Love, Lose, And Repeat

Pagophagia

"I'm sick of the heat, Oscar. It's almost midnight and I'm sweating."
    "I think it's been a mild summer, really." Oscar said lighting the pack of tobacco in his briar pipe. He arched it down to see a red cherry clutching onto dark, black tobacco. He puffed out spinning streams of smoke. It dived into his wife's face.
    "I don't know how you can stand smoking that--and in this heat! In this weather?" She waved smoke away from her eyes to clearly see her husband in his rocking chair--valor robe--tube socks, still white on the bottom. He puffed out fits of gray that slid out from cracks in his mouth.
    "Cupcake, I think you're--"
    "Say it." Her neck snapped back around at him before she popped open the window by his chair. "Say it. Say it." She sat on the ledge, with her back wobbling out into a cool wind. "Sweet Jesus even this doesn't help."
    "It's perimenopause--the beginning stages--its common for women your age."
    "My age? Jesus! Jesus, Oscar, really? I feel like I was twenty-two yesterday." She hiked up the black skirt from around her knees and up over her thighs; it was like she opened an oven door. Heat poured from her legs to release sweat. Her husband was looking down at an encyclopedia of medical terms. He liked to brush up on phrases every other month.
    "No Cupcake, but our daughter will be twenty-two next year."
    She lifted the corners of her eyes up towards her forehead,"I need a face lift and some insomnia medication." She felt it all sag back down into a puddle of skin when she released. Her fingers nails were long and painted red and if she took the nail polish off they were hard and yellow. Her feet had callouses and every other day she was snipping skintags off her neck with scissors.
    "I'll squeeze you in Thursday after my two-a-clock." He turned a crisp, loud page after wetting his thumb to lift it. His eyes shifted over words that he mumbled and shook his head at.
    "Or maybe I just need a vacation." She stopped and leaned forward. She snagged the book out of his hands, "I think I am more important than..." looking down at the table of terms, "pagophagia."
    He lifted up eyes that were cobwebbed with the gray brow that tangled down onto his eyelids and lashes. "Our annual vacation is coming up."
    "I want to go to Canada."
    "I was thinking tropical."
    "I just can't take the heat. I'm hot--all the time. It comes in..."
    "Flashes, Cupcake?" The jowls of his mouth wobbled when he talked. She watched him as he spoke and her mouth drooped open and her tongue poked the corner of her cheek,
    "Canada or I'm staying home this year, Oscar." Her eyes travelled to her husband's heavy brow to his flopping jowls to the patch of gray chest hair that lay in a public tuft of curly gray. She threw her hands in the air and they jingled with the weight of her strings of heavy gold bracelets lining her wrists. "Or you can go to your tropical destination and I will go visit Annie in Nova Scotia, or did you forget she was there?"
    "Of course I didn't forget Annie, I just forgot about my desire to travel 700 hundred miles to shiver when I can do that here in about three months."
    "You just don't care about me, or the children, or my--comfort." She put her hand over her face and let out a few dry sobs.
    He stood from the wooden rocking chair and when she saw him reach full height with clenched fists and a fire-breathing mouth she lifted her skirt again but this time it wasn't for the breeze, "Oh, Oscar." She said smiling through red lipstick that melted into wrinkles around her mouth.
    "You can go to Canada." He slammed shut the window with a quick beat. Geneva bolted up holding her backside like she just avoided a grenade; her skirt fell back down by her knees and she stood there holding her breath. He let out a strong, tobacco-smelling breath. "I'll go to Aruba, or Bermuda, separately." Then his pipe,was slammed down on the table.
    She stood with wide brown eyes and the medical dictionary dangling from one hand. She shook her head, "You mean separate vacations?" She tilted her head until it hit her shoulder, "that's an idea."
    Oscar reached a hand out in front of himself and wiggled fat, wrinkled fingers until she laid his book down on his palm.
    "Oscar, dear?"
    He turned around. His shoulders were hunched and the knot of his robe was loosening as he walked. Th light in the living room bathed the room in yellow. When she looked at his face, drained white and cold, she couldn't see the yellow anymore. "Oscar, I think this will be good for us."
    "I'm going to reread the last few pages in bed." He said holding the blue bound book over his head.
    "Oscar," it was more of a plead that second time she said his name. Her hands were fiddling with the red scarf around her neck. "Tell me what pagophagia is?"
    "Compulsive ingestion of ice." He said winding up the white, carpeted stairs.
    "Are you sure that this is what you want?"
    "Want?" He stopped at the top of the stairs but did not look back, "It's what we need."
    "What will it change?" She leaned over the railing, then ,turned back to the closed window and his pipe laid out on the table, still smoking.
    "I want to be warm, Geneva. I want to lay out on a beach and sweat."
    She took to the stairs. She creeped up each stair until she reached her husband looking back at her. She put a red finger-nailed hand to his purple robe and kissed his cheek. She felt it wiggle like jelly under the heat of her mouth. “Tomorrow at two then, Oscar dear?”
    “Whatever you need.”