Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  She ate a banana, which he wanted, too—not his own, but hers, the rest of it—because, yes, he was still hungry. He wanted to push the button on the blender when she made her smoothie, but he was afraid of the noise of the machine, so he threw himself on the floor in a frustrated rage, because he didn’t want it to be loud when he pushed the button, and he must push the button.

  Honey, she said, you know it’s loud. Every morning, it’s loud.

  No, Mama. NOOOOO­OOOOO­OO, he screamed.

  Every morning, the same. Every day, the same. After breakfast, play with trains, read a book about trains, read the same book again, again, this is the last time, and one more time, okay, just one more, then walk down the block and cross the busy street and run across the church parking lot to the train tracks up on a little hill. Examine the train tracks. Sift through the rocks. Don’t throw the rocks, honey. We don’t throw them. Balance on the train tracks. Grow frustrated. Scream and kick rocks. Calm down and discuss different train cars. Would a train be coming soon? She didn’t know. They would just have to wait and be patient.

  Was this boring? Yes, she knew it was, and she wanted someone, anyone, to understand the monotony, the mind-numbing routine, the way in which her mental activity began to slow the moment she woke each morning, beginning with high hopes, thoughts of art projects and energy, a sunny day and happy boy and goals fulfilled, and the slow yet steady grinding down of hopes to rote considerations of what to eat and what to clean, the slow agony of The Schedule—time for breakfast and time for a walk and time for lunch and time for nap and time for snack, time for pooping, time for dinner—this and then that and then this again, until every single thought had been emptied from her head and left in its place only the physical sensations of exhaustion, a pain in her lower back, greasy hair, a bloated feeling from eating too many fish-shaped, sodium-laden crackers. She spoke in toddler talk and was constantly asking different questions about poop.

  Poop in the potty, she suggested when the boy’s tummy hurt. He was now well beyond his second birthday and should be pooping in the potty. He willingly sat on the potty, and she read him a book called Potty, about pooping in the potty, and then, when he finally had to poop, he demanded, Poop in a diaper.

  But, honey, try the potty.

  No! he said, standing up. Poop in a diaper!

  She sighed.

  Sure, she said. Okay.

  She put a diaper on him, and the boy went behind the overstuffed chair and stuck his head around the corner.

  Go poop, he said. He grunted and pushed, making eye contact with her as he shat, the way he liked. When he emerged, the diaper bulged with his work.

  Wipe my butt, he said to her.

  And later that night, the boy would not go to sleep. For hours and hours and hours, they lay side by side, dueling. She did not allow herself to growl, to bark ferociously, to show her teeth, to narrow her eyes and pull her ears back closer to her skull, though she would have liked to do all these things.

  Their house was a mid-century bungalow with odd angles, built by a builder who didn’t know how to build. She had thought the house the height of charm when they moved in—had in fact convinced her husband that this was exactly where they needed to live, despite the questionable wiring and single bathroom—but now she was angered by the doors, all too narrow or too short. None of the corners were right angles. And no matter how much she cleaned, the place never felt clean. This house, she thought, growing angry, angrier. This fucking house.

  And instead of counting sheep, there in bed, as she waited for the boy to go to sleep—as he rolled and tangled, then untangled his legs in the sheets, as he asked for water, for food, complained, tried to play with her, pouted when she shushed him and said, Go night-night, it’s time to let your body rest—as he resisted and tossed and she lay still and quiet beside, she imagined punching holes in the plaster walls. How satisfying to summon the strength of her body, to feel her bones jar as her fist contacted the hard wall. Her hand would bloody. Her knuckles would probably break. But the give of the wall, the crumble, the damage. There was a relief that could come with violence, she now saw.

  Punch, punch, punch. An hour there, beside the boy. Punch. Two hours. Still awake. On another night, she would have cried. On another night, she would have gotten out of bed and gone downstairs and ignored him as he snuck from the bedroom and edged down the steps, would have read on the couch and not acknowledged him as he cuddled in the crook of her arm, would have done whatever she pleased and let him fall asleep whenever he wanted, wherever, because she couldn’t. She simply could not lie in that bed with him for one more godforsaken moment.

  She should distract herself. Read something. Anything to get her mind off of the disappointment and despair welling inside her. And there it was, on her nightstand, the Field Guide. Of course.

  She was not reading her Field Guide straight through, but instead felt called to allow the tome to spill open where it might and take up with whatever she found there. For it did feel as though the book was not a stagnant thing that existed but, rather, an entity unto itself that actually had things to say, and spoke, to her specifically.

  What do you want to talk about now? she’d think as she pulled the book from her bag at the park, and, as if in response, the book would blow open to “An Excursion in Antarctica” or “Some Thoughts on Transformation.”

  On this night, as she waited for her husband finally, blessedly, to arrive home the next day, she lay in the stuffy heat of the bedroom, her son now snoring beside her (it had taken only between two and three hours!), and flipped the book open to the section entitled “Domestic Varietals.”

