of seats with tired eyes—they rest, for a moment, on the seat occupied by Mrs. Gupta’s bag. The girl steps forward timidly, as if to ask for permission to sit, but Mrs. Gupta does not deign to answer. She is already troubled enough by the child to her right, who has now taken to scratching his arms again while his mother peers at her phone, distracted. The girl hovers for a moment more, hope seeping from her posture, before drifting toward the inside of the clinic, where there are presumably more chairs.

Seven minutes have now passed and Mrs. Gupta has run out of patience. She stands and advances on the receptionist. The receptionist, who is responding to an appointment cancellation on the telephone and trying in vain to have the client reschedule, raises an apologetic finger, motioning for Mrs. Gupta to wait for a moment.

Mrs. Gupta does not want to wait for a moment, but is not incensed enough to interrupt the receptionist’s phone call, so she merely seethes where she stands and keeps her gaze trained on the receptionist, willing her to hang up. The receptionist squirms under her gaze, admits defeat to the client on the telephone, and finally hangs up.

“When will the doctor be ready to see me?” asks Mrs. Gupta.

“She’s almost ready, Mrs. Gupta,” responds the receptionist, fiddling with the sparkly pin affixed to her hijab. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Oh! Before you see her, could you fill out these consent forms?”

“Fine,” says Mrs. Gupta tersely. The receptionist’s incompetence is almost comical, but she is loath to see the humor in the situation. After all, there is nothing funny about wasting Mrs. Gupta’s time. 

The receptionist ducks under her desk and fishes around for a sheaf of papers. She holds the papers up like a trophy for a moment before sliding them across the counter to Mrs. Gupta. “Could you read these over and sign here, here, and here?”

Mrs. Gupta takes the papers and reads them over while standing by the receptionist’s desk. Standard indemnity forms—nothing she hasn’t seen before. She takes the 0.5 Pilot pen from the receptionist and signs the papers, catching a glimpse of her own hands as she does so. She finds herself horrified at the state of them: a pale crescent of unpainted nail protrudes from her nail beds, unsightly against her week-old nude manicure. She has two choices now: scrub her nails clean with nail polish remover to preserve some standard of tidiness, or book another appointment with her manicurist. Given her schedule this week, she will have a hard time fitting in a trip to the nail salon, so she makes a mental note to remove her nail polish when she gets home.

“Here,” she says, sliding the papers back to the receptionist. “Please let me know as soon as the doctor is ready.”

“Of course! Sorry for the wait,” says the receptionist, tapping the papers against her desk to align the edges.

Mrs. Gupta returns to the row of seats, picks her bag up and sits at the left-most seat, leaving a chair between herself and the little boy, who has now taken to picking his nose. She rebukes herself for ever seeing a similarity between him and Ajay.

The boy’s mother glances up from her phone. Her face shifts from impassivity to anger in a fluid moment. “Alex!” she snaps. The boy drops his hand to his lap, surreptitiously wiping his finger on his shorts, and sits up straight. Mrs. Gupta, yet again, sees her son in him, though this time he echoes the mannerisms of her eldest—Kabir, too, feigns innocence in much the same way. As time passed, Mrs. Gupta moved from catching him with his finger up his nose to catching him returning home after his curfew; but his expressions of guilt and innocence remain unchanged even as his punishments decrease in severity. Her boys ought to have fun, after all, and Kabir has just been admitted to Princeton. He deserves a good time after making his parents so proud, and Mrs. Gupta doesn’t mind turning a blind eye to the occasional bottle of vodka or two missing from her wine fridge. If he must drink, it’s better that he builds up a tolerance before he leaves for college.

A nurse appears from the inside of the clinic. She clears her throat. “Mrs. Gupta?” she calls. “The doctor will see you now.”

Mrs. Gupta takes her time. She stands, gripping the handle of her bag with one hand and smoothing the wrinkles from her trousers with the other. She has done her utmost to keep her linen crisp through her journey from home to the clinic, but is conscious of a slight creasing around her knees that is too late to remedy. Very well. She holds her bag to her side, lifts her chin, brushes a sharp strand of hair from her brow and follows the nurse through the innards of the clinic.

The nurse leads her into a small surgical room and directs her to lie down on the paper-covered examination table. “Dr. Gill will be with you in a moment,” she says. Mrs. Gupta is tired of hearing it, but she nods and places her bag on a low table by the door. She lies down, trying to keep her pants from wrinkling as she does so, and stares up at the ceiling. 

Her heart races. She has planned and waited and scheduled and stressed in the time leading up to this moment—the moment in which Dr. Gill will be with her. She knows exactly what she wants to say. 

She turns her head to the side, unable to stare up at the bright ceiling lights for any longer, and looks at the framed medical certificates on the wall with watering eyes. Dr. Gill is highly qualified, it seems: medical school in England, and further dermatology training in the National University of Singapore. There are framed thank-you cards, some scrawled in crayon and some in bubbly adolescent scrawl, and various photographs of the doctor with esteemed clients. Mrs. Gupta glances at a photo and decides to look back up at the ceiling instead.

The door opens, and Mrs. Gupta hears the rustle of a surgical robe. A vague outline of the doctor’s head comes into focus above her, haloed by the harsh ceiling lights. The doctor is wearing a blue bouffant hat, safety glasses, and a surgical mask, and Mrs. Gupta has to squint to confirm that it truly is Dr. Gill.

