Lockout

Chapter Three

LOCKOUT 2017

Yesterday, he locked me out, I told her.

I was sitting in the den in my chair—remember the floral one my mom bought me years ago? The one with the rolled arms? Penny remembered my favorite chair.

So, I am sitting there grading papers, laptop in my lap. I had cleaned the house, done the laundry, and settled in to tackle some schoolwork. I was still in my nightie. The dogs were outside, and the puppy was old enough to hang out in the back yard without getting into mischief. She was watching a flock of pigeons alight on the fence, then giving a little woof to scare them. When she barked, they took flight, circled around, and came back.

Her puppy bark was not loud nor annoying. It was midday on a warm Saturday afternoon, not six in the morning nor eleven at night. Air conditioners roared nearby, and people had their windows closed, so she wasn’t bothering anybody.

He came down the stairs with a heavy-footed thump-thump-thump-thump-thump. He had been up in our bedroom working out, watching some sports event in the master bedroom on the television with the volume up, most likely.
“She’s barking!” he grumbled at me. “Aren’t you going to stop her?”
I looked up from my laptop and shrugged. “She’s not bothering anybody. She’s just woofing at the birds to make them fly away.”
“You need to shut her up,” he interrupted. “She’s bothering the neighbors.”
“For heaven’s sake, it’s the middle of the day. She’s not bothering the neighbors,” I said.
He glared at me. “If you won’t stop her,” he said, “I will. And if I stop her, you aren’t going to like it.”
“Are you threatening her?” I asked. He held his gaze, his blue eyes boring into mine, trying to see if I believed him. Clearly, he wasn’t kidding.
“Fine,” I said. I got up, folded my laptop, and walked out back onto the patio. The warm morning had become a warmer afternoon. The dogs couldn’t stay out much longer anyway, so it was no big deal. He was always bursting into a room where I was working to interrupt me with something that needed to be done right now. Get up. Let’s go. I need you. It was normal.
Click.
I thought I heard the door lock behind me, but I shrugged it off.
“Come on, baby girl. You need to hush up now,” I said as I grabbed her collar. Walking her back across the patio, I pulled open the screen door and turned the doorknob to take her inside. It was locked. I knocked on the door.
“Hey!” I hollered. “You locked the door. Hello?” I peered in through the glass door.
He was gone. He must have gone back upstairs. I knocked again. No answer. I figured he may have twisted the lock button by accident when he pushed the door shut behind me, so now I was locked out of the den door.
“Come on, guys,” I said to the dogs. “Let’s go inside. It’s too hot out here for you all.” They were indoors all week when I was at work, so time outdoors was something they loved usually. The pool was inviting, and they could cool off in there with a swim. Half the back yard was covered in shade from a wide-canopied tree, one of the reasons we bought the house. The wind rushed over the mountain behind our house keeping our yard cool. Now it was afternoon, so it was too hot. I was barefooted, so the pebbles hurt my feet. Beyond the shade of the tree, it was downright hot.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” I complained to nobody as the dogs walked with me to the back of the garage. We had three garage doors across the front of the house, but one had a single garage door that opened into the back yard to drive through. Thank goodness the rear door was up. I walked into the cool garage and across to the interior door that opened into the laundry room.
Locked. Well, crap. Now what?

I released the dogs to wander back into the yard then shut the rear door to keep them there until I figured this thing out. I hit the garage door opener onto the driveway. Now the first bay was open onto the street. I walked to the front of the garage and poked my head out to see if any neighbors were on their driveways nearby. Underneath my gauzy white cotton nightie, I had nothing on. With no make up on and my hair a mess, I really didn’t want anyone to see me. I dashed out the door onto the driveway, around the sidewalk, and up to the main entrance to the house. I pulled open the security door, and twisted the knob of the big, wooden front door.
Locked.

