Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Read online

  Epigraph

  . . . her important name is I. I stand with this, and with the urgency that saying I creates, a facing up to sheer presence, death and responsibility, the potential for blowing away all the gauze.

  —Alice Notley, “The Poetics of Disobedience”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Dinner

  Model’s Assistant

  Porn Star

  Zookeeper

  Bandleader’s Girlfriend

  Ant Colony

  Knife Thrower

  Deliverywoman

  Corpse Smoker

  Cat Owner

  Cannibal Lover

  Teenager

  Hellion

  Trainwreck

  Gardener

  Dancing Rat

  Magician

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Ecco Art of the Story

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  When I was eight years old, I became convinced aliens were coming to abduct me. The panic I experienced was all-consuming. It horrified my Catholic parents. I’m not saying they would’ve been thrilled if I’d been possessed by a demon instead, but they would’ve really preferred it to abduction anxiety. Exorcisms are on-brand with the Vatican; extraterrestrials aren’t.

  I felt the aliens wouldn’t come to get me in daylight. I couldn’t picture them, say, at our local grocery store, hiding in wait to snatch me up behind a pyramid-shaped display of tomato soup cans. Aliens struck me as being rather goth. Luckily, in the daylight, there could be no more effective goth repellent than our home’s hideous furnishings. We had 1970s green and yellow linoleum floors. Neon orange and brown, scratchy, wool plaid furniture. And on the living room wall, a huge, earnest painting of two raccoons someone had made while serving a prison sentence. I’m not sure if the artist painted it for my father as a heartfelt gift or as an act of revenge. The raccoons had a very, You haven’t heard the awful news yet, have you? look about them. The painting was in a direct line of sight from our front door, so upon entering the house I always looked to them first in a sort of litmus test, telepathically asking the raccoons, “How bad are things today?” We had a thermometer hanging outside the main window that my parents checked several times a day during performative arguments over who could hold out the longest before turning on the furnace. But the only forecast I worried about came from the raccoons’ expressions, and their answer never changed: “Well, things are very bad.”

  I figured the aliens would come for me while my parents slept. Which meant I needed to stay up all night. Unfortunately I lived in a stimulant-free household, in every sense of the term. Our medicine cabinet’s contents were a laminated bookmark of the Lord’s Prayer and a jar of Vaseline that looked borrowed from a World War II submarine’s engine room.

  Exploring the house at night was too scary, and my parents would hear my footsteps. I tried to wait out the night in the bathroom once, with the door shut and the light on, but my mother found me. “Why do you think you’re safe in here?” she asked. “Do aliens not go to the bathroom?” The pink foam of her rollers looked like an additional, external brain atop her scalp. She was there as a representative of logic and reason. I knew the terror I felt wasn’t rational. But I couldn’t stop feeling it.

  I began to hallucinate from lack of sleep. The edges of my life took on an animated quality that I accepted and dismissed. Piano keys would move. Furniture sometimes appeared to be sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking at it straight on. I knew that this was my mind, that I alone was experiencing these things. I knew that about my fear, too. And other things, like my thoughts at church. I didn’t have faith. But my family did, and I needed to pretend to.

  I also pretended that my anxiety was getting better. My thoughts and feelings were very different from my words and actions. I experienced this disconnect as a profound loneliness. My parents named my problem “the alien thing,” and I came to realize this was an apt description of me, too. I didn’t seem to belong in my family. Maybe I didn’t fear I was going to be abducted so much as reclaimed.

  The only thing I could really do in bed all night without waking up my parents was read, and since I had no access to caffeine, I needed terror. At the library I started checking out the most frightening things possible. If the librarians inquired, I claimed the books were for an older brother, but mostly they were too scared of me to ask questions: by age nine, lack of sleep was significantly impacting my appearance. With my dark under-eye circles, gaunt face, unbrushed hair, and affected smile that tried too hard to reassure all was fine, I looked as though my parents had a shot at needing that exorcism after all.

  Reading horror—and later, watching scary movies—gave me the chance to take a more objective perspective on dread. I was able to study its construction and analyze forms of fear. Horror also gave me the chance to feel understood. These were characters who knew something bad was going to happen, even if those around them didn’t. When I first saw the horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street at a slumber party, I was so overcome with relief that I had to sneak off to the bathroom to weep. The teenagers in the movie knew this feeling I’d been alone with for years—that if they went to sleep they were going to die. That what they were afraid of sounded too incredulous to be real. That no one was able to help or protect them.

  To me, A Nightmare on Elm Street was more like A Validation of Horrific Feelings I Struggled with in Isolation (on Elm Street).

  The most frightening form of terror, I still feel, is loneliness. Particularly the loneliness of not being believed. This is a common theme in scary films and stories: characters seek help only to be dismissed or ignored, reassured that all is well. Not only do they have to endure terror, they have to endure it all by themselves because no one will take them seriously. Oftentimes, despite knowing otherwise, they even begin to doubt themselves. They don’t want to be ostracized. They don’t want to be alone in belief.

