I Will Do Anything You Say

Issue 46 • Fall 2022 • Nonfiction

3rd Place Nonfiction
2022 Summer Contest

“I Will Do Anything You Say” is a fractured essay about fractured family history, with juxtapositions that emphasize absences as much as presence.

– Debra Monroe

2015 

Seventeen’s legs are encased in sheer, thigh-high stockings. Her feet are tucked under her in child’s pose, a position I know well from the mommy-and-me yoga I do with my sons. Her body is fixed on my phone’s screen, framed by my phone’s case and cradled in my hand. She is, in short, my digital, nesting doll. 

I lie in bed, curled around a pillow. My mind is foggy, half-present in the half-light of morning. How many nights have I fallen asleep inside her social media accounts? How many mornings have I opened my phone to look again? This particular photo, though, this is the one that does me in. Located a few scrolls down her page, it’s all I need to make me cry. 

Beneath the photo, a caption: Happy Birthday to me, motherfuckers! 17! 

Viewers offer a mix of hearts, surprise emojis, and a dozen comments. 

There’s this from a man’s name: You. Are. Stunning. 

From another man’s name: Mija, please put some clothes on. 

Allen—another man’s name, my husband’s name—calls from downstairs. I leave my phone on the nightstand but take Seventeen to the bathroom with me. 

2016 

Let’s call this windowless conference room on the third floor of the Humanities building the interrogation room. Even though the college’s Title IX coordinator can’t see my legs under the table, I press my knees together and cross my feet at the ankles just like my mother taught me. 

1995-ish 

“For when you want to make the right impression,” she said. “It’s your best defense.” 

“I thought my smile was my best defense.” 

She’s driving us down one of the gravel roads outside our tiny desert town (population: 500). Maybe we’re going to my great uncle’s ranch. Maybe we’re going to church. Maybe I have a school thing, a recital thing, a sport thing. Her thick, permed hair bounces on her shoulders. 

“That, too, baby girl. Kill them—” She makes eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. 

“With kindness,” I say. 

“That’s right.” 

I wish my eyes were green like hers. I wonder if I wish enough. 

2022 

#Metoo has brought scrutiny to the abuses perpetrated by men in positions of power and to the women who are the objects of these men’s attention. These women, in breaking silence, have given voice—and presence and power—to object. In fact, you might say they’ve rejected object to become subject. 

Off-stage, there is someone else. Hi. I’m your secondary character to be sure. As a conscious or unconscious accomplice or (my favorite) simply delusional, I am neither object or subject. I’m forgettable but never entirely forgivable. 

This is beginning to sound like a riddle. Next line: What am I? 

My name was, is, once and forever, wife. 

2016 

There’s a slim recorder on the conference table. We–the Title IX coordinator, the college’s lawyer, the union’s lawyer, the union’s faculty representative, and myself–periodically glance in its direction. The Title IX coordinator presses a button and reports the day, time, attendees. She pauses, sips from a Dasani, poises her pen above a notepad, and starts: “Mrs. Palmer—” 

“I kept my last name,” I say. “It’s M—.” 

She apologies. 

“Mrs. M—” 

“Ms. M—,” I correct. Considering she’s paid to protect against gender discrimination, I feel this is solidly a point in my favor.

She nods. “Have you read the investigative report outlining the allegations against your husband?” She leans closer to the recorder and says, “Your husband, Professor Allen Palmer.” 

I press my knees together harder, harder, until they hurt, then harder. I catalog my body: back straight, head up, shoulders down, hands loosely in my lap. It’s a position I’ve used since I was seven, for church and science fairs and class senate, for job interviews, for a thesis defense, and now, as I apply for the role of a good human being. 

I’ve gotten everything I’ve ever applied for. I smile. 

2018 

We’ve named this position feeding me to the wall. I’ve opened the door, and here we are—Orion’s arms fitted around my waist. He pulls me close as I pull him inside. There’s a lot of pulling—that’s the point here. My face to his face, pulling, his mouth to my mouth, pulling. My fingers pulling at his belt buckle. His words pulling at my lungs. Some air tips out, just a little. Then he pushes me to the wall, and because I lost a lot of weight during the divorce, he can push me up the wall, can feed me to the wall. 

