So my new husband likes to talk on the phone and smoke in the bathroom, while drinking his coffee while taking a dump. Multi-tasking at its best. I heard him call and say that he's going to come into work the next day after we got married. Due to his failure to obtain his own residency the year before, I used my connections to get him into a program a year before we got married. He was accepted late and didn't have any real time off, but they gave him a week off for the wedding - that's not what he told me. He told me they wouldn't give him any time off. He told me to maneuver the wedding date so that it fit in his every third day call schedule. He told me that they wanted him to go back to work as I heard him tell his chief on the phone that he doesn't need to be off any longer and he would like to come in to work. The first of many, many, many lies in our marriage (not the first ever as I discovered). So he went to work. He left me to take care of getting the tire changed on his car. He left me to take care of packing his shit up for our move to the middle of the country. He left me to twiddle my thumbs two days after we got married. Even though I didn't know we had a full week, I thought we had a few days so that we can enjoy our newlywed status. I was making all kinds of romantic plans in my mind. I was going to try on all my new Victoria Secret's lingerie that my friends had bought for my shower. I was going to light candles, cook romantic dinners, drink champagne, eat strawberries and relax. Instead, he left me...alone.
It was a foreshadowing of what was to come. I should have recognized it and gotten out then, but I sat alone in the kitchen and practiced how to sign my new name. What is it about marriage that makes girls stupid????
Two weeks after we got married, we were heading out to middle of the cornfields, IL so that he can start his residency. We were newlyweds embarking on a new adventure together. The movers came and took what was left of our big stuff and we packed up the Honda and headed west. It had been two weeks and I was beginning to wonder if I was unattractive as a married woman. I was wondering if somehow marriage made me grow warts. But hey, he was nervous about the new job and the move. Maybe in the hotels. Hotels bring out the frisky in everyone...right??? Wrong!
Still, I had hope and tried to overlook that little snag. The ride was awful no matter how much I tried to make it fun. I didn't get why he was in such a bad mood. I was lost in thought as we drove into the town that I was going to live in for the next 3 years. It was decrepit, it was bleak, it was ugly and it was flat. Then I was hit with the most atrocious, all lung-consuming, invasive stench I have ever smelled in my entire life. I've lived in Staten Island my entire life so it says a lot if I'm affected by a stench. New Jersey and NYC's garbage used to be dumped there near my house. The SI dump smelled like roses in comparison. You can't even begin to imagine. We had just gone over a bridge that was over something - don't know what. It was horrific!! The smell symbolized my marriage life. Later, we found out that it was the soybeans being processed.
And then he farted in the car...
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