Difficult Women Read online

  What the stone thrower’s wife loves most is when she strips out of her clothes and disappears into the world unseen. It is a sacred time, those hours between when her work is done and when her child and husband return home. She steals these moments for herself because her life is so transparent that she craves having something private, something precious. She crafts from these moments secrets for herself that she has not shared and will not share with her husband, who sees too much and loves too carefully.

  Most days, the stone thrower’s wife goes to a nearby park with wide-open spaces that cannot contain her. She stretches her long limbs and stares into the sky. She marvels at the clear blue brightness above. She closes her eyes and says a small prayer. Then she runs. She runs because she is intoxicated by the sensation of wind against her bare glass skin. She enjoys the abandon of pushing her glass body and testing its limits and feeling the rough pavement and the cold slick grass beneath her bare glass feet. Her husband loves her but he worries. He wearies. He thinks her delicate. He fears that the slightest thing will splinter her or return her to the grains of sand from which she rose. The stone thrower prefers to keep his wife trapped in the safety of their glass house, where the dangers are not seen but known. She knows that the glass walls of their home cannot protect her. She runs.

  After her afternoons in the park, the stone thrower’s wife finds herself sweaty and pleasantly sore. She walks home slowly, breathing deeply. She revels. Then she takes a cold shower, emerges, wraps herself in a soft cotton robe. When her son comes home, she will pull him into her arms, and listen when he tells her about his hopes, his dreams, his fears. He chatters away and she traces her child’s diaphanous features with her glass fingertips. The contact between their glass bodies produces a melodious keening that makes the boy’s smile wider. The stone thrower’s wife falls ever more in love with her child each day. Though it pains her, she accepts that the boy’s life is both a blessing and a curse. When her heart has had its fill of these precious moments, when she can literally feel the glass veins binding her heart pulsing and threatening to shatter, she sends her child out to play with his friends until dinner. She needs him to be part of the world, to encounter that which is seen but not known.

  The stone thrower’s son knows that he is a curiosity but he does not yet know why. In school, he sits at his desk, his glass frame shrouded by his school uniform. He is quiet but studious. He is kind but strong, like his mother. His is tough and stubborn, like his father. Though some of his classmates tease him, make faces at each other while looking through him, the stone thrower’s son has several friends who no longer concern themselves with that which makes them different, that which they cannot understand. To them, he is a boy who makes them laugh and chases them on the playground and who makes beautiful castles out of sand.

  The stone thrower works hard and plays hard and provides well for his glass family. For eight hours a day, he works in a quarry, bare-chested and sweaty, throwing all manner of stone from the depths of the quarry to waiting trucks above. He is so good at his job that he often attracts an audience. Onlookers hover nearby, admiring the elaborate web of muscles enfolding his upper body, and the way he makes his labor seem so effortless. He does not mind the onlookers. He has become accustomed to living in a glass house.

  When he finally gets home, the stone thrower sits at the kitchen table with his glass wife and their glass child. The family eats a dinner that has been lovingly prepared and the stone thrower tries not to look away from the intimate moments of his wife and son that he cannot share. He helps the boy with his homework, then together, husband and wife put the child to bed. Some nights, they hire a babysitter, leave a careful set of instructions for the care and feeding of a glass child, and then they go out for a drink at a nearby cocktail lounge. His wife dresses in her favorite little black dress, relaxes against her husband’s strong frame, enjoys the pressure of his hand in the small of her back as he steers her to a table where they can see without being seen, hear without being heard.

