Going Home Everyday

I took a shower with Dick yesterday. But it had nothing to do with sex, unfortunately. Instead, with my right arm dangling uselessly after shoulder surgery five days ago, it was me needing someone to scrub the sweat from my armpits and lather up my greasy hair. I can barely snap my own jeans and blow my own nose. And even though I’m down to only half a percocet pain-wise, that is PLENTY enough to reduce me to vegetable-like conversational responses. Who knows what I said when I was taking two pills at a time.

So it’s not my slovenly and self-pityingly-gluttonous well-groomed appearance or near-catotonic slobbering sparkling wit or even my impatient, helpless martyr-like good cheer that keeps Dick around. I did promise him that if our situation is ever reversed, and he is crippled or demented or cancerous or just old and cranky, I will wipe his bum gladly, and turn him regularly so that the bedsores have a chance to heal.

Sometimes I wonder if Dick is patient and caring with me because he loves me or merely because he is a good person. And would I prefer to believe that he is genuinely good, or that he would just do anything for me because he worships me? Without the sacrilegious issues, of course.

Either way, life, married life, is not what I expected, and the way I love Dick and am loved by him are not what I expected. For better or worse.

I fell in love for the first time when I was eighteen. It was giddy, and fabulous, and ferocious. We played board games and drank fizzy fake white wine. I fell in love with the smell in the crease of a neck, with smooth, golden skin and thick, dark-blond hair. With dazzle and charm and charisma. Fast driving and loud music and a feeling of being special, and needed, and cool.

I learned to tone down my own ambition and hide my own inclinations. I agreed that my family were hopelessly uncool and just wanted me to settle down, settle in, behave. I apologized for things that weren’t my fault, even for things that I should have been proud of. I couldn’t be happy unless my love was happy, and my love was not often happy. I tailored myself even more and stopped dreaming about the future.

Sometimes, before you can go home, you have to leave home. I went to Europe. Mom drove me to the airport and I got on a plane for the first time in my life without saying goodbye. I had to buy expensive tampons at an airport store in Amsterdam; this was before 9/11, so I stared at the security guard with the Uzzi. He didn’t care about my tampon purchase, or the fact that flying, especially the landing part, is not very glamorous with nasal congestion. It just hurts.

When you leave home you can think about home better than you ever could when you’re there. You figure out what you like (yogurt and custards and good bread) and what you really do hate (selfish people) and what you can live without (being cool) and what you need to have in your life (someone who’ll soap you up all over even when you can’t return the favor).

I came home and met Dick a year later. We were so dumb and silly when we got married. He warned me that he would probably always be poor, and that sounded romantic. I suddenly wanted to have six children and raise them in the woods, with cloth diapers I’d sewn myself from cotton I’d gleaned from the fields.

I couldn’t talk to Dick for any length of time without getting harpy and passionate and urgent. Love, this time, was not shutting in or stepping back or cleaning up. I never had to temper myself for him. Of course, his favorite part of Enchanted is when Giselle experiences and expresses anger for the first time. (I don’t know if that’s a good sign, or if I should have just stopped at Dick’s favorite part of a Disney movie . . .)

Dick made fun of the poor cripple tonight when we ran out for milk and bread (and teeth-whitening strips and a ball for Spot and bananas for Sally and strawberries for Susan). He shuffled one leg and huddled his right arm protectively at his side. Today was a hard day. I think we can add mild depression and general malaise to the side effects of percocet (besides the regular constipation and Total Foggy Mind).

The kids jumped on me until they jarred my shoulder and I yelled. I called Dick and begged him like the strong woman I am to come home early. He did. He walked in the door and the kids swarmed him, and I took a deep breath. When Dick comes home, when I anticipate sleeping close to his familiar arm and leg and hand, life actually seems almost as shiny as we thought it would be ten years ago. Before the two shoulder surgeries and the miscarriage and the elephant-man allergic reactions and the three kids and the dangerous drug neighborhoods and the messy house and the mean voice. Before living in Japan and New York City and Cairo, where we were alone together, far away from anything remotely resembling what home had meant to us before.

Going home to Dick, every night in our bed, the entire world shut out and unimportant, I forget my frustrations and disappointments and I know that life is everything I ever hoped it would be. And you know that not even percocet can create an illusion that good.

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I’ve entered this in Scribbit’s April Write-Away Contest. I know. I think I’m getting sick that way.