  This central juxtaposition of horror—denial of the truth—is also the absurdist linchpin of humor. What’s more nonsensical than mistaking danger for safety? Indifference for love? Worse for better? Our confusion of the harmful for the benign is so often absurd. As is our denial of harm. Our preference of harm, our choice of harm. So often, I make terrible (and terror-driven) decisions. Sometimes they feel absurd in hindsight. Sometimes they feel absurd as I’m choosing them. Sometimes I deny their absurdity for as long as possible.

  Humor and horror are both vehicles for examining the terror of loneliness, the absurdity of it. We attempt to deny terror and absurdity through order—schedules, routines, organization—and humor and horror both allow us to disrupt order and view the terror beneath. While horror tends to show this through the situational (something is out of order: a threat is disrupting order), humor can show this through the everyday: existence itself, its very basis and contents, is out of order. Death is out of order. Suffering is out of order. Pain is out of order. Humor lets us approach the spaces of terror in everyday life where order is not possible.

  Similarly, short stories with fabulist, surreal, or strange premises that escape realism lift the veil of everyday order to gaze at everyday terror. What’s revealed to be most surreal aren’t the things that differ from reality—the odd settings or mythical beings—but the things that do not change no matter how bizarre the story’s world. Such as loneliness.

  Order wants to deny terror. Fabulism, absurdity, and humor are tricks against order. Humor is perhaps the most versatile of the three in terms of letting us acknowledge private pain
in public. Order tells us not to be in pain in front of others, but humor lets us costume our pain for social presentation. In stories, humor can be a desperate act in the best way; it can show desperation. Humor allows us to convey terror without being shunned, and to experience terror without being isolated. Humor is a way of saying, I’m in so much pain that I’m willing to dress it up and show it to you. Laugh with me so that I will not be alone.

  Dinner

  I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound. Our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.

  The guy next to me has a fluffy, vaguely pubic black hairdo that makes him strongly resemble Elvis. It may be the humidity.

  Across the kettle a man is trying to cry, but his tears keep mixing with sweat and instead of looking sad he just seems extra warm. For a moment, I think of how extravagant it would be if we were actually boiling in tears, hundreds of thousands of them, the sweetest-true tears of infants and children, instead of in a yellowy, chickenish broth.

  I am the only woman in the kettle, which strikes me as odd. I’m voluptuous and curvy; I can understand why someone would want to gobble me up. The men do not look so delicious. One, a very old man across the kettle from me, keeps drifting in and out of a semiconscious state. Whenever his head droops down toward the broth, he will suddenly, just as the tip of his nose touches one of the surface’s bubbles, snap upright and utter a name. “Stanley” is the first. The second, “David.” Initially we think he is saying the names of his children; we even continue to humor him after he gets to the fifteenth (perhaps he’s moved on to grandchildren?), but as he yells his fortieth name it’s clear that he is not being poignant. He’s delirious.

  “We should join him,” the crying man sobs. “These are the last moments of our lives. Shouldn’t we all be calling out the names of everyone we’ve ever met? Ever known? Ever loved?”

  “Ah ha,” agrees Elvis.

  But the pallid man to Elvis’s left is less fond of this idea. A series of teardrop tattoos on his upper cheek imply victories in multiple prison kills. Ironically, he is tied up right next to the crying man. “I like silence,” the tattooed man says.

  The man on my right isn’t really my type. But he’s smiling at me through the spices and trimmings shoved into his mouth, undeterred by them. Since we’re about to be eaten, I decide, why not give this a try?

  Mindful that we’re pressed for time, I begin with, “I love you.” It’s coming from a good-pretend place. I want to pack as much into these last few moments as I can.

  But when I watch the impact my words have on him, their effect is very real. Maybe, I figure, since we are all cooking toward the finish line, things are kind of fast-forwarding. Maybe, in this context, what I’d just said could be true.

  And then it is. Seconds pass and love for him appears throughout my body and grows rapidly, like ice crystals or sea monkeys.

  We stare at one another and he scoots toward me as much as our fetters will allow, enough that our fingertips can touch. “I love you, too,” he says. “If we weren’t tied up, I’d give you the softest kiss you’ve ever felt in your life, right on your steamy lips.”

  From the corner of my eye, I notice that the tattooed man, who up until this point hasn’t been very chatty, is suddenly showing variegated upper teeth. His lips now pull back wide and verbalize the list of things he would do to me, were we not tied up. They are not romantic or legal.

  “You’re a monster,” my lover says to him. “The rest of us shouldn’t have to boil in your juices.”

  “Ah ha,” agrees Elvis.

  “We’re dying all the same, just like this murderer,” weeps the crying man. “It isn’t fair.”

  The old man’s head rises up. A drop of yellow broth falls from his chin. “Stella,” he rasps, then his eyes roll back and his head falls down. I smile.

  “That’s my name!” Glee fills me though I don’t know why. “He just said my name,” I tell my new lover, whose fingertips squeeze my own.

  “Stella.” My lover whispers my name into the hot mist.

