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Pee-play without the diapers!
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By Bel George · Posted
Chapter 11 — We Are Not Staying Home My plan, which I never stated out loud because stating it would have invited Ellen to dismantle it, was to simply stop going out. It was such a reasonable plan, from the inside. I worked from home; the work came to me down a wire. The groceries could come down a different wire, ordered and delivered, no aisle to be conspicuous in. The friends could be put off, gently, indefinitely, with the small true-enough excuses of a busy man. And the house, our quiet emptied-nest house, was safe, was known, had a bathroom on every floor and a cabinet full of supplies and a wife who managed everything, and within its walls I never had to calculate a single thing about toilets or distances or the duration of an event, because everything was to hand and nobody was watching. Why, I reasoned, would a man in my situation ever willingly leave such a place? I lasted about ten days in this philosophy before Ellen named it and ended it over breakfast. "You've turned down the Hendriks," she said. It was not a question. "Dinner, Saturday week. You told me you'd reply and you didn't, so I replied. We're going." "I'm not really up to it." "You're perfectly up to it. You're up to everything you were up to six months ago, that's rather the point I'm going to make, so you may as well hear it now over toast as later in the car." She put down her cup. "Listen to me, because I'm only going to lay this out once and then it's simply how we live. This is a small issue that is easy to handle. You hear me say that and you think I'm minimizing it, and I'm not. I mean it precisely. It is small, in the sense that it changes nothing that matters, and it is easy to handle, in the sense that I have handled it, the handling is done, the system exists and it works. The only thing left that could make it big is if we let it shrink our life. If we start saying no. No to dinners, no to the city, no to the things we like, because of a thing that is, I promise you, completely invisible to everyone but us. That's the only way this beats us, Mark. Not the leaking. The leaking's solved. The hiding is the only thing left that can still do us harm, and staying home is just hiding with the curtains open. So we're not going to. We're going to the Hendriks, and before that, this Saturday, we're going into the city, because you need trousers that fit properly over the daytime ones and I'm not ordering them blind off a website to send half of them back." "I can order trousers, Ellen. I don't need to be taken shopping like some helpless." "You can order trousers that don't fit and spend a month in the wrong ones out of stubbornness," she said. "Or we can go in on Saturday and a person who does this for a living can fit you properly in an hour. We're going in on Saturday." She picked her cup back up. "Wear the thick ones. We'll change you there before we start, so you're fresh for the afternoon. I've found the shop." I should, by now, have recognized the futility of the position I was defending. I was a man arguing for the right to hide, and I was arguing it to the one person alive who had never in thirty years permitted me to hide from anything, and who had decided, with the whole force of her practical love, that she was not going to start now. I did not yet know that the shop she had found, and the fitting room in it, was a scene I would one day put at the very front of the story of my life, the scene I would open with, because it was the first time I understood, standing in my socks behind a curtain, that the thing I had been dreading most was not waiting for me on the other side of it. But that is the prologue, and you have read the prologue, and so you know, as I did not that Saturday morning, exactly where we were going. The drive into the city I spent in a low hum of dread, watching the familiar give way to the unfamiliar, the safe known streets of our town opening out into the wide anonymous roads and then the multi-story car park under the big department store, which Ellen descended into with the calm of a woman who had looked up the parking in advance, because of course she had. She found the disabled toilet on the lower level, the one with the key from the attendant, exactly as the prologue has already told you, and she asked the man in the glass booth for the key in her clear flat voice, my husband is incontinent and needs a change before we go shopping, and the man handed it over and said the light switch sticks a bit, and that was the whole of it, the entire catastrophe I had been dreading the length of the drive, a sticky light switch. Inside, she laid out the mat and had the morning's diaper off me and a fresh one on in her ninety competent seconds, trousers down, tapes off, wipe, the new one snug, a flat hand pressed to the front and a finger round the gathers, "there, that's how it's done," and