THE ROUTINE
Sarah McGlinchey Aronson
February 2012
“I want to go home,” the woman says to the man.
“We are home,” the man replies. “This is our home.”
“No it’s not,” the woman replies. “Our house doesn’t look like this. Don’t you think I know what our house looks like?”
The man sighs.
It is a Sunday afternoon. The woman is reading The Philadelphia Inquirer, as she has every morning since they were married in 1953. A glass mug of Bigelow’s Constant Comment tea sits next to the paper. Plain – no sugar, cream or milk. She prefers it this way. On a small, china plate, there is a half-eaten piece of toasted Wonder Bread, coated with margarine. It is a simple breakfast, part of a simple routine. Breakfast and the Inquirer in her robe and slippers followed by a shower. Except the woman hasn’t showered. And it is 3:00 in the afternoon.
If you ask the woman, she will tell you, “I take a shower every day.” But if you ask her husband, or her daughter, she hasn’t taken a shower since she and her husband moved to this condo from their Colonial-style four-bedroom house four years ago.
The woman isn’t wearing her robe. She is wearing her thin, cotton pajama top and no pants. When she finishes her breakfast, she will move from the kitchen table to a spot on the loveseat. She knows it is her spot, because it is covered with a hunter green bath towel. The towel is there in case the woman forgets she has to use the bathroom.
If you ask the woman, she will tell you, “I get dressed every day.” But if you ask her husband, or her daughter, she doesn’t get dressed unless her daughter visits and tells her they are going to dinner.
The woman loves going to dinner. She loves food, savors every bite of dishes she’s had thousands of times, washing them down with a glass (or two) of Pinot Grigio. It is the one part of their former routine that is still followed. If she gets dressed. If the day is a day when the woman gets dressed, then she can go to dinner.
Her husband loves taking her to dinner. He loves holding her hand and gazing at her from across the table. Sometimes, he pretends it is 1951, and he is taking her to dinner because he is courting her. He sees the two of them at an Italian restaurant with dim lighting and heaping plates of food. He is admiring the way her black hair falls along her cheekbone and makes her fair skin look even fairer, almost white, and he is thinking, She looks as beautiful as a porcelain doll. The waitress arrives and asks for their order. The woman says, “Joe, what am I having?” The man looks at her again. Her hair is grey and her skin is dotted with brown age spots, and she can’t remember that she chose the lobster ravioli with blush sauce. The moment is ruined. The man remembers that it is not 1951. It is 2012, and this dinner is part of their new routine. The man sighs, and repeats what she told him just a few minutes ago.
The man hates this new routine.
His wife doesn’t cook, can’t remember how. On days when she doesn’t get dressed, the man prepares a Stouffer’s ‘Classic Dinner,’ a pre-packaged meal of individual portions, for each of them. It is accompanied by a small glass of caffeine-free Coke, and followed by a cup of Mott’s Apple Sauce. The man remembers when his wife used to prepare every meal, and he longs for shrimp casserole, honey-glazed ham, and apricot-filled cookies.
The woman doesn’t clean, but thinks that she does. She doesn’t empty the little wicker wastebasket, filled with her tissues, in the middle bathroom or Windex the sliding glass door to the balcony, but when her daughter visits, she tells her she does. When she says this, the man rolls his eyes. When the woman pads to the bathroom, the sound of her thick, white ribbed socks brushing the carpet as she retreats, the man says to their daughter, “She doesn’t do anything.” In actuality, he screams it, claiming that she can’t hear him anyway, and that if she did, she’d forget what he said a few minutes later. Their daughter nods and replies, “I know, Dad.”
He calls their daughter several times a day, often five or six times in a row when she doesn’t pick up, when she is seeing a client. Sometimes, he leaves a message: “I can’t take this anymore!” The message says. Sometimes, he doesn’t leave a message. The calls without messages result in the daughter never knowing if something is truly wrong, until she finds the time in her day to return her father’s calls.
“Dad, is everything ok?”
“Ok? Hmmph! Yeah, sure, things are great.” (shuffling of feet, door latching shut).
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“Are you home?”
“Of course I’m home! Where else would I be?”
“What’s going on then? Did something happen?”
“Nothing happened! That’s the problem. She’s done nothing all day. Nothing has happened all day.”
“Mom?” sighs. “Did she get dressed?”
“Hah! Do you think she got dressed?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Every day is different.”
“Every day is the same. She does nothing.” (door handle turning, door opening.) “I’m in
the bathroom! I’ll be right there.”
“Oh god, I don’t know how much longer I can take this.”
“Dad, I know. But you have to take care of yourself, too. I have to go. I’ll call you on my way home from work.”
Sighs. “It’s just, this has been building for quite some time now…”
“What has been building?”
“This whole situation. Something has to change….”
“Dad, I know. And I will help you. But I have to go. I love you.”
Later that day, in another conversation with their daughter, the man repeats an earlier comment: “Something has to change.”
“Dad, if something has to change, it’s going to have to be you, because Mom’s not going to change. She can’t. This is how she is now,” his daughter tells him.
