Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting

  “I’m not used to company,” he said.

  The pills were beginning to wane. My nerves wanted sunglasses. I felt cranky and exposed, like when the lights come on too soon after a movie. “You don’t have any furniture?” I asked. Finally I climbed on top of one of the huge freezers and sat down. My legs dangled down off the side of it like a child’s. He took a sip from his glass and began crunching one of the ice cubes. I noticed he had very large teeth; they were broad and flat like white rocks. Had it not been for the humming sounds of the freezers, his chewing noises would’ve caused my headache to scream.

  “No,” he replied, “I just have a bed.”

  “How convenient.” I swallowed a mini ice cube whole, like it was a pill. I’ve found that eating food as though it is medication sometimes helps me feel better. I haven’t chewed a grape in half a decade.

  “It’s the truth,” he replied. I hopped off of the freezer and went on a self-guided tour of his apartment. It was true; it was the truth.

  * * *

  The next morning I woke later than intended—the cannibal keeps his apartment very cold. Our sex the previous night had been truly nonverbal, and I think he expected me to leave without making future plans. “Can you get dinner Thursday, maybe?” I asked. After a few minutes he came out from the kitchen with another glass of small ice cubes. His crunches seemed like a substitution for language. “It will be fun,” I insisted; “I want to see you again.” Finally, through a series of subtle nods, he agreed to meet me at a steakhouse. This was a concession on my part; I’m vegetarian. But I figured he would like it—there was a real steakiness about him. His skin was nearly the color of raw meat and his teeth were so wide. Much of his life seemed to revolve around those teeth. For example, he was crazy about oral hygiene. His bathroom countertop held a rainbow of different mouthwashes. The waste in his kitchen trash can was just gum and mint wrappers padded by yards of spent floss.

  As I walked into work I waved at my one direct colleague and apologized for being late. She’s a dresser, meaning she selects outfits to place on the mannequins I assemble. Her nose crimpled and then her face went sour. “What’s with you?” I asked. Mornings when I first come in there are strewn boxes everywhere labeled by body part: boxes of left arms, boxes of long, thin right legs. I have to assemble around seven fake people by lunchtime.

  “You smell like old mushrooms,” she said.

  I shrugged; all I could taste were the mints I’d stolen from the cannibal’s house. They were the red and white kind that reminds me of Christmas. I began building a woman from the legs up and halfway through my coworker stood next to me and sighed. “Are these even skinnier than usual?” she asked. “Soon they will be two-dimensional.” I held out my arm and noticed the mannequin’s thigh was the same size.

  “I’m jealous of them,” I said.

  “They have no room for organs,” she countered, but it was their lives I was jealous of—living inside a window, admired all day long. In my quest to accept that I will, at some point, die, I’ve noticed that a lot of people use admiration to cope with mortality. Their thought process is that if they work hard and become good at something, or famous, or even if they just live a respectable life, then they’ll receive admiration from others and this will soften the ultimate blow. No one has ever admired me. Though if I spent all day inside a window getting complimented, maybe I wouldn’t feel so nervous or so sad. Maybe I wouldn’t steal as many pills from my terminally ill grandmother.

  * * *

  Our dinner was awkward. I ordered only sides and the cannibal ordered nothing at all except more water and more ice cubes. Finally the waiter began to mumble something about a minimum so I added a bottle of red wine as our main course. “I hope you’re thirsty,” noted the cannibal. Turns out he doesn’t drink.

  Halfway through my meal, I began to badger him. Wasn’t he hungry? Why didn’t he suggest another place if he didn’t like steak?

  He asked why I didn’t suggest another place if I was vegetarian. “I thought you would like it,” I told him. “You seem like a carnivore.” Without meaning to I began drinking from the wine bottle. He wiped my mouth with a cloth napkin.

  “Why are you a vegetarian?”

  Normally, I avoid bringing up colon cancer on dinner dates. But he asked. “My grandmother is about to die. She may have actually died this very second. She should be at a hospice, but she refuses to go.”

