They finished and she fell backward 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 toward him.
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.
* * *
The night after this, things were different. They seemed to have moved the party underground, beneath the house. The noises were incredible. I couldn’t believe they didn’t wake Robert. It wasn’t moaning so much as heavy construction machinery. The sounds of jackhammers and saws.
I had a hopeful theory but wouldn’t let myself believe it until it actually happened: one night I woke 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. They’d been digging a tunnel into my bedroom floor.
All of them came in to perform for me: every ornamental animal and the swans, every gnome, even the flamingos. Of course I didn’t get close or touch—I didn’t want to feel like a cross between Midas and Medusa, turning them back to stone. 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. I felt like my desire 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.
For Valentine’s Day, I cooked Robert a steak to keep him busy and then told him I wasn’t feeling so well. “Do you mind if I turn in a little early?” I asked. He did not look up from his potatoes, which were mashed. He was giving them a secondary mashing with his fork.
“I’m pretty bushed, too,” he said.
With that, I put my dishes in the sink and ran to my bedroom. I’d gotten up early and painted togas onto all the gnomes and creatures with washable white paint—tonight I wanted a Roman theme, and they did not disappoint.
Around three in the morning I was waving goodbye as they all crawled back down into the hole, everyone except my darling. He and I had held eyes the whole night, throughout everything. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded. His rosy, tulip-bud cheeks glistened in the lamplight. Then he pointed at my braid.
My braid is long and gray; I’ve been letting it grow since my thirties. “You want to touch it?” I asked. “Is that a good idea?” I didn’t want him to harden, though I thought of bringing him into bed in his statue form, even if he would feel like a cold doll. At least I could put my cheek to his and sleep throughout the night.
He made a scissor motion, then pointed to the backyard and blinked. “Wait,” I said. “What?” But his large knuckles just went to his lips to blow me a kiss. He walked to the magic rabbit hole they’d dug and jumped in.
I ran over and got down on my knees. But there was only carpet.
* * *
Each evening I waited for him, or any of them, to come back and answer my questions. But none of them did. I’d look out my window into the garden and he’d be there facing me, making the same scissor-shovel motions over and over. The rest of the ornaments stood behind him like disciples; with his large hat he seemed like a cult leader. They all nodded silently, appearing brainwashed.
By the end of the week, I was broken and willing to try anything. Robert was playing solitaire on the computer, generating loud, low-tech noises of victory and defeat, and I got up and ran into the garage and picked up the wire cutters. Shutting my eyes, I snipped my whole braid off below its rubber band. Wasn’t that what the gnome seemed to want?
When I dangled it out before me, it did have a magic sort of look to it. Like it was the gray shed skin of a snake I’d never want to meet.
I buried the braid next to the male gnome in a shallow grave and ran back inside. “Did you get a haircut?” Robert called out, not glancing away from the computer screen.
“I did, Robert.” I went into my bedroom and placed my pillow over my face and told myself I’d nap until evening. But somehow I slept straight through: when I woke up it was already morning. My Gnome hadn’t come at all.
Manic, I went to every garden center in the tristate area. I found each imaginable temptation: donkeys, centaurs, a harem of every available female gnome I could find.
When it was nine o’clock at night and all the stores were closing, I made my last purchase and handed the bills to the cashier. Unable to stop myself, I blurted out: “He has to love me. Or else I don’t know what.” She was young, perhaps sixteen, and chewing gum.
“I do not know anything about men,” she said.
As I pulled into my subdivision, my foot hit the brake when I saw that a group of people had congregated across the street from my house. Some were pointing, others snickering. “Oh,” I exclaimed when I saw it. There was a life-sized marble statue of a heavyset middle-aged man in my garden.
I ran past everyone, ignoring all the calls of my name. A miniature giraffe fell to the ground from my arms and shattered. I ran inside yelling “Robert, Robert”: of course an answer didn’t come. There were deer grazing around the computer where Robert had been sitting, small chipmunks outside his bedroom door.
“Oh,” I cried, “oh, my.” There inside my bedroom sat my real gnome in the flesh. I wish the whole world could’ve seen his rosy cheeks, the bedsheets turned down, his beard braided into a long braid the color and length of my former hair. I touched his bare skin and watched as it flushed and stayed soft.
