1-855-4-AMY-TIPS

Wives say this to their husbands.

Realistically, I know that this line is not the beginning of the horror movie reveal sequence that it feels like it is, but there's something about the way that Amy sits there so primly and properly on the edge of the bed with her hands folded and looks up at me with her hair still pulled tight in that immaculate ponytail that really makes me feel like my stomach is going to drop out of my asshole.

( Maybe it has nothing to do with the way that she is sitting, or the way that she is looking. Maybe it has something to do with the way I've only just stepped out of the shower after washing the Andie off my body. The way I came home and slunk up the staircase and like a coward avoided the kiss Amy tried to give me with one of those unbearably awkward side - hug - head - kiss movements because I knew, I feared, that she would somehow still taste Andie's cunt on my tongue, even though I'd haphazardly scrubbed my teeth with her own toothbrush before I'd left. Maybe it has something to do with that. )

I stand there for a moment in the doorway of the bathroom, barefoot and buck ass naked because I didn't bring in a change of clothes in my haste. Because I thought she'd have put herself to bed the way she sometimes does, quiet and oppressive and malicious in the meekness of the action, like she's daring me to ask What's Wrong? As if I would.

Like I said. Coward.

"You're not tired?"

Rest assured, readers. I am not the doting, blind, useless bitch wife that my dear, sweet, salt-of-the-earth husband thinks I am. I am the fucking lion he doesn’t want to face. I am the thorns on the inside of his wedding ring. See, Nick spends all his time working. Oh, my darling husband... he works so hard just to keep us afloat, in that big office, with his big projects so delicately placed under his thumb. (I’ve wondered for a while now, if projects under his thumb translates to three fingers and the deep red fuck me now lipstick I found on his shirt collar.)

I can smell hot cunt on him. Oh, how horrible. How terrible. My husband! I am forlorn! Spare the shit, Nick. We both know where you spend your evenings — tucked between a twenty year old’s thighs like the useless fucking coward that we both know you are. I wonder how you’ll react to this — do you want to have sex? when you stink so boldly of cheap perfume and another woman’s cunt. But you’re just about as stupid as the miserable bitch you think I am. And all I have to say is how fucking dare he.

“No, I — missed you.” I want him to hurt. I want him to stare at the ground and want it to swallow him fucking whole, because that’s what he likes, right? Deep-throated, nose-to-navel, ball-slapping swallowing. She doesn’t have a gag reflex, because that was trained out of her at the fresh, young age of eighteen, and she swallows every pathetic load he gives her like a good fucking girl. Cry me a fucking river, Nick.

“I’ve heard that once or twice.”

Kieran hears a lot of compliments. He does not have a journal or diary or blog in which to keep them all straight. And then there is the matter of his own inner dialogue, his own self-directed affirmations that are so grandiose as to only be half true. It’s scary, that he actually believes the things that come out of his mouth. 

Brave, though — Kieran wonders if he is brave. Many would consider him a coward. He hides behind his land and his girls and other people’s money. He creates his own social structure to avoid one he finds distasteful (— but didn’t he choose this, America? I digress.)

But Kieran does feel brave. He knows he is certainly not meek; therefore, he must be the opposite, right? He thinks about Cain back in the apartment, waiting to press play on their Tarantino-or-something-adjacent, boys’ night flick. He isn’t sure why he’s thinking about that right now. He should probably stop. There is a beautiful woman right here, and maybe she will wait for him, too. 

“Kieran. Kieran Glass.” He likes being called an artist. He feels like one, sometimes — like he is the architect and mastermind behind some great, fictitious world you’d only see in maps and books. 

She asked for my name. She wants me. I hate to be reductive, but deep down, this is what it all comes down to. This is how he thinks. This is what he knows. 

“Look, I hate to look like some kind of creep coming up to you because you’re by yourself. But the nose thing was really compelling. Also, it’s not every day you see a beautiful woman drinking rosé at — well, this is practically a dive bar. Part of me, a masochistic part of me, wanted to see just how far out of my league you really are.” 

You’re probably thinking that this is... beneath me. In that patronising little oh, Amy... way when you think you know what’s going on, but really, it falls outside the remit of what we talk about when I write to you. I implore you, dear reader. Don’t turn on me too. See, the world boils down to two things: those who fit, and those who don’t. Those who squeeze themselves into Macy’s tracksuits and tuck their lopping bellies in under the grateful stretch of velour fabric, and those who watch them. I don’t fit here. And no, I’m not comparing myself to the Cheeto-fingered, sleep-apnoea’d, beer-drinking slobs that mill about town because they’ve got nothing better to do than wank into an empty sock and collect every last cent that the government strings them up with. That’s Carthage. My bones don’t fit.

