The Second Husband by Cris Aboobaker

If I’m born again as a man instead of as a woman, I will aim the silly-looking mushroom waggling between my legs and shoot my stream so it splashes dead center in the toilet bowl. Bullseye! Bango! How hard can that be?

But I can’t target my Jimmy’s for him, much as I’m tempted to reach around his bulk and try. His belly is so big nowadays he can barely see his own member. I’ll admit, at our age, none of our tubes work the way they used to. But still. Every time I wipe his wayward sprinkles off the bathroom tiles, like I’m doing now, dressed for work, desperate to leave but bent over with a moistened piece of toilet paper, I want to yank on his earlobe like he was a kid. Which he really is, a sixty-five-year-old ten-year-old.

“Damn it, Jimmy!” I say, as I pop out of the bathroom.

“Yes, my baby,” he croons, as he walks away from me.

“In the bowl, Jimmy, in the bowl!”

He turns with puppy eyes. “I thought I did,” he says.

I make the snicking noise with the corners of my mouth that the kids make fun of. I caught them at it the other day in the hallway between classes. Sadiq and some boy who isn’t even in my class showing off to a couple of girls. “This is Mrs. Conti,” I heard them say, making sucking noises with clenched lips, each trying to outdo the other. They stopped when they saw me, the girls still giggling. I stopped and glared. You can’t show hurt with them, or weakness, even when you feel like crying inside.  

These ticks creep up on you over the years. Forty years of teaching High School social studies, with all the blank looks, dumb answers and clueless arrogance of teenagers, and I’ve been making that noise for God knows how long. Dimly aware of it, until I heard them laugh. Guaranteed, if there’s something ugly about you, teenagers will nail you for it.

I stepped into the lady’s room. Eyed myself in the mirror, like a beaky sparrow getting ready to peck at someone. Wearing the plaid skirt and blazer set I got on sale at Nordstroms. The same outfit I’m wearing now, as I yell at my husband while he ambles off to the kitchen, singing nonsense to himself.

He turns, rolls up to me and pulls me to his chest. “You’ll rumple my clothes,” I say, pushing at him, my voice muffled by his flesh. He smells a little funky. Is he forgetting to bathe now too, I wonder?

“I’m planting azaleas today,” he tells me. On these spring mornings, as the sun starts to warm the garden, Jimmy is there, reading and reclining on his lawn chair or dabbling in the dirt. No apron of course, mud from his t-shirt tracking into the house. Sometimes, when I come home, I’m on my knees again, with a sponge and paper towels by the garden door. Once he forgot to wear gloves while planting and got an infection, his right index finger swelling like a hot dog.

“Hey, wear gloves this time,” I tell him.

“Yes, yes” he says, “Go to school and if anyone asks, tell them I don’t miss them.” He worked there too. An English teacher. Retired ahead of me, but only by a year.

He pats my rump as I walk away, his big paw lingering. I shake it off. I used to close my eyes when he touched me that way. Another husband, another time.

I drive the couple of miles to school, turning off the boulevard into neighborhood streets. They look much the same as when I first came this way, as student teacher Anna Cohen. Though the roads have sprouted more potholes, the Tudor homes now sit cheek to cheek with faceless McMansions and now, even in spring, the trees look frowzy, like elderly ladies trying to tuck gray hairs behind their ears.

Driving these roads in the other direction once, leaving school flushed and giddy with Jimmy sitting beside me, I heard his rumbling growl as he kept touching me. “Stop that, I’m driving,” I said. And I took him home, back to the house I got in the settlement when Sam left me. I never thought I would feel that way again, trembling like a girl.

That’s how we got started, Jimmy and me, after months of sitting in the break room together, drinking coffee, talking about students and lesson plans, not fooling anyone but ourselves about where we were headed. Then that frantic afternoon, tearing off our clothes, rushing to the bedroom and feeling silly about it afterwards. We weren’t young, even then, both past forty, both with a history of spouses who left us, neither of us pretty even in our prime. How the kids must laugh, their Greek chorus of ridicule shadowing the story of our lives.

