Take Pills

AG2 William Benson has a wife: Alisha. Their marriage is far from storybook…


 

Alisha picked up Davin from Jess’s and headed home.

She’d stayed out late last night. Alisha wasn’t one for getting dead drunk, especially in a bar full of strangers, especially now. She stuck with water. Going out with the girls, that was how she’d put it, and for all she knew, Will believed her. But the only girls were the ones Alisha didn’t know. They hung out in their groups, some here to enjoy themselves, some here to meet men. Alisha had never enjoyed the interplay between groups of girls and horny guys. Some guys said women trusted women, but Alisha must be weird. She trusted no one.

She sat alone at the bar. A big girl, some men did come on to her and in the end she went out to her car with a baldy named Nick. Nick finished quickly, grunting like he was deadlifting. But Alisha didn’t mind. She got what she wanted, an honest lay, and she sent him on his way with the number for Pizza Hut.

She couldn’t keep doing this. Her condition was worsening. This morning she woke up queasy. Feelings she’d known before, but at least she hadn’t thrown up yet. Now that Will was back, she hoped she could keep from doing it until he left again.

One baby was enough for Will, both financially and mentally. They hadn’t planned Davin, but so what? Planned baby, accidental baby, they all got here the same way and deserved the same amount of love. So, Alisha had put on her big girl pants and carried Davin, giving birth to him while the Roosevelt was on its first sea trials. When they pulled in, they allowed Will to leave the ship first — one of the perks of having a new baby at home — and Will had held his son, but the look on Will’s face. Alisha had seen it before, after the first few months of marriage.

In nine months, she might see it again.

The clinic had just confirmed what she already knew. At her request, they’d given her a pamphlet outlining her options. Will had made it very clear that he did not want another kid. During the pregnancy scare to ring in 2014, he had told her, “Take pills”. Take pills. The monumental choice to keep a child or not, a decision that involved many days of tremorous thought, of debate, logical moral and philosophical, and Asshole had reduced it to two words.

Take pills.

She began cheating on him after the pregnancy scare. She did it when he was in, when he was out, and he didn’t notice. He did his fatherly duties with Davin, worked on his novels — he’d been working on them since before Alisha met him and as of yet, Barnes and Noble carried none of his books — and helped with the housework. They never had sex. Sometimes Alisha would test him, to see what he’d respond to. She knew he had a sizable porn collection on his computer. He preferred watching Latina women, and if he had something on the side, then fine. She had plenty, all strangers.

Then she’d turned up pregnant.

Alisha got on the interstate. Right now Will would be listening to music or reading. He had just spent twenty-five days at sea. But the freedom to move with him here changed little from the freedom to move without him. Will liked to read to Davin — the boy’s favorite was Curious George Goes Fishing — and Alisha figured that’s what Will would spend the rest of the afternoon doing, all the nice to see you again’s covered in a quick two seconds.

She parked. At the door, Alisha unlocked it and laid her hands on Davin’s shoulders. She whispered in his ears, “Go give Daddy a big hug and kiss.”

Davin took off running and Alisha went to the kitchen, listening to sounds of reunion. Will had put her note by the coffee maker. Alisha picked it up, shook off stray coffee grinds and tossed it in the garbage. She looked up. Davin ran into the kitchen, his father behind him.

“Hello,” Will said.

“Hey.”

“Did you have a good time last night?”

“It’s the usual.” She opened the coffee maker and dumped the leftover coffee. “Desperate guys pawing all over you.” She poured in new grinds and filled the reservoir with water. “You’d think some of these guys just got out of jail or something.”

“Well you can’t discount it, not around here.”

She pushed Brew. “What about you? Did you have fun last night?”

“I stayed here.”

She nodded. He did not, of course, stay here, even the dullest rock could have seen that. He also did not, she was almost positive, see another woman. He may have tried . . . but no, sadly, not even that. She hoped he would grow some balls, and soon.

“How was the underway?” she asked. Davin was watching them like a pupil. She tried to look happy. She’d read in Parents magazine that the parents’ interactions set the stage for their child’s development.

“I’m too exhausted to even think about it,” he said. “We had the squadrons onboard.”

“A lot of people.”

“Tons.” He tussled Davin’s hair. “Missed our little mirror here. Did you teach him that?”

“Teach him what?”

