Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (13 page)

I can actually feel The Mistake drizzling out. It’s time, I decide, to call Luke.

“Are you drunk, Babe?” he asks. “You sound kind of messed up.”

Even though I want to tell him, I panic. I cannot believe how hard I am chickening out. “I’m fine,” I say. “Just a little sleepy.” He begins telling me about football practice, and I put the phone down onto the pillow and listen. A documentary about America’s heartland is showing fields of sweeping wheat and grain on TV. When Luke says goodbye I make a very thoughtful noise on accident, the sound a homeless cat might make should a prospective adoptee decide against him.

“My guy wouldn’t come with me either. Said he wanted go to this car show.”

I look over at my roommate. She has brought along a series of framed photographs and placed them on her nightstand; several include her with babies.

“This is my oldest,” she says, smiling.

I try to change the subject. “Do they have that movie
Training Day?”
I ask. I’m tired of watching wheat.

The next morning when I check out, I have a weird surge of nostalgia for Luke. I almost can’t wait to see him. In the cab I call him and say that I need to stop by, then I imagine him holding me and the way his low whale-calls will resonate with the uneasiness in the bottom of my stomach. They will cancel each other out. They’ll dissolve everything sad.

“Sure thing Babe. Wanna watch the Packers? In the den?”

“I do,” I say. I mean it.

People are always working on their lawns in Luke’s neighborhood. I guess because they don’t have people that work on their lawns for them. When we pull up to his house his father is outside on a riding mower that’s making his surface flesh jiggle. They say you can tell what women will look like when they’re older because of their mothers, but I’ve never really heard that logic applied to men and dads. This is a good thing, I think.

I give Luke a huge hug and decide that when the time is right, I’ll know it. I wait until he is upright and celebrating a touchdown, then I give a little clap as well.

“Luke, you got me pregnant, but I took care of it for us.” I pause a little. “I know you don’t have a lot of money and stuff.”

His touchdown arms drop and his face contorts into a horrified teddy bear impersonation. “You mean you
killed it?”
he asks. His eyes have gone pained and watery.

I suddenly feel like a parent who’s telling a child a family pet died. “Come here,” I say, but he steps back.

“I’ve got to think,” he mumbles, which I know is bad.

Thinking is not a part of Luke Gunter, and not a part of feeling good. In fact it’s almost the opposite.

When I get home I take some of Grandmother’s Marinol. I’m feeling nauseous.

“Gammy,” I ask, reaching into her nightstand, “can I have some of those pills? The ones that make you eat ice cream? I think I got car sick.”

She’s asleep so I help myself. Her neck-hole is breathing and making a sputtery, flapping sound. I imagine a scenario where she’ll only awaken if the right man puts his finger into that hole and keeps it there, like a reverse King Arthur and Excalibur.

Gammy? I can’t hear you. Use the mic
.

When Grandma first wakes up she often forgets she can’t talk. It’s sad. It looks like she’s trying to blow out thousands of candles on a birthday cake.

I t-h-i-n-k I s-m-e-l-l c-h-i-c-k-e-n. I-t w-o-k-e m-e up.

There’s no chicken, Gammy
. She dozes back off violently, lots of elbows, as if she’s being escorted to sleep against her will.

I can’t help staring at her. She seems to be continually deflating from her neck hole, wrinkled and losing the battle for air. Her hole is like a withered pit that used to hold a large seed, but one day it fell out and she wilted.

It is so gross how we are born and so gross how we die.

Luke broke up with me in a text message. It said:
I feel nothing 4 U
.

After I scrapped our DNA craft project, he started dating Kristi. Apparently she is no longer using Chet as a human lollipop.

“Luke feels nothing ‘four’ me,” I said to sleeping Grandma.

Ironically, Kristi is the tallest flag on Piedmont Academy’s Mt. Abortion. She scaled it before the rest of her classmates had even started climbing. I think of how the number four could describe either me and the dead coffee-bean and Kristi and her dead who-knows-what (they vacuumed. It had to have been more like a quarter); or it could describe me and Luke and our dead coffee bean and Kristi. Or it could describe the number of Gammy’s sedatives I will have to take after receiving this distressing news.

