BACK
WHAT THEY DO AT NIGHT
brandi wells
Megan and Jeff watch movies every night. Movies about killer sheep, movies
about men wearing women’s underwear, movies about zombie cowboys. Generic
stuff.
They used to do other stuff. Walk the dog, draw pictures of men talking to god,
sleep in tents in their back yard. Then they got a discount card for the video store
around the corner from their apartment. It’s a dank little store, with dead potted
plants in the window and a backroom that is larger than the front room. In order to
properly utilize their discount card, they start renting movies every night.
They rent two movies and watch one at seven and one at ten o’clock. That leaves
enough time for a short bathroom break and for each of them to check their email.
Megan pops a bag of buttered popcorn and Jeff pops a bag of kettle corn. They mix
the two bags together, pour M&M’s in and eat them as soon as the chocolate begins
to melt, swirling in broken candy bits around the buttered kernels.
Sometimes friends call to see if they want to go out and have drinks.
“What’ll I wear?” Megan asks Jeff.
Jeff shrugs and slides the latest DVD into the computer.
Megan pulls shirts off hangers and tries on skinny jeans. None of it looks as good
as her flannel shirt, tank top and pajama pants. She calls their friends, cancels plans,
and spends the night watching movies.
Megan starts to worry that this a scheme, perpetuated by the rental store, and that
maybe they are missing out on Life. She doesn’t tell Jeff, because she’s worried that
he’s in on it. She’s worried that maybe he’s enjoying draining the life out of her. She
wakes up at night to be sure he isn’t craning over her, watching her breathe, sucking
life from her while she’s unaware. She starts sliding a pillow between their bodies
after he falls asleep.
Megan quits going with Jeff to pick out movies.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Jeff asks.
He stands next to the car with his hand on the door handle. His fingers are
wrapped around the plastic black grip and he’s looking at her, not smiling, but
looking.
“No,” she says, looking back at him. They don’t smile anymore. It’s an effort they
gave up when they quit meeting friends for drinks and walking the dog in the park. It
seems unnecessary.
Megan starts to feel anxious while Jeff’s at the video store. She worries that he
will bring something home that will kill her. One of the movies they watch will have
the perfect combination of sounds, colors, and flashes, to trigger a heart attack or
cancer or irritable bowel syndrome. She drinks special vitamin fortified water,
believing it will protect her.
Eventually, Megan quits watching the movies. She sits alone in their bedroom,
with the door shut so she can’t hear the television. She lies belly down on the
mattress and reads old romance novels. The characters have names like “Sabrina”
and “Hernandez.” One of the books has a picture of a buff man with one arm
wrapped around a woman whose tits are spilling over the top of her corseted dress.
The man’s other arm is raised above their heads and he doesn’t have a hand, only a
hook, shiny and glinting in the sun.
Jeff worries that these books will begin to alter Megan’s perceived reality. She will
expect him to have huge “swashbuckling” arms and grow his hair down to his
shoulders. She will want to go on trips and stand on a beach, wrapped in each other’s
arm while the wind is blowing their hair out of their faces. Maybe she will expect him
to last longer in bed, have mastered several aspects of the kama sutra and make her
cum by stroking the hair from her face.
“You could go to the library,” he tells her when he’s getting into bed. “Check out
something new. I mean, you don’t have to read those things.”
“I like them,” she says.
It makes him nervous to sleep so close to the books. They’re in a small mound at
the foot of the bed, inches from his feet. Pages and pages of throbbing manhood,
almost brushing the soles of feet, almost tickling his toes.
Jeff starts to throw Megan’s books away, one at a time, hoping she will think that
she is slowly misplacing them, hoping that she’ll forget she ever had them. He
doesn’t know that she tears pages out and hides them around their bedroom. Pages
folded and tucked in the dresser, in the closet, slid between the mattress and box
springs, crumpled inside her penny loafers. Pages everywhere. She waits until he
leaves for work and then she rereads the same page nine times, committing it to
memory.
Jeff brings burgers home and asks Megan to eat dinner with him.
“Sure,” she says.
They sit on the couch, with a throw pillow between them, eating double
cheeseburgers with pickles and ketchup. The previews play through and the feature
begins, centering on a small boy, standing outside his parents’ bedroom, listening to
them have loud sex, banging the walls, screaming words like “Pussy-beater.” The boy
starts pulling hairs out of his head, one at a time, until bald patches form on his skull.
Between mouthfuls, Megan recites a paragraph from one of the hidden pages of
her romance novels.
“What?” Jeff asks, but Megan keeps talking, chewing burger, letting little pieces of
beef and bread slide out of her mouth and fall into her lap.
Jeff turns the volume up, but Megan talks louder, strains, nearly yelling.
When they go to bed, Megan tries to kiss Jeff and pull him onto her, but he rolls
away. He lays a pillow between them and falls asleep.
Megan stares at him, wishing she could suck the life from him, while his eyes are
closed and he’s defenseless. She holds her breath and strains and tries as hard as she
can to suck the life from him. When she can’t, she piles her romance novels on the
pillow between them, a mini tower of sexual prowess and lust and inferiority.
(c) 2008 by Brandi Wells