About Last Night

I always loved listening to you and Mark tell a story. It was like an episode of I love Lucy.
– Ann (my younger sister)

I have no idea what you’re talking about. – me

When I was in my early forties, I went to my oby/gyn’s office for an annual routine appointment. During my exam, he kept asking me if I was feeling okay, if anything felt off, was I having any discomfort? I kept thinking, “Sheesh, dude, I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with,” only to be told that he was certain I had a cyst on my ovary, that he couldn’t believe I wasn’t in pain, and that I needed an ultrasound scheduled ASAP to confirm. It all sounded very urgent so I got the ultrasound and it was confirmed that I had a cyst the size of a lime and the Pain Train suddenly yelled, “Everybody onboard,” and I went from being just fine to not.

I had a simple, outpatient laproscopic surgery to remove the cyst and all should have been well. It wasn’t and the next few months were feeling like something was very wrong and return trips to the doctor. During that time, Mark decided we should get a tv in our room for me to watch when I wasn’t feeling great. This was some not-so-veiled bullshit because he’d been nagging me for years about putting a tv in the bedroom and finally broke me. He went out and bought one, set it up, and during the weekend when he was home to take care of things around the house, I’d go upstairs, lay down, and flip on the remote. There was no better station for me to watch during my Ovarian Rehabilitation than The Lifetime Channel, a cable channel devoted to movies of women being mistreated, abused, lied to, cheated on, and generally done wrong by men.

I’d immediately get engrossed in a movie, and when Mark would come upstairs to check on me, I’d say, “They were in love, but you could see the red flags right away. Get this. One night they have friends over, and she’s dressed up and wearing makeup and LOOKING ALL FINE FOR HIM BECAUSE SHE LOVES HIM SO MUCH, but when the friends leave, he goes crazy, tells her she looks like a whore with all that makeup on and he doesn’t need a whore in his life. And she’s like, ‘Honey, can’t you see I love you. I did this for you,’ and he’s not having it because he’s an abusive jerk just like his father which we know because of the flashbacks.” Mark would shake his head and say, “I don’t know how you can watch this shit every weekend.” I would counter that it was ABOUT LIFE, hence the name Lifetime Channel, and he said it should be called The Man Haters Channel, and from that day forward that’s the only thing he ever called it.

By the end of that summer when I couldn’t eat anything and had lost a bunch of weight, my doctor decided that he was going to go in and see what was going on. I was full of old blood because I’d been making and breaking cysts all summer and woke up to the news from Mark that because of that and other issues I had a hysterectomy. I blamed Mark for allowing that to happen even though he was merely the bearer of bad news, and suddenly I legit had a man to hate.

I was thrown into immediate menopause at the age of 44, and it was a full year before things got better. It was day after day of hot flashes, insomnia, and forgetting everything. It came to a head when I told Mark he had to go into work later one morning because we had a parent-teacher conference, he rearranged his schedule, and when we showed up the teacher looked at both of us and said, “Umm, that was yesterday.” Because the low fuel on Mark’s tank of empathy had been flashing for months he said, “Look, you’re the one that keeps the kids, me, and this house running. You need to get your shit together.” I responded by saying, “What a great idea except I haven’t slept in a year.”

That’s when I went back to the doctor with my raggedy self and said, “I cannot do this anymore. I never sleep and I DO MEAN NEVER,” and he prescribed Ambien and I started singing zippity do dah every morning because I finally was sleeping all night. Except for the wee, little problem that Ambien is meant to be a short-term solution and not something you took forever. He gave me a few refills and if I went to my regular doctor for any reason, I’d ask for a script there, too, because I could not sleep without it. I finally figured out that I could take half a one and it would work, and so I’d split my stash of pills and go off into LaLaLand every night.

