We Do What We Do in the Dark

by Michelle Hart

“No one is thinking of you that way,” said the woman. “No one is sitting around waiting for you to be good.”

Mallory felt a moment of becoming exactly the thing she had suspected she was; more than resignation, there came a sense of Yes, that’s it.

The best part of having nothing, Mallory thought, was that it couldn’t be lost.

Mallory realized this was how the woman was: she at once withheld and invited. The woman fulfilled so many of Mallory’s wants but left so many wants unfulfilled that the feeling of wanting in and of itself became desirable. There was an untouchable intensity, or an intense untouchability, to keeping a secret, to having a continuous crush, that Mallory wanted never to lose.

“Shame and pride often feel like the same thing. You begin to want to protect even the most embarrassing parts of your life.”

There is something pleasing about misery that makes it seem as though time has stopped.”

Mallory thought debating the meaning of life in a windowless room full of men was a cruel, if amusing, joke.

She worried her motherlessness, which Joseph knew about and had maybe relayed, was stamped across her forehead.

“This is what people do. If we didn’t talk about the inconsequential things that annoyed us, no one would talk about anything.”

“You and I,” she said, “we do what we do in the dark and then we deal with it all alone.” She puckered her lips and blew onto her nails. “That’s how I know you won’t tell anyone about us. If you did, whatever this is would no longer be just yours.”

“I want your life,” Mallory said. “I’m sure you’ll have it someday.”

Mallory was struck dumb by the portent of the woman’s words.

For Mallory, who’d been born with a lazy eye and later developed a cyst on one of her ovaries, this meant that her mother was lopsided too. If the two of them were halves, then together they could make a whole.

Because she saw herself as a girl only a mother could love, she often wanted to be alone, but if she couldn’t be alone, then she wanted to be the center of attention, which felt like a way to exert control over her aloneness.

Mallory listened to the two of them snicker, wanting to be let in on the joke, caught between making a new friend and sitting with the adults while they sipped their conspiratorial white wine.

My mom says he likes the idea of escape but not the reality of it.”

Still, she became aroused looking at herself, not because she thought she was all that pretty now but because she suspected someday that someone else would see this about her.

And for a moment, she had been the pretty one.

Also, she found surprising delight in the fact that a middle-aged woman could be as secretive and petty as a teenage girl.

Mallory thought then that the consequence of living so much of life through books and movies was that actual dramatic things felt unreal.

For seven years she had suffered mostly in silence; anytime someone else witnessed this distress she became resentful toward them.

What did it matter, Mallory wondered now, whether a woman was pretty or funny? She was fucked either way.

she had just wanted someone else to see her.

It was a marvelous allowance, Mallory saw then, to be given a glimpse of what another woman kept hidden.

“A boy?” “No, actually, a girl.” “At that age?” “Oh, no,” said Mallory, “it wasn’t anything like that.”

It occurred to Mallory now that what happened between that man and the woman might not have been good.

Mallory shifted in her seat, aroused by the muscle memory of having been in the woman’s bed, a time when she felt best about herself—beautiful enough to ruin someone’s life.

Before, this thought would have given Mallory a sense of superiority. Now, she felt like a loser. Yet she didn’t know exactly what she had lost.

“When you are constantly told you’re different, sometimes all you want to do is go off and be different. Marriage is boring. He jokes now about how much he misses being oppressed, how thrilling it felt when a relationship with another man was taboo. He says this so often that I don’t actually think he is joking.” “Honestly,” Mallory said, “I sort of understand what he means. Don’t you?” “Of course. There is no better sex than the kind no one knows you’re having.”

Mallory supposed the leap from bookish child to concubine did not seem far somehow.

Hilarious bc why would the woman think that but also… she should be seein a therapist

Mallory began to think that if she had become a cruel person, it was the woman who had made her that way.

Love, thought Mallory, was a lot like getting lost alongside someone else.

She felt there was nothing between her and the overwhelming brightness of the world.