The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

There are childish shapes with a little spread around the shoulders—spread too bunchy and rumpled to be wings, though. They have outgrown the nest and here and there a limb projects between the sticks. It messes with the nest’s integrity, loosens the whole structure and leaves it bulging and inclined to shed. It could rupture in the night and drop all of you, sleeping and unprepared. The popping of twigs keeps you awake, held by tensile lines of possibility: a rumbling fall and your own shadow gaping wider, like a mouth inside the ground.

If they were ready, their capes wouldn’t crease up like that. They wouldn’t have that washed-out tint. They would be expansive, scarlet and tumid with blood, able to handle whatever overflow of air came their way. But then it’s questionable if their capes will ever catch up with their lumpy hips, spindling arms, general bodily extravagance. You can see it all more clearly in dark like this dark, dark that digs itself into your face like fresh eyes. One of them is even turning hunchbacked. They’re supposed to be children, you know, but at times you can’t quite see them that way. At the very least, they’re getting too old for this.

Wait for morning, anyway. A fighting chance at what you find yourself referring to as a secondary life. A kind of supplement to this life in the nest, to be lived in secondary, almost incidentally flighted bodies. What counts after all is the swollen moment, their crush and sweat as they smear their dreaming faces on their siblings’ stomachs. There’s no compelling reason for a moment to lead anywhere other than the ground.

As the dawn comes around their legs start to glimmer in blue spandex. Perhaps they might have accomplished something exciting. Caught falling airplanes and carried them to safety. But it’s hard to escape the impression that they really won’t amount to much.

Houses are especially hard to keep clean when you can’t find them. It was the voice from up the street in the unsoiled floral apron—not your friend at all, not someone who had ever condescended to speak to you before—who came to tell you the news, but she kept just behind your right shoulder the whole time she was talking, and her whispers were coded and hypocritical. You were turning around, trying to see her, when your eyes swept across your own address. The air had a fanged quality. It bristled with inverted rooms, with the gestural spines that might have indicated the path along which children circumnavigated the coffee table—when there was still a house there.

But it wasn’t entirely gone. A fist could still find something to puncture. The trouble might lie in determining what it had hit. Behind you, the spoiled bitch from the house with the white carpets got hung up on a single syllable. She probably intended it to be part of a longer word, but broken off like that, bleated like that, it could be easily confused with the name of your son. At last she got her sounds unstuck, rolled out coherent words, and it started to seem like maybe she was talking about him after all. You thought he was yours, she said, but if you’d been paying attention you’d have noticed that he smells very different now. At the same time there was a moist snuffling, then a pricking wetness on the back of your neck, and you had to bat her away. Was she really about to take a bite out of you?

I don’t have time for this, you told her. I have to get dinner started. You meant it as an insult, but you weren’t clear if the point got across to her. You still couldn’t see her, just feel the little pops of air squeezed out between her teeth.

In the pit where your kitchen used to be, you could hear someone else repeating the same words you’d used to get rid of the bitch—repeating them again and again in a rising cadence, delighted at the joke. But you couldn’t see who was talking. It was dark down there.

One day all the housewives will throw a party. The invitation: The largest house on the block. The invitation: After the sun goes down. The invitation: Fancy dress strongly encouraged. The invitation: Grownups only! The streetlamps flicker on, the children are put to bed, and out each front door, down each driveway: a modest dress, a pleasant smile.

They ring the doorbell. They’re greeted. Kiss-kiss, kiss-kiss. A chandelier. A wine glass. A twisting grand staircase, and before it, on an indigo dais, a tremendous cake. A tremendous cake all to themselves. A tremendous, delicious cake with no children around to smear their ravenous faces in it.

Mingling and chitchat and Have you heard and Oh dear and, most of all, This is so, so very nice, isn’t it yes.

Here’s where the story turns sad. The cake, underneath the outer layer, is one of those cardboard novelty cakes, the kind strippers jump out of. Barely enough to feed a chipmunk. And inside are the children, waiting to yell surprise, waiting for the gasps and the smiles and the We’re so happy to have you here and the We were so lonely without you. But it’s a long, long party, and this is a sad, sad, story. Midnight is for the cake, and by then even the oldest of the children has fallen asleep. You can see what’s coming. A clock somewhere strikes twelve. A large knife is retrieved from the kitchen. A ceremonial cake-cutting. We just thought it would be nice to have something for ourselves for once.

When you feel a sense of disproportion—when your body is too geometric for all your clothing, your shirts turn hunchbacked, your foot still refuses to emerge from your trouser leg hours after the initial insertion—then it is time to go back to school. Bundle up your impulses. Remember it will be cold soon, and flightiness will be punished. Of course, as a housewife, you will be much larger than the other students, but you can make yourself less conspicuous by growing into the spaces between them. Compress your excess volume into cubes and then slide them surreptitiously under the desks.

Does someone look familiar? If so, he certainly does not wish to be recognized. Ignore him carefully.

Protect your own identity as well as his. Resist any urges, for example, to clean up after your fellow students, or to help them with their work. You are never safe here. Don’t bring volumes of Proust to class with you—stick, for now, to true stories of sailors rescued by dolphins.