“Oh, come on!” I hollered. “Hey! I am locked out!” I rang the bell.
No answer. Rang it again. No answer. I pounded on the door. No response.
He was probably working up a sweat on his exercise equipment with the game up loud. Or he was in the bathroom. Somehow, he couldn’t hear me, I figured. Two more rings and three more pounds on the door. Nothing.
From the alcove by our front door, I peered up and down the street again, then dashed back down toward sidewalk, up our driveway, and into the open garage. I mashed the opener to close the automatic door. Now I had to pee. Badly.

I tried the laundry door again. Still locked. Pounded on the door. No answer. I had to get inside. It was hot, I was sweating, and I really needed to go to the bathroom now. If he didn’t answer, I would have to go in the back yard and…wait. The toolchest was right there.

This door’s lock was loose and needed replacing anyway. If I can just...

Yes. That would work. I grabbed a prybar and a mallet. I inserted the prybar into the space between the door frame and door, aiming for the deadbolt. I brought the mallet down onto the prybar and it made a loud noise, shuddering the wall.
Chink! Chink! Chink!
I was making progress. Another good blow or two, and I would be inside. Just as I drew back the mallet for another good whack at the door, I heard a twist of the deadbolt and the unclick of the lock button on the doorknob.
He pulled open the door just a bit, stuck his face into the garage, and leered at me.
“How do you like it?” he hissed.
“I was locked out!” I said, as if he didn’t know.
It still hadn’t dawned on me he had done this on purpose.
“How do you like it?” he repeated.
“How do I like what? What are you talking about? Let me in so I can…”

He blocked the door with his body. “You locked me out of your room, so I locked you out of the house. How do you like being locked out?” he said.
“Get out of my way. I have to pee. Let me by….” I said attempting to push by him.
He was a foot taller than me and outweighed me by more than a hundred pounds. I still had the mallet in my right hand and the prybar in my left. He opened the door wide but held onto the frame with outspread arms, still blocking me.

“Go ahead. Hit me,” he said. “Hit me in the head with that. You know you want to.”
“Hit you? I am going to pee on you if you don’t get out of my damned way instead of standing here doing some crazy Jack Nicholsen Shining impersonation. Jeez! What is wrong with you?” I finally ducked under his left arm. This time, he let me get by. I dashed down the hallway into the bathroom only steps away, set the prybar and mallet on the sink, and pushed the door closed. Relief.

He pushed open the door. He never hesitated to come in when I was showering, in the tub, or on the toilet. I had no personal space whatsoever. Ever. Even if I asked for it.
“Now what do you want?” I asked. “Can I please pee in peace? Seriously?”
“You wanted to bash me in the head, didn’t you? Admit it.” He was still taunting me.
I would later wonder if he was voicing his own wishes: he was accusing me of wanting to do to him what he really wanted to do to me. He wanted to bash me in the head. I didn’t have enough sense then to be afraid of him. Had he grabbed the mallet or prybar off the sink, I was cornered. I silently scolded myself for being so stupid. Right now, I had to talk him down from this rage. Somehow. I hadn’t been afraid of him for a long time, but today I was afraid.

I sighed. “What is your problem, man? I mean, really? All of this over the puppy barking at some stupid birds?” I could never understand why he got so mad so suddenly, but then again, I seldom could. He could pick a fight over the color of a green bean.
“No. I locked you out because you have locked me out. Locked me out of your bedroom. Locked me out of your heart. So, I locked you out to send you a message.”
I shook my head, trying not to roll my eyes at his attempt to wax poetic after his little lapse into insanity. “Does it ever occur to you, ever,” I asked, “that after forty years of your getting up at least five times a night, maybe I need a full night’s sleep with no interruptions?”
“I can’t help that I have to get up at night,” he deflected. “I have always been that way.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I quipped. “I have been sleeping next to you for four freaking decades. But sometimes when you get up or come back to bed, you wake me up. You ever think about that?”
“Well, I don’t mean to…” he offered pathetically.
“I know that,” I said, “But when I wake up, sometimes I have to pee, too. So I just hold it and hold it because I think maybe you just got back to sleep. I lie there in the dark listening to your breathing. I say to myself, ‘Do I get up, or do I wait until his next nature call?’ I can’t predict it. It’s like a guessing game I can’t win. And if I do get up and inadvertently wake you up, there’s hell to pay. And if I don’t get up, I lie there miserable with a full bladder.”
Sometimes if I gave him more words than he gave me, he would calm down.
“I can’t help it!” he retorted. “I’m old!”
“Hey, I’m old, too, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I need a full night’s sleep once in a while. I work two full time jobs, Greg. Think about it. I am exhausted. I have to be up at 5:30 a.m. to make my morning class. I get home from my night classes as late as ten sometimes. Most mornings, I am running on fumes. So, one night I got fed up and I just moved into the guest room. At least when I sleep in there, the only thing that wakes me up is my own bladder.”

