The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (16 page)

“Laura, what do you want of me?”

“It didn’t mean anything to you.”

“What could it mean? Of course it did. You’re a lovely woman …”

Leaning on the cold slick refrigerator door, she looked at him with a chilly clarity. She saw a soft-bellied creature she had turned on its back. She saw that she could do anything with him. If she insisted, he would make love to her, he would carry her off to his neat Mondrian bachelor apartment.

“Oh, Conway, I am sorry. Do go home. We’ve both been very silly. I’ll see you tomorrow in the arbor.” She shooed him out.

Derek returned Thursday evening, instructing her about a couple he had invited for the weekend. His meeting had gone well and he would be enjoying a sizable grant to do research on certain consumer trends among retiring baby boomers. At breakfast he said, “What’s up, or I should say, down with old Gates? I thought he was going to fall over his own feet when I met him on the road.” He rubbed his not yet shaven chin, not really interested but his attention briefly caught as he waited for his coffee to cool.

She met his eyes, saying flatly, “Oh, he kissed me in the arbor last week.”

“What? Why on earth?” One eyebrow raised.

“He was telling me about his dead wife. I suppose he feels guilty or embarrassed.”

“Poor old loser.” Derek shook his head. Then he gave a dry pitying chuckle and tasted his coffee. “Don’t be too hard on the old bastard. Must be tough, all that young pussy year after year and nothing doing, not a paw on them or you’re done for.”

He drank his coffee and took his rod and reel to the boat tied up at the dock. She stood at the window, frozen. He did not care. He couldn’t manage even a flash of jealousy. He did not care. She twisted her tee-shirt in her hands, let it drop. But I love him, she moaned, I love him! And he has grown indifferent to me. I’m just a convenience. Maybe he thinks of turning me in on a new improved model.

Again she retreated to the bed, pushing her face into the pillow. She wanted to cry but no tears came. Oh, how she wanted to be nineteen again, twenty-one, twenty-three when he had loved her, when they had melted in each other’s arms. Why couldn’t she have that again? Why couldn’t she?

She turned onto her back after a while and closed her eyes tight. His room under the eaves where he had to be careful not to bump his head, the first place, the first bed where they had been together. When she entered, to the right was a red chair. Red, the color of tomato soup, and the bed was to the left …

Barbs was sitting at the dining room table of their little house in Portland just finishing up a tutoring session with a boy who could not comprehend algebra. He was failing the class and his mother had been referred to Barbs. Before retiring the previous June, she had taught math for almost forty years. She was patiently explaining that x and y were not always the same numbers (how dense was he?) when Didi came in.

She heard the door open and then smelled the Ombre Rose perfume Didi wore morning or night. Barbs had stopped growing roses, she was so sick of the scent. She had given Didi three other perfumes, but Didi kept saying that this was her signature scent. Barbs had given up.

When the boy finally escaped, Barbs got to her feet, stretching. “How come you’re home? The shop doesn’t close for three hours.”

“Oh, sweetheart …” For a moment Didi looked blank. It always scared Barbs when her partner got that vacant look on her face. It had been happening oftener lately. Much oftener.

“What happened?”

Didi stood a moment looking at her purse as if it held the answer.

“Do you not feel well?”

“Angela doesn’t want me to work there anymore.” Didi collapsed in an overstuffed chair as if deflated. She began combing her hair. She still kept it blond and curly. She tossed her head with that gesture that used to make Barbs want to kiss her.

“Why?”

Didi shrugged. She put on a beseeching smile. “I’m tired. Could you make me a nice cold martini?”

“It’s only two o’clock. Why did she fire you?” Barbs took off her glasses and cleaned them on her tee-shirt before putting them into their case and the case into the pocket of her slacks.

“How do I know? Stop picking on me.” Didi got up and escaped to the kitchen. Barbs could hear her rummaging in the refrigerator. “Didn’t you have lunch?” She called.

“I think so …”

“Don’t you remember if you ate lunch?”

Didi didn’t answer. Barbs had a pretty good idea why Angela might have fired Didi. Lately she’d become increasingly forgetful. She’d come into a room and stand there wondering why. She lost her phone, her keys, even her partial denture with some regularity, leaving it on an end table, on the couch, once in an old ashtray left over from when friends smoked. She had fallen twice in the last week, tripping over shoes she had left on the floor, tripping over their dog Simeon, who fled yelping.