  His face twitched a little. It was only for a second, but I caught it. His face is normally a smooth, smooth song whose lyrics do not change, so when the record skips it is very obvious. Something had transformed within his features; the shadows cast by his nose and eyelashes now fell in different places. “I can never eat in front of you,” he told me. “I don’t eat regular things.”

  I guess I laughed. I reached into my purse and dropped another pill.

  “How many of those do you take a day?”

  “Not your concern. What do you eat?”

  “Not your concern.” He took in an ice cube, then said, “People.”

  I can’t say exactly how, but I knew he wasn’t joking. Working with mannequins, I see caricatures of expressions all day. It makes me sensitive to the movements of real people’s faces. I can look into a crowd and notice the ground zero for Model #2342B’s smirk, or the pensive mien that inspired the vacancy behind Model #2172–00’s eyes. And at that moment I saw that he was doing an exaggerated impression of a regular man having dinner in a restaurant. I laughed my best wine laugh and tried to act amused, but I couldn’t fake it. There was a shift in earnestness and then I could not lose his eyes; he stared at me until I looked at him straight on with an admission that I’d understood.

  Instead of feeling afraid I felt excited, like we were spies. He had just confessed a beastly secret inside a packed restaurant, and no one watching us had any idea.

  On the walk home the wine began to slosh around behind my eyes like a red ocean. “I might be sick,” I mentioned. We stopped in an alley and I waited for an overweight raccoon to begrudgingly saunter away before I retched.

  “That creature. He seems used to avoiding the vomit of the intoxicated.” In the cannibal’s deep voice, this observation sounded profound.

  When we were back walking at our regular cadence, I apologized. “I didn’t mean to be disenchanting. Or do things like that not bother you?” I asked. “Are cannibals immune to gross?”

  “Not immune at all,” he said. He sounded disappointed. The rest of the walk was quiet.

  Because I was unwell, he tucked me into bed in my apartment and then announced he was leaving. I grabbed his wrist and noticed how white his teeth flashed in the dark. When he opened his mouth it was like someone had turned on a small lamp. “Should I be scared? Of you?” I didn’t mean to be rude; this slipped out on the tail end of a hiccup.

  His hand found my own and unclasped my fingers from his wrist like they were a watch. “Are you afraid of dying?” He asked this as he started toward the door—it was a question he meant to leave with me. This reminded me of high school and the way my English teacher would always ask something very thematic and complicated just as the bell rang and his words seemed to hang in the air like a fog. I rolled over onto my pillow before sitting back up and shouting after him.

  “Isn’t everyone afraid?”

  And this was the first and only time I heard him laugh. It was more a knowing laugh than an amused one, but its shape could be mistaken as humor. “No,” he said. “There are many, many people who are not afraid at all.”

  * * *

  We started having about two dates a week. I would have liked to see him more frequently, but this was all I got. He wasn’t very forthright about the details of his schedule. Occasionally I’d ask about his plans for one of our nights apart, and he would look at me and raise an eyebrow.

  Then one Wednesday he surprised me at work. Wednesday is one of the days I go to visit Grandma. “You’ll have to come along,” I apologized. “Just stay n
ear the door. She won’t even notice you. She probably won’t even notice me.”

  It was the usual—I brought up her mail, entered, gave her a big kiss hello, went through her bills, wrote checks for them and stamped their envelopes. I opened the refrigerator and made sure she had enough pudding to get her through the week. Then I found my favorite bottle of her pills and put fourteen of them into my purse.

  Before leaving I always grab her hand and try to direct my words past her face and skin, directly through her skull to her brain. “Goodbye, Grandma.” Her glassy eyes twittered a bit. I wondered if she thought my voice was coming from the television. I hugged her and walked quickly back to the cannibal at the doorway. “Let’s roll,” I said.

  “Are you going to introduce me?” he asked. I shook my head.

  “There’s no point.”

