A few months after the wedding, her parents came to visit. Nia and Richard sat with them on the veranda overlooking the rolling hills below where the neighbors grew rows and rows of grapes for wine. Nia poured them all a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and brought out a pasta salad for them to eat. She had chosen the dish because she was tired after a long day of court proceedings and it was easy to make.
Nia sat down at the table and began to eat while her husband and father talked about their work at the hospital. Her mother turned to her immediately.
“How’s married life going?”
“It’s going,” Nia said with a small smile. She never knew how to answer this question.
“Have you decided when you’ll start having children yet?”
Nia held her breath for a moment before answering. She had to give her irritation time to dissipate. “I’ve told you before, mom, Richard and I aren’t sure we want children at all.”
“Of course, you do! Who doesn’t want children? If you don’t, you might live to regret it. And you’re not getting any younger, honey.”
“Mom, please,” Nia said. Every word her mother spoke was like an additional weight on her shoulders, making her even more tired.
“I’m just saying honey, the time to make a decision is now, before you run out of time.”
“Richard and I will make a decision in our own time.”
“But—”
“Mom,” Nia put down her fork and looked at her mother with tight lips.
“Alright, alright,” her mother threw up her hands. “I forgot, you have boundaries.” Her mother took a delicate bite of the pasta salad, rolling her eyes with a little chuckle.
Nia stopped eating. She wasn’t in the mood for this gathering anymore. She sipped at her wine, grudgingly waiting for the whole thing to be over, offering her mother only short and direct sentences for conversation. Nia’s silence didn’t seem to bother her mother at all. She just kept talking.
When her parents left, Nia told Richard what her mother had said.
“I’m sure she just wants grandchildren,” Richard said as he undressed for a shower. “Don’t pay her any mind. We don’t have to listen to her.”
Nia sat on the closed toilet lid as the steam collected in the bathroom. “But you do want children, don’t you?”
“Yes, but you don’t,” Richard said. “And I’ve accepted that. I want you more than I want kids.” He smiled at her as he stepped into the shower, leaving Nia to think on his words with a much warmer heart.
A few weeks later Nia’s grandmother came to visit with a few of her book club friends. She loved coming over because their house was so spacious and bright and the veranda was the perfect place for them to gather and discuss their latest read when the weather was good. Her grandmother had brought muffins and lemonade for her little group and they finished their meeting about an hour later.
Then it was Nia’s turn to spend some time with her grandmother. She always stayed to talk with Nia for a little while after her book club friends left. She sat on one of the stools at the kitchen bar.
“Your mother says you don’t want any children,” her grandmother said.
Nia rolled her eyes. Of course, her mother had gossiped about Nia’s decisions to the rest of the family.
“Don’t listen to her,” her grandmother said. “You don’t want to end up with children you don’t want. Then you’re stuck with them. And trust me, they’ll know. Kids can sense these things.”
Nia nodded, grateful for her grandmother’s open mind. They talked for a few hours more and then her grandmother finally began to gather her things.
“Alright, I won’t take up all your time. I need to get home and start making dinner.”
Nia grabbed one of her grandmother’s bags. The tray that held the muffins rattled against the lemonade pitcher. Before she left, Nia’s grandmother pulled her into a hug, then looked her in the eye.
“Now I’m usually one to mind my own business,” her grandmother said. “But your house needs a little TLC. Dishes in the sink, bookshelves dusty— floor could use a sweep and mop too.”
Stunned, Nia frowned at her. After a moment, she recovered. “I’m trying to convince Richard to hire a maid,” Nia said, crossing her arms and pulling a little away from her grandmother. “We both work a lot. Never enough time in the day.”
“Well, that’s no excuse!” Her grandmother said. “You’re a married woman now with a home to take care of. I worked too and so did your mom, but we never let our houses get like this.”
You and mom never lived in a house this big either, Nia thought. She kept the bitter words to herself. Thinking of nothing polite she could say in return, Nia just nodded slowly.
“Well, you think about what I said,” her grandmother said, patting her arm, then turning to the street and walking toward her car. “I’ll see you later, baby doll.”
“Bye, grandma.” Usually, Nia would have walked her to her car, but today she closed the door and went to take a hot bath.
