A Cup of Comfort for Couples

by Colleen Sell

  So I go with the punches. To be safe, I stick with something basic to eat: grilled cheese, fries, Diet Coke. Sam orders baby back ribs, the all-you-can- eat special.

  “Are you sure?” I ask Sam.

  “I’m starved. I haven’t eaten since New Jersey.”

  Fact of significance: Sam finishes not only one large rack, but two and a half large racks of ribs. My comment that the ribs look a little funny — a little green — doesn’t impair his appetite.

  Then the romantic side of Sam once again shifts into overdrive. Sam decides we should go for a walk to work off the meal and to see Niagara Falls. Sam nixes my idea of driving over. We walk a few blocks. The closer we get to the falls, the louder it gets, the windier it gets, the colder it gets. Sam mentions something about having an upset stomach. I tell him he ate too much. The more we walk, the colder and crankier I get.

  I see the falls. It looks like Niagara Falls, only semi-frozen. It’s getting dark. Sam snaps some pictures with me and Niagara. I snap a few of Sam and Niagara. No one else is there to preserve this moment of the two of us together in one picture with Niagara Falls behind us. No one is crazy enough to visit Niagara Falls at this time of year, this time of day, in this ridiculous cold. I begin to worry about frostbitten appendages. All I want is to get back to the motel to soak in another hot tub and warm up. My ears hurt. My feet hurt. My toes hurt. My fingers hurt. I am imagining blackened toes. My nostrils are frozen together. I am not in a good mood.

  At this point, romantic Sam, yelling over Niagara’s rage, chooses to ask me once more, “Wanna get married?”

  I look at him. I am sure I heard him right this time. First, he threatens not to propose while we fight about directions to Niagara Falls. Next, he proposes from the doorway while he’s still watching TV and I’m taking a bath. And now, while I am freezing alive in subzero weather with my nostrils frozen shut causing me to nearly suffocate, he proposes once again. I have to answer him, but my teeth are chattering. It hurts when the air goes down my windpipe. My eyes are tearing. Icicles are forming on my cheeks and they are not from the classic tears of joy one might expect. I’m thinking that this is about as romantic as Sam can muster: Niagara Falls in the background, the two of us together on vacation, a run-of-the-mill motel room with pornographic pencil drawings above the bed’s headboard.

  As I’m about to chatter out an answer, Sam loses all the color in his face. He turns bright green and vomits over the railing into the frozen Niagara Falls below. Then he vomits some more. He vomits all the way back to the motel, all through the night, and never again asks me to marry him.

  The ten-day trip that we so diligently planned suddenly comes to a screeching halt. We are heading home to New Jersey. Sam is too sick to have fun. I am driving with Sam stretched out on the back seat, groaning. And now I am angry.

  Before this trip I hadn’t given a single thought to getting married. Now Sam has put the thought in my head and cruelly pulled it off life support. All the way home, I’m incredibly angry with Sam. In my mind, I replay the scene of him calling me a clean freak. Then I replay him vomiting over the railing into the pounding waters of Niagara. I even embellish the story by having the vomit freeze midway down before it hits the water below. I have hundreds of miles to drive and aggravate myself about my almost-proposal. I mumble under my breath while Sam writhes in self-inflicted pain. I have no pity. I manage to drive on every torn-up road from Canada to New Jersey, and I speed joyfully over every speed bump. I deliberately swerve and take corners on two wheels.

  Twenty-five years later, I still remind Sam that I never actually said yes to any of his proposals. Then I suggest going out for ribs.

  — Felice Prager

  This story was first published in Sasee Magazine, April 2010, under the title “Waiting for the Right Answer.”

  Built with Tender Loving Care

  Boxes of half-finished stories almost floated out of the storage loft. My files labeled “Miscellaneous Writing Ideas” danced their way to the front of the old file cabinet.

  No more red ink. No more late nights writing encouraging comments on student papers, from nervous Laotians to anxious middle-aged men newly laid off from a factory closing. I was done. Though I had loved my teaching job, it had taken its toll and I was worn out. My brain felt worn out. Now, my time was my own. Retirement! Plus, our two children were grown and had left the nest.

