Prompt, “Getting Ready for Bed", 25 minutes

Posted 2/9/26

It was late and she was so tired she could hardly move. She knew he was waiting for her, sprawled across the bed naked, one leg bent with foot planted on the floral bedspread, the other tilted open so that his crotch was aimed towards the bathroom. He would be gently stroking himself: “It’s all in the wrist,” as he said. His eyes half closed, waiting for the moment when the bathroom door opened and she stepped into the bedroom.

She dreaded this moment, the moment when she looked in the mirror, squared her shoulders and whispered to herself, “I can do this.” The moment when she chose to turn and walk out of the bathroom, a smile stitched across her face into the battery of his gaze. She longed for the moment when she would cinch her bathrobe tightly around her waist, knotting the belt so that the cloth would not fall open. The moment when she did not say, “I can do this,” but rather, “I can’t do this anymore” to herself first and then to him. The moment when she strode away from his slack-jawed face, hand still loosely curled around the part that mattered most in her marriage.

But tonight was not that night and she ran through her options. She had already claimed to be menstruating for the last two weeks and even with his minimal interest in or knowledge of female biology, this would be a bit of a stretch. Saying she had some post-menstrual soreness had worked a few times early on, but not in several years. He had no concern for her comfort, much less her pleasure.

Saying she was too tired was not an option either. “Well, you just go ahead and sleep and I’ll roll you over when I’m done” was the response to that offering and she had felt so nauseated by the imagined scene that she had vomited. Which had delayed his gratification for another night.

If he had wanted sex once or twice a week, she might have found it enjoyable or at least tolerable. But his insistence on nightly intercourse meant that she never had the opportunity for her desire to wax, that she was denied the possibility of longing. “If I don’t get off every day, I get cranky,” he had told her in their second month of marriage when she realized that the honeymoon sex he demanded would last long after the honeymoon was over. To herself she thought, “But you’re always cranky” and “Well, why don’t you just take care of it yourself? You do know how to do that, don’t you?”.

When her friends asked why she stayed with Bobby, she knew that her answer didn’t satisfy them: “I’ve already gone through one divorce and I’ll be damned if I’ll go through another.” One of them said, too perceptively, “From what little you’ve told me, it sounds as if you are already damned.”

How had she ended up in this place? He was so different from her first husband, a sweet, caring, gentle man who himself was the opposite of the pastor who had first molested her then raped her as a child. Michael was kind, nonthreatening… and entirely without sex appeal for her. He was too sweet, too caring, too gentle. She feared that those experiences with her pastor had too firmly bound sex with humiliation, powerlessness and submission, that she would not be able to have a “normal” sexual relationship, whatever that was. Their marriage had crumbled after eight years of celibacy, which didn’t seem to bother Michael but which left Maureen with an unscratchable itch. Until she met Bobby.

Her friends were confused when she introduced them to him.

“But, Maureen, he’s a Republican,” was what one said but left unsaid, “He works construction. He isn’t educated. He has a child out of wedlock with some trailer trash from Palatka, Florida.”

“You’re too good for him,” another said but a voice in her head replied, “I’m not good enough for anyone.” Something a long-ago therapist had told her was a legacy of the repeated assaults by her pastor and his whispered threats and humiliations.

She defended Bobby against all her friends: he had grown up poor, sometimes on food stamps. Though since he had had that experience, she didn’t understand why, now that he had a good job in construction, he railed against the poor and the needy, pounded his fist at the immigrants and the Blacks taking his taxes. Not working. He had always worked, he said. Not like them. It just hadn’t always been enough.

Their courtship had been too fast, driven in part by her terror at being alone and in part by her immense sexual need after those eight years with Daniel. She knew they didn’t have to get married to have sex; whatever belief she had had in God had been crushed by the weight of the pastor on top of her. But the excitement of her sexual desire had carried them from the sofabed sheets to the local magistrate before she had really thought things through, before she had really had a chance to get to know Bobby and who he was.

She heard him shift on the bed, the springs creaking in protest. “Are you going to come or what?” he called.

“No,” she said to herself. “I’m not.” And with a small smile, “It’s been a long time since I have.” She squared her shoulders and met her own eyes in the mirror. Setting her jaw, she reached for the belt of her bathrobe and tied it tightly in a double knot, pulling the ends hard enough to pinch skin, then braced herself to open the door.