Build-a-Grudge
by Joy Kennedy-O'Neill
Mari lugs two heavy suitcases into the office and heaves them into the corner. "Where's yours?" she asks.
I point to a half-filled garbage bag.
"That's all you got?"
"I've never done this before."
She tsks at my inexperience. Then she takes her cubicle's photos and cuts out her husband with scissors as sharp as her curses last week, when she found his secret texts. She dumps the massacred photos into one of her suitcases, along with a snow globe from their Saint Croix vacation. Finally, she tosses in an empty vase for good measure.
"Clean sweep," she says dramatically. She eyes my garbage bag. "Seriously, you couldn't find more stuff?"
I scrunch down in my chair. "It felt sort of... wrong."
I'd searched my apartment this morning for regrets. The advertisements for the Grudge store says preparing for a visit is just like a good house cleaning, but that's not exactly true. More like cleaning cobwebs with your bare finger. Unsettling.
"Why does it feel wrong?" Mari eyes me. "What's Gabe done for you lately anyway?"
"He's a good guy."
Mari snorts. She's never even met him. She's only heard me say, "I'd wish he'd--" too many times.
At lunch we go to the mall, to the Build-a-Grudge store. She makes a big show of her suitcases, huffing and angling up her elbows. A woman by the pretzel shop gives her a thumbs-up. "You go, girl!"
The pretzels smell great, but Mari says, "Don't eat. You want to be hangry when you do this."
Inside the store, she upends her suitcases' contents into a vat churning with agitation. Her shredded pictures, snow globe, and vase fall in first. Then clothes, books, old concert tickets, and dark clouds. It spins with lightning crackles, with the fury of a woman scorned.
Golden tokens spill out of a dispenser.
"Your turn."
My bag has some of Gabe's shirts and the coffee maker he promised to fix. Half-misgivings stir around in there, gray and nebulous. Foggy.
I toss them in and get tokens. Not many.
Mari feeds a machine her tokens and works a foot-pedal. Fluff rains down in a windowed box. It reminds me of the dust-bunnies under the bed that Gabe promised he'd vacuum but never did.
She then moves to a skin-machine and grips a brass wheel like she's steering a listing ship. Her fluff gets covered with green, warty fabric. Like bubbling bile.
"Excellent!" she says.
My stuffing gets wrapped in terrycloth, cocoa colored and soft. The color of Gabe's hair. It's kind of cute.
"You've got to concentrate," she says.
"I'm trying!"
She moves to eyeballs. Her grudge gets mean, jealous eyes. Mine are googly. We hold our noses by the scent machine. Hers gets smells of cheap perfume, nasty sheets, and sweat. Mine's like a mildewing shower. I had wanted more help around the apartment when I started night classes.
We step around summer-sweaty kids working a machine.
"Wait until you have kids," Mari says. "No one holds a grudge like an eight-year-old. Except them." She points outside where teenage girls drift by Hot Topic. They watch us with narrowed eyes, covered in body glitter and lip gloss. Too cool for this store.
I try to stay angry at Gabe, but I keep coming up with things I've done wrong, too. When his father died last year, did I do enough? What if he's been depressed?
The sound machine gives Mari's grudge squelches and wet slaps. Mine barks.
"We were going to get a dog," I explain sheepishly.
When we're done, her grudge looks like a fat gremlin with tentacles. Mine's like a drunk monkey. Both of ours have Velcro straps so we can hoist them on our backs. When Mari walks, her grudge makes meaty thwacks like two people humping.
She places it on a weight machine by the exit. "Fifteen pounds!" she says proudly. "Spite weighs a lot."
Mine barely registers.
"Seriously?" she asks. "What about all your talk about him not listening? Not paying attention to you?"
"I know, right?" I try to work up my anger. My grudge cocks its head. "But maybe if we had just talked more--"
