by Ju Ephraime
The following day when I was finally able to lift my head off the pillow, I hurt all over. I was exhausted, as if I had been up all night. My body felt as if someone had taken a belt and beaten the shit out of me. I was in so much pain, I thought I was coming down with the flu. I took two aspirins and climbed back into bed to wait for the drug to take effect. It took a couple of hours, but as soon as I felt better, I crawled my way out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
That morning, I did not see John before he left for work because I was late getting up, and by the time I made it downstairs, he had already left for work. There was just enough time for me to have breakfast with the girls. Johanna had prepared scrambled eggs with sausage and cheese, but I was unable to eat anything. Just watching the girls eat nauseated me. I had a cup of black coffee, saw the girls off, and made my way back upstairs to prepare for work.
I stepped into the shower and was not surprised to feel the hot water stinging my skin. I did not have the time to examine my body carefully, but I promised myself to do so when I returned home in the afternoon. I lotioned my body and grabbed the first outfit I could find, a worsted wool shift dress in burgundy and cream. This had been my favorite dress. Anytime I wore it, I felt kind of special, but I did not even notice what I was wearing until I was behind the wheel of my automobile.
I had a hectic day at work, so there was very little time to think about anything else except dealing with one difficult client after another. I was kept so busy I had no time for a lunch break.
I got home around 4:30 in the afternoon. Usually, I was a very active person. I took care of my front lawn and my back yard garden without the help of a gardener. I enjoyed the physical work. Every day, weather permitting, I would spend an hour or two in the yard before going in to prepare dinner, but today I was too exhausted. This had me a bit worried. Working in the yard was my way of unwinding after a hectic day at work.
I changed into my favorite shirt and an old pair of jeans and made my way into the kitchen. Dinner was usually with just the girls and I because John did not get home until 9:00 p.m. or thereabouts. We would always spend the time while preparing dinner discussing their day at school, and I would tell them if anything exciting happened at work.
***
My one friend, Marta, had moved away from Connecticut about six years before, and she had been having a lot of problems with her two teenagers, a boy and a girl, Michael and Mandy. I missed Marta. She had a solid head on her, and I used to be able to discuss most things with her. But after we got married and started a family, our conversations became centered on our children. As the children grew and developed, so also the topic of conversations had developed, but always about our children.
She’d often tell me, "wait for the teenage years." As she told it, no sooner had her children turned eighteen than all hell had broken loose. They no longer listened to her. They had changed their appearance by getting tattoos and piercings. She had tried punishing them by limiting their freedom, but it had only antagonized them and caused them to drift further apart from her. So I was indeed grateful that my girls were, at the moment, only interested in things that were school related.
They were at that age when anything and everything was a catastrophe. Johanna was in her last year of high school, and Kelsey had just entered, so she had four more years left to go. In their opinions, their lives were oh-so-exciting. Each had a laptop computer, on which they both spent a great deal of time doing homework. All their homework from school seemed to involve the computer in some form or other, either research or problem and activity exercises. I saw no purpose in my burdening them with my concerns. It was too sexual in nature to discuss with the girls, so I kept it to myself.
Johanna was very mature for her age, and because she had taken after John, she was a tall girl, with his dark hair and blue eyes. In a couple of years, John and I would be chasing the young men away with a stick. But, for now, Johanna appeared to be more interested in her school work—she wanted to be a litigation attorney—and for this I was grateful.
Of the two girls, Kelsey was more empathic than Johanna. She would listen and was always willing to lend a hand. Kelsey took after me. She looked a lot like I did when I was her age, even down to the hair color. She did not yet have her father’s height, and maybe never would. A very insightful girl, she was almost always able to decipher the most complicated situation. I’d find myself talking more to Kelsey than to Johanna, but I loved both my girls with the same intensity. I was just a bit closer to Kelsey.
I had been teaching them how to prepare simple meals by introducing basic tasks one at a time, so it was very seldom I was in the kitchen without one or both girls in there with me. Today, Johanna assisted and grated the cheese for a macaroni pie we would be having for dinner, while Kelsey washed the greens for a mixed garden salad. I spent the time marinating four T-Bone steaks to accompany the macaroni pie and salad.
It was a simple dinner we ate, or rather, the girls ate. I could only push my food around and around on my plate. I had no appetite. I was able to take two small bites of the steak, but it tasted like sawdust to me, and I quickly gave up the pretense.
After dinner, we went back into the kitchen where we hand-washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away. I did not have a dishwasher because I had removed the old one and replaced it with more storage space. Space was a rare commodity in the tiny kitchen, and I could not afford to waste one square inch. Most of my old dishes were not dishwasher-safe, so I’d very seldom used it anyway.
