Empty Nest

This month I turn fifty. My sister got married immediately after college. She met her husband at work and got married six weeks later. A week after she got married I went to her new apartment to help her unpack and set up house. We worked all afternoon and into the night. We fixed some spaghetti and with a bottle of wine had dinner at the kitchen counter. We were still eating when her new husband came in. He wanted her but she pushed him away because she was on her period. He grabbed me and checked me to see if I was bleeding, and when he saw that I wasn't he used me to have sex. In that way I too became his wife.

For the last 28 years I have been his along with my sister. I am fifty. She is fifty-one. We consider ourselves sisters in every way even if we have lived as wives of his in a conjugal way. In every way but one we have had a good life. Except that this man was never able to father us children. In that way we have had to console each other.