Carol Prisant - Catch 26 - A Novel

The enviable Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in the beautifully fitting couture shift that the madhouse she was confined to apparently issued to inmates.

“I am disturbed,” Liz was saying. “Don’t you think I have every reason to be?”

For sure, Frannie thought. With seven husbands, if anyone does, you do.

I do too.

Planting a fist on either side, Frannie heaved herself up off the bed and walked once again to the window. Was it going to snow? Not today, she entreated the weather gods. She didn’t need snow.

Why had she looked? She leaned her forehead against the glass again.

Turning at last to her dresser, she distractedly plucked up some underwear, and without looking down, stepped into her underpants, ran a thumb around the elastic, shook herself into her bra, then tiptoed into the chilly hall to peer around the living-room door. Stanley had gone out again. For the paper, she thought with relief as she circled the room in her underwear, straightening up and carefully baring the half-full glass of his last night’s cranberry juice to the kitchen. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t be back before she left for lunch with Arlene.

Because Frannie was so looking forward to their lunch today. They were trying out this new Italian place at the Golden Arch Mall. If Stanley got home before she went, though, he’d want to know who she was going out with, what she’d left him to eat, and especially – most vexingly – what time she thought she’d be back.

So peculiar , she thought, this belated desire for her company. She’d actually been a little flattered by it when he’d first retired, and she almost wondered if, somehow, he cared for her again. But six years had passed, and she finally understood: retired men depended on their wives like children. Even when they had computery gadgets to play with and golf magazines to read and sports channels to click through, even when they merely dozed through the long afternoons at home, they still always wanted to know where Mommy had gone. More importantly, when Mommy was coming home.

She might not be right about the children thing, though. She’d never had any.

She had strapped a pillow to herself once, just to get the sense of how it might feel to be pregnant. And she’d bought a baby doll once and hid it away.

She hated to remember that now.

But Stanley would be home any minute. Better hurry up, she thought, opening the closet door.

Too late. He was coming through the front door with the paper.

“I’m hungry. Anything in the fridge?” He limped a little, crossing the living room. He’d pulled a hamstring on the golf course last July. They didn’t kiss.

“Hold on, I’ll take a look.”

Hurrying ahead of him into the kitchen and opening the icebox door (oh God, she still called it an icebox – like her mother did) her back stitched up. She straightened too fast and felt suddenly dizzy.

“Just some of last night’s chicken,” she called back, leaning on the counter for support.

“That’ll be good.”

Stanley had had a heart scare the August before he’d retired. The surgeons had inserted two stents, and now he ate only broccoli and poached chicken. And pills.

“I’ll have that. With some toast. And remember to burn the toast a little, will you? Yesterday you forgot.”

“It’s only 11:10, Stanley. Don’t you want to wait for lunch? You’ll spoil your appetite.”

Readying her smile, Frannie waited in the living room doorway in her robe while he busied himself with throwing open her blue moiré curtains and hooking one of them over the back of her nice French chair. It would wrinkle now, she thought peevishly as she watched her husband, paper in hand, drop into his leather recliner and search, for some moments, for the sweet spot there. She watched as he perched the paper on his paunch and, with both his palms, smoothed the crimped remnants of silvery hair flat against his scalp. His scalp, she saw, silently moving behind him to fix the curtain now, his scalp was even more freckled than her chest. His hands and arms were unpleasantly mottled, too. Golf, she supposed. And no sunscreen. With the light behind his head like this, she could just make out the feathery hairs sprouting from his ears.

Of course, if Stanley looked at her, which he wasn’t doing now and seldom did – he’d have noticed her, well … whiskers. Frannie’s hand moved reflexively to the stubble of her weeks-old chin wax. She’d never mentioned the waxing to him. He’d accuse her of being vain, and he hated vain women. It wasn’t vanity to Frannie, though. It was … maintenance.

And anyhow, she said defensively to the Stanley in her head, she’d never been old before. She was trying to adjust because it felt so foreign. Like adolescence maybe. With wrinkles.

“You still dressing?” he called from behind his paper.

She scurried out of the room and reached for a blouse – any blouse – in the bedroom closet.

“Yes.”

Of course, he hated being old himself. He especially hated his cardiologist, who had pointedly told him he had “to watch.” No salt, no fat, and no Viagra.

Not that Stanley had asked for Viagra.

“No, I won’t,” he belatedly replied. “I won’t ‘spoil my appetite’ – whatever that means – for the thousandth time. I’ll eat again at 1:30 or so. Anyway,” he added triumphantly, “you know Dr. Dietz said several small meals a day.”

Rummaging now for shoes, Frannie heard the self-satisfied rustle-and-snap of his newspaper. Who could argue with the medical establishment, she thought? Not an aging dentist’s wife. But what did “spoiling your appetite” matter anyway in the long run?

And why was she still saying that?

Straightening more slowly this time, she called back, “All right. I’ll give you some chicken for now and make another plate for later. I’m having lunch with Arlene.”

“Oh, you are?” His tenor inched up a notch, edging towards the place where his little-boy whine lived and lay in wait. She imagined him padding toward the bedroom door like Sparky used to do.

Sparky, she hadn’t thought of him in years – w hat was her problem today?

“What time will you be home?’ he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe 2:30 or so. Maybe we’ll drop by the St. James’ sale afterward. Pick up something for Deb Barkley. She’s in the hospital, you know.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the matter?” The swish of the financial section put paid to Deb Barkley. “Well, don’t be too late.”

For her own thousandth time, Frannie wondered why he always said that. He’d be asleep in his chair no matter when she got home, his head against its back, the newspaper fallen to the floor, his mouth open to end-of-day dust motes.

She smoothed the blouse into the tightish waistband of her tweed skirt and ducked back into the kitchen, hurriedly arranging two plates of pale chicken, some steamed broccoli (no butter, no salt) and a piece of blackened Wonder Bread on her nice blue pottery plates, covering it all with clear plastic wrap. She stepped back and admired her work. It looked almost tasty like that. She left one plate on the counter, the other, at the front of the refrigerator, where he couldn’t possibly miss it. She could hear Elizabeth Taylor again, complaining about her spectacularly skintight white bathing suit.