Count the walls. Count again. There will be more of them the second time.

At a certain point, halfway through twilight, the housewife swallowed the house. She instantly regretted it. So much externality confused her. Objects ceased to define her, as they had in her old home, and instead became unraveling extensions of her head, her hands.

As long as she stayed home, her fate was intrinsic. It was just a matter of turning the pages and so finding out who she was. Out here she was as episodic as the streets, as dubious as a sequel.

She could hear the children bickering in her midriff. A fight over who owned the blue horse. They apparently hadn’t even noticed.

If she tried hard enough, could she stop noticing? Insinuate herself again between the covers? She shut her eyes and tried. There was too much cold wind for the effort to be convincing.

You know that someone is a person if he or she is the right size. The housewife realized that her enormity would make her status difficult to determine.

Housewife and nobody are off to the Sanatorium for Uncertain Housewives. We will return, some semblance of ourselves, when our cure is complete, or sooner should we manage to escape. We may, in fact, have a plan.

Check in for fresh dispatches around July 13th.

But please keep in mind that just because something appears to be your housewife, or even some straggling facet of your housewife, it may in fact be perfectly innocent of any relationship with her. You will be tempted to identify her too soon, too impulsively—she may well be egging you on to do so, without your ever being aware of it. Never trust your own judgment in these matters.

She may be so subtle that what you take for her reproductive organs is in fact the ceiling vent; give in to your desire to conceal, clog, or otherwise stifle it and you will have nothing but poor air quality to show for your efforts. The housewife will bait you with lascivious implications, twine your shed hairs into towels dropped on the floor, all to make you expend your energies pointlessly. You are at risk of undertaking a futile assault on manifold aspects of your own home. Start with the vent, and you will go on to burning holes in the seats of your chairs and perhaps slipping into miscegenation with them. Try to keep your violence to yourself. Slap your own arms until the fury subsides.

The strobe? You think the strobe will help? If the housewife is clever, she will soon learn to wink open only during the beats of darkness. Your eyes will ache from trying to take in the slippage between pulses of light.
Spinning in your bathroom as you search for her will only leave memories of you imprinted on the tiles. And do you really want to be remembered that way?

The housewife has her own appetites, and may see fit to play with you.

A housewife is best understood not as a discrete unit, but rather as a smattering of gestures and objects that to the casual eye may seem unrelated. She is essentially a concatenation. Even an observer long habituated to the wiles of housewives will have considerable difficulty determining the precise composition of any one of them. If he guesses–correctly–that the hand raised to turn off the television and the dropped nickel circling the floor are both elements of the same housewife, he may overlook the coat slumping off its hanger, or the cigarette left burning but unsmoked on the edge of the stove. And if he does succeed in locating all of a housewife’s parts, he will still face the daunting task of understanding both their proper sequence and the symphonic relations between them.

How, then, to detect any housewives who may have insinuated themselves into your home? Install a strobe light in likely haunts such as the kitchen and bathroom. In that hesitant light, a housewife’s tics and fidgets should separate from the objects that contain them. The ruffled pages of a book, which in daylight appeared to contain only text, may suddenly become legible as aspects of her face. The electrical cord in the corner might take on an umbilical cast, linking the housewife to her most furtive movements. If you suspect a continuing infestation you should leave the strobe on permanently.

When the fire starts, at least you will know whom to blame.

One day all the housewives will have a party. The children’ll be out back, playing chase-and-be-chased-by-the-monstrous-children. Inside, the housewives will each toss a favorite toy into a sack and stuff the whole lot of them up the chimney. One of the kids, an older one most likely, will notice that the fireplace is lit but that the flue isn’t open. She’ll see it through the sliding glass doors, the smoke filling the room, whispering out through the keyhole. She’ll run in, rescue the toys, open the flue, kiss her mom on the forehead until it’s all better. That child is the book. The smoke is the book. The toys are the book. The housewife is your ideal fucking reader.

They all crowd into a small urban park in some unpromising location, perhaps just across the street from a cement factory. It’s dusk when they arrive, and it takes them so long to peel off their gloves that by the time they begin the piece darkness is absolute.

Each one pulls the book she’s reading out of her patent handbag, followed by a minute pair of scissors. And are the scissors shaped like cranes with pinching legs, long razor bills?

Then, very carefully, they begin to snip out every bit of text pinned between quotation marks, leaving behind all the unvoiced words. Whatever the characters say aloud sorts loose on tiny excised slips of paper. The housewives use their moistened fingertips to catch the slips up one by one, then chew and swallow them. With only the haze of the street lamps to light their books this requires considerable time. They may have to return for several nights running.

The books that remain know how to keep quiet.

Any housewife who is reading a book without dialogue, or a book whose author prefers to leave the dialogue unmarked, will have to go to bed hungry.

The Housewives’ Guide to Anatomy is here to help you access the growlings of housewives, especially those growlings that occur on a strictly anatomical level.

What do housewives do all day? Don’t they get bored? No indeed. They have finely porous skins with wonderfully absorbent qualities (just one does the job!) that they can use to sop up texts. Then they can wring those texts out again, horribly mangled, just for you.