Once and Future Wife

by David Burnett

  She stared out of the window, picturing the scene. “I thought I was being so cool. I handed him my schedule.” She sighed. “I’d felt like a complete fool when he walked me twenty feet down the hall to the next room. I’ll bet my face turned purple. I managed to thank him, and he just smiled and told me he was happy to help me.”

  Dr. Wilson laughed. “I can imagine. I’d have felt embarrassed too.”

  “After class, I went back to the dorm. As I opened the door, the telephone was ringing. It was Thomas. He said that he had inadvertently ended up with one of my books. I checked quickly, and I was short one, a little thin book that I had not noticed was missing. He offered to return it—when he picked me up for dinner.”

  “He worked fast.”

  “I met him at six. I was wearing a top that was just high enough and a skirt that was just long enough to keep me from being arrested.” She laughed. “There would have been blood on the ground if my father had seen me in either one of them. We spent two hours at dinner and another two hours making out in the car afterwards. I felt so excited. I thought I was going to go all of the way on my first day in college.”

  “Good first date.”

  “The best ever. We were inseparable after that. We married the summer following graduation.”

  “Did you tell me that your father liked Thomas?”

  “You’re joking. He couldn’t stand Thomas.” She paused, thinking. “Thomas was everything Daddy was not. Daddy dropped out of high school. Thomas was going for his PhD. Thomas’s family had money. Daddy’s was dirt poor. Daddy enjoys hunting and fishing, drinking beer at the Blue Belle Café. Thomas liked photography, boating, and red wine before dinner at home.”

  She stood and strolled around the office, absently reading the titles of books on a nearby shelf. “After a while, I was no longer the little country girl I had been when I set out for college, but Daddy didn’t realize that I had changed, so he could see nothing that Thomas and I had in common. He concluded that Thomas only wanted my body, and every time I went home after my sophomore year he interrogated me, demanding to know if we were sleeping together.”

  “Were you? Sleeping together?”

  “I wished. I tried to seduce Thomas every way possible. I blush now when I think of some of the things I did. It turned out that when Thomas draws a moral line in the sand, he never crosses it. He’ll come right up to the line, like he did on our first date, but he refuses to topple over. Our honeymoon on the other hand…” She smiled. “Alexis was born nine months later, to the day. Christa arrived a little more than two years after that.”

  “You were out of college. What were the two of you doing?”

  “Thomas was in graduate school. In English. He had already published a book, but he said that he couldn’t depend on writing to support us. He wanted to be a professor.”

  “Lots of stress?”

  Jennie nodded. “I became pregnant again a few months after Alexis arrived, but the baby was stillborn. Which was devastating. I didn’t have the drive or energy to work. Alexis had colic. I had no idea what to do with a baby, certainly not a sick one. I had always heard about maternal instinct, but I must have been absent when it was handed out. I was at home all day with her. At night, Thomas had to study. I was pregnant with Christa as soon as the doctor gave Thomas and me the go-ahead to be intimate again. I suppose my hormones never had a chance to adjust.” Her eyes began to water.

  “I felt that everyone hated me and did things on purpose to cause me trouble or to make me unhappy.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone. When the baby cried, I thought she was being mean, trying to prevent me from watching my soap. I mean, she would be crying, and Thomas would come home, pick her up, and she would begin to coo. She could have done that for me if she’d wanted to, I thought. When Thomas went into another room to read, I thought that he was ignoring me.” She looked at Dr. Wilson. “Reading a book? Really? He was an English major.” She shook her head. “Dumb…It was the same with other people—my mom, Daddy, the cashier at the grocery store. No one was nice to me.”

  Dr. Wilson nodded. “We discussed your feelings. They were much the same then as when we first talked.”

  “They were worse, really. Much worse. I would respond by screaming, throwing things, hitting.” She took a deep breath. “I can see now how stupid it all was, but at the time, it seemed so real. Thomas suggested I get a job so that I could get out of the house. He arranged daycare. I thought he needed the money and was putting me to work so that he wouldn’t have to. I started to drink. Before long, I was buzzed most of the time.”

  Jennie fidgeted with her hands. “Then I hooked up with Jeff. Once Daddy got to know Jeff, he loved him. They were like two old peas in a pod.” She sighed. “I used Jeff. When I left Thomas and the girls, I moved in with him. He was one of several guys who frequented the bar, one of several who I…I hung out with. When I needed a place to stay, he was the first one I talked with who had an apartment and no wife or girlfriend.”

  “And he was mean to you too?”

  “Oh yes. My perceptions of meanness were equal opportunity perceptions. Like I said, Mom, Dad, my sister, anyone. I felt that Jeff was mean to me just as Thomas had been.” She shook her head. “The difference was that when I became upset, Thomas would try to fix it. Jeff would yell at me, smack me. Once he kicked my backside and left a bruise that was a perfect image of his work boot.”

  “Thomas was the opposite of your dad and Jeff was his twin. You ultimately left them both.”

  Jennie nodded. “I did. I left both of them. Is that bad? Does it mean that something is wrong with me?”

  “Perhaps you’re never satisfied.”

  Jennie shook her head. “I don’t think that’s it…I told you about Preacher.”

  “You did.”

  “I don’t know if it was him, or God, or…or what, but, when I left Jeff my entire life changed.” She paused, then she began the litany she had prepared to convince Alice Green to take her case.

  “I went on the wagon and I haven’t had a drink in nine years. Mom and Daddy let me stay with them while I went back to school for my teaching certificate. I began to see you and to take medication. I’ve been teaching at Carrollton Elementary, third grade, for six years now, and I was teacher of the year last year. I just received my master’s degree. I go to church. I own my own home. I don’t chase men.”

  Her lower lip began to tremble. “I look back now and I can’t believe I’m the same person.” She paused to wipe a tear from her eye. “Leaving my family was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I wish every day that I could go back and change things.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do? Relive that time? You want your children. How about Thomas?”

  Jennie smiled sadly. “I love Thomas, at least my memory of him. That ship sailed a long time ago, though.” She shook her head. “I’m not chasing my husband.”

  ***

  Those Children Are Ours is available on Amazon.