  On very special occasions, they will don their finery and attend the opera. They’ll sit in a private box above the orchestra, admire the ornate ceilings, the rich texture of the seats upon which they sit. The stone thrower’s wife will lose herself in the music, glass tears cresting her eyelids as she is transported to magical places. The stone thrower will try to enjoy himself, but with every note in every aria, his entire body will tense. He worries that it is a matter of time before a diva with perfect pitch and iron lungs will fill the opera house with a note so flawless that it matches the natural frequency of his wife’s body. He worries that in that moment of resonance, she will start to vibrate, then quake and then her glass body will fracture. He will be left, kneeling above shards of glass holding his wife’s pulsing glass heart in his callused hands. The stone thrower is always quiet when he and his wife leave the opera, humbled by the tenuous nature of a glass wife. She’ll ask him what’s wrong and he’ll look at her tenderly, and he’ll lie, he’ll say everything is just fine.

  The stone thrower, a good yet flawed man given to overindulgence, has a mistress he visits several times a week. She is a woman who is not made of glass. She is all flesh and bone, with a generous, meaty body like his. She is a different kind of mystery.

  What the stone thrower’s wife hates most is when she strips out of her clothes and slips into the world unseen. She knows about the mistress. She watches her husband and the other woman sometimes, sneaking into the mistress’s apartment, padding softly across the thick carpet of the living room. She’ll stand in the doorway and watch as her husband holds the other woman in his large, callused hands, how he will be reckless and rough. Then she will walk home, leaving a trail of glass tears for the stone thrower to follow. The stone thrower doesn’t love his mistress but he needs the moments they share, those moments when he does not have to see too much or love too carefully.

  In the Event of My Father’s Death

  When I was a girl, my father once told me that women weren’t good for much. We were parked at the mountain overlook just outside town. I was in the backseat, staring at my shoes, chewing my fingernails. He was in the front seat, drinking Maker’s Mark from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. He and my mother had just had another heated argument and he had dragged me out of the house as if I would ever choose his side. He said, “Don’t become like your mother. She is a small woman.” My father didn’t love my mother. I don’t even think he loved me but he did love making us miserable by refusing to leave.

  My father’s opinions didn’t keep him from fornicating with any number of women. My mother told me that once, after she found another woman’s earrings on her nightstand. “Tacky costume jewelry,” she said, as if the quality of the earrings angered her more than their presence in her bedroom.

  For years, my father dated a woman named Teresa. She was seven years younger and a waitress at a bar called the Mosquito Inn, which was decorated like an African safari. It didn’t make much sense to anyone because we were in Upper Michigan. Teresa had red hair she always wore in a messy pile on top of her head. She smoked skinny cigarettes and wore low-cut shirts and too much makeup. She called me Steph no matter how many times I corrected her and said, “My name is Stephanie.” She didn’t mind that my father was married and had a kid. She never expected much from him. She was the kind of woman who didn’t expect much from life. They were well suited.

  Every Saturday, my dad told my mom we were going fishing, no matter what the weather was like. I’m not sure if he was being cruel or kind with that lie. We’d leave the house before dawn and the night before, I’d stuff my backpack with books and a notepad and my Walkman, a set of clean underwear. We’d drive the seventeen miles to Teresa’s place. She lived in a trailer on a large plot of land her daddy left her. There was nothing around for miles. I know. I looked. When we pulled up, Teresa would be waiting in the doorway, wearing a silky robe that she let fall open. Underneath, she wore only a pair of lacy panties. My f
ather always grinned when he first saw her, then he ruffled my hair and said, “You can look, my darling dear, but you can’t touch.” I would shrug away from him, and make a face, but I would look because Teresa was beautiful, in the hardened way women like her are.

  As we ducked into her trailer, Teresa would toss me the remote to the small television that sat on the kitchen table and tell me to make myself at home. Then she and my dad would lock themselves in her room for hours. They were neither discreet nor quiet. My dad was a sloppy, vulgar lover, from what I could hear—all heavy breathing and grunting and ass slapping. I vowed to never let a man like him touch me like that. Teresa always giggled, her high-pitched laugh inescapable in that tiny trailer. I sat on the small couch next to the kitchen table and flipped through the three channels Teresa’s television received and tried to read or draw, but mostly I daydreamed about a time when I wouldn’t have to spend my weekends in a shitty trailer watching shitty television listening to my father fuck his mistress.

