Part 2: Marsha
Going to the dentist always made Marsha feel nervous. Of course, most things that involved leaving her home made her nervous. She could deal with work, but that wasn't very frequent. Most of the time, her boss allowed her to work from home, but every so often, she had to actually come in to the actual office.
"Jesus, Marsha," her boss would say, "you've gotta find some way to get over your problems." And she would promise to try to come in more often, and promptly ignore that promise. The only reason she was still employed was that no one else in the office could match her when it came to editing.
She didn't even know the names of her neighbors. They probably barely noticed she existed. Certainly, she doubted they knew what she looked like. Everyone else around her seemed to go off to work or school with no hesitation. The few times she'd bothered to go outside, everything around her seemed still and quiet, like everyone had vanished.
Sometimes she wondered when exactly things had gone wrong for her. There wasn't really a defining incident that had pushed her into being so agoraphobic. Some agoraphobes had a sad story about being raped, or some other trauma that kept them from functioning normally in public. Marsha just didn't like going out in public. She was just naturally shy, and a few bad experiences over the years, combined with a personal tendency to drift without an external impetus, as well as the ability to telecommute, had turned her into someone who could barely leave her house without a great deal of preparation and worry.
It had taken her all morning to get herself ready for this appointment. Not because she expected any trouble. Just because she was seeing a completely new dentist, didn't mean that anything at all was wrong. But for two hours, she'd been at the edge of hyperventilating just from the thought of going outside.
Cautiously, slowly, she made her way towards the garage door. Napoleon, her grizzled tabby cat, eyed her from his perch atop the a bookcase in the living room. He seemed to be saying,
Boy, these hoomans are weird, aren't they?
His partner-in-crime, Gibbon, a beefy all-black cat, sprawled on the kitchen floor in Marsha's path, as if he knew about the turmoil in her head, and was saying,
You don't really want to go out, so why even bother? Just stay here and pet me.
He purred like a buzz-saw and rolled over to show his furry tummy.
"That's really cute of you," Marsha said, kneeling down to pet Gibbon's belly. "But I've got to go out and get myself taken care of. I can't just lay around doing nothing, like you guys." She withdrew her hand, ignoring Gibbon's pitiful, entreating glances, and stood up straight.
Without further ado, she opened the door to the garage. Before either Napoleon or Gibbon could rise to their feet, Marsha shut the door and locked it. They'd both escaped before, and that had terrified Marsha. It had meant the dilemma of either wandering around outside, looking for a small animal with a natural talent for concealment, or sitting inside, trembling in fear at the possibility that they might just never come back.
She hopped into her car, opened the garage door, turned the key in the ignition, and started backing up down the driveway. All around her, her little suburban neighborhood was still and quiet.
Except that her next-door neighbor was out in the yard. Marsha didn't know much about her, except that she worked the night shift somewhere. Aside from that, all Marsha knew was that her name was Lacey, and she was at least a decade younger than Marsha. The few times Marsha had seen her, she'd been exercising in the front yard.
Marsha ignored Lacey's wave, and turned out of the driveway. She didn't have the time to socialize, or the inclination. Perhaps part of that was rationalization, but she really did need to get to her appointment.
The drive was much easier than getting out of her house had been. In her car, Marsha could at least pretend she was walled away from other people. Even if there were windows, she didn't really have to open up to anyone else. She was just one more person passing by in traffic.
She reached the dentist's office without incident and parked her car. After reassuring herself, multiple times, that she had everything she needed, Marsha stepped out of her car. The shopping center around the office seemed as though it were asleep. So much the better; that just meant she wouldn't run into anyone else.
The moment she stepped inside the office, Marsha started to worry about her choice of dentist. Perhaps she should've tried a different dentist. Surely there was another place she could go to, besides this one.
"Hiiiiii!" chirped the receptionist. She looked peppy and excited about being at work. She looked Arabic, to Marsha's somewhat practiced eye. But, most of all, she looked like one of the sluttiest bimbos Marsha had ever seen.
Her breasts were enormous, and mostly exposed, thanks to a deeply plunging neckline and an extremely sparing use of fabric below her nipples. At a certain point, some outfits became so pointlessly exposing, in Marsha's opinion, that their wearers ought to just walk around nude and be done with it. In this case, the receptionist seemed like she would've been just fine with that. If ravenous moths consumed all of her clothes, she, doubtless, wouldn't even bother to try covering herself.
"Um," Marsha said, timidly. "Um," she tried again. "I, um, I'm here for my appointment."
"Oooookay!" the receptionist replied, brightening. "That means you're, like, on this computey thingie." She waved a hand at the monitor on her desk, flashing her long, sparkly pink fingernails at Marsha. "Like, what's your name?"
"Marsha," Marsha said. "Marsha Smith." The receptionist stuck her tongue out and started carefully typing Marsha's name into the computer.
"That's, like, a rilly tough name," the receptionist observed. "My name's, like, so totes easy. It's just 'Noor'." Marsha thought, uncharitably but possibly truthfully, that Noor might not be able to remember a tougher name.
At last, Noor finished typing it in and triumphantly pressed "ENTER". She squinted at the screen and said, "Oh, okay! There you are, Maci! Dr. Joseph wants you in room 7! Okey-dokey?"
