Once and Future Wife

by David Burnett

  “It really is,” Sarah said. “Kevin’s student and your boyfriend were using drugs to change their behaviors.”

  Tasha nodded. “I agree. Totally different…Of course, Jennie takes medicine to control her moods.”

  No one spoke for a moment.

  “What happened to your boyfriend?” Jennie asked.

  “I don’t know. I quit seeing him. I decided he was weak. I mean, if he couldn’t control himself without taking a drug…” She looked Jennie in the eye and shrugged.

  Jennie stared at the ground, and, again, no one spoke.

  Tasha stood up. “They can’t carry all of the bowls. Let me help. Can you watch Louisa, Jennie?”

  As Tasha walked away, Sarah reached out and turned Jennie’s head toward her. “She didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Jennie.”

  “You don’t know Tasha. She meant it just the way it sounded.” She sighed. “She’s talked about it before. She believes I’m too weak to control myself, that I’ll be sick again, and I’ll totally ruin her father’s life.”

  “Jennie, you have a medical problem, just like Thomas and Christa. It’s completely different.”

  “Is it?”

  “You know it is. Dr. Wilson told you so, didn’t she?”

  Jennie nodded. “Of course. You’re right.”

  She heard laughter and, looking up, saw Thomas and the girls returning, carrying bowls heaped with pudding.

  “I want to go for a walk. Watch Louisa for me.”

  Without waiting for Sarah to respond, she hopped to her feet and marched off across the field toward the woods. She heard Thomas call her, but she did not understand what he said and she did not look back.

  Reaching the tree line, she paused and glanced over her shoulder. Everyone was on the blanket. Louisa appeared be awake and Christa was giving her a taste of pudding.

  Jennie walked a little farther. She could hear the party guests talking and laughing in the distance, but their voices faded as she moved deeper into the forest. The path led her to a stream that tumbled down a small hill before running across a field toward the pond behind the barn. The trees stood thirty feet tall here, blocking the sun, and the cool air felt good. Beside the stream, she found a large pine tree, taller than the others, so large she could not reach around it. She leaned against it and allowed herself to cry.

  She thought about the articles Tasha had given her. Actually, Tasha had only given her summaries of the research. Jennie had searched for the original reports herself, and had read them repeatedly, as if they were tea leaves, containing clues about what would happen to her in the future. She had once dropped a copy of one of the reports on the floor at school and Kara had picked it up.

  “What is this, Jennie?” She had asked as she had scanned the report. “You’re not concerned about a relapse, are you? Are you having problems again?”

  “It’s just a research report.” She had pretended it was of no real significance, but late at night, the results, the numbers of people who had become ill again in spite of treatment, had run over and over through her mind.

  Tasha had said her boyfriend had been weak, and then she had looked directly into Jennie’s eyes.

  “Tasha is right,” she said aloud. “I was weak. When I was sick, I knew what I was doing every step of the way. I knew Thomas was a kind, loving person, but I allowed myself to believe he was mean. I knew not to drink until I was drunk. I knew not to go with other men. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I continued to do it. The medication is just a crutch that allows me to not take responsibility for my own actions.” She absently kicked a pine cone that lay at her feet.

  It was a challenge Jennie knew she had to accept. Round two with her demons.

  She had to do it for Tasha, so Tasha would respect her. She had to do it for Thomas, although she could not quite verbalize why this was so. She had to do it for herself, to prove she could stand on her own two feet, to prove she deserved Thomas, to prove she would never spiral downward again.

  “I need to know if I can do it on my own. I need to prove to myself I don’t need the medicine. Thomas deserves someone who is strong…and I need to know if—I need to know that I can control myself.”

  “A few days. That’s all.” She looked up into the top branches of the tree. “I’ll give it a try. For a couple of days, a week, maybe. See if I can handle it.”

  ***

  As she dressed for bed, Jennie placed the bottles of medicine on her bedside table. All four of them, mood stabilizer, antidepressant, tranquilizer, appetite suppressant, stared back at her. For over a dozen years she had depended on them to keep her safe. Now, she was going to ditch them.

  Her stomach felt queasy. Dr. Wilson had reduced the doses over time. She had agreed to talk about a further reduction in January. Perhaps she should wait, wean herself from them rather than going cold turkey.

  She recalled her AA meetings. She still attended occasionally, and she knew the other members would scoff at the idea of gradually ceasing to drink.

  “It’s all or none,” her first mentor had told her. “You can’t go from a quart to a pint to a glass. You quit or you don’t.”

  This is the same. If I want to be in control, to live without being dependent on medicine, then I have to quit, quit totally. Cold turkey.

  If it were bottles of whiskey she held, the thing to do would be to pour them down the drain, so…

  Picking up the four bottles, she went to the bathroom. The house was silent, all four girls having fallen asleep early, two in the guest bedroom, two in sleeping bags on the floor of the living room. Thomas and Louisa were at a hotel near the city.

  Her hands shook as she emptied the bottles into the toilet. Then she flushed the medicine away.

  Jennie glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror and then whispered, “I’ll be all right.”

