Duped - (I want subtitle I indicated on cover page but I can't fir it here)

WHY

I stepped out of the shower, wet, naked, and caught a glance in our above-the-sink mirror. And then I screamed. No reason comes to mind why I would have eyed my naked self in that mirror on that day, considering I had not done so in half a decade, other than because it happened to be the day after my forty-fifth birthday and I had been ruminating on old and fat. My scream was not an I-see-Norman-Bates-standing-behind-me-with-a-knife kind of scream, but more in the category of an emboldened-mouse-just-ran-across-my-foot shriek. Either way, there was no Norman and no mouse, just one plain and simple truth with which to reckon—my nipple would no longer make the mirror cut even if I stood on my tiptoes. Granted, it was a relatively high-mount mirror and my hammer toes coupled with a resultant weak gastrocnemius precluded a fully extended tiptoe. But even at that, it was still a shock.

He knew the difference between my sprinting rodent and stabbing intruder alarms. After more than twenty-five years, you know these things. He sauntered in, shoeing away the fog, his decades-old wire rims steaming up, a bland “What’s up?” on his shrinking lips—those lips that used to be so full. Over the years, his wasting facial muscles had morphed him into the image of his late father, which would have been fine if I had liked that bigoted dullard.

Malapropos as it may have been, I actually took time, then and there, dripping and screaming, to formulate a private query as to why his glasses steamed, blinding him, and yet this same steam would not perform its fogging magic on that merciless mirror that had audaciously reflected my gravity-ridden chest. But his coat and the fact that it was an unseasonably cold early fall in the north woods gave away the science behind that phenomenon. I just had to remember, in my future, to never, never look. Never.

I told him. He displayed no change of expression, and this about him had been starting to really irritate me. He slowly peeled off his specs, right to left, like he was about to use a hand lens to inspect a diamond, navigating to within a near-sighted range of the mirror. And then he announced, in that spice-less tone that had lately so matched his demeanor, “I could lower the mirror.”

He didn’t get it. He probably thinks this has something to do with me wanting to be able to see my nipple in that mirror, I thought, like I was undertaking a visual check for nipple cancer. The civil engineer in him viewed the fix in terms of inches, not hugs. How did our minds age into different orbits when twenty-five years ago—hell ten years ago—we were so in sync?

Or were we?

Perhaps I should have seen this coming, this methodical, pragmatic, pancake-flat, low-volume approach to things that didn’t so much matter, and even to some that did, or at least, I thought did. Subscribing to the continuity theory (psychosocial) of aging, I have believed that our personalities don’t change as we age; that is, we are who we always were, only more so.

Therefore, I should have seen this coming right from the get-go when, having just returned from our honeymoon, I spied his fragrance bottles neatly lined at the rear of his dresser top, in alphabetical order. He denied this, but do the math here: Aqua Velva, Aramis, Brut, Canoe, Drakkar, English Leather, Old Spice Musk. The chance of this being a coincidence was somewhere in the range of Powerball odds.

Moreover, I should have seen this coming when three months into our marriage I noticed that his half of the closet was organized as such: shirts, pants, jackets (the order in which he put them on) and also organized according to color, and not just color—goddammit, I freaked—but according to hue from pale to bright to dark within each general color category. And—I’m not finished—the overall colors of the shirts/pants/jackets were in the order black, blue, brown, green, red, white, and yellow— alphabetical again, denied again. Fledgling young and hell-bent on nesting, I postulated that it was possible that some people do such things unconsciously. Like a guy I once dated added up the house address numbers on the Minneapolis streets down which we spent much of our then lives surfing for a parking space. When I asked why he was muttering numbers, he looked confused, and then surprised, that he was even doing this. It took me three dates to figure out what he was doing (there was never a fourth date) and the rest of my life to figure out why I attracted these abecedarian types or—oh my god, say it isn’t so—was attracted to them?

When I asked the psych people at work about this alphabetizing conundrum, they came up empty, albeit with little effort, and so I rubbed the sand out of my newlywed eyes and wrote it off as quirky, even cute, something to laugh about with the girls. And that I did.

