Forks
Benjamin Blue
She’d been drinking. That in itself was not unusual. Since she and her husband had started having their problems, she drank more each day.
First, it was a couple of beers a night. Later it became a couple of beers and some champagne each evening to deaden that empty feeling. Now, it was a shot of bourbon and four or five beers. But still that empty feeling remained.
The marriage was empty. He had not been intimate with her in a long time. She couldn’t remember the last time they had made love.
He still expressed his love for her by supporting her every wish, her dysfunctional family, and her career. He still showered gifts on her for those “special days”… the passionless anniversary, Valentine’s Day, birthday.
Thanksgiving and Christmas were filled with attending to her dysfunctional family. One brother was addicted to gambling to the place that he had borrowed money from every relative and every in-law. He’d lost his first wife over gambling and was slowly pushing his second wife down the same dead-end path.
The youngest brother had been living at home and had come down one morning to find their father sitting dead in his Easy Boy in the basement TV room. A massive coronary the EMS man had said. That brother was psychologically screwed up from knowing he had thought heard his dad call out for him sometime in the early morning hours and he had just rolled over and gone back to sleep. If he had gotten up, could he have saved his father’s life? He’d never know, but it would eat at him the rest of his life.
The oldest sister was on her second husband and already cheating on him with her intended third husband. She ran about as deep as a sheet of veneer on a cheap piece of furniture. Her single minded goals in life appeared to be to keep her hair the same color as her light beige BMW, and flaunt her boob job at everyone.
The youngest sister had been married to a drug addict wife beater. He had called it quits when she had hit him in the head with a black iron skillet and he had spent a week in the hospital with serious head trauma. She had run off to the sunny shores of Florida seeking her Nirvana.
Her husband was spending the night in Baltimore because of a going away party his colleagues were throwing for him as he had recently been promoted the district office closer to home. He didn’t want to drink and drive the forty-five miles back his home near Washington, DC.
Being closer to home made little difference in their relationship -- he worked longer hours at the new job.
She was a little woozy from the various alcoholic drinks she had consumed. She headed for the steps leading up to master bedroom. Walking from the large family room through the dining room to the formal staircase in the front hallway, she blurrily scanned the drapes, furniture, and paint and wall paper without actually seeing them. She did hesitate as she turned the corner leaving the dining room and saw his grandmother’s small bookcase filled with his leather bound collection of what someone thought was the world’s greatest books. It reminded her of the day they had carried in and placed it on that spot. They had made love right in front of it on the hard wood floor. It was the day they took possession of the house. They’d built this house together in happier days. Now, it was just a thing weighting both of them down.
She began the unsteady climb holding the handrail with her right hand and carrying her shot of bourbon with her left. She reached the eighth step when her slipper caught on the edge of the next step. She moved to catch herself and her other foot slipped back off the edge of the lower tread and she fell backward. She tried to maintain the full shot glass and grab for the railing at the same time and was successful at neither.
She fell backward. The fall seemed to last forever. The small of her back landed on the edge of one of the steps. She heard a crunching sound as her vertebrae shattered. There was a momentary crush of horrendous pain and then nothing. No feeling whatsoever.
The shot glass and its contents struck the back of the front door and shattered into a million pieces as she struck the back of her head with a loud thud on the small Persian carpet she had so lovingly picked out and placed there so long ago. The impact dazed her and she was several minutes regaining her senses.
She shook her head to clear the cobwebs and brought her hand up to her head. At least she tried to bring her hand up. She commanded her hand to her head. But her hand wouldn’t move. She felt nothing below her neck. She tried the other hand with same result. She was paralyzed! Experimenting, she could still turn her head and speak, but the rest of her body was unresponsive. She had no idea how long she lay there. She must have fallen asleep or passed out. The sound of a ringing phone stirred her from her semi-unconscious state.
She opened her eyes and tied to move again. Her body failed to respond. She listened to phone ring and decided that it must be her husband calling to wish her a good night before he went with his work friends to get plastered. Maybe that trampy administration manager with the short skirts and great legs will get from him what was rightful mine tonight.
She was immediately sorry she had even thought that as the phone stopped ringing. Her husband had never given her any reason to think he was unfaithful, other than the fact he just showed no interest in her any longer. He just seemed tired of the constant drama within her family and wanted some quiet time “with no family dramatics” as he put it. And she really had not tried anything in a long time to try to fire up his libido. So she was as much to blame as he was for the lack of passion.
Would he even be concerned that I didn’t answer the phone? Would he care that I might have hurt myself or finally decided to have a liaison with another man? Would he give a crap about this crap marriage? With those thoughts swirling through her mind, she fell into another slumber as her body tried to repair the trauma it had suffered.
When she woke, she saw light streaming through the living room windows. She tried to move and thought she detected a slight movement in her left arm. But she couldn’t tell for sure.
