Real Easy

by Marie Rutkoski

That sense of possibility crinkles up inside her like cellophane, like something that can’t return to its original shape even after it is smoothed out.

“Don’t be like this,” clearly wounded, close to anger, so she forgave him, because if she didn’t she would quickly be blamed. Although he had hurt her, she would be made to feel guilty for being hurt.

“Look, I like you, and I wish I could.” “I’m safe as houses.” “I can tell,” she says, because it is always wise to confirm a man’s good opinion of himself.

“Okay,” she says again. “I’ll quit.” He pulls back, horrified. He tells her he didn’t mean it. He takes it back, all of it. He tells her to work, if that is what she wants. She should do what she wants. He is so sorry. She tries to make him feel better for having hurt her.

The emotion Samantha feels thicken in her chest is close to pity but feels more personal, as though in being embarrassed for Jolene she experiences the aftermath of some shame from her own past, an unnameable moment that fills her with regret and the desire to revise.

She thinks about how her pediatrician called it a syndrome. She had been just a nervous kid, only fifteen, and had heard “sin dome,” and was afraid to ask what that meant. The doctor kept talking. He was kind, but his kindness was worn out, the way fabric gets thin at the elbows and knees.

THIS NIGHT WANTS to bend into itself. Some Saturday nights do. Men buy because others are buying, then buy because they have already bought, then hide from what they are doing by doing it again.

Victor has been awake for more than twenty-four hours now. It’s Sunday. It’s late. He should have spent the day napping and watching baseball. His brain is jigsawed, so that when he glances at the patrol officers there to secure the scene, he gets vertigo, and seems to be standing where they are standing.

Her grandmother prayed to God every night that Melody wouldn’t become a cripple. “I’m okay,” she would tell her grandmother over the phone. Melody didn’t like prayers. If God was listening, maybe the devil was, too. Maybe it was a bad idea to say what you wanted out loud.

The officer said to her father, “You’re going to have to come down to the station,” and then, for the first time, noticed Rosie. He put on a nice face, which made Rosie realize that the officer was not nice, and that whatever he had heard or was thinking was bad.

One day she thought, I could do that. And she needed the money. Simple as that. 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.

It is impossible. If she does what he wants, he is disappointed. If she disobeys, she will be punished. There is no way to please him because his greatest pleasure comes from there being no way.

She looks into glossy stores where the hands of dressed mannequins are lifted as if testing the wind. She passes the slow zippers of escalators, a fountain with brick planters. A Nordstrom lies not far ahead, one of the four anchor department stores set at opposing ends of the mall. The store’s quiet softens the threshold like cotton batting.