Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting

  When I get home, I decide the best thing to do is borrow Grandma’s credit card. She moved in with us after Grandpa died, five months before her tracheotomy. She was a model in her twenties, but she smoked like crazy and no part of her is beautiful anymore.

  “Gammy, can I see your wallet a second? In Driver’s Ed today they were talking about the different kinds of licenses, and how if you can’t drive, they just give you an ID card. I was thinking that must be what you have. You know how you can’t drive because of all the pills you take? How you hit that mail truck and they said no more wheels?” She sits up and tries unsuccessfully to straighten her wig. “Remember how you called the arresting officer a pauper in court?”

  She reaches for her microphone wand. The sound used to bother me a lot, but now when she talks I just think of it as a sample in a rap song and it isn’t as weird. Kristi and I told Gammy to say the word “homie” once and she did. It was hilarious.

  “M-y w-a-l-l-e-t? S-h-o-o-t. M-y p-u-r-s-e i-s a-r-o-u-n-d h-e-r-e s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e. D-a-m-n a-l-l t-h-e-s-e K-l-e-e-n-e-x w-a-d-s. Y-o-u-r m-a-i-d t-h-i-n-k-s s-h-e-s t-o-o g-o-o-d t-o p-i-c-k t-h-e-m u-p. T-e-l-l y-o-u-r f-a-t-h-e-r t-h-a-t.”

  When I see her purse, I find the card and write down its numbers. She’s doing something to her lapdog that seems like a tumor search, carefully rubbing little spots on his stomach.

  “C-a-n y-o-u c-h-a-n-g-e m-y s-o-c-k-s? T-h-e-y a-r-e w-e-t a-g-a-i-n.”

  She always thinks her socks are wet. I go over and pretend I’m feeling them without actually touching her feet.

  “Dry as a bone,” I tell her.

  * * *

  Tonight Luke and I are watching TV and doing a position called “reverse jackhammer.” We saw it online.

  “I can really feel the blood rushing to my head!” I say. In the mirror I watch Luke’s testicles bounce to and fro like a rubber cat toy. I want to reach out and bat at them playfully, except then I’d land on my skull.

  When Luke finishes he always sucks in a mass of air like he just got the world’s biggest paper cut. It sounds painful. The moment he relaxes, I push off his body and land back on all fours.

  “That was excellent,” he says. “Since we got together, I hardly watch porn.”

  I nod, bringing his head to my chest like he’s a giant infant. He tells me all about the upcoming football game this Friday and his tactics as quarterback, who he thinks is ready and who isn’t. I completely drown out the actual meaning of his words and just listen to the sound, the vibrations of it, like his voice is one of those CDs of whale calls they sell in the vitamin store.

  Later I change into a sundress and go with Luke to buy muscle supplements. He’s very into physical performance and doesn’t drink or do drugs, but he doesn’t seem to care that I do. I’m a little paranoid about this. In my worst nightmares, future Luke gets disqualified from a critical NFL game because I’m still his girlfriend and he got a contact high from my vaginal secretions and failed a pee test.

  * * *

  “I think you should just tell him.”

  Kristi and I are watching a home video of her performing fellatio on Chet. She has this idea to make instructional tapes to sell to the younger girls at school. We’re trying to write notes for the voice-over narration.

  “Does he dye his pubes or are they just like that?” I can’t decide whether or not Chet is attractive in the throes of pleasure. His upper lip peels back from the gumline in an equine fashion. It’s all very Mister Ed.

  “Dunno. Maybe henna. What is so hard about telling him?”

  “But I’m taking care of it.” Every thirty seconds or so in the video, Kristi looks back at the camera like she’s worried things aren’t recording properly.

  “Hey, was this on a tripod? Who taped this?”

  “Levi. Look, just text him that you’re pregnant. It’s way weirder if he finds out afterward. Awkward.”

  “Levi? Your brother Levi?”

  “What. I gave him twenty bucks.”

  “Oh, gross.”

  Kristi has taped nearly all her sexual exploits from the past year and a half. Anything involving threesomes with myself or another girl has the base title of “Sister Act” followed by a roman numeral.