  Life, fate, whatever you call it, has a way of interrupting one’s plans, and just as my dream was unfolding, my husband decided to retire, too, and to pursue his dream of developing lots. He wanted to build a house “on spec,” as it’s called. We had more land than we needed and through the years had talked of doing this, but it had always seemed just a distant idea. Now, here he was, at the kitchen table — barely past the last toast at his own retirement party — making concrete plans to start cutting trees and grading a road for the first lot.

  “I don’t want to build any more houses,” I told him. “I plan to write stories, to work on a romance novel. I’ve built and remodeled enough houses to last a lifetime.” I meant it.

  “You don’t have to help,” he said. He meant it.

  In a matter of weeks, two carpenter relatives were living in our basement in a rough apartment of sorts. Another young man from the neighborhood also moved in. He was in a tough position and needed work, so we willingly hired him.

  Do the math: I now had four men to cook for . . . if I wanted to do the cooking. This didn’t count the extra sheets, towels, and bathrooms to keep clean . . . if I wanted that job. It didn’t include the extra floor cleaning work, all those muddy boots. And it didn’t account for the extra groceries and preparations and clean-up chores . . . if I wanted to do any of that.

  I suppose I could have refused. But I love my husband and I knew (more than he did) that four men building a house all day need food. They need coffee, coffee cake, meat, and potatoes. They need towels and soap and bathrooms. They need a bed with clean sheets. They need lemonade and ice water.

  So it began. I packed up my writing files, walked away from my old desk, and turned off my dream.

  “This will last only a few weeks,” my husband said.

  It didn’t take him long to see that “feeding the men” was an important task. “I’d really appreciate it,” he said. “It’s hard for me to come back and start thinking of something to make for them when they’re already hungry.” (Not to mention that he was starving too.)

  So I did the work that women all over the world do — invisible duties, often taken for granted. I’m not complaining, really. I’m just stating a fact. It’s the adage of “someone’s got to do it,” I guess. And unless you can afford to hire a maid and a cook, that someone is usually the woman of the house.

  The first summer went by. I was up before everyone else, making coffee, oatmeal, toast, juice, sometimes eggs. The four men left in two pickups, roared out of the driveway and up to the building site — well-rested, well-fed, ready for a good day’s work. I cleaned up the breakfast meal and usually started right in on baking something, a cake or some cookies.

  At 10:00 A.M., I showed up at the site with an overflowing picnic basket, warm coffee cake or oatmeal cookies, and more coffee. They had a fifteen-minute break under one of the shade trees.

  Back to the house I went and started the noon meal preparations. This included potatoes, meat, a vegetable, and often some kind of dessert. Then they drove back — hot, sweaty, tired — wiping their faces and glancing toward the stove on their way to the bathroom to clean up. They ate lunch, relaxed a bit on the deck, and then went back to work.

  As mid-afternoon rolled around, I filled the picnic basket again, this time with something like fruit or more cookies, maybe some milk or soda. Another short break and they’d return to work again.

  Back at the house, I started planning the evening meal. This was usually a lighter fare, perhaps a casserole or a pasta dish, maybe some homemade soup and a salad.

  I cleaned up
and did dishes while the four men sat on the deck and talked, played cards, and made phone calls for the next day’s delivery of lumber or cement or gravel. They were all deeply tired and went to bed early.

  In between cooking and cleaning up the kitchen, I managed trips to the grocery store, made beds, did laundry, and paid the bills. Then I cooked and cleaned. Cooked and cleaned some more. By the time evening came, I was too tired to do any more than watch the evening news before I fell into bed myself. My days passed like that. Day after day after day.

  After two years, the house and a large attached garage were finished. The other men left and went back to their own lives. My husband and I began the tedious work of painting interior walls and finishing the wood trim. He did major landscaping, and I helped sow grass seed and picked rocks. The house was a beautiful cedarsided two-story with a wraparound deck and a walk-out basement. We found a Realtor who helped us sell it within six months of it being on the market.

