Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

The Paradise Deluxe was loud in every way—the carpets were an unfortunate explosion of red and orange and green and purple; classic rock blared from speakers in the ceiling.

They hugged, pounding each other’s backs in the violent way men show affection.

Their shoes are slick and shiny, just like their hair.

All her life Marcy had lived in the Midwest with people who ate red meat and starchy foods, who allowed their bodies to spread without shame.

She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.

Their voices are deep and velvety in the way of women who know things.

She’s not ashamed of who she is but in Baltimore it’s easier to be a white girl with a black girl’s ass than to be a black girl who looks white or any other kind of black girl for that matter.

He used to think his wealth was a burden but quickly realized what he could get away with.

The next time I talk to Tate I will tell her she’s the man of my dreams.

In my lab things make sense.

Outside, a fresh blanket of snow has fallen. The moon is still high. Everything is perfect and silent and still. The air hurts but feels clean.

There is this life and that life. We pretend that life never happened. It is a mercy.

If it isn’t winter, which is not often, she climbs out onto her roof with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Anna asks Hanna if she’s seeing another man and Hanna tells her sister the truth. She says, “No,” and Anna frowns. She knows Hanna is telling the truth. She knows Hanna is lying. She cannot quite figure out how she’s doing both at the same time.

The stone thrower lives in a glass house with his glass family.

My father didn’t love my mother. I don’t even think he loved me but he did love making us miserable by refusing to leave.

she found another woman’s earrings on her nightstand. “Tacky costume jewelry,” she said, as if the quality of the earrings angered her more than their presence in her bedroom.

She never asked me about our fishing trips or why we never brought any fish home.

a baby store for people with too much money and no sense.

a grocery store, the kind where everything is organic and artisanal and overpriced. For the first time in our marriage, we could afford to shop wherever we wanted.

Every time that man sank his fists into my body, I could breathe a little. I used one hurt to cover another.

Mickey Minty wasn’t incapable of handling responsibility, but given his mother’s expectations, he simply didn’t have the energy for anything more.

Winter is more a state of being than a season, in this place.

I refuse to play the part of the dissatisfied, jealous wife. I’m not dissatisfied. I know who I married.

I do not care for the taste of venison. It tastes too much like the flesh of an animal.

Sometimes I sit in one of our empty rooms, perfectly decorated, frozen in time. I sit on the floor and stare at the pink wallpaper and the wooden letters on the wall spelling a name and the linens my mother made for a perfect, tiny bed. I rock back and forth until I cannot breathe and then I crawl into the hallway and gasp for air.

Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.

she lives vicariously through me as I do through her, so she doesn’t need to get married and I don’t miss being single.

People ask us if we have some kind of special connection. We lie and tell them we don’t.

He is convinced the child is his. He is not wrong.

the money he had earned by making money for other men.

We weren’t much used to the sun anyway. That’s what we tell ourselves now that the sun has been gone so long.

Most of us guessed the Corona were mostly interested in finding a way to reopen the mines, to make themselves even more wealthy.

All the fast-food restaurants were empty now, mostly boarded up because of the Austerity Articles. There was no place for frivolity, not anymore.