---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108-page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/paperback book “Moving Forward” cc&d, v329 (the January 2023 issue) Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book a Mural of a Forest the cc&d Jan.-April 2023 magazine issues collection book		get the 426 page Jan.-April 2023 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Once, a Man Like You

Mae Ellen-Marie Wissert

    I’m always cleaning up after you.
    Leaves like helicopter blades blow through the doorframe onto the linoleum before gathering on the carpet where your size 14 shoes smoosh and break them into tiny pieces.
    In the beginning, this is what we have: a stuffy two-bedroom basement apartment with tan carpet and windows level with the ground outside. I can see people’s shoes as they walk by on the busy street downtown. You don’t notice at first, but I start moving my stuff in little by little. In May, I bring my toothbrush. Before that, you probably also didn’t notice that I was using yours. Then, I move in my beauty supplies: shampoos, conditioners, curling irons, and eyelash curlers and tweezers. I organize your closet to sneak some space in for my stuff. Eventually, I chisel away enough space for my sweaters and long dresses. You have so many shirts. You hang your pants on fancy hangers with clips, your shirts on velvet ones. Coogi sweaters like Bill Cosby that your ex-girlfriend gave you makes it look like a rainbow threw up in there.
    I’m not paying half the rent. I’m not paying any rent. I’m living with you rent-free. You take care of me, for a little while.
    In July, we take a long drive north to the smaller town where I used to live. We take the long way through the reservation. Airplanes fly low dropping red insecticide dust onto the potatoes in the fields just outside my passenger side window. Days like this are little milestones of relationships that we are lucky to experience together. We hold hands on the way there, letting go only to put cigarettes in our mouths and light them. You look away from the road to put flame to the one that hangs out of my mouth. We flick them; your knees firmly grip the steering wheel to keep our hands knotted. I feel so lucky that you are mine.
    I try to gather my things from my Aunt Judy’s house quickly enough to appease you. Why do you have to fold everything?, you say, so I hurry. Aunt Judy sews in the room over.
    We go to my grandparent’s house so they can meet you. They like you.
    On our drive home, we take the long way again. I drink too much wine. We get home and go for a walk through the neighborhood. Me: trying not to trip over my own feet. Me: trying not to slur my words. You point to a small house. That’s what I want, you say, just you and me in a tiny house. That’s all we need. Clean sheets hang on the line next to the house and blow in the wind. I bend over and get rid of some of the wine in a rosemary bush. One of your giant hands holds back my blonde hair and the other rubs my bony back. I feel better.
    We look into each other’s eyes and cry because we see forever, and it looks good. I gaze into yours and I see flashes of our future: our marriage, our babies and watching them grow. I see both of us old and grey. Hands clasped for eternity. One day one of us is going to have to live without the other, I say sobbing, nose leaking.
    Don’t say that, you say, we might die at the same time.

    My grandma told me that men like my grandpa used to come home in work boots and take them off at the door if they were the nice kind. Some kept boot scrapers on their porches. Some wouldn’t and they would drag dust or dirt or mud or whatever particles clung to them after their long day. God help the woman with a thoughtless lover who worked in an oil field; she’d be slipping on the tile. The waste manager at a nuclear power plant: she’d be giving birth to rat babies; carpets glowing green. The masons who came home with concrete on their steel-toed boots and tales of how they watched a crew member fall somewhere along the seven-hundred-twenty-six-foot wall, bodies stuck in the cement for eternity, the Hoover Dam like a giant headstone. Men like these would drag this stuff all through the house. They knew houses magically cleaned themselves.
    I like cooking lunch for you when you come home on your hour-long lunch break from your computer job, that I always wished was longer then. That day, it’s breakfast for lunch. Sausage, eggs, and pancakes. While I’m cooking, an egg falls out of my hand and onto the floor. The baseboards are streaked with years of dirt. I wash them after scooping up the albumen, in between stirring and flipping. In the background on the television, the women in the white dresses dance around each other ceremoniously with crowns made of flowers. Their skin is pale and white like mine and seems to glitter as they dance. They fall. The last one standing is the May Queen.
    You come home and tell me about your day, which is only halfway through. Your voice is loud and booming. Your face turns red, like roses and your eyes are big like saucers that I put milk in for the kittens that live outside of our apartment, feeding off of the mice that live in burrows around the apartment and in the walls. Your clenched hands drizzle sticky, glistening syrup all over the top of the fluffy pancakes and the butter melts and into the pancakes, penetrating the tiny pores. For the first time, I notice your anger. Your fork in your fist cutting through the cakes. I can’t touch mine.
    When your lunch break is over you wish you could stay with me. Maybe you want to yell some more or maybe you want to kiss me or maybe you want to pull me down onto the freshly mopped floor. I say I wish you could stay with me and mean it then. You kiss me goodbye. You’re so much larger than me. You envelop me and you tell me how much you love me and don’t even look at my face. As you go, you take the poison of your anger with you. My shoulders loosen. I didn’t notice it when you walked in, but I could see it drug behind you as you left. You leave your dirty dishes on the kitchen table. I put them in hot soapy water.
    In times before and far away from us, a man like you would be far underground with a pickaxe on his belly or back; squished into a tight space with a bright light in the center of his hardhat that used to be yellow but years of digging in the veins of the earth had turned it black. 6'4" tall and strong, coming home, face coated in inky black coal. He’d bring home a sense of dignity that only comes from using every last piece of physical strength he had. He’d scrub and scrub and try to get it all off him, but it wouldn’t budge. Even though he would be tired, he would be proud and find the want in him; his last bit of energy coming out of his loving fingers as they turned my insides dark. Our faces pressed together, my face glazed dark too. Our bed sheets smeared black. The morning after, I would have to spend some time washing them in hot suds and hang them on the line to dry. But I wouldn’t mind.

