From In These Times, the Home is a Tired Place

 Originally Published in The Normal School

 

I Now Pronounce You

 

 

In bed, the wife heard the sports announcer. Heard the cheers and chants while washing her face in the bathroom—she didn’t care. She didn’t care her new husband woke before her, the sneak, and went downstairs to watch early-morning sports television. A good decision to marry him—rushed, frantic even, but the wife was two years post-college and sick-of-it, and the husband was an American flag: starry-eyed and pin-striped, a regal flourisher to those beneath him.

 

Drunk at the Hooters bar, the husband had watched her. He’d spoken loudly about the feminist movement and embracing one’s sexuality. “Nobody has to hide beneath the covers anymore,” he’d said, and she’d believed him.

 

Good to be a wife. Just back from her honeymoon, in the center of the clean-carpeted, big-roomed house—it was his—she adjusted. She had previously rented a gritty-floored apartment above a beauty salon that emitted all sorts of smells and chemicals; she believed she’d become more beautiful walking constantly through them. Sometimes she locked herself in the new husband’s bathroom and hair-sprayed the walls and foamed mousse into the sink. . .

 

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