I’ve never been a dive-bar gal. Nick used to bring me to them — way back when I was still playing his perfect woman. I was game. I drank beer from the bottle and ordered jalapeño poppers and ate them with my fingers like the perfect date would. I watched the fucking football games, all three dreary hours of sweaty meat slabs running up and down a field. But I never fit. Redneck country, as much as my dear husband hates me calling it, is about as lawless as it was three hundred years ago.

You can tell a lot about a man by the way they ask for your name. Or, in this case, don’t. I know you clocked that too. 

Hey, aren’t you Amazing Amy? That’s the usual response: my parents’ vapid children’s books that taught their sweet cherubs how to brush their teeth and strive for greatness.

“I think the word you’re looking for is... incredibly.” I’m teasing! I’m flirting — god forbid! Someone call the police — someone call my husband! I am That Woman, and I have nothing more to say about it. I think the worst thing about Nick is that he’s driven me from one side of the country to the other with little more than a can of beans and some motel mints to stave off the total fucking boredom he’s left me with. My life is inconsequential at this point. My life is in the leftover trashcan in the corner of our apartment.

My face is a wax mould. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I can picture it — someone going in, latex gloves and resin, and smushing it into a pulp and starting again. Rubber hands push three fingers up and make my left eyelid too droopy, and pull one smile too crooked. I can see my lips being prised from my teeth and finely, and formidably, being pulled over the base of my chin. Sometimes, I think I’m a wick away from a melting candle.

Imagery aside, my face is mouldable. It lights up. It giggles. It frowns. It cries. But you stare at it for too long, and all that’s underneath is a puddle of liquid wax. Dear Diary, I can be anyone I decide to be. Anyone I need to be — that’s the real skill here, not the hmming and ohming of pathetic fawning giddy girls that stalwartly place themselves at the bottom of the food chain. No way, baby. I’m what eats the fucking lion.

You see a handsome man from across the room, but when he thinks no-one’s looking, he attempts to grab a tight fistful of the waitress’s ass — misses, thanks to the whiskey — and slips his number on a monogrammed business card into her breast pocket. Do you A) approach with caution — predators in the wild and all that, B) tell someone! Don’t let women suffer in silence! C) Watch. Plan. Men like that walk blindly, happily, following the promise of blowjobs and perky tits, into the sharpened maw of the beast.

Of course you watch. The wax slips. Before you know it, the rouge gloss of your lipstick curls up with your grimacing mouth, and your eyes roll. 

“Was I being obvious?” From across the room, picking at the peeling sticker from the base of the wine glass? Shoddy work, really. I pride myself on being better. So I straighten my back, mould my cheeks, and tug each corner up with my rubber mitts into a sorry fucking smile.

By all means, look. Dig, and dig. Truffle pig to truffle pig.

I don’t care what they find, because there’s nothing to be found — Carthage is a ghosttown. A real Midwest character that coaxes out the tumbleweeds and the clink of spurs on each boot from the very cowboys that say they don’t rule this neighbourhood.

Let me explain. I insisted that we didn’t buy. I don’t want anything tethering me to the Huck Finn slapstick hillbilly asshole-of-America that is North Carthage. The only rentals are puckered amongst the run-down estate of foreclosures and boarded up windows that is our neighbourhood. Our. I say it like it’s just a totally blasé way of meaning mine. But Nick’s dragged me here, kicking, screaming, humming and... well. I’d like to say I didn’t kick up a fuss. Nick’s mom had cancer. She’s gone now, and he seems to have dug his heels deeper and deeper into the woodloused, rotting foundations of the McMansion we’d found ourselves in.

It’s been two years. I miss the city. I miss New York, with its New York traits and its New York lights. I miss the rats that scuttle along the subway, and the piss that streams itself up the side of each wall under the cityscape. That’s how much I hate it here. I’d rather be pissed on by the homeless drunk that camps out outside each bodega and his clinking bucket of change.

“By all means.” Look around. See what you find. Because I’m telling you, one New Yorker to... whatever the fuck breed that finds himself at my door, you won’t find anything. This house is empty of Amy. It’s all Nick. Here, I’m nothing but the wisp on the wind. Here, I’m The Dunnes. I’m an empty bottle of perfume and two quarts of half-and-half away from being a total fucking stranger to this place. Nick has The Bar. I have Bleecker and a total, irrefutable claim to something better. I don’t want this life. God, will someone just fucking pull me from its grasp before I start saying shit like y’all, and darling.

I open the door — it doesn’t take much convincing. Figure out what it is you want and go on your merry way. Nick thinks I’m making too big a deal of this. I have my journals — what I squirrel away in light of a better day, and a carton of New York memories that look as obsolete as I feel here.

