Forbidden

by tess

The Hubs travels for work. A lot. We’re both certain that’s how we’ve survived a ten year marriage. He drives away and I immediately miss him. I remember all the funny stories I forgot to tell him. I worry that he’s dead in a ditch. I wonder if he misses me and our cats. I brood over all the times I should have been sweeter to him.

And then he comes home and my life feels brighter, more focused having him there. He entertains me with charmingly sarcastic travel- and client-related stories. He always brings me some completely inane gift, like the 2-ounce ketchup bottle from his room service tray or a drink stir stick that lights up when you twist it. And just about the time when I’m ready to again embrace my privacy, he starts talking about his next trip to Cincinnati. Or Seattle. Or Munich.

Like most spouses who suddenly have time on their own, I live a very different life alone than I do as half of a couple. I eat food I’d never eat with him (mango sorbet for breakfast, cinnamon toast for lunch, blueberry waffles for dinner). I stay up late at night indulging in What Not to Wear, Little Britain, and Army Wives. I wallow in an assortment of my favorite movies like Big Eden, Steel Magnolias, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

There are only two things that The Hubs absolutely, positively forbids me to do in his absence. I may not read scary books and I must not watch spooky movies. But I am drawn inexorably to them. I can hear the cries from my Stephen King bookshelf: Pennywise the Clown, Jack Torrance, and the Man in Black are calling. If I know that The Ring or Fright Night is playing on another channel, the wacky hijinks of Bart and Homer cannot hold me hostage. I am entranced by the “View Last” button on the remote control. Darting back and forth between channels. Closer and closer to the scary part. Dare I watch it? Tearing myself away at the very last second, I imagine the scene on the hallucinatory screen overlaying Friends. Only to return again and again to the horror that will undoubtedly render me unable to sleep for days and nights on end.

It all began with Dark Shadows. My friend Karen wasn’t allowed to watch it at her house but I was a latchkey kid. So after school Karen and I huddled around the 10” black and white Zenith in our fashionably mustard- and olive-colored kitchen, eyes wide and pulses fast. The crash of the sea beneath the Collinwood estate and Victoria Winters’ words beckoned us. Our palms would sweat during séances. We’d bite our lips when vampire Barnabas Collins strode manfully toward the mausoleum. But the scene that made us sprint screaming from my house was when Victoria looked in the candle-lit mirror of her dressing table and watched her own reflection grow old.

Fortunately I don’t run shrieking from the house much anymore. Then again, I don’t spend stormy afternoons watching Dark Shadows anymore either. But as God is my witness, to this day I avoid looking into unlit mirrors after dark for fear that I’ll be forced to watch the march of a hundred years across my face. Just like Victoria did that fateful night.