Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

  What a Loose Woman Sees in the Mirror

  Nothing. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t need to. She knows exactly who she is.

  Frigid Women

  How She Got That Way

  In second grade, she skinned her knee walking home from school in a plaid skirt and Mary Janes. As she sat on the kitchen counter, watching her mother dab the wound with alcohol, to keep it clean she said, she wanted nothing more than to poke it, to see how much she could make herself hurt.

  With Whom She Surrounds Herself

  She has a husband and a child and she loves them in her way though they both like to gang up on her, call her cold. It is her against them. This infuriates her but she says nothing. She smiles coolly. At night, her husband often tries to reach for her but she turns on her side, or digs her fingernails into his wrist as she pushes him away. He misunderstands her motives and when he’s golfing with his friends, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer, the stink of which he will bring home, he likes to say the old ball and chain never puts out. He doesn’t cheat, mostly because he’s a busy man, and he likes his child well enough but he does frequent strip bars and he brings the stink of those places home with him, too. At night, there is always a burning in her chest as she tries to hold her breath.

  What a Frigid Woman Wears

  Every day, she wakes up at 5 a.m. and runs until her body feels like it might fall apart. Everyone tells her she should run marathons but she doesn’t see the point. She doesn’t need to wear a number on her chest to feel validated. She lives in the country. She can run all she wants. She can go longer than 26.2 miles. She can do anything. She runs because she likes it. She runs because she loves her body, the power of it, how it has always saved her when she most needed saving. She loves to wear formfitting clothing that shows off her musculature—the leanness of her legs, the gentle curves of her calves, the flat of her stomach. When she feels people watching her, she remembers the freedom of running and knows that one day, she will just keep going.

  What Happened When Her Mother Died

  She was pregnant with her own child, due any day, her body swollen and unfamiliar. There was a phone call and she stood there, afterward, listening to the dial tone, unable to move. The water ran hot in the kitchen sink and she idly wondered if it would ever stop without human intervention. She drove to the hospital slowly, her belly pressed painfully against the steering wheel. She didn’t answer her phone when her husband called. She found her mother’s body, stiff and alone, draped in a blue sheet, so still. She ignored the nurse as she slid next to her mother, her belly pulsing against her mother’s cooling skin. So many people came and stared, tried to get her to move, but she did not leave her mother alone.

  Where a Frigid Woman Goes at Night

  There are places for people with secrets and she has secrets, so many of them that sometimes they threaten to choke her. She goes to the places for people with secrets and there she waits.

  Crazy Women

  Why a Crazy Woman Is Misunderstood

  It started with a phone call after a third date where she followed him home and they had sex, nothing memorable, but overall, adequate. They had breakfast at the diner next door. He ate eggs, scrambled soft. She had pancakes, doused in syrup and butter. “I can’t believe you’re a woman who eats,” he said. “You’re a goddamned dream.” She smiled at him, the scent of maple heavy in her nose. When they said goodbye, they kissed long and hard, bruising their lips together. It was hours later, in her own apartment, when she remembered she left her briefcase on his couch. She called and he didn’t answer and there were important papers, an iPad; she couldn’t just let it go. She kept calling and he kept not answering. He called his best friend and said, “This crazy bitch is blowing up my phone.” She went to his apartment and when he answered the door he said, “I’ve got mad skills.” She rolled her eyes, said, “It wasn’t that good,” and pointed to her briefcase, exactly where she left it. His face reddened as she swept past him, grabbed her briefcase, and walked out, head held high.

  What a Crazy Woman Talks About in Therapy

  The therapist’s office is small, so small it could drive a woman crazy. When she and her therapist sit across from each other on small couches, their knees practically touch. This makes her cringe but it can’t be helped. She needs someone to talk to. She needs someone to hear her, to understand. She needed help. She has seen many therapists. One told her she was too pretty to have real problems. Another told her to find herself a good man. She knew this therapist wouldn’t last long. At the end of her first appointment, after a recitation of all the things that would make anyone crazy, he handed her four pieces of stapled paper—self-care worksheets, and this after she had explicitly told him she didn’t believe in affirmation-based therapy. It was the second visit. He asked her if she had completed the worksheets and she said, “I put a one for everything.” He leaned forward. She could see a pattern of dryness on his bald scalp. “You mean to say it never occurs to you to eat regularly?” He stared at her, an eyebrow raised. She never looked away.

  What a Crazy Woman Thinks About While Walking Down the Street

  She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn’t want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn’t hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it’s a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. She keeps her keys in her hand, three of them held between her fingers, like a dull claw. She makes eye contact only when necessary and if a man should catch her eye, she juts her chin forward, makes sure the line of her jaw is strong. When she leaves work or the bar late, she calls a car service and when the car pulls up to her building, she quickly scans the street to make sure it’s safe to walk the short distance from the curb to the door. She once told a boyfriend about these considerations and he said, “You are completely out of your mind.” She told a new friend at work and she said, “Honey, you’re not crazy. You’re a woman.”

