by Lydia Millet
Big bosoms, she wrote in her journal. Very big.
Had Dan been a breast man? He never told her that. She was respectable. A 36C.
The men appeared a week later, when she was still on sick leave. Not actually sick, just crying, smoking and eating donuts. They offered to clean out the gutters, replace an AC filter and remove a dead limb from a tree; the limb, their spokesman said, was already splitting from the trunk. It could fall on her roof anytime. Cave it in. An injury could be sustained. Death might occur, even.
She was grateful; she hadn’t noticed those things needed doing.
Lately she found she was getting so used to their support—logistical support, as she thought of it—that she began slacking off. The men will do it, she’d think, lying in bed, feeling the sun from the window slant across her face. The men will handle it. It used to be just the tasks that took muscle or mechanical know-how, but lately she’d even relied on them for housecleaning. Scrubbing, mopping, using a pumice stone on toilet rings.
She’d lie in her bed stretching out, lazing till late morning on the weekends, or put her feet up on a padded stool while resting in a large armchair, reading a novel about romance in a tropical setting. She’d watch a movie on demand and spoon ice cream straight from the carton, while in the shadows the men tooth-brushed mold from the caulking between the shower tiles or ran vinegar through the dishwasher.
She didn’t like the men to see her relaxing while they worked. She typically shut the bedroom door for privacy. Sometimes the spokesman needed to know something and knocked. Where did she keep the Shop-Vac? Did she own a Pozidriv screwdriver, or just that messy drawer of Phillips heads? Before she opened the door she’d pause the movie, turn off the monitor, hide the ice cream behind a potted plant, and spread out some paperwork on her bed. And when she opened the door she had to remind herself to squat, since the men took umbrage if you talked down to them.
As far as she could tell, they had a solemn respect for paperwork. “I better get back to my paperwork,” she’d say, after a typically gruff exchange.
They cleaned with admirable thoroughness, though they tended to use way too much ammonia—enough to choke a horse. Once they polished a table so hard they stripped the stain right off the wood. Also, when they moved furniture to clean the floors, they always left it standing there in rectilinear formations. The men didn’t know about asymmetry. Japan, feng shui, the men had no idea. Chairs sat opposite each other squarely, for instance, so that living-room guests would be forced to face each other down in staring contests. She had to go around sliding it back into place.
Homunculi, she wrote in her journal. Defn: Diminutive human beings. She never saw them outside the house—well, never past the boundaries of her property. In the backyard, sure, even out to the curb, which they sometimes skirted while mowing the lawn, but never at large on the street. They were her men, she guessed—at least partly. Possibly they came with the neighborhood association dues. Although when she was married she’d never seen them; back in those days they’d never come around. Maybe they figured that when you were married, you didn’t need a team of men to help keep up. (They were wrong. In fact, when you were married you needed the men even more. When you were married you had to practically beg for help around the house.)
Technically she was still married, of course, but after all this time she had to figure that the men, like her, had realized Dan was never coming back. Dan was missing in action, where action was not some battlefield on foreign soil but their familiar life. Once familiar. Now faint. Sometimes Dan was an idea—Dan was a husband idea. The idea was draped over hangers in the closet. Drinking a cup of coffee at the counter. Reaching into the fridge for a beer. Dozing off in the middle of a pretty testy argument.
Sometimes he wasn’t even an idea. Ideas could fade if you ignored them.
A bout of food poisoning laid her low after a burger-shack dinner with coworkers, and the next day, wretched, she caught sight of the men while she was dragging herself from her bedroom into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. They stood lined up outside her sliding doors, saluting from the patio. The salutes were jaunty: not exactly a joke, the men weren’t inclined to humor, but there was a certain wit to the gesture. She padded across the rug in her socks and slid the doors open and then, instead of squatting—she was too weak for that, dehydrated from vomiting—sat down cross-legged on the floor, half-collapsed. She told them how sick she was, but they didn’t need telling. They could see it, no doubt, from her sallow complexion and the greasy pants she’d slept in and hadn’t bothered to change. In decent health she’d never show herself like this. Even to a dachshund.
