Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

  The argument keeping Parker awake ended with Anna saying, “It’s not really fair, the price of loving you, and I don’t know how much longer I’m willing to pay.” Her voice was so quiet it made Parker shiver.

  He wasn’t opposed to following Anna anywhere and he hated what the South had become. The price of rising again was steep, steeper than anyone could have imagined. When he was at the bar with his friends—alcohol, unlike fast food, had been deemed a necessity—Parker listened to all the angry talk. He gritted his teeth and wished his friends wouldn’t assume he felt the same way. “You’re still here,” Anna liked to say. “Why wouldn’t people assume you agree?” And Parker would walk away because he also hated the sharpness of her tongue when his wife was right.

  The real problem was his father, General Parker Coles Johnson V, who once led the Army of the Federated States of the South, cobbled together from the military bases below the Mason-Dixon and not much else. The General, as the family had always called him, with very little affection, some fear, and grudging respect, expected the people in his bloodline to mind their place, standing tall, albeit behind him. Sometimes, at Sunday dinner, Parker could feel the General staring, as if his father somehow knew that love as well as something far more trivial, like french fries, was pulling Parker’s heart north.

  In the morning, Parker opened his eyes and shivered, the bed cold and empty. The house was quiet, the air stale. He rose out of bed slowly, his body full of familiar aches, and found Anna in the bathroom, applying eyeliner to her lower eyelid. Women in the South didn’t have much need for makeup anymore, since face painting was deemed an overly expensive frivolity when money needed to be directed to rebuilding efforts, but Anna wasn’t going to stop making her face pretty and by the grace of her husband’s name, no one was going to say a word about it.

  Parker stood behind his wife, rubbing her shoulders, kissing the back of her neck through her hair, which smelled clean and sweet. She studied him in the bathroom mirror. “I’m not thrilled about dinner at your father’s tonight. All this ceremony, and for what?”

  He sighed, nodded. Parker gently rubbed at the thick scar on the left side of his chest, an ugly circle of dead tissue. “But you’ll come?”

  Anna set her eyeliner pencil, contraband from her family in the North, on the lip of the sink. “Have I ever not stood by you?” She scowled, shook her head at his reflection, and stalked out of the bathroom.

  There was the boy, Parker Coles Johnson VII, named as such, Anna agreed, grudgingly, because it was his father’s name and only after that was it the name of the other men who came before them. He carried both his mother’s and his father’s looks in him—a smart boy, smarter than most people knew what to do with. Their son often made people uncomfortable when he spoke, so many questions, all incisive, well considered. When the boy was eight, Parker sat with him, studying a map for a geography project. There were the Western Territories, dry land full of people who didn’t realize their water came from Michigan and now paid exorbitant prices to quench their thirst, and the Republic of Texas, soon to be annexed by Mexico. The Federated States of the North included pretty much every state that didn’t secede, stretched across much of the country, skipping most of the West and including California and Hawaii. And then there was Florida, now a colony of Cuba, where those who could afford it went for sunny vacations and fruity cocktails and spicy food. The boy pointed at the various territories that used to be the United States, his face screwed with concentration. “Why aren’t all these states together?” he asked. Parker felt a flush of pride quickly followed by shame.

  “They used to be,” Parker said, squeezing his son’s shoulder. “They ought to be.”

  Parker explained that once, there was an election and small-minded people couldn’t handle the man who won and then there was anger and then there were petitions and then terrible decisions were made—demands for secession, refusals from Washington, rising tensions, a war to bring secession about, the wall erected, everything going to hell on only one side of the wall, dulling whatever victory was to be had. It all happened so fast, it hardly seemed real, until the war began and it was too real and then the war ended and nothing had been saved, which was always the case when foolish men made foolish, prideful decisions.

  The boy nodded, tracing along the Colorado border. “The states should be together again. We should ask grandpa to do that,” he said with the conviction only children can have for the people they trust most.

  Soon after that Parker and Anna sent the boy away. The borders had reopened after the war even though the fences stayed. For a price, anyone could go north or come south, though generally, people went in only one direction. The boy was with Anna’s parents, gone now a year because Anna wasn’t going to have any child of hers learning the kind of nonsense they were teaching in the South. He was too smart for that, too good, and on this point, she and Parker agreed. They spoke to their son once a week, on the videophone, saw how he was growing into his boy body—long and lanky—but still, very much a boy. Each week, Anna promised their son they would see him soon and Parker nodded silently, looking away because he didn’t dare look in his son’s eyes.

  The only room in their home with pictures of the boy was his bedroom, which was a shrine to the child, all his belongings waiting patiently for his return. Parker found Anna in their son’s bed, on her side, holding the boy’s pillow to her face. Without looking up she said, “This still smells like him. Leave me alone, please.” There was no anger in her voice, only weariness, and that frightened Parker more than Anna’s anger ever could.

  Parker wanted to say something but couldn’t. His mouth was dry and sour. His chest ached. And then he was angry because none of this was his fault and he couldn’t do a damn thing about any of it. He slammed his fist against their son’s dresser. “I won’t live like this, my woman hating me in my own house.”

