Respect Me, Part 1 by Nia Arthurs

One

Harriet

I grabmy husband’s mistress by the hair. Feel my nails scrape against her lily-white scalp. Wrench her extensions the way I discard tufts of dandelions from my rose garden.

She shrieks like a banshee. Like some otherworldly monster, clawing out of the grave. Out of hell. A devil wrapped in my robe, sipping from my wine glass. In my freaking house.

I throw my weight and my words around. Cohesive sentences broken by expletives. Dark obscenities. Vicious threats.

The woman manages to slip out of my grasp like the worm that she is. Big brown eyes blink in my direction, filled with shock and pain.

I give her a once-over. Make side-by-side comparisons in the space of three seconds.

Jerrison really lowered his standards with this one.

She’s young. The kind of young that believes her opinions matter even though she lacks experience. The kind with shelves of participation trophies and awkward photos of herself in lingerie, celebrating the years before gravity sags everything and the sun carves lines into her face.

Blonde. From the bottle. Her roots are showing. Black. Darkness creeping on light.

Her body’s lanky–if I’m being harsh. Willowy if I’m being kind. But her tits are like watermelons. She must have back problems. There’s no way her scrawny frame was built to support that.

Fake hair. Fake eyes. Fake tits. Airhead Barbie. As plastic as the dolls I used to play with in childhood.

Jerrison lurches to his feet, his thick blonde eyebrows slashing over startling blue eyes. “Harriet? I thought you were going on a business trip?”

There’s an edge to my smile. I feel the rage building and building, galvanized by his ridiculous question.

He wants to know why I’m here.

Like this isn’t my house.

Like my name’s not on the mortgage.

Like he wasn’t sipping wine beside another woman, giggling and cuddling her five seconds before I busted in.

I ball my fingers into fists. Fight the lump that forms in the back of my throat, a lump that always precedes my tears.

Beyond the anger, frustration and disappointment is a secret hope.

Please let this be a dream.

Nightmare. Reality.

I never thought it would come to this. That I would fake a business trip just so I could catch my husband in the act.

I wanted evidence. Proof beyond whispered phone calls in the night. Socked feet tiptoeing out when he thought I was asleep. Empty sides of the bed. Strange credit card purchases. Hotels. Lingerie. Flowers that never came to me.

My marriage fell on the rocks and capsized, but I stubbornly believed it hadn’t come to this point. It took effort to ignore the signs when I was bombarded with fragments of the truth. Nudges from my intuition. Whispers from my co-workers, friends, and family—those who loved me enough, who were brave enough, to bring their concerns to me.

“I noticed your husband with someone last week…”

“I thought you should know…”

“Is Jerrison seeing someone…?”

I didn’t want to believe it. Even if I knew I was no longer his priority, even if the nights he reached for me, slid inside me, moved over me had dried up to nothing. Even if we never said ‘I love you’ or went on dates or exchanged more than the necessary conversations about bills, politics, and schedules, I believed in our marriage vows. To love and to hold. To honor. To respect.

I was there when Jerrison made those promises in front of everyone. Love shining in his eyes. Chest puffing out in a double-breasted suit with a flower clipped to the lapel.

He held my hand. Squeezed my fingers. Repeated after the priest in a giant cathedral that echoed with prestige and old money. The kind of religion people fought wars over.

‘I will always love you, Harriet’.

Except Jerrison didn’t warn me that his love came with strings. With business suits carrying the subtle scent of perfume. With lipstick stains on wrinkled napkins. With callers that go silent and then hang up when I answer the phone instead of him.

Today, I summoned the courage to see for myself, but there was no preparation for this moment. No motive beyond an urgent desire to prove I wasn’t crazy.

I wanted my husband to face me.

To see me.

To watch me watching him.

And I wanted remorse. Knees hitting the hardwood floors. Tears gushing from his incredible blue eyes. Hands up, rasping together in pleas for understanding.

But my husband did not receive my script because he’s not following the lines.

It’s been five minutes since I burst into the house, caught him with Blondie and grabbed her hair.

Five minutes.

I have yet to receive an apology.

“J-Jerry!” Barbie whispers, reaching for Jerrison. Bracelets dance up scrawny arms, clanking loudly against her elbows.

My gaze drags back to her. The way my voice carries through the room sounds like a gun without its safety. “Touch him and die.”

She snatches her hands back. Looks at me with fear and trembling.

I am her end.

And she knows it.