  The moment we hit the stairs I reached into my purse, grabbed two pills, and swallowed them: immediately, before they even had the chance to start working, I felt giddy. He was walking in front of me, taking each stair with a mathematical evenness, and the opportunity to throw him off-kilter was tempting. I jumped onto his back and wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed his hair, which was short but also seemed like it had never been cut; it is naturally jagged. He reached up to his shoulders and placed his arms on mine and we went down the stairs like that. I held his strong neck and he carried me all the way to the subway, where I sat on his lap. By then the pill was working and I relaxed into his body. At our stop I made him pick me up like we’d just been married, which he did not like. But he let me hold his hand as we walked up the stairs of the subway, and then of the apartment building. I’d become used to the smell of his apartment, to the way even his water had that taste about it, a primal flavor. It was like drinking the cleanest dirt on the planet.

  That night I woke up and couldn’t sleep. I used the bathroom but still felt restless. The hum of the freezers seemed like an invitation. I walked out into the living room and stared at them. In the dark they seemed like large white animals asleep against the walls. The one in the back left caught my eye and I went over to explore. Soon I realized what one half of my brain wanted to show to the other: the padlock was missing.

  I placed my fingertips below the seal of the freezer’s lip and tried to quietly lift its lid. It was more difficult than I thought—the seal seemed to be clenching itself shut. I reasoned with it, lied; “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I’m not the one who normally opens you, but I have his permission.”

  Once it came free it was like I had uncovered a secret universe. Blue light flooded out into the room and the cold mist inside the freezer greeted me with a mysterious form of smoke. The lid instantly seemed to want to close; I felt a downward pressure that I fought against. My panic grew as I found I could not fight it back; I wasn’t strong enough. It took me a moment to realize that this was due to the cannibal. He was standing right next to me, pushing down upon the lid.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  In my surprise I backed away from the freezer. The lid snapped shut and he immediately padlocked it. I felt a vague anger swell in my chest, upset that he had denied me. “Why can’t I see?” I asked. “If it would frighten me away, do you think I’d even be here?”

  His pajamas were completely white. In the dark he was simply a body with floating teeth.

  “Let’s go back to bed.”

  “No. Let’s not.” I felt my chest thumping and my head whining. “I’m here and I’m sleeping with you. I might love you,” I said. “It isn’t fair for you to have so many secrets.”

  “Seeing inside that freezer is very different from thinking about seeing inside.”

  “It won’t be once you let me look.”

  At this point he switched on the light, but a shadow remained over his face.

  “And then what? You look inside and see and then what?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I’ve been letting us pretend I’m something else.”

  “So we stop pretending,” I said.

  He shut the lamp back off and walked back to the bedroom, and I followed.

  Following him wherever he went, I reminded myself, got me into this mess, but I lay down and our bodies found each other and in the morning when I woke up he was already awake and staring at me.

  * * *

  The next night, he did not call. When I finally broke down and phoned him two days later, his number had been disconnected. I went to his apartment and banged and banged and waited, but there was no answer.

  At work, the mannequin limbs suddenly seemed unfairly heavy. I kept thinking of him off somewhere in the city, handling real body parts. My assemblage time dropped and I got behind on my quota. My coworker kept running in yelling, “I needed a body for this outfit five minutes ago!”

  “I’ll wear the outfit,” I pleaded. “Let me pose and stand in the window.” She laughed and came over to help me; we struggled to push a left arm into a left arm socket. Working together we managed to finish; I promised her I’d be better tomorrow.

  That Wednesday I stopped by the supermarket and got more pudding, then went to the pharmacy to pick up Grandma’s refills. I would need extra help, I knew, to get me through the week, possibly even through the month and the year.

  Maybe I would sit with her and eat some pudding and take more pills and not call or show up at work tomorrow. If I got fired I could just begin sitting with Grandma all day and night. Maybe, I reasoned, the two of us had enough grief in common to live side by side.

  When I opened her door, I had to step back and look at the apartment number to make sure the key had unlocked the right place. The lights were off and so was the television. Flipping on the light switch, I walked into an empty living room. She was not in her chair. On the seat there was a bottle of pills and a note written in sprawling cannibal handwriting: PLEASE POUR THESE DOWN THE SINK AND LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. GO BEGIN LIVING YOUR LIFE.

