by Clarinda Harriss.
- Spray
Besides Jermaine of the housekeeping staff and the desk clerks who always wish her a blessed day, the only person who spoke to Candyce at the famous university’s rec center during the whole first year of her membership is a skinny, aggressively meditative type. He is a man who works out with his eyes shut except to shoot people dirty looks if they make any noise. Apparently convinced of his own bio-spiritual prowess, he uses way too much weight on the machines, with the result that the weights drop with a deafening clatter when he finishes a lift. He is monochromatic: grey of sparse hair and grey of complexion. A professor, clearly, but she doesn’t want to impugn any one department or College by guessing which.
–You sprayed my glasses.
In retrospect she wishes she’d flipped him the bird. In retrospect she knows exactly what she should have said.
–Sorry, she said.
Shaking his head at her clumsiness or rudeness or however he perceived her incorrect mat-wiping technique, he had abandoned the complicated yoga position into which he had macraméed himself, dropped to his bony knees, and demonstrated the proper method: i.e., spraying a wad of paper towels from one of the bottles of liquid posted about the area and mopping the mat with the sodden paper instead of spraying the mat and then wiping it with a dry wad.
Spray the mat and mop it dry was how mat wiping was done at her old gym, the YMCA on 33rd Street, where it would have been unthinkable for anybody, male or female, old or young, patron or employee, to fail to offer a gracious “good day,” a blessed day. She sometimes wonders why only older black people say “good day,” or “good afternoon,” any more, though “good morning” seems to be kind of multigenerational and multiracial. She wonders about races and generations and invisibility. She wonders about gangsta rap, how to balance it against the courtly flirtations with which the elderly black men of the Y flattered her after they finished bench-pressing half their ample weight. Flattered all the women, in fact, so long as they were of a certain age.
At the Y she once accidentally sent a cloud of spray pouffing into the air too near a dark gentleman one machine over. He pretended to wipe his glasses. Thanks, they needed that, he’d chuckled.
Damn. There she’d stood, being lectured by the famous university’s Professor of Mat Spraying, with a riposte ready and waiting and unused. Your glasses were filthy, dude.
- Stages
When she hit 50, she became invisible. From about 13 to 49, she could tell how she looked that day just by walking down the street and observing the way men looked at her. The men were reflectors like glass doors and store windows. Suddenly, nobody looked. What it some pheromone thing? Did she stop having the female smell? That explanation made no sense; the men half a block away couldn’t have smelled her, but they’d looked. She intercepts those looks now when she walks with her daughter, her daughter-in-law, her granddaughters. It never stops hurting, just a little bit, to realize those looks are not for her.
Twenty years later, unexpectedly, she regained a modicum of visibility via the Y Ghetto C A. God bless whose old gents with their close-cut grey hair or long grey dreads, their yellow-gray or brown eyes alight in their dark faces. Their smiles. Their “good day,” with a nod that was almost a bow.
- Rituals
Fred bows over his sink in the remodeled his-and-hers bathroom adjoining the bedroom they have shared ever since she told him he might as well move in. His head with its curly mane of white hair is tented under a towel. In this stance his resemblance to her late father is especially pronounced. Fred is into Extreme Shaving, shaving in a way that is as much as possible like being shaved in a barber shop, except for the copious shedding of his blood. Like her father, he does the whole bit: Yardley shaving soap in a wooden bowl, wooden brush with bristles from some actual animal or other, an old fashioned silvery “safety razor” that gets unscrewed to accept a razor blade from a slim blue packet. He owns a straight razor but can’t find it. Fact is, she hid it–deep in her own panties-and-bras drawer–as soon as she noticed that his head tended to nod when nodding wasn’t relevant. Fred accepts the fact that he can’t find things. In this too he reminds her of her father, who more than once said of her mother’s uncanny ability to find his lost objects, “The womb in a sensing instrument.” He had given up being, or at least showing, that he was embarrassed to be so forgetful.
In a minute Fred will ask her whether or not he should wear a tie. She will say Yes, we are going to a wedding, or No, we are just going to a little bistro, or No, we aren’t going out tonight. She will not say For godsake, you asked me that five minutes ago.
Sometimes she does say that. Then she hates herself and, when he asks her again in five more minutes, she tries to sound as bright and cheery as a fifties housewife in a vacuum cleaner commercial.
- Signs
Pedaling a stationary bike at the famous university’s rec center, she reads and re-reads a paper sign, lettered in ball-point ink, posted on a nearby door:
PERSONAL
TRAINING OFFICE.
