Ways Mary-Beth Could Spend Her Friday Night

Option #1

The quiet boy in your office said he’d love to take you hiking. You’ve never been hiking in your life, but you told him to pick you up around dinner time. When he rings the doorbell wearing frayed flannel and work boots, he will ask why you are wearing a dress, why the lipstick. The mountain’s waiting, he’ll say, put on some man’s clothes. From the stoop of your apartment, you will be able to see the truss bridge over the creek, low in its bed; the mountain behind it, ridges like a crippled spine. It reminds you of the McAllister place, the abandoned cabin behind your high school, where the boys dropped their beers bottles in the well and the girls never came out the same. There won’t be any cell service on that mountain. Tell the quiet boy you have a headache. When he offers to cook you dinner instead, tell him lactose problems, tell him laundry. When he leaves, lock the door. Run a bath and dump in your roommate’s lavender aromatherapy salts. Undress in front of the mirror and imagine your thin ankles tucked into hiking boots, your wrists bound in fishing line.

Option #2

Walk to the restaurant by the river and sit alone at the bar. Put on the tights without runs in them, trace glitter eyeliner on your lids from the drugstore on the square. This is an experiment, remind yourself. When the first man offers you a drink, a middle-aged man in a black t-shirt with his eyes loose and low, politely decline. Sip your water. They will stare, their fingers on their glasses like talons. You will wonder if they have wives, children, pensions. Wonder if they are virgins, if they are criminals. They stare into the dregs of coffee, the used up limes at the bottoms of their gin and tonics. The jukebox kicks to life, belching out Friends in Low Places and the bar starts to sing. A man with teeth like dirty piano keys swings an arm around your shoulder and your blood jumps. Slide off the bar stool and walk home with your keys gripped in your hands. Empty the bottle of red wine in the fridge, its rank red sugar swirling down the kitchen sink.

Option #3

Go to the police, finally. Walk into the station and ask for the sheriff. By now the DNA is gone, but you remember a scar on his cheek, running the length from his eye to his mouth, the skin white and raised up singing. There can’t be many men like that. Tell them the seven and seven he bought you tasted bitter, but you drank it anyway. Tell them he took your underwear, the ones with the purple rhinestones. Tell them to find him and put a twelve-gauge in his mouth, though you know the police won’t do that. Your daddy would, if he were still alive. Drive up the river in your old Buick, the one with the busted gas cap. Watch the moon make milks puddles on the river and wipe your mind clear of memories of the house you grew up in, especially your daddy’s phlegm covered tissues he left brown-spotted around the living room the week before he died. Sometimes you think this man with the scar gave you cancer. A yellow pus souring in your stomach, filling up all the clean spaces.

Option #4

Drink the bottle of red wine in the fridge and call the boy who invited you hiking. Make him garlic butter bread and stuffed pork chops, light candles. Pour him glasses of the whiskey your roommate’s boyfriend keeps under the sink. When he offers you a cigarette on the porch, take it, even though you swore this time you would quit for real. Wear the ash as perfume. When he kisses you, when he pokes his cold tongue between your lips, accept it. He is a nice boy, he is quiet. He goes hiking. When he carries you to your bedroom, imagine you are a pile of firewood, a rotting collection of nature. Imagine him naked by a lake in late June, the flat green water, the scream of cicadas. This is romance. The quiet boy’s eyes are half-closed, but this is how it works. Bite your tongue, feel your skin rising to meet his hands, his flames for fingers.

Option #5

Call your mother. Ask her how things have been since your sister moved back home. Ask about the new priest at her parish, the Irish one who challenges the kids to basketball games after Communion. When she asks about grandkids, stay silent. Do not tell her you have not received Communion in years. That your body feels like a soft wafer watered down. From your porch, you will be able to see the mountains in the distance like rumpled tissues. You can imagine her two states over, sitting on the couch with the dog’s head in her lap, sipping a limoncello. Imagine telling her what happened, speaking into the phone about the man with the scar who chewed up your body and spat it out. Expect she will cry mother’s tears, her body will spark up and her nipples will hammer and her legs will shake and she will think she has failed. Mom, you will yearn to say, he didn’t break me. Instead, listen to her talk about blood pressure medications. Light another cigarette and watch a slow nucleus of yellow bloom in the filter. Imagine how easy it would be for a man with a scar to snatch you, here on your porch, in your sweatpants and yellowed wife beater, your man’s clothes. Imagine you might not fight back. Sit and listen, rubbing your free hand between your legs for warmth.

Option #6

Clean your apartment. Bleach the bathtub, and when you breathe in the chemicals a quick pinpoint of pain will erupt in your head that is not altogether unpleasant. Wonder only momentarily what bleach tastes like, if the sting is like bourbon, if you could stomach it until you fell asleep. Take the trash to the curb, sort out the recyclables like you mean to every week. Fold the laundry, make the bed with the pressed lilac linens your mother bought you when you moved into your first apartment. Don’t think about your older sister and the room you grew up in, the lace curtains making shapes on the carpet, your body cupped up into her little girl arms before bed. Your roommate will walk into the living room as your scrub the coffee table, but she will know better than to ask. Her boyfriend will be with her, the one with the skinny fingers and the motorcycle. He smiles his yellow smile at you, and you decide to take a walk. Stand smoking on the truss bridge, the creek below stagnant and smelly. The mountains in the distance are green, the trees bursting their new leaves. Imagine living in a cabin with the quiet boy, him gone all day killing deer and chopping timber. You could make stew in the galley kitchen, you could line his muddy boots up by the door. You imagine at night he would be too tired to touch you. You imagine you could live that life.

Option #7

Drink the bottle of red wine in the fridge. Swirl it and savor it, like mother’s milk. Your sister gave up her fellowship at the hospital to go home when your father died. Your sister fell out of a bunk bed in kindergarten and sprained her right arm; it took your parents hours to find her because she cried so quietly. Drink from the bottle and think how you ought to get out more. You ought to go home more. When your heads get topsy-turvy, crawl into your roommate’s bed and wait for her to get home. Her sheets smell like vanilla and butter, and they are still warm from when she left. Curl your body up like a shrimp. Run your fingertips over your pillowy stomach. The only thing worse than being touched is not being touched. When your roommate gets home, she will not yell that you spilled the wine on her sheets. She will brush the hair from your face and try to get you to eat something. The bread will turn your stomach sour and bile, the toilet will look white as a scar. Your roommate rubs your back and tells you next week will be different. Feel yourself emptying, the way funeral houses do, the way a body can hoist itself up clean.