A Cup of Comfort for Couples

by Colleen Sell

  Fate stepped in, however, to confound Dad’s common sense. At age seventy-two, Miss Ida developed cancer. And damn that disease straight to the lowest depths of hell. I try to hate no one in this world. But I harbor a hatred of cancer that borders on fanatical. No single man, however evil his soul, could ever inflict such slow, racking pain on others. No man would have the patience to torture that way, to take away coordination, then mobility, then speech, then sight, then mental capacity, then finally, finally, the entire body itself, over the course of months and months.

  And Dad stepped to the plate, as it were. Only the best; forget the cost. He cared for a father, a mother, and a sister until their last breath. Miss Ida would get the same . . . No, she’d get better treatment.

  She was told she could try chemotherapy. She could go to the Medical College of Virginia, an hour’s drive away, and have the treatments three times a week. It might help lengthen her life. Here’s a secret Dad doesn’t know: she didn’t want to. She wanted to go home to the Lord. He was waiting there for her, no doubt about it. But Lord, Archie. What would he do? If she could “tough it out,” maybe she could take care of him a few more years. She had to try, any road. Miss Ida was a fighter, she was. She fought through cancer in her sinus cavity and through cancer in her colon, but the disease finally had its way, three years later, in the hideous form of a brain tumor.

  But back to the original chemotherapy. Who in the world would take her to the treatments? I was teaching in Lynchburg, three hours away. Moses, my brother, was the county engineer, working ten hours a day and rearing his own two boys. How would Ida get to MCV every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?

  “Well, Good Lord, I’ll get in the car and take her,” responded Archie. “Reckon I still have enough sense to drive to Richmond, any road.”

  Well, Moses looked at me and I looked at him. No words were spoken, but the question hung between us. Who’s going to tell Dad he’s too old to drive Interstate 95 to Richmond? Being a soul who has always felt discretion to be the better part of valor, I flat out refused to open my mouth; Moses, having a bit more courage, had the gumption to say, “Dad, uh . . . do you think . . .” before getting an Archie Clements “wither you straight down to the floor” glare. Then he shut up too.

  Anyway, the American Cancer Society saved us from the horns of that dilemma, and God bless them for it. Seems they had a van for Southside, Virginia, that would take Miss Ida right from her door to MCV, and back again, every treatment. Guess who went with her? You got it: A.B., complaining about how fast the driver was going — “He’ll kill us all before it’s said and done!” — every mile of the way. The man who hated to stir five miles from his door washed up, put on a suit and tie, and went to Richmond three days a week, for six weeks, at the age of eighty-six. Just to be there for Miss Ida. Just to hold her hand and keep her company.

  And when it got bad, got really, really bad, terminal braintumor bad, he didn’t quaver. Brain tumor; no hope. Well, fine. We’ll need round-the-clock nurses; who can you recommend? Not for a second did he consider any alternative. Nursing home? Forget it. Miss Ida was going to be in the place she loved most: home. Home and safe. Happy as he could make her.

  Eight months. That’s right. Eight months. Nurses, round the clock for eight months. That’s what she needed. That’s what she got. The man who saved every penny he ever made, who drove one particular truck for twenty-two years before it literally fell apart, threw open his wallet. Wide.

  And every night, through it all, he walked into their bedroom. (He had long since evacuated to my old room, but he went in at bedtime, nonetheless.) Held her hand and told her, “I love you, Miss Ida. Good night. I’m a right lucky man to have you for a wife.”

  Cost him a king’s ransom. He lived with the stench of diapers, of vomit, of death, for eight months. Lived with strangers tracking in and out of his house. He’s a very private man, and he hated it all. But every night, he walked in that room, he put a smile on that face, and he told her, “I love you, Miss Ida. I’m lucky I found you.”

  He was, of course. Lucky. She would have done the same for him in half a heartbeat. But how many would stick? How many would give that “full measure of devotion,” as Mr. Lincoln called it? I wonder.

  Miss Ida and A.B. knew what Lena Younger knew. They knew about loving when someone is down, about giving when a person needs it most, without question, without reservation, without thinking of what’s in it for you.

