The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

“Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over.”

Mrs. Dalloway has taken to following her when she goes out shopping, or to visit with friends. It’s not really a problem: the chick is presentable enough, you can take her anywhere, and it’s not like the clerks will think she’s shoplifting or anything. She’s mute, although sometimes her thoughts nudge Sally more than words would. Still, Sally makes the best of it, even tries to make it fun, sometimes using Mrs. Dalloway as a hat stand or hooking an umbrella over her stiff pale arm. She can’t help feeling Mrs. Dalloway’s mooning silences and twitchy eyes as an incitement to chaos, though: Why don’t you put that in your purse? Why don’t you try lying down on the sidewalk for a while, and just see what happens? The problem with her is that she wants to go somewhere, like maybe to some vapid colonial paradise where the palm trees mimic sustained explosions, and she’s got the crackpot idea that if she just follows Sally long enough that’s where they’ll end up. It could start to get kind of galling. The joke of it is that Sally’s not going anywhere wilder than the nearest Woolworth’s.

After a few days Sally tries shutting the door of the luncheonette in Mrs. Dalloway’s face. Still the woman lingers persistently outside, her breath fogging up the window more than you’d think could be possible. First her mopey, drapey face, then her elegant feathered hat and sloping shoulders, all disappear behind a sweaty gray round on the glass. Once the gray circle is large and even enough, a few drops spatter onto it–tears, Sally assumes–but instead of trickling down the way they ought to they trace recursive loops through the cloud on the pane.

Sally does her best to ignore it; this way Mrs. Dalloway has of fucking with gravity strikes Sally as the most perverted thing she’s done yet. And why can’t she keep her tears on her own damned face? The droplets stroke up, coil back, then take small leaps across empty space, cutting trails through the gray as they go so that scribbles of Mrs. Dalloway’s face start to show through again. Her wet black pupils track the ham sandwich all the time Sally eats it. Sally feels like she’s caught at the center of two sticky, elliptical orbits, and although she doesn’t want to watch she finds herself glancing over at the window more frequently. And then she gets it: those tears are writing on the picture window. Of course the script is backwards from where Sally is sitting, but there’s no mistaking it. It looks like a love letter. Sally tries to pretend she isn’t reading it, but she can’t help smiling to herself. So Mrs. Dalloway is finally coming straight out with it, and asking Sally to take her away!

The letter isn’t to her, but to someone named Richard. Sally doesn’t even know the guy.

Mrs. Dalloway is asking him, twenty times in a row, if she can finally come home.

The kids hate it when she has friends over. It’s so embarrassing. Why can’t they just play bridge or something?

They especially hate it when they see her in that white bikini, stretch marks scrawled around her pale belly, with the shovel dangling backwards from her hand like some obscenely overgrown cigarette holder. Her flamingo-colored toenail polish is chipped, her swagger jaunty and dissolute. Her son has to fish her copy of As I Lay Dying out of a puddle of spilled gin and tonic. He fastidiously straightens the pages, one by one, and sets it in the sun to dry while the hornets swarm in to drink the sap from its paper. Are those really hornets, or are they crawling letters swollen from the heat, letters armed with stings?

He swings his arms haphazardly to drive off the hornets. Her friends find this so funny that, though he knows they’re trying to talk through their laughter, he can’t understand a word they’re saying.

They start digging. Of course his dad will patch the lawn later without saying anything. At most, he’ll make a crack about it, what-your-mother-costs-me-in-turf.

His mother wiggles neck-deep into a hole in the soil. Her friends shush each other and shuffle up to the brink expectantly, their flowered dresses merging into a disturbed patchwork of colors. They chirrup and squirm, getting more abstracted by the moment. One pink beaked profile seems to fold back on itself and slur into a wrinkly cinnamon-colored cheek, its two blue eyes stacked one above the other like saucers in a cupboard. The boy blinks as rapidly as he can, making the women pleat and smear together under their stiff crests of hair. It’s the only way he has to fight back, after all. It’s their fault his mother is acting like this.

She kicks a leg up out of the hole as if she thought it was a bathtub. She flourishes her toes, stares everyone in the eye except him, then smiles luxuriantly. Her friends lean forward. “Oh,” says the pinkest of them, “Oh, that’s a good one! Look at that. It even has punctuation!”

To the boy it looks like his mother’s leg is smeared with utterly random crumbs of dirt, but he knows from experience that no one else will see it that way. His mother’s friends all interrupt each other in their eagerness to read it out: “Cash hollering to catch her and I hollowing gunning…”

“That is so obviously an ‘R’. Hollering running…”

“That is not punctuation, it’s just a fucking ant…”

“Is that from the kid who keeps saying his mother is a fish? His monologue? It is, right?”

One of them struggles forward in her rush to see and slops half her drink down his mother’s leg. Rivulets of filthy gin curl around the pale stubbled flesh.

