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“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety.”
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2
“Burn with me!
The only music is time,
The only dance is love.”
King of the River, Stanley Kunitz
Standing at her closet, still naked from her shower and wondering what to wear to lunch, Frannie heard Stanley’s key scratch at the front door lock. A draught of biting winter air sliced through their bedroom. Frannie hurried to close the door.
“It’s pretty cold,” she thought she heard him say. “May snow.”
But he managed to catch the bedroom door before it fully closed and he caught her standing there. Oh, God. She tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. He shouldn’t see her like this.
Her husband barely glanced at her as he pushed past to retrieve his glasses from the top of the chest of drawers.
“Why bother?” he said mildly, dropping the glasses into his breast pocket and closing the door behind him.
Moving away from the chill left in the air, Frannie moved slowly towards the bathroom’s full-length mirror. Arms at her sides, she stood. And looked. To see what Stanley had seen.
Her mottled, freckled chest, he’d seen. But they hadn’t known about sun back then, so it was something of a surprise, although she’d never expected these pancaked breasts, either, nor the small mushroom farms growing beneath their awkward, sloppy, weight. And what about the puffy hill of her pale, defenseless stomach that ended in a scraggly patch of pubic hair – some of which was gray, she saw now. How had she not known that pubic hair turns gray? In fact, when Arlene had mentioned it the other morning, she’d been stunned. Although it made a certain sense, she thought. The hair on her head was mostly gray (beneath the dye). Her eyebrows – what was left of them – were gray. She touched them up, but they were gray. Yet how, at sixty-six, could there still have been something so basic she didn’t know? Age was supposed to bring wisdom.
She ran damp palms down her thickened body. No waist, wide hips, fat thighs. When she got to those lumpy thighs, she folded her hands into fists, and her reluctant gaze slid past hairless shins to her sad, bunioned feet with their overlong second toes.
It couldn’t have been many years ago when she’d been slim and supple as a whippet, her hipbones like paired knives and a stomach, not just flat, but absurdly concave. Her skin had been satin back then; her breasts … alright, they’d been unexceptional. Not perky not plush, just a nothing-to-brag-about B cup. But these days – these leftover days – she was into – and even a little out of – a DD. But at twenty, there’d been none of these flesh-colored moles, had there? No veinous freeways, no pinkly larval skin tags. (Who thought up words like “skin-tags” anyway?) With an involuntary groan, Frannie turned toward the window and the late-winter treeline beyond.
Why had she looked?
She sat heavily on the bed and reached for the remote, but it wasn’t there. She felt around the floor, and finding it under one of Stanley’s socks, pushed herself up to one elbow and clicked.
Elizabeth Taylor. There she was.
Frannie leaned gratefully back on the pillows. They smelled of his hair.
Oh yes, there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, with her perfect, provocative, perfect and large, perfect and movie-star breasts. Elizabeth in Suddenly Last Summer yet again.
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