Fried & True (19 page)

May 2005

GOING SOUTH

We're forever sitting around with our friends, postulating about old age. As Bette Davis famously said, “Old age is not for sissies.”

Spending time with Muriel and Anyda, who are lucky enough to be able to stay in their own home and care for each other at their age, is an inspiration. But I fear they are the exception rather than the rule.

Proud and extraordinary women, the ladies make concessions to age, but carry on with only a small bit of extra help. Charlie takes care of the garden and makes the salon night appetizers the ladies used to make; Lois Ann, the friend they call daughter, handles outside maintenance and backyard cottage details. Their friend Carolyn cleans the house for them once a week. Carolyn started out as a hired house cleaner and thirty years later, ‘though she has her own professional career, she still comes once a week to straighten up. By this time, she is a dear friend. Bonnie chauffeurs Muriel to the library. Actually, Muriel often drives her beloved Lincoln on the way to the library, but if she tires from book browsing, she will give up the wheel to Bonnie for the return trip.

At home, Muriel scoots around in her wheelchair, propelled by foot power, to cook breakfasts, including microwavable grits or eggs, while Anyda does the carrying of dishes, food and utensils to the table. It's a slow process, but it gets done.

Until very recently, almost all of the household chores got done by the ladies themselves, albeit at a crawl. Now, a little more help is accepted, but not much more. Neighbors do the grocery shopping and newspaper recycling. Other folks make sure that the liquor doesn't run out.

Several years ago, when the octogenarians were still making an annual trek south to Florida in the winter, we went to visit
them at Lighthouse Point just outside Ft. Lauderdale.

They had a small ranch home, surrounded by grapefruit and orange trees, in a quiet community. Anyda and I chatted about books and politics. “That Newt Gingrich is properly named,” Anyda said, looking at a newspaper headline. “He is a little lizard.” Bonnie and Muriel concurred as they concentrated on their hands of cards.

“Gin.” Muriel quietly announced with a coy smile as she beat Bonnie at the game again and again.

During that long-ago Florida visit Anyda asked me to read the latest book she was working on and make editing suggestions. I was flattered and nervous. Editing for an icon can be daunting indeed, but Anyda relished talking about her characters, their motivations and their feminist triumphs. Those discussions were the very beginning of my working affiliation with A&M Books.

As for their yearly drive south, they always traveled in a big sedan, with boxes full of the yellow legal pads for whatever novel Anyda was currently writing and with whatever cat happened to be making its home with them at the time.

“At motels on the way, the cats would always wind up under the bed,” Muriel told us, “and we would have to call the front desk and ask for a clerk to come and retrieve the cat for us before we could leave.” According to Anyda, several of the clerks came away with battle scars. One time, they had to have motel staff disassemble an entire bed frame to recover a recalcitrant feline.

Those winters away from Rehoboth were good for their health, and gave them some exercise as well. Before Muriel's hip started giving her trouble she had been an avid tennis player. Rehoboth old timers remember watching Anyda going into the A&P to shop, while Muriel remained outside practicing her tennis game on the side of the building. Along with tennis, both Anyda and Muriel loved golf, and were two of the founding members of the Rehoboth Yacht and Country Club. Of course, in those days (and maybe today, for all I know) there
was no family membership for their kind of family.

During their Florida winters, Muriel continued to play tennis. Anyda, acknowledging that Muriel was the only athlete in the family, would agree to step onto the court to lob tennis balls over the net so Muriel could practice. Into their seventies they played tennis, or their version of it, several mornings a week and spent part of each day tending the garden.

In the afternoons, Muriel devoured books by Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steele, while Anyda wrote her own stories, or gave
The New York Times
and
Washington Post
crossword puzzles their due.

During our Florida visit, as they did with many friends passing through the area, the ladies graciously opened their home for overnight guests and happily accompanied us out for crab cakes and white wine at places famous for fresh Florida-caught seafood and views of the Intercoastal Waterway. We had to fight for the check. Sometimes we would win.