“Comma in the wrong place!” his mother squeals. She can’t stop laughing.

Her favorite book is Anna Karenina. She thinks Jane Austen is for sissies.

It’s a sluggish day in late September. The kids are back at school. She slumps down on the carpet, methodically binding herself in the cord of the vacuum cleaner and then rolling free again. Her copy of Anna Karenina rolls with her, getting more and more rumpled. A few pages rip loose, and when she examines them she could just about cry. Why did they have to be her very favorites?

The scene she loves most–the one she always thinks about–is the one where Anna kisses her own hand and then says, ‘I must be going mad’! Every time she reads this part, she asks herself if Anna kissed her hand hello, or goodbye? Every time she reads it, she finds herself nodding approvingly, encouraging Anna to keep going–slap another kiss on those fingers while you can, honey, Vronsky doesn’t count for beans. The real adultery, she thinks, is what you do with yourself. Like even the girls she knows who keep running around on their husbands are still, like, always just with some guy, and how big a change can that really be? What counts is what she does sitting on the stump up by the train tracks behind her house, a dayglow pink hula hoop askew around her ankles and her copy of Anna Karenina leaning on her knees. She’s read about that kiss on the hand so many times that the pages must have worried away from the cracked spine, because now they’re fluttering weakly in her fingers.

She knows she shouldn’t just loll around moping. Her husband just got that big promotion, and she should bake a cake to celebrate.

She drags herself up, sifts her flour, separates her goddamn eggs.

At first she minces those loose pages as fine as pepper, since that way nobody will notice them. But after a while it depresses her, seeing the letters of that loved scene ground into freckles, and she starts to cheat just a little. Their eyes are just going to be goggling away at the TV anyhow. First intact letters, then soon whole words and a few phrases are dusting down into the vanilla batter. Her cake should damn sure be legible. She swirls the fragments in, and thinks that they aren’t so conspicuous really. ‘I must be going mad’ she snips out with extra care and reserves for decoration. She’ll tuck it under the frosting. Whoever finds it gets to make a wish.

She butters and flours two nine-inch round cake pans before pouring in the batter. Seriously, who looks at a piece of cake attentively enough to read it? Who even sees what they eat nowadays?

Her husband wolfs his cake right down. Her daughter says she isn’t hungry. And her son lingers at the table long after everyone else has gone, pulling his piece into smaller and smaller crumbs and sorting them into two piles, one with ink and one without. He never once looks up from this task, not even when she asks him to please help clear the table. You’d think the kid had gone deaf.

She can’t sleep. Her curlers are coming undone, straggling down her neck. She sits at the kitchen table–it must be three in the morning–smoking and reading a story by Henry James, “Sir Edmund Orme.” The ghost in this story has an unusual solidity, a daylight vividness, but it’s highly selective: although it appears at churches and parties (always appropriately attired) only three of the characters ever see it.

She’s not so sure about this. The only ghosts she knows are the ones who shape themselves sometimes from her cigarette smoke. Ghosts must be adhesive or something, because they fill up with smoke the way a lint trap catches lint, until they start to show vague wobbly heads, limp arms. If she looked up into the cone of light projecting from the top of her lamp she could see one right now, shimmying and swaying just to get her attention, but she doesn’t. Doesn’t want to give it the satisfaction. As she keeps reading, she feels more and more pissy towards ghosts in general, so much so that she stubs out her cigarette to deprive the one above her of substance.

So Sir Edmund Orme killed himself when Mrs. Marden dumped him. Is that really her fault? What kind of wimp kills himself over a girl? And besides, why does he have to pick on her kid? Charlotte Marden didn’t do anything to him, but Sir Edmund’s ghost won’t stop following her. All Charlotte’s doing is declining to fall in love with the narrator, and the housewife doesn’t like the narrator much, either. She hopes Charlotte won’t marry him.

She thinks she like The Wings of the Dove better. At least in that one the girl gets the money.

This story, she starts to realize, is about an intergenerational haunting specifically intended to hound poor Charlotte into the kind of loveless marriage her mother escaped by ditching Sir Edmund–and her mother is taking the ghost’s side! Just because she feels guilty! Is this what ghosts are all about, enforcing the limits on women’s lives?

Our housewife doesn’t look up. She lights another cigarette, acting really casual about it. Only way to see where the creep is lurking. She smokes it right down to the filter. From the corner of her eye she can see the ghost thickening up above her, bobbling and capering, desperate for acknowledgment.

She pushes her chair back, shuffles idly across her kitchen, like she was just going to get a glass of juice or a snack.

She picks up the broom and pivots fast on her heels. The ghost is too dumb to be worried. It’s practically spasming with happiness now that she’s looking at it.

She swings the broom as hard as she can.

In the morning she’ll have to think up some excuse for why the lamp got broken.