Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

  I visit my parents in Florida for Thanksgiving and my mother asks why I don’t call as often. I explain how work has gotten busy. I explain how snow has fallen every single day for more than a month and how everyone thinks I’m from Detroit. My mother says I look thin. She says I’m too quiet. We don’t talk about the dead child or the father of the dead child. There is this life and that life. We pretend that life never happened. It is a mercy. Magnus calls every morning before he leaves for work and every night before he falls asleep. One afternoon he calls and my mother answers my phone. I hear her laughing as she says, “What an unusual name.” When she hands me my phone, she asks, “Who is this Magnus? Such a nice young man.” I push. I say he’s no one important, because I don’t know how to explain him or who I am when I’m with him. I say it a little too loudly. When I put my phone to my ear I can hear only a dial tone. Magnus doesn’t call for the rest of my trip. We won’t speak until the end of January.

  In my lab things make sense but they don’t. I can’t concentrate. I want to call Magnus but my repeated bad behavior overwhelms me. The weather has grown colder, sharper. The world grows and I shrink. My students work on final projects. I have a paper accepted at a major conference. The semester ends, I return to Florida for the holidays. My mother says I look thin. She says I’m too quiet. When she asks if I want to talk about my child I shake my head. I say, “Please don’t ever mention her again, not ever.” My mother holds the palm of one hand to my cheek and the palm of the other over my heart. I send Magnus a card and a letter and gift and another letter and another letter offering apologies, admitting that we very much are a thing, admitting that I long for him. He sends me a text message that says, “I’m still angry.” I send more letters. He writes back once and I carry his letter with me everywhere. I try to acquire a taste for venison. The new semester starts. I have another paper accepted at a conference, this one in Europe. A new group of students try to flirt with me while learning about the wonder of concrete. I get a research grant and my department chair offers me a tenure-track faculty position with the department. He tells me to take as much time as I need to consider his offer. He says the department really needs someone like me. He says, “You kill two birds with one stone, Katie.” I contemplate placing his head in the compression-testing machine and the sound it would make. I say, “I prefer to be called Kate.”

  The hydrologist corners me in my lab late at night and makes an inappropriate advance that leaves me unsettled. For weeks I will feel his long, skinny fingers, how they grabbed at things that were not his to hold. Even though it’s after midnight, I call Magnus. My voice is shaking. He says, “You hurt my feelings,” and the simple honesty of his words hurts. I say, “I’m sorry. I never say what I really feel,” and I cry. He asks, “What’s wrong?” He knows me better than I care to admit. I tell him about the married hydrologist, a dirty man with a bright pink tongue who tried to lick my ear and who called me Black Beauty and who got aggressive when I tried to push him away and how I’m nervous about walking to my car. Magnus says, “I’m on my way.” I wait for him by the main entrance and when I recognize his bulky frame trudging through the snow toward me, everything feels more bearable. Magnus doesn’t say a word. He just holds me. After a long while, he punches the brick wall and says, “I’m going to kill that guy.” I believe him. He walks me to my lab to get my things.

  At my apartment, I hold a bag of frozen corn against Magnus’s scraped knuckles. I say, “I shouldn’t have called.” He says, “Yes, you should have.” He says, “You have to be nicer to me.” I say, “I do.” I straddle his lap and kiss his torn knuckles and pull his hands beneath my shirt and look into his beautiful blue-gray eyes and I don’t say it, but I think, I love you.

  Magnus starts picking me up from work every night and if I have to work late, he sits with me, watching me work. There is an encounter with the hydrologist. Words are exchanged. Magnus clarifies for the hydrologist my disinterest in curries of any kind. He doesn’t trouble me again. While I work, Magnus tells me about trees and everything a man could ever know from spending his days among them. He often smells like pine and sawdust.