Barbs went out on the back deck and called the shop. Angela answered. Barbs came straight to the point and Angela explained. “She keeps making mistakes with money. She’s looking straight at an American Express card and she dials Visa. She can’t keep bills or coins straight. I’m losing money on her. I’m sorry, but I just can’t carry her any longer … Don’t you think perhaps she should see a specialist?”

“You think I haven’t tried to get her to one?”

Barbs sat in an Adirondack chair on their deck staring out at the lawn and the phlox in bloom, white and pink and magenta, the picnic table, the bird house, all the artifacts and plants they had put into their yard together after they bought this little house. Simeon came wagging to put his head in her lap. He was a mix of black lab and probably boxer, a good-sized dog with black fur and a rectangular head and floppy lighter ears from some ancestor. The yard was full of the warm weather accoutrements of Didi and her years together. They had been a couple for eleven years, longer than her relationship with Andie the tennis pro had lasted. For two years after that affair had gone bust, she endured casual pickups and friends’ attempts at matchmaking until she was sick of trying.

Then she met Didi who was volunteering for the same candidate she was working to elect. Barbs had been out since college, but Didi was straight and married—but not very. Her son and daughter were grown and raising their own children. She had caught her husband cheating on her twice and was deeply discouraged. She knew he was seeing someone. She began confiding in Barbs.

Didi had been cute, even at fifty-nine—a womanly figure, a flirtatious little giggle, a way of tossing her head and looking out from under her lashes. She had been a buyer for a department store chain before breeding and she still had a sense of style, although very feminine and rather flowery. When Barbs thought of that time, she saw Didi in her summer dresses, always beautifully tanned, always put together. But sad. She wanted to protect this woman who had been sorely used and was being cast aside. Even her occasional ditziness was charming. She was so different from the women Barbs had been involved with, someone who needed taking care of, someone she could make a home with. Didi was three years older than Barbs, while her tennis pro
had been eleven years younger. An older woman was less likely to leave her. She was keen to be partnered for life. Didi needed her, and she was ready to be the steady foundation under her.

Seducing her had taken patience but then Didi had exploded into orgasm, something she had rarely experienced with her husband. She instantly proclaimed herself a lesbian and moved in with Barbs. Her husband had not contested the divorce; he seemed on the whole rather relieved to offload his wife. Her daughter Cordelia and husband Nick accepted them quickly, but the brother, Spencer, four years older, sulked. Resented. Always wanted Didi to visit without Barbs, which was no problem for Barbs, who found him a bore and darkly conservative.

Didi and Barbs. Barbs and Didi. They were a couple in their Portland neighborhood, in the lesbian community, in local and citywide organizations. They agitated for gay marriage. They supported liberal candidates. They worked to clean up their neighborhood and get stop signs and street lights where needed. They hiked in the great park across the river and once took a white rafting trip, but Didi fell in the river and was miserable. They had had a good life … until recently. And mostly. She had been disappointed, she admitted to herself only reluctantly, by Didi’s silliness, her love of dreadful romance novels that were mostly heterosexual, her unwillingness to learn even elementary Spanish when they went to Mexico or French when they took a vacation in Paris. She still said gauche things that made Barbs wince. She filled their house with gewgaws, a brass Eiffel tower, pillows with doggies on them, a whole collection of china shepherdesses and sheep that filled a corner cabinet. Barbs’s taste ran to the stark and simple. Her favorite artist was Brancusi. A love of mathematics, she felt, led her to the core of design. Barbs and Didi were a compromise from the first year. But the important thing, she had always felt, was that they were a
couple, they were committed, neither of them would run off or give up on the other. They were in it for life. Nobody was perfect, but they managed okay. Loneliness was much worse. She was too old to go searching for impossible perfection.

She had managed to get Didi to their local doctor by making an appointment for her annual exam and the same for Didi right after hers. She had a private conversation with the doctor about Didi’s forgetfulness and unsteadiness. The doctor asked Didi some questions, which she mostly evaded or couldn’t remember. Afterwards the doctor called Barbs and strongly recommended a neurologist give Didi a real looking at. Didi objected. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing at all! You’re just picking on me again. Nothing I do satisfies you any longer.” She pouted for two days.

