The Nighttime Accident

The Nighttime Accident

Fred and Mabel were ready for bed, having completed all their nighttime rituals. Mabel with her facial mud pack and Fred with his smidgen of Vicks Salve in each nostril, to keep his air passages open, plus it prevented flu and colds, or so he claimed. They lay in bed watching the 10:00 news, and when it was over, Mabel started her nightly routine informing Fred of all the things he had not done or not done correctly that day. They had just a month earlier celebrated their 29th anniversary of what most folks call wedded bliss. At forty-eight years, Fred had other words for their condition, but knew if he used them, it would just mean more instructions he would have to endure.

During the first year or so, he had challenged Mabel’s assertions of his ineptness, but as time passed, more and more he questioned what the purpose of bothering with her rumblings about him. Most of the time, their lives were pleasant and they got along well, but occasionally Mabel went on a tear and he just had to close down his hearing for a while till Hurricane Mabel blew over. However, just about every night she did an accounting of his actions for that day. Luckily, most of the day he was at work, which left little time for her to evaluate, since he had a good job that paid well and permitted Mabel to have the things she desired. And, their once every week or two sex life was satisfactory, too.

That night, after she had completed her inventory of his mistakes, she ended with the old standard by saying, “And another thing, you never let down the toilet seat when you finish in the bathroom.

Forgetting his vow of silence, he countered with, “I do, too. I just occasionally forget. Besides have you ever fallen in and seriously injured yourself? Have you ever heard of anyone falling in and drowning?”

“Of course not, Fred,” she asserted, “Any fool knows it’s not the danger of injury, but it’s the common courtesy of closing the toilet so you don’t have to look at that thing every time you go in the bathroom.”

“Look at it! Look at it! Mabel, that thing in there is a fact of life. You can’t get along without it. Mr. Crapper who invented it did a wonderful thing and instead of being put off, repulsed, as it were, you should enjoy seeing it because it makes your life easier and more pleasant. Not to mention less odorous,” he asserted.

“Oh, Fred, you do go on, don’t you,” she scolded. “Do you enjoy looking into the toilet when you go in there?”

“Well, I never thought of whether I enjoy it or not, but I do look in most times when I go in there because most of the time I'm going to pee and I gotta look in to be sure I hit it!” he said emphatically.

“And that’s another thing, you obviously don’t look very well, cause I have to clean up all around it because you don’t hit it very often. You spray the entire bathroom. What do you do in there, look to see if there’s writing on the walls with a phone number. 'For a good time call 555-…'”

“Don’t list our number,” he interrupted, “I’ve called it and there wasn’t a good time to be had.”

“Why, Fred T. Baker!” she exclaimed, “How dare you say such a thing! All my life I’ve tried to see that you were satisfied, even those silly thongs and stuff you bought, even though they were the most horrible things to wear, even for a short while…well, well I never!” And she turned over and tried to go to sleep.

Fred felt bad about this little episode. He had just been pushed too far tonight with the same old harangue and lashed back. But it would do no good to apologize for what he had said, 'cause it took a certain amount of time for Mabel to get past things like that, so he, too, turned over and went to sleep.

Sometime about 3 a.m. Fred awoke with an urgent need to go to the bathroom. The coffee he drank needed to be released from the confines of his bladder. Easing out of bed so as to disturb Mabel as little as possible, he walked softly to the bathroom and going to the water closet, he sat down so he would not have to turn on the light, nor spray the walls.

The water closet was small and so arranged that his approach was to walk through the door, then turning left, take one step, turn around, and sit down.

He sat there for a while, half asleep when he realized there was a movement in the darkness of the bathroom. At first, he thought a prowler had entered the house, but then he realized it was only Mabel coming into the bathroom. Why he did not cry out to alert her that he was in the bathroom, he never understood. Maybe in his sleep fogged brain, he thought she must have realized he was not in the bed, or that because he could see her in the darkness, she could see him. However, like him, she was half asleep as she made her way into the bathroom. But unlike him, instead of entering the water closet forward, she made her about face outside the door, then backed through the door to the toilet. To him she was like a large garbage truck and as she came backing into his space he could almost hear the distinct beeping of the back-up warning alarm and the high pitch whine of hydraulic pumps as she stopped short of the seat raised her
nightgown, lowered her panties and began the slow, cautious dropping of her posterior to the seat of the toilet. It is hard to know what occurred first, however, when the backs of her thighs touched the tops of his, she poised in mid-sit while her sleep clouded brain tried to figure out what it was on which she was about to sit.

There weren’t too many conclusions for her to assume, however her fertile mind collected up several. Like a prowler that had broken into the house and was now at this very minute hiding by sitting on the toilet seat; a boa constrictor that was wound around the toilet waiting for a victim; a monster, possibly an alien with cold clammy skin waiting to abduct her to his space craft where he would study her brain. These and others raced through her mind and with those possibilities, she knew she must shout out the alarm. Maybe she could awaken Fred, who would come to rescue her, and dispatch whatever fiend was now occupying their toilet seat. However, the muscles in her legs, arms as well as the nervous system that controlled her lungs, vocal cords and bladder controls, all seemed to be controlled by the same nerve and muscle and she leaped hoping to somehow catch a hold on the wallpaper and escape whatever was on the toilet.

With her heart racing, she screamed and pleaded for Fred to come to her rescue and when Fred said, “Oh, Mabel, will you calm down. You’re going to wake all the neighbors,” she knew it was Fred who had been sitting on the seat all the time.

Extracting her fingernails from the wallpaper, she slid down the wall, flipped on the light and said, “Fred, of all the things you have done to me, this is the most despicable. I can’t believe that you, sitting on that seat in the dark would not say something to me before I got to the toilet. But would let me come in unaware and frighten the…the…the daylights out of me. And another thing, what in tarnation were you doing sitting here in the dark? That I would like to know! Do you get some perverse pleasure sitting there in the dark or do you just come in here every night and sit for a while hoping I will get up so you can scare the living daylights out of me?” She seemed to be close to tears as the realization of almost being abducted by an alien or swallowed by a large snake dawned on her.

Fred did not really have an answer to all these and the other 10,000 questions she would ask about this incident. He knew that to say anything was to invite an additional 10,000 questions that would never end and so the best solution to this situation was to go to bed. And so, with a good night, he rose from the toilet, flushed, lowered the lid, and padded off to their bed. Mabel, on the other hand, had to change her sleeping clothes and clean up the floor before she could return to bed.

Fred had become adept at going to sleep while she ranted, so as she slammed and banged thing in the bathroom, he drifted off into a deep sleep because he had to get up and go to work in two hours.