What Were They Thinking?
3 Overcoming Life’s Catastrophes
BRIAN’S BIRTHDAY was in October. The cutoff for starting school was September 15, so he spent another year in kindergarten. I tried to negotiate getting him admitted to first grade, but with his small size and somewhat sickly demeanor, the school wouldn’t budge. Even among children that were all younger than he was, he was the smallest in his kindergarten class. I worried about his socialization. For as small as he was, he was far more mature than his classmates and spent nearly all his time reading.
It was no better at home.
“Aaaah! Mommy!” I rushed into the kitchen to find my eldest with a bloody nose. “Ja-Ja-Jessica hit me!”
Oh dear. I thought for once we were going to have a peaceful spring. Drew was finishing first grade, Jessica was finishing second grade, and Betts was finishing fourth grade. At long last, Brian was going to get out of kindergarten. Unfortunately, I knew there was more to the story than Betts was giving me. Our sweet little next-door neighbor girl simply did not go around hitting people. She was the girly-girl of the neighborhood and in second grade already knew more about applying makeup than I did. Getting into a fist fight was not likely. Still, I resisted the urge to ask my daughter what she’d done to deserve getting hit. After she was cleaned up and the bleeding stopped, I took her back outside to investigate the crime.
Jessica was helping Brian learn to ride his bicycle. He was still so small that we’d only just found a bicycle this spring that we could adjust low enough for him. He flat-out refused to ride his trike any longer.
“Jessica? Did you hit Betts?” Jessica stopped Brian’s bicycle and made sure he had his feet on the ground before she turned to face us. She ignored me and ignored my question. Instead, she marched straight up to Betts, who cowered beside me.
“You push Brian off his bicycle again, I’ll bloody both your noses!” she screamed. Then she spun around to face her brother who’d just about made it to Brian with a look of mischief in his eyes. “That goes for you, too, brat!” she yelled. “I’ll make you cry.” Drew stopped and became intensely interested in a stick he found on the ground. Waving it around he ran off whooping and pretending to shoot.
I walked over to where my son was still straddling the bike frame standing on his tiptoes so he wouldn’t crush himself on the crossbar. I looked at his torn slacks and scraped knee.
“Why didn’t you come in the house when you got hurt?” I asked.
“Um… Betts got hurt.” He said that as if it explained everything. I suppose it did.
“Jessica, I appreciate you trying to protect Brian, but don’t you think we might find some ways that don’t involve hitting each other?” I asked. Jessica scowled at Betts. I’m not sure what she was going to say because Brian came up to us right then.
“Is your hurt better, Betsy?” he asked. She nodded and then hugged him. She was a full head taller than her brother but she permitted the familiarity. Brian turned around and ran back to his bicycle, followed by Jessica. He mounted up while she steadied the bike and he started pedaling with her running along beside him.
“Yuck! Boy cooties!” Betts growled. She stomped off toward the barn calling for Silk.
Let me see. Betts is three-and-a-half years older than Brian. I can’t get rid of either one until they are eighteen. That means I’ll have been a parent for twenty-one years before they’re both out of the house. That is not nearly enough time for me to learn how to raise children.
The summer was shit from hell. Excuse my French.
We were in a new world. Hayden got up each morning and went to work at the electronic components factory in South Bend. God knows we needed the factory. We all thought it would close by the end of the Vietnam War when the aviation parts they manufactured were no longer needed. The Studebaker plant closed three years before we graduated from high school. Ball Band had been purchased and the Mishawaka Woolen Mills name had already been dropped. We weren’t sure how our other industries would survive. Our whole area had been in depression for ten years. Classmates had found it difficult to get work and moved to Elkhart, Chicago, and Fort Wayne. We’d been insulated for the most part. Hayden had worked on the farm. His father shared the profit with him. I could do my part-time work as a church secretary even with a baby. Our social lives revolved around each other, our parents, the Barnes family, and the church. Those were all the people we ever saw.
I guess I didn’t realize how much losing his mother, stopping work on the farm, and going to work in a factory affected Hayden. I was so wrapped up in refereeing between our children that I didn’t take note of his problems. It just seemed that no matter how much overtime he put in, we were still behind on the bills. As much as I’d revitalized our sex life with my realization of how much he loved me two years ago, I was thirty-one years old and knew I wasn’t the pretty teen he fell in love with. I was always tired and I guess I complained a lot.
No guessing about it. I was becoming every bit as much a bitch as my daughter.
It was late at night—for us. Probably ten o’clock. In the summer, the kids stayed up until nightfall and we collapsed soon after. Hayden had to be at work by seven. I was nearly asleep when he spoke, nudging me awake.