That wasn’t quite true. He had made a few nocturnal visits, but they were less frequent when he had to walk down the hall to my room. None of that was my plan. My move to the guest room was really about sleep and not about avoiding sex.
“I want you to move back in our bedroom,” he stated flatly. “I miss you.”
His tone was pleading. Suddenly, he was the victim. But I didn’t miss him.
I was sleeping in the antique bed my grandparents had given me for my 13th birthday fifty years ago, the same bed he and I slept in after returning from our honeymoon. We took it apart in my parents’ home and put it together in our first apartment. With a full-size mattress, it was not really big enough for two adults, but we made it work for the first eight years of our marriage. A killer deal on a king-sized bed at a garage sale ended that. The king bed was luxurious. We could stretch out and sleep near but not next to each other. Ever since then, we slept without touching.
Now, not even a king-sized bed was big enough to hold all the space between us.

“Can I please have some privacy? If you will leave the bathroom, I will think about it,” I said. But I didn’t mean right away. I didn’t mean this afternoon or tonight. My adrenaline had barely subsided, so my heart was still pounding from this bizarre scene of his erratic behavior. In his mind, it was completely acceptable for him to threaten the puppy, completely rational for him to lock me out forcing me to run around outside trying to get in, completely normal for him to meet me at the door with a leering face and mocking words, taunting me to bash him in the head with a tool. He had always been combative, sure that he was right about everything, and quick to give an opinion. But he had turned a corner. This was new.

He is losing it, I said as I related the details to Penny that day. Lord only knows what he will do next.
An hour had gone by since I began telling her this story. Suddenly, saying to her what had happened, describing the life I was living, giving her details I had told no one else, brought them into clear focus. Saying a thing makes it real. Now you can’t ignore it. Now it is real.

Now I was awake.

At last, somebody knew. And I could finally see something was very wrong. The truth was, he had been difficult for years, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. I didn’t know yet exactly what was wrong, but now that I had told the truth about his actions, I felt a sense of relief. I was waking up from a long dream, a dream that seemed so real for so long. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.

“So, what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do. There’s nothing I can do. It just is what it is.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I get it. But some of that stuff is really bad. It’s not normal, you know? Who says those things? I mean, really. Who does that?”
“I know,” I said. “But what can I do?”

We were about to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. Just that number made me shake my head in disbelief. Forty years seemed impossible. Our sons were married with families of their own and lived far away. Our daughter was in her final year of college, so there were only the three of us in the house. In one year, she’d finish her degree. I couldn’t even think about…
Put that word out of your mind, Bethany.

We can’t afford an apartment for him plus this house. If I could get a smaller house….where would my daughter live? In the dorms? This time next year, she’d be out of college. Best to just wait it out. Things would get better. They always did. They had to.

“We’re taking a trip to California in July for our anniversary,” I reminded Penny. "Just the two of us. We’ll figure it out. We always find some way to put things back together, somehow. We’ve been through rough patches before."
“Okay, well…” she hesitated. “You know you can always call me if you need to talk.” We said our goodbyes, exchanging I love you's as we always did when we hung up, and I actually felt better. At last, somebody knew what was really going on.

And that I wasn’t the one who was crazy.