  What a Crazy Woman Eats

  It is hard to remember the taste of cream, of butter, of salt. In her kitchen, she has a shelf of cookbooks—Light Eating Right, Getting Creative with Kale, Thin Eats, and one very worn copy of The Art of French Cooking she opens only when her hunger is so gnawing, the only thing that will sate her is to read of veloutés and bouillabaisse. On Sundays she plans her meals for the week using her cookbooks. It is a dreary process that leaves her tongue dry. Next to the stove there is a small scale she uses to weigh everything. She understands the importance of precise measurements.

  What Happens When a Crazy Woman Snaps

  She is sitting at her desk, working late, when her boss hulks his way into her office, sitting too close, on the edge of her desk, taking up space in the way men do. He stares down her blouse and it’s the presumption in the way he doesn’t hide his interest that makes her hold the sharp letter opener in the cool palm of her hand.

  Mothers

  What She Sees in Her Child’s Face

  From the moment the boy was born, he was the spitting image of his father. “Carved right out of that man’s ass,” her mom, prone to vulgarity, said in the hospital room as she held her first grandson. When she was finally alone, her husband in the cafeteria looking for something to eat, she held her firstborn child and stared at him, eager to see some mark of herself, eager to feel like the nine months of carrying him, the bed rest, the way he tore her all the way open, was worth it. She never found what she was looking for.

  What She Says to the Other Mothers at Her Child’s School

  One Wednesday a month, she has to bring a healthy snack to her son’s classroom and serve as a helper. Her husband serves on Thursdays. She takes time off from work to do this and makes up the hours at night after she has put her son to sleep. They call this arrangement flextime but really, it’s stretch time—she has never worked more hours than after she had her son. It’s hard to know what healthy means an
ymore. That’s what she thinks each week. She brought peanut butter and crackers once but one of the other mothers frowned, her lips drawn in a tight line. “Peanut allergies,” the other mother muttered. It was all very confusing. For several months she brought only orange wedges until yet another mother pulled her aside and said children need variety to thrive. She said, “Don’t they get variety during the other days of the week?” It was soon after that she was told she was no longer needed as a classroom aide and on Wednesday, in her office, when she might have otherwise been in her son’s classroom, she felt triumphant.

  What She Thinks About Raising a Boy

  Throughout her pregnancy, she was convinced she would be having a girl. She was ready for that. She was ready to love someone who would have something essential in common with her. When the doctor laid her bloody, mewling son on her chest, when she realized he was not a she, it was such a shock she couldn’t speak. She warmed to him because he was a fat baby boy. Everywhere on his body, rolls. She loved to trace them and put powder in the folds of his skin to keep him dry and sweet smelling. Even his wrists had rolls and she would kiss them whenever she could. Her husband didn’t approve, said too much affection made a boy soft, but she ignored him because she often spied him doing the exact same thing as he changed the boy’s diaper or put him down for a nap.

  Where She Went When She Realized She Was Pregnant Again

  After work, nauseated and irritable, she went to the bar where she and her colleagues liked to congregate because the martinis were stiff and made with gin the way martinis were supposed to be made. She sat alone, though her friends urged her to join them. She drank one martini after another until she was so drunk she had to call her husband to come get her, which he did. He carried her upstairs and undressed her. He gave her water, two aspirin, and held her close, tried to figure out what was wrong. As she fell asleep, she murmured, “I cannot do it again.” He wished, very much, to know what she meant.

  How a Mother Loves

  She and her son like to watch documentaries about wild animals. Mothers are often vicious when protecting their cubs, sharp teeth bared and shiny wet. She wishes she could feel that way about her own child, whom she likes well enough. She understands people will never be as true as animals.

  Dead Girls

  Death makes them more interesting. Death makes them more beautiful. It’s something about their bodies on display in final repose—eyes wide open, lips blue, limbs stiff, skin cold. Finally, it might be said, they are at peace.

  FLORIDA

  3333 Palmetto Crest Circle

  The adjustment had been uncomfortable. All her life Marcy had lived in the Midwest with people who ate red meat and starchy foods, who allowed their bodies to spread without shame. And then her husband was transferred to Naples. Marcy’s mother said, “Naples, like in Italy?” and Marcy said, “No, Florida,” and her mother said, “Oh dear.”

  The women in Naples all looked the same—lean and darkly tan, their faces narrow with hungered discipline, whittled by the same surgeon. They stared at Marcy’s relatively ample physique with disgust or envy or something between the two. At night, Marcy worried about her ass and thighs. Her husband always said, “Baby, you are perfect,” and she flushed angrily. His assurances were so reflexive as to be insulting.

  In Omaha, they lived in a neighborhood. In Naples, they moved into a gated community, Palmetto Landing, where each estate was blandly unique and sprawling—tall facades, lots of glass and balustrades around the windows, Spanish tiles on the roofs—the streets cobbled with tiny square bricks. The first time they drove up to the gatehouse, manned by a white-haired gentleman in polyester, Marcy leaned forward to study the landscaping, tall cypresses encircled by Peruvian lilies looming over the guardhouse. She sighed, said, “This is a bit much.” Her husband said, “Baby, people love the illusion of safety and the spectacle of enclosure.” They were given bar-coded stickers for their cars.

