Trading Post

I think we got a clear answer on the questions we had in this chapter. Richy is the baby. Kate is the big. End.  I am curious about what you have in mind for this story. The development is quite linear so far. Maybe it is about accepting his position and finding happiness in it? We will see. 

I'm in York, PA too. 

Chapter 9 — Consequences She did not raise her voice. I want to begin there, because I had braced, across two days of waiting, for a reckoning with some volume to it, and what I got instead was Ellen at her quietest, which I had learned by then was the weather to fear. She stood in the doorway of my office with the plastic bag in her hand, and she set it down on the corner of my desk, on top of my notes, where I would have to look at it, and she pulled the spare chair round and sat, and folded her hands, and waited until I had turned all the way around and there was nowhere left for my eyes to go but to her. "I'm not going to ask you about the day," she said. "I know about the day. I knew the evening you came home, I knew when you held that spare up and told me you hadn't needed it, and I've known every hour since while I waited for you to come and tell me yourself, which you were never going to do. So we'll skip that part. I want to talk about what happens now." "Ellen." "Let me finish. You'll have your turn, and you can shout if you like, it won't change anything but you're welcome to it." She said it without heat. "Here is where we are. For months I have tried to do this with you. Not to you. With you. I let you choose the pad. I let you argue me down to the pull-up for the dentist. I packed you a spare for your meeting and asked you, at the door, to use it if you needed it, and I trusted you to. Every single time I have left room for your judgment, your judgment has cost us, and worse than the cost, every single time, you have lied to me about it afterward rather than let me help. The dentist. The chair. And now a whole day out that ended with you coming home in trousers that aren't yours, which you haven't explained and which I haven't asked you to, because I was waiting to see if you'd tell me on your own. You didn't. You came home in someone else's trousers with a bag of ruined ones you thought I wouldn't find, and you held up a dry spare, and you let me praise you. That's the one I can't get past, Mark. You stood in my kitchen and let me be glad about the worst day you'd had, to my face, because being seen through mattered more to you than the truth did. Again." I had no defense. I had spent two days building one and it had crumbled the moment she sat down, because there is no defense, there was never any defense, and we both knew it. "So I'm done leaving room," she said. "That's the whole of it. I gave you room and you used it to hide in. From now on there's no room. I make the decisions about your protection, all of them, and I make sure they're followed, because the one thing today proved beyond any argument is that when it's left to you, you don't follow them. You had an accident in your own underwear and came home with both pull-ups bone dry, which tells me you weren't wearing one when it happened, which tells me you took it off, the thing I checked at the door with my own hand, somewhere out there where I couldn't see, to prove some point to yourself. And then you lied. A man who'll do that can't be given the choice. So you don't have it anymore. I'm sorry. You spent it." The new arrangement arrived not as a speech but as a reorganization, which is how all of Ellen's largest decisions arrive, through the quiet movement of objects. The pull-ups left the cabinet. By the next morning they were simply gone, the way the pads had gone before them, exiled to wherever the previous defeated options went, and in their place, faced and stacked, were the taped briefs, the real ones, the night ones, except that there was no longer any such thing as the night ones, because they were now the all-the-time ones. A new brand had appeared beside them too, thicker than anything I had worn, a daytime brand she had researched in her thorough way, rated for hours, rated for exactly the kind of man who sits at a desk and forgets he has a body until the body reminds him. "Full-time," she said, when I came down and found the cabinet rearranged and understood. "Day and night. No more pull-ups. Pull-ups were a courtesy and you abused the courtesy, so the courtesy's withdrawn. The taped ones don't come off without me, which is rather the point, because you've shown me what you do when you can take your own protection off whenever you fancy proving something." She poured my coffee. "It's not a punishment. I want you to hear that, even though it's going to feel like one for a while. It's just the system without the holes you kept climbing through. That's all it is. The holes are closed." And then she took me upstairs and taped me into the first of them, the thick daytime one, in the morning light, with the same ninety competent seconds, and this time when she pressed her palm flat to check the seal and said "there," there was no performance of warmth and no withholding of it either. It was simply done. It was simply how the day now started. The season was on my side, that winter, in a way I was grateful for without quite letting myself examine why. It was the dark cold end of the year, and a man in the dark cold end of the year wears heavy trousers and thick jumpers and a cardigan over the top against the draughts, layers on layers, and all of it hid the new bulk of me completely, so that even on the days I had to answer the door to a delivery or walk to the shops I could do it armoured in wool, certain that nothing showed. I told myself it was lucky, the timing, that the thing had arrived in winter when I could hide it under clothes, and I did not think past that, did not think ahead to spring, to summer, to the layers coming off, to the question of what I would do when the wool could no longer cover me. I was not, that January, ready to think about being seen in summer. As it turned out, by the time summer came the hiding would matter to me far