Eugene Fischer - Husbandry

"I heard a gunshot this morning," Marilyn says to Gerry when he gets home.

"You heard one yesterday morning," he tells her. "It was the neighbor's dog. It had died during the night and they were putting it down." Marilyn is sitting in the chair facing the living room window. She's wearing one of her dressing gowns, the one with the sturdy-looking brick houses with perfect ovals of white smoke puffing out of the chimneys. Gerry comes up behind her and gives her a hug around the shoulders and then, when she turns to face him, a kiss.

"They should have brought it to you," she says.

"They should have. But they're very hands-on. Not the type to pay for something they think they can do themselves. We don't like them very much."

"At least they didn't dig up our cable this time," she says. Less than a year prior to waking up the neighborhood by shooting their dead dog at dawn, the neighbors had decided to self-install a fiberglass swimming pool. They rented a backhoe to excavate with, and promptly used it to break the neighborhood's fiber optic line. Gerry smiles at his wife's recollection.

It's dark out. Marilyn is just looking at her own reflection in the window, so Gerry closes the blinds. He extends a hand and helps her from her seat. When she is standing he can see a large yellow stain on her dressing gown.

"Did you spill something?" he asks her.

She follows his gaze down her front and clutches at the stain. "I spilled something on myself," she says. "It's orange juice."

"Good choice! Nice and sticky. How about we go upstairs, and you let me give you a bath?" She nods. He gives her his arm to hold and they head up the steps together. In the bathroom he helps her out of her gown. She has definitely lost weight. Her hip bones are underlined by shadows from the bright heat lamp in the ceiling. He can see all the different parts of her shoulder. Her ribs ripple the skin below her breasts.

Gerry starts the tub filling, then takes the gown downstairs and tosses it in the washing machine. He looks in the kitchen and finds the bottle of orange juice still sitting out on the counter. He puts it back in the refrigerator. Then it's back up the stairs, two at a time.

In the bathroom, he helps Marilyn into the tub and strips to the waist. He kneels next to the tub and turns off the water. "Okay, let's clean you up," he says as he works a soapy washcloth into a lather. He gathers her hair out of the way, and starts with her upper back, putting the soap on with the washcloth and spreading it over her smooth skin with his hand. After her back, he washes her arms, and then her chest. He puts a hand under her knee and lifts her leg out of the water to wash that, but she stops him.

"Stop it," she tells him, "I hate this." She pushes his hands off of her body.

"What's wrong?"

"I hate all this stupid washing!" She hits the water with both hands, not at the same time. "I hate the way you always wash your hands after you touch my pussy. I'm not dirty! It makes me feel disgusting, Richard!"

He puts the washcloth down in the water and sits back on his heels. He presses wet fingertips into his eyelids. When he opens his eyes, the accusation is still sitting there on her face.

"You're not dirty," he tells her, "and I don't do that." He takes her hands—she tries to pull them away, but he is insistent and holds them tightly. "I have never done that. I'm not Richard. You know who I am. I'm Gerry. Your husband, Gerry."

This phase of Gerry and Marilyn's life together begins with Marilyn sitting high up on a tall bed covered by a sheet of noisy white paper, and Gerry sitting closer to the ground, on the hard cushion of a doctor's office chair. Harsh lights and cold filtered air fill the room. It is a scene they have shared before.

The first time was in the office of their general practitioner. Marilyn, up on the paper, was scornful. Gerry was relieved. He had been trying to get Marilyn to come with him to the doctor for weeks. He noticed that she had become forgetful. Sometimes she would ask him a question more than once, insistent that no answer had been provided. Once she couldn't remember how to get to the grocery store. Gerry's suggestion that a visit to the doctor would be appropriate, or even that her behavior had been unusual, was not easily accepted. "I'm just stressed out right now," Marilyn would explain. "If you were still waiting to find out if you were going to have funding for next year, you would be a little distracted too." Her rationalizations were insufficient, however, the day Gerry discovered her in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a roast beef sandwich that was identical to three others already on the table. Three superfluous sandwiches led to their first trip to the doctor.

Their second doctor's visit was to the office of a neurologist, the neurologist that their GP had referred them to. This second iteration involved Marilyn opening her arms like a cross and touching her nose and reciting lists of words. Little games that were somehow supposed to reveal what was happening inside of her skull.

The third time was in a special facility called the Stonewood Imaging Center, a place with the infrastructure to run more technically advanced tests. In this place Marilyn had her blood drawn while up on the table, and then efficient and impersonal technicians fed her into a tube and took pictures of her brain. Gerry paid sixty dollars extra to have two copies made of those pictures.

Now they are back in the neurologist's office, and the neurologist, eventually, arrives. "The popular term for it is EOA," he says, "which is short for 'early onset Alzheimer's,' although the jury is very much still out on whether or not Alzheimer's disease and EOA are the same. It is extremely rare. The two diseases are alike in that they are both neurodegenerative diseases: forms of dementia. EOA progresses somewhat faster than typical Alzheimer's, and the mental symptoms are sometimes accompanied by a degree of muscular atrophy and loss of coordination." The neurologist goes on to talk about treatment, care facilities, lots of things that hardly make an impression on Gerry, who is focused on his wife up on the table, new and fragile and mysterious.

When they leave Gerry asks, "Do you want me to drive?"

"I drove here. I can drive us home," Marilyn tells him.

"I know you can. I was just asking if you want to."

She does. The trip is mostly a silent one, filled with the nothing of a radio news broadcast. At home Marilyn heads into the kitchen and gets a can of dough out of the refrigerator. "I was thinking I would make a pizza tonight," she says.

"Why don't you let me make us dinner tonight. You've had a rough day," says Gerry.

"I can make us dinner. I'm fine."

"You aren't fine!" Gerry says. "I'm not saying you can't make dinner, but you aren't fine! You can't keep pretending anymore that nothing's wrong."

"I'm not pretending anything. Though I might want to pretend that you understand how freaking out and abandoning my normal routine is the last thing I need right now."

"Okay. So, if you're not pretending this isn't real, then talk to me."

"I don't want to talk about it!" Marilyn shouts.

Gerry doesn't say anything, just stands behind her as she gets the pizza pan out of its cabinet. When she looks back at him, she seems to see that he needs something more from her.

"Look, alright, I'm sick," she says, "I acknowledge that. I'm sick, but I'm fine. I can make us dinner, and I'll go to work tomorrow, and I'll take my prescriptions, and everything is going to be fine. Let's not make this any bigger of a deal then it has to be, okay?" With a can of dough in one hand and a pizza pan in the other, she hugs her husband. "And if I forget to take the pizza out of the oven, you'll just have to do it for me."