“Our wall is extra hungry today,” he says, hot breath collecting behind my ear. For a moment, he pulls away, and my feet return to the floor, but let me be clear—this pull is pallid, flat, your common street pull, not our pull. He is merely taking a step back for affect. “I want to do this forever,” he says. He says it sadly, and I know he is thinking about his wife. “That okay with you?” 

“That’s perfect for me,” I say. Then, right there, against a hungry wall, we don’t pull, and we don’t push. Out of our loneliness, desire, and wishful thinking, Orion and I invent a new force. 

2015 

I undress, take a towel off the floor, and pump soap onto it. I scrub under my arms and between my legs, stopping to examine the revolution of hair growing in my armpits. It’s nice, I think, soft. Why haven’t I grown it before? 

I wonder if Seventeen has grown out her armpit hair. Probably not. Probably she wouldn’t grow it out when she’s still enjoying the newness of shaving it off. 

I make the suggestion in my head. I mean, it’s something I’ve started doing, talking to her, watching her react out of the corner of my eye. Give it a shot, I say. Fight the patriarchy. 

She says, You’re not a fighter. You’re a depressed piece of shit. 

I don’t like this. It’s out of character for her? Too astute? 

I revise: She gives me the finger. 

Better. 

I slip into a pair of flats and spray a cloud of dry shampoo around my head. 

Downstairs, my sons are watching Curious George and eating slices of Wonder bread, waving them around like little white flags. Allen comes in from the kitchen. He’s turning a hand towel around the wet belly of a mixing bowl. 

“They really should eat fruit or nuts for a snack,” I say. “Not plain bread.” 

“Jesus,” he says. “Okay, wow.” 

“Hug?” my five-year-old says. He’s been alternating between nibbling the piece of bread in his right hand and the piece in his left hand, so now he’s holding two floppy, white crescents. His three-year-old brother mimics this, but one of his slices is all gobbled up. His empty hand pumps open and closed as if to catch me. 

“Tell Mommy to have a good appointment,” Allen says. “Say, Come back happy.” 

A piece of bread brushes my cheek when I pull away. It’s cold and wet on the nibble. 

“Daddy is silly,” I say. “Mommy is always happy.” 

Twenty minutes later, I sit opposite a small woman with straight, black hair and delicate features. The clipboard sits giant in her lap, the pen a sausage between her fingers. 

“You look better,” she says. “Are you showering?” 

“I think I need to leave him.” 

“That’s a thought,” she says. “Still obsessing?” 

“Less, I think.” 

“Your homework was to delete the social media accounts?” 

“Yes. But, no.” 

“How often are you reading the emails? Ballpark?” 

“Only a handful.” 

“So, five times a day?” she asks. “Give me a number.” 

“My mother says I can’t do it to my kids.” 

She makes a note on her clipboard and then tucks it next to her. She sits forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped, waiting. 

“I’m saving money when I go to the grocery store,” I say. “Ask for cash back, put it under the carpet in my closet. Dumb, right? A few hundred dollars can’t buy me a cheeseburger in this state.” 

“Sex addiction is an illness,” she says. “He is sick. Would you leave someone who is sick?” 

Some Months Earlier 

On Friday, August 22, 2015, Allen Palmer wrote: Send me your number and I’ll think about it. Here are the rules if I text you. Never ever call only text. If I tell you to stop texting do it immediately. Whenever you are in a room with me you must do exactly what I say. Exactly what i say. Once you have my number never email me again. 

On Friday, August 22, 2015, [Seventeen] wrote: I will do anything you say. 

2016 

I nod. I’ve read it. The report, written by an outside investigator hired by the college, is fifty pages long and contains accounts from two students aged thirty-five and thirty-seven. Seventeen, funny enough, is not in the report. It’s not funny. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. In fact, no one here knows about Seventeen. If I told them, this would all be over. The faculty union would drop support of my husband; he would lose his tenure, his job, and I would— 

I know Allen and Seventeen exchanged emails a year ago. They burn in my files. I see them when I close my eyes. The thing is, that is, here’s the thing: I can’t believe these new allegations. 

