Shit on a Stick
by Julie Webb
I remember the first time I pretended Kent’s hand belonged to someone else.
I was lying on my side in bed imagining myself at his funeral: rain, black-clad figures gripping black umbrellas, the uniformed dispersal of the family wading through mud with silent tongues. I could hear the sloshing of feet and the sucking of deep breathes, when his hand brushed my back. I pretended to be asleep as a vision of Ben exploded in my mind and it was his thirst reaching for me. And I had no desire to stop it.
In my daydreams it is always Kent who dies, never me. His unfortunate demise, although difficult and untimely, releases me, each and every time, into a brand new life. One where I can set the thermostat on any number I chose. One where I can make pancakes for supper or hamburgers for breakfast. One where I sit in a room void of bickering and brimming with peace and quiet.
It’s not that we aren’t happy. After twenty-three years of marriage and months of counseling, anyone can learn to be happy. What I crave is the passion. I miss the hunger in his eyes. Hell, I miss the urges inside myself that used to move me out of the recliner and into his lap. I guess all the little nit-picky stuff eats away at you until you look at the man across the dinner table from you and say, What happened to the person I married? And he looks at you like your head is green and you were just dropped out of a space ship into his front yard. I giggle and reassure him, Just kidding. He laughs and asks me what’s on TV tonight.
I questioned the counselor, How had we stalled? What had gone wrong? He asked me to repeat the question so he could understand it better. I squared my shoulders: I get the sense that my marriage has stopped.
He stared at me. I laughed nervously then tried to get myself off the hook by saying: fuck, the truth is now that it’s stalled, I’d be thrilled if it shifted into reverse and headed backward at full speed, at least we had lots of sex in the beginning. The counselor looked at me as if I were the oncoming atrocity that had crashed into and damaged our marriage. What? I demanded. What’d I say wrong?
I always felt he liked Kent better than he liked me. There is something about human nature that makes each one of us want to be the one who is better liked. But then, why would he like me at all? When we were going to the counseling sessions I looked like shit on a stick. But don’t all people whose marriages hit rock bottom look colorless and indifferent? I didn’t realize it then, but my life had already fallen apart and my disregard was a symptom. Like a sore throat precedes the flu, my disgust for Kent was scratchy and irritating. There were so many days I wanted to get on with the high fever and the retching just so we could get it over with. But there was a process to manage. Hoops to jump through. Counselors to be paid.
One day in session Kent started crying. He didn’t want our marriage to end. He couldn’t imagine his life without me. He wanted us to work harder at counseling and harder on our marriage. He didn’t want to lose me. He couldn’t bare it. He just couldn’t. As the counselor helped Kent explore his feelings, I excused myself to the bathroom. I excused myself often, mostly because I was bored out of my mind and partly because I hated feeling like I was eavesdropping on Kent’s personal counseling sessions. The empathy of the counselor toward Kent turned my stomach more than once. Although I never threw up in the bathroom, it was a nice place. I did like sitting in there, letting the white noise envelope me while I imagined all the things Kent was saying about me that made the counselor not like me even more.
The whole counseling thing was Kent’s idea. He found someone who came with all the bells and whistles: plenty of letters behind his name, decades of experience and even the religious world view that Kent had embraced in his early twenties until exchanging it for his favorite beer. Kent told me he knew this counselor could help us. We can get our lives back on track, he said. We could renew our vows at the church and take a second honeymoon. I wasn’t as enthused. The only reason I agreed to go was for the same reason most people go to therapy, to get an assessment. All I wanted was a quick in and out. A lifting of the hood along with a deep look inside. A tinkering of sorts that resulted in a checklist of what needed to be fixed. Then we could take the list home and decide what parts, if any, to spend our hard earned money repairing.
It only took two, maybe three, months before I realized I didn’t like this guy. I fucking hated the way he sat in his chair with his folded hands between his legs and his plastic smile on his face. Kent ate up that shit, but not me. I fucking hated all of his Time magazines in the reception area and my world being narrated by some droning voice on talk radio while we waited. What I hated the most was the way he acted out his emotions, cycling through surprise and sadness and understanding over and over again. He was like talking to an inanimate object.
But I suppose I owed it to Kent. After all these years, I had to make some effort to fix us. So I went . . . until, like a slap in the face, my fiftieth birthday came and went.
It’s not like it came out of nowhere, I just wasn’t expecting it to be so painful. I started waking up at night with something pressing on my chest, a sad sense of urgency. My time was running out. And every night all I could think about was If I came down with some terrible disease, who would I want beside me to live out those final days? Who would help me make sense of my life--this is who I am. This is what I know. This is what I love. Whose breath did I want whispering in my ear? Whose face did I want to be the last thing I ever saw on this earth?
For a while I stuffed my life with distractions: picked up some overtime at work, went hiking with the girlfriends, talked Kent into having sex. Then, one day during a counseling session I excused myself to the bathroom. My stomach was whirling and it wasn’t Kent this time. I leaned over the sink, letting the white noise serenade my upset insides when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Fuck. I looked old, so sad. I hadn’t washed my hair in three days. I had been wearing the same pair of jeans all week. Who is this person?
And that is when I hit the brakes. Stopped everything and listened. Listened for me, for my voice in all this. But all I could hear inside was screaming. Loud anger. I was angry with Kent for dragging me along side his life for two decades. And angry at myself for letting him.
I went back into the session and looked Kent in the eyes, announcing that I had made a decision. I realized then that I couldn’t blame the counselor, he was just doing what he was being paid to do--save marriages. And I couldn’t blame Kent. I think at some point in our marriage he had actually come to love me and that’s why we were in marital counseling in the first place. What I had been doing was wasting my days on things that are not my life: work, television, laundry, marriage counseling, Kent. For the first time I saw that my life wasn’t about me at all.
That’s when I quit trying. I let go of the anger. Let go of the feeling of wasting so much time. Kent kept wanting to talk to me but there was nothing inside me to say. I wanted to explain it to him, but there was only nothingness. And I welcomed the nothingness, letting it lull me to sleep at night and daily feeding it indifference, letting it swell like bread dough rising. For a while, drowning in nothingness was a scary place. I know now that nothingness floats like a phantom around every life, numbing our senses and deluding our minds if we let it.
I remember the first time I saw myself in the mirror again.
I was lying on my side in bed, the day Kent moved out, imaging what my funeral would be like: sunshine pouring down the backs of black suits and dresses, beads of sweat dripping from the reverend’s sideburns. A sparse group of acquaintances swaying around the gravesite, so quiet I could hear their hearts and hold each beat in my hand. That’s when the thought of my mother losing her youngest daughter made me tearful. I went into the bathroom for a tissue. The night light was next to the mirror and bright enough for me to catch a glimpse of myself. Fuck. My voice exploded inside my head. It told me to be proud that I was no longer burdening myself with the thankless task of fixing what couldn’t be fixed. It told me it was okay to feel again. And then, I laughed when it told me I no longer look like shit on a stick.
Poignantly articulated feelings that every divorcing couple can relate to. A sensation of freedom is a powerful emotion that can catapult life to sun-soaked possibilities.
MB
Posted by: M.B. Yunus | August 23, 2013 at 02:34 PM