  Kristi sighs. “Luke’s body is so fit. I wish Chet looked like that.” This comment makes my stomach feel bad, like I’ve eaten too much.

  Luke’s my boyfriend, I want to say. Instead I excuse myself and go throw up. I guess it’s morning sickness.

  * * *

  Kristi has a balloon arrangement sent to my recovery room at the Blooming Rose. One says, “You’re a Star!” and is actually shaped like a star. Another, “Congratulations!”

  Now that it’s over with, I decide I can finally tell Luke, so I call him. But when I hear his voice I chicken out.

  “Are you drunk, babe?” he asks. “You sound kind of messed up.”

  “I guess so,” I say. He starts telling me about football practice, and I put the phone down onto the pillow and listen. A documentary about America’s heartland is showing fields of sweeping wheat and grain on TV. When Luke says goodbye I make a very thoughtful noise on accident, the sound a homeless cat might make when a prospective adoptee decides against him.

  I look at the balloons and decide I don’t ever want Luke to know. Our relationship is a lot like a balloon, I realize. Being with Luke is so effortless. All I have to do to keep our relationship airborne, to make sure it doesn’t fall on the ground, is give it a gentle tap of effort every now and then. It’s so light and I want to keep it that way.

  But later, when I’m cleared to check out and leave, I have this weird surge of longing for Luke. I almost can’t wait to see him. I call him from the cab ride home and ask if I can stop by. I’m thinking about him holding me and the way his low whale calls will resonate with the uneasiness in the bottom of my stomach. They will cancel each other out.

  People are always working on their lawns in Luke’s neighborhood. I guess because they don’t have people who work on their lawns for them.

  When the cab pulls up to Luke’s house, Luke’s father is on a riding mower. I watch him for a moment, the way all his surface flesh jiggles when the mower rounds a corner. They say you can tell what women will look like when they’re older because of their mothers, but I’ve never heard that logic applied to men and dads.

  Luke and I are watching a game on ESPN in the den. I decide if his team wins, I’ll tell him; if they lose, it’s a secret forever. Once I have this thought, I feel like I can’t undo it, even though it was a rule I made. With each touchdown Luke jumps upright to celebrate, I feel more and more terrified. My silence in the face of his excitement gets so obvious that he asks me if I’m a fan of the opposing team. It’s a joke question—I’ve sworn allegiance to his team since we got together—but when I don’t answer and forget to smile, it shakes him for a moment. “Are you?” he asks me again. He’s serious.

  It feels like an out that I should take: a more tolerable reason for us to break up than me telling him the truth, and the relationship getting all weighed down with feelings it can’t handle. Though of all the possible lies I could use to end things with Luke, liking another team would probably hurt him the most.

  “Of course not,” I assure him. He lets out the most relieved sigh I’ve ever heard.

  “I love you,” he says.

  If he’d said anything else, I could’ve kept my mouth shut. But this was too ridiculously pretend even for me.

  “You got me pregnant,” I say, and he thinks I’m teasing.

  “Love’s just a word,” he says.

  “I’m serious.” I take the Blooming Rose receipt out of my purse and show him. “I took care of it for us today. I know you don’t have a lot of money.”

  “Wow,” he says. On TV his team is celebrating, jumping up and down in front of the camera. “Yeah!” one of the players yells.

  Luke goes completely silent. Every so often his dad rides by the window on the mower. Each time h
e gets to the edge of the lawn, a moment comes when if he didn’t turn the steering wheel he would go off the grass and onto the road leading out of the subdivision. For some reason I keep wishing for this to happen each time. Go, I think. Make a run for it. Like the only way I can stay with Luke, in his house or as his girlfriend, is if his father goes.

  I sit with Luke until the mower turns off and the garage door opens. Then, when his dad comes inside, I leave.

  * * *

  I decide to walk home, which is farther than I thought. I get nauseous. The thought of raiding Grandma’s Marinol helps me power through.

  When I finally make it there I go straight to her room. “Gammy,” I ask, reaching into her nightstand, “can I have some of those pills? The ones that make you eat ice cream? I think I got carsick.”

