A Really Good Wife: A Pop-Up WeWrite Contest!
Happy the husband of a really good wife; The number of his days will be doubled. A perfect wife is the joy of her husband, He will live out the years of his life in peace. --Ecclesiasticus 26:1-4
This is my entry for A Pop-Up WeWrite Contest! hosted by @owasco
The Prompt: The Sandwich
written by @owasco
"Ugh! The bread is soaking wet! Bread is not supposed to be soaking wet!" he snarled at me as he spit a soggy mouthful of half-chewed peanut butter sandwich into a tissue. I stood at attention next to his bed. He handed the sodden and heavy tissue to me.
He was now vegan, grain free, nightshade free, lectin free, phytic acid free, and deaf to my feeble protestations. He was not free, however, from his acutely tuned palate, which was maddeningly different from mine.
He had requested a peanut butter sandwich. I knew meeting all his new diet criteria would be a bitch, but I rose to the challenge. I had to.
I chose a very small ten dollar loaf of 'bread' and bought it. I bought some raw peanuts. I shelled the peanuts. I soaked, sprouted, and dehydrated the peanuts. After very lightly roasting them, I ground those peanuts into peanut butter. I then very carefully smeared the freshly ground peanut butter onto the somewhat normal looking bread. I made sure to get the peanut butter to the edges just like I had learned in home economics class long, long ago.
I knew how to make a proper tea sandwich.
I now spent my life trying to make this man happy. I signed up for that didn't I? Wasn’t that my reason for being? To make this man happy?
Well, he was not happy with that sandwich.
"To enjoy your work and accept your lot in life--this is indeed
a gift from God," Mom always reminded me. "Ecclesiastes five-nineteen."
Aren't gifts returnable if you have a cash register receipt? Is a marriage license refundable?
"In sickness and in health, until death us do part," Mom would say ominously.
Ah, death. The easy way out. Why did petty, mean people cling so tenaciously to life? Dale could do the decent thing and die, but no, he had to hang in there regardless of the extraordinary expense and medical interventions. And the demands on my time, my effort.
Every day I envisioned a new way for Dale to die.
One push, at the top of the stairs. What if he didn't die?
Oops, there goes the portable radio into the bathtub. Sizzle!
Unwashed lettuce tainted with e coli. Eww, messy bed linens, prolonged pain, no guarantee of death.
Lily of the valley mixed with his dandelion greens...would the coroner catch me?
The stain of blood on my hands, or the shame and guilt of abandoning my husband, the peanut-eating invalid who couldn't say please or thank you, who could never say that's all right, you did your best, and it's good enough for me.
Never. Nothing I did for him was ever good enough.
"He's never beat you," Mom would say. "He put a roof over your head. He's neat and clean, conscientious, and highly respected in the community. Why do you need glory and praise?"
I didn't! I just wanted to hear that I was valued, loved, appreciated.
I wanted my life back. Some sense of agency. A purpose other than being at his disposal, 24-7. I'd tried leaving him for weeks at a time, but Dale always guilt-tripped me into coming back.
Mom was six feet under now, but I heard her louder than ever: You reap what you sow. What bad seed did I sow, to end up with a miserable SOB who was impossible to please and hell-bent on making me share every atom of his pain?
Why shouldn't Dale reap what he'd sown?
A knock came at the screen door, which opened before I could get to the kitchen. Darcy. O Lord God, not Dale's discard, the daughter nobody else would have known about if she hadn't sued for medical records of her birth parents. Of course she was in need of more than information. She required Dale's financial assistance, and he freely gave it--for as long as she would sit at his side sympathizing with his hoard of health problems. Naturally, her visits were short. She always had some new spa to hurry off to, some friends to impose on during her travels, some eco-farm with medicinal herbs to go visit.
"Hi Mom," she greeted me. Inappropriately. Over her shoulder, I caught sight of her SUV in the driveway. "I hope you're taking good care of my daddy."
I'd take care of him, all right, and his little indiscretion of a daughter too.
"How's your Keto diet going?" I said. "You ever get past that Keto flu thing?"
"Oh, I'm going vegan now." She marched right past me, to the living room, where Dale lay on his sick bed. I missed my sofa and coffee table full of books, the time to read them, an inch of my own to breathe in.