  I sat down in the chair, which still had the strange odor of her sick body. The onrushing guilt of leading him to her was growing as a sticky heat in the back of my ribs. I took two more of her pills to stave it off, turned on the television. I waited for tears but felt only tranquil fatigue, a fuzziness that was massaged by the bright images of a popular cartoon. I wanted to go take something from him in return—to break into his apartment, if he even still lived there, unplug all his freezers and let their contents spoil.

  It was only hours later, when the night grew dim, that I noticed his face entering the periphery of my vision. His teeth were aglow in the dark with a similar electricity as the television screen. With the TV at my feet and his vibrant teeth at my head, I found myself bookended by light. And what an insufferable anguish, to be surrounded with brightness but radiate nothing at all.

  Teenager

  I am sixteen years old and I cannot have Luke Gunter’s baby. I have seen my older cousin’s deflated football breasts. They have weird marks and lines that make them look like optical illusions, like how pencils placed into glasses of water appear broken.

  Pregnancy ruined her whole body. She will tell this to anyone. She had just one kid and now her whole backside looks like a Salvador Dalí painting.

  Vaginal elasticity is a secondary concern. I do not want to suffer the fate of many a cute sweater, suddenly stretched too large for proper wear. I want to keep my vag as tight a squeeze as the glove in the infamous O. J. Simpson trial.

  I have a lot on my mind even before Kristi removes her left shoe.

  You’re missing half a toe?

  Kristi is a risk-taker. She explains that one night she and her former boyfriend (his real name is something like Brian but he goes by DJ Sex, even though he’s not a DJ) each made a pact to cut off a piece. Kristi, of course, went first. DJ Sex has a small machete collection thanks to the Citrus Park Flea Market, and after icing down her pinky toe she hooked it over a wooden stool. The real pain apparently came in the hours that followed. The actual moment of separation wa
s only a pinch, like the guns they use to pierce your ears in the mall.

  DJ Sex chickened out, but that isn’t why she dumped him. “He started working at the gag-gift store next to Cookie Time. It was just too weird to hang out there. Every time I’d go in he and his coworkers were playing with a giant glow-in-the-dark body condom, all stoned and giggling. He seemed so seventh grade all of a sudden.”

  We are painting our nails. Kristi’s bedspread is a cowhide rug that she’s very protective of; she keeps making little “tsk” noises at me when my foot gets too close to the edge of the towel.

  “I beat you,” she says. With only nine toenails Kristi has an unfair advantage. “It’s sort of why I never wear flip-flops. I mean I care what people think but I don’t.”

  This is true. When Kristi was fourteen she got pregnant (pre–DJ Sex) and paid Laura Fitch’s older brother Steve forty dollars to drive her to Orlando for an abortion, even though she knew he’d tell everyone.

  I started hanging out with Kristi a few months later, when she got an iguana, but recently our friendship has taken an intimate and critical turn since I, too, am with fetus. “Think of it as fat and you’re going to get lipo,” she says.

  I’m not going to just stop in at the first clinic I pass. I want to go to the Blooming Rose.

  Procedures there are costly. It’s not one of those clinics whose cement-block walls are covered with STD info posters (one such poster at our school gives each STD an illustrated, anthropomorphized version of what that STD might look like, were it a grumpy cartoon character. Chlamydia looks like an electrocuted gumdrop).

  The Blooming Rose has Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.

  Though if I put it on my credit card, my parents might see the billing statement and get involved. Unfortunately I didn’t get knocked up by Kristi’s now-boyfriend, Chet, or another student with an American Express. I’m feeling the realized danger of sleeping with scholarship recipients like Luke, even though he’s totally hot and athletic, and he did get five hundred dollars for being a semifinalist when I sent his photo in to the Teen! Teen! Magazine! secondary school Campus Crawl contest. But that money is gone. I made him buy me a purse.