I stood in a borrowed disabled toilet in a department store car park being changed by my wife and the world did not end, the world went on selling things three floors above us, oblivious. And then we went up to the menswear floor, and I met Monique. I have already told you most of what happened there, because it is where this whole book begins. The fitting room. The thin curtain. Ellen, on the other side of it, in her bank-clerk voice, telling a stranger that her husband wore the proper kind, with the tapes, full-time, that there was no room in the seat. Over everything. All of that you know. What the prologue did not tell you, because the prologue was about my fear, was the hour that followed once the fear had nowhere left to stand, and that hour is the real point of the chapter, so let me give it to you now. Once Monique knew, once it was said and out and absorbed by her with no more drama than a hemline, the whole thing turned, astonishingly, into a pleasure. Not a trial endured. A pleasure. Because Monique was good at her job, and her job, that afternoon, was me, and there is a deep and unexpected comfort in being well served by someone who knows exactly what you need and is not remotely troubled by it. She brought trousers in a heavier drape, "this fabric, the weight of it falls over everything, you'll see, there's no line at all." She brought a cut with a touch more room in the seat that did not look like more room, that looked simply like well-made trousers. She had me turn, and turn again, and she stood back with her head on one side and assessed me the way a good tailor assesses anyone, as a problem of cloth and proportion to be solved elegantly, and the fact that part of the proportion was a thick taped diaper was, to her, simply one more parameter, no different from a long inseam or a high waist. "You'd be amazed," she said, smoothing the back of a pair of charcoal trousers, "how many gentlemen I fit for exactly this. Truly. More than you would think." And she told me, while she pinned, about a regular of years, a man who sailed competitively, whom she had only understood at his retirement do, and she told it not as gossip but as reassurance, the way you tell a frightened person you are not the only one, you are not even unusual, you are simply Tuesday afternoon to me, and I stood there in the charcoal trousers and felt the last of my dread drain out through the soles of my feet, because she was right, I could see in the mirror that she was right, there was no line at all, you would have to know, somebody would have to tell you, and the only person in that whole bright department telling anyone was Ellen, calmly, to the one person whose job it was to help. We took five pairs. Charcoal, navy, two greys, a brown. Monique had them taken away to have the lengths done and told us they'd be ready within the week, and she shook my hand at the till, and she said, "You come back to me when you need more, I'll know your fit now, it'll take ten minutes," and she meant it, and I understood that I had acquired, in the space of an hour, not a humiliation but a tailor, a person in the world who knew my situation and was glad to help with it and had made me look well while doing it. I walked out of that shop with a strange unfamiliar warmth in my chest, and it took me half the escalator down to identify it, because I had not felt it in relation to my condition before, not once. It was the warmth of having been helped. Properly helped, competently helped, by someone who saw the whole truth of me and reached not for pity and not for distaste but for a tape measure. Ellen had been telling me for months that this was how the world mostly was, if you would only let it be, and I had not believed her, and Monique had just spent an hour proving her right with a mouthful of pins. The rest of the day Ellen had planned, of course, because Ellen does not drive an hour into the city for one errand when the day can be made to hold more. We had lunch in a café with a glass front, watching the street, and I sat in a public café eating a sandwich in my Pampers. I am sorry. I have got ahead of myself, and I should not have, because that is not the word I had for it then and I promised myself I would tell this in order. That day it was a diaper, a medical word, a clinical fact, and it would be some time yet before it became, in my own head and in Ellen's mouth, the other one, the softer one, the one I just let slip. There came a particular evening, and a particular conversation, that earned that word, and I will not cheapen them by letting it leak in ahead of its place, so you will have to forgive the one time it has, and put it down to a narrator who already knows how the story ends and cannot always keep his face straight about it. The word was coming. I felt the first edge of it even that day, a hint of how differently I had begun to hold the whole business. But on that day, in that café, it was still a diaper, and I sat there eating a sandwich in one and