  She’s asleep so I help myself. Her neck hole is breathing and making a sputtery, flapping sound. I imagine a geriatric fairy-tale scenario where she’ll only awaken if the right man puts his finger into the hole and keeps it there, like a reverse King Arthur and Excalibur.

  But then her eyes open, and her lips. “Gammy? I can’t hear you. Use the mic.”

  When Grandma first wakes up she often forgets she can’t talk. It’s sad. It looks like she’s trying to blow out thousands of candles on a birthday cake.

  “I t-h-i-n-k I s-m-e-l-l c-h-i-c-k-e-n. I-t w-o-k-e m-e u-p.”

  “There’s no chicken, Gammy.” She dozes back off violently, lots of elbows, like she’s being escorted to sleep against her will.

  I can’t help staring at her. She seems to be continually deflating from her neck hole. It looks like a withered pit that used to hold a large seed, then one day it fell out and she wilted.

  It is so gross how we are born and so gross how we die.

  * * *

  Luke sent me a breakup text message the next day, and started dating Kristi the day after that, even though I’m sure from time to time she’s still planning to use Chet as a human lollipop for continuity on her video series.

  One jealous afternoon when I’m positive they’re involved in an act of fornication at Kristi’s at that very moment, I call Kristi’s phone (knowing she will not answer) in order to get her voicemail (knowing they will listen out of curiosity, probably on speakerphone). My rage will be the soundtrack of this particular Kristi home porn session.

  I leave a mean tirade about how I know they’re naked together, but maybe Luke doesn’t realize he’s being filmed? Because Kristi’s the type to just hide the camera if she’s worried he’s going to say no.

  She begins a flurry of calls and angry texts minutes later, but I don’t answer or read them. I place the phone next to my head and listen to it vibrate. If I put my ear close enough, the sound almost reminds me of Luke’s dad on the riding mower. I imagine myself driving one for a minute, making circles in the grass until I get dizzy. I make myself actually dizzy doing this. An oily kind of sweetness starts to crawl up my throat and then melt back down, over and over, like something I ate long ago but am just now tasting.

  Hellion

  I never had breasts until I went to Hell. When I died at the age of thirty-nine I was barely an A-cup. I often used to purchase bras from the preteen section. The bra I died in had tiny unicorns patterned across one nipple and tiny rainbows patterned across the other.

  As I walked around Hell I noticed all the females had them. I was looking down my shirt at them when another woman patted me on the back. “They’re for defense,” she said. I didn’t understand until later that day when a fellow Hellion began hitting on me, a real know-it-all. The kind of person who always has a toothpick in his mouth. When I first got to Hell, I was shocked they’d let people have sharp objects like toothpicks; I expected the rules of strict prisons. But that is lesson number one. Hell is not the same as prison.

  As I grew angry with the guy, my breasts began making a percolating sound. It felt like they were being forcibly tickled. My nipples hardened into nozzles and a bubbling green liquid that smelled like motor oil shot out of them. It sprayed all over the man’s face and his skin began to smoke and blister.

  I watched him run over to the lava pond and look at his reflection. “Now I’m a mutant for eternity!” he screamed.

  A very tall man named Ben walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. Ben is intimidating at first: he is covered from head to toe with eye implants. “Sorry about that,” he muttered. A bat poked its head out of Ben’s beard. The bat was wearing a monocle.

  Some people in Hell are nice. They just happened to have done a very reprehensible thing at one point. I killed my husband once, for instance. But I felt bad enough about it to also kill myself.

  * * *

  Hell isn’t that awful, but it does smell. People often ask, “What died in here?”

  Our currency is little coins made of hair and liver that we have to spend before they rot. We get a weekly allowance, and it’s actually hard to spend it all. A lot of people start collecting things. For example, Ben collects eyes and surgically embeds them all over his body. His best eye is in his belly button. He wears little high-rise T-shirts so that his belly-eye can see and be seen at all times.

  I expected a lot of axe murderers to be running around, licking bloody knives and looking sinister. But wild serial killers are totally the minority down here. Hell really isn’t that violent. Maybe it’s the heat.