Dancing Rat
I don’t know if I’m able to have children. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex? Are you referring to the cost we save on contraceptives? To the funds it takes to raise a child?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”
Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s TV show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.
Whisker-Bop! is a musical dance program that’s big on counting, manners, and household poison control warnings. I am one of the primary characters (a mouse). In addition to a small team of children, I gallivant around with a raccoon and a walrus, which is a particularly unlikely interspecies friendship. The whiskers on all of our costumes are comically long and often get in the way of things—this is one of the primary sources of comedy on the show, as is my character Sneezoid’s bad allergies. In every episode I deliver multiple atch-choo punch lines in a high-pitched voice, then I look at the camera and giggle. My audition for the job almost solely consisted of me showcasing my fake sneezing abilities.
I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tool: Do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t g
et more proactive? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive to a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.
But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. Especially Missy. Her pet name for me off-camera is Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.
Like most predators, Missy can sense fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.
“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you, Ratty?”
Since day one when she asked me if I had any children and I said, “Not yet,” Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her helicopter stage parent shoots me a laser-glare.
I hate Missy but I’m also weirdly obsessed with her. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to further punish myself, I probably will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, and buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship brings me closer to motherhood. “I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control,” I often think.
The show’s writers have sensed my codependent feelings for Missy. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so that I wouldn’t “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. I think I might even be catching a cold! Atch-choo!” Those were my lines, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”
The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy Ratty and try to use this name as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”
“But Missy calls you . . .” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”
* * *
Sometimes Kyle watches the show, even though I beg him not to. “Oh right,” he says. “Like you wouldn’t watch me if I was singing on television in a dancing mouse costume?”
There are moments on the show when you can actually sense me glaring at Missy through my mask, wishing her harm behind my gigantic fake eyes. All this is made worse by how incredible Missy smells—like flowers but softer, without the alcohol of perfume. Despite her evil, her smell makes me want to kiss her satin head.
Of course the home audience doesn’t notice my disdain. But Kyle sees all.
“Man.” Kyle laughs. “Look at your posture. You want to teach that kid a lesson.”
But I do not. I want her reborn. I want her mine, without any knowledge of show business, bleached teeth, or interview skills.
* * *
Missy isn’t kind or gentle. On set it’s common for her to greet me by jamming her tiny fingers between my ribs and insisting she shouldn’t feed her rat any more this week because I’m getting fatter. Something about Missy takes me back to high school, even though she is only six years old. Perhaps I project her popularity: she will no doubt be popular. This automatically makes her better than me, who was not even popular for a day.
Today she and I are doing a song called “Leave It Alone (If It’s Under the Sink).” The dancing is strenuous, especially in the suit, where I have no sensation as to what my true range of motion is. I accidentally bounce my giant mouse midriff against her when we’re doing a series of twirls.
“CUT!” Missy loves to yell this. The director and the producers have repeatedly told her that whether or not taping should halt is not her decision, but to no avail. “Fatty Ratty bumped into me!”
I give a few humble apologies through my mask, which makes a large, distorted echo inside and fills me with fears of existential loneliness.
“Take your mask off when you talk,” Missy yells, “I can’t understand you.”
She says this despite knowing I cannot take my mask off unassisted. It is a very heavy mask with ceramic veneer on the upper face. Similar to a space suit, it screws on so that it will stay firmly in place throughout rigorous musical routines.
I put my arms up and shrug in a type of “oh well” expression. Like an abusive lover, Missy can sense when she’s pushed me to the breaking point and needs to reel me back in.
“Silly mousie,” she says, and then hugs me a little. I pat her tiny back with my oversized mouse paw.
* * *
“Draino? That’s a big no-noooooooo . . .” I place my paw to my forehead and spin around several times in front of a blue screen. Animated, I will appear to be swirled down an oversized sink pipe. Everything is oversized on Whisker-Bop! except for the children. For some reason, this makes them seem infinitely smarter.
