Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (15 page)

“I want to see you,” I whined. In a way, this was the biggest part of the excitement. The devil is millions of folds that I know somehow unfold. He is the largest insect in the universe, and a dragon and a goat and a man and a beard and skin that has been burnt clean.

“I can’t,” he said. “Right now, I can’t.”

I thought Hell would be all give or all take. But there’s just not enough room to plunder. We’re all here; we all have to go to the same small bar.

Most importantly, we have to learn that we are wrong sometimes. That there was at least one time, in our old lives, when we were very wrong.

I nodded and he blew out the torch. I couldn’t see him but I could feel him swelling, becoming fifty shadows almost as big as the room. My hand had been on his chest when the torch blew out, and now I felt his skin begin to slide up under my palm like he was a magic plant growing and growing; soon my hand was on his hip.

I began to explore his bones with my hand; I felt far more bones than legs or wings. I tried to count with my fingers their hundreds of knobs and ends. He lay back down, though he hardly fit upon the bed, and coaxed me up onto him. His warm breath was coming from every direction at once.

“This part is a little normal,” he said. But it wasn’t true.

Afterwards he fell asleep quickly. I felt him shrinking back, his entire body receding and folding, everything tucking neatly into place. I listened to the deep years of his lungs and decided to have a cigarette. We are smokers, he and I.

It’s true, the lighter was cheating. “Respect his wishes,” I told myself, “haven’t you learned anything?” But I was too excited to learn.

When I clicked the lighter, years seemed to pass. I could see through all the parts of him. His skin now looked like a clear bat’s. In his wings, cells were beating far faster than I could see; behind his lids his pink eyes were spinning. His long tongue flickered in his mouth and his stomach was full of small limbs. He was a machine, a riddle. Looking at him, I felt that I was growing smarter every second. I was able to watch him like children watch fish.

Then he woke up and caught me peeking.

“I’ve been in love before,” I told him, meaning the other time was not one bit like this. I felt my ribs and my stomach begin to grow and unfold like his skin.

He shot me a smile.
Don’t go getting swept away
, it said, a grounding look to tell me that Hell is different from my old life, but not as different as all that. Not so different that I couldn’t get hurt, or hurt him. He let me look on just a moment more, then the flame was blown out by a wind that came from nowhere.

Although we broke up two months ago, I agree to be his class reunion date anyway. I buy a dress I can’t fill and stuff it. Upon picking me up, my breasts are the first thing he comments on. They look frighteningly geometric and remind him of earmuffs, or Princess Leia.

I had cut a tennis ball in half and put one side into each bra cup. More natural-looking materials were available in my apartment, but I’d had a vision: he and I at the end of the night, drunk and reenamored. I’d take off my shirt and they’d practically glow in the dark. “Let me squeeze those fuzzy lemons,” he’d say, and I’d laugh and he’d toss them across the room; we’d make love to the sounds of their bouncing.

Already it seemed that probably wouldn’t happen.

When I wake up it’s 3,000 degrees and morning. I vaguely remember being in a large punch bowl and the DJ saying something about me over the microphone. I’m in a hot car, his, covered in a film of fruit punch and grapefruit vodka. One of the tennis ball halves is gone from my dress. I look over and see it on the driver’s seat, filled with quarters and a napkin note in microscopic print:

Here is some change. Go wash the puke from my backseat. Its more prominent aspects will have to be vacuumed up—use the foam brush. The one that leaves steam lines. Everyone at the reunion asked if I’d met you that night at an AA meeting
.

I mean to do everything he suggests but realize I’m so sleepy, so I find a flowerbed a few blocks over and crash. No one invited the ants. They like the dried ice cream punch on my skin, and don’t stop biting if I only crush half of their bodies.

Unfortunately their carcasses stick to the punch film so I appear to have a flesh-eating disease. When I return to the car, he is standing there with a very clean woman. She is looking in at the pile of puke on the backseat with a glare of recollection and pain, as though it used to be her dog but her pet somehow got liquefied and his remains were then sprinkled with parsley (on the way to the reunion last night we’d stopped for some Italian. The waiter kept checking out my tennis balls).