  In March, winter lingers. Magnus builds me an igloo and inside, he lights a small fire. He says, “Sometimes, I feel I don’t know a thing about you.” I am sitting between his legs, my back to his chest. Even though we’re wearing layers of clothing, it feels like we’re naked. I say, “You know I’m not very nice.” He kisses my cheek. He says, “That’s not true.” He says, “Tell me something true.” I tell him how I hold on to the idea of Amelia even though I shouldn’t, how she’s all I really think about, how she might be trying to walk now or say her first words. I tell him I think I love him and I love how he likes me. He brings my cold fingers to his warm lips. He fills all the hollow spaces.

  How

  How These Things Come to Pass

  Hanna does her best thinking late at night when all the usurpers living in her house are asleep. If it isn’t winter, which is not often, she climbs out onto her roof with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She smokes and stares up at the blue-black night sky. She lives in the North Country, where the stars make sense. Hanna shares her home with her unemployed husband, her twin sister, her sister’s husband, their son, and her father. She is the only one who works—mornings, she waits tables at the Koivu Café, and nights, she tends bar at Karpela’s Supper Club. She leaves most of her tips at her best friend Laura’s house. Hanna is plotting her escape.

  The most popular dish at the Koivu is the pannukakku, a Finnish pancake. If Old Larsen is too hungover, Hanna will heat the iron skillet in the oven and mix the batter—first eggs, beating them lightly, slowly adding the honey, salt, and milk, finally sifting the flour in. She enjoys the ratchet sound as she pulls the sift trigger. She sways from side to side and imagines she is a flamenco dancer. She is in Spain, where it is warm, where there is sun and beauty. Hanna likes making pannukakku with extra butter so the edges of the pancakes are golden and crisp. Sometimes she’ll carefully remove the edges from a pancake and eat them just like that. She’s still in Spain, eating bread from a panadería, perhaps enjoying a little wine. Then she’ll hear someone shout “Order up!” and she is no longer in Spain. She is in the middle of nowhere, standing over a hot, greasy stove.

  Peter, Hanna’s husband, comes in for breakfast every morning. Hanna saves him a spot at the counter and she takes his order. He stares down her uniform, ogling her cleavage and waggling his eyebrows. She feigns affection, smacks his head with her order pad, and hands his ticket to Old Larsen, who growls, “We don’t do any damn substitutions,” but then makes Peter three eggs over easy, hash browns with onions and cheese, four slices of bacon, white toast, and two pannukakku, slightly undercooked. When his food is ready, Hanna takes a break, sits next to Peter, watches him eat. His beard is growing long. A man without a job doesn’t need a clean face, he tells her. She hates watching Peter eat. She hates that he follows her to work. She hates his face.

  Her husband thinks they are trying to have a child. He wears boxers instead of briefs though he prefers the security of the latter. Peter once read in a magazine that wearing boxers increased sperm motility. He and Hanna have sex only when the home ovulation kit he bought at Walmart indicates she is fertile. Peter would prefer to have sex every day. Hanna would prefer to never have sex with Peter again, not because she’s frigid but because she finds it difficult to become aroused by a perpetually unemployed man. Two years ago, Hanna said she was going on vacation with Laura downstate and instead drove to Marquette and had her tubes tied. She wasn’t going to end up like her mother with too many children in a too-small house with too little to eat. Despite her best efforts, however, she has found herself living in a too-small house with too many people and too little to eat. It is a bitter pill to swallow.

  When she gets off work at three in the afternoon, Hanna goes home, washes the grease and salt from her skin, and changes into something cute but a little slutty. She heads to
the university the next town over. She’s twenty-seven but looks far younger, so she pretends she’s a student. Sometimes she attends a class in one of the big lecture halls. She takes notes and plays with her hair and thinks about all the things she could have done. Other days she sits in the library and reads books and learns things so that when she finally escapes she can be more than a waitress with a great rack in a dead Upper Michigan town.

