Marriage Troubles

Just a second ago, Bob was busy folding laundry. 

He’d placed a towel on top of the pile and reached for another, but now he was somewhere else entirely, feet tingling on the cool tiles of the master bathroom, mid-blink, staring straight into the horrified eyes of his wife, whose mouth was frozen in a small, perfect ‘o.’

His wife, standing wrapped in a white towel, still holding a mascara wand to one half-painted eye, dropped it into the sink with a clatter. She didn’t say anything—just stared. Bob opened his mouth, a question already forming, but before he could speak, a scream ruptured the silence.

It was a man’s scream—raw, high-pitched, unfamiliar—coming from just outside the closed bathroom door.

Had they …swapped bodies?

He blinked. His view did not improve.

He looked at his hands.

These were not his hands.

They were most certainly Clara’s.

They were slender, with nails painted a haphazard shade of peach and the faintest outline of veins visible beneath creamy skin. The faint, talcum scent of Clara’s body lotion wafted upward. He glanced downward—his torso, unfamiliar, towel-clad, breasts pressed tight against terrycloth. 

Bob let out a yelp, or at least meant to. What came out was a high, strangled whine that was definitely not his usual basso.

The door to the bathroom swung open.

He—she—Clara—stood there in Bob’s body, features slack with terror, one hand clutching the waistband of his—her—his—plaid pajama bottoms. Bob saw his own mouth open and close like a stunned goldfish, then heard his voice, plaintive and alien: “What… the fuck?”

“Bob?” she said, voice low, uncertain.

Bob clutched the towel tighter. He pressed a hand to his chest. Under the towel, the breast was warm, alive. His (her?) nipple responded, shrinking to a tight, puckered bead. The reaction was Pavlovian—he’d stared at Clara’s breasts for fifteen years, and now he had the sensation of being both the gawker and the gawkee.

“I’m …you?”

Clara-in-Bob’s-body nodded.

“I’m… you,” she echoed.

“Holy shit,” Clara—now Bob—scratched at the stubble on her new chin, wincing as if even that sensation stung, “What did you do?”

“What did I do?” Bob’s new voice cracked, “I didn’t do anything!”

They just stared at each other a good long moment, before Bob started to giggle.

It came out in a musical trill more suited to a schoolgirl than to either of them. Bob clapped a hand (her hand) over his mouth.

And then Clara—no, Bob—was laughing too, except that laugh was deeper, louder, more of a bark.

“Stop it,” said Clara-in-Bob, but a smile was tugging at the corners of her mouth, “This isn’t—this is not funny, Bob.”

“It kind of is, though…” Bob’s lips curled into a mischievous smirk.

He couldn’t help it. This was, on every level, the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him, and the only way he knew to cope was to lean in with full, undiluted Bob. He cupped the towel more closely around his stolen form and, with a kind of cartoonish awe, brought both hands up to his new chest. The sensation was both familiar and spectacularly not. He pressed his palms in experimentally, marveling at the way the flesh gave, the way the shape shifted, the way the nerves lit up in a way that was not exactly how he’d imagined it, but also not entirely dissimilar to his adolescent daydreams.

He made a show of it, glancing over at Clara-in-Bob’s-body to see if she was watching. Of course she was. She looked like she might faint, or explode, or possibly kill him, but that did not deter him. If anything, it egged him on.

He did an exaggerated shimmy, jiggling the towel-wrapped breasts.

“I can finally have my way with you,” he said, voice lilting, the innuendo practically oozing from the words.

“Oh my god,” Clara grunted in protest, but she couldn’t quite keep the corners of her—his—mouth from twitching, “I can’t believe you, Bob.”

He chuckled at his new face in the mirror.

He was about to say something else—something flippant, probably, because that was always his first instinct—when the full impact of the predicament hit him, blunt as a dropped barbell.

He was Clara.

Not just borrowing her shoes, not just peeking into her mind for a second, but living in her actual, present-tense, piloted-by-Bob body. He felt the tug of her hair at his neck, the quick, staccato pulse of her heart beating hard and fast against her ribs.

He noticed the small heap of clean clothes Clara has laid out for herself on the counter.

A bra, panties, jeans, and one of those tailored tees Clara liked—soft, sea-green.

He looked back at Clara, who was still getting used to her own new face in the mirror, “I guess I should, uh, get dressed, huh?”

Clara, in his old body, managed a tight nod, “That would probably be… appropriate.”

Bob gripped the edge of the towel, raising an eyebrow at Clara as if to ask, “Are you sure?”

He dropped the towel, letting it fall to a puddle around his ankles. 

He was naked. Fully, absolutely naked. He was a naked…woman.

He didn’t know where to look first. His—her—body seemed at once familiar and completely new: the gentle inward slope of the waist, the smooth, almost alien concavity below the ribs, the subtle flare of the hips, the elegant suggestion of muscle and curve that had never belonged to him before. And the breasts—well, they were there, rising and falling with every shallow, uncertain breath, buoyant and alive, slightly asymmetrical in a way that made them seem both more real and more private than he’d ever imagined.

Bob resisted the urge to reach out and cup them, but only barely.