“What are you covered in?” he asks.

“I’m Beth,” the girl offers reluctantly. She can’t look at me without scratching herself. I would scratch too, but my fingernails are already filled with dead ants.

“Is that your cousin?” she whispers to him.

I then realize clean Beth couldn’t attend the reunion, so he told her he’d take his cousin and called me.

When I walk up to him, Beth steps back. My one tennis boob has fallen down somewhere in the front of my dress, poking out like the tiniest pregnancy in the world.

“Cousin,” I report. I put my hand on his inner thigh. I realize my clothes are wet; maybe I had peed myself, or maybe the flowerbed had sprinklers.

The girl makes a squeak and leaves immediately on foot. I’m ready for him to run after her—to walk myself home, wash off the dead insects and grow very, very bored.

But instead he stares. I’m itchy, squirmy; he presses me back. His leg pins me against the car right in the ball-stomach. “I’m deciding if you’re too much,” he says, and I meet his stare fondly. I refuse to blink while I wait.

It began during an unconscionably dry spell in lovemaking for Robert and me. I’d gone to the bathroom to cry in my robe, which is big and towellike and cloaks my large and lonely breasts that hang from age. I kept pulling my robe in tighter to swaddle them; in my head I could hear them screaming for attention and I tried to muffle the noise by drawing my robe in even tighter. I was pondering going into the guest room and smothering them with a pillow when I saw the gnomes.

They appeared to be necking, a female and a male gnome. I squinted at them through my bathroom window. “You’ve gone crazy,” I told myself, “that frigid man has made you nuts.” Yet there they were in front of me, clearly rubbing against one another by the bushes. Then, simply and effortlessly, the plastic deer that sits in front of our hydrangeas got up and walked over towards them, stilted on thin plastic legs, to lick the salt from their skin.

Of course shame followed. I already felt guilty about wanting to be satisfied by my husband, who had now turned me down every night for an entire month. I kept telling myself that it wouldn’t,
simply could not
last four whole weeks, but each day drew closer to that horrible terminus, the point at which, I felt, I must accept the fact that Robert was either cheating on me or had fallen deeply out of love with my physical person.

But now there was a newer, more velvet shame, one soft with complete insanity. I cannot describe how hypnotic it was to watch the gnomes, the deer with the sandpapery-plastic tongue. It seemed wrong, like getting turned on at the zoo. I had opened my towel robe and pressed my flesh to the cold, dark window. Panted. Made steam.

When I went back to bed, I stared at Robert, who had a pie-slice-sized ray of light over his turned-up chin. My skin was flushed and my towel robe hung open, slowly absorbing the sweat from my body.
Wake up and look at me
, I thought,
I’m presenting you with all that I have
. My feet stopped at the lit bar from the streetlamp that fell upon the carpet, a boundary of the night-world where gnomes and deer lived and played on one side and Robert snored soundly on the other. How good it would feel to take Robert inside that light, to have both our bodies squeeze together somehow, for our particles to jump into a shared space and stay.

That night I had a Lilliputian dream about the gnomes binding me to my bed. It culminated with the male gnome riding in atop the large plastic deer to demonstrate his prowess over creatures several times his own size.

I gasped as I woke, but Robert was nowhere to be found; he’d left for work and I was stuck playing detective: searching for traces of his aftershave on the carpet in front of his dresser, looking for new stray hairs around the sink. I felt like maybe I’d invented the person I’d always assumed my husband to be, and now, at sixty-two, it was perhaps time to grow up and let him go.

“Well we’re not teenagers anymore,” he tells me that night, when I bring up how it has been a full month of abstinence. I am dressed like a cheerleader, albeit a fat, wrinkled one. I purchased the uniform from a costume shop. The fabric is cheap and the initials of the school it touts are a dubious “FU.”

“Do you think I should get a breast lift?” I ask, though he’s already turned over and has shut off the light by his bed stand.

“Why would you do something like that?” he mumbles. Seeds of what soon will be gentle snores are already pollinating in the back of his throat.