As recently as two years ago, the ladies made their last trip South. That time, they reluctantly accepted the generous assistance of their close friend Curt as chauffeur.

Bonnie and I adored their industriousness in the face of advancing age. Prior to leaving for the journey, “We'd go out in the morning and open up the big trunk on the car,” Muriel told me, “Then we'd go back inside and get the suitcases.”

“We would take the empty suitcases and place them in the trunk, wide open. Then we would go back inside and start to bring out the clothes.”

‘You packed the suitcases in the trunk?” I asked, trying to picture the ladies walking out their front door with arm loads of golf shirts and khaki pants, not to mention unmentionables.

“We could never have gotten them out of the house filled, so we came up with this plan,” Muriel said, looking at Anyda for concurrence.

“Oh, yes, this was the easy way.” Anyda said, describing the reverse tactic once they arrived at their winter home.

On our now long ago Florida visit we shared cocktails and
conversation much as we had been doing in Rehoboth. But having three days of quality time was very special.

Knowing the ladies these last eight years or so has been a gift. All the same, I would have loved to meet them when they were younger. We could only imagine their youth and enthusiasm for everything they did. We loved digging through their slides of Rehoboth summers and trans-Atlantic travels on the original QE2 for the World Bank. “Oh, yes, Muriel got to go with me several times, on ocean liners and trains through Europe. The World Bank was a very progressive organization, you know.”

I guess so.

As much as we tried to dig for more details about the closeted life of lesbians in post-war Washington, D.C., the ladies preferred talking about the present.

And presently, they were managing just fine, in their Rehoboth home, doing their publishing tasks, enjoying the antics of their cats and basking in the friendship of the whole neighborhood and then some.

Anyda's eyesight has been deteriorating and she often uses a big magnifying glass to read. Muriel cannot hear much without her hearing aids, but she's finicky about wearing them. And when she does have them in her ears, we can be deep in conversation and I'll see her go to adjust them. I wonder if she's turning them on or turning me off.

As another nod to passing time, Anyda agreed to let Bonnie put her sunroom love seat up on a six-inch platform so it would be less of a struggle to get up and down. When Bonnie worried that the legs of the loveseat might slip off the platform, Anyda came up with a plan. She asked her neighbor Hayden to rinse out four cat food cans, nail them to the platform and lodge the sofa legs in them. It was a look. But it worked.

And while the ladies are doing well on their own, they are quick to let us know that they are fully prepared for the future. Anyda Marchant the attorney made sure of that. Anyda's correspondence, book drafts and other papers will go to the Lesbian
Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, NY…some day.

“I've promised all of this to the archives after I'm gone.” Anyda said, pointing to a dozen cartons piled up in the corner of the sunroom. Looking at me, she added “it will be your problem to get them there.”

I figured. They also made preparations relative to living wills, internment and all of the other details associated with a future they refuse to discuss. The thought of one of them living without the other is too terribly painful to imagine.

So in the meantime, they make regular visits to their trusted doctor and do everything they can to take expert care of each other and extend their lengthy love affair as long as humanly possible.

Will we still be living in our home, taking care of a Schnauzer or two in our later years? Or at an all-lesbian assisted living facility? We don't have such a luxury here yet, but there has been plenty of hypotheses. Knowing this community, it will happen.

I can picture it now. I'll be scribbling on yellow legal pads and Bonnie will be flirting with the baby dykes on staff. And beating the heck out of everyone at gin rummy. We should be so very, very lucky.

June 2005

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

SIBLING RIVALRY

As my sister and I celebrated at a family party last week, we got to talking—and she was shocked at some of the things she learned. So I'm going to share them with you to put a human face on this ridiculous special rights business.

My sister Gwen has been married to her husband Rick for 19 years.

I have been partnered with Bonnie for 23 years as well as married for two years in the eyes of the Canadian government.

These two sisters and their spouses have all paid into social security since bell bottoms were hot the first time and Lyndon Johnson was president.

