Chapter 5 – Juliette
FIVE
JULIETTE
Ways to get your husband to divorce you: Part I
The silent treatment. It was a time honored tradition women had been practicing for years. It didn’t require much effort. It made everything uncomfortable, which brought home the point that this was not going to be an enjoyable living environment.
Which meant he should seek life elsewhere.
Unfortunately, we were a week into this experiment and Creed seemed unfazed.
I’d put a schedule on the refrigerator for meals, food shopping, and general area cleaning.
He was on his own for cleaning his bedroom, bathroom and his own laundry. I had no idea if he kept up with any of it, because I didn’t care.
We didn’t share meals. There was no television in the house.
(Herb had been certain all entertainment was the work of the devil.) If I was in the study at the computer, Creed was out working the fields.
If I was collecting eggs from the chicken coop, he was in the study.
He had his own laptop. A sleek MacBook Air that I was only slightly envious of as my seven year old Dell was dying a slow death.
Still, no more locks to pick to get access to the internet.
I had my own transportation now and had been in town several times on my own to go to the grocery store and pick up other supplies.
Although, not the hardware store.
I wasn’t ready to face Kevin yet. He would have heard about the lie I told, about how Creed and I had been pen pals for years. He would have felt betrayed by that, and I just didn’t have enough energy to let myself feel guilty about that.
That first trip to Nash’s grocery store, though, had been a special time. Alone. On my own without any kind of deadline to return. I might have spent hours wandering each and every aisle of the tiny store, investigating every single option I had.
The freedom had been dizzying.
Still, my opening silent salvo wasn’t helping my cause.
Creed didn’t question the schedule, the chores, or the silence.
It wasn’t until I came home from a town run to find several large packages lined up on the porch that I actually felt the presence of Creed in my world.
Two men were hauling a mattress out the front door and throwing it in the back of a delivery truck. Done with that, they then pulled out a new mattress wrapped in plastic.
Creed was supervising the move.
“What’s this?”
He turned to look at me like he’d almost forgotten what I sounded like.
“She talks,” he said.
“Explain.”
“I’ve given you a week to…grieve, I guess. Is that what you’ve been doing? Anyway, it’s enough time. I’m moving into my bedroom.”
“Your bedroom?”
“Your father’s bedroom. It’s the biggest in the house and it has an attached bathroom. I own this house now, so yeah, it’s my bedroom.”
“My father died in that bedroom!”
It wasn’t that I believed in ghosts or anything, but that room smelled like death, morphine, and antiseptic. Who would want to claim it?
“I know. That’s why I’ve had the windows open all morning to air it out and I’m replacing the mattress. Go head, guys,” he said, directing the delivery men. “Back of the house, the bedroom on the right.”
Instantly, I was furious.
“You need help bringing in the groceries?”
I stomped up to the porch looking at the brown boxes stacked up. “What is all this?”
He came up behind me. “A new desktop I thought we could share. A television for the living room. I checked it out and you can stream just about anything as long as you have WIFI, including live sports. This is just a start, though. I did an assessment of all the kitchen appliances and there’s nothing in there that isn’t over twenty years old. All of it will need to be upgraded.”
I reached up to grab my hair with the idea that I might rip all of it out. “You can’t do this! This is my house, my home. I say what stays and what goes. And you don’t get to just take what bedroom you want!”
I was shouting. Screaming at the top of my lungs. I could see the two delivery guys scrambling out the front door as if they knew I was about to pop off like a rocket and didn’t want to be around to see the fireworks.
My chest felt tight, like I couldn’t breathe right.
I started taking shorter breaths, but that didn’t help.
Soon I was panting and I could see spots in front of my eyes.
This had never happened to me before. Was I dying?
Was this some type of heart attack? Had this been Creed’s plan all along?
To take what was mine and let me die of absolute frustration at my lack of agency?
His arms wrapped around me from behind and my first instinct was to fight him.
I aimed my sneaker covered foot at his shin, but whatever feeble blows I landed, did nothing to stop him.
He pulled me inside the house to the living room.
and sat on the couch with me on his lap.
Wrapped in his embrace like he was a fucking anaconda, I assumed he was trying to smother me to death.
Then I felt his chest rising and falling. Rising and falling against my back.