less, not because a summer shirt conceals a diaper the way winter wool does, it does not, but because I would no longer be so afraid of the faint chance of it showing, would have made a kind of peace with the small risk of being seen. But I did not know that then. Then, I was simply glad of the cold, and the jumpers, and the dark. The underwear went into the attic. She did that herself, that afternoon, and she let me watch, or perhaps made me watch, I have never been sure which. She gathered every pair from my drawer, all of it, the ordinary underwear I had worn out of the house to that meeting, the last of it, and she folded it into a box, and she labeled the box in her square handwriting, and she carried it up to the attic and set it on a shelf, and the label said FOR LATER. For when the therapy works. That was the understanding the box was built on, that it was temporary storage, that one day the physio and perhaps the medication would do their work and the box would come down and the underwear would return and this would all have been a season we passed through. We both said it, that afternoon, the "for when the therapy works." We said it to each other like a thing we believed. It is the only label in the house Ellen ever wrote that turned out to be untrue. The box is still up there. We never opened it again. But that afternoon we both needed it to say FOR LATER, and so it did, and we carried on. I should tell you how the days were built now, because the building of them was the thing, more than any single diaper. Four times a day she changed me. That was the rhythm, and it took me a while to understand that it had to be, that this was not Ellen being excessive but Ellen being correct, because a man who wets without much warning several times a day fills even the best of them, and even the thick daytime brand has its limit, and Ellen does not believe in pushing a thing past its limit and hoping. So: the morning one, taped on after my shower, to start the day. A change around midday, before lunch. Another in the early evening, before dinner, so I was fresh for the meal and the hours after it. And the last at bedtime, the one that saw me through the night. Four. Built into the day like meals, like the coffee at ten, like everything else in a house Ellen runs, which is to say built in so thoroughly that within a fortnight I had stopped counting them and they had become simply the shape of the day, the punctuation of it. In between, there was the check. I have mentioned the check before, the two fingers feeling for wetness at the front, but in those weeks it stopped being an event and became a kind of weather, ambient, constant, woven through everything. She would do it passing my desk with the ten o'clock coffee. She would do it in the kitchen while the other hand stirred a pot, the way you'd check a roast, casual, proprietary, not even looking at me, her hand making its brief professional inquiry low at the front of me and drawing its conclusion and moving on. Once in a while, less often, the check was a more thorough one, and a more deliberate one. She would hook a finger in the back of the waistband and draw it out and look, an unhurried peek down the back of me, because Ellen's thoroughness did not stop at the front and she liked, now and then, to see the whole of me with her own eyes and be sure, even though the back was never where the trouble was. She would look, and find me clean there, as she always did, and let the waistband go, and move on just the same. It was a thing she could only do at home, of course, or later in the privacy of a stall, because there is no discreet way to pull open the back of a man's waistband and look inside, and so the peek became one of the private rituals, the ones that belonged to our own rooms and our own four walls, distinct from the quick fond touch she could give me anywhere. In the early days it made me flush every time, the sheer matter-of-factness of it, the way she'd check me in her own kitchen as unremarkably as testing whether the iron was hot. By the end of those weeks it had become something I barely registered in the moment and, if I am honest, something I had started to register in a different way entirely, a small grounding touch that told me, several times a day, where I stood and that someone was paying attention to it so that I did not have to. But that is getting ahead of where I was then. Then, it mostly made me flush. There was one thing left to me, and I held onto it with a disproportionate gratitude, and it was this: the diapers were for the one problem, the bladder, the thing I actually had, and for the other, the ordinary other, I still went to the toilet like a man. When I needed to, I came and found her, and she untaped me, and I went, and she taped me back into the same one, because the same one was usually barely damp and a barely damp brief is not a thing Ellen Vos throws away, they cost what they cost and we are not made of money, and then I carried on. It was a small dignity and it was also, I understood even then, the line that kept the whole arrangement on the right side of bearable. The thought of the alternative, of losing that too, of having to be cleaned up by my wife like an infant, was so far beyond anything I could contemplate that I did not contemplate it. I came and asked, every time, swallowing the small indignity of asking because the larger indignity was unthinkable, and she dealt with it briskly and without comment, and that was that. I have wondered, since, whether the very fact that I could bring myself to ask her for that, the untaping, the toilet, was itself the first crack in the wall that had kept me from asking her for anything, the wall that had cost me the dentist and the meeting and the staged praise. Perhaps it was. You can be taught to ask. It turns out you can be taught to ask. I was angry for a while. I want that on the record, because I do not want to give the impression that I went gently into the new arrangement, that I was reformed by one stern conversation and one rearranged cabinet. I was not. For a good two weeks I was furious, in the low simmering way