* * *
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As she began to type, “Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.
* * *
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“In the fifties, we would have been housewives,” her friend shrugged, sopping up a hangover with a large humble mound of ancient grains.
“In the fifties, I would have belonged to a milkshake gang and had a nickname like Ratbite,” she countered, glaring at the salad that had been served to her on a board, forking it with such violence that a cucumber skidded off and landed in her lap, where it sat looking up at her like a fresh green clock.
* * *
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White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
* * *
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The comforting thing about movies was that she could watch bodies that were not feeling they were bodies. Moving effortlessly through graveyards, even uphill, wearing clothing whose tags did not itch, there was never a stray hair caught in the lip gloss, the frictionlessness of bodies in heaven. Sliding over each other like transparencies, riding love as picturesquely as prairie horses, the sex scenes like blouses brushing against slacks in a closet, not feeling and not feeling all the things she would miss in the clear blue place.
Grass sawed at the edge of the sea, it did not have to feel that it was grass. A fur coat in a movie made in 1946 approached a state of being cruelty-free, so far was it from its original foxes. The exception was movies made by geniuses. Everything in them wore a halo that was the specific pain of being itself. Well, and the other exception was when an actress had a little mustache, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it the whole time.
* * *
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“I have the most unbelievable news for you,” her husband said one day, and informed her that their downstairs neighbor was currently starring in a reality show called South’n Chawm, which, like all reality shows, was about a group of close friends who hated each other. They watched the entire first season in a day, unbelieving. The documentation had been going on under her feet the whole time. Surely some word of hers must have drifted down through the ceiling and into the permanent record—some album played on repeat, some cry in the night. But no, the more she looked, the more there was no evidence of her: alone, in pain, haloed by her little mustache, locked in her thinking heaven above the screaming, hateful friends.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“I hate this dildo,” she announced. “I’ve always hated it. I’m throwing it away first thing in the morning.” They had been exercising it earlier and it was still tucked between the sheets, bald and shocking and full of fake pearls.
“Oh, did it hurt?” her husband asked with exaggerated innocence, repositioning the marble carving of his torso on the pillow.
“Of course it hurt!” she yelled, waving the dildo at him like a sex conductor. Its circumference really was huge. And why did they put the fake veins on? She didn’t want something that was shaped like a dolphin or anything, but why did they have to put the veins on? “Imagine this going up your ass!”
“But I don’t want it up my ass,” her husband said reasonably.
“As if wanting something makes it hurt less!” This statement sailed through the room as an unintentional piece of wisdom, clean as laundry and full of wind. Oh, she loved to yell, loved to be inconsistent, loved to make no sense in the little awestruck hours of the night, which stared up at her as a perfect audience with their equal little heads. Hadn’t she opened as wide as possible earlier, hadn’t she moaned, even said yes, yes, more as he used it on her? She had, she had. Despite all that, wasn’t it still her prerogative to throb between the legs? It was. He should have to take it. He should have to endure the shocking thing with veins for once.
“Men,” she said, now satisfied. The dildo went back into its chest. Four years ago she would have written a personal essay about this for a women’s website called Dangerous Amanda or Brunette Ambition, and she would have been paid $250 for it, but now there was only the moan, the moment, and the sailing wisdom, now there was only the unrepeatable night.