Bo awoke early. Earlier than usual. He intended to have what Ellie referred to as a decent breakfast. Eggs, toast, fruit? Muesli? More protein? Less protein? He was determined but remained unsure of what to make and chose instead to shower and wait for her to get up.
They had been living in an independent living community for almost a year, and Bo felt an increasing degree of acceptance of the arrangement. It was part of a continuing care retirement community. It was expensive. He had researched it. They had planned well to meet the initial costs and the monthly fees.
He called it The Home. Ellie did too.
Mike Barletta lived there. Sam Janssen was considering it. It would be good. Or, it would be what it would be.
He showered. Long and hot, and toweled off on the soft bathmat while listening to Ellie dressing and leaving the bedroom.
These long mornings together, after so many years spending most of the time apart during the days at work were, on the whole, good for him. He wanted them to be good for both of them. But, again, he was unsure. He knew that he could sometimes be demanding. When he had been, he immediately would see how it affected her. A momentary wince. A reticence to respond.
He sensed, too, that this move would, unlike the several other moves they had made together, be different. Perhaps with more baggage rather than less. Not only that, but it would be the last move they would make together. That it might cause a material shift in the way they related to one another. The proximity and pressure of their near constant presence. What they might be thinking and guardedly not saying. Feeling and not expressing. Seeing and not seeing or choosing not to see.
He wondered, too, if others in the community, men he might see every day and spoke with often, also feel that need for some degree of the tentative remoteness he was feeling? Was there something so essentially threatening and fear-provoking in the prospect of daily contact, scrutiny, and exposure? Or was it just him? Dreading to approach it from any distance or angle. That there might be some deeply hidden secret past that would be discovered. What Anna Freud may have called protective foundational repression. A forgotten bill left unpaid many years ago accumulating exorbitant interest, a final letter from a wronged and jilted lover never mentioned, or an incriminating photograph, whose possible existence was being denied and hidden under the basement stairs among wads of old insulation and dried mouse droppings.
As Ellie passes the bathroom door, Bo is reciting in his deep precise Bud Abbott voice, “I am telling you,” he is saying, “Who’s on first. What’s on second, and I Don’t Know is on third.”
Moving bowls and pans from one place to another in the kitchen she, in her best, searching, Lou Costello voice, “That’s what I said, ‘who’s on first?’”
When she hears him coming up behind her, she turns. He looks at her.
“What?” she says to him, reflexively touching her cheek with her fingers.
“Nothing,” he tells her.
“No, don’t say that. I know it’s something. The way you’re looking at me. Is there schmutz on my face?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“It’s just that you look different.”
“Good different or bad different? Tell me.”
“Just different. You look older.”
“What?”
“There are like new lines on your face, around your nose, that I don’t remember seeing before.”
“Like when I was twenty-three or yesterday?”
“I didn’t see you yesterday. I had my surgery yesterday and came home and slept all day.”
“Then the day before that? Tell me.”
“Yes. The day before that.”
“Bo, Honey. Nothing has changed. I am the same as I was two days ago.”
“You just look different.”
She sees his concern. “Come with me,” she says. Taking his arm, she leads him back toward the bathroom. “Close your eyes,” she tells him and she reaches into the room and turns on all of the lights. “Don’t open them until I tell you when and do only do what I tell you to do.”
“Ellie.”
“Trust me,” she says, and she turns him around, so his back is to the mirror. “Don’t open them, she tells him and, steadying him gently on his shoulder, she moves around him and stands so that they are now face-to-face.
“It is very bright in here,” she tells him. “So, slowly, I want you to open one eye at a time and look at me.”
He does as she tells him. Left eye then right eye. Left eye then right eye.
“What do you see?”
“Oh, my God.”
“Tell me.”
“With my right eye you look normal. Like my Ellie Mae.”
“And?”
“And with my left you look like you did in the kitchen. Older, sort of.”
Bo, they are both the same me. You are different. The lines have been there. They are part of me. You are only seeing me clearly now with the eye you had the cataract surgery in. You have a new clear lens in that eye. Look at the wall. What color do you see?”
“White.”
“What was it two days ago?”
“Gray.”
“Same wall. Not old or young. Different. Now, look in the mirror. Look at yourself.”
“My God, Ell, I look so much older. There are lines and creases I had not seen before. And I’ve lost so much hair. It scares me. I don’t want to look so old.”
“Boey, trust me, you’ll get used to it,” she says and leads him back toward the kitchen. In the morning light through the kitchen window, she turns to him and says, “It will all be okay.”
Then slowly jiggling a thick, imaginary, George Burns’ cigar to one side of her mouth, she says, “Say ‘Goodnight, Gracie,’”
“Goodnight, Gracie.”
The Catfish Review 