3 STRIKES: Chapter 1, Strike 1

Chapter 1, Strike 1

Walking in on your naked fiancé hovering over a nude woman on the bathroom floor is really an empowering experience.

Don’t laugh.

I didn’t say that it was a pleasant experience…although, the look on their faces, if captured on camera, is what one might reminisce upon as an amusing Kodak Moment.

I said empowering.

How so, you smirk?

Because, think about it, you have been the center of their evil attraction. You are their God that must not see or hear their sin for it is against you that they are sinning. In fact, without you, their ‘sexual apex”, their liaisons, turns into, well, a mere relationship…with relationship type expectations…demands and loyalties which your fiancé is now adamantly sinning against.

Empowering especially, if the woman is younger than you are, has larger breasts, smaller waist and longer legs, a flat tummy that is now moist with your boyfriends sweat and long, healthy hair that drapes over her shoulders and made up face like a flattering curtain.

All right, she wasn’t really quite as that perfect (he wishes) but it fits the way I felt at the time about her.

So anyways, you caught your fiancé with an averagely pretty woman in his apartment, on his bathroom floor.

You are staring down on them.

You are hurt, indescribable pain, in shock, in denial…shock and denial again until finally you start to feel something akin to the anger of the octopus sea witch in Disney’s Little Mermaid.

PISSED OFF!

You are Ursulla – you become an enormous, tentacled beast; breaking the building walls and sending them, the sinners, into screams of repentance and fear…they cower and cover their eyes at the sight of you, hug each other’s naked bodies in the passion of shared horror while your tentacles flail about you destroying the bathroom. Debris is falling around them, water sprays in all directions…outside, cars are slamming into each other, people are screaming, pointing at the roofless building and at the big, black octopus monster that is you roaring in anger. But you pay no heed, your only focus are these two naked and pathetic creatures on the black, bathroom floor rug. Your eyes are red with fury and you hiss down on them through your large, razor sharp piranha teeth…you pick them up by a foot in separate tentacles and shake them like filthy rags while you shout in that booming, metallic voice, “HOW DARE YOU!? HOW…DARE…YOU? YOU...YOU WILL SUFFER FOR THIS! YOU WILL PAY! YOU POOR…UNFORTUNATE SOULS!”

Alas, you are no sea witch.

You are an average woman and here you are staring in shock down on them in mere human form. Indeed, if you were a beast, you’d be a deer caught in a headlight; stupefied. A sense of danger comes over you and you are afraid of what you will do next…because you are not quite sure what they are seeing. Maybe it’s only a dream. Your brain does not want to accept what your eyes are seeing and your heart just wants to stop breathing.

Your future with him had just been shattered and you are on the verge of…of climbing atop the throne because this is where it gets empowering!

Yes, amazingly, all of this rushed through my head in the first few seconds when I walked in on Roger and the busty brunette. That’s right, not blonde, but brunette, because in this love triangle, I am the blue-eye blonde.

  And so, from atop my throne, I threw back my head, I pointed down at Roger’s shriveled thingy, which hung down in a droopy, pathetic way now, and I laughed. A throaty, sexy, witching laughter, which rolled out from my mouth as smooth as velvet, as though I had been practicing it for an audition: A perfect Ursula.

They looked at each other, confused.

Good.

I glared at one from the other, one eyebrow raised, apparently very amused and still laughing.

I twisted my lips and purposefully eyed them up and down, making them aware of their nakedness.

Roger covered the limp thing with his hands…like I haven’t seen it before?

The woman started to reach for a towel draped over the tub behind her. There was no blush in the world that would do a better job on her face than her own natural blush she had for me.

Our eyes met and I supposed she knew my name. I did not care to know hers. But I did smile down on her, forgivingly, like God in the New Testament...and began to take steps back. My laughter began to cease and I felt the oncoming of a tear-a-thon.

I had to get out of Roger’s apartment. They would not witness their affair breaking me.

I turned slowly and began to walk away.

“Jaynnie, I…I…this…this…” I heard Roger stutter.

But there was nothing he had to say that I wanted to hear.

By the time I made it to the end of his entrance my face was wet from the tears, which they did not see.

“God dam it!” I heard Roger yell after me. “Jay!”

Without hesitating, just as quietly as I had opened it – to surprise Roger with my early home coming - I closed the door to my ex-fiancé’s apartment.

***

“Mother! I will not talk to him about it…or anything else. There is nothing to talk about; he did all the talking for both of us when he decided whether one of us should see other people.”

After my uncontrollable crying ceased and I was able to talk again without my voice all raspy and grievance-like, I had called my mother first about Roger’s affair. Certainly I have close friends who would offer condolences and then force me to come out get stinking drunk and clubbing with them but I think I needed my mother’s pushy ways. I suspected she would somehow end up on Rogers’ side and being my own defense lawyer was really helping me step out of my victim’s role.

I suggest trying it.

“But Jaynie, maybe it didn’t happen that way,” she said nervously, probably scared that I would cancel the wedding.

“I don’t care, mom.”

“Honey, I’m just saying, find out how it happened before you make the decision.”

I sighed. “We would not be having this conversation if you had been there and seen them on the floor. How they got there really would not be an issue.”

She paused.

“Yup, they were having all the fun,” I added.