  Eventually, Teresa and my father would emerge from the bedroom. He never wore a shirt, always letting his pale, saggy stomach hang out like he was proud of it. They would both be all smiles and my father would stretch out next to me on the couch, rubbing his bare belly. Teresa would make us grilled cheese sandwiches or corn dogs and tater tots or some other appropriately white trash meal. Then the three of us would watch more television, sometimes a movie. Around nine, they would turn in for the night and I would lie on the couch, staring out the small window, listening to the laughing and grunting and ass slapping and heavy breathing, hoping my mother was having an affair with the guy from the hardware store or one of the deacons from church. We went home late on Sunday evening and my mother was always waiting with a home-cooked meal. My father handed her flowers we picked up at the grocery store and kissed her on the cheek. She never asked me about our fishing trips or why we never brought any fish home.

  When my father died after driving too fast over an icy bridge, Teresa came to his funeral. My mother, who never had been any good about making a fuss about things that just weren’t right, didn’t say anything. She simply stared forward, her eyes burning a hole in my father’s casket as his mistress sat on the other side of the aisle. My mother sat with her spine ramrod straight. She didn’t shed a single tear. She was going to mourn my father with a dignity he never possessed in life. Teresa, though, was a mess, sobbing openly, blowing her nose into a handkerchief an usher handed her. After the service, my mother stood in front of the church in her neatly pressed lavender suit, greeting the guests, thanking them for attending, ignoring their whispers. Teresa, she stood next to my father, her perfectly manicured hand on his casket, still making a mess of herself with her crying. I guess she loved him. It was nice that someone did.

  I went to visit Teresa the first Saturday after my father died. I was driving then, almost on my way to college. At the crack of dawn, I knocked and waited, shifting from foot to foot. When she opened the door, she was wearing her silk robe, as she always did, and it was open, revealing her body, as lovely as it had always been. Her eyes were red. Once my father died, I don’t know that she ever stopped crying. Silently, Teresa stepped aside and I ducked under her arm and into the trailer. She sat at the tiny kitchen table and lit a cigarette, then offered me one. I nodded, and for a while, we just sat there, legs crossed, looking at each other, smoking her cheap, skinny cigarettes.

  “He loved spending Saturdays with you,” she finally said.

  I shook my head. “He loved spending Saturdays with you.”

  Teresa smiled sadly. “It’s not that simple.”

  I shrugged, slid lower in my seat, lit another cigarette.

  She slid her hand across the table, dragging her fingers across my knuckles. I looked at Teresa, saw how hard living had taken up residence in her features. I squeezed her hand gently. I wanted her to feel something soft. She stood, let her silk robe fall to the floor, and started walking to her bedroom. Then she turned to look at me over her shoulder and I stood.

  Break All the Way Down

  The mother of my boyfriend’s youngest child called in the middle of the night. My boyfriend was asleep, the heat from his body wrapping around us. I stared at the dark shadows of the ceiling fan lazily spinning above us. He sleeps soundly despite many reasons he should not.

  “I’m at the front door,” she said. Her voice was tight and thin.

  I tried to shake my boyfriend awake but he merely shifted, stretching his leg across my side of the bed. He snored lightly. I sighed.

  Anna Lisa, the mother of my boyfriend’s youngest child, handed me her daughter, still in her carrier, as well as a large duffel bag. She nodded toward the bag. “The baby’s things.” I looked at the baby, neither cute nor ugly, a blob of indeterminate features. We stood quietly, listened to moths and other insects flying into the bright, buzzing lamp covering us in its light. My shoulders ached. The air was damp and heavy. Anna Lisa is beautiful but she looked tired. She wore a loose pair of sweatpants with fading block letters down the left leg. Her T-shirt was stained. Her breasts were swollen. I could see that. Her hair hung limply in her face. She smelled ripe. There were dark circles beneath her eyes. I don’t know that we looked different.