"Darcy, honey." Dale lifted his arm and they fist-bumped like old pals.
Tall, model-thin, with eyes the exact same gray-blue as Dale's and hair and ears that stuck out like everyone else's in his family, Darcy was a ray of sunshine in Dale's miserable life. She only showed up when she wanted something from us. What would it be this time?
"Struts," she was saying. She had driven in peril to get here, but of course she wouldn't feel safe leaving until repairs were made. I listened to the excruciating details of her First-World problems while staring out the window at her red Murano with the multitude of repair bills. The SUV was as sickly and high-maintenance as Darcy and her father.
Darcy wouldn't come right out and ask for money, but she'd flatter Dale and butter his bread just exactly right and pour his tea more perfectly than I possibly could. It takes one obsessive-compulsive hypochondriac to know one. "River people are dirty," Dale always said of my family, but when were we ever bed-ridden or sick?
One upside to Darcy's visits: she'd fuss over Dale for at least a few minutes, which gave me a chance to slip out to the detached garage and check the contents of my Kia Sorento. Suitcases packed and ready to go at a moment's notice, buried under flats of Dale's empty mineral water bottles. Time to run those to the store and hand-feed them into those awful machines. And add a few boxes of non-perishable grocery items--if I wanted, I could live on processed food full of gluten, sugar, MSG, nitrates, and whatever the hell was banned last week. GMOs? Mixed tocopherols? All mine!
"I'm off to grab some groceries," I announced. "Darcy, you can stay here and enjoy your daddy."
She gave me her beatific smile, the one that had Dale so deceived, he'd probably buy her a whole new SUV before this visit was over.
Not that I'd be here to see. It was my turn to travel.
"Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you," I mumbled for Dale's darling daughter while I backed the Kia out of the garage.
Darcy's days were about to get very, very long, indeed.
Thank you for hosting this we-write, @owasco!
I was planning to take a dark turn with it, but you know my m.o. - why put my protagonists up a tree and shoot at 'em, if I can show them the way down the tree and all the way out of town? I'm boring and predictable, but happy to see these fictional heroines spread their wings and fly away!
Please come join us at @freewritehouse
Where You Do You
Great addition to the story Carol. I liked how you added another character to the mix. Nice ending with the wife getting out of Dodge. 😆
#posh https://twitter.com/tea_in_carolina/status/1229511188066770952
Love the extra layer of family! Guilt free escape AND revenge. hahahaha. I hope she cleaned out the bank accounts and owns the life insurance policies. Darcy can have the house and EVERYTHING in it. Love this one.
Thank you so very much for your entry!
Thank you, @owasco and @redheadpei!
I was thinking of the word count, or I might have mentioned her own bank account, kept safe from the daughter. I'd also thought of having her cash out a life insurance policy. You make a good point: let Darcy have the house and all that's in it (including Dale) - a lot of women would be lucky to escape with little more than their lives from a prison of a marriage, or trap.
This is great fun and the final sentence is perfect. There's no need to kill a man when you can visit upon him prolonged suffering instead:)
Some fates are worse than death. :)
The selfish, self-absorbed daughter will surely break free of the noose, unless Daddy gets his hooks in her, taking advantage of her dependency...and the wife washes her hands of them both, I hope. :)
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I loved how carefully you treated the background and all these excerpts from the New Testament, I gather. Your English, of course, is a thing of beauty.
And yet another solution to the puzzle. Rather than killing the cringe, just leave him to his own devices.
Not sure where did she go, but I guess she was going to visit her "river" relatives. Whatever that meant. )
Enjoyable read!
Thank you!
My mom grew up along the river, where half a dozen brothers and sisters got married and built houses and raised all these cousins who'd go ice skating, ice fishing, canoing, or clamming on the banks of the Cedar. I never would have imagined anyone calling them "dirty river people," but in fact, one of them ended up with a clean, neat-freak German mother-in-law who thought the Irish (and river people) were "dirty." I keep a clean house (paper clutter aside), but not as clean as those German women, who'd wash curtains and rugs waaaay more often than I do. And sweep the front step, even scrub it soap and water... not for me! (I don't even do windows.) I'm unclean! eep!