But first, the message. Positive that they are involved in an act of fornication at this very moment, I call Kristi’s phone (knowing she will not answer) in order to get her machine (knowing they will hear it). My rage will be the soundtrack of this particular Kristi home pornography session.

I leave a mean tirade about how I know they’re naked and on camera, and she picks up in the middle of it,

“You stupid bi—”

but I snap my phone shut. My phone is a tightly shut clam and all the badness that happened inside is going to irritate itself into a pearl. It will just take a bit of time. My phone vibrates again and again, filling, no doubt, with venomous messages I will never listen to, but the thought of never hearing them somehow makes me sad. I get even sadder as I think of Luke and Kristi together, and me alone, and this oily kind of sweetness starts to crawl up my throat and then melt back down again over and over, like something I ate long ago but am just now tasting.

I work at a small business that makes ice sculptures for gay pool parties. I answered the job ad because I’m diabetic and they offered health insurance. When I showed up for the interview, they were thrilled.

“You’re perfection!” exclaimed my bosses, a male couple who were looking for someone who would not easily distract or be distracted. “Not only are you a woman, but you are also a very plain one.”

At the end of each party, I have the saddest job: to melt down the ice creation into nothingness. This makes the hose in my hand somehow feel like a gun. I try to at least be humane about it. If the sculpture is an animal, say a dolphin, I always do the head first. That way it will no longer be able to feel anything and the rest of its death can be painless.

One night the ice sculpture for the party was a giant hypodermic needle. It was some LA heroin-chic thing, but being diabetic and humorless, I didn’t think it was funny.

“You know,” I said in a heavy tone to my bosses, “some people have to use needles every day.”

“Honey,” they chided, “we’re not catering a rehab graduation. It’s a joke.” I told them I wasn’t laughing and they gave me this look that said they felt sorry for me, the same one they’d given me when I asked if they liked my new outfit.

That night, as the partygoers passed the sculpture pointing and laughing, I stood next to it with my chisel and politely scowled. Whenever someone asked for a piece, I gave him one that was far too big, overfilling the cup and spilling the drink.

“There’s more where that came from,” I’d mention.

Later, when one of the waiters offered me a glass of champagne on a tray, I took it.

“Look who’s letting loose,” one of my bosses teased, passing me. He was naked except for a strategic piece of animal print silk.

I decided to have another glass. Eventually, a man came up and asked why I looked so glum. I never drink, being as alcohol turns straight into sugar, so I was feeling a deep, meaty warmth that I’m not used to, especially not when standing next to a block of ice.

“I have to inject myself with insulin every day.” I was speaking in a volume and tone not socially appropriate for the hired help. “I don’t think this symbol should be used as a novelty.”

The man took a slow sip of his drink. The drink was probably warm, seeing as he’d walked over to me to get ice. His movements were universally calm; even his blinks seemed to take longer than they should.

“That’s the thing about symbols,” he said, “they mean different things to different people.”

I chopped off a large piece of needle and plunked it into the man’s cup. He did not say thanks, but “Huh.”

I began to look him over. I was suddenly very lonely, and hoped that this man, who had now been standing with me longer than any guest at any party ever had, maybe wasn’t gay. I think the man somehow picked up on it, my sudden ache for physical affection.

“I think it would be therapeutic,” he said, “if you gave the needle a big hug and a kiss. You clearly have some resentment towards needles, and resentment is just not healthy.” He took another one of the slowest sips in the world, even slower now that he had such a large piece of ice in his cup.

Had I drank four glasses of champagne? Five?

I wrapped my arms around it. I’ve never had a lover, so it was an awkward embrace.

The sculpture felt slimy but cleansing, like my wrists were being covered in very cold perfume. I puckered up my lips and closed my eyes, but before I started to move in the man stopped me. His face had slowly gotten very close to mine.

“You’ve got to give it a real kiss,” he said. “The kind that make people forgive things.” Then, slowly, he kissed me. It started with his tongue poking soft and flat into my mouth. Both our lips were warm and burning with alcohol. When it was over, I gave him that look that asks for more, but he pointed me towards the ice needle. “I
am
gay,” he said, also slowly, as though I’d had more than enough time to figure it out.