“Hang on.” Will hurried out of the kitchen and hurried back, carrying a book: Winston is Worried. Will had bought books for Davin on Amazon while underway. Boxes had arrived here, the boy ripping them open like Christmas presents, and Alisha had checked through the books to make sure they were appropriate. The boy liked Curious George. He hadn’t touched this one.

“Davin,” Will said, flipping through the pages. “What’s the doggie doing?”

The doggie was trying to climb the tree to get a cat. Davin glanced at the picture, went over to the wall, and pretended to climb. He did this three times.

Alisha applauded. Little mirror was right.

“And you know what? I didn’t teach him that. He brought me the book and showed me.”

“Oh,” and she stopped. Now that was weird.

“What’s wrong honey?”

Honey? Since when had he called her honey? She nodded at the microwave. “Is the clock wrong?”

“I haven’t messed with it. Why?”

“It seems like . . . ” But she had trouble saying it aloud. Seems like time just jumped ahead several minutes.

“Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“It moves too quickly, always.” Not long ago, Davin had been a little growth in her belly. Now he was two, pretending to climb walls. Not long ago, she’d thought she was pregnant, and her husband had given her advice.

Take pills.

What advice would he give now? He had that lost look he often got. It used to be rare — Alisha would catch glimpses from time to time, like a rumored animal on the loose — but these past few months it had become more frequent. Lost, like all the gears were still turning but the engine they ran had to cool down for a few seconds.

Davin wanted to show them the doggie.

“What’s the doggie doing buddy?” Will said, and Davin pretended to climb the wall again.


 

If you liked this sample from Keepers of Time, consider following me on Twitter or Facebook. The samples, in order:

  1. A Step Ahead
  2. Thirty-Four with a Shrug
  3. An Encounter at the Thirsty Camel
  4. Take Pills

Thanks for reading!

Thirty-Four With A Shrug

AG2 William Benson, who can travel short distances into the future, comes home from a long underway to find that his wife has “gone out with the girls”. This follows sequentially from A Step Ahead.

On the drive home William experienced the aftereffects. Strange thoughts, mixed voices. It was just his mind playing catch-up, but still, he had to be careful.

He stopped at the package store. Friday night, packed as usual. William roamed the aisles for a while, pretending to browse and noting how the line grew. He let his mind finish playing catch up. By the time he was done, the line had wrapped around the coolers in the back.

William got in his car. All better now. He drove home in the dark. Party this weekend. Weekend pleasure, Monday morning regret, and no regret was worse than the regret experienced in a floating steel labyrinth.

Just wait till deployment. Nine months, maybe eleven.

Current mess deck rumors suggested they’d get extended. It made sense. Hadn’t the Bataan gotten extended? The Bush? Or were those just rumors too? The worst rumors were the ones that had come true before. Precedence. Hard to argue against it.

Deployment. Nine months, eleven. Eleven? Call it what it is: a fucking year. No amount of port visits could justify that. William had never jumped ahead more than a few hours. Not one day, let alone 365. How long would it take to catch up then? Could he ever?

He pulled into the driveway. They lived in military housing, free but you lose your basic housing allowance. Fourteen hundred dollars you won’t see, to live in a safe neighborhood. It seemed a fair trade-off to William.

No lights were on and he knew what he’d find before he found it. The note taped to the door was written in marker.

Got tired of waiting up. Davin’s at Jess’s. I’m going out with the girls. Don’t wait up.

Past this was her name, Alisha, a heart dotting the i.

William nodded. Made sense. She rarely waited for him anymore. He plucked the note off the door and turned it around, smiling in triumph.

On the back she’d written, AKA ADMIN BITCH

#

William stood over the sink and poured himself a shot of Jack Daniels. He downed the shot, poured another and held it up.

Davin would be okay — let the fat bitch keep him tonight. Jess worked part-time as a caretaker and she had great reviews. Alisha would be okay too — she’d gone out with some girls, all Navy, attached and single, and they chose the designated driver beforehand, no rock-paper-scissors or its close cousin hatchet-shield-club. Alisha would be okay. She might meet a guy.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

His wife’s infidelity only gave him an excuse to be unfaithful too. And while he did flirt with some of the girls on the ship, William had found that since discovering his gift his desire for sex had dropped. He didn’t want her like he had in the early days, and when they did have sex, he laid there and let her do everything. She acted like she preferred it, but he knew better.