There are inconsistencies in the narratives, plot holes my mother calls them when I call to read the report to her. Plot holes, impossibilities, sexual encounters on alleged dates and times when Allen was with me. 

I don’t tell the Title IX coordinator about Seventeen, but I tell her about this. 

“Can you prove that he was with you?” 

I guess I can’t. 

“Why should we believe you?” 

I don’t know. 

“How did you and your husband meet?” 

I was a student, not his student. He was a professor. My mother introduced us. 

“You were a student?” 

Not his student. 

“Not his student?” 

Not his student. 

“He’s quite a bit older than you? What’s your birthdate?” 

The questions continue. My chest aches, and I feel wild this side of my carefully positioned limbs. How I felt during labor or as a child when I locked myself in a trunk during a game of hide-and-seek. 

“Not his student?” 

Not his student. 

“What kinds of things did he say to you when you started dating?” 

A gasping in my body, a flight. I know what she’s after, what she wants me to say. I ask for water, and the union’s faculty representative—poor guy’s been fidgeting in his seat this whole time—hops to fetch some. 

I sip from an absurdly light and fragile cup, the kind that live in stacks by water coolers. 

I think I can see, for just a moment, Seventeen—at the whiteboard, in her sheer stockings. I imagine her drawing dicks of various sizes. She giggles over squiggly pubic hairs. 

“Is this funny?” the Title IX coordinator asks. She makes a note. 

I try to parse it out, looking for context clues. I swear I’ve forgotten the meaning of the word. The union lawyer, a grandpa figure with sharp eyes, pats my hand and says, “Take a breath.” 

2020 

Allen is suicidal again, and I won’t let him see the kids. They talk once a week. I press my ears to their bedroom doors, but I can only hear muffled voices, which remind me of their soft kicks inside my pregnant body. 

Also—although we rarely leave the house, we’re wearing masks when we do. Stores are limiting purchases of toilet paper. Shit has gotten weird. 

2018 

There are days I still can’t believe I left, and although it has only been a year and a half, I have trouble remembering details. 

I can remember Allen driving to a hotel and spa while I packed the house and loaded the Uhaul. “This is really hard on me,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me when I need you most.” 

I can remember the kids stayed with my mother, who finally came around to the idea of me “quitting” the marriage. Of course, she still reminds me that “the grass is not always greener on the other side” and that I’m “swapping one kind of hard for another.” “True,” I say. “But I like this hard more.” 

I can remember my brother arriving to drive the Uhaul. “Are you sure about this?” he said. “It’s just gonna fuck them up like it fucked us up.” 

“It is,” I say. “I’m sure.” 

But I have to concentrate to remember even the layout of our old house, the one I raised my babies in until just recently. Where was the linen closet? What color were the boys’ rooms? 

What’s more, there’s Orion. Another unbelievable. Late night correspondence, long walks, and a month ago he helped me pick out a Christmas tree. After tying it to my car, he squeezed my hand and said he’d follow me home to lug it in. On the way, he called so we could sing Christmas carols together. “Because that’s what you do,” he said, “when you’re falling.” 

But, it doesn’t matter where we go—the wall, the bed, the floor, the table—we’re being watched. Sometimes our ghosts are close, their faces inches from our faces. I don’t tell Orion; I don’t want to scare him away. Sometimes they take seats in the living room. Orion’s wife is fond of the red chair by the fireplace. My ex prefers to stretch out on the leather couch, the one he slept on the year prior to our separation. Seventeen chooses whichever corner provides the best light for appearing both sexy and judgy. Our haunts don’t talk to each other, but they share looks that say, “Can you believe these two?” 

Today, though, is a good day. They’re watching us from outside. Seventeen is glaring by the rhododendrons. Allen steals glances at her. Orion’s wife presses both her hands to the pane. 

Today, Orion comes in and immediately pushes me against the wall. He says, “I want to do this forever. That okay with you?” 

Today, I say, “That’s perfect for me.” God help me, I mean it. 

2016 

I do as I’m told. I take a breath. I take two. 