  And here’s what I always tell my eighth-grade students. Go out, find someone you love. Then picture them old, bald, sick, costing you a fortune both emotionally and financially. Ask yourself: Will I still be able to say “I love you?” Will I still say “I’m lucky I found you?”

  If the answer is no, keep looking. If it’s yes, run for the altar as quickly as you can, for those relationships come but once in many, many lifetimes.

  — Connie Ellison

  My Year in China

  In my house I don’t need a calendar to chart the passage of time. I can plot the years more simply, by my husband’s passions. 2009: The Year of the China Obsession.

  Several months ago, Marc decided he wanted to read ancient Chinese classics — and any old translations wouldn’t do. He cruised the Internet, compiling a master reading list from the websites of the major universities offering courses in Chinese studies — Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago. Then he tracked down the books through Amazon.com and wrote himself a syllabus. Now, more than thirty books are piled on his bedside table, a tower of books, his own personal Great Wall of China: such classics as The Three Kingdoms; the six-volume The Dream of the Red Chamber, also inexplicably known as the Story of the Stone; Anthony C. Yu’s Journey to the West (in four different volumes); the Analects of Confucius; the I Ching; a history of daily life in China on the eve of the Mongol Invasion (thirteenth century, in case you care); assorted myths and legends; and my personal favorite, China’s Examination Hell: Civil Service Exams of Imperialist China. The more arcane, the better.

  “This stuff reads like a Chinese Peyton Place!” he says, eyes alight, as he plows through The Plum in the Golden Vase.

  He particularly savors the footnotes. “Do you want to know about the system of keeping concubines?” he’ll ask. “And did you know they use the patronymic as a first name?”

  My eyes glaze over.

  Marc talks about teaching himself to read Chinese: a character a day. “In ten years, I’d know almost four-thousand characters,” he says.

  And I may not be one of them, I think, but smile instead.

  The smile gets a little forced, though, when he starts downloading Chinese fonts for his computer; and when he does a Google search on the subject of “tea” and hyperlinks into Hong Kong, where he learns how to prepare tea in the traditional Chinese way; and when the tea catalogs arrive followed by mail orders of $100 worth of loose tea leaves, as well as a traditional covered Chinese tea cup from which to drink it.

  In self-defense, I flee the house for a cappuccino at Starbucks, only to turn on the CD player in his car and be assaulted by the sound of Chinese pipa music.

  Whenever there is a lull in our conversation, he reverts to the subject of his passion. And so it goes: the winter of his Chinese content.

  This love affair with China is not new. It may, in fact, be genetic. His father was stationed in China during World War II, an eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn who returned with a pocket full of ancient Chinese coins and a brown scrapbook of photos of his nude Chinese girlfriend.

  “Just think,” Marc says, “somewhere in China I may have a half-brother.”

  In high school, he talked about majoring in Chinese, until his mother sat him down. “Honey,” she said, “you can’t even pass high school Spanish.”

  So what’s a wife to do when her husband’s passion bores her silly?

  Well, I overstate. It’s not the interest I mind; it’s the total immersion — the depth, the breadth, the sheer, one-track mindedness of it a
ll. Often, when there is a lull in our conversation, he’ll get that far-away look, an air of distraction, but at least I never have to worry he’s thinking of another woman. Oh no. More likely, he’s pondering the genealogy of the Ming dynasty.

  “What are you thinking about?” I’ll say.

  Sheepishly, he’ll say, “You don’t really want to know.”

  I never laugh. Out loud. Oh, I may roll my eyes once in a while, but a wife’s got to have a little room to react. Besides, I know we won’t be in China forever.

  Because last year we went to outer space: The Cosmos. The Final Frontier. 2008 was The Year of the Telescope. Astronomy was the reigning passion. Not just a subscription to Sky & Telescope, mind you. It was a full-blown love affair with the stars.

  He downloaded star maps from NASA. He trudged the whole family across a frozen field in the dead of winter to watch a comet we could easily see from our own back yard. He drove to the mountains of rural Pennsylvania to track down one of the country’s experts on configuring telescopes, boned up on all the optics involved, determined which scope he could couple with a camera in order to do some astral photography, and finally, after an endless one-sided discussion, ordered a telescope. His only regret: that we had neither space nor money for the twelve-incher he really wanted.