Now if those weren’t enough clues to prevent me from being surprised during that post-birthday mirror encounter, how about the fact that he was the only person I have ever known who tightened his shoestrings at every pair of eyes, from the toes to the instep, every time he put them on. Even when he was going out to retrieve our dog who had just dug her way under the fence and into the road. Even when the rain was coming down 800-count percale and his new Ford minivan was in the driveway with its windows open. Even when he was madder than hell at me for deciding at the last minute that I was willing to pain through that sci-fi movie he so badly wanted to see.

But, being fair, he also should have seen “old me” coming when he long ago discovered that I even bothered to decode his wardrobe arrangement—I, whose closet looked like the racks of T.J. Max on Black Friday, at closing; I, who rarely sported footwear that required fastening; I, who owned more than seventy-five pairs of resale bib overalls. Alas, neither of us should have been surprised that we were aging into who we always were … only more so.

That said, what really should have surprised both of us was that we lasted, and moreover, that we loved lasting.

Yes, it must have been that birthday and the seemingly sudden metamorphoses of both our bodies and our relationship. But unlike caterpillars, we could not shed our exoskeletons; we could not molt. We had started going to seed from the outside in.

I spent the rest of that day in tortured pursuit of supporting data that might serve to jump-start my ego into the hovering denial that was working hard to become its friend: North to south, were my lids draped over my eyes like a scarf window valence? How many chins were in my profile? There were seven between my two grandmothers. Did my neck resemble a partially closed umbrella, and were my toenails opaque like my Busia’s? I skipped over my torso—never my strong suit, even in youth, hence the bibs. There, thankfully, were some nos to those questions, and I still counted only the two chins I was born with. But that scant positive data was not enough to satisfy my ravenous inner defense.

And it also happened to be the birthday on which my daughter forgot to call until 10:45 PM (Central), the birthday during which I received an iron from my husband along with a “Well, you said the one you have is crap” (and we’re talking the kind of iron you get at a pharmacy or gas station—not a bell or whistle in earshot), the birthday on which my son called at 10:52 PM after his sister reminded him, and only after she had received a call from her dad—Iron Man—at 10:44 to complain that neither of them had called. He must have checked the answering machine, because I did not bring up their dismissiveness. The placating eleventh hour calls only made it worse … if only I had been able to figure out what it was.

Ah yes, that birthday that marked the days—fifty-nine to be exact—since my last period, because my last period started on my husband’s September 1st birthday, which I vividly recalled because I had walked out of the Italian restaurant with a marinara-colored stain on the back of my khaki skirt (I had alfredo), and my birthday is the 29th of October, and thirty days has September. Easy and in-my-face math to add up to fifty-nine. And I hadn’t had sex in at least twice that interval (seriously decreased libido layered with MLB playoffs), and what that meant was that I would have to spread eagle, in stirrups, in front of a very good man who happened to have nose hairs long enough to wrap around a half-inch curling iron. Then, once I got past those proboscis hairs, which always made my nose itch throughout the exam, I’d have to deal with the dark advent leading up to the delivery of the results that would take me back to his office. And therein, my mind would attempt to distract itself with short-lived filler thoughts, such as whether all of his patients got itchy noses during their visits and what, if anything, he made of that coincidence.

Moreover, if that was the fuel, here be the kindling. At the dawn of that defining birthday, while reaching for an alcohol wipe in the pocket of my scrubs, I noticed that there were more wrinkles on my scrub than on our recently departed Shar Pei. Embarrassed in front of my adolescent patient, I proffered: “I guess I should have used an iron on this scrub.” Her reply, which only added to my budding gerascophobia was, “What’s an iron?”

That birthday. Yes, I do think that birthday was a big influence on the why.

Or, maybe it was brewing well before that iron birthday.

Yes, of course it was …

I was the baby of the family and eventually the only baby when my sister died of brain cancer in mid-life. My mother was quite old...