The men suggested they fold her laundry, order some groceries for delivery. They said they could make dinner if she felt up to eating by evening, and if she didn’t, no worries, it would keep. Maybe they’d even throw some entrées together for later in the week, lasagna or a ratatouille. Stick them in the freezer. They asked if she was counting carbs, or was it calories, and was she eating fish at the moment; they’d noticed she didn’t buy poultry.
Their proposal seemed, at first, too personal. Was there a pair of underwear in the dryer, for instance? Well, she could always check . . . and cooking! They’d have to stand on stools to reach the stove. She could picture their stubby arms held over her gas burners as they reached toward the back for pots and pans—easy to set a sleeve on fire. The freezer, too, was out of reach. And yet they knew their own capacities; likely there wasn’t any harm in it.
As she stood up, a wave of nausea making her sway and grimace, she thought maybe their spokesman had grown a bit. Of course that couldn’t be. They were men, not boys, and had long ago reached puberty. She glanced at his feet: scuffed brown work boots. Probably in a little boys’ size. Maybe they just had more of a heel on them than other shoes he wore.
Trial run, she thought. The men could cook for her this once. Her own cooking, if she was being totally honest—not so great. She mostly made pasta or salads. She’d tried a frittata last summer. Burned it.
It struck her, as it had several times before, to wonder what the men were getting out of this. At the beginning she’d assumed she’d be paying them, but they always waved off questions about how much she owed. If they didn’t work for the neighborhood association, maybe their teamwork was some sort of government-subsidized employment program for the physically challenged—like the nearby community garden, staffed by three retarded guys, one of whom had grabbed her tits—but didn’t want to ask in case it gave offense. She knew their height wasn’t, to them, a disability as such. Only a characteristic. And it was true: it seemed to her, sometimes, like there was no domestic task the tiny men weren’t equal to.
Still. Who would possibly wish to compensate the team for doing her cooking? Her laundry?
She’d have a frank conversation with the men as soon as she felt better. Very frank. Get to the bottom of their helpfulness.
She fell asleep for a long time after that and when she got up after twelve hours, ravenous, found her refrigerator and her freezer both well stocked. As usual they’d gone off without a word, but on her way out to the car she caught sight of the spokesman, pruning a jasmine vine on the side of the house. He was up on a stepladder.
She walked over, stood beneath him to thank him for all the meals. Sure, he was on a ladder, but this time she had to swear he was taller. And bulkier. You’d never see a dachshund this big. He was almost the size of a poodle. Standard.
“Listen, this is awkward,” she said, squinting up. The sky was already bright. “It’s—I just want to thank you for everything. Would you accept—compensation . . . ?”
The spokesman inclined his head a bit, acknowledging but not responding. Had he ever said more than five words to her in a row? It could be—she had to admit—frustrating, sometimes, the strong, silent position. Did you have to take the rough with the smooth? She waved and spun on her heel. Maybe the men were independently wealthy.
That afternoon sh
e asked a couple of employees back to the house—make them feel comfortable with the boss. Outreach. Plus she could feed them the men’s lasagna, have something homemade to offer. For once. A paralegal and an assistant. They came over bearing wine (the paralegal) and daffodils (the assistant) and though she didn’t brag about the lasagna directly, she also didn’t deny ownership. Hey. The men didn’t ask for credit.
She drank most of the wine herself—the paralegal preferred beer and the assistant, a jack Mormon, was a total lightweight—and they laughed over the pieces of gossip the paralegal related. One of the lawyers had a serious foot fetish, according to his browsing history—not only a foot fetish but a fetish for dirty feet. A sales rep was having a steamy affair with the married head of HR. An IT guy, buddies with the paralegal, knew about it all.