Their last passion was after boot camp graduation. William’s family hadn’t come and Alisha’s left the two of them alone. They’d gone out to “get some donuts” and William didn’t know if it were true or not, and with Alisha yanking at his dress blues, he didn’t care either. Their last moment of lust.

William downed the shot and poured another.

Life had changed since he’d discovered his gift, but it wasn’t Alisha’s infidelity, her impending exit from the Navy or his own lack of lust that bothered him. In the end, it was a simple feeling.

He hated his life.

He had hated his life since grad school, when it became apparent that even if he did finish, it didn’t matter: he was going nowhere. He looked at the other graduate students, who gave little shrugs when asked what they planned to do with their degrees. Thirty-four year olds, some with families, pissing away their youth for a piece of paper, and when asked what they planned to do with it, they shrugged. Hell if I know.

William would be in debt the rest of his life, thanks to college. The Navy was supposed to give him money to go back and do a real degree. Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Civil Engineering. A little something to show for his efforts, that would be nice, not Thirty-Four with a Shrug. What are you going to do? Hell if I know.

Then Alisha got pregnant.

We were using protection, everyone’s classic excuse. In William’s case, he didn’t know — when he’d lost his lust, he’d lost his interest too, his planning . . . and one morning Alisha turned up pregnant, and what are you going to do? Hell if I know?

But, no. William knew.

It involved two decades and a Thank You for Your Service.

A car went by, brake lights flashing, easing over the speed bumps. He downed this shot and laid the glass in the sink.

Alisha wasn’t the only one who could go out.

Book Review: Good Chinese Wife, by Susan Blumberg-Kason

The Book: Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong, by Susan Blumberg-Kason

The Quick & Dirty: An awful marriage built on a foundation with the strength of whipped cream.

The Review:

A self-described wallflower, Susan wants to leave behind her mundane upbringing in suburban Chicago. China, the place for expat reinvention since 1979, provides her with a way: Cai Jun, a graduate student in Music from Hubei province.

The night Susan meets him she’s locked out of her dorm room, and after he returns her phone card, she talks to her friend Janice about this attractive exotic guy:

“He couldn’t understand the English instructions, so he didn’t even use the card,” I told Janice.

“I heard. Still, I don’t think you should’ve given it to him.”

“He seems honest.”

“You don’t know him.”

***

Good Chinese Wife is Susan Blumberg-Kason’s memoir of her failed marriage to a Chinese man named Cai Jun. Her marriage was an extension of her own interest in China. On a 1988 high school trip to Nanjing:

That trip showed me I could be popular in ways I never experienced at school in the United States. China seemed like a place where I could start over and shed my inhibitions with new people who would never know I had been a wallflower all of my life.

It’s tempting to say she fell in love with China first, but in reality she fell in love with her own idea of China: the possibility of personal reinvention, that in the Middle Kingdom you can become the idealized version of yourself that you will never be back home. Cai represents this idea. From their first dance:

…dancing with him seemed so different than it had with the other men in the room. Suddenly I felt coordinated, even graceful. … I also felt comfortable in his arms, as if he could whisk me away from my past inhibitions and humiliations.

It’s hard to know what else she sees in Cai. When justifying her pending marriage, she writes, “He listens, he understands, he cares”…but how? If he ever listened, understood or cared, it is not shown in the book.

***

Susan is very much lost in a Chinese fairy tale and she describes their courtship as such, from their first dance to their first kiss to Cai’s own description of his life in the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps mundane for Cai, it comes off to Susan as something out of a movie.

The fairy tale ends in Shanghai, where the defining moment in their relationship occurs. After a long boat ride down the Yangtze from Wuhan, where Susan’s copy of Beijingers in New York provided what little company it could, Cai gives her the cold shoulder. He had promised Susan that he would take her to a book store to buy her an English book, but after buying train tickets, he abruptly changes his mind. When she brings this up, he won’t talk to her the whole train ride. When the a stewardess comes by offering lunch, he deliberately orders one.

Cai doesn’t improve from there. After a week of traveling, he tells her she needs to bathe because “women are dirty”, and has Susan bathe in a dirty bathroom, using the bowl and rag method. When she hesitates to wash herself with a rag above a squat toilet that serves as a haven for sewer rats, he decides she needs a lesson in how to bathe:

Cai squatted next to the basin and pantomimed splashing water upward onto his crotch. “Like this.” He glared at me while he continued his miming. “Chinese peasant women take baths like this.” And then he repeated, with a snarl, how women were dirty, especially in the summer.

