Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Read Free Page A

saying, “This is me and Garla. Peace.”
    She has made me the best-dressed party nerd of all time. Once, she put these chain link pants on me and I couldn’t move, not even like a robot. Garla—wearing six-inch stiletto heels—actually picked me up, carried me up the stairs to the party, and planted me by yet another fish tank, either so I’d have something to watch or because she knew that at some point, a part of her body would be posing inside of it and she very much wanted for me to be there to say, “Now Garla has to go home” when it started to get boring for her.
    There was never a conversation where Garla hired me to be her assistant. I just started speaking up when it made sense to, like when people asked if they could cut her arm a tiny bit with a sword in order to drink a drop of it off the blade’s tip and she answered them with “Special coffin,” in a very tiny voice. “We have to go, Garla,” I used to say, but I soon learned that “Garla has to go” is a better way to phrase it, because then it seems like it’s entirely out of her control and she doesn’t have a choice. Garla does not like choices.
    Tonight we go to another fashion show. Garla’s walking in it so I wait backstage in the chair where her makeup was done, and at several points people inquire as to why I’m there. Very few actually want me to leave; they’re just genuinely trying to understand.
    Afterwards we go to the home of a fellow model where I watch Garla drink herself into a deep sea. She is a metronomcial drinker. I can count the glasses she drinks per hour, like a time signature, and know exactly how drunk she is at any given moment. With me it’s the opposite; the drunk is that mystery wedding guest who may show up early, late, or not at all. By four a.m. Garla is lying on an island countertop in the kitchen. Some guy has dumped a miniature Buddhist sand garden out on her abdomen, and he’s swirling the sand around over her stomach with a tiny bamboo rake. Her head is not on the counter; it’s flipped back like a Pez dispenser, and I walk over and we have this intoxicated moment.
    “I know you’re more,” my drunken eyes say. They say this in a breathy, hesitant manner that insists it has taken a lot of time for them to work up the courage to say such a thing, without words nonetheless.
    “Yes,” answer Garla’s eyes, and like all of Garla’s answers it is a mysterious pearl whose full value I begin to appraise immediately. I walk over to her and lift her head up with my hands so it is level with the counter, holding it. I look down at her like a surgeon.
    “Some type of sausage,” Garla says; she likes the cured meats.
    It is hard not to drop her head, not to toss it away like a shell that seemed of greater worth from a distance, beneath the water.
    I keep wondering if Garla will ask me to quit my regular job copyediting and join her full-time in model-land. Her agency is very good to her, but I know she needs me, or at least could really use me, more than she does, which leads me to wonder two things: Does Garla have others like Me? If so, how many Mes are there? Does she really need Me at all? The thing about Garla is that it’s always okay for Garla. No matter what happens, Garla will be okay. I just speed the okayness up a little bit for her so that okay is sure to happen in real time.
    Although my life has so many more great things in it now than before I met Garla, I’m still beginning to feel used. And—how can I deny this—I want more of Garla. She is a rare substance, if only because of the role and power she has in our society and not anything she holds innately. Rare substances make people feel selfish and greedy, and Garla is no exception. Neither am I.
    I am also getting a little sick of my special Garla-phone, but it’s really expensive and the only thing Garla will call me on. I got rid of my other phone and now have only the phone Garla gave me, perhaps because I know she intended it