The girls and I were busy talking and laughing between drying the dishes when the blender came on with a high-pitched, almost screeching whine, a much higher speed than it should be. We looked at each other, and without saying a word, I reached over and turned off the blender. Just to make sure it could not go back on, I unplugged it from the outlet. We continued with our chores without paying much attention to the old blender. We all thought the cause was an electrical malfunction and left it at that.
That night, we played an abbreviated game of Monopoly and then I retired for the night, still too tired to be much fun. I walked up to my room and fell right into bed without undressing. I slept the entire night and did not even hear when my husband came home or got into bed.
I awoke at 5:30 a.m., and he was already up with the coffee on. I poured myself a cup and sat down to have a brief conversation with him.
I looked up from examining a spot I had noticed on my upper arm, and caught John looking at me with a worried look on his face.
“Are you alright, sweetheart?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “Why do you ask?”
“You have dark circles underneath your eyes. The kind you get from lack of sleep. Haven’t you been sleeping well?”
“No, I haven’t,” I answered. “Have you?”
“Like a log,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, I slept so soundly I haven’t been getting up to visit the bathroom like usual. Not that I’m complaining. Far from it. I evidently needed the rest.”
“Well, so long as you’re happy,” I replied acerbically.
“I’ll try to be home early tonight,” he said. “Wait up for me.”
I gave him a quick glance to make certain he was not kidding because “Wait up for me” was code for our sexual escapades.
“Okay,” I responded, smiling. “I’ll definitely be waiting up for you.”
If only I could have. By the time John came home that night, I was dead to the world. Everything was fuzzy and muddled in my head. I had difficulty separating my dreams from reality. I could remember climbing the stairs, getting undressed and stepping into the shower. Everything after that was a blur. I could not recall going through my nightly rituals, brushing my hair or putting on my night cream. The events after I’d stepped into the shower had been erased from my memory. However, I could recall the dream-like events quite vividly. Down to the last tiny detail, it was almost identical to the one of the previous
night. I was once again engaged in a sexual encounter with an unknown man which took up the better part of the night.
Once again, I did not hear when John came home; neither was I aware of him getting into bed. This was only the second time in nineteen years of our marriage I was not aware of him arriving home and getting into bed next to me.
I’d met John when I had just turned eighteen, the year after I graduated high school. I had gone with my girlfriend Marta to her cousin’s sixteenth birthday party. I did not want to go because I thought there would be kids younger than me, and it was not the kind of party an eighteen-year-old wanted to go to. But I was wrong; the party turned out to be quite a mixed crowd with the majority of the young people there in my age group, invited by the birthday girl’s older brother. It turned out to be quite a good party.
I was standing in the corner, feeling a bit out of place because the only person I knew there was my friend, Marta. I was definitely not an outgoing person. I was about to go to Marta and suggest that we leave when a guy, who I had noticed watching me from the other side of the room, came up to me and asked me to dance. They were playing Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step I Take,” so of course, I said yes. He took my hand in his and wrapped his arms around my waist and began dancing with me without moving from the spot where I had been standing since I had entered the house.
I took in his tight-fitting shirt and loose-fitting jeans. I had a strong dislike for men in tight jeans. Call me silly, but I wouldn’t give the time of day to a man in tight-fitted jeans. I thought it was the act of someone crying for attention, and I had no intention of giving him the time of day. So, based on the way he was dressed—hair not so long to be untidy, nice height, and a great shape from what I could see from the shirt that tapered down to a slim trimmed waist—I kept dancing.
“Mind if I ask your name?” I asked, feeling silly dancing at the edge of the room.
“I’m John, John Warrington,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Syria. Syria Falconer. Do you live around here?”
“I do,” he replied. “What about you?”
“I do also. But I haven’t seen you around here before. Where do you go to school?”
“You mean high school?” he asked.
“Yes. What did you think I meant?”
He did not respond, simply looked at me with those piercing blue eyes which seemed to see right through me. He was tall, and although I was not short, I had to look up at him. His hair was very dark, and the combination of dark hair with blue eyes was arresting, almost mesmerizing. I tried to avoid looking up at him too often because something about him made me feel smaller than my five feet seven, and I did not like that feeling. I was always proud of my height because it gave me a certain air of confidence that I would not ordinarily have. I was not shy, but I was not a social butterfly either. I had very few friends and only one close girlfriend, Marta. We had been friends from junior high.
The way he made me feel had me on the defensive, and I blurted out, “I’m no longer in high school. I just graduated. And you?”
“I’m in my second year at the University of New Haven,” he responded.
“What are you taking?” I asked.
“I’m a business major,” he replied. “What about you?”
“I’m also majoring in business with a minor in marketing.”