It was during this time that my friend called me very last minute to say that she had gotten four free tickets to see the Backstreet Boys and did we want to take our girls to go see them. I said, “Of course,” and an hour later she and her daughter picked up me and my daughter and we went to a concert full of middle-aged moms with screaming girls. We chatted above the noise the whole time until the Backstreet Boys came out and the screaming ratcheted up a few decibels. Turns out those Backstreet Boys were very easy on the eyes and Gayla leaned over to me and said, “Which one would you do?” She told me her pick and I said, “The drummer, I’d definitely do the drummer,” and she said I could have him all to myself, and like two high school girls we swooned over our picks from up in the rafters. We got home close to midnight and Maggie went right to sleep. I was too wound up and so I had a beer with a full Ambien chaser and went to bed.

The next morning, I took the kids to school, came home and was drinking my 3rd cup of coffee to wake up and Mark came downstairs dressed for work. As I stood at the counter pouring cream into my cup, he came behind me and was kissing my neck and asking me if I was tired after LAST NIGHT. “Yeah, kind of,” I said. “It was pretty late before I got to bed,” and he kept kissing my neck and then said, “I thought so with the concert and you getting home late and then us doing it you must be worn out this morning.” “Doing what?” I asked and he said, “It.” I was so confused and turned around and said, “I have no idea what the it is that you’re talking about?” He looked surprised and said, “The sex it.”

“The sex it??? I went upstairs and went to bed,” I said, and Mark said, “No you didn’t,” and it went back and forth like that for a long time until we both realized I had no recollection of something he had total recall of. We were both shocked, and after letting this information settle for a few minutes, I said on the down down down down low even though we were the only ones in the house, “Wow, I don’t know what happened last night but it’s going to be okay, Mark. I’ve seen this before in a Lifetime movie. I’m not accusing you of anything but there is a thing called marital rape which isn’t cool but I since I don’t remember any of it it’s no harm no foul, amiright?” He looked at me like I was batshit crazy and said, “Marital rape??!!! Oh no. Oh no you don’t. You’re not pulling that Man Haters Channel shit on me. Nope. Not having it. I would never do that to you and, guess what, Virgin Mary, I was sound asleep and next thing I know you’re naked on top of me,” and all that lovey-dovey morning stuff that had been going on just a few minutes before took a hard left. He was out the door and I was left alone with my thoughts which were blankety blank blank.

For the next few days, we gave each other a very wide berth like we were two drunks that met in a bar and had a quickie in the bathroom and then found ourselves seated next to each other at a wedding reception. Lots of side-eyes and, huh, this person looks familiar but I can figure out why. It was all I could think about and I’d look at Mark and start to say, “Did I….was there……do you think….” and there was no second part of the question because it was all a big nothing. From there I convinced myself that this was the unraveling of my brain and before long I would end up, as Mark would frequently say, “Sitting in the corner looking at the wall and humming one note over and over.”

Finally Mark asked me about the details of the night, and I gave him the Cliff Notes version of the concert and how I couldn’t wind down when I got home. When I got to the beer and Ambien part, he said, “Jesus Christ, Kath, you can’t be mixing that shit. That’s why you don’t remember anything,” and he kept shaking his head and looking at me like I was an absolute moron. “Oh, I said, “I knew about operating heavy equipment, but c’mon, a beer bottle isn’t heavy.” And then I laughed, hahahahahaha ha ha, which he who was accused of marital rape did not find funny. Eventually we went back to regularly scheduled programming until one day I brought up that night again. “Was I talking at all when this was going on?” I asked Mark. “Yeah,” he said, “I didn’t know what you were saying at first but you kept repeating the same thing over and over. You asked me if I was in the band.” “Oh my god,” I said, “what did you say?”

“I looked at you and said I am tonight, baby.”

It was many years later before I told Gayla what happened the night of the concert. She listened, nodding every so often, and then said, “If I’m understanding this correctly, what you did was roofie yourself so you could bang Mark and pretend he was the drummer for the Backstreet Boys. Is that right?” I took a sip of my wine and said, “Sheesh, Gayla, when you put it like that it sounds kinda bad,” and then she took a sip of her wine, looked straight at me and said, “God, you’re such a whore,” and we laughed until we cried.