Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (16 page)

For Valentine’s Day, I cooked Robert a steak to keep him busy and then told him I wasn’t feeling so well. “Do you mind if I turn in a little early?” I asked. He did not look up from his potatoes, which were mashed. He was giving them a secondary mashing with his fork.

“Think I’ll be asleep pretty soon too,” he said.

With that, I put my dishes in the sink and ran to my bedroom. I’d gotten up early and painted togas onto all the gnomes and creatures with washable white paint—I wanted a Roman theme, and they did not disappoint.

Around three in the morning I was waving goodbye as they all crawled back down into the hole, everyone except my darling. He and I had held eyes the whole night, throughout everything. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded. His rosy, tulip-bud cheeks glistened in the lamplight. Then he pointed at my braid.

My braid is long and gray; I’ve been letting it grow since my thirties. “You want to touch it?” I asked. “Is that a good idea?” I didn’t want him to harden, though I thought of bringing him into bed in his statue form, even if he would feel like a cold doll. At least I could put my cheek to his and sleep throughout the night.

He shook his head and made a scissor motion, then posed his hands as though he had a shovel in them, digging up invisible earth and throwing it over his back.

“You want me to cut it off and bury it?”

He nodded. His large knuckles went to his lips as he blew me a kiss, then he disappeared down the magic rabbit hole they’d dug.

I didn’t get much sleep after they left. Was this a kind of power trip on My Gnome’s part? Did I really want to cut away thirty years of hair? Could he somehow enjoy my hair more if it was buried in the ground?

For days I thought it over, hoping each evening he would come to answer my questions. But no one came, not a single one of them. At nights when I’d look out my window he’d be there facing me, making the same scissor-shovel motions over and over. The rest of the ornaments stood behind him like disciples; with his large hat he seemed like a cult leader. They all nodded silently, appearing brainwashed.

By the fourth morning I was broken. Robert was playing solitaire on the computer and generating loud low-tech noises of victory and defeat. Fiery tears began to surge and I bounced up.
I cannot live in the suburbs another day without him
, I told myself, and I ran to the garage and shut my eyes and used wire cutters to snip the whole braid off below its rubber band.

When I dangled it out before me it looked impressively magic, like the long wiry skin of a snake I’d never want to meet.

I buried it at the male gnome’s feet, a shallow grave, and ran back inside. Robert glanced away from the computer screen momentarily. “Did you get a haircut?”

“I did, Robert.” I went into my bedroom and placed my pillow over my face and cried, and when I woke up it was already morning. My Gnome hadn’t come at all.

Manic, I went to every garden center in the tri-state area. I found each imaginable temptation: donkeys, centaurs, the prettiest and most apple-pie female gnomes available. When it was nine o’clock at night and all the stores were closing, I made my last purchase and handed the bills to the cashier. Unable to stop myself, I blurted out: “He has to love me. Or else I don’t know what.” She was young, perhaps sixteen, and chewing gum.

“I do not know anything about men,” she said.

As I pulled into my subdivision, my foot hit the gas when I saw a group of people had congregated across the street from my house. Some were pointing, others snickering. “Oh,” I exclaimed when I saw it. There was a life-sized marble statue of a heavyset middle-aged man in my garden.

I ran past everyone, ignoring all the calls of my name. A miniature giraffe fell to the ground from my arms and shattered. I ran inside yelling “Robert, Robert”: of course an answer didn’t come. There were deer grazing around the computer where Robert had been sitting, small chipmunks outside his bedroom door.

“Oh,” I cried, “oh, my.” There inside my bedroom sat my real dwarf in the flesh. I wish the whole world could’ve seen his rosy cheeks, the bed sheets turned down, his beard braided into a long braid the color and length of my former hair. I touched his bare skin and watched as it flushed and stayed soft.

I don’t know if I’m able to have children myself. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the cost we save on contraceptives, the funds it takes to raise a child, what. If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”

Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.

Whisker-Bop! is a musical dance program that’s big on counting, manners, and going green. I am one of the primary characters (a mouse). I gallivant around with a raccoon and a bat, although this would never happen in nature, in addition to a small team of children. Due to their extraordinary length, our whiskers often comically get in the way of our counting/singing/dancing/morality-teaching. My name is Sneezoid because I have bad allergies; why this isn’t a concern I’m not sure. Every episode requires that I atch-hoo in a high-pitched voice and giggle afterwards. This prompts everyone else to giggle. During the interview for the job, I was asked to do little more than showcase my fake sneezing ability. I had a whole speech planned: how much I love kids, my work in an inner-city children’s community theater. It didn’t come up.

I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tool: do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t go along with the process? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive to a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.

But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. My costume includes a set of felt rodent teeth that are on my facial mask around my chin, and I often wish these teeth were real so I could gnaw the golden ponytail off my young costar Missy. She calls me Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.

Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in
The Scarlet Letter
, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.

“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you Ratty?”

After our initial meeting (she asked me if I had any children and I said “Not yet”), Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her stage-tyrant parent shoots me a laser-glare.

I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her sonic white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand.
I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control
, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood.