It’s like summer camp all over again. We were never the Christian Crusader types — Rand and Marybeth made it compellingly clear that our extracurriculars would enforce the secular teachings of the Amazing Amy series without too much of a blip. Tennis camp, mostly. We were real country club magnates.

Did you expect anything less? I play tennis, she beats her coach with three games to one. I pass grade three cello and give it up because the strings keep sticking to my fingers and the practice in cold, empty halls was beginning to get on my nerves, and Amazing Amy first-chairs a fucking orchestra.

“That depends.” 

I know her like I know the back of my hands. Every freckle, every crease, every scar through the knuckle that every boyfriend has ever asked about — that one’s from being pushed down the stairs by a best friend and that one’s from catching her palm on the hob (catching, like it isn’t a calculated nod to getting exactly what she wants. I know the games — I play them too. Sweet, but stupid.)

“What do I win?” Because, reader, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know one thing. I don’t lose. I’m not that type of woman. It’s like some ridiculous playback of Annie Get Your Gun. Anything you can do, I can do better. So we play. And we play. And we play. It’s a tussle for control, revenge for the hair-pulling and shin-kicking, and when all’s said and done, it keeps us sane. Cute, right? It’s the kind of sisterly relationship Rand and Marybeth always purported — one day, we won’t be here, and you’ll only have each other. One day, you’ll be best friends. One day, you’ll lean on one another.

Kieran usually likes them young. 

He likes when they still care what their parents think — or, better yet, when their parents are gone or dead. He likes when they talk about what they learned in undergrad and how their friends make them feel. He doesn’t like divorcees, and marriage usually requires a certain age, a certain something. Leaving it — a certain something else. But he doesn’t mind when they’re already taken. He doesn’t mind that at all.

But he also likes them pathetic, desperate, forlorn. He likes Amy’s lipstick, likes how it’s smudged a little bit over the actual edge of her lips. He likes the soft look in her eye (he’s yet to see it occasionally sharpen). He likes when their goals aren’t attainable or when they’ve already been slighted, just a little, by life. Optimism and naivety aren’t bad, but it’s easier when something’s already been a little broken in by someone else. 

Kieran doesn’t really think like this so explicitly. God, he doesn’t fancy himself a fucking monster. He is just a nice man from Ireland, with a nice Irish accent, who likes a nice drink at a half-decent bar. He likes making friends and surrounding himself with likeminded people (who will fuck him whenever the mood strikes). 

“What gives? Has something got to give, now?” His accent works with women no matter their age. He plays it up on first meetings, likes when people ask him questions about where he’s from. He is good at playing vague and creating a reality you want to know more about, want to be apart of.

“I just thought I’d like to talk to you a bit. And I was deeply, deeply concerned that no one had ever complimented you before on your nose. Which is adorable, and perfect, and cute, as I have said already. If I could paint your picture, I would have asked already. So, there.”

At risk of this sounding like just another journal entry in just another woman’s pathetic, dry-hump life, dear diary. Today I got hit on by a nice man in a shitty bar. Okay, I can’t even pretend. I won’t make you sit through reading that. It’s hard to fake — the simper, the lip-bite, the giggling, giddy glee that pushes your tits out and sends out the fuck-me-pheremones, but it’s easier than the ghost I’ve become of late.

Jesus, I sound fucking pathetic. Average. Dumb. I hate that word. Average. Like I’ve been slapped with a C+ and a could do better in red ink. Nick and I had another fight. It sounds so banal, to even think about — Nick didn’t empty the trash again. Nick left his socks on the floor in the bedroom again. Nick left beard hair clogging up the drain again. I’ve become someone that I had no hand in becoming — Average Amy. Not quite the same ring to it.

“Has anyone ever told you, you are a very brave man?” 

My parents would umm and aah about my next moves. I think they miss me, deep down — deep down in a way that can be smothered with tennis in the Hamptons and cocktails by the beach. In debt my fucking ass.

I have spent years giving parts of myself away. Amazing Amy, one step ahead. Naughty Nick... eh. Disappointing. Here I am, world! I am officially the stupid, hormonal, empty fucking husk that you see before you! Doesn’t it make you sick? I’m a fucking sock that my Darling Husband pumps his cum into once every month and thinks I can’t smell whatever whore he’s fucking on the side each time he stumbles into bed past midnight.

BOLD   —  character trait.