If she’d seen that sign at her old gym, she might have thought the first word was intended to be “Personnel.” Spelling was not the long suit of paper-sign makers at the Y. After a few seconds she realizes that the sign is correctly spelled, if poorly worded and spaced.
PERSONAL TRAINERS’
OFFICE
would have been a clearer way to indicate that the door opened into the small space where the long, lean, sweat-pants clad , ponytailed or crew-cut trainer-kids convened. Actually good signage is by no means the long suit of the new gym. She considers the sign posted on one of the inside doors to the fitness room: THIS IS NOT AN ENTRANCE. Any would-be enter-ers would be on the other side of the door. She supposes the sign is meant to tell people inside to watch out for people outside who might barge in because they have no sign to tell them not to.
Having attended grad school at the famous university decades earlier, back when it was an all-male undergrad school, she is not surprised. McDonogh Hall, for example, had, on each venerable floor, two rooms with big opaque glass windows in their heavy oak doors; at one end of the hall the door read JANITOR, and at the other end the door read LAVATORY with nothing to indicate WOMEN or MEN. Queried about this conundrum, her adviser had smiled into his moustache.
–There were no women here when McDonogh Hall was built.
–But there are now.
–Ah, yes. Well, I think one of those lavatories on the third floor has become the de facto Ladies Room.
–How is a person supposed to know that?
–It’s a bit of an intelligence test.
Years later Candyce realized he had been making a little pun: “intelligence” as in “military intelligence” or “secret intelligence”: information one must glean cunningly.
Huh, she could post some signs in this gym, all right.
DON’T BOGART THE BALLS. DON’T HOARD THE DISKS.
IF YOU ADD A FREE WEIGHT, TAKE IT OFF WHEN YOU’RE DONE. NOT EVERYBODY CAN HEAVE A 100-LB FRISBEE AROUND.
WOULD IT KILL YOU TO PUT THE 5-POUND ADD-ON THING SOMEPLACE WHERE SOMEBODY ELSE CAN FIND IT, LIKE ON TOP OF THE MACHINE?
And of course EXIT in place of the current THIS IS NOT AN ENTRANCE. And ENTRANCE on the other side.
- Signs, II
She should have seen the warning signs when she first started dating Fred. She’d thought he just wasn’t paying attention. Five years later she realizes with the help of much self-help and Fred-help literature from the famous university hospital’s Memory Loss Clinic that he is paying attention, he is desperately straining to give every word his most profound attention, but he can’t hold a thought for more than a couple of seconds. It hardly matters, because Fred is as handsome and sweet as he was back when he was a sophomore at the famous university and she was a high school senior at Notre Dame Prep. Her parents would have loved Fred. But he never became one of those boys waiting for her uncomfortably in the foyer: she never actually went out with him.
Back then in several brief encounters he showed her it was actually possible for a boy to be hip, cool (what were the words they used then?), adored by his frat brothers as well as by myriad girls from Goucher and Mary Washington and preppy high schools (the last having nary a prayer of landing him for a date), and still be, well, nice. Better than nice. Kind, gentle, considerate, and smart. Also willing and able to read. Read actual books. He knew the gender of George Eliot before she did. She learned these things at a Delta Phi fraternity party to which a less-cool-than-Fred freshman at the famous university had escorted her. Now Fred has no recollection of even talking to her at that party.
It was in the late 1950s that she first encountered Fred. They met at a gathering to which her parents and other parents had been invited to bring their sulky, foot-dragging teenage children, among most of whom reading was not cool or hip or whatever. Certainly studying ballet because you wanted to (not because you had had polio, as Candyce told her prep school classmates) was not. Convinced somehow that she could have admitted to Fred that she read books and wanted to be a ballet dancer, Candyce developed a crush on Fred which went unrequited, indeed entirely unrecognized, till some fifty years later when they met at a mutual friend’s art opening in Manhattan. By then Fred seemed even cooler and hipper. He was the absentee landlord of the gallery.
But maybe the years’ mileage had done some good to Candyce’s squeaky-clean RC Girls Prep School exterior. He saw her and he liked her. And he had not lost the thing she’d always suspected he had: a sweet tooth for sex. Both had been married three times and vowed not to do that again. Both had a batch of cool, hip grandchildren. Fred moved from his costly near-NYC digs into Candyce’s big old house not far from the famous university’s campus.
