A Cup of Comfort for Couples (27 page)

He invited me to his house, where Gary slept in a king-sized bed in the master bedroom and Jim slept on a twin mattress on the floor of a tiny room resembling a closet with windows. Upstairs were two additional bedrooms, both stuffed with Jim's possessions. One was filled with rows and rows of black plastic shelving units from Home Depot, each covered in matching boxes from the post office, neatly stacked and meticulously labeled. The other room had built-in shelves nestled within its walls, and sitting neatly upon each shelf was a stack of folded pants. Every pair of slacks, jeans, and trousers was perfect — each pair crisply ironed and accurately folded to exactly the same length, each stack precisely the same height as the one next to it. And each pants tower was labeled with an identical yellow Post-it, with neatly printed letters that said, “Slightly Tight,” “Very Tight,” “Very Loose,” “Slightly Loose,” or “Just Right.”

But the pants towers paled next to his yogurt cup collection. These he had amassed for years, and they held a place of honor on a shelf built just for them, immediately adjacent to his plastic bag collection. It was obvious that Jim never parted with anything that might possibly, someday be useful. I suspected this might bode well for a future relationship, as I, too, was useful.

After two failed relationships, I had baggage. I had trust issues. I had been knocked around quite a bit and made to feel even smaller than my five-foot frame might suggest. I trusted no one. I fully expected the relationship to fail, and I figured I would be the one to cause its inevitable demise. It was only a matter of time.

But somehow Jim got past all of that. His first kiss was brushed gently upon my forehead, and I confess that I melted inside. When he invited me to stay over, it was just that — staying over. There was no sex, just cuddling, and I had never felt so completely safe and cherished. When we finally made love, it was the most profound and intensely passionate experience of my life. I know it sounds cliché, but I think maybe we both cried just a little.

Introducing Jim to my family was, well, different. My folks were cleaning out my grandparents' house in Ogunquit, and Jim volunteered to help. He arrived, not dressed to impress his possible future in-laws. No, he wore lime green sweat pants that were undoubtedly taken from the slightly tight pants tower, with a matching lime green sweatshirt that had also seen slimmer days. He had no vanity, no need to impress. He was eternally unguarded, completely open and honest, unapologetically saying, “This is me. This is who I am.”

My dad didn't seem to notice Jim's lack of fashion sense. He was too busy checking out the brand new Honda Prelude SI. Out loud, he said, “That's a nice car.” But what he meant was, “Thank goodness I don't have to loan him money.”

When I met Jim's mom, she turned to him and said, in Italian, “She's no thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six, but she has a nice smile.”

Jim translated, “She loves your smile.” He didn't know I understood Italian.

I remember the question Gary asked when I had been dating Jim for about a week. He looked at me with a completely serious expression and said, “So are you going to marry him?”

A bit taken aback, I replied, “Well, don't you think I should get to know him first?”

Gary laughed dismissively, saying, “What's to know? He isn't very deep.”

At the time, his comment seemed insulting. But as the weeks turned into months, I realized Gary was right. Everything I needed to know about Jim was right there on the surface. There was no dark ambush lurking beneath the sweet, geeky faÇade. He really did wear his heart on his sleeve. And today, after more than two decades of marriage, he is still the very same Jim I met in the hot tub. He still makes me laugh until my stomach hurts, and although the limegreen outfit is (thankfully) long gone, his love for me is so deep it can still make me cry a little.

—
Nancy DeMarco

Loving Done Right

I
'm back in the city teaching this year, so I get
Raisin
again. I'm so excited.

Just in case that made no sense whatsoever (and unless you're a middle school English teacher, it probably won't), let me clarify: I'm talking about teaching eighth-grade students the play
Raisin in the
Sun
, by Lorraine Hansberry. It's a great work of literature, full of wisdom and truth, and I'm hereby ordering everyone who hasn't read it to get a copy now. After reading the play and completing the quizzes and final test, you are allowed to rent the Sidney Poitier movie of the same title. What a treat.

Raisin
is a play about racial equality, about lost dreams and hopes that have died, but mostly about love. Not the romantic, falling in and out kind, but the love that lasts — the love that weathers the storms of the years and still survives.

One of the great monologues in the play is given by Mama, Lena Younger. When the family is at its lowest, when her son, Walter Lee, has lost all the money that held the keys to their family's dreams and hopes, his sister, Beneatha, lashes out, calling him a “toothless rat . . . less than a man.”

Mama turns to her daughter and says:

“.
. . Child, when do you think is the time to love
somebody the most? When they done good? When
they gone and made things easy for everybody? Well,
that
ain't
the time.
It's
when
he's
at his lowest, when
life done beat him down. When
he's
at his lowest
and
can't
believe in himself.
It's
when the world done
whipped
him.”

I remember that speech and how it played a part in the lives of my parents.

To the casual observer, my dad got the lion's share in the marriage stakes, and that's a fact. I've said it before: in Miss Ida, my dad hit a jackpot that would break every casino in Vegas.

He never diapered an infant, nor dressed one, nor picked up after one. He never cleaned a thing in the house. He never cooked a meal. He never washed a load of laundry. When he arose in the morning, a fresh shirt, underwear, overalls (or suit, on Sunday), and socks were laid on the bed waiting. He lived with a wife who never complained, nagged, or bossed. She managed his finances, raised his children, cleaned his house, and cared for his mother and sister, all with a loving nature and kindness that few can match.

