WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (45 page)

“And that’s why they call it a hope chest.” Lena said glancing at my
friends and then me. I cringed.  My e
yes glazed over into wicked witch mode. I wanted to melt her on the spot and erase this day from memory. 
Blink. Open eyes. Nope. Didn't work. I'm still here.
 And she was still talking. God help me. Her voice was bubbly as if everything that existed for a woman could only be found inside the matrimony of marriage, inside a freaking hope chest. Jesus ever loving kitchen Christ! My thoughts orbited out of the room
. I’m not even out of school and she’s trying to marry me off. I haven’t had a boyfriend yet? Not one. Not even a kiss. What’s the big deal anyway? What if I don’t want to get married? What if I want to tour the world? How am I going to lug that monstrous thing up the Great Wall of China? What good is a kitchen blender on a mountain top? Is she serious? JESUS! This might be Lena Hart’s life—but it was not going to be mine.
 

Let's just say sweet sixteen wasn't sweet. Today, the hope chest follows me where ever I go, a kitchen curse I can’t outrun. It’s pressed against the wall like an unfulfilled prophecy with expectations I failed to live up to, my cross to bear, lugging it back and forth and we have the same identifying marks, scars, bangs, scratches, nicks and cuts. I used to open the lid and scream into it.

“HOPE! What hope? Where the hell is this hope? Huh? Who gave you your namesake anyway? Stupid, stupid hope chest.”

My sarcastic banter verged on the tip of lunacy. I was always on the tip, of course, waiting to fall off, waiting to self-destruct. My marriage was far from the dreams I
had as a child while I dreamed of love in the arms of the wondering tree.  My
marriage was back and forth, try and try again.
Hope and more hope.  Looking for hope.  Desperate for hope.  Desperate for love.  Somebody love me I screamed. 
I can’t tell you how many times I threatened divorce to manipulate and change the situation while Branson just glared at me
as if I’d stay with him forever.  Then he’d storm off, drink
and hoard up inside a bar or a seedy strip club.
I used to sit home and drive myself mad why he’d go to strip clubs and watch naked women, when he had a woman at home?  It just baffled me. It also drove me to the point where I’d do just about anything to please him, keep him happy and at home. 
Other times, I’d sit alone in the dark against that damn hope chest, wounded and broken. It was pathetic. 
Me and the hope chest, each of us looking for hope, living on crumbs of hope; praying for hope. Hope deferred.
 
Heavy loads, heavy heart, moving in, moving out. Weak wood, weak heart.

“He’ll never change.” I’d say after one of our bitter fights. “I‘m not putting up with this shit anymore. I‘m done.” And then I’d pack my hopeless hope chest and storm out. “This is it.” I’d scream on my way out slamming the door. “Done. Over. 
Bullshit!”

Four days later, a week later, a month…
I’d return.
 
Weak heart. Weak wood.
We’d make up. 
Each time, I’d convince myself that tomorrow would be different. Things will get better. I will be a better wife, a better lover, a better person. 
THEN…it will be better. THEN…he will change. THEN…he will love me like I need to be loved. THEN…THEN…THEN.
But 
THEN
 never happened
. I d
rove myself crazy over him. Him, him, him. 
I felt trapped. Unloved. Unfocused. Undirected. Lost.
 I needed someone to give me permission to live and tell me how to do it, because honestly, I didn’t know how. 
I didn’t know how to live. And I certainly didn’t know how to love.
 So me and my weak heart and weak wooded hope chest, prayed, screamed, drank, worried, and lived on crumbs of deferred hope. Sometimes I wondered if it was possible for me to love anyone without giving up my whole
soul. 
 

The whole time, deep inside the Dumas of Umbra, the little girl sat restless and waiting. She’d kick her bare feet against my weak heart
to feel emotions I didn’t want to feel. 
She would scream out the truth and beat the walls. 
I had to shut her out. I pushed her down. I silenced her voice.
 I
didn’t need help.  I
had the ability to destroy myself—
all by myself.
 Punishment for my sins. 
Make the bed…live the lie.
 

I loved Branson in the only way I knew how, desperate and needy and I hated him in the only way I knew how, seething and lethal. It was the only sick formula I could function in. 
Love or hate. All or nothing. No balance, no rest, no in-betweens.
 In reality, I needed about twenty five therapists.
I am a reactor. I over react.
 Looking back, I needed him to stay sick so that I could fix him. By fixing him, I didn't have to fix myself. I looked in the mirror but I could never really SEE me. D
ENIAL is a bone I hadn't dug up. 
Until now.
 If all my attention was on him, what he did, said or done, or didn’t do, or should’ve done, or couldn’t do, or who he was seeing, and why, or this and that, then basically all my focus was on him,
not me.
Eyes on him. Eyes off me. I didn’t have to face the adult or the little girl held captive inside the house that haunted me.

Sometimes in my brief moments of solitude, I’d try to figure out why I married him. What attracted me, what did I like? I could come to no clear conclusion, only that the broken knob inside my head turned and pointed in his direction. 
That’s it. 
The only common factor for us was sex. Oh, yeah, we both enjoyed our sex. It was as informal as going to an exercise class. My need for physical affection, intimacy and touch was substituted with sex. In my mind, I believed that love would follow. 
It will come.  It will. 
I’d give and then I’d get in return. 
Living on hope.
 