The doorbell rang. She tied to yell hoping to attract attention. Her voice was hardly more than a horse whisper. She croaked a “Help me! Please help me!” But it was barely audible.
She heard a thud as a package was dropped at the door. The UPS man turned and scurried to his van and thought no more of the house with the injured woman no more than five feet from where he had rung the bell.
She lay there inert and silent for a long time. As she lay there, her mind began looking back on her life and the decisions she had made that had led to this awful moment.
Forks, she thought, my life decisions are like forks in a road. Take the wrong fork and you end up on poorly paved, dead end routes.
She decided her first major fork was when she had broken up with her high school boyfriend. They had loved each other for years and she had finally given herself to him on the backseat of his parents’ Buick at the drive-in movies two months before they graduated. The whole episode had taken less than five minutes and happened so quickly she had few memories other then the lingering feeling that her family would find out and her priest would excommunicate her for being one of those “bad girls”.
He had become standoffish after she had given all she had to offer that night. It wasn’t until years later that it would finally come to her that he wasn’t mad at her or thinking of her as a tramp for “putting out”. He felt guilt about what he had done to his virgin princess that he had held on a pedestal throughout high school.
They broke up three months to the day after the backseat quickie. He moved away less than two months later and she had not heard from him until six months ago when he had come back to town for his mother’s funeral.
She thought about other forks in her life. The dating and eventual marriage to her husband, who was a good man, but not her first love or soul mate, was the next major fork in her life’s roadmap. She had settled for affection and stability. The key word, she thought, was “settled”. She had given herself to him without hesitation, but also with some hidden reservation that she was only vaguely aware of at the time. That reservation grew as they lived the first few years with her on birth control pills until one fateful day when the next major fork in her life’s road happened.
They mutually agreed not to have children, using the thin excuse that they liked their lifestyle and ability to travel the world when they wished. A few weeks later, he had a vasectomy and she came off the pills.
As she lay paralyzed on the floor, it came to her that the lifestyle excuse was just that, an excuse. The real reason she now knew was that she did want children, just not with her current spouse.
This realization had come to her during the time she had spent with her ex-boyfriend at the local airport’s Holiday Inn. Her husband had been away on a month long consulting engagement in Hong Kong. Two weeks after he left, she ran into her ex-boyfriend at the grocery store. He’d come back to bury his mother. He looked forlorn and sad as he spoke with her. Her heart leapt out to this man who had always meant so much to her. She wanted (and needed) to nurture him. Hold him close to her bosom and soothe the pain he was feeling.
And so she did. In his bed at the hotel, she consoled him, held him, loved him, and made love to him. Four times she did this over the next week, until he had to fly back to his home. Once, she’d just arrived at the hotel and had taken a call on her cell phone from her husband in Hong Kong. She’d lied to him and said that she had run into her old boyfriend and if it was okay was going to share a dinner with him for “old times’ sake”.
He’d said it was fine and hoped she had a good time. He’d said, “I love you.” at the end of the call and she had replied, “Yeh, me too.” Her husband had immediately known that he’d lost her, but bit his tongue. He thought that maybe a quick, dirty little affair would rekindle her passion and help right their sinking marriage.
That very night, she realized that she wanted children badly. And her ex could give them to her.
Her husband returned from the trip and life had settled into its same boring, passionless routine.. She talked with her lover everyday, sometimes two and three times a day. She reached the point that she wanted to scream. She vowed to sit her husband down and announce she wanted a divorce. That fork in the road had been scheduled for this first night he was back from his office party.
Now she lay broken waiting for her husband to arrive home and find her. She questioned herself, Should I talk about divorce until I heal from this fall? Will my lover rush to my bedside to help me through this if I cast off my husband?
She knew one thing. It would be unfair to everyone concerned if she just let things go along while she hopefully recovered from her injuries. It would be unfair to her husband to have him nurse her back to health and then dump him. She knew he was a kind man that would do everything he could to help her recover. But it was unfair to him to place that burden on him knowing she would leave him in the end.
It was unfair to lover because he needed to know that she loved him unconditionally and wanted to be his and his alone. It would be unfair to leave him dangling awaiting her action at some future time.
It was unfair to her to be forced to continue to live with someone that she didn’t love.
Yes, I’ve still got to tell him that it’s over. No matter what, I’ve got to do that.
She pondered the best way to tell him when she heard the garage door opener whirring and then the garage door to the house open and close. She heard him throw his keys on the kitchen counter. She heard his footsteps as he walked the hall toward where she lay. She heard him stop. She heard his sharp intake of air as he spotted her broken body at the bottom of the steps.
As the footsteps moved rapidly closer, she calmly pondered, how might this next fork in my life play out? Only time will tell.