Barbs was angry with herself for not being able to insist on Didi getting checked out by a specialist. She was angry with herself for the way all the little gestures and giggles and silly jokes she had once found charming now grated on her so that she was constantly reining in her temper. Didi was dependent on her, something she had found pleasing, something that had made her feel secure in the relationship. Now that dependence felt more like dead weight. Yet in spite of everything, she had loved Didi desperately and long. She still loved her, she was sure, but somehow it was lost in the cloud that seemed to surround her partner.

After Didi left the gas burner on the stove turned on and forgot it till the kitchen curtain caught fire, she finally got her to a neurologist. “The house might have burned down. I only caught it after the curtain was ablaze.” Simeon had barked and barked, alerting her. She had torn down the curtain, thrown it into the sink and turned the water on full blast. But the accident so easily might have been a tragedy.

“I forgot for a minute. Everybody forgets sometimes.”

But the fire scared Didi. She let herself be carted off to a neurologist at one of the large hospitals. Barbs cancelled her
tutorials, but she was surprised that it took all day. At the end, the doctor called her aside. “My opinion is that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We can give her medication that will slow it down some. I don’t know what you want to tell her, but my advice is that it’s a lot for her to handle. She seems too fragile for such a sentence. You know we have no cure yet.”

She felt as if she carried a boulder in her belly. A huge doom squatted on both of them. She called Cordelia, who wept on hearing the news. “Are they sure?”

“The doctor seems pretty confidant in his diagnosis. I could get a second opinion …”

“It’s terribly sad. Poor mother. But I don’t know what I can do from here. I’m up to my neck getting Christopher ready for college. Nick is on the road more and more since he was promoted and I’m stuck with everything for the house and the kids. And Alicia is a handful!”

Spencer was blunter. “You wanted her enough to break up her marriage. So you deal with her. She’s your problem. I’ve got enough of my own.”

She began to hold Didi oftener, to comfort her for the end Didi fortunately could not imagine. Even when she did not feel particularly loving, she made herself act out affection. She made sure Didi took the drug supposed to slow the progress of the disease. After a series of burnt disasters, she took over the cooking, although sometimes Didi would forget, start to bake cookies and leave off with a mess in the kitchen. She had to be watched. She turned on the bath water, wandered off till the bath overflowed, shorting out some wiring in the basement.

Barbs imagined that her life now was something like having a young child. She also found that acting out affection actually seemed to increase it, mixed with a large dose of pity. Gradually they stopped seeing their friends; it was too difficult. As the months slogged by, Didi began to forget who they were and sometimes made inappropriate
comments like “Who is that fat woman? Do I know her? She should go on a diet.”

Their social world collapsed to just the two of them until Barbs found an adult day care where she could bring Didi five mornings a week. Didi liked it. She made friends with other senile women and enjoyed the games. Barbs began having coffee with friends. Everybody told her how heroic she was. She knew better. Didi often forgot Barbs’s name, although she remembered who Simeon was. In the evenings they watched TV, although Didi seldom followed plots, or Barbs read to her. Didi would sometimes sing songs she had learned as a child or heard on the radio as an adolescent or a young adult. Barbs, who hadn’t sung in years since quitting the choir at her parents’ church, began to sing with her. Didi remembered the words to dozens of songs. It felt almost normal when they sang together. Simeon liked it too, beating his heavy tail on the floor as if he were marking time.

Cordelia called once a week, every Sunday, got an update from Barbs and attempted to communicate with her mother. There was no communication with Spencer. She had written him that Didi had Alzheimer’s but got no response. Perhaps he considered it contagious or a disease of lesbians.

She remembered when she had first been with Didi, the changes that still were visible in her lover’s body from childbearing had fascinated her. She had never felt a desire to breed, but she was insatiably curious and asked Didi dozens of questions about pregnancy, giving birth and raising babies. Now, she thought, now I know. I have a child but she is growing backwards into babbling and then silence. But I made a commitment: partners for life. But she will leave me, not physically but mentally. And for the first time since she was sixteen, Barbs wept.