Change feels uncomfortable for the man, like driving down an unfamiliar highway with no one in the passenger seat to help him navigate. He longs for the past, dislikes the present, and fears the future. He feels as if he is starting over, learning to understand his wife’s moods, her mannerisms, tossing the ones he’d grown to know, love, and predict for nearly 50 years, in the trash like a car battery that no longer works. This new routine was never what he wanted.
August 2012
“Joe, did we lock the door to the garage?” The woman asks the man. They are lying in bed, in the king-size, four-poster mahogany bed she found at Sears’ Furniture Outlet before they moved into their Colonial-style 4-bedroom house on Meadowbrook Lane.
“We don’t have a garage,” the man replies.
“What? That’s ridiculous. Of course we do.”
“No, dear, we haven’t had a garage since we moved into this condo.”
“We live in a condo?”
“Yes, dear,” the man replies. He sighs.
The woman is quiet. The room is dark, with the lights turned off and the heavy, canvas curtains pulled tight across the windows that face the condominium parking lot. The man closes his eyes. He pretends they are in the house on Meadowbrook Lane, and that he made sure to lock the garage door, the front door, and the back door before they went to bed. He pretends he is full from roasted chicken thighs, mashed potatoes, and green bean casserole. He pretends they lit a fire in the fireplace that night, and that he relaxed in his leather easy chair while they watched the 11:00 news on 6ABC and talked of their weekend plans. He pictures he is wrapped in a warm, colorful afghan, feeling smooth leather against the back of his head, hearing the pop of flames engulfing blocks of wood.
“Joe, did I turn off the oven?” the woman asks. The man is back in reality – the woman has taken his hand and pulled him back, leaving no time for protest.
“You didn’t cook anything tonight,” the man responds.
“What? That’s ridiculous. I cook dinner for us every night.”
“No, dear, you haven’t cooked since we moved in to this condo.”
“We live in a condo?”
“Yes, dear.”
He can hear her breathing, knows she is thinking, wondering, trying to understand the facts that float through her mind. But because her brain doesn’t have the Velcro they need to stick, they will float away into the ether of forget. The man can’t see the woman because his back is turned away from her. He wants to stay like this, wants to allow his mind to take him back to the year 2000, to a typical Thursday evening at their house on Meadowbrook Lane. He wants to hop into the sturdy, dependable, automatic Lexus that is his mind, and drive away from this condo on Harvard Avenue, away from repeated conversations and frozen dinners. But he knows that if he does that, she cannot go with him. His wife’s mind is a shaky, unreliable, manual Geo. And she has forgotten how to drive stick.
Suddenly, he realizes that the room is very quiet. Too quiet.
“Are you ok?” he asks. He turns to his right, rolling his body around so he can see her. He lets his eyes adjust. In the darkness her fuzzy shape is beautiful. A sharp nose protrudes from high cheekbones. A thin mouth is pulled tight across her face, lips resting in a straight line. Large eyes are – wait, her eyes are closed. They are closed! Fear seizes his chest. He leans over her, looking down at her chest, watching for a rise and fall movement. Three seconds pass. Nothing. What will he do if she leaves him? He loves this woman he’s slowly watched lose herself these past 8 years. She is a shell of her former self - a beautiful firecracker replaced with a charred bulb that fizzes when it tries to emit flames. But she is him, and he is her. Who will be if he doesn’t have her?
Her eyes fly open. “Ahhh!” she shrieks. “Joe, what are you doing? I’m trying to sleep.”
The man sighs and moves to the side of her. He stretches out on his side, looking at her.
She is fine, he tells himself.
“Joe?” she asks.
“Yes?”
“Did we lock the door to the garage?”
February 2013
In January 2013, the woman died. While getting up from the toilet, she lost her balance and fell, landing hard on the tile floor. Mustering all of his strength, the man tried, but could not lift her up. She was admitted to the hospital, and then discharged to an assisted living facility. The man visited her at this facility multiple times a day, bringing glazed donuts and chocolate chip cookies for the staff, and searching the halls for a doctor who could answer his questions. Each night, he returned to the condo to sleep.
Today is Thursday, and the man is not at the condo. Because it is Thursday, the man is having lunch at the Senior Center. After lunch, he will join his friend Larry at the pinocle table, where they will share pictures of their grandchildren and talk about the forecasted snowstorm between games. Tomorrow, he will meet his granddaughter, Sarah, for breakfast at the diner.
That night, he heats up a frozen dinner in the microwave. 6ABC’s 6:00 newscast is muted on the TV. There is no shuffling of socked feet down the hall, no questions about whether or not the garage door is closed or what the weather will be like today. The little wicker wastebasket in the middle bathroom has less tissues.
In the darkness of their bedroom that night, the man closes his eyes. He pretends it is August, and he is full from Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and Mott’s apple sauce.
“Joe, did we lock the door to the garage?”
The man smiles.
Sarah McGlinchey Aronson is a teacher, writer, and marketing professional with a background in journalism and French. An avid runner dedicated to public service, Sarah is an advocate of suicide prevention and exercise for healthy living. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Elon University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.