  “What if it’s some kind of death list,” the crying man snivels. “What if that old guy’s been here for ages, been in pots with hundreds of people who’ve all been eaten, but he always gets left behind because he’s so old. It would drive a person crazy. It might make him repeat over and over again the names of people he’s had to watch die in a half-hearted attempt to bring them back.” After pondering this, the crying man lets out a long, shrill sob that is chirp-like. It reminds me of a parakeet I had when I was young. I try to remember its name.

  “Dan,” the old man says. That was not the name of my parakeet.

  “That’s my name.” My lover laughs, lifting toward me as much as he can. “He just said our names back-to-back. It’s like our love planted them in his head!”

  The tattooed man makes a puking noise.

  For fun, I ask everyone to please mouth his name, just to see if the old man will say it next. I encourage them to hurry up and do it while the old man’s head is flaccid beneath a layer of broth.

  “Hector,” whimpers the crying man.

  “Sam,” sings Elvis.

  “Fuck you,” says the tattooed man.

  Dan and I watch the old man with anticipation. Finally his aged face surfaces, and he gums the taste of the broth droplets on his cheeks before saying “Lancelot.”

  “That proves it,” my lover coos. “Our names before; it was magic.” I nod and we project ourselves into each other’s eyes.

  I want this moment to stay. I want it to multiply on and on with the unnatural growth of things just before death, speeding off the pure fat of life’s last seconds. I want the feeling of our brushing fingertips to breed like cancerous cells.

  When the steel door opens, we all turn and stare. The old man sits up and blinks his wet lashes. A chef enters; his hands are busy sharpening a long knife against a stone. “Who first?” he barks. We’re all silent, though I think I hear the old man whisper “Daisy.”

  “All right then.” The chef points his knife at me and theatrically moves it around a little, like he’s writing his name in the air. “Let’s start with you, since you’re the meatiest.”

  I turn to give my lover a farewell glance, but then his screams fill the room. “No!” he cries, thrashing madly and fishlike. “Take me in her place. Please, I’m begging you. Make her the very last one.”

  “Okay,” agrees the chef. “Sure.” But first he twirls his knife at me a little more, like he’s casting a spell, just so I know who’s in charge.

  Two men wearing long oven gloves come over and cut my lover’s ropes. Dan stretches his lips out to kiss me, but is too soon pulled away and carried from the room like a ladder—one man at his shoulders, one man at his feet. “Please,” he shouts, “one kiss,” but the two men aren’t as permissive as the chef. His words don’t register with them. They possibly do not speak English, or any language.

  “That was a beautiful gesture,” says the crying man. He’s sobbing now. “Such love.”

  I figure Dan would want me to try to make the best of my borrowed time. I need a distraction from grief. “Do you sing?” I ask Elvis-Sam.

  “Are you lonesome, tonight?” he croons. The garlic cloves really muffle his vibrato.

  I’m about to request a happier song when the chef and his goons reenter. The tattooed man speaks up when he sees them.

  “I’ll go,” he says, “I hate these people.”

  So they take him. As he’s pulled from the water, we see that he also has a tattoo on his arm that reads, MOTHER. This makes Crying-Hector cry even harder. “I should’ve called my mother more,” he laments. “Told her I love her and appreciate her sacrifices.” He takes in a deep breath. “We actually smell a little like her cooking.”

  “This one’s for Mother,” says Elvis-Sam. He begins singing again. “Mama liked the roses . . .”

  “I�
��m not imagining the Elvis thing, right?” I ask him. “Did you work as an impersonator?”

  Crying-Hector’s wails are uncontrollable. Ripples in the broth start moving from his torso over to mine. They’re lapping at my stomach like a soft current.

  His emotion touches me. I want to extend my foot across our little bullion pond and wipe his tears with my brothy toes, but my legs are bound together at the ankles.

  When the door opens, four new henchmen, increasingly sour from the first to the fourth, enter with the chef. “I need two this time,” he orders. The men grab Elvis-Sam and Crying-Hector, who continue singing and weeping respectively as they are carried away.

  Alone with the old man it is very quiet, and I realize how loud the boiling noises have become. He lifts his head and says, “Heidi.”

  I knew a Heidi once. From ballet class in high school. I pause and imagine being taken from the kettle and laid onto a silver platter next to a ten-foot-tall layer cake, and on top of that cake is Heidi, tied and gagged and mounted in a pirouette pose. When she sees me, our eyes exchange wide glances of recognition and tender helplessness.

  “Lacey,” the old man says. As they pull him from the broth, I see he’s missing a leg. I wonder if he arrived with it missing, or if they ate his leg and then put him back.

  With the others all gone, the boiling bubbles feel far more scalding than before. I am bad at science and don’t know if before we had all somehow shared the heat but now I alone bear its brunt. It seems so. I miss my lover, and this additional suffering perhaps makes the broth feel hotter as well.

  As the footsteps come, I wonder if there will be anything after death. I try to think of Dan waiting for me on the other side, our budding love being allowed to blossom from the beyond. But my mind keeps trying to prepare for what it will feel like if they don’t kill me before they start cutting me up. “There are worse ways to die,” I tell myself, “than being boiled and then sliced with a knife.” But it takes me a while to think of one.