Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls
Page 14
Munchkin Burger touts itself as “the finest mini-burger palace in the land,” I tell her.
“Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew I was here.” Missy giggled. The skin around her mouth had taken on a greasy sheen.
“It’s called pigging out,” I said. This was Missy’s good side. Even though I knew she would tell her mother all about it later, pretend she hated it and make me out to be a total villain, here she was: my partner in crime. Eater of the forbidden fruit.
As the day went on, my urge to defile her perfection grew extreme. I had the thought of taking her to a dive bar to see if they’d let me drink free in exchange for Missy washing dishes.
“What now?” I asked. “Television?” Missy’s mouth dropped open. I suddenly realized that even though Missy is on television, she’s not allowed to watch it.
“I don’t want to get fat,” she said. “Do you think I’m fat?”
“Do you think I’m fat?” I asked.
Missy didn’t respond.
* * *
We did watch television. During each commercial, she immediately began to critique aspects of the actor’s performance and physical appearance. She is completely brutal. If someone’s right eye is even slightly higher than the left, she will not let this slide.
When her mother came to pick her up, Missy gave me a mini-hug, but then she ran screaming to the backseat of their deluxe SUV to see if her brothers were hired for the part. “My whole week will be ruined if they got it,” she told me. Apparently the Gowers children have a competitive streak.
I watched as they drove away down the road. When her mother finds out about Munchkin Burger, she will probably make Missy get a colonic.
A few hours later when Kyle got home, the contrast was nice. Adult World. It seemed a little amusement parky—sex, alcohol, swearing. I tried to take in the sudden quiet. It was so quiet. I told myself that there was something furious and wrong about the constant sound, color, and stimulation that children crave, their habitual need to celebrate and have a party. Life is not a party. I actually said this to Kyle: “Life is not a party.” I took it back as soon as I said it. It made him look sad.
* * *
“I don’t get people who have children as a move toward immortality,” Kyle tells me. “So that they can feel better about death or something.”
I made Kyle take me to a romantic restaurant to talk about the subject. It seemed more theoretical that way, like we were making conversation rather than having a conversation. Plus, if I felt myself starting to get upset, I could take a sip of martini in a slow, calculated manner, like a robot mannequin in a commercial about robot mannequins who enjoy martinis the way real, elegant people do.
“I would like to feel better about death, though,” I admit.
“It’s just death. You’re not going to care when you’re dead.”
I want to write Kyle off as a simple person, but I know him and he is not simple. It’s unfair, though, how he can have so much clarity about difficult things. Why have children? Why fear death? “I mean you and I certainly don’t have to have a child for the sake of our species.”
“Well, Kyle, I wouldn’t want to have a child to benefit mankind. That would take all the fun out of it.” My hand finds my martini carefully, straightened, like a mission payload specialist guided it there. Grip. Sip.
“What, do you want it to give your life some kind of purpose?” He lingers on the word “purpose” and his garlicky breath finds my nose. It’s a little sexy, how he smells like garlic and doesn’t need a purpose.
“Well, what is life’s purpose?” I cringe a little, realizing I had this conversation on one of my first dates at a coffee shop. I guess it hasn’t gotten old.
“Purpose is something we think about to try to feel better about how weird everything is.”
But the thought of becoming a mother is a weirdness I want to feel out a little more. I will live with it for a while longer as if it were truly a baby; I will let it grow and see what shape it takes before deciding what to do. Until then, I can go on living each day as Missy’s secondary mother, a giant rodent who is slightly repulsed by her human offspring.
He and I make a toast to ourselves, to purposeless lives and our candlelit table; dinner is expensive but afterward the sex will be free.
Magician
After my older brother Keith lost his arm in a car accident, I bought him a bird. I thought it might be nice, the company and its bright color. He and I go to the same college and live down the hall from one another in the same apartment complex. We’re very different, though. We did not hang out much before his accident. Keith was an athlete and an alcoholic; I prefer chemistry and yarn.
