Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

GARDENER

It began during an unconscionably dry spell in lovemaking for Robert and me. I’d gone to the bathroom to cry in my robe, which is big and towellike and cloaks my large and lonely breasts that hang from age. I kept pulling my robe in tighter to swaddle them; in my head I could hear them screaming for attention and I tried to muffle the noise by drawing my robe in even tighter. I was pondering going into the guest room and smothering them with a pillow when I saw the gnomes.

They appeared to be necking, a female and a male gnome. I squinted at them through my bathroom window. “You’ve gone crazy,” I told myself, “that frigid man has made you nuts.” Yet there they were in front of me, clearly rubbing against one another by the bushes. Then, simply and effortlessly, the plastic deer that sits in front of our hydrangeas got up and walked over towards them, stilted on thin plastic legs, to lick the salt from their skin.

Of course shame followed. I already felt guilty about wanting to be satisfied by my husband, who had now turned me down every night for an entire month. I kept telling myself that it wouldn’t, simply could not last four whole weeks, but each day drew closer to that horrible terminus, the point at which, I felt, I must accept the fact that Robert was either cheating on me or had fallen deeply out of love with my physical person.

But now there was a newer, more velvet shame, one soft with complete insanity. I cannot describe how hypnotic it was to watch the gnomes, the deer with the sandpapery-plastic tongue. It seemed wrong, like getting turned on at the zoo. I had opened my towel robe and pressed my flesh to the cold, dark window. Panted. Made steam.

When I went back to bed, I stared at Robert, who had a pie-slice-sized ray of light over his turned-up chin. My skin was flushed and my towel robe hung open, slowly absorbing the sweat from my body. Wake up and look at me, I thought, I’m presenting you with all that I have. My feet stopped at the lit bar from the streetlamp that fell upon the carpet, a boundary of the night-world where gnomes and deer lived and played on one side and Robert snored soundly on the other. How good it would feel to take Robert inside that light, to have both our bodies squeeze together somehow, for our particles to jump into a shared space and stay.

That night I had a Lilliputian dream about the gnomes binding me to my bed. It culminated with the male gnome riding in atop the large plastic deer to demonstrate his prowess over creatures several times his own size.

I gasped as I woke, but Robert was nowhere to be found; he’d left for work and I was stuck playing detective: searching for traces of his aftershave on the carpet in front of his dresser, looking for new stray hairs around the sink. I felt like maybe I’d invented the person I’d always assumed my husband to be, and now, at sixty-two, it was perhaps time to grow up and let him go.

“Well we’re not teenagers anymore,” he tells me that night, when I bring up how it has been a full month of abstinence. I am dressed like a cheerleader, albeit a fat, wrinkled one. I purchased the uniform from a costume shop. The fabric is cheap and the initials of the school it touts are a dubious “FU.”

“Do you think I should get a breast lift?” I ask, though he’s already turned over and has shut off the light by his bed stand.

“Why would you do something like that?” he mumbles. Seeds of what soon will be gentle snores are already pollinating in the back of his throat.

Against my better judgment, I creep out into the garage in my uniform. It’s exciting to think of how awful it would be should someone see me, a neighbor or one of the subdivision’s night security officers. Robert’s car is a long Cadillac and I lie down across the hood and the windshield, stretching myself. From here I can see the backyard out the garage’s side window, and once again the femme gnome and the male have taken up one another’s company. The lust inside the male gnome’s sturdy brow makes his cherubic face seem dangerous and a little thrilling. His white beard has a silvery hue; its shine is modern, like clothes the young people wear into nightclubs. He seems to be in some kind of race against himself; his frown reminds me of a depression-era work mural, a depiction of unyielding strength that cannot be slowed down by the whims of economic fate.

Spying on them, I have the strangest sensation that the car beneath me is going to start up, turn on its lights and bust through the garage door carrying me splayed upon it in my failed costume. Would the gnomes stop what they were doing and hide then, I wondered? Would they erotically harden in place?

On the night marking a sexless forty days and forty nights, I decided this is it. I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and left the bedroom. “What?” Robert called halfheartedly. “Have I been snoring?” I went to the guest room and told myself that from now on, I was sleeping there. I’d had enough of pretense.

The guest room is right next to the garden, so close that I feared they might see me watching. I carefully lit a single match and hid below the windowsill. Peeking through the mini blinds, I watched my gnome in the throws of passion with the yard’s plumpest female milkmaid gnome. I decided that she might have to have a horrible ceramic accident soon.

But oh, his buttocks, the worker-bee industry of their contractions as they squeezed up and out! The muscles of his tiny back as he ran his fingers through her hair! I lit match after match as they burned down to my fingers, letting the pain linger slightly longer with each one. It stung: how could I die without knowing such passion? Why should I be deprived while some statue got her fill?

They finished and she fell backwards into his arms, her Dutch bonnet slightly askew. He helped her step into her wooden clogs and sat back down to pack his pipe. I watched lustfully as he hitched his overalls back up. Then, suddenly, he started patting his pockets and cursing, scanning over the ground around him. It hit me: he needed a light for his pipe.

As I slid up the windowsill, I heard the collective gasp of the gnomes and other ornaments, all except my gnome, who looked at me with steady eyes. I lit a new match and held it out towards him. “I love you,” I whispered as he took tiny steps nearer. “Are you real?”

