The Housewives’ Guide To Anatomy

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.

Is literature really over?

What else will keep subtext from burying us all? It keeps piling up–every word, every expression, has its heavy subtextual mimic, the freight of the unspoken that it drops on us. (Words that are manipulative,  sadistic, wheedling, drag endless wakes of unsaid replicas.) Literature gets the job of digging us out: reclaiming subtexts as texts, spelling out what weighs on us. Rendered as language, subtext lacks the same power to oppress.

Such a restless enterprise, when there’s always more of it, cultural and interpersonal, mounting on all sides. But it hardly strikes me that this is the moment to quit trying.

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.

Even if the room was definitely empty when you locked the doors and windows, inspected all the closets, and then turned off the lights, you should still assume it is populated once dark closes in. Whatever you cannot see is fecund and will surely breed figures that in one respect or another refer to the human form.

If something touches you in the dark, you should leap at once to the conclusion that this presence is animate, however cold, geometric, and lifeless its surfaces happen to feel. Does it refuse to yield under your fingertips, is it as chill and flat as the side of a refrigerator? Nonetheless, you must inform yourself loudly and insistently that it is not merely alive, but also intelligent and hungry. Do the work yourself. Conjure a coat of rough, oily hairs, breathing sides, and a smell of musk and upturned earth. The senses are deceptive unless properly directed, and this new version will surely be more accurate than your first impression.

If the presence then becomes threatening, try to distract it. Imagine beautified variants of your own body inside whatever garments happen to be lying around, or if none are available present the same body unclothed.