  There are a lot of people with tempers here, and a lot of nurses. I don’t know why, but the bar is always full of them, guzzling fake beer and talking about how they wish they could go back to Earth for just a second and pull someone’s catheter out really fast. There is only one small bar in Hell but everyone manages to hang out inside. The beer is nonalcoholic.

  I was complaining about this the first time I actually got to talk to the devil one-on-one.

  “You’d get dehydrated,” he mumbled. “Alcohol is a great idea if everyone wants a headache.”

  The devil’s voice isn’t what you’d expect. He sounds like a leprechaun who’s been smoking for centuries. The latter part makes sense—he is a smoker. Our conversation started with me telling him how exciting it was to get to smoke again in Hell. “I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t,” he agreed.

  But newcomers experience a placebo effect in the bar during their first couple of visits, and I was no exception. As the night progressed, I started to feel intoxicated and my conversation with the devil took a turn for the worse.

  “And what’s up with the ceiling?” I added. “It’s like the inside of the biggest dead animal in the universe.” The walls are all bones and stretchy tendon.

  The devil put out his cigar and stood up. “It’s worked for a long time,” he said. “Why change it now?” But from his expression I could tell he was hurt.

  * * *

  A few days later there was a knock on my door, and it was none other than the devil.

  “You were right,” he said and nodded, “what you said the other night.”

  “I was drunk,” I offered. His eyebrows rose. “Though not technically.”

  “No, some things could be updated.” We began to gaze at one another. His eyes turned a fiery red that didn’t exactly scare me but was certainly assertive.

  I thought for a moment. “You could build a roller coaster?” I described my favorite ride ever, the Demon Drop, which plummets straight down and makes my stomach feel wild every time I ride it.

  He agreed it would be a good thing to try. We had a raffle contest to decide the ride’s name. The winner was Betty, a former Wisconsin housewife, who chose SKULLKRUSH. She seemed to hope the name would be prophetic.

  As the ride was being built, the nurses wanted to know if they could set up a triage hospital next to SKULLKRUSH. “I don’t think anyone will get hurt,” I said, which was maybe a naïve stance about a roller coaster in Hell.

  “Just in case,” they insisted.

  The hospital turned out to be very beneficial. The laws of physics that apply to such rides in our
universe turn out to not be wholly applicable here. Of course no one can die, but mangling is very possible. On the upside, though, so is reconstruction.

  Examples of this abound, like Varmint Man, who lost a rib in a poker game. I accepted an invitation from Varmint Man to try his yoga class, which wasn’t the best because of the twelve baby raccoons romping around in his chest hole. Hell varmints waste no time packing up inside of cavities. They were sort of cute, but since they were demon raccoons, they had green buckteeth and pus flowing freely from their eyes.

  I mentioned this to the devil one night after a wonderful date riding SKULLKRUSH (it was nice to feel the falling stomach feeling while holding his giant claw), and he was more than happy to help. He suggested we take Varmint Man dumpster diving to find something to seal up the chest hole. The dumpsters in Hell have unbelievable finds. I always thought I was hot stuff on Earth, wading through the old éclair piles behind Dough Knots. I had no idea. We ended up outfitting Varmint Man with an elaborate series of copper piping: resistant to rodent teeth. I also found an intestine that had been stuffed with rat poison and fashioned into a noose. I decided to hang the whole thing from my chandelier. “You’re becoming more comfortable with entrails,” the devil commented. I liked the way he took notice of my growth.

  * * *

  Even with the malfunctions, SKULLKRUSH turned out to be very popular. The best part was how the devil and I had succeeded in it together. “We make a good team,” he said.

  We were keeping the bags of profit from SKULLKRUSH at my place, but soon they started rotting. “Our money is beginning to liquefy,” I told him. He tugged on his goatee for a while, seemingly weighing whether or not to say what was on his mind. Finally he sighed and took my hand and told me to get all the money together. His hands in mine gave me that great feeling of dating someone my father would completely not approve of.

  We walked the bags down a long tunnel that was like an everlasting gobstopper of horrible smells: first dead cats then dead dogs then dead cows then dead whales until I couldn’t even take it. “This stinks,” I managed. The walls were boiling with blood.