When Richard returned home from his fishing day with his friend Earl, Nia told him what had happened.
“I think we should hire a maid,” Nia suggested for the millionth time. “People notice these things.”
“If we want to start our restaurant, we can’t afford it. Our student loan payments are through the roof. Unless you want to put it off a few extra months.”
“No, we’ve put it off long enough,” Nia said. “There’s got to be someone out there with a cheap service.”
“The more we spend on that, the less we save for what we really want. We can just clean the house ourselves.”
“We never have time to clean. And you’re not exactly a cleaning type of guy.”
“We’ll do what we can and screw what everybody else thinks. If we’re happy, why do we care?”
Nia nodded, but it was easy for Richard to say. Any criticism would fall on her, not him. Nia did prefer a clean home. She hated the way the dishes so frequently piled up, the way the shelves collected dust, the way the floors didn’t shine when she opened the curtains. She kept the thought to herself. She would just put a little more effort into cleaning.
The next day, Nia set aside a few hours to dust and sweep and mop the floors. It was when she put the mop and bucket back in the cleaning supply closet that the second string appeared, pulling at her elbow. It dug into her skin, making her itch, but she ignored it, just like the last. Even when her arm jerked out of her control, she pretended it hadn’t happened. She told herself it wasn’t a big deal.
The months passed by, and Nia continued to do the cleaning. Despite Richard’s claims that he would help, he hardly ever did. And the strings multiplied, sprouting from different joints on her body and stretching into the ceiling. They phased easily from room to room as she moved about the house. When she went to work, they extended into the sky, an unseen force pulling at them from somewhere, trying to control her.
She began to notice an energy coming from the strings, pulsing down their nearly invisible surfaces. They wanted to spread, to multiply. To control more parts of her.
One night her parents came over for dinner and Nia cooked a meal of salmon, mashed potatoes, and roasted asparagus. She felt it was a simple, but delicious meal that no one could possibly find anything to complain about. Her father had hinted that her cooking needed improvement on a few occasions. Nia wanted to avoid his annoying comments. She didn’t know why she suddenly cared so much. She never really cared before. Before the strings started to appear, she’d seemed to be made of air— people’s rude comments passed right through her and she would go about her day completely unbothered. Now her form was solidifying, turning her into a thing of crystal and china— one small tap could leave a web of cracks. And she never managed to glue herself back together.
Her parents and husband sat around the table.
“Richard, can you help me make the plates?”
“Sure, hon,” Richard said, pushing back his chair.
“Oh no, Richard, you don’t need to do that,” Nia’s mother said, getting up and rushing to the kitchen area. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll help.”
Nia took a deep breath to avoid saying something rude, but allowed her mother’s presence in the kitchen.
“You can’t be making your husband do a woman’s job in front of guests,” her mother whispered in her ear as they put the plates together.
“There’s no such thing as a woman’s job, mom,” Nia said.
Her mother huffed and took two plates to the table, setting them in front of the men with a smile. Nia brought the remaining plates over and then went to fetch wine.
The rest of the meal went fine and Nia cleared away the dishes with a little resentment as the men sat back and relaxed, chatting about sports and fishing. She felt the fourteenth string appear on her knee, felt the stinging itch, like that of a mosquito bite, which was becoming all too familiar. She tried to ignore it. If she paid too close attention, she would truly see it. The illusion of her well-put-together-home would roll back, revealing the one who pulled the strings, exposing her life for what it was— a show. If she saw all these things, if she looked too closely at the strings, she would become angry, and anger might blow away the backdrops even quicker. She gritted her teeth and was proud of herself when she refrained from screaming her frustration for the remainder of the visit.
As her parents left, her father found a moment to whisper in her ear. “That was a decent meal, Nia, but the fish was a little over cooked, just so you know.”
“Why thank you, dad,” Nia said as sarcastically as she could.
“I know he won’t complain, but Richard does like his fish,” her father said, oblivious to Nia’s mood.
“Bye, dad,” Nia said, happily closing the door on her parents.
Richard noticed Nia’s change in attitude. “What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing.” Nia started on the dishes.
“What did they say?” Richard asked in a knowing tone.