  Per White: “While my research abroad has certainly been some of the most engrossing and fascinating of my career, the domestic breeds of magical women cannot be overlooked and, in fact, absolutely merit their own frank and serious consideration.”

  Well, then, the mother thought. Here we go.

  On these pages, she found the Slaythe,

  …a type of modern creature drawn to and focused on all things related to her career, success, financial earning, and power. This creature is not specific to any particular field, but you can find her in the highest echelons of her chosen area of expertise.

  She will dress as she sees fit, in any sort of style, but should you be unlucky enough to engage with her in antagonistic business negotiations, be on the lookout: a slicing look can leave you incapacitated for days. A sharp word is able to inspire a profound and crushing doubt of all life decisions. Sometimes—though this is as yet an unconfirmed theory of mine, albeit based on years of observation—the Slaythe may ever so slightly edge into sharpness, with her actual corporeal body taking on a new pointedness, her face narrowing outward to a point as her forehead and nose and chin shift into a sort of precipitous range. Perhaps this is magic, or perhaps this is aging. (With the right funding, I would gladly design a proper study.)

  The failed Slaythe is a sorry creature indeed, though no less caustic. Outside the realm of business, you will find her within an immaculate home, her children obedient, her mate equally docile, the household observing a strict schedule. Nothing less than perfection will be accepted by this breed of Slaythe, whose dreams, now diverted, express themselves even more viciously. I wish her family well.

  Slaythe prefer ambiguous domestic partnerships with other women. Whether sexual or not, you will most likely never be able to discern.

  One might imagine other women would hold the Slaythe in contempt of the cooperative and selfless spirit that often animates female social circles, but I’ve found that, more than not, the opposite is true instead: beta females in proximity to the Slaythe will hold her in high regard and feed from her power, growing into their own animations, over months or years, of their own Slaythe selves.

  The mother closed her eyes. What must it be like to sit among women with the s
ame animating vitality? To build vast empires and heretofore undreamt worlds? To control the exchange of ideas, the evolution of a society? She had never really been all that interested in traditional success or power, but for a moment she saw the appeal of it, of an empire ruled only by women, and then the appeal of wielding might that could bring it all down, on a whim. An entire ruined kingdom as manifestation of one woman’s rage. A crushed and crumbling room. Anything to put what she felt outside her own body, for she had borne it long enough and did not want it anymore.

  * * *

  —

  IN ADDITION TO THE hair spreading on her neck and now shoulders, her pointy teeth, her tail, the next morning her breasts were swollen and tender, and her lower back was cramped. A thick, heavy headache thudded beneath everything she did. This she knew. This was normal, or at least normal ever since her period had come back a year after the baby, a bright deluge or a muddy trickle, a week of flooding or a couple days of next to nothing. She could depend on nothing reproductive now, other than the suffering.

  Never had she felt this sort of agony before her periods, a state so acute that she now understood those women who had murdered their husbands, then claimed PMS as a defense. Her only instincts during this time were toward violence.

  Adding to her premenstrual agony, the fat black cat with its unkempt fur sticking out at odd angles, big green eyes devoid of intelligence, rawled and rawled at the exact frequency that inspired homicidal rage.

  Did she perhaps kick the cat a little—mostly by accident, since the thing was always there at her feet, asking for more food, but also the smallest bit on purpose, just enough to loft a fount of gleeful murder-joy inside her chest? Yes.

  Out out out out outoutoutout, she grunted, thundering around the kitchen to try to catch the animal, who skittered between the chair legs, then under the kitchen table.

  The mother stomped to scare it out, then grabbed its oddly rotund midsection. The cat deflated ever so little and squeaked like a toy. Its tiny legs wiggled as she carried it to the door and propelled it onto the porch.

  She used to love the cat, back before she had her son. It was a beautiful creature, pure black and fluffed extravagantly, with big green owl-eyes and a tiny, high-pitched princess meow that sounded like a bell. She was astoundingly beautiful and, to the same degree, astoundingly idiotic. She meowed frantically until someone walked over to the bowl and pointed at her food and shook it around a bit, at which point she began to eat as if starved. She always darted in the same direction the mother was walking, and then got stepped on, then made a horrible noise and rocketed off to the basement. She ate too much and had become overweight and could no longer properly clean herself, so the mother had to, weekly, wash matted poop from her butt hair, and did so with great disdain. Such a cleaning was necessary since the cat was prone to urinary-tract infections due to what the veterinarian had called an “anomalous vulva.”

  But we made it here together! her husband would say warmly whenever she complained about the cat. He cradled the stupid thing in his arms and argued: just think, we and this cat all evolved from a single-celled organism and made it to this moment in history, together. We did it!

  The mother would let out a bark of laughter, for of course she had never thought of it in such terms before, and it did at least for a time make the cat more a triumphant comrade than a worthless pest, but that camaraderie soon faded.

  Oh sure, yes, they had all made it. But, honestly, this cat never would have made it without human intervention. Her breed would have been a palace cat, the cat of the queen, a cat who sat on a silken cushion all day and was fed minced meat that a ruddy cook had prepared. The cat did, then, in a way, deserve to die, if you were playing by evolutionary rules.