She, however, felt she had hit the matrimonial sweepstakes, too. Having one dear sister married to a raging alcoholic with a taste for violence and another married to a man fifty years her senior and browbeaten almost to the breaking point by his domineering family, Ida felt like a princess. Her youngest sister, Celia, married very well: a man of both good character and great intelligence, but “Lord, he carried Celie away from home! All the way to West Virginia, then clear to Omaha, Nebraska.” Being more than ten miles from her “good mumma” was a fate Miss Ida couldn't begin to fathom.

So she considered herself dead lucky. Always did. Archie Clements worked hard, was a good father, a good role model, got himself up for church on Sunday, never drank. He was a responsible man, a civic leader, a man of respect in the community. And he paid attention to her. When it came to making a business deal, A.B. had the good sense to listen to his wife. She was his partner and equal when it came to finance. (She was actually his superior, but let's give Dad his due, shall we?) Together, they achieved the two great dreams of her life: a nice brick home and a college education for their two children. And in his own way, Dad let her know she was valued, loved, and appreciated. It wasn't with candy, flowers, and diamonds, but those things weren't what Miss Ida was all about.

In both of their minds, Dad did his part. He worked like a dog. Miss Ida was eleven years his junior; she'd outlive him by twenty years, at least. He worked every day, mindful that she'd need enough to get by when he was gone. The men of my father's generation “dropped like flies,” as he put it, of heart attacks and cancer. He buried his friends and acquaintances — and kept working, knowing he'd never outlive Miss Ida.

Fate stepped in, however, to confound Dad's common sense. At age seventy-two, Miss Ida developed cancer. And damn that disease straight to the lowest depths of hell. I try to hate no one in this world. But I harbor a hatred of cancer that borders on fanatical. No single man, however evil his soul, could ever inflict such slow, racking pain on others. No man would have the patience to torture that way, to take away coordination, then mobility, then speech, then sight, then mental capacity, then finally, finally, the entire body itself, over the course of months and months.

And Dad stepped to the plate, as it were. Only the best; forget the cost. He cared for a father, a mother, and a sister until their last breath. Miss Ida would get the same . . . No, she'd get better treatment.

She was told she could try chemotherapy. She could go to the Medical College of Virginia, an hour's drive away, and have the treatments three times a week. It might help lengthen her life. Here's a secret Dad doesn't know: she didn't want to. She wanted to go home to the Lord. He was waiting there for her, no doubt about it. But Lord, Archie. What would he do? If she could “tough it out,” maybe she could take care of him a few more years. She had to try, any road. Miss Ida was a fighter, she was. She fought through cancer in her sinus cavity and through cancer in her colon, but the disease finally had its way, three years later, in the hideous form of a brain tumor.

But back to the original chemotherapy. Who in the world would take her to the treatments? I was teaching in Lynchburg, three hours away. Moses, my brother, was the county engineer, working ten hours a day and rearing his own two boys. How would Ida get to MCV every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?

“Well, Good Lord, I'll get in the car and take her,” responded Archie. “Reckon I still have enough sense to drive to Richmond, any road.”

Well, Moses looked at me and I looked at him. No words were spoken, but the question hung between us. Who's going to tell Dad he's too old to drive Interstate 95 to Richmond? Being a soul who has always felt discretion to be the better part of valor, I flat out refused to open my mouth; Moses, having a bit more courage, had the gumption to say, “Dad, uh . . . do you think . . .” before getting an Archie Clements “wither you straight down to the floor” glare. Then he shut up too.

Anyway, the American Cancer Society saved us from the horns of that dilemma, and God bless them for it. Seems they had a van for Southside, Virginia, that would take Miss Ida right from her door to MCV, and back again, every treatment. Guess who went with her? You got it: A.B., complaining about how fast the driver was going — “He'll kill us all before it's said and done!” — every mile of the way. The man who hated to stir five miles from his door washed up, put on a suit and tie, and went to Richmond three days a week, for six weeks, at the age of eighty-six. Just to be there for Miss Ida. Just to hold her hand and keep her company.

And when it got bad, got really, really bad, terminal braintumor bad, he didn't quaver. Brain tumor; no hope. Well, fine. We'll need round-the-clock nurses; who can you recommend? Not for a second did he consider any alternative. Nursing home? Forget it. Miss Ida was going to be in the place she loved most: home. Home and safe. Happy as he could make her.

Eight months. That's right. Eight months. Nurses, round the clock for eight months. That's what she needed. That's what she got. The man who saved every penny he ever made, who drove one particular truck for twenty-two years before it literally fell apart, threw open his wallet. Wide.

And every night, through it all, he walked into their bedroom. (He had long since evacuated to my old room, but he went in at bedtime, nonetheless.) Held her hand and told her, “I love you, Miss Ida. Good night. I'm a right lucky man to have you for a wife.”

Cost him a king's ransom. He lived with the stench of diapers, of vomit, of death, for eight months. Lived with strangers tracking in and out of his house. He's a very private man, and he hated it all. But every night, he walked in that room, he put a smile on that face, and he told her, “I love you, Miss Ida. I'm lucky I found you.”

He was, of course. Lucky. She would have done the same for him in half a heartbeat. But how many would stick? How many would give that “full measure of devotion,” as Mr. Lincoln called it? I wonder.

Miss Ida and A.B. knew what Lena Younger knew. They knew about loving when someone is down, about giving when a person needs it most, without question, without reservation, without thinking of what's in it for you.

And here's what I always tell my eighth-grade students. Go out, find someone you love. Then picture them old, bald, sick, costing you a fortune both emotionally and financially. Ask yourself:
Will I still
be able to say
“
I love
you?”
Will I still say
“
I'm
lucky I
found
you?”