by Jill Williams
Mama didn’t care what her boyfriends did to me as long as they weren’t throttling her. I was blonde, pretty, and compliant—the perfect chew toy for men who wanted a puppy instead of a dog. Easy to train, easier to break. I bounded right out of that cage with the first man who sugar-talked me into believing I was a precious child of God. He said I was like the woman at the well who’d been with many men: a whore that God desperately loved. He cried while slipping a zirconia ring onto my left hand, vowing to love me for eternity. I was eighteen and he was thirty-two, a young pastor just starting out.
“Baby,” he said the next morning, “I can’t wait to show my beautiful bride to the congregation. To protect you from gossip, I told everyone you’re twenty-five. Women are so jealous and petty, and I’d hate for them to treat you like you’re a conniving Lolita.”
He told me that God gave men wives to keep them from fornicating, since fornication was a sin. I wasn’t very smart. I didn’t know those big fancy Bible words or what forna-who meant. He patted my head.
“Baby, fornication is what you did with twelve different men. You spread your legs and said, ‘Come inside.’”
Tears stacked up in my eyes. I wiped ’em away real quick, as Jimmy hated whenever I cried. He claimed I manipulated him with feminine wiles to get my way.
“You’re wrong, baby. I’m crying because you’re acting like I’m a slut. I didn’t ask those men to do what they did to me. I—”
He roadblocked my face with his hand.
“You might not have asked them with your mouth, but you certainly did with your body. Probably sticking out those titties or shoving your hiney in their faces! You gave signals. Just like you did with me. But fortunately for you, I’m no animal. I waited for marriage, God’s covenant, before I came inside you. You were my first and you’ll be my last. I was your thirteenth, and God’s keeping watch to make certain I’ll be the only one.”
I whimpered like a puppy scared of thunder. “I’m sorry, Jimmy, for not being the bride you wanted. I promise to never look at another man as long as I live.”
He hugged me, explaining with my past, his trust needed to be earned. I had to be patient because there was a lot for him to accept about me. I tried my darndest: reading the Bible, listening only to Christian music, respecting him and not talking back, keeping the house sparkling clean, and having sex six days a week and twice on Sunday.
Jimmy joked, calling me a “dead dick defibrillator” when this nasty old man asked me to crawl into bed and suck his weenie for a spell. I didn’t laugh. That old coot smelled like three-day-old shit baking in the sun. I about ripped the whiskers clean off that warthog’s chin.
“Listen here, old man, I don’t want what you’ve got. You stick your pecker back in your pants, ask Jesus to forgive your sins, and I’ll play you a pretty hymn. If you don’t, I’ll chop it off and shove it down your throat.”
Jimmy’s eyes popped wide. I was forced against my will to “give back to the Lord,” which meant tinkling the ivories every Tuesday at Colonial Haven Nursing Home. I played the piano, accompanying Jimmy’s tone-deaf tenor. If I had a revolver in my hand when he screeched, “There’s power in the blood,” his brains and blood would go SPLAT all over the piss-stained walls, and I’d be halfway to Mexico with a bottle of tequila and a hairy hand on my knee. Instead, I smiled meekly and told the old coot I was sorry.
Jimmy gritted his teeth and added, “Yes, Pastor Stevens, I’m sorry for my wife’s outburst. She’s on her period and can be quite irrational at times.”
He raised the roof when we got in the car. “How dare you speak to an older man of God like that! I didn’t want to believe the Quilters for Christ when I overheard them whispering about your Jezebel spirit. I got in their faces, yelling, ‘Don’t you dare impugn my bride!’
“Sister Cindy wept, saying she spoke the truth in love and as an older woman of God, she didn’t think you gave her proper respect. She warned against running wild in tight yoga pants and snug crop tops. And then she saw you one week later, all glistened with sweat and shorts hiked clear up your butt. You got defensive, saying you’re not going to wear a prairie dress to satisfy her. Don’t you ever speak to her like that again! I’m cancelling your gym membership, and until it’s evident that you’ve repented, you’re not getting it back.”
Oh, I did a lot of repenting in that front seat. I repented for my weakness. For being too scared to flavor his morning coffee with ten drops of Visine until he dropped dead on the kitchen floor and I was a widowed woman weeping over his coffin—snot dripping from my nose while in reality I cried tears of joy, knowing I’d never have to feel his icy hands poking and prodding my body, ramming his penis into me dry and hard until I cried because I was the temple curtain ripped in two and he was Pontius Pilate hanging me on a cross.
Yup. I thought it. But I never said it.
On our fifth anniversary, we went to a fancy steakhouse. Jimmy ordered prime rib and I got filet mignon. Our waiter, Devon, presented a bottle of wine and “a red rose for the beautiful lady.” I blushed. He was around my age, with the prettiest green eyes I’d ever seen—a medical student busting his butt to pay off debt. I asked him what kind of doctor he wanted to be. His eyes crinkled, reminding me of paper roses and mood boards.
“Trauma surgeon. People have horrific accidents and I visualize myself cutting out their wounds, making them whole. I want to take the patients that everyone’s given up on, the ones who’ve been read their last rites by the priest, and heal them. Cheesy, but true.”
Devon and I locked eyes. Just a chaste moment of mutual admiration, nothing more.
