For the bad wife does not sit with her husband while he plays video games on his phone.
For the bad wife hears a sound like water gurgling through old pipes when the husband speaks again about his bad shoulder, elbow, heels, or thumb.
And lo, she does not think much about his very bad thumb.
For the bad wife spends her time imagining love with another instead of love with her husband.
She is there and not there. In her mind, she transports herself. And how can any soul–husband or wife–survive that kind of absence?
For the bad wife finds it easier to take offense.
For a kiss now feels like an inquisition of their marriage.
For when the bad wife talks to her therapist, her therapist is pretty sure some of this may be related to the Catholic Church and trauma and the bad wife’s stepfather who tried to be a priest and was kicked out.
And the bad wife is willful and sometimes wishes for ignorance.
And the bad wife knows all she really needs to do is cut off ties with the other man, yet she doesn’t. And then condemns herself.
For the bad wife was raised to be better than this, her own mother excommunicated due to divorce, her own mother accused of infidelity—for the bad wife no longer believes in any god yet can’t stop wishing she could enter the gates of heaven and be endlessly forgiven.
Yet still will not stop texting this other man.
For the bad wife has taken photos of herself in lace at angles, almost hitting “send.” Then feels sick to her stomach.
A year of therapy, morning meditation, daily self-help books, a year of scouring herself for reasons she is the heart of all the fault in the marriage.
For the bad wife has a libido. For the bad wife cannot stop touching herself and thinking of–yet again–the other man. For the bad wife no longer wants her husband’s touch even though she wants to be touched and yet and yet and yet and yet for the bad wife is everything I promised myself I would never be when I was a child and went to bed after saying my prayers below that godforsaken cross that used to terrify me with Jesus and the blood and the nails above my head as my stepfather screamed and called me, a child, “Whore,” as he screamed
and proclaimed with vindication that he came into my bedroom at night and that my sleeping child-soft hands smelled sinfully of “pussy.”
For the bad wife simultaneously thinks she will never be any good, yet has begun to think her nipples are buttercups.
For the bad wife is a bad wife is a bad wife.
And aren’t all husbands and wives bad?
For the bad wife tells her therapist, “No, none of this is about religion” and would prefer to believe she is just bad, her impulses and unhappiness are wrong, and lo and behold the therapist says, “So why then are you punishing yourself?”
For the bad wife has pleaded to her therapist, “Diagnose me with something. Please tell me how I am wrong.”
For the bad wife has begun to believe punishment is love and love is punishment.
For despite the nuns teaching her to love with an open heart– she cannot any longer.
For despite her earnest wanting to learn to forgive– she still, as an adult, cannot.
For the bad wife does not touch the husband, and the husband does not touch her, and instead she moves her body from room to room. An old bit of rock, a fossil, a dry wall carving, a washed up tablet that recalls the times he called her frigid, he was disgusted by her coarseness, her raunch, her crudity. And of course the times he touched her badly, such that night she was driving and he dug his fingernails into the denim origami of her crotch, the fortune teller of her crotch, Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House, and when she said, “No, the child can see from the backseat,” he did it again, harder, and when she said “No” a second time, he became enraged, “How dare you act like I’m raping you,” and of course the times he said all this was all her fault. All, all, all. This has been engraved all over her.
For the bad wife loves his dick yet, contradictorily, feels her husband is like a walking crime. She will never get past this. Dead as dry leaves.
For the bad wife is unsure if they were back in Ancient Israel, would she even share her one goat with him?
For the bad wife is stingy.
For the bad wife wants to sin.
For the bad wife wants the expensive black lingerie beyond the budget, wear it once and stain and be undone. For the bad wife demands sacrifice. For the bad wife is unforgiving and
relentless, which he used to enjoy, but perhaps is a little too much BDSM. For the bad wife the bad wife the bad wife. She always puts more butter on her popcorn than on his for movie night.
This is the liturgy of the bad wife, the four signs of the bad wife’s cross, clit, tit, tit, and opened wet labia.
This ecstasy is not a prayer of contrition. Not a holy confession. Thou shalt not judge the bad wife. Nobody shall judge the bad wife. For she already judges herself. And if there is a god or goddess up there in the sky scampering about looking for other victims, then they too are no longer allowed to judge her. For she is supple but will not supplicate.
And anyone who designs to judge her, let them answer to me.
For this is the word of the bad wife.
Shakespeare wrote, “All is fair in love and war..” WIFE X disagrees. Pat Benatar sang, “Love is a battlefield.” And with the statistics about intimate partner violence, household labor, and more—WIFE X agrees with Benatar, which is why she is using this nom de guerre as she writes from her home somewhere on the East Coast.