  October

  Just before she had drifted off, the grandfather clock in the hall had struck midnight. Now, as she lay in bed, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, Jennie heard the chimes again, followed by two deep bongs. She stretched, rearranged the covers, turned on her side, and closed her eyes. Her mind began to wander.

  It had been a month since she tossed her medicine, and she had been fine, hadn’t she?

  She sighed.

  There was the telephone call from her mother the week before. She had wanted Jennie to drive her to visit her father at the state prison in Milledgevile. He was sorry for what he had done, she had told Jennie, and he wanted to apologize to her in person. Jennie had felt anger rising, but rather than trying to control it, she had screamed at her mother, had told her that an apology four years after the fact was too little, too late, and that she never wanted to see her father again, that when he was released in six months, she planned to have a restraining order issued to keep him away. Then she had slammed the telephone down, clicking off without waiting for a reply.

  She knew she had acted as she would have when she was sick, but, she insisted to herself, there were differences. First, everything she had said about her father was true. He had waited over four years to apologize, she did not want to see him again, and she had already talked with her attorney about the order.

  More important, she had called her mother thirty minutes later to apologize and had taken her to dinner the next evening. The old Jennie would never have done that, she told herself.

  Then there was the incident at the grocery store, when the cashier had given her incorrect change for a purchase. She had paid with a twenty-dollar bill, but had received change as if she had handed her a ten. She had cursed at the woman when she discovered the mistake, not really saying anything too bad, but the woman had blushed and run away from her register, crying.

  Jennie knew she should not have made a scene, but the woman should have been paying attention to what she was doing rather than talking with the man in line behind Jennie. She always flirted with the guys rather than attending to her work, and Jennie had seen her make similar errors i
n the past. It was time that someone called her behavior to her attention, and it did not appear that her supervisor was planning to do it.

  No, both incidents were justified.

  She turned over and closed her eyes. Two hours of sleep were simply not enough. As she thought about it, however, she realized she had been sleeping far less than her normal seven hours for a couple of weeks. She had flushed her sleep medication with all of the others, it was true, but if she needed more sleep, shouldn’t she be tired?

  She found it boring to lie in bed, awake, for hours, but her lack of sleep did not appear to affect her during the day. She still got up early, energetic, wide awake, and ready for the day. She had read that sleep patterns change over time, and had concluded hers were in a state of flux. It would be terrific if she found herself to be in need of less sleep than she had needed for the past several years. A couple of extra hours each night without sleep would make it so much easier to get done all she wanted to do.

  Sometimes, like tonight, she had simply awakened. After a couple of hours, she might doze off again. Other times, though, she had been awakened by a bad dream.

  The night before, for instance, she had dreamed it was her wedding day. She had been wearing a long, white dress, not a wedding gown, but an evening gown. She was standing in the family room of Thomas’s house, soon to be their house, waiting for her brother to arrive to take her to the church. The door had opened, and Thomas had entered. He wore khakis, a polo shirt, and slip-ons with no socks. He had been for a walk on the Battery and, in one hand, carried a notebook that he used to record ideas for his books. In the other was a long roll of paper that Jennie had recognized as a map to a buried treasure.

  “Why aren’t you dressed?” she had demanded.

  “I am dressed.” He had looked her up and down. “Why are you wearing that? You can’t wear white to hunt for treasure.”

  “I’m ready for our wedding. We are getting married today.”

  “Married?” he had replied. “I can’t marry you. You’re too weak.”

  She had awakened in tears. She knew dreams were generally pretty meaningless, or at least uninterpretable, but it was clear that this dream sprang from her insecurity about her relationship with Thomas.

  It had been four weeks since they had seen each other, although they did talk at least every other night. In fact, in her insistence on “dragging Jennie into the twenty-first century,” as she had put it, Alexis had installed Skype on her computer when everyone had visited over Labor Day.

  “So you can keep up with Louisa,” she had said as the girls had demonstrated how to use the program. “You can see her as well as talk with her.”

  “Right,” Amy had chimed in. “For keeping up with Louisa. It will be almost like being in the same room.”

  Tasha had sniffed and turned away, walking to the window to look at the garden, but all of the others had seemed to be excited. Jennie certainly had been, and she and Thomas used it now, instead of the phone.

  They had planned for Thomas to visit the previous weekend, but when they had talked on Thursday, he’d told her Louisa was ill, vomiting, feverish. He was not going to subject her to the drive feeling as badly as she did. Jennie had not seen Louisa during their Skype session on Thursday, but Thomas had reported she was listless, lying in her crib, her face flushed, her thumb in her mouth, her stuffed rabbit clutched in her other hand.

  By Saturday, though, she had seemed to be fine.

  It made sense. Babies do get sick. Sometimes they seem to be deathly ill one day and fit as a feather the next.

  It was also a good excuse, a believable excuse. No one questioned a parent’s need to care for a sick child.

  Jennie turned onto her other side. She had thought about his call a number of times, once staring at the leaves falling from the oak tree in her side yard for thirty minutes while she dissected every word he had said, every nuance in his voice, every expression on his face, attempting to determine if he had been truthful or whether he’d had something he preferred to do rather than visiting her. Perhaps someone.