Kyle has brought me lunch, which is our excuse to go have sex in my dressing room. I’m embarrassed that we do this near the set of a children’s show, but we kind of love it and cannot pinpoint why. It’s not like it even feels naughty, just creepy and a little bit pathetic.
Today, though, there are kids running through the hallway, shrieking their shrieks and banging on doors with their limbs as they pass. Though Kyle feels good, I can’t help but have the children’s screams redirect my thoughts to procreational aspects of sex. “There is more to life,” I tell the part of my brain that wants so badly to know which one of us, if not both, is the reproductively defective one. “Pregnancy is not the goal of this sex.”
But in this one moment it suddenly becomes way too much that we aren’t trying to make a child. I love Kyle; at least I love a lot of him. There is enough to love there to be passed on. I want to distill us both down into seven little pounds that will grow as needed, someone who is both of us but also free of us. Someone who can give half of each of us a second chance.
“Sorry,” Kyle mumbles, nuzzling his face into my chest. He’s finished. I pet his damp forehead and his curly hair.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “Sometimes it’s weird for me at work.”
* * *
Going back on set with fresh semen inside me reminds me of that rumor about a chemical that will turn all the water around people’s legs purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.
Kyle very sweetly helps redo my ponytail and screw my mask back on. The inside of the mask is disgusting; it almost looks like the hide from a real animal, or worse. I’ve never asked what it is. I can imagine the producer looking me straight in the eye and saying, “We recycled some old Nazi lampshades.”
Kyle gives me a kiss on my mouse cheek and turns to leave when Missy appears out of nowhere like something from The Shining. Before she even opens her mouth I know that it is going to be horrible; I can feel the psychic energy she’s drawing from my brain being sucked out the left side of my head underneath my ear.
“Why won’t you give Ratty a baby?”
Kyle shoots me a betrayed look at first, and I shake my giant mouse head “No,” as if to say, “Of course I never told a child your sperm might be deficient,” but then reason seems to soften into him—he does know Missy, after all.
Kyle puts on a horrific fake smile that is so scary, it’s like he’s wearing invisible clown paint. He squats down to her eye level. “That’s none of your business, is it, cutie?”
I decide it’s best to intervene. “Bye, Kyle.” I smile, motioning for
Missy to follow me as we leave my dressing room. Missy grabs my tail a little too tightly and uses it to pull me to our start positions for the “Goodbye Should Just Be Called Catch You Later!” dance.
“What do you see in him anyway?” asks Missy. Then she laughs.
* * *
Missy’s mother catches me at a weak moment. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and around three A.M. I got up and watched a horrific birthing show on television. They showed babies coming out of crotches and then big jellyfish afterbabies, again coming out of crotches. The odd part was how I was more jealous than disgusted. I wanted to be the one screaming inside a hot tub while Kyle rubbed my back and my cartoon stomach morphed and dropped. Suddenly it was six A.M.; I’d been secretly crying since about four.
“Hello?”
Even as I picked up the phone, I wondered why I was picking up the phone; it was six in the morning. The answer, of course, was that I hoped it would be a tiny fetus calling on some human tissue receiver, asking if it could please leave its mommy and crawl into me.
“Hello?” There was a pause and then the strained voice added, “Good morning to you.”
“I don’t go to church.” I started to hang up, but there was the sound of protest.
“No, wait—this is Mrs. Gowers, Missy’s mom. I’m sorry to call so early but I have a bit of an emergency.”
Apparently two of her other star children (she has three, Missy and a set of twin boys, all of them on television, all Village of the Damned genetically engineered–looking) had a callback and Missy’s nanny was sick. “When I told Missy that I didn’t know what to do with her, she specifically asked to spend the day with you.” Mrs. Gowers paused. “She likes working with you, I suppose.”
Mrs. Gowers does not like me. I’m not beautiful and therefore am not a good role model for Missy.
“Sure,” I agreed. At first I started planning to spend the day like her mother would want us to: get mani-pedis, buy some pink things with ruffles, practice walking. But when Missy arrived she was very curious about the size of our house (“Are you poor? How poor are you? Are you ever, like, hungry but you can’t eat because food costs a lot to you?”), and these questions gave me a better idea.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Page 13