It’s got so they always grocery-shop together–whether at the Ghetto Giant or the expensive shops with names that had been on awninged Baltimore butcher shops or bakeries back when photos of the city were taken in the 1800s. At the Giant not long ago a little girl had tugged her grandmother’s hand, pointed to Fred and Candyce, and whispered, “Look. They match.” It must be all the white hair, Candyce figured.
Candyce has learned to use wisely the moments when she gets to go anywhere, such as the post office or dry cleaner, by herself. Good cell-phone-the-girlfriends time. But she is finding that texting them once in a while works almost as well. And Fred is increasingly alarmed to be left home alone.
- Weight
–God damn, you must have some triceps on you, Sweetie. You ought to take off that sweatshirt, show ‘em off.
–What?
–You have what, 55 pounds stacked on that machine.
–I just got to it. I’m going to take off all but 25.
She hates being a compulsive explainer. But this is the longest exchange she has had with a fellow gym member since she started coming here eight months ago.
–Jake Jacobsen. Please ta meetcha.
–Candyce here.
–Hey there, Candy.
–CANDYCE.
–Been watchin you, Candy.
His handshake lasts a few seconds too long, as does his eye-lock. Candyce recognizes him: he is the codger who wears his white hair Liberace-style and carries a skinny black comb in his shorts with which he flips the giant wave back from his forehead whenever he gets up from the bench.
He flips his pompadour like Sonny Stetke, the movie-star gorgeous basketball player who ruled Polytech High School five decades ago. Sonny was a greaser, only in Baltimore they were called drapes. Their hair wasn’t greasy; it draped elegantly to a D.A. at the back, a meshing of bodily fiber as intricate as any real duck’s ass. Except Jake Jacobsen’s draped hair is white. And fifty-some years later than Sonny Stetke’s.
–How much weight do you do total?
This is not a question which has ever occurred to her. She supposes she could figure it out—70 pounds on one machine, 30 on another, 25 on the triceps machine, 50 or so on the abs machine—but why bother?
–Look here.
Jake thrusts a spiral notebook up under Candyce’s bifocals. In it are pages and pages of columns with dates, machines, amounts of weight.
–I’ve lifted a hundred thousand pounds since I started coming here.
–Pretty impressive.
Candyce peers beyond his shoulder to see if her favorite bike (the only one facing the windows) is free. Just past Jake’s large, expensive gym shoes she can see a young blond woman seated on a mat in some sort of yoga pose. Viewed from behind, she appears to be cuddling a bald baby, nuzzling the blond fuzz on its head. It takes a few seconds for Candyce to compute “baby’s head = girl’s knee.”
–Well, I’ve got to get to my mat work now.
–I’ve watched you do your mat work. You could do that at home. You ought to spend more time lifting. Not that you don’t already have a great body, Hon. But how are you going to fight off the all guys coming after you if you don’t do strength training?
–I’m going to go do my mat work now.
The thing about the elderly black flirts at the Y was, they’d never think of getting in your way, blocking your path to wherever you were headed. There was a certain fluidity about them. They told you that you looked especially fine today, but they kept moving.
Flipping his pompadour, Jake looms between her and the mat area like a ghost of drapes past, a very tall and solid ghost. Hon. He calls her Hon. “Hon” is so far removed from famous-university patois that it’s almost refreshing. For a second.
- Refrain
–Are we doing anything special tonight?
–No, we’re just going to have a nice dinner on the sun-porch and maybe watch a move on On Demand.
–So I don’t need to shave?
–No, sweetheart, you can rest your face today and get a little bit stubbly, like those actors when we were watching the Oscars. Remember how sexy we thought they were? I thought so, anyway.
–Fine, I’ll shave tomorrow.
Fred prepares the hot towel and commences to shave.
- Pictures
–Candy, Hon, I got something to show you.
–I’ve already seen your weight notebook.
–Wait’ll you see this. It’s a scrapbook. My dad was an artist. You’ll see my dad had great taste in women. Big T and A man, my dad. He’d a loved you.
Candyce grudgingly looks at the open book of pictures while Jake turns the pages.
–Oh my god! That painting is hanging in my house!
Jake’s dad had to be Christian Jacobsen, a semi-famous painter who had been a friend of her parents. He mostly painted nudes, which, judging from the scrapbook, grew pinker as he got older. The painting in Candyce’s house was done in his earlier palette, ivory skin emerging from burnt umber. Candyce has always thought it was a picture of her mother, though her mother denied it to her dying day and her father always twinkled enigmatically when queried.
–You need to come home with me. I can show you paintings nobody else ever seen. He left me all the paintings that wasn’t sold.