  My husband’s endeavor was successful. He began talking about the next house he wanted to build.

  I was two years into retirement and hadn’t written one story or article.

  My resentment was palpable. Not only had I not followed my dream, but what I thought had been a generous offer — a willingness to be the helpmate — was now being taken for granted. My cooking and cleaning services were now a “given.” Instead of being a writer, I was now the support staff for my husband’s projects.

  We also had grown apart with the presence of others in the house so often. He was happier laughing and working with the other men than he was taking me out for a movie and a dinner date. He was always too preoccupied and tired. When we did manage time away, all he could talk about was the next house. I just stared out the window.

  I became distant and cold. He felt it; I felt it.

  “I don’t care,” I said out loud.

  Time passed, and fate had another plan in store for me. My mother suffered a heart attack and underwent triple bypass surgery in a medical center far from our home. I was the sibling most able to help with her long (successful!) recovery, so I went to stay with her for about six months. In some strange way, I was almost relieved to get away from my own home, from my husband, and from the constant pressure of his projects.

  My mother grew stronger, and little by little my caretaking skills improved. We’d never been very close, and this turned out to be a special time, when she could count on me and I could nurture her back to health. I took her to her doctor appointments, cooked the right kind of meals for her, and made sure she got to the rehab clinic for her exercises, and we shared many fierce Scrabble games during peaceful winter afternoons. I took long walks when I could and did some hard thinking about my marriage, how lonely I felt, and what I wanted to do in my retirement years. Support staff was not in the cards, and that was kind of scary. I didn’t want to go home.

  The time came when I was no longer needed at my mother’s house. She was well enough to get back to her own life, and I had to face the music at my own house. I hoped to negotiate with my husband for the type of life I wanted and needed. I needed him to see that I had my own dream. He would just have to hire a cook and a cleaner if he was going to continue down this building path. It would be hard to tell him, because I knew that he had a dream too. But it wasn’t working for me.

  When I walked in the door, he was waiting for me with an unreadable look on his face. “I missed you,” he said.

  We had been in touch by phone over the months, but our conversations were strained.

  He took my hand and led me to the basement without saying anything. He opened the door to one of the rooms that had served as a bedroom for one of the carpenters, turned on the lights, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a lovely room with the walls painted light blue. Clean, stained birch shelving covered one whole wall — built-in bookcases from floor to ceiling! A tweed grey-blue carpet lay on what had been just a cement floor. A new roll-top desk and comfortable- looking office chair were positioned in one corner, and beside the computer was a vase filled with the large white blossoms of our own hydrangea bush.

  “Here’s your writing studio,” my husband said, as he took one flower out of the vase and handed it to me. “You know I love you.” He looked so shy, as if wondering about his skills as an interior decorator.

  My eyes filled with tears, and I let myself be gathered into his warm, strong carpenter arms. “I love you too,” I said. “And I’ve missed you so much.”

  Of course, the sun didn’t shine every day after that, and fireworks didn’t go off every evening. I filled up the bookshelves in no time. We had a lot of talks and started to figure out how we could both have our retirement dreams met, and then we talked some more.

  After the hydrangea blossoms dried, I kept them on my desk so I could remember their beauty and the love they represented. And I’m writing.

  — Mary E. Winter

  Diving for Love

  Thirty years ago when David and I took off for our honeymoon to Hawaii, we carried a lot of baggage. We took just a few suitcases with some light clothing, bathing suits, and sunscreen, but we had plenty of emotional baggage. It was the second marriage for both of us. We’d fallen madly in love a few years before, spent a year in passionate romantic bliss, then a year arguing just as passionately to work out the kinks, and after six months of living together amicably, we were ready to get married.

  Three days before the wedding, David brought me to his lawyer’s office to sign a prenuptial agreement. Because his first marriage had lasted only a few years, he wanted to be sure, in case ours failed, that he’d keep the house he now owned. I was crushed. Didn’t he have faith in our love? But something in me told me to go ahead with the wedding on blind faith. The ceremony was beautiful, the wedding a dream, but on the airplane heading for Hawaii the next morning, I was fighting off tears.