  Anna pulled the pillow from her face. “Then don’t,” she said.

  Hers was a mostly empty threat. From the beginning, they had shared something strong, something beyond anything they had previously known. Anna appreciated Parker’s quiet nature, the clean calm of what he believed. Parker loved her edge, how she could never be tamed. He had had his fill of seeing what happened when women lowered their necks too much to the men they loved—his mother, the women his brothers married, how each year, they seemed to grow smaller and smaller. He didn’t want a small woman, not like that. During those early months, when Anna slipped through the dark to his house every night, when they tore at each other like their bodies were more than flesh and bone, he told her, “Don’t ever become small,” and she said, “I never could.”

  Husband and wife avoided each other for the rest of the day. They were both in the house but it felt empty, silent, as if Anna wouldn’t even grant Parker the small pleasure of hearing her move and hum through their home. As he considered his wife’s mood, Parker thought, with no small amount of pride, that she was bigger than ever—small in stature, but she knew how to take up room.

  At church, Parker sat up front with his family—mother, father, brothers, their wives and children. He sat so rigidly his back throbbed by the time the preacher finished his sermon on liberty and faith and the goodness of war. After, when he stood next to his parents, Parker ignored questions about Anna and her whereabouts. There weren’t many. People in town didn’t understand Anna and largely believed her to be godless, a designation she rather enjoyed because she understood that in their community, to be godless was to have a mind of one’s own. Back at the family estate, Parker changed into jeans and a flannel shirt and took his nephews fishing, though they caught nothing. He tried not to think of fishing with his boy, how his son stared intently at the water as if he might will fish toward his line.

  At six, sharp, Anna was at his parents’ home, wearing a blue dress, her hair piled on top of her head, her lips thickly covered in the bright red lipstick her mother-in-law hated. As he greeted her at the door, Parker held hi
s hand against the small of her back and whispered, “Thank you for coming.” She looked at him, held his gaze, but didn’t smile.

  Dinner was a solemn affair, the General droning on and on about the Austerity Articles and how they weren’t austere enough and how people were getting lax, soft really, how if something didn’t give the South would be overrun by Northern trash once more because the border fence was falling apart. Parker poked at his food, longed for something with no redeeming nutritional value. He recalled the tiny bits of artificial onion in a Big Mac and how they crunched between his teeth. Anna didn’t bother to hide her disdain. When she said, “The South needs to be overrun so things can be set right again,” Parker stared at his plate, cleared his throat softly, wondered when he became the kind of man who looked down instead of standing up. Everyone stopped eating and stared at Anna and she stared right back. Parker was proud, as he always was. His woman wasn’t scared of anything. The General started to respond but then didn’t. He took a sip of wine, red, staining his lips and teeth and tongue.

  When Parker was back home, in bed alone, his right leg ached. The frag still lurked beneath the skin covering his thigh, embedded just above the muscles. When he walked, he felt the splinters of metal and wished he could cut himself open and tear them out. He had learned to live with the pain but lately, in a cold bed without a warm woman, the pain was too much, too fresh, a burden he was forced to carry because of the decisions of other men.

  During the war, Parker was a dutiful son. That was the way of the men in their family, though such duty was nothing he would want for his own boy. On the day he left with his father and brothers, Anna stood on their porch, her hair wild, her eyes wild, her voice wild. She would not be contained. She stared at the General. She addressed him by his full name. She said, “Parker Coles Johnson the Fifth, you bring this man back to me of sound body and mind.” The General blinked. No one called him anything but General or Sir, and certainly not a woman. The General was so unnerved he removed his hat, held it to his chest. He said, “Yes, ma’am, I will.” As they walked to the waiting Humvee, the General turned to his son and said, “Don’t you make a liar out of me, son.”

  It was a long tour—mostly border protection in Maryland. Parker was never sure if they were supposed to be keeping people in or out or what the point of it all was. Parker bunked with his brothers in the tent next to their father’s. He was constantly surrounded by the stink of men, their coarse voices. He could hardly bear to think of the home Anna kept, little soaps that smelled of lavender and linen, and her food—such strange flavors from countries he would likely never visit but now longed to.

  Every day the Coles boys, as they were called, went on patrol. They were a general’s sons. They did useful work and did that useful work well but their service involved nothing that would get them killed, nothing that would keep them from going home to the women who were waiting. What Parker remembers most from those three long years was the boredom, riding around in rusty jeeps, sitting quiet while his brothers jawed about nothing he gave one damn about. It was rare they ever fired their weapons for anything but target practice and hunting deer. Parker thought about Anna, and the yeasty smell of her neck in the morning. He thought about the lines of her body, how she was so smart it scared him, the letters she wrote—short, almost terse, but letting him know she was waiting, and still loved him. In one Anna said, “Don’t make me undone by loving you.”