If, heaven forbid, something happens to my sister or her hubby, the surviving baby boomer can collect a social security death benefit, then cash the 401K and keep the house (and all 18 cats in it) without inheritance taxes. If there was a pension involved, the surviving spouse could claim it, which would be important, because 18 cats eat a lot of Friskies. The merry widow or widower might not be so merry but at least they could keep themselves in cat litter.

If something happens to me or Bonnie, one of us could be stuck paying a crippling tax bill on the spouse's IRA. We'd be coughing up a staggering estate tax on half the damn house, and not receive a penny in Social Security death benefit or any survivor benefit from all the years our spouse paid into the system. In fact, if one of us had a pension (sadly, we aren't that lucky), it would just…zzzpppft, disappear as if no one remained behind needing to put dog kibble on the table.

But that's not the worst of it.

If one of our quartet doesn't die, but is merely very sick, the difference is even more appalling. Say my sister or her mate get cat scratch fever and need expensive nursing home care.
The healthy spouse will still have a place to live since my sister's ailing husband could qualify for Medicaid without having to sell his home. That's because the government recognizes that his legally wed wife and all her cats would still need a roof over their fuzzy heads.

If Bonnie or I had to go to a nursing home, the healthy spouse would have to sell the house in order for Medicaid to kick in. Great. One of us and a pair of Schnauzers will be living in a camper in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The government would probably make better provisions for a surviving Schnauzer than a remaining gay partner.

Even as we worry about future tragedies, we see daily inequities. My sister's husband and I each have a job with health insurance benefits. And my sister is covered under hubby's health plan.

My employer wanted to offer domestic partner coverage—and I was willing to pay for my mate's policy, but the insurance company nixed the idea. And even if they had agreed, I would have had to pay federal income tax on Bonnie's premium amount as if it were salary. If my sister's husband had been treated this way he'd have developed distemper.

So since we can't get insurance for Bonnie, even IF we are willing to pay the extra tax, she has to rely on the Veteran's Administration for her health care. Frankly, it's a darn good thing this particular gay was in the military.

And speaking of the armed services, my sister's husband got a student deferment during the Vietnam era and never served, so he didn't have access to the VA home loan benefit. If he had, he could have financed their home through a lower cost VA loan.

Well, Bonnie did serve during that conflict (albeit stateside) and applied for a VA loan for our first house. The real estate agent snidely told her she could only borrow money on half the cost of the mortgage because technically she was only buying half the house. Useless benefit. BaDaBoom.

It's enough to make you sick, but it had better not. When
my sister was hospitalized with an intestinal ailment (hairballs?), there was no question that her husband could have round the clock access to her hospital room.

When Bonnie was laid up for seven weeks several years ago, I had to come out of the closet to roughly a platoon of people before I was granted family status, and though I sat at Bonnie's bedside every day for what seemed like a millennium, I still got the fish eye at every shift change.

The really frightening fact remained that while I pitched in day and night as an unpaid member of her health care team, any one of the hospital staff could have tossed me out on my butt, legally unable to visit, much less help. Just thinking about it gives me kennel cough.

So you have four people here. Two couples. And a lotta house pets. Both couples have sworn to the for-better-for-worse thing, and in the ensuing years have actually seen better and worse and better again.

Gwen and Rick were able to have a wedding in their own country, with all of their friends and family in attendance. Bonnie and I had to sneak across the border to Canada and leave our friends and family to join us only through digital photos.

To his credit and my enduring thanks, my Dad paid for both weddings.

So there is it. Two long term relationships. Two couples tossing the occasional flea bomb. Two happy households. Except for our choice in companion animals, we're pretty much the same. And each couple forks over the requisite taxes. But according to the Human Rights Campaign, Gwen and Rick have over a thousand important, life-altering, financially and emotionally important rights that we do not have.

Special rights my ass.

America may be the land of the free, but you have to pay Uncle Sam through the nose for your benefits. If you are straight, you get what you pay for. If you're gay, you don't.

I'm so mad I'm foaming at the mouth and may need Rabies shots….