    Even before I officially move my stuff in, I can’t stand the look of the filth. I clean things that haven’t been cleaned in years: your stove, caked with thick, creamy grease; your refrigerator; stained with sticky juice. Old vegetables lay in the bottom drawers surrounded by murky, brown water; your bathtub: at least four years of built-up dirt that’s dripped off bodies; a mat lining the bottom so it’s less slippery but all I can think about is the bacteria that live in there. When I shower alone, I try to keep my feet off of it. When we shower together it’s all I can look at as I’m folded in front of you: one half of who I am.
    One day after work, you yell at me for the first time. I steeped iced tea in an old pickle jar, the taste of tea leaves mixed with the smell of pickles, which you hate. Something shatters. Then you yell all the time: for being at an intersection too long; for leaving cashmere sweaters and maxi dresses on the racks in the bathroom; for clogging the kitchen drain by not scraping the plates well enough; for being so stupid to think you’d ever want to have babies with someone as careless and messy as me.

    A man like you used to be in a forest. He’d come home smelling like mahogany and in his free time he’d work on a bigger house for us, even though the one we have is perfectly fine. It’s just the two of us. He’d say that when we have a bigger house, we can make a cub. I am getting older, and he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to finish. His hands would be dry and scratchy when they caressed me. We’d make love. I’d wrap my legs around him like a rope to try to keep him inside of me, but he’d pull out at the last second. He’d kiss me goodnight and tell me he loves me. I’d wake up and smell the mahogany that lingered on the sheets and his pillow. It would smell so sweet, but the purple dust covers the mirrors and bookshelves. I’d spend most of the day sweeping and wiping the coated surfaces.

    In the evenings, when your rant is over and my head hurts and my bones are tired and want me to ask you to please shut up, you fall asleep in front of a screen of a movie we were supposed to be watching together. I watch the elderly couple as they jump off the cliff. I turn to talk to you about how disturbing it all is and there you lay on your big chair, mouth open and breathing loud.
    After the movie, I want to ask you to go for a walk with me. I want your hand to smother mine. I want to talk to you about the man in the bear suit and the woman who loved him but smiled and cried tears of joy as she watched him burn.
    But I don’t do any of that. Instead, I let you fuck me and call it making love.

    In September, we decide we’re going to move into a house. The mice in the apartment have overtaken the kitchen, chewing holes in cracker sleeves and leaving excrement in pots and pans, and the landlord won’t call an exterminator. You set up mouse traps but they’re constantly going off on your peanut butter covered fingers as you set them. I hear a snap and then your screams as I lay on the plush blue velvet couch. I laugh but only to myself. We find a house. A tiny white house with red trim.
    In our new house, the doorways are too short, and you don’t learn how to duck. Your bald head earns a pretty-much permanent bump the same height as the doorframe. There isn’t enough room for both of our clothes, so I box some of mine up and ask you to put them in the basement with the spiders. You hit your head again as you’re coming back up the stairs and it ruins your whole entire day. You scream obscenities at the house, at me, wishing you never moved in here. It’s too small for you.