I stuck out my tongue that still tasted of his booze, which was a more grown-up booze than I had been drinking, and pushed it right against the needle at its very base. I channeled warm and loving thoughts. For a moment I felt at peace.

Then I realized I was stuck.

The slow man broke his trademark and quickly left. I stood there for awhile, watching the guests stare at me, laugh, and then take the pick from my arm, which was still wrapped around the needle, and help themselves to some less-gigantic pieces of ice. Since I was attached to the sculpture, when they chiseled it I felt like they were breaking off a piece of me too, and I protested in grunts and wrapped it more tightly around myself. The chiseling made everything vibrate in a threatening way. I wanted it to stop.

I grunted louder and mounted the sculpture fully, like it was a tree and I a koala. I was wearing a thin dress and the ice numbed my skin.

Finally my bosses approached. They’d never touched me before, but somehow their hands felt familiar. They chiseled off the piece of ice around my tongue and then told me go to a sink and hold it under warm water. “You’re not the first person this has happened to,” they kept saying, but they weren’t reassuring about it. As we walked towards the bathroom, I looked back at the needle. All the places where I’d been pressed against it had melted smooth; its calibrated numbers had disappeared, and the handle now curved inward in places.

As the hot water began to flow, I couldn’t help but notice my bosses looked sad, a bit like me when I have to kill the ice sculptures.

“We thought you would work out so nicely,” they lamented. The stream of faucet water was big and roaring in my ear. The water was so hot that I imagined I was traveling into a volcano, that my tongue was made of lava, and my hair. I let the water run all over my head and neck, staying under the stream as I heard my ex-bosses leave the bathroom.

Beneath the faucet, I pictured myself in another, similar universe on a night much like tonight, finishing out the party then hosing the sculpture down needle-first. As my drunken warmth returned I stayed with the small relief of that image, the still absence that comes when the head melts clean of its body.

I never had breasts until I went to Hell. When I died at the age of thirty-nine I was barely an A-cup. I often used to purchase bras from the preteen section. The bra I died in had tiny unicorns patterned across one nipple and tiny rainbows patterned across the other.

At first I thought it was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for type deal. All my life I had wanted a bigger chest, and now I was going to be saddled with one and learn all the ways that it’s inconvenient—back pain, unwanted attention, etc. But as I walked around I began to notice that all the females had them. I was looking down my shirt when another woman patted me on the back. “They’re for defense,” she winked. I didn’t understand until later that day when a fellow Hellion began hitting on me, a real know-it-all. The kind of person who always has a toothpick in his mouth. When I first got to Hell, I was shocked they’d let people have sharp objects like toothpicks; I expected the rules of prison. But that is lesson #1. Hell is not the same as prison.

As I grew angry with the guy, my breasts began to make a percolating sound. It felt like they were being forcibly tickled. My nipples hardened into nozzles and a bubbling green liquid that smelled like motor oil shot out of them. It sprayed all over the man’s face and his skin began to smoke and blister.

I watched him run over to the lava pond and look at his reflection. “I’m a mutant for eternity!” he screamed.

A giant man named Ben walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. Ben is intimidating at first: he is covered from head-to-toe with eye implants. “Sorry about that,” he muttered. A bat poked its head out of Ben’s beard. The bat was wearing an eye patch.

Some people in Hell are nice. They just happened to have done a very reprehensible thing at one point. I killed my husband once, for instance. But I felt bad enough about it to also kill myself.

Hell isn’t that awful, but it does smell. People often ask, “What died in here?”

The answer is complicated. It could be a lot of things. Our currency is little coins made of hair and liver that we have to spend before they rot. We get a weekly allowance, enough to keep most people entertained, but if we want more money we can mop the floors, etc. It’s common for people to start a collection as a hobby. For example, Ben collects eyes and surgically embeds them all over his body. His best eye is in his belly button. He wears little high-rise t-shirts so that his belly-eye can see and be seen at all times.