  When we stepped off the plane in Kauai, the warm breeze was so playful and erotic that I put aside the baggage and inhaled. Then exhaled, softer. Yes. That afternoon we wandered on a beach where hot water gushed up from crevices, bursting every few minutes like warm body fluids. David picked a blood-red flower and braided it into my hair. We had landed in the land of hot love; no broken hearts allowed. The rhythm of the islands enveloped us like new, sweet skin.

  In the next days, we danced in yellow moonlight, crooned with ukuleles, sucked on mangos, made slow love, snorkeled on red reefs, and swam with purple fishes. On the fifth day, we decided to venture deeper into the ocean. Instead of spending months getting certified to scuba dive, tourists in Hawaii can take a two-hour group lesson and then dive thirty feet below the ocean’s surface with instructors. We were island adventurers, drenched in warm passion and smothered in fragrant leis, so we signed up to swim into the underworld.

  The first hour of instruction included a comprehensive list of every possible death under the sea. The second hour squeaked with rubber suits, breathing apparatus, and stark fear. In the heavy wetsuit, my loose, hula-dancing body became stiff and awkward. My swim fins slapped hard on the training deck, jutting out at sharp angles when I tried to walk. The metal tank strapped to my back was leaden, and the flimsy mouth tube my only life-line. Place the rubber nozzle in your mouth and breathe slowly. Do not inhale sharply. In and out slowly, naturally. I envisioned myself at the bottom of the ocean, unable to breathe, the tube floating out of my reach. Place the mask over your eyes and push firmly to seal. If your vision clouds, tip your head back slightly, and push the seal up and down to let excess water escape. I imagined my vision clouding as the water rushed into my lungs, my arms flailing, eyes bulging, as I watched one last purple fish float by.

  David was grinning as he pulled the apparatus in and out of his mouth, walking easy, tall and lanky in his slick wetsuit — Lloyd Bridges ready for Sea Hunt. I breathed into my air hose, shlshhshhlsh, and out, phshhshshhh, peering closely at the gauge on my tank. When your gauge goes down to less than one hundred, wave your arms at an instructor. The per
son whose gauge goes down to one hundred first must signal immediately, and we will all return to the surface. Breathe in slowly, shlshhshhls, breathe out calmly, phshhshshhh. I began to shiver uncontrollably.

  David slipped off his mask and walked closer. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m terrified.” The shivers had become spasms; my knees were buckling.

  “I thought you wanted to do this.” David put his arms around me to steady me, reached behind and loos-ened my mask, then pulled me over to sit on a bench. “Wasn’t this your idea, honey?” He was peering at me curiously, as if he’d never met this quivering creature.

  “Yes, I do want to do it. I just forgot that I get terrified if I can’t breathe.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since this scuba diving lesson.”

  “Should we forget it, and do something else?”

  “No. After all the time to put on this stuff, I want to at least enjoy the view under the water.

  A few minutes later I steeled myself as we plunged into the water. My eyes glared frozen from behind my mask, while bubbles drifted up with each breath: in shlshlshsh, out phshshshsh, bubble, bubble; in shlshlshh, out phsshshsh, bubble, bubble. I tried to swim, but I couldn’t get my legs to unfurl and my arms flapped at my sides, like turtle fins. The instructor floated by me, gesturing. She pointed to my curled knees, then to her own legs, which she waved in an exaggerated mermaid swish. I tried a swish or two, but then snapped back to fetal position. Breathe in shslshshlsh, breathe out, pshshhshsh, bubble, bubble.

  David was somewhere in the drift of divers floating in strange, ghostly bubbles. I searched for his face behind the masks, but my own mask was beginning to get cloudy. If your vision clouds, tip your head back slightly, and push the seal up and down to let excess water escape. I tipped my head back, then pushed the seal up and down as carefully as I could. When the mask filled with saltwater, I panicked. Though I waved my arms wildly to get an instructor’s attention, no one came, so I headed for the surface, alone. Push up, breathe in, shlshhshshh, push harder, kick, breathe out, phshshshsh, reach up, splash out.