discovered that it is exactly as possible as eating a sandwich in any other state, that nobody can see, that nobody is looking, that the catastrophe is, as ever, entirely interior. We went to a bookshop. We walked. And somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, on the escalator down from the bookshop's upper floor, the familiar warmth arrived without warning, the body settling its own accounts the way it does, and I wet myself, standing on a moving escalator in the middle of a busy store, and the only thing that happened was that the thick daytime diaper took it, all of it, silently, and I rode the rest of the way down dry-trousered and outwardly serene with a secret nobody on that escalator would ever guess. I told Ellen, quietly, at the bottom. Not in panic. Just a murmur. "I need a change when there's a chance." "There's a parents' room on this floor," she said, because she had clocked it on the way in, because she always clocks them, and she steered us to it, and the handbag came off her shoulder, the big one she carried everywhere now, the one with the change kit always in it, and in a clean bright family room with a fold-down table meant for infants she changed me, briskly, completely, in a couple of minutes, and we washed our hands and walked back out into the store, and the whole interruption had cost us perhaps five minutes and not one gram of distress. That was the thing I kept colliding with, all that long day in the city. The sheer manageability of it. Everything I had spent months dreading, the public outing, the wetting in a crowd, the change away from home, had happened, every one of them, in the course of a single ordinary Saturday, and every one of them had been a non-event, smoothed flat by Ellen's planning and Ellen's handbag and Ellen's refusal to let any of it be a crisis. I had been so certain that to leave the house was to court disaster, and the truth, which she had known all along, was that the house had simply been where I hid, and that out here, managed, prepared, padded, I was not in danger at all. I was just a man having a day out with his wife. We drove home in the early evening with five pairs of trousers being altered behind us and the light going gold over the fields, and I was tired in the good way, the way you are tired after a day that went well, and I was quiet, turning the whole of it over. "You were right," I said, eventually. "About the staying home." "I usually am," said Ellen, eyes on the road. "It's tiresome for you, I know." "I mean it. I'd have stayed in that house until I rotted. I'd have turned into one of those men who never goes anywhere and tells himself it's a preference." I watched the fields go by. "You wouldn't let me. Thank you." She didn't answer for a moment. And then, at a red light, where the car sat idling in the gold evening light, she reached across without looking and put her hand on my knee, just rested it there, warm, the way she used to in the early years before three children and a mortgage had filled both our hands too full for idle gestures, and she left it there until the light went green, and then she put it back on the wheel and drove on, and neither of us said anything, because nothing needed saying. It was, I realized somewhere on the road home, the warmest I had felt toward her, and the warmest I had felt her be toward me, in longer than I could properly remember. Not despite the day. Because of it. Because she had taken the worst thing in my life and made it, for one Saturday, simply the background condition of a good day out, and in doing so had given me back the world I had been ready to surrender, and there is a kind of love in that, a practical unsentimental load-bearing kind, that is worth more than any number of soft words, and I was only just, that evening, beginning to understand that it was what I had been married to for thirty years without fully seeing it. Her hand had been warm on my knee. I thought about it the rest of the way home. I was thinking about it still when she taped me into the bedtime change that night, her hands sure, the "there," the light off, and I lay in the dark beside her with the day folding shut around me, dry and managed and quietly, dangerously happy. -
I can definitely promise that it'll give Videl the "heroic" encounter she's been dreaming of. -
"Now baby do you want mommy to dress you or do you want to do it yourself?" Sandy says tickling Kayla's legs a little. -
By Red-squirrels · Posted
Clare is in a meeting with a client when she receives the picture and has to stop herself laughing. She messages her mother. As soon as Victoria gets the message she opens the bedroom door loving the sight before her. “well i have to say i like the look Alex whats going on here. Give me a twirl” she says sternly -
By Red-squirrels · Posted
“Good boy Timmy” i say taking the drinks and handing one to your wife. “these are very nice” i say taking a sip. “You make a good servant”
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