LITMIR.BIZ

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Look, get it out of your head. I’m not going to the mainland in the summer. You know I don’t feel well, I can’t be traveling in such heat with all my problems. It’ll set me back ten years.”

      He suggested making plans to go in the fall when the weather became cooler. He was playing on her love of the slots. On her love of getting dressed up and like a proper civilized person giving her money away willingly and happily to a small steel machine.

      Viva! Las Vegas.

      But she couldn’t face the thought of traveling anywhere with George, of spending every waking moment with him and sleeping moment, too, for they could hardly get two hotel rooms, could they? The thought of not having a room of her own to retire to where she could close the door, and when no one would see her, was too difficult even as a thought to Allison. She couldn’t imagine it, how could she ever live it?

      “Would you stop pestering me already! What’s this compulsion with always going, going, going? Why can’t you sit still for a moment? And if you wanted your beloved continent so much, why did we buy a condo in Maui, then, huh? Why did you push me to buy one here?”

      George reminded her she was the one who had wanted to live in Maui.

      “Oh, that’s right, blame it all on me. Well, fine, we’re here, and I’m paying plenty for this condo, I’m not leaving it for three months to go somewhere else. What an idiotic waste of money. You always were a spendthrift. That’s why you don’t have any money now.”

      Slowly, very slowly, he suggested selling the condo and moving back east. To North Carolina, perhaps, where there was fishing and gardening, and seasons, and lakes—where his brother lived.

      “We just got here and you want to move already? You’re sick, that’s what you are. You need professional help, why can’t you be happy anywhere, why? It’s beautiful here, what the hell is wrong with you? You have too much time on your hands, that’s your problem.”

      And then she started falling down.

      After the first time she fell, he asked her about it, and she said, “Cough syrup. Haven’t you been paying any attention to what’s going on with me? I’m very sick.” She coughed for emphasis.

      “Maybe if you left the apartment once for five minutes in a whole month, you’d feel better.”

      “Oh, that’s great! Go ahead, scream at a sick woman!”

      The next morning when George came back from his constitutional walk and swim at eight-thirty, she had fallen again in the sunken living room.

      “It’s my osteoporosis,” she said later. “My knees buckle. They don’t bend anymore like they used to.”

      He found her on the floor clutching the mail in her hands.

      “The cough syrup,” Allison told him. “Mixed with antidepressants. The doctor said it’s a very dangerous combination. I could die.”

      “Then why do you take them in a combination?”

      “Oh, I suppose that’s what you want, your depressed wife to cough herself to death!”

      In the mornings she was always in a terrible mood, and in the afternoons George didn’t see her because she was sleeping. He hated cooking only for himself, hated eating alone. But what could he do? He would have tuna sashimi, with some soy sauce and wasabi. He had never had tuna of the kind he bought in Maui, or pineapples. He ate them in the afternoon, while he planned his dinner menu, read cookbooks, went on the computer, emailed his friends, called one of his children and sat on the patio, smoking and waiting for his wife to awaken. The sun was bright, the wind high, the trees sparkling green, and twice a week the rolling lawns in the condo units were mowed and the air smelled so green and fresh and cut-grassy as he ate his dripping mangoes.

      Allison got up hours before George, despite the black blankets she hung on her windows to keep the light out. As soon as the Hawaiian sun shot an arrow of light over the horizon at five, Allison was up. She didn’t want to be up. She wished she could sleep soundly through till midday. When the children were small, isn’t that what she had dreamed about? Isn’t that what her oldest daughter dreams about now, with four little ones of her own? To sleep and not be awakened? Why won’t Allison’s body sleep past the squinting sunrise?

      It’s that Hawaiian sunrise.

      At night she stayed up until two or three in the morning, watching old movies, infomercials, the psychic network, the shopping channel, and had big plans for herself for the next day. Big plans. She would get up, and go for that cursed beach walk with him, and she would clean and do laundry and then maybe they would go out for the afternoon, go for a drive, into the fucking rainforest, into the fucking volcano. To Lahaina maybe where she could do a little shopping, a little window browsing. They would find a restaurant right on the ocean and have dinner while watching the sunset. Oh, and she would read. She had the time. Her older daughters kept sending her novels to read. Her small condo was overwhelmed with their packages. It’s not that she didn’t try to read. She did. She just couldn’t read a single sentence through to the end. Not one. Her mind would start wandering, she would lose track of her thoughts, she would start examining her hands, dotted with age, darkened with the years. Her nails, thinking about polish, red or clear? She would—

      Nothing held her interest, not a single word in anybody else’s life. Don’t they know what’s happening to me, she wanted to cry. I’m old. My skin is sagging, and the corners of my eyes have turned down. I’m bloated and I’ve got skin where I shouldn’t have any.

       The look of love is in your eyes …

      Sometimes music played from the past in the quiet condo.

      I want to be young again, she cried, standing by the window. I want to be young and to swim in the sea, and fall in love, I want to be beautiful and watch him fall in love with me.

      She told this to George and he flung out his hand and said, “Swim in the sea every fucking morning, Allison.”

      “You don’t understand anything,” she said. “I said swim in the sea young.”

      She wasn’t growing old gracefully.

      The day was so long, there was so much of it, and there was nothing she wanted to do, there was nothing she needed to do. Was Hawaii beautiful? Yes, so what. Peaceful? Still so what. She constantly wished for rain. Rain! Sky be cloudy! Be gray.

      Every day was like every other. The morning was crisp, in the afternoon there were winds, and the evening was all gold hues and still waters. Come another day and another and another. After living in seasonal New York so many years, after coming from damp northern Poland as a little girl, Allison had said all her life that what she wanted was somewhere warm to rest her weary bones. They came to Maui when they heard it was paradise. And here it was.

      Allison had never been more miserable.

      She cleaned the condo, but that took all of an hour. She showered. She made her bed. She made coffee. She smoked. She pretended to read the paper, she pretended to read books, she thumbed through catalogs, she indifferently watched TV. She didn’t know how to make her life right. If only she hadn’t had all those children. They sapped, sucked what young life she had had and weren’t any comfort to her in her old age either. She never heard from them. Even from youngest to whom she still sent money. Allison didn’t hear from Lily the most. The ungrateful youngest child. The noose around the neck of Allison’s thwarted ambitions.

      But it wasn’t the nonexistent career she lamented the most. It wasn’t the children. It wasn’t the husband. It was the loss of youth, the loss of youthful beauty, the loss of skin tone and smoothness, the pert freshness of her young legs, her arms, her flat stomach; it was the vertical lines, the horizontal lines, it was the neck that no amount of Creme de la Mer could fix. Youth. In the war against Time, her minuscule armies were being defeated, and it wasn’t an even fight. Time knew she wasn’t a mythical creature that sloughed off its old skin as it went into the sea and came out fresh to her daughters and granddaughters

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