“Sandeepa Gupta?” asks the doctor. Her voice is unpleasantly soft and curiously devoid of character and tone. Mrs. Gupta strains to hear it over the blood rushing in her ears.

“Sandy,” she says.

“Sandy. And you’re here for Botox?” She has keen eyes, Mrs. Gupta notes. They weren’t all that visible in her hazy Facebook profile picture, and are still shrouded by the safety glasses she wears, but they pierce Mrs. Gupta all the same as they trace the lines of her face. 

“Yes.”

“All right. Could you sit up for me and indicate the target areas? We can work out the injection sites from there.”

This is not how Mrs. Gupta planned for it to go. She sits up and numbly goes over the pre-Botox routine with the doctor, deciding on the quantity of Botox and the number and position of the injection sites. She wonders if she’ll be able to emote at all after this. She hopes not, given what she plans to do next.

“All right,” says the doctor, after scribbling something onto a clipboard with firm, practiced strokes. “I’ll go fetch a dose and we’ll get started in a moment. Do you mind if I have a trainee nurse in for observation?” She doesn’t inflect it like a question—indeed, she doesn’t inflect it at all, leaving no room for refusal. The doctor is almost at the door when Mrs. Gupta shakes her head.

“I’d rather not,” she says.

The doctor pauses, and then nods. “All right, then,” she says, her tone as flat as ever, and leaves the room. She returns, as promised, with a few needles and bottles of a solution Mrs. Gupta assumes is Botox. She has never wondered what the substance itself looks like, and doesn’t now find herself curious. Instead, she looks at the doctor as she stands over a table and extracts a needle from its packaging, inspecting it for a moment before pressing it through the rubber lid of one of the bottles, each movement measured and precise.

“I know you’re fucking my husband,” says Mrs. Gupta.

Dr. Gill taps the air bubbles out of the syringe nimbly. “Okay,” she replies.

Mrs. Gupta had not planned on it going this way, either. When she envisioned it, time after time, night after night, she planned on a volatile confrontation in which she came out the clear victor. She imagined daring Dr. Gill to even think about coming near her husband again. She imagined tears and triumph and storming out of the clinic settled, once again, in her skin.

Dr. Gill takes her silence as the end of the conversation and walks towards the examination table. “I’m going to start with the—”

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” demands Mrs. Gupta, sitting up. “You—you’re having an affair with my husband!”

“I know that,” says Dr. Gill, not lowering the needle.

Mrs. Gupta is dumbfounded. “You know... You knew it was an affair?”

“Yes,” says the doctor.

“You knew he was my husband?”

“Yes. Well, I didn’t know he was your husband,” admits the doctor, “but I knew he was married.”

“What?” breathes Mrs. Gupta, horrified. Her hands tremble—she wants to slap the doctor. She wants to hide her face. She settles for clasping her hands together in her lap, tight enough that her knuckles turn white. “This whole time... You knew? Did he tell you?”

The doctor sighs. “Does that change anything for you?”

Mrs. Gupta’s heart stutters in her chest. She imagined hissing cutting words to a red-lipped, wrong-footed young woman who spoke only to stammer apologies. This doctor, with her flat voice and blunt words—how could she have expected this? She recalls Mrs. Shah’s encouraging words at their last tea, and curses her name. “No,” she says, endeavouring to keep her voice flat, too. “It doesn’t change the fact that my husband had an affair. Why?”

“Why did he cheat on you? Or why with me?” the doctor asks. She stands by the examination table with a needle and seems almost as if she’s inquiring into Mrs. Gupta’s medical history.

“How dare you?” Mrs. Gupta hisses, though her voice shakes. “Why did you sleep with him? Why did you ruin—” She stops herself there. Dr. Gill is not enough to ruin Mrs. Gupta’s perfect life. An act of God is not enough to ruin Mrs. Gupta’s life. Her husband won’t leave her, and she certainly won’t leave him. Does this change anything for her at all?

“I’m sorry,” says the doctor, though she does not sound as if she means it.

“Right.” Mrs. Gupta turns away. She looks, instead, at the framed certificates on the wall. She pays special attention to them, this time, hoping to will away the burning in her eyes. Dr Preeti Gill, Medicine, Newcastle University, 1977... She blinks. 1977? She looks back at the doctor. Beneath the bouffant hat and safety goggles and surgical mask, Mrs. Gupta can now make out crow’s feet at her eyes and deep wrinkles in her forehead. She studies the doctor’s hands, blunt nails outlined by blue surgical gloves, and at the wisp of steel-grey hair curled at the doctor’s temples. No—this is not what she had expected at all.

“Listen, Sandy,” sighs the doctor. “Whatever you may think of me, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Dermatology, that is. I’m here in my capacity as a medical provider. I can administer your Botox and you can leave to face your husband, or you can leave now and face your husband anyway. Or not. Whatever you choose, tell me now, because I have a six-year-old boy with eczema waiting outside for treatment and he has basketball camp at 5:30.”

Mrs. Gupta lies back against the examination table. She looks up at the white lights, dry-eyed. “Okay,” she says. “Basketball camp. Can’t miss that. Where are we starting?”

“We’ll target the laughter lines first,” says the doctor. Mrs. Gupta nods.