Jerrison does too. He moves in front of her. “Did you lie to me about the business trip?” He has the audacity to look annoyed as he pieces everything together. “You set me up. There wasn’t any emergency at HQ, was there?”

Something ugly knots inside my chest. A twisted, ravenous evil. The side that society beats out of us. That school and eight-hour jobs in hot cubicles told us was wrong.

Conform. Restrain. Hold it in.

Do not let them see you explode.

Jail time. Police escorts. Assault charges.

Choose peace over violence. Choose conversation over fists. My dad taught me that when he taught me how to box. ‘You have power and now you have a responsibility to use that power wisely.’

Whoever made those arbitrary rules has never been cheated on. Never walked in on their husband with another woman. Never had to choke down the acidic bile that starts in the stomach and rises to the throat.

I feel like a soda bottle shaken to within an inch of its life. A volcano spitting ash, a precursor to the lava.

Our breaths hit the air and damages the silence.

No one moves.

It’s like we’re stuck in time. Each of us a cast member in a ridiculous set piece, moved around by a Higher Being that we don’t understand. That couldn’t possibly be benevolent.

“Harriet…” Jerrison says my name like an adult would to a misbehaving child in the middle of aisle four. ‘No, you can’t have that cereal, baby. It’s too expensive’.

“Shut up.”

“You need to calm down.”

“And you need to move.” It’s all I can say through clenched teeth. Every muscle in my body coils. Flames lick at my skin and neck. Sweat beads on my upper lip.

“No,” Jerrison says. “Let’s talk about this like rational adults.”

The Blonde begins to smile. She’s got painfully thin lips that threaten to disappear completely from her face. The kind of lips that will probably land her in a plastic surgeon’s office, asking for fillers and holding up a picture of a woman who looks like me.

I hate her.

Every inch of her.

I want her to die.

Jerrison’s eyebrows jerk a little closer together. He takes a step toward me. Hands outstretched. Eyes narrowed. Animal control approaching a rabid raccoon. Here, kitty kitty.

I can’t look at him. Can’t breathe from the pain that snaps at me like a shark out for blood.

There’s no remorse in my husband’s face.

No shame.

He’s still tense, still acting as if he’s got the upper hand. As if I should be ashamed for interrupting him.

I get the sense that I’m messing up his day. That I’m moving away from his script. That I should fold myself into a little box while he plays with his tramp. Make way until he’s finished. Because isn’t that what a good wife does? Step aside while her husband screws his girlfriend?

Bastard.

The betrayal barrels into me. A boulder on my back. Shackles on my feet.

I refuse to cry. She’s still here. The other woman.

I’m going to burn that robe. With her still in it.

“Fine.” I whirl around and stomp to the mud room. Grabbing the bat we store on our shelf of prized junk, I stalk back to the main hall.

Barbie shrieks when she sees the bat. “Jerrison, she’s going to kill me!”

My husband stares at me with wide eyes.

I swing the bat over my shoulder and give him a cold smirk. “Excuse me a minute.”

“Harriet…”

I throw the front door open. Her cherry convertible is pretty. Svelte. Just like Barbie. Not a scratch on its red paint. She takes good care of this thing.

Good.

The first swing of my bat smashes against a rearview mirror. Glass shatters into a million pieces and feeds my rage. I bash the hood like a madwoman. Jump on the trunk and beat the roof. Gorilla stomps. Blown tail lights. Cracked windshield.

Jerrison yells at me.

Barbie wails.

I don’t stop and neither of them come close enough to grab me. Smart idiots. They know I’ll exchange metal and glass for sinew and flesh.

When I’m done, my straight hair sticks to my cheek and my hands hurt from gripping the bat so tightly. Something sharp stings my hand. I think some glass shards might have sailed through the air and scratched me.

My boots thump the concrete driveway. The bat rolls from my fingers and clanks to the ground, sliding back and forth before coming to a stop at one of my rose bushes.

Barbie’s crying and so am I. The tears leak out of my eyes without permission.

I face the other woman. “You have ten seconds to get the hell out of here. If you ever come back to this house again, I promise you I won’t show the restraint that I have today.”

Her heels clack on the ground as she limps off. I’m surprised when her car starts. I’m surprised when it speeds out of the gate, the muffler scraping pavement and the side mirrors swinging in the breeze.

My attentions shifts to the man standing in the doorway of our home.

The love of my life.

The man I pledged my world to.

My cheating husband.