American Housewife: Stories

by Helen Ellis

  I refuse.

  She says, “One of us is going to get him. You might as well let me be nice to you.” She unwinds the foil string, pops the orange in her mouth, and offers me the cherry.

  I take it. And of course it tastes good. Red is always the best flavor. It takes the bitterness out of my mouth.

  The Fitter calls, “What’s the holdup?”

  When we don’t answer, I hear the bedsprings squeak. The Fitter walks toward the bathroom door. He knocks. He’s never knocked.

  He asks, “Is everything okay in there?”

  And then to Myrtle: “Is she okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I answer.

  But I know I’m not fine. The sicker I get, the more business booms.

  I reach out and let Myrtle help me to my feet. I take the last bra—the pink princess bra—from the towel rack. Myrtle takes off the balcony. Her breasts droop. They look sad. The pink princess bra is happy. I hold it out for her to slip her arms through, but Myrtle doesn’t budge. She stares at the appliqué tulips on the straps.

  She admits, “I can’t afford it.”

  “You could charge it.”

  “Barbara won’t let me have any debt.”

  Myrtle pulls her not-so-sporty sports bra over her head. She gathers herself. Her tamped-down nipples look like googly eyes.

  I say, “You’ll keep your mom from gossiping? You’ll keep the other women in line?”

  Myrtle nods.

  “You’ll be nice?”

  She picks up my washcloth. She folds it and places it on the edge of the sink. She puts the balcony and the basic back on their hangers. She spreads the kimono so that its cranes look like they will fly off the peg.

  None of this is done as I would do it, but I wave my hand: Good enough.

  I slip the pink bra into her purse.

  HOW TO BE A

  GROWN-ASS LADY

  Compliment everyone. Take a compliment. Wear sunscreen on your face and hands even when it’s cloudy. Dye your gray hair black, brown, or blond. Run the dishwasher half full. Have company over and serve what you want to eat. When a guest says your meat loaf looks like a football, don’t tell the woman that her husband is obviously gay.

  Don’t bite your cuticles. Get rid of a wart before there’s a cluster. Don’t sit on a toilet in front of anyone, ever. If your husband wants a bigger TV, for heaven’s sake let him have it.

  Go to the mall for your Clinique bonus gift. Buy three pieces of clothing twice a year at full price. Get refitted for bras on your birthday. Replace your tights every winter. Forget thongs. If your white shirt has sweat stains, throw it away. Tip 20 percent on the whole bill including alcohol and tax. When St. Jude’s mails you personalized address labels and asks for a forty-five-dollar donation, write them a check.

  Get your Pap smears and mammograms. Get your teeth cleaned. Join a book club. Join two. Never put your phone on a restaurant table. Don’t tell your friends with kids that if they die, you’ll take care of their kids.

  If you don’t like something someone says, say: “That’s interesting.”

  If you like something someone says, say: “That’s interesting!”

  Don’t brag about not going to church. Don’t complain about your interior designer. Give flight attendants your full attention during their in-case-of-emergency takeoff routines. Talk to cabdrivers. Engage strangers while waiting in line.

  Don’t reprimand people who call you sweetheart.

  Don’t reprimand people who call you ma’am.

  Accept it: you’re too old to drink more than one drink and sleep through the night. Face it: you’re never going to get carded again, so quit asking bouncers if they want to see your ID. Quit going places where they have bouncers.

  Call friends you haven’t spoken to since high school and tell them about your weird dream that they were in. Don’t chastise your husband because he dream-cheated on you. When your husband is in the bathroom, don’t knock on or talk to him through the closed bathroom door. When a young person doesn’t get your reference, don’t repeat, “Kiss my grits!” with the hope that they will.

  Call people under thirty kids.

  Call people over sixty young.

  Listen to gangsta rap in the privacy of your own headphones. Listen to erotic audiobooks when you scrub the bathroom floor. Worry about cancer. Google menopause. Challenge insurance claims. Ask your friend who’s a shrink if you should see a shrink. Don’t look at your profile because it’s not the mirror or the lighting or the time of day, it’s you.