  Then we needed a vehicle to transport the thing, so we traded in our car (well, actually, the lease was up) for a station wagon, not because I’m a June Cleaver wannabe but because, as Marc happily pointed out, we could take the telescope on family vacations, like some bulky third child.

  Currently, the telescope sits in a very large, customized, padded suitcase in the corner of our bedroom, where the five-year-old has to be dissuaded from climbing on it.

  And the passion before that? I like to think of that as The Year of the Rowing Machine, where every night I would listen to him recount how many meters he’d rowed, watch him faithfully record them on the spreadsheet he set up on the computer, hear again and again how close he was to the 10 million-meter mark. Every night at 10:30, you’d find him in the basement, lashed to the machine like Ben-Hur, the TV turned up way too loud so he could hear it over the rhythmic sound of the rowing machine that breathes like bellows, a metallic lung whirring shuuuush, shuuuush.

  And so I chart the passage of our lives together: The Year of Arctic Exploration. The Year of Arthurian Romance. The Year of Glacial Geology. The Year of Fractals and Chaos Theory. The Year of Kafka.

  Yes, Franz. It began innocently, with our hand-in-hand stroll through an exhibit of Kafka photos and memorabilia at the Jewish Museum, then progressed to full-blown purchasing madness: Every book Kafka ever penned. All the Kafka biographies. Photo essays on Prague. Kafka’s letters. Kafka’s friends’ letters. You get the idea.

  So what will next year bring? Ancient Sumerian texts? Thermal oceanography? Conversational Urdu? The Monkey chants of New Guinea?

  Marc offers a clue. “When I’m done with China, I think I’ll do India,” he says.

  Uh-oh. Time for chicken vindaloo. Break out the Ravi Shankar records.

  “Now, don’t laugh,” he’ll say, and I know I’m about to hear about a new passion.

  “Thank you for not making fun of me,” he’ll say. “Thank you for listening.”

  All right, so now I feel a little guilty. But even though the interests are not ones I always share, I do love that he’s so totally taken over by them. He brings this passion, this intensity, to everything: to me, our marriage, our children, his work. This was the intensity that first drew me in.

  “We’re going too fast,” I said to him on our second date, pulling out of a long kiss. “I think we should put the brakes on a little.”

  “We can put on the physical brakes,” he said readily. “But please don’t put on the emotional ones.”

  That just about did me in. A man who wasn’t afraid to feel, to admit he felt, who welcomed intimacy? I was hooked.

  On the day of our wedding, finally alone in the car, Marc lifted my hand and kissed it. “My dad would have loved you,” he said.

  It made me well up.

  The year after Marc’s dad died was The Year of the Ham Radio. Nightly, he listened to Radio Havana (in English) and fired off postcards to Cuba.

  “If life is as good there as you keep saying, how come everyone is trying to leave?” he’d write.

  That was the 1960s, the time of the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution, but still he wrote away to Radio Havana as well as Radio Beijing, probably the only kid in America who was regularly receiving brown paper bundles from China filled with Maoist pamphlets, which made his mother a little hysterical. “Stop it! The FBI will be after you,” she’d say. I picture my husband as a skinny little boy, looking much like my sons: blue-eyed, long lashed, and trusting, smelling sweetly of milk and mud. And I ache for that boy who lost his father too soon.

  This is a man who will never be bored and never be boring. This is a man who could retire tomorrow and find forty things to do. And this is what first drew me to him — the insatiable intellectual curiosity. That and the kissing.

  “When we retire, we should move to a college town,” he says. “Forget Florida. Cultural wasteland. It’s the land of the Early Bird Special.”

  Life with him is not dull. He makes me laugh. This is a man who, when an old boyfriend called me after seventeen years of silence, simply handed me the phone and said, “It’s for you. It’s Charlie.” No questions.

  He’s the guy my parents called whenever there was a medical emergency. How many times did he carry my mother to the emergency room in the middle of the night and sit by her stretcher, insisting she be seen, and attended to, immediately? He’s comfortable, and comforting, in hospitals. Thirty years ago he ran the admitting desk at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Well, what else does a person do with a master’s degree in medieval and Renaissance literature?