My two boys. Of all the inconsistencies and impossibilities, these are the two that I wish I could explain. I want to say, The allegations against Allen can’t be true because it’s inconsistent with what they were promised. It’s impossible after what we’ve been through. They deserve more, better. 

I want to describe how the day Allen was sent home on administrative leave, he stood at the kitchen sink window to watch our boys play outside. He said, “I can’t believe I ever risked all this. Why would I do it again? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it again. You have to believe me. Say you believe me.” 

But I can’t say this to the Title IX coordinator and her recorder. Can’t exactly say these allegations are false because, duh, my husband learned his lesson after sexting with an underage girl. 

I can’t say, as further evidence, that I’ve never done anything wrong my whole life. I am a good person. I was spanked once as a child for something my brother did, and my mother later apologized. I am a good person. I am a good girl. I am the good girl. 

Besides, I think, these women are thirty-five and thirty-seven—younger than him, but still much older than me. Wouldn’t they just say no? Wouldn’t I just say no? 

Some months later, 2017 

It’s my best friend who tells the college about Seventeen. My friend works in the same department as Allen, and I don’t know if she approached HR or if they approached her. She knew from the beginning of course. I was at her house when I saw the emails. 

The plan, see, was to take a couple days to work on my novel. In the few years since graduate school, I’d written a smattering of stories, none very good, and about a dozen novel chapters. I’d also birthed two bundles of sticky, sweet, complicated joy. I felt I was coming out of the fog that settles over parents of very young children and that my writing was better for it, my aim more true. I would finish the novel in a year. I would take six months to revise. I would call my old professors to ask if they could be my people in it’s-not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know. The best part? They would be proud of me. 

I now pay a woman to ask me if I have showered lately. 

At my best friend’s house, I was scrolling through e-books on my tablet when the device pinged. A tiny envelope icon in the top, right corner. Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. 

On Friday, August 22, 2015, Allen Palmer wrote: It’s funny because tonight only my boys are both asleep and my wife is out of town. I’m worried you’d abuse my phone number. There would have to be rules. 

On Friday, August 22, 2015, [Seventeen] wrote: Yes sir I promise I will follow all of your rules I swear to god. 

It’s my friend who tells HR, and I don’t blame her. 

She’s been avoiding my calls, and when I finally reach her, she is cold. It’s shocking but not surprising, like the floorboards on the first chilly morning in October. She seems to have forgotten that, like my therapist, mother, and brother, she advised staying, sticking it out, forgiveness. “Who even knows their students’ ages?” she said. 

Now she says she wants nothing to do with me until I leave him. 

As we’re hanging up, I cry so hard that I can only hope she understands me when I say I love her. Maybe part of me knows there’s really only one choice? Leave him and never talk to her again? The next morning I send the emails to the union lawyer. 

2020 

I’ve met Someone. I can’t tell if his lack of ambition is exactly what I need or if it will eventually piss me off. He makes me giggle into the night, but I often wish he were more creative. Orion was creative. Someone is nothing like Orion who was nothing like Allen. Someone, also, is nothing like Allen. Someone is Someone. He isn’t sad. He knows who he is and what he wants. He just doesn’t create. 

The sex is good, all the positions. He appears loyal to his family and friends. Apparently, he is never depressed. I think I already said that. I think the kids will like him. He has the diet of an eight-year-old and does not appreciate poetry. In fact, he downright dislikes poetry. And even though we just started dating, I decide here and now that I will never marry a man who downright dislikes poetry. 

I stand in front of his refrigerator, and at the bottom of his grocery list, I brainstorm gateway poets. Seventeen leans over the sink, shaving her armpits. Allen is outside the kitchen window—always outside now, which could be progress? Orion rests against a wall, not a hungry one, helping me. 

fruity pebbles 

mac cheese 

lays 

Collins 

Hoagland 

Oliver 

Diaz 

1995ish 

She says my eyes are beautiful. 

“Sure,” I say. 

“Like dirt.” 