Nia sighed and sagged slightly over the sink. “Just the usual.”
“Ignore them,” Richard said.
“Easy for you to say when they never say anything to you,” Nia said. “Apparently it’s my job, as the haver-of-a-vagina to make sure the house is clean and the food is perfectly cooked and that I serve all the food like some medieval ideal of a woman.”
“Oh, Nia...”
“You could have done something,” Nia said. “When my mom told you to sit back down. You knew what she was doing. You could have helped anyway. Would have been nice to have some support.”
There was silence for a moment, then: “I’m sorry, you’re right.” Richard came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. His lips pressed against the back of her neck. “I’ll get the dishes.”
“Thank you,” Nia said, her anger softening at his touch. She dried her hands and sat in the living room to read instead. That night, when she lay down in bed, the strings itched a little less than usual.
A year flowed by and the strings continued to irritate Nia’s skin. Something began to pull at them, making her do things she didn’t want to do. When she really wanted to take a minute to rest after work, the strings took her into the kitchen instead. They made her cook a meal for herself and her husband and sit down and eat it. When she wanted to take a hot bath, the strings made her straighten up the house. On some days, Nia could resist the strings’ power, but on most days, she was dragged along, made to do the household tasks. Sometimes, Nia would stub her toe or drop a glass on the kitchen floor, its pieces shattering across the tiles, and in those moments, she swore she could hear, faint but distinct, a crowd of people laughing. It was like she’d left on an old sitcom in another room, but the audience laughed at all of Nia’s lowest moments. When she cried in the shower, the voices laughed. When she burned the cookies she was baking, they laughed a little louder.
Finally, Nia pointed out the strings to Richard. She needed someone to cut them. Anytime she reached for the scissors or a knife to free herself, the strings pulled her hands away and made her do something else.
Richard looked at the air around Nia, his eyes searching for the threads she had described. “I’m sorry, Nia. I don’t see anything.”
“Just try to cut them,” Nia said.
There’s one here, coming out of my wrist.”
With a bewildered expression, Richard opened the scissors and held them in the air above Nia’s wrist.
“Here?”
“A little further forward.”
Richard adjusted the scissors’ position.
“Here?”
Nia nodded. “Cut.”
Richard squeezed the scissors, but they went right through the string as if it wasn’t even there. Nia stared at the spot where the scissors should have cut through. She heard that familiar, sitcom laugh track, a little louder and clearer than usual. Richard seemed not to notice.
“It didn’t work,” Nia said in a daze. “Why didn’t it work?”
“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I wish I could be more helpful.”
“It didn’t work,” Nia said again.
Richard left the room and Nia could hear him hammering away at something in the garage not long after. Above that, she could hear the audience’s laughter, louder than ever before, as if they were right there in the room. The world began to lose its color. The roses she’d put in a vase on the kitchen table were almost black. The trees in the backyard faded to gray. The sky, once bright blue, now looked a pale white.
Nia tried to cut the string herself. She reached for the scissors, intending to start with her legs, but as her hand was about to close on them, her arm jerked forward and she knocked over the vase of roses. The audience’s laughter echoed around the room, bouncing through her skull, making her dizzy. Another two strings appeared on her face, digging into her cheeks. She tried to get the scissors again, launching herself at them in an effort to think ahead of the strings, but the threads jerked her roughly away from the table and she fell flat on the floor, her chest landing on the puddle of water from the vase, the thorns of the roses snatching at the skin on her neck. The audience laughed and the last bit of color Nia could see—the blood from her neck swirling in the water— drained to complete black and white. Nia’s awareness of the world faded away. Suddenly it was as if she were a small point of consciousness, hovering in the back of her own mind. The strings picked her up from the floor and busied her body with the task of making dinner. Richard returned to the dining room.
“Smells good in here,” he said, sitting at the table. He was wearing a suit now, as if he’d just come home from work rather than from the garage.
Nia was screaming, but Richard couldn’t hear. She tried to move her mouth to tell Richard that this wasn’t her, that the woman he married was trapped inside a marionette. But the strings moved her cheeks into a smile. They manipulated her lips and tongue and the only words that came out were, “Thank you, honey. Welcome home. Dinner will be ready soon.”
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