Wanda

Wanda is Squares’s lover, partner of three years, and lead teacher at his yoga studio. Her pregnancy turns a relationship that appears composed from the outside into a test of whether the two can face a life-changing decision together. Beneath her poised presence is a history of severe anorexia and lasting physical harm; when she asks Squares not to shut her out, the central question is not only what they will do about the pregnancy, but whether he will meet her vulnerability with honesty and care.

Identity and Presence

Wanda enters with the confidence and command of someone accustomed to being seen: tall, long-limbed, and graceful, wearing a lavender leotard. She takes in the room with alert eyes. As lead teacher, she belongs to the carefully arranged world of the yoga studio, where the beauty and discipline of the practice are visible in its students and spaces. The office she shares with Squares is part of the building owned by Yoga Squared Corporation; she and Squares live on the two floors above the studio.

Her physical poise does not mean she is emotionally untouched. When she tells Will that she is pregnant, she does so privately, after taking time to settle herself. The narrator observes the cracks in her usually cool facade when she explains that she had expected Squares to be happy. That brief contrast—between the poised teacher and a woman looking away as she admits her fear—makes her disclosure a moment of unusual exposure rather than a casual announcement.

Partnership with Squares

Wanda and Squares have been together for three years. Their intimacy is apparent in the ordinary details of their shared life, but the pregnancy exposes a serious difficulty in how they communicate. Wanda believes Squares may want her to end the pregnancy. When Will raises the fact that Squares is avoiding her, she confirms it; Squares himself refuses to discuss what is happening. His withdrawal leaves her trying to understand his response without receiving a clear answer from him.

Their racial difference is also explicitly noted. Wanda is Black, and the narrator connects this fact to the irony of her relationship with Squares, whose past is described as checkered. The account does not spell out that past in this moment, but it does distinguish the racial tension between them from the force of their love: the tension is present, yet, in the narrator’s judgment, less powerful than their attachment. Wanda’s pregnancy does not erase that strain; it places another consequential question inside a relationship already marked by differences and history.

Pregnancy and Medical History

Wanda’s pregnancy carries particular weight because it contradicts what doctors had told her after years of anorexia. She recalls being valedictorian of her high-school class before stopping eating, losing weight, and developing a pattern of exercising and restricting food. She says she fell below ninety pounds and continued to see herself as fat. The illness became severe enough that she had to be hospitalized.

The physical consequences were not presented as a distant or purely emotional past. Wanda says the anorexia damaged her liver and heart, and that her doctors were still unsure of the extent of that damage. She did not go into cardiac arrest, although she believed she had come close. After she recovered, doctors told her that she probably would never become pregnant; if she did, they thought she would most likely be unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Her present situation therefore arrives against a history of medical warning, not simply as an unexpected change in plans.

Wanda does not recount the whole history. She indicates that she will not go into every part of her recovery, keeping some of that experience private even as she explains why the pregnancy matters. What she does disclose makes clear that the decision before her is entangled with a past in which her body was placed under extreme strain and with a future she had been told might not be possible.

The Late-Night Confrontation

At three in the morning, Squares creeps up the stairs rather than risk waking Wanda with the elevator. The quiet approach leads not to rest but to a confrontation: Wanda is sitting on the couch in the dark, arms and legs crossed. She asks whether he wants her to end the pregnancy. She is still in her first trimester and says that ending it would require only taking a pill. The timing makes the question immediate, while her insistence that she is waiting for an answer shows that his silence has become part of the crisis.

Squares responds by questioning why the decision should suddenly be up to him. Wanda’s question is not merely a request for permission; in context, she is asking him to state what he wants instead of evading her. He says he is tired and asks for a few hours of sleep before she presses him again. When he asks what she wants him to say, she does not retreat from the issue. The darkness and their adjusting eyes leave the room indistinct, but not the conflict: Wanda is seeking a direct response from the person whose reaction matters to her.

Vulnerability and Unresolved Change

Wanda’s plea that Squares not shut her out gathers the relationship’s central tension into a single request. He says that it is a big step, a response that acknowledges the scale of the decision without resolving what he wants. The available account does not establish whether Wanda ends the pregnancy, whether she carries it to term, or how the couple ultimately decides to proceed. Her arc at this point remains open, defined by the demand for an answer rather than by a settled outcome.

Her story also sets outward composure against the physical and emotional costs that composure can conceal. The yoga teacher who appears graceful and self-possessed has survived a dangerous illness and now confronts a pregnancy once considered unlikely. The narrative does not reduce her to either her former anorexia or her relationship with Squares: Wanda speaks about her own history, identifies the choice before them, and asks not to be excluded from a conversation about her life. That act of insistence is the clearest change the episode affords her—not a resolution, but a refusal to let Squares’s avoidance stand in for an answer.