HUBBY HUMOR

Waiting for My Wife at Target

I imagined I was Atlas the Titan

I pull into the Target parking lot and find a spot with some shade. My wife and I enter the store through the automatic doors. She grabs a shopping cart, and before I know it, she disappears into a crowd of similarly dressed female customers who seem to be heading in the same direction. I notice other husbands, equally bewildered, with their hands in their pockets.

After so many years of shopping with my wife, I stopped searching and calling for her. When she’s at Target, she doesn’t want me anywhere near her. She turns off the phone because she doesn’t want her shopping disturbed. So I meander about the store, moving my way through the makeup section, gazing in the big oval mirror at my sweaty pores. I’m growing older by the minute. I tell myself I need to trim my bushy eyebrows and tweeze the protruding nose hairs once I get home, but I never do.

Somehow I find myself in women's shoes, and I imagine what it would be like to wear a pair of those high heels, knowing that my big feet would never fit into any of those narrow sizes. As I notice people trying on shoes, a grandma type gives me a sour look as she catches me gazing at her hammertoes.

“Oh, there she is!” I cry, thinking it’s my wife coming for me.

Upon a closer look, I am disappointed. She is just a manikin who looks like my wife. They make the dummies more lifelike nowadays, more in sync with how middle-aged men and women appear. Some have large butts and drooping boobs. Some even look ugly and have bad skin.

After a few minutes of drifting aimlessly around the store, I decided to cure my boredom with food. So I buy an Americana from Starbucks, take a bite from a warm croissant, and then follow it up with a chicken and bacon panini.

With my stomach full, I take a breath of fresh air outside. I stare cross-eyed at the big red ball in front of the store and imagine it on my shoulders like Atlas the Titan, holding it there for all eternity. I fantasize I have the strength of ten men, perhaps the strongest man on earth. Then, as my knees buckle with triumph, still holding the red ball above my head, my wife returns fresh from a shopping orgasm.

“Sorry I took so long,” she says, smiling. “There was this woman in line who couldn’t stop talking with the clerk. I was going to say something but realized I do the same sometimes.”

“No worries, honey. I had a little snack and strolled around the store enjoying myself.”

Her cart is overflowing with every household product known to man. There are paper towels, deodorant, dental floss, Ziploc sandwich bags, three boxes of Swiffers, and eight-gallon jugs of spring water that could fill up the humps of seventeen camels.

“Oh, and I got this for you, Harry. It was only four-ninety-five on sale. A thirty-six pack of hankies for when you go to work and need to blow your nose.”

“Oh, thank you,” I say, remembering that I am still holding the red Target ball over my head.

I put the oversized cannonball down, careful not to drop it on my toes. Then, taking a few deep breaths, I load all of my wife’s Target bags into the trunk, feeling useful once more.

© 2021 Mark Tulin

Here’s another funny one by Mark —