“Deep breath in,” he said. Then did it. “Deep breath out,” he said. Then did it.
Again and again until I picked up his pattern.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
The black spots in front of my eyes melted away and my pants turned back into normal breaths.
I could feel tears welling up in my eyes but I didn’t want to cry in front of him. Crying would show him weakness and I couldn’t have that. Not if I was going to defeat him.
“You see how wrong this is, don’t you?” I finally said, my voice cracking against my will. “You see what you’ve taken from me?”
“You’re my wife. I haven’t taken anything from you. And if you would let yourself accept that, you would see you’re better off.”
“Better off? With some fucking person I don’t know,” I spat at him over my shoulder.
I still couldn’t move my body from his damn embrace.
I tried wiggling out of it, but his arms were fucking massive and one squeeze of his biceps let me know I wasn’t going anywhere.
Maybe his job in the Navy had been pulling up anchors.
“We’ve been living in this house alone together for over a week. You could have tried to get to know me.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“You have freedom you didn’t have before.
You have space you didn’t have before. You have someone who can do twice the amount of labor around this place, you didn’t have before.
You have access to money to improve the quality of life you didn’t have before.
All you have to do is ask for what you want.
If you’re too dense to see that, I can’t help you. ”
Instantly, his arms released me and I flew off his lap. I turned to face him and watched as he casually folded those beefy arms over his chest and looked at me with his stupid, ugly face like I was the unreasonable person in this situation.
“I don’t want to know you. You are nothing but a bad dream to me, and at some point, I will wake up.”
“Okay, well, if you’re going to be a bitch about it, can we go back to the silent treatment? I liked that version of you better. Nice to look at without much to say.”
I clamped my lips shut rather than retaliate. Because I knew he’d said that last thing to get a rise out of me.
This man, this usurper, was like a fucking brick wall.
Unmovable. Impenetrable. Impossible.
With one final stomp of my Keds on the hardwood floor, I left the living room and went out to the truck to bring in the groceries. Angrily putting shit away into cabinets without seeing what I was doing.
I stopped when I felt his presence enter the kitchen.
“I’m probably poking a tiger, but figured I’d try anyway. When you shop, can you get Hellman’s instead of Miracle Whip? I hate that shit.”
Miracle Whip was my father’s choice. I hated that shit, too. I poked through the grocery bags and found what I was looking for. I pulled out a large jar of Miracle Whip and showed it to him.
“You mean this?”
“Yeah. Hellman’s is better.”
Then I did what any sane person would do in my situation, I threw the jar with all my strength directly at his head. He must have sensed it was coming, because with an easy move he sidestepped the jar and it broke against the wall behind him.
We both watched a trail of Miracle Whip drip down the kitchen wall to the linoleum floor.
“Glad we agree,” he said. “Your mess, you clean it.”
He left and I leaned back against the counter.
Instantly, I understood the error of my ways.
I’d opened our war with the silent treatment. Clearly, as a weapon, not nearly powerful enough. While it made things awkward, it wasn’t disruptive enough.
He needed to feel uncomfortable in this house. Uncertain.
He didn’t like Miracle Whip.
Okay, what else didn’t he like?
“What the fuck?!”
The shout came from the kitchen.
Meanwhile, I was tucked away in my bedroom snickering in silence.
After Creed had moved all of his shit into my father’s bedroom, (I would never think of it as Creed’s), I moved all my shit back into the upstairs bedroom, despite the fact that it was the smaller of the two empty rooms.
I wanted to be as far away from him as possible and this way we each had our own bathroom, so there was no chance of us running into each other unclothed.
It had been my turn to make dinner. Any time I butchered chicken, I would remove the liver and then freeze it with the other saved livers. Chicken liver in small doses could add a lot of flavor to stocks or stews.
But, an entire stew made out of chicken liver?
That wasn’t going to be very pleasant.
The door to my bedroom swung open and I braced myself for his ire.
“The fuck is this, Jules?” he asked, a bowl of brown mush in his hand.
“Chicken liver stew,” I said, honestly. “It’s one of my favorites,” I lied.
I’d made myself a peanut butter sandwich earlier.
“This is fucking bullshit and you know it. This tastes like shit and I’m not eating it.”