“Hmmpf,” she responded. “Okay, he made a mistake, had a moment of weakness. Haven’t you ever?”

“No, mom.”

“Well at least find out if it was the first time. Maybe you can still work this out. He’s your fiancé not just any man.”

“Mom, I –“

“You never listen to me, Jay. Not since you were a little baby. Heck, since you were born! Why I remember the day you were born –“.

I sighed and rolled my eyes at her bringing up the same story of the first moment she and I shared after I was born. It took a sip of my wine and imagined mom, Kate Standley, twenty miles away, sitting in her lazy-boy, a tea in one hand and health magazine in the other. A dull image of my mother but at forty four she was still young and really an attractive woman with green eyes, long, chestnut hair, a petite frame and soft facial features that turned plenty men's and guy's heads, that's right guys my age. She did lead a fairly mundane life though after she and dad divorced eight years ago. I don’t think she’s even been on even one date.

“- and then they cleaned you up and put you on my stomach and I tried to have that mother-new-baby eye contact moment with you. Well like a little miracle baby you lifted your head and it was going to be so perfect because you started to grunt so cutely as you looked around.” I could hear she was talking with a smile on her face but was not beguiled. “But you know you would not look at me. I tried to get you to. ‘Hullo, baby girl. I’m your mummy,’ I cooed. And you turned your little newborn cone head to look around the hospital room and everything else but me.  I’m not saying you were a bad baby or daughter but since right then, since that first moment we met, I knew you would probably not listen to me and I was right.”

“Mom,” I sighed audibly into the receiver, hoping she got my exasperation “this is not like anything else we argued over. This isn’t about where I’m going to live or what job I should take.” About a year ago I was offered two positions. One at a law firm as the assistant secretary, which was better money; the other a receptionist at a local radio station, CRD 92.7, Courtland Radio, a local news and talk radio station. My mother thought I should take the lawyer assistant job. I took the radio station job, not to disobey her advice, as she still thinks, but because I saw more opportunities for advancement with the station. (I always thought interviewing stars would be fun and did take two years in journalism, I even took photography, so it did make sense.) But so far there hasn’t been one and indeed I was promptly stationed at the front desk where I've remained since “You are telling me to try to make up with a cheating fiancé, a man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with because I trusted him.” I really put a lot of emphasis on the ‘trusted’. “I mean, who knows how long he’s been cheating? My god, we’ve been together short of a year year…engaged for just two weeks! And already I’m not good enough? That's like hyperspeeding through at least fifteen years, where one might cheat being in a stale old relationship, in my opinion. And even if it was his first time? Even if he didn’t see her again, in the future there would be someone else. Hell even if there weren’t, I’d always expect that day to come. Any time I’d come home early or late, I’d wonder if that’s the day I’d find him with someone else…or find evidence of it.” I cringed at the thought. “And what if I do get a promotion and have to travel? I’d go through emotional hell trying to trust Roger being away from him days at a time. Now do you really want me to live like that, mom?”

I waited for her argument…but the line was quiet.

I waited longer.

Quiet.

There was certainly a lot more I wanted to add to my presentation, but this was just so rare. Did I rend my mother speechless?

The quiet moment went on until I began to wonder what she was thinking…was she comparing her life to mine?

Was she thinking of dad?

Was she even still there?

“Mom, you there?”

Then I heard it, the sobbing on the other end of the line.

“Oh…Jay,” she cried. “You’re right. No, of course I don’t want to you live like that. You are a good girl and deserve better than a husband like him. Shame on him for treating you that way. I…I hope he gets what he deserves. And that tramp too!”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! The sudden change was both unexpected and new.

“What comes around goes around and it will for both of them, you’ll see.” She blew her nose. “Honey, you are only twenty-five and have your life ahead of you. You will go on and one day, you will find a good man; whereas people like him and her will never find true happiness. You are too good for a man like Roger Raymond.”

And like with a switch, my mother had me in tears and now I was rendered speechless. Was she really saying these things, my un-mothering mother?

It felt so nice though and I was surprised at how relieving it was to hear her be on my side for a change. And I was even more surprised when realized that I had actually wanted my mother to say things like this when I called. As she spoke, an enormous weight lifted off my shoulders and suddenly Roger’s infidelity didn’t seem to cloud my future. I would get over it, I could do anything…I had my mommie!

Then of a sudden, as though she had just sang me a lullaby, I was overcome with exhaustion. The Roger trial was over. We were on the same side.

For the next few minutes we said nothing as we listened to each other snivel.

Then she cleared her throat and spoke while she wiped her nose.

 “You go and take care of yourself now, Jay. I’ll come out tomorrow. We’ll have supper at a real nice restaurant. We’ll drink wine and talk. I need to go to my palates class here soon but I’ll use that time to think of ways to help you through this. Be nice to yourself now, you hear me, and you’ll get past this in no time. You may find you’re actually happier.”

I yawned. “Ok, mom.”

“Be strong, you hear me?”

I smiled, completely drowning in this new feeling of being mothered. “I will. I’m going to have a bubble bath.”…and then I’ll call Deseerei, I thought. I can already hear her “Oh my god!”s. She will probably want to take me out, being a pro at the singles’s life. I could use the distraction. It was Friday, after all. A good bath and clean shave would revive me. “Goodnight, mom,” I said after she blew me a kiss and hung up.