When he stepped into the light of the flame, a tight grip washed through me and I felt the vertigo of six decades falling away. My mind seemed new and just-born—I could only stare at him and make heavy breaths of wonder. The creases in his forehead were so small and delicate; all his skin seemed like a soft dried fruit.

I lit his pipe but then made the mistake of grazing his forehead with my hand. He instantly turned still and cold; the fire of his pipe went to ash.

I heard them at night, each night, working and toiling, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it until it actually happened. I woke up to the guest bedroom bathed in a soft, pink glow. When I got out of bed and saw his cone hat rising slowly from the ground like an emerging missile, I knew I’d been right in determining the cause of all the noise: they’d been digging a tunnel into my bedroom floor.

They began coming in each evening to perform for me, all of them: the animals and the swans and the gnomes and even the flamingos. Of course I didn’t get close or touch—I didn’t want a repeat of the last time, where it all disappeared and they hardened. It had made me feel like a cross between Midas and Medusa. And how awkward it would be to have to parade them all out from my bedroom back into the yard in the middle of the night, perhaps running into Robert as he headed to the bathroom with bowel trouble.

I grew and grew my collection, stopping almost daily to pick out new friends to meet in the flesh that evening. And understanding that My Gnome could not physically be mine, my jealousy faded; instead we became a team. I tried to choose the most beautiful and artfully sculpted female gnomes for him, knowing that he would trace them back to me as the root of his pleasure.

How he watched me when he was with them, and how I watched him. At first I only watched; I felt like such a simple old woman. But after a while, I began to touch myself while they played, and I watched them watch me. Often I’d cry because their miniature world was just so beautiful. I felt like my love was a giant blanket, the top of a tent, and each night they all came inside of it to move around and make me warm.

For Valentine’s Day, I cooked Robert a steak to keep him busy and then told him I wasn’t feeling so well. “Do you mind if I turn in a little early?” I asked. He did not look up from his potatoes, which were mashed. He was giving them a secondary mashing with his fork.

“Think I’ll be asleep pretty soon too,” he said.

With that, I put my dishes in the sink and ran to my bedroom. I’d gotten up early and painted togas onto all the gnomes and creatures with washable white paint—I wanted a Roman theme, and they did not disappoint.

Around three in the morning I was waving goodbye as they all crawled back down into the hole, everyone except my darling. He and I had held eyes the whole night, throughout everything. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded. His rosy, tulip-bud cheeks glistened in the lamplight. Then he pointed at my braid.

My braid is long and gray; I’ve been letting it grow since my thirties. “You want to touch it?” I asked. “Is that a good idea?” I didn’t want him to harden, though I thought of bringing him into bed in his statue form, even if he would feel like a cold doll. At least I could put my cheek to his and sleep throughout the night.

He shook his head and made a scissor motion, then posed his hands as though he had a shovel in them, digging up invisible earth and throwing it over his back.

“You want me to cut it off and bury it?”

He nodded. His large knuckles went to his lips as he blew me a kiss, then he disappeared down the magic rabbit hole they’d dug.

I didn’t get much sleep after they left. Was this a kind of power trip on My Gnome’s part? Did I really want to cut away thirty years of hair? Could he somehow enjoy my hair more if it was buried in the ground?

For days I thought it over, hoping each evening he would come to answer my questions. But no one came, not a single one of them. At nights when I’d look out my window he’d be there facing me, making the same scissor-shovel motions over and over. The rest of the ornaments stood behind him like disciples; with his large hat he seemed like a cult leader. They all nodded silently, appearing brainwashed.

By the fourth morning I was broken. Robert was playing solitaire on the computer and generating loud low-tech noises of victory and defeat. Fiery tears began to surge and I bounced up. I cannot live in the suburbs another day without him, I told myself, and I ran to the garage and shut my eyes and used wire cutters to snip the whole braid off below its rubber band.

When I dangled it out before me it looked impressively magic, like the long wiry skin of a snake I’d never want to meet.

I buried it at the male gnome’s feet, a shallow grave, and ran back inside. Robert glanced away from the computer screen momentarily. “Did you get a haircut?”

“I did, Robert.” I went into my bedroom and placed my pillow over my face and cried, and when I woke up it was already morning. My Gnome hadn’t come at all.

Manic, I went to every garden center in the tri-state area. I found each imaginable temptation: donkeys, centaurs, the prettiest and most apple-pie female gnomes available. When it was nine o’clock at night and all the stores were closing, I made my last purchase and handed the bills to the cashier. Unable to stop myself, I blurted out: “He has to love me. Or else I don’t know what.” She was young, perhaps sixteen, and chewing gum.

“I do not know anything about men,” she said.

As I pulled into my subdivision, my foot hit the gas when I saw a group of people had congregated across the street from my house. Some were pointing, others snickering. “Oh,” I exclaimed when I saw it. There was a life-sized marble statue of a heavyset middle-aged man in my garden.

I ran past everyone, ignoring all the calls of my name. A miniature giraffe fell to the ground from my arms and shattered. I ran inside yelling “Robert, Robert”: of course an answer didn’t come. There were deer grazing around the computer where Robert had been sitting, small chipmunks outside his bedroom door.

“Oh,” I cried, “oh, my.” There inside my bedroom sat my real dwarf in the flesh. I wish the whole world could’ve seen his rosy cheeks, the bed sheets turned down, his beard braided into a long braid the color and length of my former hair. I touched his bare skin and watched as it flushed and stayed soft.