of a man who knows he is in the wrong and resents it all the more for that, and I sulked, and I made small pointless protests, and once I announced that I would simply order my own pull-ups online and wear what I liked in my own house, and Ellen looked up from the crossword and said, "All right," in the tone that meant she had already considered this and found it beneath addressing, "and the first time you have an accident in one because it didn't hold, which we both know it will, you'll have proved my point and we'll be exactly back here, except you'll have wasted the money. But order them if it helps. You're a grown man." Which was, of course, precisely the thing that disarmed me, because she was right, and because she had not forbidden it, she had simply described the future, the way she always did, and let me decline to walk into it myself. I did not order the pull-ups. I never ordered the pull-ups. The threat to order the pull-ups quietly joined the long list of my rebellions that died of being permitted. And then there was the Tuesday. It was an ordinary Tuesday, the worst kind, the kind where everything that is going to change in you changes without ceremony. I was deep in the invoicing system, hours deep, the world gone the way it goes, and Ellen came in at ten with the coffee, one knuckle on the door, the old ritual. She set the cup on the coaster. She looked at the screens and understood nothing. And on her way out, without breaking stride, without it being a thing, she slid two fingers to the front of me and pressed, the ambient check, found whatever there was to find, a damp one, a midmorning one, nothing remarkable, and she said, "You're fine. Good boy," and squeezed my shoulder once, and went out, and clicked the door shut behind her. Good boy. She had never said it before, not like this, not to me. Good boy. In passing, attached to nothing, tossed off as lightly as you're fine, two words she probably did not even register saying, the kind of thing you say to a dog you are fond of or a child who has eaten their vegetables, and it landed in the exact center of me and detonated, quietly, with no outward sign at all. I sat at my desk with my coffee going cold and my heart going hard and I did not move for a full minute. There was no reason for it. It was an absurd thing to be undone by, two idle syllables from my wife on her way out of a room. And I was undone by it. Something in me, some deep and previously unsuspected something, had heard good boy in that flat fond passing tone, attached to the fact of me sitting padded and damp and checked at my desk, and had responded with a flood of feeling so total and so unexpected and so completely at odds with the fury I had been carefully nursing for two weeks that I genuinely did not know what to do with myself. It was not the humiliation I would have predicted. It was nearer the opposite of humiliation. It was the warmth of being seen, and held, and approved, and managed, and the appalling discovery that some part of me had apparently been starving for exactly that and had just been fed. I did not tell her. Of course I did not tell her. I picked up my cold coffee and I drank it and I turned back to the invoicing system and I worked, and the two words sat in me all afternoon like a coal, and that evening when she taped me into the before-dinner change I was very careful to be exactly as grudging as I had been all fortnight, because the alternative, letting her see what good boy had done to me, was a door I was nowhere near ready to open. But it had been said. And I had heard it. And we had both, I think, felt the floor shift very slightly under the whole arrangement, the way it had shifted that first night with the tapes, the door opening in the far part of the house. She did not say it again for a while. I have thought, since, that she was being careful too, that she had felt me go still under her hand and had filed it the way she files everything, and was waiting, the way she waits, to be sure of what she had found before she reached for it again. So that is where Part of my life ended and another part began, though I could not have drawn the line at the time and only see it now, looking back. By the end of those weeks I was a man who wore taped diapers full-time, changed four times a day by his wife, checked at the waistband a dozen times a day in passing, his ordinary underwear in a labeled box in the attic, his protection no longer in any sense his own decision. Six months earlier the description would have read to me as a catalogue of catastrophe, the absolute floor of male dignity, a life I would have said I would rather not live. And the strange thing, the thing I was not ready to say aloud to Ellen or to myself or to you, was that I was not unhappy. I was dry. I was rested. I had not had a public accident or a soaked chair or a ruined suit since the day on the staircase, because the holes Ellen spoke of really were closed, and a man with no holes in his system has nothing to dread, and a man with nothing to dread sleeps, and works, and laughs at dinner, and stops mapping every building he enters for its toilets. The vigilance was gone. The exhausting, grinding, months-long vigilance of holding on and racing and hiding and managing was simply gone, lifted off me, carried now by someone else who was, it had to be admitted, far better at carrying it than I had ever been. And at ten o'clock, every working morning, there was a knock, one knuckle, and the door opened, and Ellen came in with the coffee and set it on the coaster and checked me at the waistband out of pure habit and told me I was fine, and went out, and clicked the door shut. Padded, dry, managed, oddly calm. Both of us still calling it practical. Both of us still pretending that practical was all it was. It was not all it was. But that, as with so much in this story, is something I would only let myself understand later, and only because she understood it first, and waited, with her usual terrible patience, for me to catch up.

Welcome to DD! I'm in South Central (York) PA here and am always happy to chat.

Hello from western nebraska