  By the time she had realized the futility of what she was doing, her jaw had ached from the way she had clenched it and she had felt sick at her stomach. She had no reason to suppose Louisa’s illness had simply been an excuse not to see her.

  Now, as she lay in the darkness, she pictured Thomas’s smile as he had arrived for his visit on Labor Day. They’d had little time alone that weekend, but after the barbeque the four older girls had driven into Carrollton to see a movie, leaving Thomas at her house.

  “Have a good time,” Alexis had called as they left.

  “Behave yourselves,” Tasha had added.

  “But not too much,” Christa had mumbled as she rolled her eyes at Tasha’s comment, and Amy had laughed. None of them could even imagine they would do anything they shouldn’t.

  They had behaved, but Jennie clearly remembered how Thomas had kissed her as they sat in her living room, Louisa sound asleep in the portable crib nearby. It had been a quick kiss followed by a gentle hug, but she had felt warm and tingly, as she had in college when they would sit together after a date.

  No, there was no reason to suspect Thomas had not wanted to visit. Still…

  Jennie checked the time again. Two thirty. She might as well get out of bed. It wasn’t as if she could not use the time. School had been in session just over a month, and interim reports were due on Monday. She had twenty-four students this year, four more than she normally did.

  She knew it sounded petty to complain about four extra students, but her class was twenty percent larger than normal. That meant more papers to read, more tests to grade, more reports to prepare. As she taught, there were more students to observe. It took more effort to make sure they all were paying attention and, hopefully, learning. More students entailed more noise, more misbehavior, more tussling, more tears, more boys to tease more girls…

  She pulled herself out of bed. She had been totally stressed out all week, worrying about the interims. Last night, she had lain in the tub with lilac bubble bath, trying to relax. Obviously, it hadn’t worked. Now, though, she had a little over three hours before she normally awakened to get ready for school. If she concentrated, she might be able to knock out the reports before breakfast.

  ****

  Jennie yawned as she checked her mail box in the school’s office. Money for the sale of wrapping paper, the school’s fall fund raiser, was due, and she would need to collect it this morning. School pictures, fall pictures, would be taken next week, and she had brochures to send home. I’d better give those out as the children leave this afternoon, she thought. She counted the brochures. “Only twenty of them,” she huffed.

  “Kara,” she called across the room. “Everyone knows I have four extra students this year. Why do you constantly give me twenty of everything? It was the same with the paper sale…”

  “What’s wrong, Jennie?”

  “I have twenty-four students…”

  “Right, the brochures. The PTA chair left both sets. She can’t remember we’re crowded this year. I have some more.” Kara looked her in the eye as she handed her the extra brochures. “Didn’t sleep well last night?”

  Jennie nodded.

  “Another dream?”

  “No. No dream. I slept for a couple of hours, then, poof! I was wide awake. I lay there for another half hour, then I got up, made coffee, and finished my interims.”

  “You know you need your sleep. Have you told Dr. Wilson you’re having trouble?”

  “I’m not running to her because I lay awake a couple of nights. I’ll see her next month.”

  “Couple of weeks as I recall. Maybe she needs to increase your medicine, the one for sleeping.”

  “I’m fine, Kara,” Jennie snapped. “You sound like my mother.”

  “I’m just worried…”

  Jennie forced a smile. “I know you are, Kara, but I’m fine. Really. It’s just the stress of a new school year, the
extra kids, and…everything.” She thought about Thomas. “If I’m still having problems in a couple of weeks, I’ll do something.”

  Jennie took the brochures and headed down the hall toward her classroom.

  ****

  Each day, Jennie appointed two students, usually one boy and one girl, to be her “daily helpers,” assisting her in such activities as running errands and passing out papers. Each student had a turn about every other week. On this morning, Deborah Willis and James Agee were her helpers, and cards with their names were displayed on the board at the front of the room.

  After collecting money for the wrapping paper, Jennie gave a silent reading assignment and had Deborah come to her desk to help count the money.

  This paper is certainly expensive, Jennie thought, finding her class had sold one hundred rolls at five dollars and twenty-five cents each. She and Deborah had counted the money once and had begun to do it a second time when Kara appeared at the door.

  “Ms. Bateman, may I speak to you for a minute?”

  “You go ahead and check our total,” Jennie told Deborah as she stepped into the hall to talk.

  When Jennie returned, Deborah had finished counting and had returned to her desk. The money was stacked on the desk, currency and coins arranged by amount.

  “Were we right, Deborah?”

  “Yes ma’am. Five hundred twenty-five dollars.”

  “Thank you.” Jennie placed the money in the large brown collection envelope and tied the flap down, winding the string attached to the flap around the tab on the envelope.

  “James, will you take this to the office for me?” She handed him the envelope.

  “Don’t drop it, or we’ll be crawling on the floor collecting all of the dimes and nickels,” she told him. James smiled as he left the room, and Jennie turned to the class, reminding them it was Friday and she would hand out their weekly math test when James returned. “If you have any last minute questions, ask them now.”