In the morning, he wakes me at six-thirty and then gets in the shower. I stand in front of the refrigerator listening to him sing “Ramblin’ Man.” He likes to picture himself on the open road with his guitar strapped to his back but he never goes anywhere. To guarantee he stays put, he buys property that poor people live in. He owns a whole little neighborhood of nine houses that should be condemned. I help him clean them out when the poor people pick up and move in the middle of the night and he pays me in buffets, hot showers, and a warm place to sleep because I don’t work, which is temporary, my not working, but the longer I don’t work the less I can imagine going back to my cubicle at the government office where I used to take disability claims, reinstating prisoners’ benefits while they gawked.
I’m careful not to burn the toast because he won’t eat it if there’s any black on it. Then I slab on butter and jelly while a couple of eggs fry. When the eggs look about done, I top them with pepperjack and cheddar and he makes a sandwich out of the whole thing and eats it while standing over the sink. I sit on the counter and watch, kick my legs—the yolks squirt and dribble because I didn’t cook them long enough, he could get salmonella—and think about my day, all the empty hours and how I don’t even have enough money to go to lunch, how he didn’t leave me any money on the piano bench yesterday like he sometimes does. I wipe a glob of yellow off his beard and he picks up his briefcase and kisses me goodbye. After I lock the door behind him, I think how much I love him, how he is like a husband and I am like a wife.
I spend the day waiting for him, but I force myself to do a few things so I’ll have something to tell him when he asks what I did. I jumped rope five hundred times. I read to page 38 in my library book. I cleaned the bathtub and took a bath.
When he gets home, I want to go somewhere, the drive-in maybe, but he wants me to handcuff him to the bed. All day long he’s been in charge and now he wants somebody else to be in charge. I like handcuffing him to the bed for a few minutes, while I sit on his face, but then I want to leave him there and go cut my toenails or watch television. I don’t want to do the things he wants me to do to him.
I slap him hard and call him the names he likes—bitch, whore, cunt. He tosses his head from side to side like you never see anyone do in real life. It reminds me of a princess trapped in a tower. I slap him again and work my finger into his asshole and think about what I’m going to eat for supper because there’s nothing to eat here that I like. He doesn’t even have any milk. If he’d give me some money, I’d go buy milk. Then I could eat cereal.
“Please,” he says, “please.” More head tossing.
“Don’t beg,” I say, “I hate for a man to beg,” but he thinks this is part of the program so he bites his lip. I slap him hard and scoot to the edge of the bed and look at him out of the corner of my eye, which I imagine is pretty creepy. If I were him and he were me, I’d be creeped out.
“I’m going to leave you here,” I say.
He looks at me like a dog, uncomprehending, whatever I say goes. I put my panties on and close the door. In the kitchen, I wash my hands and listen to the wheelchair man roll around, the laugh track on his television erupt. The house is split into three pieces: my boyfriend (slumlord) on one end, the wheelchair man in the middle, and a pretty white girl who talks black on the other end. Sometimes she comes over and wants to wash her clothes and I tell her I’m sorry, I was on my way out, but then I have to leave, which really pisses me off.
I turn on the big-screen in the den. Like everything else, he got it for free or cheap and there’s something wrong with it. In this case, the picture is usually shaped like a bow tie. Right now it’s not but it could go into bow tie mode at any minute. I lie on the fake leather couch and watch Man vs. Wild, nestle my feet into a pile of blankets. So far nothing has proven useful—it’s doubtful I’ll ever have a reason to make my pants into a flotation device. On day five in the middle of nowhere, Bear is lying on the ground in the pitch dark talking about how hungry he is, and then he’s talking about how lonely he is. Just about everyone seems to need my love and it makes me sad because already my love has been spread around too much and there are still so many people I might have saved who will now be lost forever.
My boyfriend is hollering from the bedroom—he has to take a piss. I go into the kitchen and look through the cabinets and there’s still nothing, and then I remember the pint of ice cream in the freezer. There’s a lot left but I already picked out all the heath bar chunks so it’s barely worth eating. I take the top off and put the carton in the microwave, slurp it from a big spoon while Bear finds his way back to civilization.
I fall asleep. When I wake up, it’s dark. I like it when this happens. I twist my hair into a bun on top of my head and walk quietly back to the bedroom and open the door.
“You fucking bitch,” he says, without looking at me.
I make like I’m going to walk out and he turns and says, “No—you’re not a bitch, you’re a smart, beautiful woman.” I can’t stand to be called a woman. I’m a girl. I’ll always be a girl. I take the little key and unlock him and he runs to the bathroom and pees for a long time, a heavy stream. Tomorrow is Saturday and we’ll go to the river and drink beer and maybe catch more fish to put in the tank. Some of them will die from shock and then the monster will have a heyday. I think about this and try to get excited. He goes into the kitchen so I follow him in there and kneel on the linoleum. He gags me again and again until I throw up a small pool of sour vanilla. Now he’s happy. Now he will do whatever I want, he says. I want to see my sister. I want to eat Thai food with her at our favorite place where we used to live but I can’t because she’s in the hospital and we don’t live there anymore.
I scoop up the mess with a paper towel and stay on the floor.
“So?” he says, opening a can of Diet Rite. With his other hand, he pets the top of my head.
Second choice would be the drive-in, where I’d fall asleep in his arms before the double feature begins, but then I think about the last time we went to the drive-in, how he had a taillight out and we got pulled over and he wasn’t wearing any underwear so he couldn’t tuck his one-hitter into his crotch like he usually does so he told me to put it in my panties but I refused and we were pushing it back and forth while the policeman was walking toward us and then he shoved it between his ass cheeks at the last second. The cop asked him to get out and the two of them walked around the car to look at the taillight and when he finally got back in, he said, I know not to ever consider your panties again and I said, No, please don’t consider them, and then I had to drink myself out of a panic attack while he laughed and took a single shot of whiskey, like every time he comes back from Murfreesboro with a slab of marijuana in his motorcycle jacket.
“I wonder what Coach is doing,” I say, though I know what Coach is doing—getting drunk on his couch. When he gets really drunk, he’ll spy on his neighbors or hide things from himself around the house. Coach is the only person we hang out with, a bad alcoholic with a cough like he’s dying.
We drive over there with half a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack and he answers the door in his sunglasses.
“Miss Amy,” he says.