  Hanna flirts with boys because at the Michigan Institute of Technology there are lots and lots of boys who want nothing more than to be noticed by a pretty girl. She never pretends she’s anything but smart. She’s too old for that. Sometimes the boys take her to the dining hall or the Campus Café for a snack. She tells them she’s in mechanical engineering because Laura is a secretary in that department. Sometimes the boys invite her to their messy dorm rooms littered with dirty laundry and video game consoles and roommates or their squalid apartments off campus. She gives them blowjobs and lies with them on their narrow twin beds covered in thin sheets and tells them lies they like to hear. After the boys fall asleep, Hanna heads back across the bridge to Karpela’s, where she tends bar until two in the morning.

  Peter visits Hanna at the supper club, too, but he has to pay for his drinks so he doesn’t visit often. Don Karpela, the owner, is always around, grabbing at things with his meaty fingers. He’s a greedy man and a friend of her father. Even though he’s nearing sixty, Don is always breathing down Hanna’s neck, bumping up against her in the cramped space behind the bar, telling her he’d make her damn happy if she’d leave her old man. When he does that, Hanna closes her eyes and breathes easy because she needs her job. If Peter is around when Don is making his moves, he’ll laugh and raise his glass. “You can have her,” he’ll slur, as if he has a say in the matter.

  After the bar closes Hanna wipes everything down and washes all the glasses and empties the ashtrays. She and Laura, who also works at the supper club, will sit on the hood of Hanna’s car in the back alley and hold hands. Hanna will lean against Laura’s shoulder and inhale deeply and marvel that her friend can still smell good after hours in that dark, smoky space where men don’t hear the word no. If the night is empty enough, they will kiss for a very long time, until their cold lips become warm, until the world falls away, until their bodies feel like they will split at the heart. She and Laura never talk about these moments but when Hanna is plotting her escape, she is not going alone.

  Hanna’s twin sister, Anna, often waits up for Hanna. She worries. She always has. She’s a nervous woman. As a child, she was a nervous girl. Their mother, before she left, liked to say that Hanna got all the sisu, the fierce strength that should have been shared by both girls. Hanna and Anna always knew their mother didn’t know them at all. They were both strong and fierce. Anna’s husband worked at the paper mill in Niagara until some foreign company bought it and closed it and then most people in town lost their homes because all the work that needed doing was already done. When Anna called, nervous as always, to ask if she and her family could stay with Hanna, she had not even posed the question before Hanna said, “Yes.”

  Hanna and Anna are not openly demonstrative but they love each other wildly. In high school, Anna dated a boy who didn’t treat her well. When Hanna found out, she put a good hurting on him. Hanna pretended to be her sister and she took the bad boy up to the trails behind the county fairgrounds. She got down on her knees and started to give him head and she told him if he ever laid a hand on her sister again and before she finished that sentence, she bit down on his cock and told herself she wouldn’t stop biting down until her teeth met. She smiled when she tasted his blood. He screamed so softly it made the hairs on her arm stand on end. Hanna still sees that boy around town once in a while. He’s not a boy anymore but he walks with a hitch and always crosses to the other side of the street when he sees her coming.

  On the nights when Hanna and Laura sit on the hood of Laura’s car and kiss until their cold lips warm, Anna stands outside on the front porch, shivering, waiting. Her cheeks flush. Her heart flutters around her chest awkwardly. Anna asks Hanna if she’s seeing another man and Hanna tells her sister the truth. She says, “No,” and Anna frowns. She knows Hanna is telling the truth. She knows Hanna is lying. She cannot quite figure out how she’s doing both at the same time. The sisters smoke a cigarette together, and before they go in, Anna will place a gentle hand on Hanna’s arm. She’ll say, “Be careful.” Hanna will kiss her twin’s forehead, and she’ll think, I will, and Anna will hear her.