Jimmy’s face flushed to medium-rare. “So, Dr. Devon. Know any fertility specialists? My wife can’t seem to get pregnant. I hate to ask a medical question, but could her excessive number of sexual partners prior to me have anything to do with that?”
Devon clenched his jaw. “Sir, I’m a third-year student. Obstetrics and gynecology isn’t a specialty I’ve delved into. But urology is right up my alley. Maybe you’ve got a low sperm count, some weak swimmers, or Low T. That seems more plausible than a high body count.”
As Devon walked away, Jimmy’s face flushed to rare. I stifled a laugh, my heart breaking simultaneously. I desperately wanted children, just not with Jimmy. It was okay for him to tear me down, but if he ever did the same to our child, I’d drug him with oxycodone and Ex-Lax, stuff him into frilly panties and a push-up bra, and shove his head under cold bathtub water until his eyes popped like a frog’s, his hands clawed at the air, his face flashed blue, and his bowels evacuated into floating brown soup, a dead, steaming pile of shit. And then I’d call the police, frantic and screaming that he was a cross-dressing, drug-using, suicidal pervert who lied through his teeth when he said I was twenty-five—that he was Jeffrey Epstein with a Bible and a ton cheaper.
Jimmy left a five-dollar tip and a Do You Know Where You’ll Spend Eternity? pamphlet. I wanted to crawl under the table, shave my head, and hightail it to a Buddhist monastery where I’d take a vow of silence and never lay eyes on Jimmy again. Fortunately, I had a hundred-dollar bill in my purse—something I’d been saving for a special occasion, and Devon was awfully special. I tossed the turn-or-burn pamphlet onto a table of Japanese businessmen and placed the hundred-dollar bill under the salt shaker.
The ride home felt like I was trapped inside a house on fire. Neither of us spoke. Jimmy’s hands coiled around the steering wheel like twin snakes: cold, hissing, and filled with poison. I dreaded the inevitable, obligatory anniversary sex and rehearsed the steps in my mind.
1. Change into a black push-up bra and matching panties. Try not to cry during.
2. While having the deed done to you, make lists: favorite songs, favorite TV shows, favorite death fantasies about your husband.
3. Fake it, scream like a banshee, call him Daddy, and yell that your lady parts are on fire, all while composing a shopping list in your mind.
4. When he asks for a glass of water after, smile real big. He never specifies where it comes from. Toilet bowl, undrained bathtub, dog dish—the possibilities are endless.
5. Last but most important, dig to the bottom of your jewelry box and pop a Loestrin in your mouth.
Jimmy humped and pumped, a pneumatic drill busting concrete. But this time I wasn’t fantasizing about his violent death or nearly biting my tongue off to keep from sobbing. The unforgiving, harsh light of our bedroom transformed into an operating theater. A set of kind green eyes behind a surgical mask peered down at me. The man held a scalpel, gently—so very gently—whispering, “I’m not taking anything from you; I’m taking things out of you.”
He made a clean incision along my frontal lobe, and with whispering hands, he lifted away the toxic labels stuck to my brain: whore, cheap slut, cum guzzler, worthless, piss-poor excuse for a human being. Black, gangrenous, and twisted, they barely put up a fight as he dropped the poisonous parts into a stainless steel tray for incineration. He washed my wounds with cool saline and stitched me together, clean and unblemished.
Jimmy grunted and rolled over. Me? I stared at the ceiling, and for once, the speed bump snoring to my left didn’t matter crap to me.
The next morning, Jimmy and I planted flowers in the garden. He was in an especially foul mood, bitching and moaning about runny eggs, burnt toast, and too much salt. He scream-quoted Proverbs 31 about a woman of noble character, and how I was a disgraceful rottenness in his bones.
I didn’t tremble or blink back tears. Why would I? He was nothing but a five-year-old bully screeching that I was a big giant poopy-head. I knew the truth now, and no amount of name-calling could ever wash it away.
He shouted against a brick wall, spit flying with every insult. The words never found a landing place, and poor Jimmy was oblivious to the army of hornets buzzing around his flapping jaw. Lowly privates carrying out a fragging, the hornets revolted against their superior officer. By the time he felt the first sting, his face was already turning blue. I had plenty of time to race into the house and grab a bottle of Benadryl. Instead, I stood there and watched his eyes bulge like those dead frogs in my dream. He collapsed, clutching his throat and foaming at the mouth. As he convulsed one last time, surrounded by a muddy river of his own waste, I knew he was dead. Dead at last.
Three months later, flush with insurance money, I sat at the mahogany bar of the marble-tiled steakhouse downtown, wearing a red dress and drinking a martini cold enough to freeze time.
I looked for Devon—not hoping for romance, but maybe a smile, or a conversation about current events. Just two friends chatting, nothing more than that. Jimmy was rotting six feet under and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. And for the first time in my life, the air tasted like freedom and medium-rare steak.
Jill Williams is a writer from Georgia. Her work explores the intersection of the profane and holy. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in EXPAT PRESS, BULL, SOME WORDS, CITYWIDE LUNCH, REVOLUTION JOHN, URBAN PIGS, LITERARY GARAGE and elsewhere. Twitter @JillWillia85528