And then the inevitable happened.
The breaking point. 
I was on a covert mission, obsessively stalking my husband to confirm my suspicions that he was having an affair with a two bit hussy who worked at the convenience store down the road from our home. It was pitch dark except for the light pole at the intersection. I could hear the low hum of electricity flowing and the pings of a thousand bugs bouncing off the glass globe. In the darkness, with my window cracked, the neighborhood was alive with voices stirring, shadows leaping, insanity cracking. I stared at Branson’s truck in the bitch’s driveway behind her cherry red Camaro. I envisioned cracking both wind shields and flattening the tires. I sat for hours listening to front doors open and close, dogs barking, crickets chirping, moths and insects frying in the light and the chatter of crackpot neighbors. I wished for superpower
s, Wonder woman shit.  L
aser beam eyes to blow up her house, vaporizing them to dust in the middle of their sex act. 
Boom!
 A satisfied vindictive laugh escaped from my lips. I watched them burn, burn, burn. In the front seat of a borrowed Ford, I went mad thinking of all the things he must be doing with her. I wanted to knock the door down, barge in and confront the worthless bastard, then haul off and stab his scrotum with the four inch spiked heels that ditzy whore was wearing earlier today, when I went in to buy a coke and a pack of gum.

“A dollar twenty eight.” She said not knowing who I was.
Or did she?
 I was calm on the outside but inside the house, that boiled inside me, I looked her up and down with a monster of green envy and jealously. 
What did she have that I didn’t?
She was pretty, sure, a cross of Farrah Fawcett from Charlie’s Angels and Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, but around the edges, all I saw was
slut.
 I waited for her to smile with no teeth but when she did, they were perfect in every way.
Bitch!
 Before I committed assault by punching her freckled way too much makeup face, I threw two dollars on the counter, stormed out and left tread marks in the parking lot. That night whatever sanity I had left was covered with a plethora of dark twisted shit. And thank God, before it was too late, divine intervention, a southern lodestar breaking it
s way through the muck and mire.  My mission was covert, and I could not be recognized, so I wore a
disguise, dark sunglasses and a blonde wig. I was spinning off into a terrible, horrible place of 
adultery—equals murder.
 I acted the scene out in my head, a hundred times over until every fiber in me was ready to commit the act. All I had to do was get out of the truck…and just when I was about to….a fucking June bug shot through the window and tangled up in my fake hair. 
God almighty!
 It was like the plague of Egypt all up around me ‘cause that is one bug that will damn near make me strip down in public. 
A bug for God sakes.
 
A little bitty June bug. 
A frenzy followed suit. I tore up the cab and the clip
s of the wig tangled in my real hair and I damn near scalped myself in the process. 
While I was cat fighting with a bug, I caught glance of a crazy woman in the rear view mirror. It was just enough, 
a God glance
, a curse glance.  I saw a woman I didn't recognize. And at the same time, something strange, otherworldly. The mirror reflection was the wigged out crazy jealous woman and drifting in and out of her, was a white, horrible pasty face ghost figure with hollow spaces, no eyes, lost and dreadful. Momentarily, the childhood vision came back, the Dresden horrors of my childhood. I stared into the mirror
mystified.  And then it was gone,
leaving behind the crazy woman, which left me to wonder which was worse. And then I realized, God sent that freaking June bug on a death mission. “Go forth and wake that crazy Willodean up before she does something irreversible.”

I had momentarily lost my ever loving mind. The buzzing of the lights, the madness, fighting the bug, fighting myself, fighting Branson, fighting things I couldn’t control…
everything.
 In the mirror reflection I saw a broken woman, a tousled wig, crooked sunshades and lost, desperate eyes. For the first time I saw who I had become.
What the hell are you doing Willodean? Just leave the bastard. Why do you do this to yourself? I mean, do you think he’ll suddenly transform into a knight in shining armor, a man of your dreams? No. You have no control over what he does. He is the only one who can change himself. Not you. Get a grip. Get a life. This is making you do crazy things. You can’t stop him no more than you could stop that bug. You can’t. So go home. Leave him. Do the hard thing. Do it. Do what you ha
ve to do for yourself. NOT THIS. 
 

I talked to this sad, crazy, hopeless wigged out woman in the rear view mirror, and thought of that damn hope chest and everything it represented. Sheet sets, blenders, spoons, forks, sharp knives and a whirlwind of household items spewed out of it until it looked like Dorothy’s house spinning in a tornado in the Wizard of Oz. In my head, I desecrated the weak wood into a million tiny splinters of deferred hope, then burnt it into a million deferred ashes, and then dumped the deferred, hopeless ash heap, on top of Branson’s deferred never going to be the man I want or need, cheating, lying, almost bald, drunk, piece of shit head. And then I walked out on him, for good. Of course, that was in my mind. 
How could I do that in real life?
 My mind was a teeter-totter slipping back and forth in and out of crazy town. All I could think of, is the right, good, decent, loving man he would be with her but refused to be with me. My insecurities flared, my blood boiled green. She would get his best and I’d get his worse. I was just the warm up girl. The rag you throw away before you get a new one. I fell into a maddening psychosis. I saw his hands on her bare hips, his lips kiss her neck, his affectionate longings of her. The affair passionate and blooming. Everything I longed for, and always wanted, she was now receiving.
And then a shift. 
My mind reversed gears. 
Spinning. Frothing. 
She must have lured my husband like some petty convenience store tramp. How could they be having sex for hours? But what if they’re actually talking? 
We didn’t do that. We could never talk to each other.
 

Of course, affairs were nothing new to Branson. I suspected several over the years and had proof of many but I was too coward to say anything. Too afraid to know the truth.
Too scared to be alone, so rather than be alone, I’d suffer through it.  I was so
afraid he’d leave me. Shit. 
I’m alone anyway.
 And
look what it’s come to? 
I’m alone in a borrowed pickup truck in the middle of the night stalking my piece of shit never gonna change husband. 
What the hell has happened to my life?
I don’t even remember having a life. 
My mind alternated on going, staying, killing, loving, and all kinds of crazy
stuff.