The song came to an end, and we stood there, neither of us making a move to walk away. Just as I turned to tell him I had to go looking for my friend, he asked for my telephone number. I had never given anyone my telephone number before, so I was a bit reluctant, but I found myself searching in my bag for a pen and paper.
“I don’t give my telephone number to just anyone,” I informed him.
“Oh, I feel privileged.” He laughed. “Don’t you worry your pretty head. I’ll take good care of it.”
“You’d better,” I responded, smiling.
“Why me?” he asked. “Do you think I’m special?”
“Don’t kid yourself. I don’t know you well enough to make that assumption, but consider yourself lucky.”
“Okay,” he responded with a full smile.
His smile left me gasping. He was not a bad-looking individual to begin with, which is why I had danced with him, but when he gave a full smile, his entire face was transformed. The smile began with his eyes, and his beautiful mouth became even more attractive, if that was possible. He had perfect white teeth, all even and beautifully shaped. His mouth was wide with full sensuous lips. I could not take my eyes off his mouth; it looked so scrumptious. I salivated at the thought of those lips against mine, and as if he read my thoughts, he leaned over and kissed me. I was so busy gaping at him that he had no problem putting his tongue into my mouth, and I let him. What am I saying? I practically devoured him. And this began my love affair with my husband, John, which had been going on strong until the events of the last few nights.
***
One would think, with a full night’s sleep I would have been well-rested the next day, but I was just as exhausted as the day before. I worried about my lack of energy. But I took my shower, went down to the kitchen and prepared breakfast for my family. I still could not eat any breakfast. On top of everything else, my appetite had taken a hiatus. The very thought of food was enough to make me nauseated. The only thing I could tolerate was black coffee. I never liked black coffee before. My coffee used to always be milk and coffee, not coffee and milk, but now the thought of milk in my coffee was enough to turn my stomach.
It appeared my metabolism was going through some drastic changes. One day I had been a perfectly normal, happy, easy-going individual. I had been happy being the career woman, housewife, and mother, and I had lots of energy to work at any of my roles. Now I could barely drag myself to work, let alone work outside in my yard.
I willed myself off to work for the second day in a row, but I could no longer hide the truth from myself. Something was definitely wrong with me. I started to believe that I might have to go to the doctor to get a thorough exam. I didn’t know what I would report to the doctor. There was nothing specific about my symptoms. I could not admit to any specific pain. As a matter of fact, I would have to admit to having very little discomfort today, except for a slight stinging in my nether regions. I couldn’t say the same for the physical exhaustion. It was as if I ran a marathon all night or had done something strenuous that left me physically exhausted in the morning. It could very well be psychological because I had no idea what triggered it.
That day work was hectic as usual. I had to show three properties, and two of my clients were very demanding. Several times, I had to repeat my mantra—the customer is always right—to keep from snapping at them and walking away from a possible sale. I was surprised when I was able to collect a deposit from one of the three showings I did that day. I had been told time and time again that I was a very good agent, but somehow lately all my training and experience seemed to have gone out the window. I had become moody and I got upset very easily. Sometimes I had great difficulty recognizing myself.
I could not wait to see the end of this day. However, when I got there, I had no more peace there than I’d had at work. To get myself moving and to keep my mind off my situation, I took out the lawn mower to try cutting the grass. After several attempts, I had barely finished the front lawn. I had to put away the mower because there was no way I would have been able to do the backyard also. So for today, I left it undone.
Cooking dinner that evening was an altogether different matter. For the life of me, I could not work up enough energy to prepare the dinner, so I had to order takeout food. We very seldom did takeout food, and then only on that rare occasional, weekend and/or holiday. John was not too thrilled about takeout dinners, but the girls were ecstatic. Again, I ate nothing, but I did down three cups of black coffee.
Johanna, my older daughter, being a bit more observant than her sister, and even my husband questioned my sudden love of black coffee. I had to
tell her I did not know, but the milk made me sick. She just kept looking at me in an inquiring manner, finally stating the obvious.
“You don’t look well, Mama. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I replied, “but I seem to be coming down with something because I get tired doing the simplest task.”
“Well, you should seriously think about going to the doctor if this continues,” she said, sounding like a grown-up.
“You know, Johanna, I think I’m going to call my boss tomorrow and do some work from home. Maybe, that way, I can get some of my energy back.”
So, on the third day of my mysterious malaise, I stayed at home, fully intending to complete some paperwork that I had been putting off doing for weeks. I powered up my laptop and sat down to get some work done; unfortunately, I could not concentrate.
I had the most difficult time remaining awake. My every desire seemed to be to crawl back into bed. I kept fighting it and could not recall giving in to it, but when I again became conscious, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I was in my bed. How I got there, I could not remember. It was the most distressing feeling, not being able to recall my actions.