***

It didn’t surprise me to learn that Cai was already divorced. We’re given his perspective on what happened, but the way he treats Susan helps you draw your conclusions. He has a daughter with his ex-wife. Susan encourages him to be part of her life, just as later when she encourages him to be part of her son’s life.

But some people just aren’t meant to be parents or spouses, just as some people aren’t meant to live abroad. From the forced bath, Cai and Susan visit America, live in China and finally move to America.

Cai has a hard time adjusting to life in a new place. He handles it about as well as you’d expect. A new job doesn’t help. Neither do new friends (with whom he spends more time than his wife and son), and then there’s the circumcision.

Per Jewish custom, Susan wants her son ceremonially circumcised:

“In the Jewish tradition, baby boys have a circumcision ceremony.” Careful not to preach, I explained the tradition and why Jewish people subscribe to it.

Either she didn’t fully explain it  or her words went over Cai’s head. Regardless, Cai thought it was an innocuous tradition; he likes tradition and he doesn’t understand what circumcision entails until he hears his newborn son scream. Cai comforts the boy, the glimmers of sympathy fading as he leaves the boy in a car seat and stomps off to his room.

***

Numb, I continued to stand there and wonder if our cultural differences were greater than I could handle. … Was it China, or was I the one at fault?

Their marriage was built on an awful foundation, doomed to failure from the first kiss to Susan’s flight from San Francisco. But it’s important to separate individual behavior from culture influences. It’s not cultural differences that ended their marriage; it’s not cultural differences that made Cai give Susan an STD, nor was it the root of his insinuation that “women are dirty” and their trouble at conceiving must have been her fault. No, it’s the behavior of a child lost in a world of adults; someone who has no control over the events around him and never will.

There is a basic way people should treat each other, especially in a marriage. Cai wanted a doormat. Unfortunately, for the first few years of marriage, he got one. After Susan finally has enough, we have to wonder, What took you so long? Why didn’t you just leave him before?

If he divorced me, what would I tell my parents and my friends? It never crossed my mind to threaten Cai with divorce if he didn’t start treating me better. But even if I’d been stronger, I wouldn’t have given up after just three months of marriage. Surely everyone needed time to get used to living with another person.

I lived through two divorces growing up, so I’ve seen it firsthand: it’s not that easy. Not when you’re invested emotionally and perhaps financially in someone, not when there’s a child in your life. Babies often save marriages, and that’s rarely a good thing.

And in the end, we realize that’s it’s a difference not of culture, but rather, of character. Some people know how to treat others.

Others simply don’t.

***

Available at Amazon!

Socks

I met my wife in September 2008, at Wuhan University of Science and Engineering, now Wuhan Textile University, not to be confused with Wuhan University or anything close to prestige.

Our relationship took time to develop. She had never dated anyone before; she’d never even kissed a boy.

That may seem odd to see in a twenty-seven year old woman. It certainly struck me as odd, and the first time I kissed her, she didn’t know how to react. The product of a sexually sheltered upbringing. As another teacher put it, people in their twenties going on twelve.

So our relationship progressed slowly, and after a city-wide foreign teachers’ banquet, we were official: she put the check in the box labeled Yes and had a friend pass the note back to me in class. We’ve been going steady ever since.

We had different ideas about showing one’s love, and early on actions did not strike me the way they strike me now, six years on, when I’ve moved from an easygoing lifestyle in an “exotic” place to the classic American model: job, car, house. Debt. Everything that makes the American Dream the most numbing sleep.

She showed her love for me in her own way; she checked under my fingernails for nicotine stains to make sure I wasn’t smoking. Any ailment called for a solid dose of warm water, and if that failed, then you graduated to the emergency treatment: IV. I needed the IV treatment the morning after a long night, in which I’d tested out a brilliant idea: mixing baijiu with Sprite to mute the nasty taste. Unfortunately, my idea worked.

But it’s socks that stand out to me now, typing this at a broken table, years removed from who I was and what I knew, the memories no less fresh.

I came to China with the same socks I’d been wearing for at least a year, and during one of our South Lake walks I mentioned that I had a hole in my socks; my big toe could fit right through.

She’d didn’t acknowledge this, far as I can remember, but the next day when we met up for dinner, she had something for me.

A package of socks.

She told me she hoped it was the right size.