He clamped his arms tight over his chest, as if to shield the newness from view, and then, remembering he was technically alone with his own spouse, dropped them again, defiant. He flexed one bicep experimentally; it was smaller than he was used to, but the muscle still responded, smooth under the skin. He shrugged, and the shoulder joint moved with a feline grace. He rotated his wrists, spread his fingers, curled them into a fist, opened them again. There was a strange delight in this body’s responsiveness, a kind of lightness, an agility he’d never had before.

He stood for a moment, stunned by the parade of sensations. Without thinking, he brushed a thumb over the small freckle at the top of his sternum, a spot he’d always noticed on Clara but never imagined mapping onto himself.

He turned a little, examining his profile. The hips actually jutted out. He ran a hand down the unfamiliar plane of his stomach, feeling the subtle, soft yield of skin and muscle beneath.

He realized there was a small bruise on the outside of his—Clara’s—thigh. When had she gotten that? How had he not noticed? He ran his hand over it, pressed the edge with the ball of his thumb, felt the little pulse of ache and the strange echo in the base of the spine: this is mine, this body is mine, this is happening.

“Holy shit, Clara… I’m really, really you,” Bob tucked his wife’s long hair behind his ear.

He turned his head from side to side, letting the hair swing, watching how it caught the light and settled against the line of his—her—jaw.

The sight of the bra alone was enough to knock the wind out of him.

He picked it up. The lace was scratchy against his palm. Embarrassment scorched up the back of his neck.

He managed the hook-and-eye routine of the bra after a few embarrassing seconds of confusion (inside out, upside down, try again). He fumbled the straps onto his delicate, unfamiliar shoulders.

He reached for the underwear. He slipped on the panties, a high-cut, seamless variety that glided over the borrowed hips.

There was a flush crawling up his—her?—neck, this ridiculous sense of shyness as he struggled into his wife’s jeans.

The jeans squeezed up his thighs. He shimmied them up, wiggling his hips to get the waistband past the widest point.

He pulled on the sea-green shirt, the fabric stretching over the curve of the bra and clinging to the gentle slopes of Clara’s borrowed frame. The sleeves, short and cuffed, hugged his upper arms with a gentle pressure that felt less like an embrace and more like a gentle reminder: you are someone else now.

He turned toward the mirror, half-afraid of what he’d see. There was Clara’s shape, materialized in the silvered glass, every line and contour instantly familiar yet wholly strange. The sway of the hips, the delicate tilt of the chin, the fine, almost imperious arch of the eyebrow—those were all hers.

But then there was the posture: a distinct Bob-hunch in the shoulders, the faint, apologetic stoop that had followed him since adolescence. He grimaced. The face in the mirror grimaced back.

He tried to relax, to inhabit the body the way Clara did: shoulders back, chin up, that air of brisk, declarative confidence.

He caught Clara’s reflection over his shoulder.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. There was only the hum of the old bathroom fan, and the sound of two people breathing in the wrong bodies.

He tried a weak smile.

“What now?” Bob said, half expecting Clara to whip out a plan.

She shrugged, with the kind of resignation you only learn after a decade of marriage.

“Now we try not to panic,” she said, glancing warily at the closed window, “and, uh, figure out if this is permanent?”

Bob stared at the window, “You think this could be permanent?”

“I mean, isn’t this how it always starts in the movies?” Clara-in-Bob gestured at the mirror, “There’s a lesson or a curse or something. We eat the magic fortune cookie, we argue with a psychic, we get hit by lightning. Did you eat a fortune cookie?”

Bob scoffed initially, but reconsidered. He could recall eating a slightly stale fig bar, but nothing more exotic than that in recent memory. Maybe this was a Freaky Friday kind of comedy. Maybe it was a horror.

He sat on the closed toilet, jeans cupping his ass in a way that was both supportive and troubling. He tried to cross his legs, failed, uncrossed them, and then sat with knees together. Something in his new hips wanted the pose.

“I didn’t eat a fortune cookie,” he said, “Unless Oreos count.”

“At least we know each other really well. Would make it easier to pass as each other. No one would notice.”

He didn’t want to think about how true that was.

He tried to imagine himself from the outside. Leggy, long-haired Clara, with her deliberate slow walk and her little head tilt, slouching at the kitchen counter with a mug of coffee in both hands. Was he supposed to swish? To giggle? To use those little sing-song end rails she did at the end of a sentence?

He looked at Clara—his wife, his actual spouse, yes, but also, somehow, at present, his… husband. The realization hit him with the force of a bad sitcom punchline. He was the wife. Through no act of legislation or social convention, he had become, in every legal and phenomenological sense, the wife in this marriage.

He considered, for a wild and dizzying moment, that he could be “Clara” now, if he wanted. Clara instead of Bob. Referring to himself as Clara. He imagined them, years from now, still in each other’s bodies.

Clara at the DMV. Clara at the dentist. Clara signing the lease. Clara, in front of the mirror, making small talk with a neighbor or a delivery guy and—crucially—never needing to correct the assumption. He imagined introducing himself as Clara. He imagined doing it for years, forever.

This was ridiculous. This was ludicrous. This was… he could hardly believe it, but it was also, a tiny voice whispered, a smidge thrilling.