Getting up from the couch around eleven, wondering when they would leave, she tottered up the stairs to use the bathroom and found two men beside her bed. For a moment she was taken aback—it seemed intrusive. Oh, but they were doing a turn-down service, that was all. One of them straightened as she came in, leaving a foil-wrapped chocolate on her pillow. It looked comical, him shimmying backward on his stomach off the side of the mattress. He hadn’t been able to reach her pillow without throwing himself on top of the bed—but her bed was high, and, like the spokesman, he seemed taller and broader-shouldered now than he had before.
This was a first, she thought, the team performing tasks while there were strangers in the house. (Plus, no one had asked them for turn-down service. She’d never understood turn-down service. What was the point, for Chrissake?) She wished they’d come downstairs and meet her coworkers. Maybe the paralegal or the assistant would get the men to talk, for once.
But before she could invite them down—a nightcap? Just this once?—they’d waddled past. They’d disappeared into Dan’s man cave, or what used to be. She followed, then saw she must have been mistaken: they weren’t there. She had to clean it out, put his things in storage. Or should she just give them to Goodwill? Yeah. Hell if Dan deserved storage. The dartboard, the photo of his farmer grandparents that looked just like American Gothic, even the high-school pole-vaulting trophy. She’d set it up as a guest bedroom. Invite some guests.
In the living room the paralegal and the assistant had gotten serious. They were talking in hushed voices when she came back in, their heads close together.
“Oh. Delia!” said the paralegal loudly, interrupting what the assistant was saying.
“That’s my name,” she said. “What, were you talking about me?”
“Ha ha!” said the paralegal.
“Oh my God,” said the assistant. “It’s so late! I had no idea! But wait. Which of us was the designated driver?”
After they left she thought about Dan. She’d thought it was a slump, but the slump had lasted a long time. Most days when they got home they hadn’t even eaten together. He’d order pizza when she was trying to watch her weight, and then she’d make herself a salad. Or he’d come home with Chinese, enough for two but nothing that she liked. He’d eat the leftovers straight from the boxes the next night, not even heat them up. Cold and slimy. On weekend nights, he worked or he watched games; on Sunday he played golf, which was off limits to her. Once, not long before he left, he forgot his clubs but was still gone for six hours. He said he’d borrowed someone else’s. “Testing a competition brand.”
Occasionally they’d run an errand together, but even that had started to feel strained. When all you had was trips to Costco it wasn’t a good sign.
What got to her was how he’d done it. That was what kept her up at night. Couldn’t he have just said, like other guys did, hey, I want a divorce?
She’d never pegged him for a coward. He could be taciturn, he could be distant, but he wasn’t guided by fear. He’d been in the army as a young man. Never saw combat, but still. No, it hadn’t been fear and it hadn’t been an oversight. “Shit! Almost forgot to tell you, honey, I’m leaving you tomorrow.” He wanted to disappear. He wanted to leave her holding a bag of nothing.
Champagne at 11 a.m.
She wasn’t even worth a goodbye.
In the morning she decided she’d call Goodwill. She needed to eyeball the contents of the man cave quickly before she left to get a sense what size of truck they’d need. The door was closed—had she left it closed?—and when she pushed it open she gasped. Chair, desk, lamps, a rug, shelves. The metal file cabinet.
Nothing else.
All his personal effects were gone. Even the wall where the dartboard had been was bare, a field of dart-pricks around a clean circle.
Oddly what came to her first was He’s back. Her heart raced.
But that ended. No one was back. Dan was in Fiji with very big bosoms. Or maybe Sacramento. (He always liked Sacramento. Another mystery.) The men had cleared it out, that was all. They’d taken care of it. She was confused, standing there in the doorway, about whether to be annoyed or grateful. How had they known?
She tried leaving money in an envelope for them on the table—five hundred bucks in cash, just a test since what they’d done was worth far more.
They didn’t pick it up.
A few afternoons later she came home from work to find the front of her house barely visible beneath extensive scaffolding. The team was painting—six guys? No, all seven, painting the trim, the door, all the woodwork. She was attached to the colors of her house. It was fake Tudor, and the particular shades of brown and cream were based on some famous sixteenth-century building in England. She jumped out of her car and ran up the front walk.
