Laughter

She settled in behind the marble kitchen counter, stooped on a kitchen stool, her elbows, arms, and hands forming an arch upon which her hollowed out face sat. Her feet she perched on the lowest rung of the post-modern stool. She refused to wear shoes in the house, the one act of defiance against her submission to suburban house wife to a middle-aged doctor.

Her hair she put up in a messy bun held by a simple thin ribbon, tied so that it was hidden in the dark hair. Sprigs of hair sprouted from the malformed bun.

Her husband was digging in their ironically bare refrigerator for his juice cleanse, a concoction of various exotic fruits and vegetables. She found in in the refrigerator everyday, its soured and pale orange color making her feel nauseous and ill. She didn’t juice. She just didn’t eat, choosing instead to feed a hunger in her with more hunger and boredom.

He was wearing his workout clothes, a pair of basketball shorts which skimmed his knees, a sleeveless t-shirt. On the counter, his iPhone and wireless earbuds lay. He had recently shaved his head, something about having a clean surgery theatre.

She hated when he used that word theatre. There was no theatrical about what her husband did at all. It was, despite his incessant nattering, one of the most boring occupations that she had ever heard described. She never told him that. She let her desire for drama in her life fester in her stomach along with the hunger.

“Try behind the kale on the bottom shelf,” she said.

He bent down, and, as if pulling at the Holy Grail, lifted the juice from behind the kale.

Harvey was a thick man, meaning there was a certain thickness around his head, his neck, his arms and legs, a thickness and a heaviness. It was why she would not let him mount her when having sex, the sweaty thing that it was. He put his all into having sex with her, pushing and driving, with all his thickness and heaviness into her body, using all of his energy and becoming slippery and sticky at the same time. And when done he would collapse onto her like a giant boulder she tried pushing up the hill and which rolled back down on her.

Instead, when he signaled his interest, when he put his hairy arm around her waist, and kissed her with his thick lips on his svelte neck, she submitted to his desire, though she wished just to get it over with.

She didn’t know it at the time, but she wasn’t the person he married at the time their vows were exchanged.

She was wearing her own workout gear as well, but in a very casual way, because she had not exercised this morning. He had asked her to accompany him, and she had agreed to go, but then the morning came after a long night of watching television and prodding her tablet for something to fill up the hole in her soul, and she felt too tired to rise from her bed.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she had told her, as she had so many times in the past.

“How was your workout?” she asked now in a thorny way.

“Good,” he said. He wiped his mouth with his sweaty, hairy arm. “Going to take a shower, Babe. Wanna join me?”

She was uncomfortable enough with her own body, the thought of permitting this rough, ape of a man ogle her, despite the fact that he was her husband, well, it sickened her.

“Do you want me to get in the shower with you?”

She always thought this request was odd coming from a man who daily scrubbed right before and after each surgery, was so concerned with the cleanliness of things.

“No,” he said. 

She laughed.  It was a loud laugh and dangerous as it carried through the house they shared, rebounding off the high ceiling and dashing upstairs into the living part of the house, the home office, the bedroom, the den.

“What’s funny,” he asked.  She observed the stupid smile on his face, which looked like he was wincing in pain, and trying to hide it.  She knew he hated her laugh, its raucousness which he could not tie down or domesticate.  It was a laugh that demanded space which he could never give her.  

On the night of their honeymoon, the laugh drove him insane, the constant playfulness, even when they were consummating their marriage. 

….