All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

My boss demanded I wear pantyhose. You are a contractor, he told me, no benefits. Women who work for me wear makeup, that is how it is. My men wear suits.

Early on he called me his rock star. This was funny to me, since in actuality rock stars get onstage, perform, fuck many girls, wreck the hotel room. I, meanwhile, sweated competence, a hungry efficiency. Waxed my arms, radiated deference, never met a Gantt chart I didn’t like.

This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit. As the summer began, I moved to Milwaukee, a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away, I lay on the sun-warmed wood floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.

knew how beautiful I was in that moment, felt it burned into me, a brand.

In summertime Milwaukee is six-packs in parks, listening to free jazz, festival everything, gastropubs with the young and hip foaming out of them, home repairs, grilling out. All neighborliness, sweet like a laugh.

Postwar decline gutted the neighborhood. Smoked it, cased it, cured it for another day.

Who could ever hate you? You don’t know me, I said, pleasantly enough.

We’d been put in different rooms to sleep. When he snuck in to go down on me, I thought, despite marshalling every neuron available to block this comparison, of the half-blind family dog, who’d licked my shin repeatedly during dinner.

I felt abashed and earnest and yearning and very very young.

I didn’t know everywhere. I knew the place that spawned me, which, based on visits past, already was mutating beyond my recognition. I knew our college town, the way someone still essentially a child could learn a place. One day maybe I would know Milwaukee.

Tig’s boldness moved through other people. I stuck my head out of the Honda Fit’s moonroof and sang its refrain into the cold evening air.

But it originated somewhere instinctive in my belly, not my brain,

I’d never tasted this sort of meat before, and it was sweet and creamy but still of the sea, retaining the essence of its origin. That seemed beautiful to me, and haunting too.

My mother’s face swam before me. As did my father’s eyes: large and intelligent, with great capacity for laughter and fear.

What I recalled most clearly from that class was my own reaction, the fear and discomfort that revealed to me where my loyalties lay, how I believed change should happen: civilized, inspiring, with speeches, without blood. With perhaps a modicum of fairness for people who had not made the cruel machine that was now being bludgeoned but tried to look out for themselves and live, run the train cars of their lives on the tracks laid out before them.

The air ate at me. I held my body very stiff and told myself, One foot, then another, then another.

At one point she asks a woman employed at a fish cannery if she made friends with, was close to, talked with the other women on the factory assembly line. Not really, the woman answers. The woman’s boyfriend hangs around nearby, ready to pick her up. What do you do all day, then? I daydream. What do you daydream about? the writer presses. About sex. I guess that’s my fault, the boyfriend apologizes proudly. No, it’s not you, says the woman. It’s the tuna fish.

I had chosen to be matter-of-fact, slip the pronoun in like a receipt in a shopping bag. No need to make a production.

It’s distressing, how many people elect to be boring when they have the option not to be.

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.

To shame me for wanting what I had been taught to want seemed like a callous cheat, a wanton shifting of goalposts.

As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment.

I went to fetch the coconut grater before I dared to retort from the safety of the next room, This is a hotel. And I, like you, am a servant in it.

taking in the bemused look in her eyes, feeling the vague gathering mists of foolishness—and of course, real wild desire is braided tightly with foolishness, with all that is awkward and stilted.

One by the vegetable garden said, appended by a question mark, Sneha’s Parents? I closed the small notebook and held it to my heart; I burst into tears.

I could never tell them this, the same way I could never let Marina or my friends know how skewed the image they had of me was, how deep my failure ran.

Funk is real.

My scores and answers indicated, among other things, she had said, a lack of excitement about the future. Sleeping a great deal or sleeping very little. An ongoing melancholy. My laughter burbled up again, helpless, irrepressible. It was the first time I had been this disrespectful to a grown-up. If you cured me of all these, I told her, I don’t even know who I would be. It would be like getting lobotomized. I would not recognize myself.

Something settled in me, clicked into place like a cog.

feels so bad to tell you any of this, I gasped. Because of what you and Papa went through. I’m not a good child, and it’s okay, I never have been, but I wanted to honor what you all did for me, Ma, I wanted to at least not cause you pain— My nose dripped. My mother asked me a few questions, her voice calm. Okay, mollé, she said gently. Don’t worry so badly. We will call in the morning. You go get sleep now.

Shit. Sorry. Sorry. Pass the wine, I’ll wash down my foot.

You so crazy. What? Son. Garbage came outta here.

Garbage mentioned