  The soldiers slept with their rifles on the ground right next to their cots. When he couldn’t sleep, Parker lay on his back, holding his rifle against his chest beneath the thick wool blanket, whispering, “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” He would say those words and he would laugh because the words made no sense, no sense at all. The rifle was just a hunk of metal, a heavy thing, a killing thing.

  Parker could shoot true and straight. He wasn’t afraid of guns. He had been hunting with his father and brothers since he was knee-high, the General beaming as his boys took down all manner of wildlife, slapping their shoulders with his meaty, callused hands. Parker knew how to hold the butt of the rifle against his shoulder just so, how to exhale slowly when depressing the trigger, how to understand the wind and the crispness of air to better gauge how a bullet might fly through it. He understood how a bullet could tear through a body, and leave a man blown open and bleeding. He had seen it. He had done it and so when it was done to him while he and his brothers were doing a sweep near the Potomac River, he wasn’t angry. Terrible things happened to men in war.

  He never saw the Northern soldiers as they emerged from the brush. He was too far in his head and then he was all the way in his body, on the ground, clutching at his leg, screaming. He screamed so much he spit blood. There was a bullet somewhere in his shoulder, he could feel it burning him from the inside out, and one somewhere in his chest, and two, maybe, in his thigh. His brothers were hunched over him, frantically trying to stanch the bleeding, stabbing him with a shot of morphine. Thom, the eldest, muttered, “The General is going to kill us.” William, the second eldest, kept firing his rifle into the empty distance, the enemy soldiers nowhere to be seen, gone just like that. While the Coles boys waited for help, Parker turned his head to the side. He hurt everywhere but was all screamed out, the morphine finally doing its work, dulling everything. He stared at the water of the Potomac, thick with sludge, trash bobbing gently along the surface. He thought of his wife’s words—don’t make me undone.

  The General brought Parker home himself, took a week of leave to do it and see to his own wife, who, after being married to a military man all her life, was just about waited out. As they rode in the ambulance, the General talked about why he gave his youngest son his name. “I looked at you,” the General said, “and you were so damn little, I was afraid to touch you but you reached out and grabbed my finger and you held on real strong. I thought to myself, This boy will be able to carry the weight of my name. I was right about that.” The General’s voice cracked and he held on to Parker’s arm. “I was right,” he said, again, softly.

  As they pulled into the driveway, Anna ran down the stairs of their porch to the ambulance. She clutched her chest. She looked very young. Parker tried to sit up, tried to speak, but he was so tired, his mouth dry and thick with his tongue. Anna was gentle with her husband. She smoothed his sweaty hair from his forehead. She pressed her lips against his even though they were dry and cracked. She whispered, “I love you,” in his ear, her breath tickling him everywhere. Anna looked him up and down and when she was satisfied that she could live with the man the General had returned to her, she directed the EMTs to bring Parker inside.

  When the General tried to follow, Anna stopped him, her small hand planted against the older man’s chest, her fingers curled into claws. “You are not welcome in my home,” she said. “You broke your promise.” The General didn’t protest, just tipped the brim of his hat and stared after Anna, marveling that his quietest boy ended up with such a woman. Anna followed her husband’s stretcher into their home and Parker smiled wanly.

  Before he was shot up, Parker had not known Anna to have any fragility about her, but that first night home, his wife sitting in bed next to him, Parker thought she might shatter if he touched her. She was solemn. She held her hand against his rib cage, near one of his bandages, and said, “You are done serving your father.” Parker covered her hand with his and nodded. The war ended soon after and then Parker and Anna’s son was conceived and born and life went on but most men in the South kept walking around feeling like they should be fighting something, without knowing quite what.

  In the morning, Anna stood in the doorway of their bedroom. “It’s time,” she said, and Parker slowly sat up, wiped his eyes, longed for a glass of cold water but knew better than to ask for one. He followed Anna into the study, his limp more pronounced after a bad night’s sleep, and they sat side by side. They put on the happy faces they knew their son would want to see. When the video call came through
and they saw the boy on the screen, his bright eyes, his hair growing long over his face, Anna bit at her lower lip and grabbed Parker’s thigh, the wrong one, and he winced as he felt the frag shift and pierce his muscle anew. Parker gritted his teeth and forced himself to smile wider. They listened as their son chattered about everything he had learned in school, how three of his teachers were quite boring, his new friend he really liked even though she was a girl, an experiment he was doing in the refrigerator, the park his grandparents took him to.

  “When will I see you again?” Seven, as they called him, asked.

  Parker reached out to touch the video monitor but looked away. “Soon, kid. Soon.”

  Seven nodded, temporarily satisfied with the answer that wasn’t really an answer. When the call ended, Anna and Parker sat where they were; they did not move.

  “Our son looks more like you every day,” Anna said. “I am glad for it. You are a fine-looking man even though you are an infuriating one.”

  Parker didn’t know what to say though he felt a stirring of vanity and smiled. He stretched his legs and cracked his knuckles.

  Anna poked Parker’s side. “Remember when Seven was born? He was such a strange little creature, so squirmy and red, absolutely unknowable. I was terrified. I don’t know that any child has ever been looked at for so long while doing so little.”