Ahaha... Yeah, I remember my first visit to Vienna, when women washed the pavement in front of their shops with soap. I can only imagine what they do inside their houses. Then again I was in Tijuana and saw there the other side of that spectrum. )))
Wow! As young as you are, it must mean the Clean Habit persisted into the next generations. No wonder they thought my mom's "river people" were dirty. Her uncle lived in a tar-paper shack and he washed dishes by soaking them in a gunny sack in the river. The Cedar River! Which didn't run clear and clean even in the 1930s. No surprise, it wasn't germs that killed him, it was a truck. Like my dad always says -you can diet and exercise and pass on the donuts and give up smoking and get hit by a train and die young anyway.
Yeah. Yong enough to remember this Iris man winning the Olympic Games )))
You're older than i am? I would not have guessed! You're tech-savvy and contemporary in ways that I will never be. :)
I am just a programmer by trade. That's all :)))
I am so happy to read the happy end of this story 😁
It is me time and I am sure dad and daughter loooove to spend quality time together. Dad can reap what he seeded now too. 💕
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Thank you so much Kitty! You nailed it - sardonically, cleverly!
The grasping, self-absorbed daughter might not slip out of the trap as slickly as she usually does. And I love mgaft's idea of the wife slipping back to her "dirty river people" who--you guessed it--the controlling husband had alienated and estranged her from. That's their m.o.
If only real life served karma as swiftly as fiction does.
Real life might but it takes so much longer and if we seldom notice it. 💕
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I have doubts Darcy will stick around and take care of him, but she'll probably have to do some things she doesn't want to do in order to get him to keep supporting her financially.
Great story!
Yes!! You get it!!
She needs his money. Her SUV needs repairs. She is STUCK HERE for some time. Karma, Karma, Karma... arsenic is quicker, but if another villain is at hand she'll take what she can. :)
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Thank you very much. 👍
Ha ha!
I don't think Darcy's days will be long. She'll head for the hills. I do think Dale will do a Lazarus and recover miraculously.
Well told, but I was so irritated with the narrator. Can't relate to that passivity.
I wouldn't harm him. Just take off.
Hope she enjoys her gluten-free snacks :))
Passivity... indoctrinated with doing the right thing... well, I know two women who inspired the narrator, and it aggravates me to hear of Christian duty, marriage vows, and accepting our lot in life, when they're married to tyrants who are not the model of Christian virtue that good wives might submit to and be better off for it. (Big might, eh?) You may not have grown up Fundamentalist. I instinctively sensed a lack of logic in it all... thanks for reading and commenting!
P.S. I don't think the narrator will eat all that processed food. It's just liberating for her to remember that she has the right to choose to. :)
Oh, if you only knew. I think I was born a feminist, or at least became an obligatory feminist, because of the circumstances in my home. My mother--a wonderful woman--was devout Catholic. Under the same kind of theological yoke as Protestant fundamentalism. Married for life, no matter what. Or be damned to hell. This orthodoxy, which cemented male superiority, was reinforced by cultural roots: traditional Sicilian. 2000 years of patriarchy.
I was a feminist before it was a movement :)) I think that's why the narrator annoyed me so. I didn't blame her. Just found it very, very irritating. Which means, you told the story really well. Too real for me :))
"Too real" for me too - sounds like you and I both were born allergic to the indoctrination of patriarchal "good wife" mentality. I've read books about parenting a "Spirited Child" where we are advised to let go of the myth that "good" children are submissive - and "a dull child gives you no grief" - but we have 150+ years of institutionalized education punishing the "ADHD" and "spiritied" children, rewarding the sheep, the ones who can sit still all day and not go stir crazy. But none of this is news to you. ;)
I should add that my mother tried so hard to be patient. It was such a different mindset. She was a devoted mother, just born at a different time, in different circumstances.
I hear you. :)
We are more than our DNA. Nature vs Nurture. Upbringing, society, culture.
And the misfits, the rebels, who slip through the cracks.
Passivity. I've been mulling that over. What I thought I showed was a heroine who has been indoctrinated by her mother, but she argues with her mom, she questions her, and she ultimately rejects Mom's "accept your lot in life" view and makes her break. To me the heroine was fighting all along, even if it took her a long time to overcome what she'd been taught. Moments ago, I finally found and read your entry. Now that's a frustrating read - we want to see the downtrodden woman fight back, rebel, start a revolution (and locate Belinda!). :))