  HOW TO BE A PATRON

  OF THE ARTS

  Step 1: Take your husband’s money.

  He will offer it to you six years after your first novel is published. You refused to marry him until that first novel sold. Then you spent those six years writing a second novel while you held on to your secretarial job so you wouldn’t get a big head about your literary success or lose yourself in marriage. Your literary success was three reprints and a spot in Vogue’s “What People Are Talking About.” Marriage is a soft place full of three-thousand-dollar couches and twenty-eight-dollar bottles of wine.

  You write on weekends because you work in an office fifty hours a week because you need something to fall back on and you don’t want to fall back on your husband. So you take dictation, make appointments; you juggle phone lines, you open mail. You point to signature lines while your book advance dwindles. If you don’t finish your word-count quota, you don’t go out with friends. And you never go on vacation, and you haven’t had kids. You’ll do all that once your second novel is published. But it hasn’t been published because you haven’t gotten it right.

  “Writing is rewriting,” you tell your husband.

  He says, “I can’t stand to see you like this.”

  You are hunched over your desk and wearing your pajamas. The cats bat at your drawstrings. You sneeze and powdered sugar from a doughnut comes out your nose. You haven’t had sex since forever because your failings are armor. Cross your legs and you clink.

  Your husband says, “Let me support you and you can just write.”

  When he opens the blinds to let in the afternoon light, cover your face and nod. Cry because it hurts.

  Step 2: Lose yourself in marriage.

  Quit your secretarial job and realize how much easier it is to take care of only one man, especially when that one man, your husband, has a secretary of his own. Be grateful for this gift of uninterrupted writing time and show your husband how grateful you are.

  Clean the apartment like you’ve never cleaned an apartment. Buy a bristled wand that gets the dust out of the radiator. Buy a fuzzy claw on a stick to get at the molding. Buy a toothbrush that’s not a toothbrush that gets grime out from around the oven dials. Repaint the place. Bright colors—Hanna-Barbera Yellow! Breakfast at Tiffany’s Blue! Not Your Grandmother’s Coral!—so that your apartment looks like a slice of Key West on the Upper East Side. Buy a new three-thousand-dollar couch because the cats turned the old one into a scratching post. Have people over. For dinner. For Oscar night. For board games. To play poker. Entertain. Cater everything all by yourself.

  Say thank you when friends say, “You should be a party planner!”

  Make love to your husband when he says, “Wasn’t tonight fun?”

  Make love to your husband sometimes two times a week. Remember what a good kisser he is. Touch places and perform acts that he wouldn’t want you to write that you touched and performed. Enjoy the embarrassment. Learn that life’s more fun when you’re loose.

  Step 3: Make your own mantra.

  Take Pilates. Take hot yoga. Take restorative yoga where you wrap your arms and legs around a bolster like a treed koala bear for forty minutes. Walk around the Reservoir. Walk past crusties and chuggers and upskirters and stale MILFs. Plow through herds of private-school track team girls like a chafe-resistant crop-panted Lululemon-wearing Moses.

  For as long as you can remember, writing has been your religion. So, play God. Think
up a new and improved list of writing commandments:

  Thou shalt not put your writing before your health.

  Thou shalt not compare your writing schedule to Stephen King’s.

  Thou shalt not curse those published in Tin House.

  Thou shalt remember that you published one novel and that is more than most people do.

  Thou shalt write a monthly check to Sallie Mae to pay off your student loan and not make a fuss about it.

  Thou shalt kill your darlings.

  Thou shalt not beat yourself up for not writing any darlings.

  Thou shalt not plagiarize just to get the ball rolling.

  Thou shalt not lie that you are “working on something.”

  Thou shalt not envy those who really are.

  Step 4: Support the literary community.

  When you come upon the independent bookstore, stand back and marvel. Touch a lamppost to steady your balance. It’s like you’ve found a unicorn grazing next to the dry cleaner that a friend told you could get cat barf out of cashmere. Inside, the woman behind the counter wears glasses, two pairs at once. She’s a regular six-eyes. She’s in a caftan. Or is that a muumuu? Whichever, the bell sleeves could ring in the New Year.