  Their community had a country club. They joined because the transfer came with a promotion and a raise. Marcy’s husband said it was important to live up to their new station. He mostly wanted to play golf with men whose bellies were fatter than his. In Palmetto Landing, the men’s bodies expanded in inverse proportion to those of their wives.

  Each morning, there was a group fitness class at the clubhouse—Spinning, Zumba, kickboxing, always something different. The instructor was a young, aggressively fit woman, Caridad. The other wives loved to say her name, trilling their r’s to show Caridad ellas hablan español. Marcy stood in the back of the studio in sweatpants and an old T-shirt of her husband’s while the women around her perspired in their perfectly coordinated outfits fancier than most of Marcy’s wardrobe.

  Marcy enjoyed the pleasant soreness as she drove the five blocks home after each class. She liked how for an hour, there was a precise set of instructions she was meant to follow, a clear sense of direction.

  The other wives were quietly fascinated by Marcy in that she was a rare species in the wealthy enclave—a first wife. Ellen Katz, who lived three doors down, often squeezed Marcy’s shoulder with her cool, bony hand. She’d say, “We’re rooting for you,” and offered words of encouragement as Marcy’s figure slimmed. Marcy never knew what to say during these moments, but she smiled politely because she understood these people and how they existed only in relation to those around them.

  1217 Ridgewood Rd Unit 11

  My wife and I watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves because we work hourly jobs and live in a crappy apartment surrounded by McMansions as part of an “economic diversity initiative” in our gated community. Our GEDs didn’t take us as far as we hoped but they got us to Palmetto Landing, and sometimes, we tell ourselves that’s enough. We got our GEDs because we wanted to get married. We wanted to get married so we could have sex because back then we believed what our parents told us about going to hell if we fornicated and at that point, we had done everything but have sex and we knew that the disposition of our souls was in grave danger if we didn’t do something drastic. Our parents told us we couldn’t get married until we had our high school diplomas because we were too young and we needed a good solid education before we could make adult decisions and we thought they were delusional because we actually went to school every day and knew that they weren’t teaching us a damn thing. We showed them by going across the state line to get married but then the sex wasn’t that great and then we couldn’t find jobs that didn’t involve customer service and now we’ve accepted that this is as good as it’s going to get. We watch as the extraordinarily fat people tearfully explain how they got to one thousand pounds, how it was a slippery slope, how they tried diets, how now they’re stuck in their soiled beds and have to be cut out of their homes and taken to a special fat hospital for emergency surgery with the assistance of special fat SWAT teams with good back strength who wear latex gloves and grave expressions.

  The best part of these documentaries is when the medical professionals talk about the fat people like they understand, like they sympathize, like this is all normal, when you know that when those doctors and nurses get home, they sit in bed crying, eating a tub of ice cream asking themselves how tragedies like these happen. The wife and I giggle when the doctors use the word staggering or when the fat person says I let things get out of hand. For the next week, we’ll repeat that phrase as often as we can and then laugh uncontrollably. For example, I’ll get home late from work and the wife will be at the kitchen table waiting and she’ll be kind of irritated because she took the time to bake a Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven and microwave some frozen broccoli so I’ll say I let things get out of hand. She’ll try not to crack a smile and then her cheeks will twitch and she’ll start shaking and then we’ll both laugh so hard that there’s snot coming out of our noses and we’re laugh-crying and she’s forgotten that I was late and won’t spend the next hour interrogating me about why my shirt reeks like cigarette smo
ke even though we both know that I’m late because I met my best friend, whom she hates mostly because he did finish high school and isn’t married, for a couple of beers at the bar he owns.

  The sex between the wife and me has improved significantly over the past seven years. I think we’re starting to resent getting married at seventeen a lot less. After we watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people, my wife fucks me like she’s auditioning to become a contract porn star and tells me that she’s so fucking glad that we’re both thin and that we have families who love us enough not to feed us to death and I tell her I’m so fucking glad we’re both thin and I lick her nipples and get extra creative and we both moan and pant and I want the moment to last so I think about the poor SOB who needs a team of physical therapists to give him a bath and how he groans in pain as they heave and shift his folds and awkward deposits of fat, all so it will take me a little longer to come. Mornings after Thank God We’re Not Fat Sex, the wife and I tend to hate each other a little so we don’t speak and make as little eye contact as possible. Instead, we move silently through our morning routines as we try to assess any damage we may have caused. She brushes her teeth and takes a shower and shaves her legs and uses all the hot water and leaves little tiny leg hairs around the drain and curls her hair and puts on her makeup and forgets to cap her mascara and the entire time, I’m sitting on the toilet pretending to read a magazine but really I’m just staring at her naked body because she’s hotter than me. She starts the coffee, makes it too strong just the way I hate it, fills her travel thermos, leaves for her job as a receptionist at a beauty salon, and I get to spend an hour or so alone in our apartment watching Home Shopping Network until I have to go to work at a copy shop where I spend my day in front of a Xerox machine pushing buttons, flirting with college girls who need photocopies and just can’t seem to work the machine while getting high on hot toner fumes.