–That’s not going to happen, Jake.
She’d have thought the son of a semi-famous painter would use better grammar.
–Well, if you change your mind.
He hands her his card with his address and the name of his plumbing business: Johnny OnThe Spot. Maybe he doesn’t realize that Johnny OnThe Spot is already in use by a company specializing in portable toilets. Naming portable toilet companies ranks high among American art forms, she has always thought—Portapotty, Spot a Pot, Gottugo with that Motley Crue-type umlaut over the u—but it seems to her that the son of a semi-famous painter ought to be able to come up with something original.
- Memories
The monthly lunch gathering of the Lunch Ladies—retirees from the college where Candyce used to teach—took place this time in one of the now-trendy stone storefront places on the 200-some-year-old main street of Ellicott City, just west of Baltimore. Maybe it was the wine (only one glass of Sauvignon blanc, and she’d made it last till almost 3 PM), but driving home afterward Candyce got completely turned around. Only she didn’t realize it until she noticed she was driving into the sun’s downward path, when the sinking sun should be behind her. She turned around and headed east, at first worried—was her wonderful sense of direction starting to fail her?–then rather proud of her ability to travel by the sun. Celestial navigation, she told herself. An ancient art.
At the front door she knocks repeatedly on the mullioned glass, having driven Fred’s car without remembering that he didn’t carry a house key on the ring with his car key. The doorbell had died years ago. No answer. Candyce feels a flash of fear; she is at least an hour late getting home from the lingering luncheon; has something happened to him? Just as she starts fumbling under a hydrangea for the plastic rock hiding the spare key, Fred pops out of the side door—the door that opens into the laundry room. He is wearing only a T-shirt. It is just long enough in front to cover the essentials; in back the shirt reveals the two crescents where his tough little butt meets his long runner’s legs.
–Were you knocking? I couldn’t hear with the dryer going.
Fred took over laundry duty almost immediately after moving in. He said it was because he wanted to feel useful, but Candyce’s having dyed his pale yellow shirt a sort of orangey maize by washing it with a red towel must have had something to do with it. Candyce was grateful. Lately she’d been dying her own clothing some unintended colors
Candyce follows him into the laundry room. Fred is now naked.
–Might as well wash everything. Did you know you have a stain of some sort all down the front of your dress?
Candyce pulls her flowered-jersey maxi-dress off over her head and drops it into the open washing machine door. It’s the kind of dress under which nothing much has to be worn, even by somebody Candyce’s age. She notices Fred gazing pointedly at her black string bikini, for which her rationale is that she really ought to wear something in the way of underwear—suppose (her mother’s voice rises from the grave) she’s run over crossing the street or something? She kicks off the bikini and adds it to the washing machine. Fred’s eyes gleam approval.
–Mr. Wu: his dream comes true.
–Wow, Fred, that’s a little poem! But Mr.Wu? Who’s that?
Fred shakes his head in mock disbelief.
–How could you not remember Mr. Wu’s Chinese Hand Laundry?
Ah so. Yes. It was around the corner from the school where she and Fred first met in the middle of the previous century, right next to the drug store with the soda fountain.
The door opens onto the driveway beside the house. The neighbors on that side both work from home. Their house is mostly windows. Candyce and Fred tacitly agree to leave the door open while they enjoy each other’s stripped-down state. Sort of reverse voyeurism. Sexy.
- Mat work
–Don’t DO that!
She didn’t mean to yell, but she couldn’t help it. She is easily startled, and she can’t get used to sitting up from a mat-induced endorphin trance with Jake standing at her feet, watching. No telling how long he’s been watching. Nobody yells at anybody at the famous university’s rec center. Heads turn her way. This Monday she is momentarily visible.
–Do what, Hon?
Jake had grabbed hold of her foot while she was still on her back on the mat, counting ceiling tiles in French, Spanish, and English.
–Didn’t want to startle you.
–Well, you did, and I wish you wouldn’t stand around watching me. It really makes me nervous.
Jake takes her by both hands and helps her up. She can smell his breath—braunsweiger? He keeps hold of her hands.
–Shouldn’t be so touchy, little Miss Candy.
And now he does something unbelievable. He pinches her. Not her butt—not that she even has much of a butt to pinch—but her right breast. Pinches her boob, her tit, her bosom, her girl. In all her 70-some years, most of which included having a pretty sizable rack, nobody has ever done that. It stung. And it stunned.