She tells me she loves nothing more than putting her hands in dirt. All the beautiful things in this world grow out of dirt. Dirt, she says, is what our house sits on and what our feet walk on. She looks out the window—sky and desert brush in all directions—and says it’s what cradles us in the end. I ask what she means, but she says, “Nevermind.” I wonder if she read it in a book. She’s the high school English teacher and the smartest person in our town, and I think I’ll grow up to be like her and marry a man like my dad, who is the best dad in the whole world, but we’ll have house on green grass, not dirt, with flowers in front but not the yellow ones. 

2017-2022 

You might be wondering what happens to the sick man. The union drops their support, but he’s still not fired. Seventeen is contacted by the school, but she doesn’t want to press charges. The school pays him hundreds of thousands to walk away. He spends that in a couple of years and struggles to find work. He eventually admits that Thirty-seven’s allegations were true. He wonders if Thirty-five was her friend and invented a story out of solidarity. When he calls to say he’s going to kill himself, he admits to a dozen other affairs, some with women I knew. He does not kill himself. He lives with his mother, who is terrible to him. His children love him fiercely. 

2016 

As I’m driving home from the interview with the Title IX coordinator, I think about the end of Flannery O’Conner’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” 

“She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 

I run the metaphor a dozen ways. I wonder if for years I was holding the gun to his head, and then, what. I freaking dropped it? Oops, butterfingers. Or, was he holding the gun to mine? Or maybe the problem was that we never had any guns, not really. Just two dipshits standing in the woods. 

I grip the steering wheel and wonder if I am the grandmother and my childhood is the gun. 

I think marriage might be the gun or a Mexican standoff, each of us holding a gun to the other’s temple. I think, Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I think we are Allen and Candice. I think we are the guns, no bodies, just two pistols, no names, just man and wife. 

2021 

Someone loses a friendly bet and has to read a book of poetry of my choice. The kids laugh as he groans, “A bet’s a bet.” 

I sit on the couch between stacks of thin, colorful spines, but I can’t decide. Instead, when we’re allowed to return to work, I stand at the copier and make a mixed tape. Seventeen presses the button. Despite the mandate, she doesn’t wear a mask. 

Can’t find a sheer one to match your stockings, hmm? 

Her body is still in focus, but her face is fuzzy now. Probably because it’s been a couple years since I’ve slinked through her social media accounts. Oh well. I don’t need to see her features to know her expression. 

Someone comes to me when he’s done reading and says he likes this one, and this one, too. He says, “It’s kind of remarkable, isn’t it? What people can do with words?” 

August 2015 

To my credit, when I find out, I spiral hard. 

I consider Facebook messaging Seventeen to say I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. But, among the photos of her in lingerie are photos of her holding knives and posts glorifying school shooters. I decide, instead, to do nothing, which is to stay, I decide to live with her. I grow fonder of her with each passing week. It’s a modern-day love story. I tell her often, Any way you slice it, it’s not your fault. And I appreciate the many ways she tells me to fuck off. 

2022 

Someone asks me to marry him, not against a wall but against a sunset on my father’s lawn. He writes me a poem. But I don’t know, you know? I don’t know how to tell him what I’ve been deciding behind his back—that marriage is an institution, not a poem, that institutions are stages and stages are deserts, that people are numbers and numbers are ghosts and ghosts are viral. That even what’s viral can be denied, or maybe it’s that denial is the most powerful virus of all. I’m still working that one out. That I’m a gun-not a-gun, and that we get one to fuck up and to be fucked up by. That’s not funny or it is, maybe, yesterday or tomorrow. I don’t know how to tell him that even though some of my ghosts sleep outside now, I still think about my hands, and I think about my hands. 

2007 

In a twist, a tipsy dervish twirl of fate, I have grown allergic to the cat I gifted Allen two years ago. Lolita, we named him before we knew he was a him. Lo is what stuck. 

It’s the middle of the night, and I’m sucking in air at the bedroom window. Allen lies in bed with Lo sucking on the pasty crook of his arm—a habit we’ve recently learned means he was taken too young. 

“We’re going to have to rehome him, aren’t we?” Allen says, covering Lo’s ears as if to shield him from the conversation. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll still marry you.” 

“You want to marry me?” 

“Duh,” he says. “But you get to break it to the cat.” 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry