By Olivia Brochu
Spill your water and you won’t get another one the rest of the day – she can hear the words coming out of his mouth but she can’t see his face while he says it, she can only see the faces of her friends with widened eyes or raised eyebrows, subtle reactions except that she has known them for 25 years now and they made the same faces when she stopped eating when she was 15 and they noticed how she wouldn’t order fries at the diner after school anymore and would let her milkshake melt in the tall glass, the whipped cream spilling over the side so that it no longer looked delicious but instead made her feel kind of sick to her stomach, like she felt now, under the scratchy blue and white striped comforter at their beach rental, which made her itch even through the Egyptian cotton sheets she brought from home because beach rentals never include the linens and that’s the main reason she hates getting one, that and having to be in a bikini all day long, but every summer her childhood friends, changed now by wrinkles and stretch marks and sun damage, convince her to spend a week at the Jersey shore, so here she is, wide awake in the middle of the night, her older boyfriend snoring softly next to her, sleeping without shame while she lies there unable to rest because he threatened forced dehydration upon his own child, and what’s worse – he did it in front of an audience, an audience of women who always find her to be inferior in some way, ever since she succumbed so publicly to the anorexia they all secretly suffered from but hers was somehow worse because she lost so much weight and occasionally passed out, which she knew in theory was a big deal but even now, after decades of therapy and general recovery, she thinks got an overblown reaction, much like the reaction to her boyfriend’s comments, which he probably didn’t even really mean, but she would never ask him because they didn’t talk about things like that, they didn’t talk about much at all, they just went out for dinners and took his girls for ice cream and fucked, frequently and savagely, unlike any other fucking she had done before, and that’s why he was here, next to her in this scratchy bed, because sex with him had finally freed her from a lifelong desire to never, ever be touched – and no man had been able to do it before him, not even her husband, who was perhaps asexual, and equally interested in avoiding pressing their naked bodies against each other, but for different reasons, so when she wanted to fuck this man, she felt no shame in following those instincts even if she was married and had been for four years and did want to have babies with her husband even if that meant actually having sex sometimes, but she put all of that aside to have desire roll through her deprived body from her groin to her nipples, and it was so wildly freeing to feel deeply rooted in her body for the first time ever after years and years of truly hating her physical form, that she could never look back, could never go without that feeling again, so she left her husband and kept sleeping with this man even if he was gruff to his daughters and she saw him kick a dog once and he didn’t read books or like to see any of the movies that she preferred – her friends would call it a sex haze, something they outgrew years before meeting their husbands and settling into suburbia to raise their perfect children in their perfect McMansions, and they will lecture her to end the whole thing, all while using soft tones and gentle words, like she’s a child falling for the oldest trick in the book, but that will only make her want to stay in it even more, because maybe it was just a sex haze, but it was the kind of fog she could happily stumble through for the rest of her forties, because living life with no blinders, nothing to block the unbridled pain of existence, hadn’t proved that fortunate for her either, and if it meant she had to do things like check on whimpering dogs and make sure his daughters get a water refill even if they accidentally knock their glass over at breakfast while reaching for the cereal, then so be it, so she climbs out from under that cheap Ikea bedspread and uses her hands as a guide against the wall and down the stairs to the kitchen, sandy tiles under her feet while she fills the girl’s bottle with fresh filtered water, screws the lid on, and plants it silently on her bedside table, gently tucking the girl’s bangs behind her ear before tiptoeing out of the room and back to her own to finally, finally fall asleep.
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Olivia Brochu’s work has been featured by Flash Flood Journal, Pithead Chapel, Anti-Heroin Chic, and more. Two of her essays were finalists in WOW Women on Writing contests. She lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania with her husband and their four children. If you’re wondering what it’s like to have four kids – it’s loud. You can read more of her work at oliviabrochuwrites.com.