Most of the girls he hung around with were beautiful. I’m not beautiful, although he told me once that I was, kind of. “You just aren’t beautiful in a way that people notice” is what he said. I don’t think unnoticeable beauty is what most people are looking for. They want excitement. My face does not remind anyone of that.
When I take the bird into Keith’s apartment, it’s so dark that the bird stops chirping. “It is not nighttime yet,” I tell the bird, but it stays quiet and does not believe me. “I brought you a bird. It will cheer you up and make you feel better,” I tell Keith, but he stays quiet and does not believe me. Keith’s living room is like a reverse sundial; shadows shift to tell that time does not pass.
* * *
Whenever I go over to his place since the accident, I can feel my heart breathing and my lungs beating. Things are all messed up. The pulse of my breath makes a thin white cloud in the air. The room is too cold for a bird.
I turn on the heater, and its loud ticks sound like the restoration of life. I set the bird by the window and put a towel over its cage. “It will be under there, when you’re ready,” I tell him. “Please do not kill it.”
Keith stares at me and I realize he’s looking at my sweater. “I knitted it,” I tell him.
There’s a moment of quiet, then he laughs a little. “You should knit something to go over the end of my arm.” He smiles at my discomfort. “You should knit me a fake hand.” I want to laugh, too, but laughing around Keith is like a foreign word I’ve forgotten the meaning of; I want to use it but I don’t know how.
Keith itches the air where his arm used to be, and he and I stare at the space for a long time. Sometimes I get the feeling that everything could be okay if I could make myself touch the new end of his arm. I sit down next to him but he folds his arm into his lap. “I hate birds,” he mutters.
“You’ll like this one.” I sound assertive when I say this, but I’m not. “I’ll be able to hear it in my apartment down the hall, so we’ll kind of be sharing it that way.”
“Will you take care of it?” Keith asks.
For a moment I forget he’s talking about the bird. I look at the dome of gauze on the end of his arm. I have a terrible urge to touch it, to pat it like the stomach of a soft doll.
“Sure,” I say. We sit together until the shadows get darker but time does not pass, and eventually, gently, I place my head onto his shoulder. The end of his arm now rests so close to me that I feel like it is listening to my heartbeat. “Do you still feel your hand?” I ask. He tells me he doesn’t feel anything.
A sudden chirp startles us; we’d forgotten about the bird.
I stare across the room at the towel-covered cage, and for a moment I imagine the noise as a signal for the start of a magic trick: I’ll walk over to the cage and pull off the towel to reveal my brother’s forearm and hand sitting inside the bars. The gauze on Keith’s arm will shift and wiggle until a tiny bird pokes its way out, and then we’ll both watch it fly away.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express deep gratitude to the editors and readers of the following publications where the stories below first appeared:
Apostrophe Cast, July 2008: “Teenager”
BOMB, vol. 113, 2010: “Cannibal Lover”
Denver Quarterly, vol.
43.3, 2009: “Magician”
Eleven Eleven, vol. 9, 2010: “Ant Colony”
La Petite Zine, vol. 21, 2008: “Bandleader’s Girlfriend”
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, vol. 24, 2009: “Corpse Smoker”
MAKE Literary Magazine, vol. 7, 2008: “Deliverywoman”
Mid-American Review, vol. 29.2, 2009: “Model’s Assistant”
No Contest, October 2009: “Dancing Rat”
The Southeast Review, vol. 25.1, 2006: “Zookeeper”
Swink, vol. 3, 2007: “Porn Star”
Tin House, vol. 33, 2007: “Dinner”
Versal, vol. 5, 2007: “Trainwreck”
Quarterly West, vol. 70, 2010: “Knife Thrower”
About the Author
ALISSA NUTTING is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. She is the author of the novels Tampa and Made for Love.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS. Copyright © 2010 by Alissa Nutting. Introduction © 2018 by Alissa Nutting. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-269986-2
Version 05182018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-269985-5
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