“Marilyn, we need to talk.”
“Not now, Hayden, I’m too tired. I promise we can have sex tomorrow night.” I guess that had become a pretty standard response to his overtures over the past year. The truth was that I was ashamed of my body. I wasn’t exactly fat, but two babies had left my stomach soft and puffed out. My breasts were still okay because I never breastfed a baby, but they were beginning to soften and sag as well. I was too tired to shave my legs and armpits regularly. My hair hadn’t been professionally done in a year. I couldn’t see how Hayden could possibly find me desirable. It was easier to push him away.
“I had an affair, Marilyn.”
I lay there suddenly awake but unmoving. My husband? The only man I’d ever kissed? The father of my children? Rutting with some faceless bimbo when I thought he was working?
I couldn’t breathe.
I wanted to sob and scream and run and hide. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I gasped for air.
“I ended it, Marilyn. I never thought it could ever happen to me—to us. I swear it’s over. But we’ve been so… far apart. I never should have quit the farm and gone to the factory. I’m… I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry!” I exploded. “We took wedding vows! I gave you everything. And you’re sorry? What did you do? Accidentally run into her on the assembly line and decide to put some parts together? How could you do this to me?”
I rolled out of the bed and grabbed my pillow. I went to the sofa in the living room and then went back to grab the sheet off the bed to wrap up in, leaving Hayden in his pajama bottoms uncovered on the bed. His hairy chest was heaving with sobs. It’s funny how the thing I noticed at that moment was that he had more hair on his chest than on the top of his head. I curled up in a ball on the sofa with the sheet pulled over my head and cried the rest of the night.
I considered taking the children and moving across Mosquito Road to my parents’ house. But I was too ashamed to tell anyone that I wasn’t a good enough wife to keep my husband at home.
He got up in the morning and went to work. He was home promptly after work. It went on like that for several days with neither of us saying more than “Here’s your lunch bag,” or “How were the kids today?”
Summer hours at the church were cut to Saturday mornings when I typed up the bulletin and ran it on the mimeograph. Once a month, I typed the stencil for the newsletter, ran it off, and mailed it. It was simply one day after another. An existence that I survived.
We were old. I was old. I wasn’t a young pretty girl any longer, so it made sense in my screwed-up brain that Hayden would want someone younger. Prettier. More willing. Someone who didn’t push him away every time he reached out to her.
I noticed he was home more. No overtime, so he said. He’d planted twenty acres of his dad’s farm for hay and got two cuttings in to feed the horse over the winter. I didn’t think poor old Silk could eat that much over the winter, but the horse was his and Betts’. It was a Friday afternoon before dinner that Betts came running through the door screaming, “Silk! My Silk!” She was crying and ran into her room and slammed the door shut.
It would be like Betts to cry over Silk if there had been an accident. Hayden could be dead and she’d yell about Silk. I ran out the back door and headed to the barn. I stopped short when I saw Hayden in the pasture leading the white horse around with Brian in the saddle. He looked so tiny up there, for all that he was six years old. Well, Betts was going to fume over this forever, that was for sure. But what I saw in that field…
I saw a loving and devoted father with his son. I saw a man who cared for his family and worked hard to provide for them. I saw the man I fell in love with and rejected so often that he found another. I saw the man… the man I wanted to hold and grow old with.
I kept walking toward the pasture and leaned on the fence. I imagined what I must look like in a scruffy housedress and my hair under a bandana. I should have gone back to the house and got prettied up, but I couldn’t let it go another minute.
Brian had a grin across his face a mile wide as Hayden led Silk up to the fence.
“I’m learning to ride, Mom!” he exclaimed. “I love Silk.” I looked up at Hayden’s face, eight inches above mine, and he smiled.
“You’re going to have to buy another horse,” I said softly.
His smiling lips dropped down to mine and lingered there a moment.
“Maybe we should talk about that tonight,” he said.
“In bed.”
It wasn’t smooth sailing from that point on. We’d both hurt each other deeply. I started taking better care of myself, got a haircut and perm. And color. I couldn’t help but notice that there were gray hairs creeping into my dark brown locks. Not after the hairdresser pointed them out to me. I was way too young for a blue rinse.
I was thrown completely for a loop though when I found that Hayden’s affair had not been with a teen or twenty-something. She was ten years older than we were. It turned out that he didn’t need someone younger, he just wanted someone who was interested.
And she did prove to be interested. She didn’t want the affair to end. She even called the house one evening. I was shocked at her brazenness.