  Now the mother did not want another thing needing her, needing to be cuddled, fed, washed, cooed at, and doted over. Now she wanted only silence and not to be touched.

  Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there—this idea had begun to weigh on her. Of course, it had crossed her mind before, but after her son arrived it took on a new shape, an unwieldy heft, and then even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. And once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable.

  She needed to get cat food and other groceries that day, and she did not want to get cat food and other groceries, but she went to get them anyway.

  At the grocery store, she could not get out from inside this thinking, that she was trapped, that it was all a plot, and she spiraled into an even worse mood, despite her efforts toward positive thought and the choice of happiness.

  She wondered whether she was being hysterical as she wheeled the cart through the produce and past the deli. That was the last thing she wanted to be. She had always prided herself on not being a hysterical woman but, rather, a smart woman with good points who sometimes got a little upset but was mostly cool to hang out with.

  Of course, she knew that the concept of “the hysterical woman” was itself a sexist creation, and she rejected the label altogether, but she also made sure no one would ever associate her with such a label to begin with.

  The boy babbled, Cookie, cookie, cookie, from his seat in the cart, then did his sign for please, rubbing both his palms up and down on his chest and looking at her with big eyes.

  She smiled and touched his nose and meandered distractedly toward the bakery department.

  It wasn’t hysteria if the claim one was hysterical about was true, if the systems of which one was a part were set up from the start to put women at a disadvantage. In fact, even though a loose historical definition of hysteria would indict the uterus and out-of-control female hormones, it was these very things that did not handicap women but elevated them, sharpening their minds, availing to them the realities of gender politics and honing critical thinking skills until razor-sharp.

  Yes, certainly, her emerging rage was in part a by-product of physiological processes, but how could you not be pissed after having a baby? she wondered as she picked up a wedge of cheese and sniffed it, registering a depth of smell hitherto unknown to her—hay, smoke, honey, a fungal musk, a sweet-rotten tang. Amazing, she thought as she set it back down. A premenstrual sensitivity, she told herself, even though what she feared—with a sharp realization—was that this was yet another canine development, this heightened sense, which only grew stronger and stronger as she moved through the store: the ripe yeasts of the bakery, the baking soda and bitter cocoa of the boy’s chocolate-chip cookie, the milks in all the states of freshness and souring, vinegar from the olive bar, the deadened fields of grass in the bagged-bread aisle, high sharp notes of fresh coffee grounds.

  She was alive in a new way as she walked about the store, the boy’s happy face covered in chocolate. She smelled the dark tea and damp dirt of the aged urine in his diaper, then the salt and green of the seafood section. The boy liked to look at the lobsters in the tank, claws banded, wallowing in a pile in the murky water. They stopped to watch the animals tumbling over each other and knocking against the glass.

  The grocery store is a locus of oppression, she thought as she wheeled onward, past an old lady who worked at the store and cooked fish-fillet samples in an electric skillet at a small lectern.

  Bite? the mother asked the boy, pointing to the cookie. Share?

  He held the cookie out to her, and she nibbled on the edge. Thank you, she signed, and he clapped his dirty hands. She wished she had an entire cookie, a dozen cookies. She was suddenly ravenous, but, no, that wasn’t right. She didn’t want cookies. She went to the meat counter and bought three thick rib-eye steaks, the smell of pennies and blood and death spinning her into a depthless hunger. They were so
beautiful! How had she never before noticed their beauty, the deep red of the meat set starkly against the white swirls of fat. Each a tiny masterpiece, she thought, licking her lips. She asked for more: two pounds of ground chuck. On second thought, make it three. A half-dozen bratwursts. What about that stew meat? It looked delicious. How about a pound of that? And look at that top-round roast. That one that’s the size of a possum, she said, pointing, to the butcher, who chuckled as he retrieved it from the case. And some premade kabobs for good measure, for vegetables, because that was healthy, she said, getting hold of herself.

  Yes, vegetables were very civilized. Dogs wouldn’t buy vegetables.

  Listen to what you’re saying, she said to herself.

  Stop it, another self said. Stop talking to yourself.

  Shit, she thought.

  It was a Friday, and her husband would be home from work later that day. She had upward of ten pounds of red meat in her cart. They still needed juice, wipes, yogurt, bananas, crunchy snacks, and a bag of utterly civilized carrots.

  Imagine trying to shop for crunchy snacks with a toddler and heightened near-animal sense of smell while the enormity of patriarchal society loomed behind every box of farm-themed crackers, in the crackle of every pretzel bag you picked up.

  As she walked through the automatic sliding doors of the grocery store to the parking lot, someone behind her said her name, and she turned.

  Sally—single, cute, young, happy, blonde Sal—waved and nearly skipped toward her with glee.

  Hey, how’s it going!? she asked, hugging the mother and ruffling the boy’s hair. I haven’t seen you in forever. Do you love being home with this guy? I bet it’s so fun.