  And this is the same guy who held my hand in the labor room when I yelled, “Lamaze, shlamaze, get me drugs!” Although he did do one unforgivable thing: somewhere around 4:00 a.m., he put his head down on the foot of my gurney and passed out. And had the nerve to snore. But when our first son was born and roomed in with me and I recovered from the long labor and C-section, Marc stayed in the hospital too, jumping up from the cot every time the baby snuffled or sighed. And he held our infant son and crooned to him so gently that I felt weepy with love and forgave him — mostly — for falling asleep in the labor room.

  So what do you do if the passion of the moment, the flavor of the month, the obsession of the year leaves you cold?

  You listen. Because you know that were it reversed, he would listen to you. Because you realize that he doesn’t drink, gamble, smoke, or womanize, and that you always know exactly where he is. Because he’s your best friend, lover, and companion, the guy who in the aftershock of an early morning earthquake could still turn to you in bed and ask, “Did the earth move for you too?”

  So bring on the garam masala and the Bhagavad Gita, and to India I will go. Because you know what? I wouldn’t miss any of his adventures. Not for all the tea in China.

  — Liane Kupferberg Carter

  The Prism

  “Hon, you look naked in that swimsuit.” My husband’s voice curls into my ear. His nose is in my hair, his hands on my waist. Our baby is sandwiched between us, tiny swim trunks riding so high on his pear-shaped body that he looks like a mini-Florida retiree. My husband’s tone is one part possessive and one part flirtatious. His voice competes with the echoes of splashes and squeals bouncing off the tiled surfaces of the indoor water park. The air is thick with chlorine and humidity. I smile, thinking I know what he means but am not exactly sure.

  We are on a family weekend getaway at a water-park hotel in the suburbs, an hour’s drive from our Chicago home. Our five-year-old daughter run-walks (running is prohibited) a circuit within the kiddie section, sliding from one small waterslide to the next. Her brown skin gleams over her equine spine; she is lean and
long. There was never a moment of chubbiness in her babyhood. She is unlike her baby brother, whose thick white thighs grip my hip like a vice.

  When my daughter was growing inside me, unborn, my husband was not jealous of me, would not have cared if I looked naked in my swimsuit. That was a time, too, when I probably would not have gone on a suburban weekend water-park trip, thinking it was not cultured or quaint or perfect enough.

  After my husband’s swimsuit comment, I hoist the baby into his arms so I can go to the bathroom. I make my way past the wet swirling slides, over a faux bridge with a rope railing spanning the “lazy river,” to the women’s locker room. There, I peek in the mirror.

  My swimsuit is white, and I am afraid what my husband meant is that you can see the color of my flesh and the bulges of my post-partum belly through it. But the swimsuit is lined and my fears are not realized. Though wet, the swimsuit still appears white, not transparent. Its dress-like shape floats away from my belly and does not cling. I found it featured in a magazine article about swimsuits designed to hide the flaws of a “mom” figure.

  The water park is filled with teenage and twenty-something girls in micro bikinis and with round breasts and taut bellies. In the presence of these girls, the idea that my mom swimsuit is erotic to anyone strikes me as amusing. That it is erotic to my husband is reassuring.

  While the swimsuit is not clinging and not transparent, I see the outline of my nipples. This probably inspired my husband’s “naked” comment. It does not bother me, though it once may have made me self-conscious. I am still nursing the baby and my breasts feel about as erotic to me as my arms. In the bevy of half-naked younger girls, I feel inconspicuous enough.

  When I met my husband in college, he would lope around campus like a bouncing question mark, no taller than I, his posture a curve, skinny inside his baggy clothes. He was always quick to ingratiate himself with others, which I thought of as kindness and gentleness. I never saw him lose his temper. He seemed so nonthreatening, a guy who would not, could not, hurt me. I understand now why harmlessness appealed to me. My dad had spent years drilling the mantra “boys only want one thing” into my head; my mom was afraid for me to walk anywhere outside alone, day or night, lest I get abducted; and college campuses were rife with seminars on date rape and domestic violence. Though I had experienced none of those things, their threats breathed down my neck.