The Last Housewife
Ashley Winstead
In the words of Patricia Lockwood: This is for every woman who isn’t interested in heaven unless her anger gets to go there too.
Content warning: Suicide, rape, physical violence, sexual violence, trauma, self-harm, misogyny, gender essentialism, drug use.
Part One
Scheherazade, you careful actress
These are the stories I tell you to save my life.
I am naturally smooth and sun-streaked and fat-lipped in the exact way you like. （Picture me like this, dear husband, as I speak to you.）
You could have any of us. You could have so many, one right after the other. You’re hardwired for it; it’s the most natural thing for a man like you to take us, to plow through us, to discard. I am lucky you have chosen to keep me.
You ensure we are more than fed and sheltered, that we are rich and careless, and I am grateful. When you thrust, you reach a place deep inside me I could never reach myself.
In your arms I am safe and comfortable.
In your arms I am a good daughter and a good wife. Who has never cheated, never stolen, never offered herself to the god of sin for a single lap of pleasure. Who has never wanted something sick and troubling, who has never held her hands up to the light, watching them fill with dark, hot blood, thrill zipping her spine. Who would? Can you imagine?
These are the stories I tell you to stave off the night you will finally look at me from across the room, see the woman underneath the fiction—weaving, weaving madly—and lop off her head.
Chapter One
From a young age I could feel them watching. Could feel the weight of their eyes and their hunger pressing over my skin like the skimming fingers of a lover, or an appraiser, dragging a hand down the bones of a rare find. Like most women, I grew up with the looking, grew into it. So that even today, alone in the backyard, I can still feel those phantom eyes and shape my body to the audience. Carrying myself in ways that will please them, stretching out gracefully by the pool, back arched, eyes closed against the sun like a woman in a movie, an icon of mystery and elegance, as delicate and unknowable as Keats’s maiden on the Grecian urn.
Always, before, it seemed obvious they were looking: on the street, in the grocery store, staring up from tables at restaurants. But lately, finding myself thirty and unexpectedly alone most of the time, I had begun to face certain facts. To wonder if the eyes of those men hadn’t simply burned me deep enough when I was young, so the scars were still sparking years later, like a bad burn from the oven that feels alive for days. Or maybe I’d snatched their eyes, a self-protective measure, buried them deep beneath my skin, and now I was watching myself. As a feminist culture writer—at least, a former one—these were possibilities I knew to consider.
Truthfully, I wasn’t doing much considering these days. I’d quit my job writing for The Slice six months ago, trading in thousand-word essays with titles like “Why booty shorts and baby talk are fall’s surprising feminist trends” for the chance to write my first novel. I’d been waiting my entire life to write the book—my alleged passion project—yet ever since I’d had the time and means to actually do it, I’d found myself without the aforementioned passion. Without any words at all, you might say. The trouble was the ending: I couldn’t fathom it, and without that, the words wouldn’t flow.
So instead of writing, I’d sunk slowly into the daily rhythms familiar to the other wives in our new Highland Park neighborhood: a gluten-free breakfast, followed by yoga or Pilates, then lunch with the girls, shopping （in person or online）， dinner with the husband upon his return from work, wine and sex, maybe. But always, always, a grand finale of quiet contemplation when the lights went out, wondering how the days of one’s newly useless life could dissipate so quickly, like grains of sand through an hourglass. How in a twist of irony one could become a piece of art rather than an artist.