Mom: Chap Stick

CHAP STICK

They dressed to go out for a walk around the neighborhood. His doctor told him to get more exercise. Diabetes. The doc warned him of the consequences if ignored: There would be problems with kidneys, heart, swelling, blindness, all of it. But he didn’t hear the part about exercise – a deliberate oversight, until his feet started to swell and ankles disappeared. Not a particularly fastidious man but it was beginning to hurt to walk. So his solution was to bombard his feet with exercise: walking fast, walking slow, while standing he would go up on toes and come down on heels, anything to keep the feet moving. But it wasn’t enough. Then more problems: The stress test came back. His heart rate was fast; pumping way too hard for the slow workout the technicians had put him through at the med-lab. Additional blood tests turned up high levels of cholesterol. He was a heart attack just waiting to happen. He was taking vitamins, aspirins, heart medicine, calcium tablets, and insulin shots; not to mention all the extra meds he took for the side effects to control diarrhea, constipation, and sleeplessness. Then there was the pain killers to help with the pain in his feet.

Good Lord, he told himself, he was only 60. In his second childhood: The kids were gone and the house was empty. Good Lord, he repeated, they could be having sex all over the house now, in any room or closet they wanted. He bent down to tie his sneaker and his spine clicked and his muscles groaned with the task. He left the bedroom while she put on her shoes.

He wandered down the hall and into the dining room. There was that huge dining room table and all those chairs, the scene of many family celebrations. Used and used and used – lots of memories around that thing. It was hard and non-conforming. It stood in front of the sliding glass door which opened into the back yard. The room was full of browns and greens, but in the middle was the deep blue table looking like a pool in the middle of forested nature with the odor of roses coming through the screen door. He rubbed his forehead and walked back down the hallway.

Good Lord, he repeated, his second childhood, and they were dressing to go for a walk for exercise.
He leaned against the bathroom door. His wife was applying chap stick to her lips. The pinkish balm was invisible; her lips were a soft brown. “Why you doin’ that?” he asked nodding to the mirror and chap stick.

“You know why, Silly,” she replied with another swipe across her lips. She looked good to him even after thirty-five years of marriage. Her body showed the evidence of time. He couldn’t pretend she was lithe and agile as she once had been, but she had raised three children, worked fulltime, and was the social director for the family now. Her interests had shifted.

“No, really, why?” he asked.

“The cold. Don’t want them crackin’ and bleedin’. You know this. Why you asking? ” She held out the tube to him. “Want some?”

It smelled like menthol. Like medicine. It smelled like what it was supposed to be. He jolted back; the odor was so strong. So mentholated. “No thanks. You ‘bout ready?” The odor made him feel old, like the old men he used to work with that smelled like Ben-Gay. Old and medicinal odors went together in his head. He wasn’t old; he was in his second childhood.

“Almost,” She replied and leaned up closer to the mirror.

He went back out to the hallway, to the dining room and stared at the table. He remembered a similar scene a couple of weeks past; same question, different answer. He had asked “why you doin’ that?” as another woman applied chap stick to her lips. She stood just over there at the head of the table, a different woman, brown from the sun and strong in his arms.

“For you,” she whispered.

The table was hard. The scent of roses wafted through the sliding glass door. The neighbors dogs barked. A cat rubbed up against the screen door and purred. There was a bombardment of scents and sounds, but he noticed nothing except the smell and taste of that cherry chap stick.