  I invited her in, offered to give her a bath. I wanted to help her undress, pulling her shirt over her head. I wanted to run a bath of hot water, to wash her body and scrub her back and her thighs, the still loose skin of her stomach, to wash her clean.

  “I cannot take care of my child anymore.”

  I looked at the baby again. The baby stared back, yawned, and blinked tiredly. “You want to leave your baby with him?”

  Anna Lisa shook her head. “I’m leaving my baby with you.”

  My husband hates my new boyfriend. I do, too. He is the kind of person everyone hates. My husband is the man I love. He likes his eggs scrambled soft with freshly ground paper, sea salt. I woke up early every morning to make him breakfast, enjoyed the rhythm of it, enjoyed feeling useful in that way. My husband calls me daily, says, “Why are you punishing yourself?” He says, “Come home.”

  My boyfriend isn’t really my boyfriend; he and I aren’t quite living together. We came to a silent agreement where more often than not, I am around. My things are still at my house—four bedrooms, three baths—with my husband. I visit my things, my husband, often. I run my fingers over the modern statue near the front entrance, the dimple in my husband’s chin, the thick, ropy muscles of his shoulders, the mahogany mantel over the fireplace. I belong with these things, they are mine, so I do not stay long.

  A mosquito bit my cheek and I winced. I pressed my hand to my stomach, ignored the thin roll of scar, how it pulsed against my palm. The baby whimpered so I set the duffel bag just inside the foyer and picked her up out of her carrier, held her against my shoulder. She smelled sweet and powdery and settled as I patted her back, soft, steady. I said there, there baby love. Anna Lisa covered my hand with hers as I comforted her child. Anna Lisa’s hand was sweaty.

  She did not look at the baby as she walked away.

  I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open.

  In the morning, my boyfriend kicked my foot with his heavy work boot. “What the fuck is this?” I sat up quickly, holding a finger to my lips. I stood and pulled him into the bedroom. “Anna Lisa brought the baby last night. She can’t take care of her anymore.”

  My boyfriend shook his head and reached for his phone, quickly dialing his ex. “This is bullshit,” he muttered. When Anna Lisa didn’t answer, he threw his phone against the wall. “What the hell am I supposed to do with a baby?”

  “Keep it alive.”

  He shook his head and brushed past me. “I have to go to work. You deal with this.”

  I have read many baby books. After my boyfriend left, I filled the kitchen sink with warm wat
er and soap and washed the baby, gave her a fresh diaper, and chose the cutest outfit. I prepared a bottle and fed the baby and she fell back asleep. I did a quick inventory—a stack of neatly folded onesies, seven outfits, a stuffed animal, three bottles and a ziplock bag filled with nipples, two cans of formula, a half-filled package of baby wipes, six diapers, and a notebook filled with detailed instructions about the baby’s personality, likes and dislikes, daily schedule, what the baby’s different sounds mean, the kind of accounting made possible only by the reach of a mother’s love. We needed to go shopping but first I needed to share this development with my husband. Once or twice a week, he works from home. I found him in his office, bare-chested, wearing a pair of flannel pajama pants. He smiled when he saw me and I wanted to crawl inside him.

  When he noticed me carrying a baby, he stood, frowning. “Why are you holding a baby?”

  “A woman gave it to me.”

  My husband peered into the carrier. “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  A lot of people decided I went crazy after the accident. They kept waiting for me to strip naked in a shopping mall or eat a cat or something. When I took up with an asshole, they breathed a sigh of relief. “Your situation is still fixable,” my mother said when I was still taking her calls.

  I am not crazy.

  My husband, Ben, crouched down and tapped the baby on her nose. She smiled and he did it again. He looked up. “You didn’t, like, steal this baby, did you?”

  I shook my head. “It’s his baby. His ex dropped her off last night. She said she was leaving the baby for me.”