“Do you like this one?” He showed her his latest creation, framed in the scrolled gold frame he used for all his works, exchanging one for the other almost daily.
She screwed up her face. “No, not as much as the others,” she said carefully. She hated not being effusive about his efforts, knowing how excited he was about each drawing, how these drawings meant so much to him, the only “work” he felt he now produced.
Retirement was so much harder on men her age than on women she reflected. She herself was thankful not to have to go into an office at a set time anymore, wrangle with people, coax and cajole them, attend meetings where nothing was ever decided. Wiggle her feet in uncomfortable “office” shoes, surreptitiously adjust bra straps, straighten skirts.
Now she luxuriated in the morning when she awoke, looking at the time and thinking that she didn’t have to rush anywhere. She woke early out of habit and that, too, was a luxury, looking at the spreading light outside, burrowing under the duvet until the central heating clicked on. What would work have looked like now anyway, she wondered, in these days where telecommuting was required, the campuses being shut, COVID warnings everywhere. Would her staff have been laid off? Would she have had a whole new set of challenges....
She shook herself back to his question, looked at his crestfallen face.
“Oh, you don’t like it,” he said.
“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “I just feel that scrolled gold frame is wrong for that drawing.” Unlike his other works, this one was pale, a series of Picasso-like dots that coalesced into a beach scene. “The frame overpowers it.”
He lumbered out of the kitchen and she thought nothing more of it until, walking down the hall, she saw that the drawing had replaced another one, one that she HAD liked.
“Hmmm,” she thought. “So much for my opinion.” And then she caught herself.
This was how marriages start to crumble post-retirement and especially during these COVID times. The little things become major when nothing else intervenes.
When, during this time of stay-at-home, every interaction becomes a minefield for an explosion of hurt feelings, of pent-up emotions. When the realization comes that this person that you had once longed to spend every waking moment of your life with had somehow changed into someone you would barely want to spend an hour with.
Did HE feel the same way, she wondered. Was he tired of their relationship, wondering where life would take them next? She looked over at him, asleep on the couch at 9 in the morning, wearing the same t-shirt he had worn for the past several months, the underarms worn away, wearing away more with every wash.
Or was she, as he sometimes said when he felt guilty about no longer displaying the same passion for her as he had earlier in their marriage, his mainstay, the thing (that word, “thing”) that made his life bearable. “Like a child’s beloved teddy bear,” she snorted to herself. Forgotten until some event drove the child to grab it as a defense against an unfair, cold world.
She marched to the laundry room, grabbing the dog’s leash from its peg, Clancy dancing at her heels. These thoughts were just NOT worth having on this bright beautiful day, the first day of December, when the promise of the Christmas season and, more potently, the promise of this awful year of 2020, with its pandemic and almost continuous bad news/fake news and contention, would finally end and 2021 would usher in a vaccine and hope of new beginnings.
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