“Mrs. Frost… Marilyn, I’m Eugenia Dennis. I know you already know about my affair with your husband. I’m terribly sorry I hurt you. It wasn’t my intent. I didn’t have any intent. I didn’t plan to have an affair, and certainly not with a married man,” she said when I answered.
“What do you want, Eugenia?”
“Genie. I wish I could put me back in a bottle,” she said as she heaved a deep sigh. “I fell in love with your husband. I’m sorry but it’s true. We live in an age where all kinds of things are possible. We’re pretty sheltered here in Northern Indiana, but in California there are couples that are actually threesomes. There are queer people who are openly with each other. There are…”
“Forgive me for interrupting, but could you get to the point?”
“Can we both be with him?”
There it was, right out front. And I had to admit that I’d thought of it already. I might be a farm girl, but I’m pretty well informed. I read the newspaper. We subscribed to Life and The Ladies’ Home Journal. Even National Geographic and Readers’ Digest. I’d heard of the sexual revolution that was going on all around us, even in parochial Indiana. But to actually share my husband?
I know what I said, but what was I thinking?
“Have you ever been with another woman?” I asked. I was greeted by absolute silence. “You have to know that any woman I share my husband with is going to be shared with me.”
“That’s… perverted.”
“Well, think about it. Don’t call again unless you’re ready to put your face between my legs.” I hung up.
I was absolutely giddy. What on earth had I done? Hayden and I had indulged in oral sex on occasion. Not often. Usually, if we were going to have sex, I would be on my back with my legs open or, after my own sexual awakening, on top of him. But always with his penis in my vagina. And here I had just suggested oral sex with a woman!
Before Hayden got home that afternoon, I’d showered, shaved my legs and pits, and had even trimmed my pubic hair from around my lips. Then I spent ten minutes with a soft hair brush, brushing said hair until I was certain there would be no loose hairs to get in Hayden’s mouth. And in the process found my own vaginal fluids running rather freely.
I called in a favor from Ellen and asked her to watch the kids for a few hours. She agreed to feed them.
When Hayden got home, I pushed him toward the bathroom.
“Shower,” I said. “Don’t bother to dress afterwards.”
His eyes popped open in surprise, but he hustled himself into the bathroom. I was pleased to hear his electric shaver as well. We’d made love since reconciling, but if I had my way, Hayden was going to have the ride of his life tonight. And so was I.
He came out of the bathroom and found me naked on the bed. In broad daylight! His generous cock… God! I called it a cock! It was rising quickly. It sprang to full attention when I pulled him into my mouth. Yes, I’d given him a blowjob before, but in eleven years of marriage, it was always considered foreplay. Not that he needed much. This time he was gasping and pushing at my head, trying to warn me that he was going to come, but I stuck to his cock like a vacuum cleaner and for the first time ever he filled my mouth with semen.
I hadn’t thought it through very well. It started dribbling out of my mouth while he was still spurting and I reflexively swallowed. In my mind, I had just become a wanton whore for my husband. I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to rinse my mouth and brush my teeth. Then I pranced back into the bedroom, swaying my hips and my breasts as Hayden watched transfixed. I crawled over him onto the bed, dragging my nipples through that deep hair on his chest. Electric! I flopped down beside him and spread my legs.
“Your turn,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ll be up again for a while,” he sighed.
“You have a mouth,” I replied. The dawn came rapidly over his face and he scrambled around to face my newly barbered crotch. Hayden didn’t have much experience in this but he was enthusiastic and in my current state of arousal, it only took about ten minutes until I lost control of my senses and climaxed.
As we cuddled in the afterglow, I told Hayden about Genie’s call and what I’d told her. At first, I thought he was mad at me but he was hard again in record time and I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. I mounted him and he pounded up into me.
“I didn’t even know she had our phone number. I can’t believe she called you.” Still, something had gotten his engine running. “I’ll call her and tell her again that it is over and to never call my home again. You are it, Marilyn. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m never going back.”
“It excited you, Hayden. I can feel it inside. You weren’t this hard before. The idea of two women excites you, doesn’t it?”
“Please, Marilyn. Don’t make me confess to every man’s fantasy.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see if she calls back.” I could feel his penis flare inside me. If he was this excited and came, I could end up pregnant again!
“Would you do that? Really?”
“I can think of some things that two women could do to you.”
“But the other?”
“Having her give me oral sex?”
“And giving it?”
“Oh! Uh… Crap! I didn’t think about that part. Would you want to see me…? See me eating another woman’s… um… pussy?” I rasped.
Hayden came.
Damn it! So did I.
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