Small Animal Needs
The small child gets angry about my anger at bedtime and tells me I am a “waste on a woman.” He’s tired. He’s testing the language, how to weaponize the available words. Women, he has learned, should be pleasant.
*
I’m not sure what I expected. Once I imagined this life, or something close to it — a visiting assistant professor in Milwaukee scraping ice off my windshield at 7:30 in the morning, I wondered what the opposite of living alone in the Rust Belt would be. A housewife in Raleigh? I didn’t want that, but was trying to imagine something safe and banal. A daydream I didn’t want. I should have known, given my wonky powers, that my vision would appear, but skewed. Next door to Raleigh, semi-comfortable, semi-provided-for before I left again.
*
“A beautiful woman becomes a ghost,” writes a male poet in a poem I read online. Here is how you test such a sentence: Does her beauty (nationality/ethnicity/social class) really tell us anything about her character? No? Then why is that your adjective there? Here, it’s meant to elicit pathos. She is beautiful. That beauty is missing from the world. How we suffer for its loss.
*
Another story: A beautiful young woman smokes a bunch of pot one night and walks one across a four-lane highway with her little girl to the nearest rundown grocery store. Maybe she’s out of tampons. When the woman and child get to there, they realize why they never come to this store, especially at night. It is white and scuffed and fluorescent inside. Purgatory as a Kubrick movie. They turn down an aisle and see a rat scurrying across the far end. They find the night manager and report the sighting. He looks them up and down. Inside the woman’s beauty is something staunch. An unsettling self-assurance in a poor girl from student housing. Even more unsettling, her little girl has the same quality. Her pigtails are askew. Her clothes are secondhand. But she looks, somehow, knowing. He tells them, no, that couldn’t have happened. They are not there to witness, but to be witnessed.