Real Easy

by Marie Rutkoski

He is so sorry. She tries to make him feel better for having hurt her.

although he had hurt her, wasn’t it because he was committed to her? Wasn’t jealousy a form of love?

It’s gross but also boring. There is nothing original about what men want to do to women.

She didn’t know how to express the expectedness of sexual violence, how it felt nearly inescapable.

It makes her impatient, the way people think that a stripper must be some cracked-out whore, like no good woman ever took off her clothes for practical reasons. What is marriage, half the time? Women have sex they don’t want in order to keep the peace and avoid the calamity of divorce, yet everyone thinks that’s perfectly acceptable.

How could she not have realized what he truly was from the moment she met him? She is to blame.

She supposed that liking the club was a betrayal of women. She knew that it was the dancers’ choice to work there, but also that everything about women and men had foreordained this choice.

He stood over their bed, yelling down at her. She got this scared rabbit look. Her face was pathetic. Manipulative. It was so easy to make him happy, if she only tried, and now she was making him feel like he was the crazy one.

She didn’t care to know the girls’ real names. Stage names were more real. They were chosen. They said something about a person.

“I thought some white Christians adopted you. They say they want to give Black babies a good home, but really they just want to raise them up white. They think it’s their calling.”