- Secrets
She won’t tell Fred about getting her boob tweaked. If she does, she knows he’ll insist on coming to the gym with her. The gym is her escape. She fears she may be coming down with what all the books on aging—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s– call “caretaker burnout.”
Maybe when she needs to be alone for a little while she should shop instead.
Fred, nearing 80, is as strong and obstinate as a mule. He had been a marathon runner. Earlier, he had been a lacrosse star. The gym would be good for him. She ought to accept his daily offer to come with her. She doesn’t have to tell him about the pinch. Then she thinks about Fred and Jake becoming weight buddies, weight rivals. Men glom onto Fred; he is what used to be called a man’s man. She doesn’t tell Fred anything about the Jake thing, even though not telling him makes her feel unfaithful.
She feels unfaithful enough every time she glimpses his hurt expression when she tells him she feels she works out better when she does it by herself.
As for substituting shopping for working out, Fred loves to shop with her. Even when she’s shopping for shoes.
- Routine
Candyce figures if she changes from Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to Tuesdays and Thursdays (Jake was right about her mat work being do-able at home) and changes from early to late morning, she won’t run into him. But he is always there.
Somehow she tends to forget about him when she is on the mat. She tries to concentrate on each muscle of her abdomen and thighs and buttocks—one buttock at a time, actually–as she goes through her core-strengthening exercises. She makes them harder for herself with elastic resistance bands stretched between hands and feet and a stability disk under her feet to force herself to work at maintaining balance. She tries hard not to arch her back while doing planks.
She allows herself to show off on the calves machine where you lie on your stomach and lift with your feet. She can do 75 pounds a leg on that one, though it probably doesn’t do her back any good. She counts knee lifts in Spanish and leg lifts in French. She makes herself start over if she accidentally switched languages. She sometimes does beaucoup, muchos, extra reps while counting ceiling tiles and thinking about Fred. Cien. Oops, cent.
–Goddammit, get away from me!
This time she yells loud and on purpose. Because there he is, the boob-squeezing bastard, standing over her.
The grey guy whose glasses she’d sprayed stares at her. So do a couple of undergrads on the ellipticals. Nobody yells at anybody at the famous university’s rec center. And, oddly enough, everybody talks to Jake, if only to say Wow, man, that’s great, when he displays his latest weight notebook entries.
- Henry
When Candyce dismounts from the tall spin bike, she nearly trips over a small robot. His name, Henry, appears in large black newspaper-headline-type letters on his bright red forehead. At the base of his red skull is a small flag of Great Britain. She knows Henry is just a fancy vacuum cleaner, but she can’t help patting his round pate. Henry has a rather big head, considering how short he is; his body type is “dwarf.”
She immediately strikes “dwarf” from her anthropomorphizing of Henry. After all, her own body type is now “deformed.” Almost “crippled.” The maternal osteoporosis and spinal stenosis. The paternal broad shoulders. The boobs, from whence? Whatever, wherever, they are no longer quite the same size, shape, or lateral plane. Seventies suck.
–Hello, Henry. Hello, Jermaine, how do you like Henry?
–I love Henry. He’s the best. You should see how cute he runs his little teeny brushes over the tops of the baseboards and all.
So Candyce feels that maybe she hasn’t gone stark crazy after all. Burned-out caregivers sometimes do that, according to the books. Just last week, she turned on Fred for the first time. Yelled at him till she was hoarse. The issue was his having once again disappeared the Xeroxed regimen and list of medications, as well as the actual meds, which the Memory Clinic doctor had prescribed. She banged the table where he sat staring into his computer till the computer jumped and he jumped up as if to defend himself.
Instead he clutched his head with both hands and wept.
–My memory, he said. My memory is not the best.
His agony was one which Candyce suddenly, blindingly, recognized. It was the agony and the exact gesture of her father during one of her mother’s most terrible tirades. Candyce has never been able to forgive her mother for those tirades until now.
- Missing
It is a relief when Candyce sits up on the mat one Monday and Jake isn’t there. He isn’t there Wednesday, either, or Friday. Not that week or the following week. She has to admit she kind of misses him. She definitely feels bad about him. She’d been openly rude to him. Anybody who hadn’t spotted the tit-tweak, which was probably everybody, would consider her manners gross. Especially at a male-centric place like the famous university, at least the famous university as it used to be. Or does she miss the way his eyes made her so extremely visible?
Maybe Jake has stopped coming to the gym on account of her. She revs up her nerve and approaches one of the thirty-something men she has often seen him talking to.