  “Can I help you?” she asks.

  “Just looking,” you say.

  Half a dozen stuffed ravens circle you from the tops of bookshelves. Their marble eyeballs are cloudy. You reach into your purse and finger your Wet Wipes. A clock strikes noon and an automated voice squawks, “The butler did it! The butler did it!”

  You ask, “What does the clock say at one?”

  She says, “It’s always the butler. You’re in a mystery bookstore. The joke never gets old.”

  You don’t read mysteries, but this lady and her talking clock and her dead birds make you want to give it a whirl. You ask, “What would you suggest?”

  She asks, “Do you have any hobbies?”

  You don’t want to say writing, so you say, “Poker.”

  She says, “Try the Short Stacked series.” She motions to a display table piled with mass-market paperbacks. She says, “It’s about a woman poker player who’s four foot nine, flat-chested, and broke. She travels the tournament circuit and has all kinds of weird poker player friends. The first one takes place at the Aviation Club in Paris. A dealer goes missing, so it’s called Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?”

  Buy the book at full price so the writer gets her full royalty of fifty-nine cents and the independent bookstore gets a cut that will help it stay afloat in a choppy sea of pirated e-books. Carry your paperback proudly like a public radio tote bag. Show it off on the subway and in line for bank tellers. Read the mystery book. Guess who did it and be delighted when you’re wrong. Go back to the store and buy the next one in the series. Read and repeat until you’ve read all ten Short Stacked books, ending with Dead Donkeys Don’t Rabbit Hunt. Rejoice in this new world outside the masterpiece opus that you’ve been struggling to write.

  Attend Malice Domestic, a conference for mysteries in which mostly female protagonists have pet cats that never die and an eye for clues that police don’t pick up on. Share a hotel room with your new friend, the independent bookstore lady, whose name is Joyce. Meet writers and readers who, just like Joyce, have draped their postmenopausal torsos with colorful sheathes and heaped chunky necklaces up their throats like Fisher-Price ring tosses. Share online clothes catalog links. Share pictures of your cats. This one looks like they’re reading the newspaper. Meet the Short Stacked novelist, who dresses her twenty-pound calico like different literary detectives and photographs him for her annual fan calendar. For 2016, with the help of a granny wig and a disbelieving glower, Miss Marple is July.

  Volunteer to host a fund-raiser to save Joyce’s struggling independent bookstore. Ask mystery writers you met at Malice Domestic to donate works of art to be sold. The Short Stacked author donates a calico portrait of Jack Reacher sitting in a bathroom sink. Joyce parts with one of her ravens, which it turns out she had stuffed by her former attorney-turned-taxidermist, who runs her business out of a Classic Six on Fifth and Sixty-Third.

  Amass fifty pieces. Hang them on your apartment walls. Place the raven on your writing desk that you’ll use for writing once this fund-raiser is over. Make a price sheet and overcharge. Invite poker players from your weekly game. Invite alumni from your graduate creative writing program who now have kids, teaching gigs, two novels published, or all of the above. Invite Joyce to invite her best customers. Invite author art donors to invite a plus one. Serve Poirot Punch—a mixture of strawberry Kool-Aid and Prosecco—to get everyone drunk. Serve pigs-in-blankets you’ve crafted to look like severed fingers to make everyone thirsty so that they drink more. When somebody buys something, mark the wall beside it with a red sticker dot. Red sticker dots make people crazy. They’re contagious and everybody wants one and wants one right now.

  “It’s bedlam!” cries a gentleman in orange corduroys.

  There is a buying frenzy and your walls get the measles.

  Say thank you when friends say, “You should open an art gallery!”

  Make love to your husband after he buys the one piece that wasn’t bought, Joyce’s raven.

  Step 5: Become a gay man’s arm candy.

  When Clive Lee phones to ask you to lunch, say yes. Clive Lee is the gentleman who wore the orange cords and bought the cat in the sink picture for two thousand dollars. He is also an editor at Berkley Prime Crime.

