A Story of a lady

Here's something someone sent me on msn :P. Hope you like it. Not saying that I'm stealing, author-Vonny Derbishire

A Story

Once there was a married woman. Her days were soft – her activities light and unchallenging, since the technologies of easy consumerist society had long ago removed the mantle of hardship that women had borne for centuries. From the time she aroused herself from sleep till she put herself back to bed at night, not a moment of resistance or effort would impose itself on her body or mind. She had become so adept at avoiding the merest hint of strain, that she had pushed her husband to seek employment far more remunerative than he would ordinarily have aspired to, so that she could afford the luxuries she required for her life. Their contract of marriage was, in her mind not for any other purpose but to make her dreams come true, and her life one of ease and luxury. To this end she spent months reading books on ‘motivational psychology’ to perfect her techniques of persuasion and manipulation, so that she was able to ‘persuade’ her uneducated, ’rough diamond’ husband to get into the stock-brokering business. At this he did reasonable well, and would no doubt have become a millionaire in a few years, but for the wife’s endless pleasure seeking, which required more cash than he could ever hope to bring home. The more he earned through his exploitation of third-world farmers in the ‘futures’ trade, the more her need for self-aggrandisement demanded expenditures on unnecessary and duplicated luxury products. Her luxuries included a maid to do her housework, a nanny to mind her children (although she prided herself, years later, on being able to say that she personally always supervised the children's bathing), a swimming pool in the backyard, a fully concreted yard so as to avoid the need for gardening, and every domestic convenience appliance known to modern kind. But she went further: the more her household became replete with every gadget under the sun, the more her need to be ‘up-to-date’ with everything. Over the years it became an accepted culture in the house that no matter what technological wonders a particular appliance embodied, be it a refrigerator, a stereogram or a Satellite linked rear-projection TV, it arrived in the house with its in-built obsolescence presumed to arrive along with the packaging. In short, the moment it was unwrapped it had already lost its pristine quality of being the latest, and was destined within a few months to be on its way to the tip as an object of no more value than last weeks newspaper.

The husband went to work each day, and came home with his depression tucked away under a blank exterior, feeding himself on plates of hot-dogs and bowls of ice-cream after having prepared a meal for the family on the day the maid hadn’t managed it, or there had been no take-aways ordered. It was necessary for him to present an untroubled front to the world, as once before, when they were younger and his realisation of her unquenchable appetites had begun to sink in and he’d been at a loss how to feed that insipient monster, he had succumbed to a despondency that cost him his modest job. It had also cost him dearly by being subjected to his wife’s full attention, being her ‘subject’ as she read the self-help manuals and set herself up as his judge and therapist to speed him on his way to better performance in his next position. He could not think of that time without experiencing the gut-aches and the bowel contractions that normally attend primal fear – and his ‘treatment’ at the time had been the catalyst for his retreat into a shell so thick, the rest of his life felt like a hazy trip in a cotton-wool cocoon. He could not afford to permit himself the feelings that attended the utter denial of his emotions her treatment entailed. He learned that ‘feeling’ anything at all was bad, and being strong and manly was good, and that good husbands don’t have insecurities and self-doubts that interfere with their capacity to bring home the bacon. Such as it went, the message was pretty much the current wisdom in modern American society – had he wanted to escape his marriage because of the stifling restrictions it placed on his soul, he would only have found himself the subject of wider scrutiny and condemnation from society at large. Although he was uneducated, his gut instincts told him this, and he accepted this as the rules of fate to which he would have to adapt. He could not question the underlying assumptions inherent in this viewpoint without thereby doing the unthinkable, unpatriotic thing; questioning the capitalist culture of America, and its claim to be the best society in the world. His security depended on his acceptance of the rules. He could not deny his wife a single one of her whims for the same reasons – although in his early years of marriage he did attempt at times to curb her spending. He was put straight in these pathetic episodes with such devastatingly undermining lectures from her as a result, that he soon learned to keep quiet. He did not want to become her ‘subject’ for reassignment of emotion/thought/priority values again. He would just be good at his job, and bring home more bacon than she could possibly have use for. His largest regret as the years went by became the fact that he had failed her in that objective – he never could earn more than she could spend, and he knew that he had been a bitter disappointment to her after all. Even though he was a man of simple tastes who could not have cared less if he’d made toast on a campfire, he unquestioningly acceded to her ever demand in his quest for approval. Their ‘compact’ consisted of their silent agreement not to let their secret become common knowledge. Her friends all required that she would keep up the façade of unlimited access to consumer goods of ever-increasing sophistication and for them to be replaced at ever-shorter intervals. These possessions and habits were, after all, the only things that gave proof to the world that she had not married beneath her status, as her overly critical family had always hinted, and that she was as good any day as her sister, who had been naturally blessed with gifts and talents she could never hope to emulate.