ITALIC   —  situational.

absent-minded | abusive | addict | adrenaline junkie | aggressive | aimless | alcoholic | anxious | arrogant | audacious | bad liar | bigmouth | bigot | blindly loyal | blunt | callous | childish | chronic heroism | cheater | clingy | clumsy | cocky | codependent | competitive | corrupt | cowardly | cruel | cynical | delinquent | delusional | dependent | depressed | deranged | disloyal | ditzy | egotistical | envious | erratic | fickle | finicky | fixated | flaky | frail | fraudulent | foul mouthed | guilt complex | gloomy | gluttonous | gossiper | gruff | GRUDGE-HOLDING | gullible | hedonistic | humorless | hypochondriac | hypocritical | idealist | idiotic | ignorant | immature | impatient | incompetent | indecisive | insecure | insensitive | lazy | lewd | liar | lustful |  manipulative | masochistic | meddlesome | melodramatic | money-loving | moody | naive | nervous | nosy | ornery | overprotective | overly sensitive | paranoid | passive-aggressive | perfectionist | pessimist | petty | power-hungry | proud | possessive | pushover | reckless | reclusive | remorseless | rigorous | sadistic | sarcastic | senile | selfish | self-destructive | shallow | sociopathic | sore loser | spineless | spiteful | spoiled | stubborn | suspicious | tactless | temperamental | timid | thief | tone-deaf | traitorous | unathletic | ungracious | unlucky | unsophisticated | untrustworthy | vain | withdrawn | workaholic.

Well, I’ll be damned. A housewife walks into a bar... well, I haven’t quite come up with the punchline yet. But the point still stands. (God, is that all I am now? A housewife?) The recession’s been tough (!), I can’t find the work (!). For a while, I didn’t have to, with a fat trust fund and two phD parents to fall back on, until that rug was pulled out from under me. And now, I’m lamenting over a glass of eight-dollar rosé with one ice cube and the remains of a lipstick stain on its side. Whore red is not my shade.

I’ve become everything I fucking despise.

“And you are very charming.” Does this make me a cougar? Don’t look at me like that. I’m not my husband. But I am bored. (Looking like me, you’re used to this kind of attention. It’s more nice tits, or what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this, but the creativity is appreciated. 

“So what gives?” He reminds me of Nick, five years ago. Ambitious. Clever. Cool. God, my husband was so fucking cool. And I wanted to be that for him! I wanted to be cool, like that’s the best thing in the world. I wanted him to look at me and think, yeah. That’s my cool wife. She doesn’t moan. She doesn’t nag. She loves me, and I love her, and that’s all we need in the world. The world has a way of getting in the middle of that, and a U-haul and three hours of unpacking later, and. Well. I think I left my heart in New York.

That’s a saying, right? I left my heart in [fill in the blank]. It’s like a bad tourist gimmick sold on the side of the street. It’s a New York delicacy, next to pastrami and rye, and right behind the I HEART NYC t-shirts made from polyester and child labour.

But, in the most eloquent of terms, I mean this: Every ounce of adoration, love, and respect I once felt for Nick is still wrapped in packing tape in the corner of our NY apartment.

So why not?

This is a straitjacket. I feel like I’m being tossed out like a piece of old furniture. Half of me’s still in the apartment, overlooking the city in the bowels of a cold, empty bedroom. He’s taken me, trussed up like a Christmas ham, away from the very lifeblood I’ve lived and loved all my life, and packed me off like some fucking UPS man. Slap a stamp on it, and watch it get crushed and crumpled from one end of America to the other. You might think I’m dramatic — of course we’ll move to the armpit of the country and support your family though this time. I’m game. I was always game. He didn’t even have to say the word, and I was packing up my trinkets. (Trinkets, because that’s all I have now. A box in the corner of a U-haul that the rest of my soul can die in. Hm. I take your point. Dramatic.) But it’s not like that.

He barely looks at me as we leave. I can’t tell if it’s guilt, or don’t look at me like that, Amy. He defrauds the entire fucking idea by pretending it’s our next big adventure. The rest is background noise. But when you start fading into the background along with the linens I don’t think he ever liked... that’s the breaking point. That’s the thin line between husband and wife and... master and his bitch.

He wraps me up, calm, cool, and barely leaves me standing there, in the midst of our entire lives being plucked up, each string at a time, from our New York lives. He’s going to make me a fucking hillbilly. 

Nick Dunne has broken my heart.

I’m trying not to be a bitch. I am. But I’m no Georgia Peach. (He’d correct me there — ah ah ah, Amy. We’re not going to the south. It’s the Midwest, as he likes to remind me of how my geographical inconsistencies are one of the other things he’d like to leave behind in Manhattan. It’s not The South with a capital S, but it’s damn near close enough. I Google Mapped it before we came outside. Middle-of-fucking-nowhere America. Crime rates are crawling up like the spider up my neck and circling like the goddamn horseflies. Yee-fucking-haw.)

“Are you ready?” I love my husband, I love my husband, I love my husband. I will support him through anything. I will feed him, and cherish him, and fuck him til he can’t stand up, and I’ll put on my best smile and take my deepest breath and march my way down to the firing squad.