“What’s happening?” she called up. “What’s going on?”
She looked—they were painting the rich brown a dull, flat gray—and started to panic a bit.
“But—” she called. “I like it the way it is!”
The spokesman, wearing paint-splattered overalls, looked down at her and nodded briefly. It seemed like a polite nod, but then he turned back to his work. Not listening to a word she said—the objection hadn’t registered.
“Please! Guys! I really like the brown!” she repeated. The men went on painting.
She stood back and watched them for a while. Technically, if they wouldn’t stop she could call the cops on them, but was she willing to risk their defection? Was she willing to give up everything they did? Eventually she sighed and shook her head and went in the side door. So they made a mistake every so often—well, rough with the smooth. Maybe the gray was a primer coat. Maybe they planned to freshen up the brown. It had been peeling here and there.
The sun was going down when they left for the day. She came out and looked up at the house. Still couldn’t see much past the scaffolding, but enough to confirm the trim had in fact been changed from brown to gray. It wasn’t a color she liked, but she could live with it, she guessed.
“Having some work done?” asked a neighbor man, pulling his garbage can to the curb. What was his name: Leon? Tony? Something like that.
“Yeah. Do you know those guys?” she asked.
They might have done some work for him—he wasn’t married, for one thing. He might be eligible for their help. A confirmed bachelor. You could see why: a reddish wart on his cheek that looked like the bud of a dried-out rose. Spent most of his money on satellite dishes. They clustered on his roof. An NSA operative, maybe. Los Feliz branch.
“Technically, you need approval from the association,” he said, squinting up at the scaffolding. “It’s a historic district.”
“But see, I never asked them to do it,” she said. Defensive, sure—the guy was a busybody. “I didn’t even want it changed.”
“Yeah. Still. Approval,” he said stiffly.
“Honestly,” she said, “maybe you could get the homeowners’ to speak to them? Maybe they’d make them paint it back. I feel like—it’s out of my hands. Like I said. I didn’t want it.”
He looked at her, mouth agape. He shouldn’t do that. It drew more attention to the wart. You saw the
hole of the mouth, you saw the round wart so near, and you couldn’t help thinking how the wart would fit right in the mouth.
Couldn’t you get those things removed?
“Lost me. Your contractors aren’t doing what you told them to?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know if I’d call them contractors, per se,” she said. “Maybe you’ve seen them around. The little men?”
He stared at her a minute longer, then shook his head.
“Been a goddamn long day,” he said, and trudged back inside.
But then there was the removal of all her window treatments, leaving the light streaming in and no privacy from passersby on the street until she hung new ones. And then, because of her work schedule, she couldn’t track them down to question them before they attached some vertical blinds she frankly couldn’t stand—where were her plain white-cotton tab tops? Even their vintage hardware had disappeared, replaced by the cheap plastic doohickeys the vinyl strips were attached to. They switched out her multiple TV remotes for a “universal” one she didn’t know to use; she couldn’t even get the DVR to work.
She needed a sit-down with the men. Maybe it was the payment issue—maybe, though she’d offered, left the test envelope, her willingness to pay them hadn’t been quite clear. Although, quite honestly, all these supplies: surely they wouldn’t have gone out and bought them without approval, if they were strapped for cash?
At work, she went over to ask Cheryl, the paralegal, to notarize something but Cheryl wasn’t at her carrel. On the screen the inbox was open, which normally wouldn’t have caught her attention except that she saw her own face there. Her face was there in the body of the email, the headshot from her bio on the website, but it was attached to a cartoon body. She leaned closer to see.
It was some Disney thing—a still from the classic animated version of Snow White, was what it was. There was Snow White, in her yellow skirt and blue bodice, and beside her were seven dwarfs, their fat faces looking up at her with big, round noses, red like boozers’. The dwarfs were dipsomaniacs.