Always Happy Hour: Stories(25)

“I’m difficult,” I say, though I don’t know if I’m difficult because I don’t know how difficult other girls are. He says I’m more difficult than most, though not as difficult as the Blockbuster girl, but he also says it’s okay because I’m pretty and pretty girls have room, unlike fat girls, like my sister, who have no room, who should learn to keep their mouths shut.

I grab one and throw it in, right above a fish’s mouth: bloop! Then I turn around and walk out, wash my hands and get back in bed. Adult Swim is on. They aren’t shows I’d have ever watched on my own but I like them now, especially the one with the mean baby and talking dog. I feel like I’m figuring something out about boys when I watch them—something like how much they can appreciate smart when it’s presented to them as stupid.

He takes off all his clothes and gets into bed with me. I put my head on his shoulder and stick my face in his armpit; even when he stinks I like it, especially when he stinks. I’m allergic to his semen, though. It burns and gives me infections, but he always wants to put it in me because he has this notion about “spilled seed.” Anything outside the vagina constitutes spilled. I tell him I’m going to get pregnant but he knows this isn’t true because I’m on the pill and the pill is 99.9 percent effective if you take it every day, which I do. I also have a tilted uterus.

In the morning, he wakes me at six-thirty and then gets in the shower. I stand in front of the refrigerator listening to him sing “Ramblin’ Man.” He likes to picture himself on the open road with his guitar strapped to his back but he never goes anywhere. To guarantee he stays put, he buys property that poor people live in. He owns a whole little neighborhood of nine houses that should be condemned. I help him clean them out when the poor people pick up and move in the middle of the night and he pays me in buffets, hot showers, and a warm place to sleep because I don’t work, which is temporary, my not working, but the longer I don’t work the less I can imagine going back to my cubicle at the government office where I used to take disability claims, reinstating prisoners’ benefits while they gawked.

I’m careful not to burn the toast because he won’t eat it if there’s any black on it. Then I slab on butter and jelly while a couple of eggs fry. When the eggs look about done, I top them with pepperjack and cheddar and he makes a sandwich out of the whole thing and eats it while standing over the sink. I sit on the counter and watch, kick my legs—the yolks squirt and dribble because I didn’t cook them long enough, he could get salmonella—and think about my day, all the empty hours and how I don’t even have enough money to go to lunch, how he didn’t leave me any money on the piano bench yesterday like he sometimes does. I wipe a glob of yellow off his beard and he picks up his briefcase and kisses me goodbye. After I lock the door behind him, I think how much I love him, how he is like a husband and I am like a wife.

I spend the day waiting for him, but I force myself to do a few things so I’ll have something to tell him when he asks what I did. I jumped rope five hundred times. I read to page 38 in my library book. I cleaned the bathtub and took a bath.

When he gets home, I want to go somewhere, the drive-in maybe, but he wants me to handcuff him to the bed. All day long he’s been in charge and now he wants somebody else to be in charge. I like handcuffing him to the bed for a few minutes, while I sit on his face, but then I want to leave him there and go cut my toenails or watch television. I don’t want to do the things he wants me to do to him.

I slap him hard and call him the names he likes—bitch, whore, cunt. He tosses his head from side to side like you never see anyone do in real life. It reminds me of a princess trapped in a tower. I slap him again and work my finger into his asshole and think about what I’m going to eat for supper because there’s nothing to eat here that I like. He doesn’t even have any milk. If he’d give me some money, I’d go buy milk. Then I could eat cereal.

“Please,” he says, “please.” More head tossing.

“Don’t beg,” I say, “I hate for a man to beg,” but he thinks this is part of the program so he bites his lip. I slap him hard and scoot to the edge of the bed and look at him out of the corner of my eye, which I imagine is pretty creepy. If I were him and he were me, I’d be creeped out.

“I’m going to leave you here,” I say.

He looks at me like a dog, uncomprehending, whatever I say goes. I put my panties on and close the door. In the kitchen, I wash my hands and listen to the wheelchair man roll around, the laugh track on his television erupt. The house is split into three pieces: my boyfriend (slumlord) on one end, the wheelchair man in the middle, and a pretty white girl who talks black on the other end. Sometimes she comes over and wants to wash her clothes and I tell her I’m sorry, I was on my way out, but then I have to leave, which really pisses me off.

I turn on the big-screen in the den. Like everything else, he got it for free or cheap and there’s something wrong with it. In this case, the picture is usually shaped like a bow tie. Right now it’s not but it could go into bow tie mode at any minute. I lie on the fake leather couch and watch Man vs. Wild, nestle my feet into a pile of blankets. So far nothing has proven useful—it’s doubtful I’ll ever have a reason to make my pants into a flotation device. On day five in the middle of nowhere, Bear is lying on the ground in the pitch dark talking about how hungry he is, and then he’s talking about how lonely he is. Just about everyone seems to need my love and it makes me sad because already my love has been spread around too much and there are still so many people I might have saved who will now be lost forever.