Where I’ve Been Tonight
by Shelby Hinte
I keep changing the cutoff time for drinking liquids before bed but still, every day at three a.m., my bladder wakes me up to pee. First, I walk to the kitchen and open the silverware drawer, I take out the biggest spoon, pull down the jar of peanut butter from the cupboard, scoop out a mound, and return the jar. I take my spoonful of peanut butter to the bathroom. In the bathroom, I pull down my underwear with one hand, sit on the toilet, and lick the peanut butter off the spoon like it’s a lollipop while I pee. It appears these acts are beyond my control. Peanut butter is not the only thing I’ve enjoyed licking off spoons in the privacy of a bathroom. A story my mother loves to tell is how when I was a toddler, the only way she could get me to take a bath, was if she let me bring the container of Country Crock margarine to eat with a spoon while she shampooed my hair. This affinity for eating high-fat spreads off a spoon in the bathroom is one of the many habits from my childhood I wish I would have outgrown by now. The type of habit that makes a person wonder how another human could ever see them as anything but gross. I am aware of how disgusting it is — underwear at my ankles, piss trickling into the toilet bowl, spoon in my mouth — because I am in constant fear of getting caught. Sitting on the toilet, half-asleep, tonguing peanut butter, my heart picks up its pace whenever I think I hear my husband walking down the hall. He’s actually come down the hall more than once to use the bathroom in the middle of the night while I was in there licking my peanut butter. When it happens, he knocks on the door and asks, you almost done in there? Shoving the spoon in my mouth, I make a noise like uh-uh, while trying to tongue the remaining peanut butter off as quickly as possible. I stuff my polished-clean spoon in my makeup bag before flushing. When I open the door to give him his turn, I feel disappointment at having been rushed through a ritual I simultaneously relish and yearn to quit, but it’s better to feel rushed and disappointed than to have your husband discover that you’re disgusting. I come out of the bathroom, and he kisses me on his way in. You taste like peanut butter, he says, but it is more of a sleepy sweet muttering than an accusation. Yeah, I say back. He closes the door behind him, and I return to bed. It is hard to keep a marriage going for as long as we have. Not openly licking peanut butter off of a spoon while I pee is one of the ways I do my part. Him pretending like he’s never found one of my peanut butter spoons in the bathroom is how he does his.
Shelby Hinte is a bay area writer, teacher, and editor. She is a regular contributor at Write or Die Tribe and a prose reader for No Contact. Her writing can be found in ZYZZYVA, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, HAD, Identity Theory, and elsewhere.