    Men like you were always looking for something bigger. Men like you would have cows drop dead from the exhaustion of pulling a wagon during westward expansion. Men like you fulfilling their destiny. Men like you slicing the cows right then and there. Men like you with their shiny knives. Men like you didn’t have a choice. Blood puddled along the trail. It didn’t make sense for men like you to lug around a huge dead cow; getting more swollen and bloated as the day and the heat progressed. Men like you would cut the parts they wanted and leave the rest.
    You pick out tri tip at the local grocery store, and I remember the strawberry margaritas I made at our last dinner party. My friends are already skeptical about you. Last time you threw a tequila bottle across our backyard because I sat too close to Jeff. It shattered on the asphalt. Glass splintered everywhere. You swore I wanted to fuck him. You swore he wanted to fuck me. He did well to defuse you, I thought, something I could never do. In the end you two hugged each other, paws on each other’s backs and I imagined everything was alright. They left. But you weren’t done with me. You raised your voice. All I wanted was to collapse on my bed and close my eyes but when I tried you flicked the light on. A walk alone would have calmed me, but you blocked the door and the way out. You grabbed my pale face and you squeezed and forced me to look up at you. You let go hard and I could still feel the warmth of your hands wrapped around my jaw up to my cheeks. As you pushed me backwards onto the bed, I told you to stop but you sunk your thick claws into me anyway.

    When we arrive my friend’s white house, my body is tense. Maybe things will go better this time. The tri-tip goes on the grill; it sizzles and my mouth waters. The air is awkward like everyone knows something I don’t. I see you trying to keep your cool, but I know you feel it too. You look human for a second as you try to impress them with your jokes. The lush, green backyard has a fire pit in the middle, and we sit around it, butts planted on camping chairs. The meat is moist like I like it and I watch you let the pink juices drip out of your mouth and onto the plate. Later, we make smores. The hot, gooey black marshmallow, and the melted chocolate oozes out of the sides of the sweet sandwich.

    A man like you used to be gone for a few days and I’d wonder where he was: if he was still alive or if something more vicious and somehow bigger got him. I’d look out our window and past the white flakes that crowded the air and my vision; I’d think I’d see him walking in the distance, cervine blood dripping through the snow, his dark snow-shoed footprints following behind him like an endless shadow far into the mountains. I’d boil water and pour it in the bathtub. I’d put sticky, sweet porridge on the wood-burning stove. In the doorway, I’d admire his icy beard. When he got out of the bath, I’d scour the tub to get rid of the red film where the pink water line was, hands stained red for days. When I’d get to the bedroom, he’d already be sleeping, his cold hands far away from my body.

    In January, our days are cold and white.
    “You’re supposed to support me,” you say to me as we were driving home from your friend’s house after a football game. You’re wearing your teams’ jersey: the Chicago Bears. I don’t tell you look fat in it. I don’t give a shit about football. We’re in your white Cadillac. You’re always complaining about how it costs too much. At the party, you made a joke that I didn’t laugh at. You’re not a comedian.
    When we get home, the eggshells fall out of the car, and I trample on them.
    You yell. I scream and slam my fists on the counter. I pull at my hair, try to get you to hear me. You don’t. I go into the bathroom and lock the door. I look in the bathroom mirror. Red and infuriated, I look like the you I’ve seen so many times. I want to be alone, and you jiggle the handle. The only thing standing in the way of you and your prey is a door made of particle board.
    I curl up in the corner like it’s my winter cave. Except then I don’t.
    This is the part where I’m not made smaller anymore.
    I think of the man who destroys mountains in search of coal. Swinging axes that wound the Earth then pick the scabs. I think of the man who cuts down trees and then entire forests. I think of the man who left that which didn’t serve him on land that never belonged to him on his way to grab more. Just a flag and all this belongs to you now. I think of the man who misses the head on the first, second, and third shot. He catches up to the deer as it shakes and bleeds and pants and stares him in the face.
    You have no choice but to put it out of its misery now. Adrenaline and fear have already soured the meat. You leave it behind for the wolves and bears.
    The door starts shaking and banging loudly as your size 14 shoed foot comes through and pieces goes flying. It releases itself and the hinges sway, and it feels like betrayal.
    A woman like me thinks about fire and white dresses and covered wagons and the times your hands would reach between my legs after I said “no.”
    A woman like me calls the police and they come. They tell a man like you to leave and she watches him drive away leaving tire tracks in the snow, leaving a woman like me to sweep up the mess afterwards. You left your Coogi sweaters behind.
    A woman like me notices some blood on the sleeve of one of the sweaters. She scrubs it away. She scrubs the hem of her dress. Squeezing out the suds and draping it over the towel rack. She hangs her cashmere sweater there too. She hangs a floral dress from the doorframe where the door is missing, then another on the refrigerator. She grabs a lacy one and hangs it in the pantry, another on the cupboard. She hangs all of her dresses all over the house, ditzy print creeping into the bedroom. She dances with them until she falls down. Then she gets up, takes the wreath—weaved with pink plastic peonies, purple geraniums, and white daisies—off her front door and places it atop her proud head.

 

    “Once, A Man like You” was previously published in Black Rock & Sage.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...