Against my better judgment, I creep out into the garage in my uniform. It’s exciting to think of how awful it would be should someone see me, a neighbor or one of the subdivision’s night security officers. Robert’s car is a long Cadillac and I lie down across the hood and the windshield, stretching myself. From here I can see the backyard out the garage’s side window, and once again the femme gnome and the male have taken up one another’s company. The lust inside the male gnome’s sturdy brow makes his cherubic face seem dangerous and a little thrilling. His white beard has a silvery hue; its shine is modern, like clothes the young people wear into nightclubs. He seems to be in some kind of race against himself; his frown reminds me of a depression-era work mural, a depiction of unyielding strength that cannot be slowed down by the whims of economic fate.

Spying on them, I have the strangest sensation that the car beneath me is going to start up, turn on its lights and bust through the garage door carrying me splayed upon it in my failed costume. Would the gnomes stop what they were doing and hide then, I wondered? Would they erotically harden in place?

On the night marking a sexless forty days and forty nights, I decided
this is it
. I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and left the bedroom. “What?” Robert called halfheartedly. “Have I been snoring?” I went to the guest room and told myself that from now on, I was sleeping there. I’d had enough of pretense.

The guest room is right next to the garden, so close that I feared they might see me watching. I carefully lit a single match and hid below the windowsill. Peeking through the mini blinds, I watched my gnome in the throws of passion with the yard’s plumpest female milkmaid gnome. I decided that she might have to have a horrible ceramic accident soon.

But oh, his buttocks, the worker-bee industry of their contractions as they squeezed up and out! The muscles of his tiny back as he ran his fingers through her hair! I lit match after match as they burned down to my fingers, letting the pain linger slightly longer with each one. It stung: how could I die without knowing such passion? Why should I be deprived while some statue got her fill?

They finished and she fell backwards into his arms, her Dutch bonnet slightly askew. He helped her step into her wooden clogs and sat back down to pack his pipe. I watched lustfully as he hitched his overalls back up. Then, suddenly, he started patting his pockets and cursing, scanning over the ground around him. It hit me: he needed a light for his pipe.

As I slid up the windowsill, I heard the collective gasp of the gnomes and other ornaments, all except my gnome, who looked at me with steady eyes. I lit a new match and held it out towards him. “I love you,” I whispered as he took tiny steps nearer. “Are you real?”

When he stepped into the light of the flame, a tight grip washed through me and I felt the vertigo of six decades falling away. My mind seemed new and just-born—I could only stare at him and make heavy breaths of wonder. The creases in his forehead were so small and delicate; all his skin seemed like a soft dried fruit.

I lit his pipe but then made the mistake of grazing his forehead with my hand. He instantly turned still and cold; the fire of his pipe went to ash.

I heard them at night, each night, working and toiling, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it until it actually happened. I woke up to the guest bedroom bathed in a soft, pink glow. When I got out of bed and saw his cone hat rising slowly from the ground like an emerging missile, I knew I’d been right in determining the cause of all the noise: they’d been digging a tunnel into my bedroom floor.

They began coming in each evening to perform for me, all of them: the animals and the swans and the gnomes and even the flamingos. Of course I didn’t get close or touch—I didn’t want a repeat of the last time, where it all disappeared and they hardened. It had made me feel like a cross between Midas and Medusa. And how awkward it would be to have to parade them all out from my bedroom back into the yard in the middle of the night, perhaps running into Robert as he headed to the bathroom with bowel trouble.

I grew and grew my collection, stopping almost daily to pick out new friends to meet in the flesh that evening. And understanding that My Gnome could not physically be mine, my jealousy faded; instead we became a team. I tried to choose the most beautiful and artfully sculpted female gnomes for him, knowing that he would trace them back to me as the root of his pleasure.

How he watched me when he was with them, and how I watched him. At first I only watched; I felt like such a simple old woman. But after a while, I began to touch myself while they played, and I watched them watch me. Often I’d cry because their miniature world was just so beautiful. I felt like my love was a giant blanket, the top of a tent, and each night they all came inside of it to move around and make me warm.