Ray with Beer (2019)
Wriggling out of the shapewear made me lightheaded and I had to gulp greedy breaths of air when I became free. I shivered while I fought against David’s tight grip on the comforter.
BY DANA PUGH
IMAGE BY MEAHA CAUDLE-CHOI
If you’re not careful, a marriage will swallow you up.
I was nineteen when I met my husband and, misguided as I was, I thought he was discovering me. Even more, that I was discovering myself. It was too late when I realized the truth.
The cheap fabric of my black dress pinched at my armpits and sucked in the gut that had begun to loosen and swell when I reached forty. My skin’s elasticity had stretched too far, wearing out and giving in like the waistband of old briefs. Then, Spanx took over.
I sat across the table from Nadeen. She had five children and a grandson on the way. She claimed she was still madly in love with her husband. Mad was probably the right word for it.
“Don’t you look pretty,” she told me. “Are those new shoes?”
“Thank you,” I said. What I didn’t say: David didn’t notice. He said nothing as the perfume sprayed, one of his favourites from years ago, some of the droplets landing on his turned back. A vague “See you later,” was all I got when I pulled my peacoat around me, the second skin I wanted his love to be.
“Will you?” I asked.
“Did you say something?” he asked the air. My mind was already out the door.
The server brought the wine list after I told him not to bother. Oh well. Being ignored. “It’s the plight of the woman,” mother had always warned. I never listened.
Nadeen and I sipped on rich reds that stained our lips and loosened our tongues and talked about the bills we couldn’t pay and the children who didn’t need us and the husbands who barely existed. A good night, overall.
I wondered when we got so old.
“Remember when we got our drinks for free?” Nadeen asked. She meant when we were young, and our breasts were perky. The only things we’d given birth to were ideas and dreams of the future. We were pregnant with hope and promise.
The thing about being old—older—is that inside you feel the same. You imagine the outside of you is still reflecting the youth within you. It’s only by the tone of the server that you realize how you must look. You know it when he talks to you like you’re a dear friend of his mother. What will I be when he looks at me and sees his granny?
The bill came before we were finished, a way of shoving the old out in preparation for the new. I pushed my hand down my coat sleeve, my stored mitt popping out, a mini birth in its own right. Nadeen buttoned herself into a trench coat that I knew couldn’t be warm enough. I closed my mouth before I could tell her to bundle up or offer her my scarf. I wasn’t her mother, after all.
I was already the mother of too many. David included.
When I got home, he was already in bed, his form made lumpy and swollen by the blankets. Only his feet and ears stuck out. I thought of Mr. Potato Head.
I remembered the pile of dishes in the sink. Somebody else will do them, he must have thought.
The zipper’s teeth gnawed at my flesh while I struggled to remove my dress, alone, maneuvering my arthritic elbows like a contortionist. Wriggling out of the shapewear made me lightheaded and I had to gulp greedy breaths of air when I became free. I shivered while I fought against David’s tight grip on the comforter.
Weaseling my way in, I wrapped my cold arms around his body. He jerked awake and away. “What are you doing?” he asked me, as if it were so insane and unthinkable that a woman would want closeness with her husband. I tried to explain that I wanted his heat to fill me up, that I needed to wear his skin around my own like a blanket, like a snail’s shell. A home.
He didn’t understand. “I’m too hot, just too hot, can’t do it,” he muttered, over and over again, each word a blow. “I’m suffocating,” he said. He was always suffocating.
“You don’t want me,” I cried.
He didn’t turn to face me. I wondered if I had said those words aloud, or if they had simply reverberated inside my skull.
David ran five miles every day. You could set a watch to his routine. His body was the same as when I met him—the skin a bit weaker, maybe some slack in his jowls, but that was it. He did the New York Times crossword each Monday—I’d long suspected the Saturday one was too hard—and I watched The Bachelorette on my own.
Other people complained about the changes in their spouses’ bodies. “Would it kill him to hit the gym a couple times a week? I’m just saying.” David’s sameness enraged me. It wasn’t fair. My body didn’t match who I was on the inside. I was young and pretty, too.
He had filled me with our babies and made me his wife. His love had stretched and warped my stomach, my breasts, my body. My skin was now a lattice of stretch marks that shone like the cracks of roads now filled in. My dreams and ideas were discarded like useless trinkets during a move.
It was easy to blame my husband. He was the one who forgot our anniversary a few too many times—even when it was written in red ink on the calendar, circled with a heart.
I was the one who found his keys on the floor and stuck them into his coat pocket, ensuring he’d get to work on time. Ensuring his schedule could remain intact. I was the one who turned on the TV on Monday nights instead of asking him about his day. Instead of trying to create a spark.
I reached out to David from across the great expanse of our bed. In the early days of our romance, we shared a twin bed. I couldn’t imagine that now. My hand wrapped around his arm, just below the shoulder, and he let out a sleepy sigh. “I need space. Just some breathing room.”
My breath caught in my throat.
David cocooned himself in our blankets. It was a shield designed to keep me out. Because I had scooped him out and gobbled him up. I cashed in his love like cheques, until he was empty and needy.
I made him my child and then I screamed because he was no longer my man.
Dana Pugh holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto and is wrapping up a Graduate Certificate in creative writing through Humber College. She spends her time doing literally anything to avoid writing. When she does write, it’s about relationships.
Image: Meaha Caudle-Choi, Ray with Beer, oil paint on canvas, 2019.
Edited for publication by Leah Waddel, as part of the Professional Writing and Communications Program.
The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Applied Research & Innovation.