  How Hanna Ikonen Knows It Is Time to Get the Girl and Get Out of Town

  Hanna and Anna’s father, Red, lives in the basement. He’s not allowed on the second floor, where everyone sleeps. When Peter asks why, Hanna just shakes her head and says, “It’s personal.” She doesn’t share personal things with her husband. Her father used to work in the mines. When the last copper mine closed he didn’t bother trying to learn a new trade. He started holding his back when he walked around, said he was injured. He collected disability and when that ran out, he lived with a series of girlfriends who each kicked him out before long. Finally, when there was no woman in town who would give him the time of day, Red showed up on Hanna’s doorstep, reeking of whiskey, his beard long and unkempt. He slurred an incoherent apology for being a lousy father. He begged his daughter to have mercy on an old man. Hanna wasn’t moved by his plea but she knew he would be her problem one way or the other. She told him he could make himself comfortable in the basement, but if she ever saw him on the second floor, that would be that. It has been fifteen years since the mine closed but Red still calls himself a miner.

  The whereabouts of Hanna and Anna’s mother, Ilse, are unknown. She left when the girls were eleven. It was a Thursday morning. Ilse got the girls and their brothers ready for school, fed them breakfast—steel-cut oats topped with sliced bananas. She kissed them atop their pale blond heads and told them to be good. She was gone when they returned home from school. For a while, they heard a rumor that Ilse had taken up with a shoe salesman in Marquette. Later, there was news of her from Iron Mountain, a dentist’s wife, with a new family. Then there was no news at all.

  Hanna and Anna have five brothers scattered throughout the state. They are mostly bitter, lazy, indifferent, and unwilling to have a hand in the care and feeding of their father. When Hanna organized a conference call with her siblings to discuss the disposition of their father, the Boys, as they are collectively known, said it was women’s work and if the Twins didn’t want to do that work, they could let the old man rot. One of the brothers, Venn, offered to send Hanna or Anna, whoever shouldered the burden of caring for Red, twenty dollars a month. Simultaneously, the Twins told him to stick it up his ass and then they told the Boys to go fuck themselves. After they hung up, Hanna called Anna and Anna offered to take care of Red until he drank himself to death but Hanna worried that death by drink would take too long. Anna had a child to raise, after all.

  It is an ordinary Tuesday when Hanna decides to go home after working at the café instead of heading across the bridge to the institute to play make-believe with college boys. She can feel grease oozing out of her pores and what she wants, more than anything, is to soak in a clean bathtub, in an empty house. When she pulls into her driveway and sees Anna pacing back and forth in front of the garage, Hanna knows there will be no bath or empty house today. She parks the car, takes a deep breath, and joins her sister, who informs Hanna that their mother is sitting on the Salvation Army couch in the living room drinking a cup of tea. Hanna thinks, Of course she is.

  How Hanna Met and Married Peter Lahti

  Anna fell in love when she was seventeen. His name was Logan, and he lived on the reservation in Baraga. She loved his long black hair and his smooth brown skin and the softness of his voice. They met at a football game and the day after graduation, they married and moved. When Anna left, Hanna was happy for her sister, but she also hoped beyond all hopes that her sister and her new husband would take
her with them. She could have said something. Years later Hanna realized she should have said something, but she became the one who stayed. She got an apartment of her own and started hanging out at the university sitting in on the classes she couldn’t afford. Peter lived in the apartment next door and back then he worked as a truck driver hauling lumber downstate, so dating him was fine because he wasn’t around much.

  After a long trip when Peter was gone for three weeks, he showed up at Hanna’s door, his hair slicked back, beard trimmed, wearing a button-down shirt and freshly pressed jeans. In one hand he held a cheap bouquet of carnations. He had forgotten that Hanna had told him, on their first date, that she hated carnations. He thrust the flowers into Hanna’s hands, invited himself into her apartment, and said, “I missed you so much. Let’s get married.” Hanna, elbow deep into a bottle of wine at that point, shrugged. Peter, an optimist at heart, took the gesture as a response in the affirmative. They married not long after in a ceremony attended by Anna and her husband, Red, and three of the Boys. No one from Peter’s family attended. His mother was scandalized her boy would marry any child of Red Ikonen.