Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

ALCOHOLIC

Although we broke up two months ago, I agree to be his class reunion date anyway. I buy a dress I can’t fill and stuff it. Upon picking me up, my breasts are the first thing he comments on. They look frighteningly geometric and remind him of earmuffs, or Princess Leia.

I had cut a tennis ball in half and put one side into each bra cup. More natural-looking materials were available in my apartment, but I’d had a vision: he and I at the end of the night, drunk and reenamored. I’d take off my shirt and they’d practically glow in the dark. “Let me squeeze those fuzzy lemons,” he’d say, and I’d laugh and he’d toss them across the room; we’d make love to the sounds of their bouncing.

Already it seemed that probably wouldn’t happen.

When I wake up it’s 3,000 degrees and morning. I vaguely remember being in a large punch bowl and the DJ saying something about me over the microphone. I’m in a hot car, his, covered in a film of fruit punch and grapefruit vodka. One of the tennis ball halves is gone from my dress. I look over and see it on the driver’s seat, filled with quarters and a napkin note in microscopic print:

Here is some change. Go wash the puke from my backseat. Its more prominent aspects will have to be vacuumed up—use the foam brush. The one that leaves steam lines. Everyone at the reunion asked if I’d met you that night at an AA meeting.

I mean to do everything he suggests but realize I’m so sleepy, so I find a flowerbed a few blocks over and crash. No one invited the ants. They like the dried ice cream punch on my skin, and don’t stop biting if I only crush half of their bodies.

Unfortunately their carcasses stick to the punch film so I appear to have a flesh-eating disease. When I return to the car, he is standing there with a very clean woman. She is looking in at the pile of puke on the backseat with a glare of recollection and pain, as though it used to be her dog but her pet somehow got liquefied and his remains were then sprinkled with parsley (on the way to the reunion last night we’d stopped for some Italian. The waiter kept checking out my tennis balls).

“What are you covered in?” he asks.

“I’m Beth,” the girl offers reluctantly. She can’t look at me without scratching herself. I would scratch too, but my fingernails are already filled with dead ants.

“Is that your cousin?” she whispers to him.

I then realize clean Beth couldn’t attend the reunion, so he told her he’d take his cousin and called me.

When I walk up to him, Beth steps back. My one tennis boob has fallen down somewhere in the front of my dress, poking out like the tiniest pregnancy in the world.

“Cousin,” I report. I put my hand on his inner thigh. I realize my clothes are wet; maybe I had peed myself, or maybe the flowerbed had sprinklers.

The girl makes a squeak and leaves immediately on foot. I’m ready for him to run after her—to walk myself home, wash off the dead insects and grow very, very bored.

But instead he stares. I’m itchy, squirmy; he presses me back. His leg pins me against the car right in the ball-stomach. “I’m deciding if you’re too much,” he says, and I meet his stare fondly. I refuse to blink while I wait.