Her husband’s lack of success in keeping her credit cards topped up to the desired limits was therefore hidden behind the permanent habit of dipping into the equity of the family home, with the result that after 40 years of marriage the debt on the house was about ten times the amount they had originally borrowed to buy it. Refinancing was usually achieved under the guise of renovation work, over-quoted to allow substantial increases of surplus cash to be available for more immediate concerns. So, on a twice-yearly basis there would be another overhaul of a major nature to the kitchen, the bathroom, the pool, the heating or air-conditioning system, or a new car. Several University educations also were financed under this scheme, and the prevailing belief grew among her friends that her husband was indeed a very successful man, and for herself she gradually came to accept that even though everything ultimately was borrowed, it didn’t matter as long as the bill would come later. She had the pragmatism to reason that once she died there would be no further inconvenience to her if there was nothing left but a pile of debts, and if there was no inheritance for the children. She always expected to go first anyway, having eaten herself into a state of advanced obesity by the time she was in her mid-thirties. By the time she was fifty she had developed polyps, diabetes, heart problems, shortness of breath and an almost total inability to move her limbs. Her social agenda dictated that she attend lunches in restaurants around town every day of the week, often following on from specialist appointments, and her dinner routine normally involved making the difficult choice between making the husband cook up something on the barbeque or phoning for take-away Chines, Japanese, Mongolian, Jewish or Italian. Her choices were invariably fat-laden, but disguised under the sophistication of some exotic spices and foreign name. He, on the other hand, rarely partook of these expensive delicacies, helping himself to a few hot-dogs from the freezer compartment after he had served up her meal to her satisfaction. Her obvious enjoyment in filling up her plate with serve after serve while she held court on all her important gossip from around the ‘higher’ end of town was his pleasure. If she was happy, he was happy – if for no other reason than that if she wasn’t happy he certainly wouldn’t be permitted to rest until the source of her displeasure was eliminated. Such is the nature of many a marriage I am told, and in hind-sight he could honestly tell himself that it could have been infinitely worse: she might have had a yen for jewellery, fine clothes and travel – and then where would he have been? How could he have financed that? At least her pleasures were mainly indoors, and her oversized television had spared him many an evening when there might have been an occasion for conversation had the room not been totally dominated by the monstrous screen and the demands made on the occupants of the room by the arrangement of the seating around the television as though it were the benches around an altar in a temple. So he congratulated himself whenever he saw his old girlfriend around town, who had kept her youthful figure and was draped in furs and jewellery even when attending the most mundane of locations, that he had struck the better deal. His wife, being embarrassed about her weight, lately kept indoors unless she was meeting the select few friends she still went out to lunch with – people who had themselves such immense health concerns that her problems seemed trifling by comparison.

And so, after forty-four years of silently battling the odds, the old man suffered a fatal heart attack while attempting to make a huge deal on the futures market. His President, in starting a war against the hapless Iraqis, had turned world opinion regarding the US economy temporarily in a downward direction – confidence was low – and the expected revenue from new investments had failed to materialise. As if on cue his over-ride system took effect – the wife would need to have access to his death-plan if she was to pay the debts – and obediently his body took a dive from which he did not have to wake. He went to his long-deserved sleep, blissfully relieved from all further responsibility for her comfort zone, and his own deep-seated knowledge that his life had basically been one big fuck-up. No more thought, no more chance to break the rule of silence.

Damn I feel that I'm friggin stupid compared to this one, anyway, I'm not gonna give up. Just see *at least* *gulp*