–Jake hasn’t been here for quite a while. Do you think something’s happened to him?
–You mean that older man with all the white hair? Very personable. You really have to admire how hard he works out at his age. He must be away on vacation or something.
The student working the front desk overhears.
–Mr. Jacobsen had an accident. Here’s his wife’s phone number if you want to find out how he’s doing. Poor guy. We hear it was pretty serious.
Candyce runs up to the lobby with her cell phone and calls. Mrs. Jacobsen’s Baltimore-accented voice sounds exhausted. She explains at length that he got hit by a car as he was jaywalking across a rush-hour street to get carry-out Chinese. She tells Candyce that she had made a perfectly good dinner at home but no, he said he didn’t feel like any damn chicken again.
Boor, boor, boor, Candyce thinks.
Mrs. Jacobsen’s voice quavers. She’d yelled at him, told him he might as well go find something to eat someplace else because she sure as hell wasn’t going to cook a different dinner.
–It was hit and run. He’s paralyzed for life.”
In the silence she adds, You know, for him the worst part was the hospital lost his toupee.
- Penance
Candyce resigns from the famous university’s rec center.
She walks to the Y (same distance from her house, different direction, different socio-economics) and applies for re-instatement. The Y actually costs twice as much, because the base rate pays for yoga and Zumba and swim classes. She doesn’t take yoga, Zumba, or swim classes.
She walks from the Y back to the famous university’s rec center while retracting her resignation via cell phone.
When she gets to the famous university, Jermaine is walking Henry in the lobby of the rec center. She pats Henry’s head and nods good day to Jermaine. Then she darts around the corner to the Ladies Room where she contemplates her hair in the mirror. Same shoulder-length pageboy she’d worn since high school, only white instead of auburn. She wets her hands and scours her hair straight back, stuffs it behind her ears, and secures it by wrapping a sweat band around her forehead. Well, not actually a sweat band: the polar fleece ear warmer she has carried in her jacket pocket ever since the last time it was cold. She leaves her ears sticking out. She looks harsh and serious.
- Forgiveness
In the fitness room a man speaks to Candyce. His exact words are “A screw’s missing.” He refers to her OMG squeal upon yanking the seat of the traps machine clear out of its socket when she tried to raise it, and, more specifically, to the sight of her standing there holding the whole seat and its iron support in her hands. He helps her stick the support back into the socket. The man had been using the traps machine ahead of her; he is huge, which is why the seat had been down as low as it would go.
–You do so much weight on this machine it makes me feel like a total wimp.
Candyce moves the pin from the 85-pound position to the 25-pound position and adds the extra five-pound thing. The man smiles slightly as he hurries to the overhead pull-down machine. Candyce hopes he doesn’t think she was flirting. She hopes she wasn’t flirting.
On her way out, somebody else speaks; not to her, but in her general direction. The portly gentleman manning the front desk is pointing out a bowl of leftover Halloween M & M mini-packs to a woman who has just come in.
–These are not exactly healthy. The woman glares at the M & Ms.
–Well, they’re green. Candyce taps the little green dress of the lady M & M dancing on the wrapper.
The gentleman at the desk laughs. To Candyce’s surprise, so does the woman.
–You’re right, I’ll take two.
–I’m taking a couple extras for my boyfriend, OK? Candyce put three little packs of M & Ms into a pocket of her gym bag, two for Fred and one for herself.
It wasn’t a conversation, exactly, but it seems like a start.
- Homecoming
When Candyce gets home from the rec center, Fred greets her looking so handsome she realizes how greasy and sweaty she is, not to mention the fact that he is a better looking man than she is a woman. This is something that bothered Candyce when he arrived for their 50-year-belated first date. Today he is wearing a tattersall shirt over a navy tee; indigo jeans, slightly whiskered; a mushroom gray linen sports coat. His white hair is a mass of waves which he tries to tame with beautiful unsuccess.
–Where did you say we were going this evening?
–Just the Giant, sweet thing. You’ll dazzle ’em at the Giant. We don’t have dinner plans except right here.
–I vacuumed the dining room. The Garners are coming, I believe.
–Remember? They were here two nights ago?
Candyce hates herself when she does that “Remember?” thing. Never again, she vows for the hundredth time. She doesn’t want to see those tears, those two hands clutching his desperate face, ever again. She knows she will.
–Your hair’s different.
Fred looks Candyce over with the appraising gaze of a man half his age.
–For the gym, love. After I shower I’m going to fluff it back up. So it’s just like yours.