  Meet him at Michael’s, a warhorse of literary lunch spots where your Scribner editor met you six years ago to celebrate, but never took you again because you never came through with book number two. Cradle a dirty vodka martini and pick at a Cobb salad and gobble up Clive Lee’s gossip about every publishing hotshot and MacArthur genius that walks through the door.

  Wish you were a MacArthur genius.

  Clive Lee asks, “Why, so you can spend the rest of your miserable born days trying to live up to your potential?”

  Shrug. Mash an avocado cube with your fork.

  Clive Lee says, “Madam, you are a lady of the house. You are a woman of leisure. That is all anyone in their right mind wants to be.”

  Go to lunch with Clive Lee once a week. Go to book parties with him. Go to book award banquets with him. Go to the opera and Encores! and Carnegie Hall. Attend Broadway and Off-Broadway and black box performances with foldout chairs in the depths of downtown. Start applause. Rattle your jewelry. Rejoice in your discovery that gay men love middle-aged women with no kids, cash, and time on their hands. Every time you sit down to write, accept an invitation for something more fabulous to do.

  Teach eight of Clive Lee’s friends to play poker on Sunday nights in the orchestra pit of The Book of Mormon. Bank $3K monthly off a violinist who, despite your teachings, always pushes all-in with the second-best hand.

  Say thank you when Clive Lee says, “You should be a professional poker player!”

  Make love to your husband when he says, “It’s your money. Do whatever you want with it.”

  Step 6: Buy art.

  Go to the Affordable Art Fair, Scope, Red Dot, Volta, and Pulse, where artists are “emerging.” “Emerging” in Manhattan means less than ten grand. Buy a Doe. Buy a Ball. Buy Emilie Clark and Frohawk Two Feathers. Buy an ape head made of tinfoil. Buy a slide projector that projects the word “SUCKAH” on your bedroom wall. Think better of this placement and move the projector to your kitchen. Link your arm with Joyce’s and visit School of Visual Arts students’ work spaces in abandoned can factories and naval yards located twelve blocks from any subway stop in Brooklyn. Get to know Dumbo. Brave Bushwick. Buy a photo of a Cracker Barrel robber with a pantie on his head. Commission a photo of your medicine cabinet that Clive Lee tells you is the Warhol screen print of today. Trust your own taste and commission the tinfoil artist to craft sculptures of your cats.

  Place the tinfoil cats next to Joyce’s raven on your writing desk. Remove your laptop because it interrupts
the visual flow. Plug it in on the kitchen counter and use it to Pinterest recipes for a dinner party in the tinfoil artist’s honor. Beam with pride when Clive Lee and three other guests ask for seconds and buy tinfoil ape heads for their art collections.

  Accept the tinfoil artist’s extra-long handsy hug.

  Say thank you when the tinfoil artist says, “You should be a nude model!”

  Make love to your husband when he says, “Over my dead body.”

  Step 7: Become a muse.

  Let the tinfoil artist sculpt your head and chest from the cleavage up. This is his first foray into the human form and it earns him an exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery, and nine versions of your tinfoil self sell out in twenty minutes. His art student friends get the shakes from the red sticker dots. They’re all starving and look even hungrier in their hand-painted high-tops. They are sprite-like and travel in a clump. They come at you like your cats do when you unwrap deli meat. Their energy is frenetic. Bend down and say hello.

  When asked what you do, say, “I’m just a fan.”

  When pressed, try: “I’m a housewife.”

  When pressed further (as in: yes, but what did you do before you got married?), admit that you published one book. “It was a novel.” Talk about it in the past tense as if it’s a dead child. Don’t lie. Obey your commandments. Say, “I’m not working on anything now.” Don’t lie. Say, “I’m into helping young artists.”

  A videographer asks, “Would you help me?”

  “And me?” asks a young lady whose handmade hat looks like an anatomically correct heart.

  Say, “Sure.”

  Wear the heart girl’s kidney fascinator to the Met Costume Ball. When asked, give the hat and the girl’s information to Anna Wintour. Be okay with the fact that now Vogue is talking about the organ hat artist. Show how okay you are by placing her issue on the top of your coffee table’s fanned array of magazines.