The show’s writers have sensed the obsessive link between Missy and me. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so I would no longer “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. Brrrrr!” That was Missy’s line, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”

The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy and try to use this name as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”

“But Missy calls you...” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”

Sometimes Kyle watches the show, even though I beg him not to. “Oh right,” he says, “like you wouldn’t watch me if I was singing on television in a dancing mouse costume?”

There are moments on the show when I can actually be seen glaring at Missy, killing her slowly with my gigantic fake eyes. Like the scene last week when she was explaining how stealing is bad: it is wrong to borrow things from mommy’s purse and daddy’s wallet, even if one plans on returning them. At the time, I was enraged at how purely incredible Missy smelled—like flowers but softer, without the alcohol of perfume. Her smell makes me want to kiss her satin head.

Of course the home audience doesn’t notice my disdain. But Kyle sees all.

“Man,” laughed Kyle. “Look at your posture. You want to teach that kid a lesson.”

But I do not. I want her reborn. I want her mine, without any knowledge of show business, bleached teeth, or interview skills.

Missy isn’t very kind or gentle. At work it’s common for her to greet me by jamming her tiny fingers between my ribs and insisting she shouldn’t feed her rat any more this week because I’m getting fatter. Something about Missy takes me back to high school, even though she is only six years old. Perhaps I project her popularity: she will no doubt be popular. This automatically makes her better than me, who was not even popular for a day.

Today she and I are doing a song called “Leave It Alone (If It’s Under the Sink).” The dancing is strenuous, especially in the suit, where I have no sensation as to what my true range of motion is. I accidentally bounce my giant mouse midriff against her when we’re doing a series of twirls.

“CUT!” Missy loves to yell this. The director and the producers have repeatedly told her that whether or not taping should halt is not her decision, but to no avail. “Fatty Ratty bumped into me!”

I give a few humble apologies through my mask, which makes a large, distorted echo inside and allows me to hear the way I might sound to others if I had learned to speak although deaf.

“Take your mask off when you talk,” Missy yells, “I can’t understand you.”

She says this despite knowing that I cannot take my mask off unassisted. It is a very heavy mask with ceramic veneer on the upper face. Similar to a spacesuit, it screws on so that it will stay firmly in place throughout rigorous musical routines.

I put my arms up and shrug in a type of “oh well” expression. Like an abusive lover, Missy can sense when she’s pushed me to the breaking point and needs to reel me back in.

“Silly mousie,” she says, and then hugs me a little. I pat her tiny back with my oversized mouse paw.

“Draino? Oh noooooooo...” I place my paw to my forehead and spin around several times in front of a blue screen. Animated, I will appear to be swirled down an oversized sink pipe. Everything is oversized on Whisker Bop! except for the children. For some reason, this makes them seem infinitely smarter.

Kyle has brought me lunch, which is our excuse to go have sex in my dressing room. I’m embarrassed that we do this near the set of a children’s show, but we kind of love it and cannot pinpoint why. It’s not like it even feels naughty, just creepy and a little bit pathetic.

Today though, there are kids running through the hallway, shrieking their shrieks and banging on doors with their limbs as they pass. Though Kyle feels good, I can’t help but have the children’s screams redirect my thoughts to the
why
of sex, the primal reason he and I have been programmed and physically engineered to engage in this behavior.
There is more to life
I tell the part of my brain that wants so badly to know which one of us, if not both, is the reproductively defective one. I suppose if I found out that it was him and not me, this same part of my brain would then ask: what is the real point of having sex with Kyle?

I try to reign in my thoughts. Children are not the only reason for sex, I remind myself. They are just one reason. A very loud reason that feels entitled to run around all over the backstage area yelling and laughing at things that aren’t funny.

But in this one moment it suddenly becomes way too much that we aren’t trying to make a child. I love Kyle; at least I love a lot of him. There is enough to love there to be passed on. I want to distill us both down into seven little pounds that will grow as needed, both him and me but also someone who’s free of us, free to ignore the ways that we’re crazy and not valid. It seems like a baby would save us, not our relationship but literally us: half of us both could have a new chance.

“Sorry,” Kyle mumbles, nuzzling his face into my chest. He’s finished. I pet his damp forehead and his curly hair.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “Sometimes it’s weird for me at work.”

Going back on set when I know I have semen inside of me reminds me of that urban myth about a chemical that will turn all the water around people’s legs purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.

Kyle very sweetly helps redo my ponytail and screw my mask back on. The inside of the mask is disgusting; it almost looks like the hide from a real animal. I’ve never asked what it is. I can imagine the producer looking me straight in the eye and saying, “We recycled some old Nazi lampshades.” It smells kind of like a cellar, if the cellar were filled with the musk of adolescent deer.

Kyle gives me a kiss on my mouse cheek and turns to leave when Missy appears out of nowhere like something from
The Shining
. Before she even opens her mouth I know that it is going to be horrible; I can feel the psychic energy she’s drawing from my brain being sucked out the left side of my head underneath my ear.

“Why won’t you give Ratty a baby? Is something wrong with your seeds?”