They would laugh even more if they knew the whole story. Fortunately for us, the neighborhood has changed so I’m never faced with kids whose parents knew me as Mrs. Cohen. Whose first husband decided, after a romance that was supposed to last a lifetime, that he didn’t love her anymore and divorced her to start a new family. In one of those sloppy, destructive things men do, like spraying their urine all over the bathroom tiles.

School is school, today like any other day. Sometimes, the reason I do this, the magic of it, breaks through like waking from a dream. Today it’s the glint in Lakeisha’s eyes when I read the lines from Lincoln’s second inaugural, not the ones everyone knows, about malice for none and charity for all, but from the paragraph before: “Until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword.” In that instant her eyes light up and I am teaching just to her. Then she looks out the window, sniggers to the girl next to her, and I’m just old Mrs. Conti droning on about ancient history that means nothing to her at all.

 The drive home is like any other day, the lights on the boulevard stopping me every two minutes with idiots honking their horns behind me. Jimmy is in the garden when I come home, dozing over his book. I stick out my head and tell him to watch the stove while I take a shower. I put some rice to boil, strips of chicken in the pan. Come in now, I tell him, and keep an eye on it. That’s all I ask.

I come out, toweled down, in a house dress, comfortable, no bra when I’m at home, my hair still lank and damp. I smell smoke as I come around the corner and I’ll be damned if he didn’t let the chicken burn. Not too much, as I rush over to turn down the flame and push the pieces around with a wooden spoon. It’s salvageable, still edible. I turn to him, as he gets up and puts his book down, looking around like a helpless child.

“What the hell is wrong with you! How useless can you be!”

If I could, I would have pulled the words back into my mouth, like a cartoon bubble. The temperature changed; we had crossed an invisible line.

“Stop it, Anna!” he says and slams his hand on the table.

I step back. He never calls me that. Honey, baby, darling, sweetie, other things in bed, but never my name. Not since that first day we came home together. And in twenty years of marriage, in the years I knew him before, I never saw him hit something. Could not imagine it.

We are standing in the kitchen, a few feet apart, and he is twice my size. It is the end with a man, the absolute end, if I think I might not be safe with him.

“Don’t you ever threaten me.” I shiver as chill air from the garden door catches the dampness of my hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pointing to the cups and saucers on the table, still rattling from his slap. “Useless. I’m useless.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, Jimmy. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

With our difference in size, the best way for us was with me on top. Through all my celibate years after Ron left, I never thought I would have that again. It was glorious. But those days are gone. We’ve talked about pills, everyone takes them nowadays, even young guys, but I was afraid it wouldn’t be healthy for him and I don’t care that much anymore. “It’s ok Jimmy,” I’d rub his head and tell him, when he tried and failed. “It’s ok.”

“I can’t remember things like I used to,” he says. “I try. But you’re yelling at me all the time. I can’t take it, Anna, I can’t.”

A horrifying vision. Maybe Jimmy’s sloppiness that so annoys me isn’t just because he’s a man. What if something else is happening, beyond his control, that may get worse? Oh God. Give me the patience, and the strength.

“Stop yelling at me. I’m not Ron,” he says, and shakes his head.

“What does Ron have to do with it?” My voice gets shrill. “What does Ron have to do with what happens between you and me?”

But Ron is with us in the kitchen. A mirage. Jimmy’s reflection. An amiable bear of a man, so much like Jimmy that I sometimes think of things Jimmy said and remember, no, that was Ron. So much like Jimmy. Until the day Ron said he found someone else and left me.

“I’m the other husband. The one who stayed,” says Jimmy. He looks like he’s about to cry and I come over, take his head and hold it between my breasts.

As I rock him into me, I think of the kids and a lesson they will never learn in school because only life can teach it. Everyone deserves love. Even Mr. and Mrs. Conti.

Cris Aboobaker

Image: A pair of gold wedding rings one on top of the other. From pixabay.com