BEANSTALK and other shorts

Autumn Couple

Marisa had married at 46, and she wondered how many years they’d get. 40? 30? Would it be enough? How much of it would be under the tense gun of disablement, one partner looking after another, gulping resentment while the other shuffled, whale-slow, to the toilet? Would his eyes cease to contain him? Would she be single in all but name for a good 20 of those years?

            So many things she left to him to do, in the way of Fifty’s women. He paid the bills, yes, fixed the computer and swept the gutters out. He carried the heavy stuff, dug trenches. When she had lived alone, she had done these things for herself – or not at all. It was beginning to annoy her, how many things he maintained in cherry condition which she would have allowed to dilapidate themselves naturally.

            Did that make her slovenly, or him uptight?

            Their rhythms, too, were different. She required rest and contemplation, and good reasons to do anything, or the mood to do it. He just acted – as if he had no preferences at all, like a duck or a squid that acts on prerecorded prompts. He would get home from work, see a fallen tree branch, and head straight for the garage for tools to cut it up. She, with her tea in hand, would have been looking at it and deciding whether she wanted to do this, for an hour.

            He got out of bed directly into the shower and thence to clothes. She got to the shower two hours after waking, debating over coffee whether the day deserved her dressing for it.

            What would happen to the house when he slowed down and stopped? For surely a fuse would burst somewhere. Like a fountain running too long with too little water, the pump would burn dry.  She thought with dismay of the house settling into genteel decrepitude, and the neighbors talking about her. Would she still care, if they were not looking?

            The grass would wave itself in the breeze, crowned by little seed-heads, and the when the bicycle tire popped, she would just stop riding.

            What was it in her that accepted atrophy, the world spinning down to a stop with a glug and a whisper? What was it in her that could watch the cobwebs grow and continue drinking its tea, and when the hot water main broke, just drink it cold with perfect placid balance?

            She would fit right into old age, she thought. He would not fit - he would break. She loved him. But she wondered if she’d like it, not having him show her up in her inherent entropy.

            She knew she was not The American Way. Perhaps she was something more ancient. She suspected her way hurt less.

            None of that stopped the guilt.

            She adored him peevishly, like a favorite gorgeous parakeet that insists on chirruping all through your afternoon nap.