I’m pissed off. （I do not find myself yukking it up with Brian in ERs, or anywhere else, these days.） I want to point out that not understanding the doctor’s directions is no one’s idea of “handling it really well,” but I’m crying too hard and I thank her, as I should.
* * *
—
Diverticulitis it is. Ten days of bland but not raw food, and some smooth peanut butter on white bread is okay but no peanuts or popcorn. Jennifer promised me that in Brian’s diverticulitis info packet, there’s a list of foods he should eat for the ten days of antibiotics and a few recipes for rice/dairy/chicken. There is no list. I am furious and frightened and turn to Dr. Google before I drive to the grocery store. It’s a boring diet, especially for a man who loves chorizo, habanero sauce, Szechuan chili oil, and Popeyes chicken. I sympathize and keep offering rice and canned fruit and cheese and yogurt and baked chicken, and when he says, “How about chocolate?” for the third time, I just say no and then I go cry in the bathroom. He wouldn’t have followed me out of the room fourteen years ago, and he’s not going to start now.
The next day starts calmer and then not so much. Brian feels no worse and goes to the gym and buys a cable for the Garmin in his car. We’ve had a straightforward conversation about his need for a new GPS, and not his vintage version, which seems to be missing some important, smaller byways. He schleps all over eastern Connecticut, without me, and finally gets the cord he needs. He has been remarkably persistent and I admire him and I was scared witless when he’d been gone for five hours. I congratulate him and tell him all the bland goodies that await him. I wonder if I should hide his keys or if we will have to negotiate every drive for the foreseeable future. （We will.）
I sit down to work late in the day and Brian calls me: He has lost his keys （along with the groceries in the grocery cart） at our nearby Stop & Shop. I pick him up and we don’t bother trying to retrieve our cart. Before dinner, the Stop & Shop manager calls Brian to say that the keys have been found. But Brian never checks his voicemail, so he doesn’t know this. But I guess that the keys have been found and go there anyway and ask the manager, who says they do have the keys. But he can’t give them back to me because I am not Brian. I go home to get Brian. But Brian is watching Rachel Maddow, and he doesn’t want to go. I want to go. I want to get it done. I want just one fucking crisis to be resolved neatly and I would like it to be resolved today. Mutually annoyed, we go to the Stop & Shop and I walk in with him. Brian kids around with the manager and we walk out a few minutes later, Brian swinging his keys and whistling. Not relaxing.
Thursday, July 18, 2019, Stony Creek
MRI Day
The appointment for Brian’s MRI is at eight forty-five and it’s only fifteen minutes away. We both wake up at six-thirty. Brian lies in bed for a while, grumbling at his phone. He takes his morning meds and tells me he’s contemplating a shower. I encourage the shower because he has a bad case of psoriasis on his scalp, and the only thing that keeps it from trailing into his eyebrows and erupting around his nose is the medicated shampoo he uses every day.
We have been talking about the psoriasis-shampoo-used-daily for about a year and a half. Looking back, it seems like a lot of fraught conversation to have about continuing to do something he’s done almost every day for the fourteen years we’ve been together. He’s a good-looking man. When we went to his Yale reunions, trim blond women, often married to other Old Blues, would toss their hair （even at our advanced age） and say, Oh, you’re with Brian Ameche? Thor? You know, that was his nickname…when I knew him, they’d say.
My husband always smelled great and looked good and was vain about his good looks, his wolfish smile and his dark, thick hair. I didn’t mind the vanity, which was not excessive and mostly shared only with me. About once a year he grabbed his stomach and said, If it was free, I’d get a tummy tuck. After he had his cataracts removed, he dragged me into the bathroom to look with him into the mirror. These bags, he said. You never told me. Six weeks later, he was getting an eye lift. When we’d go out to dinner and look out on a sea of men his age, even if we had been in a furious argument, he’d grin, tap me on the hand, and say, Howdya like me now? And I’d always laugh. I didn’t understand why I was now having to say: Wash your hair, honey. Or, Honey, take a shower.
Now I understand. And now that I understand, I wish that it was middle-aged-man laziness, or retirement blues, or a man’s response to being told what to do.
It’s not. I’ve been reading and it’s mild cognitive impairment, which is, as far as I can tell （our informative, post-MRI meeting with the neurologist will be next week）， a wildly euphemistic name for the early stages of dementia, although all the medical websites quickly state that not every case of MCI turns into dementia. For some people, it’s just a memory fog that never lifts but, in better news, it does not descend.
I turn my mirror to modest magnify （in L.A., a makeup artist told me that if you have a mirror that magnifies more than 3X, you’ll never leave your house）。 I’ve put on mascara and moisturizer. I don’t expect the technicians at the MRI center will like me more for putting on a little makeup. I am absolutely sure that they don’t give a shit, but I was a bartender and I know no one likes a problem customer （loud, bedroom slippers, food on the sweater, smelling like piss）。 More effort than clean and pleasant is not required. Brian has always been our best shot at excellent customer care. Big, handsome man with a big laugh who says, Thank you for your help, or hard work, or advice—every time. We were once in a Starbucks with a barista-in-training our age, who was struggling. After the man delivered our coffees to us, Brian put five dollars in the tip jar and said quietly, “You’re doing great. Don’t let those punk kids throw you off.” The man almost kissed him.
Brian is downstairs having his tea and I am still upstairs. I take a good look in the mirror. Under the tan, I’m gray. I could be any of my unlucky ancestors, facing a rifle, or a cattle car, or my burning village. I am wearing a white shirt and navy pants because it’s summer in Connecticut, and I’ve brushed my hair in a reasonable manner （in what my daughters and I call an “elevated” ponytail, which is how I used to do my daughters’ hair—with a Topsy Tail device—and how my oldest daughter does her daughters’ now, and instead of satisfaction at the generational line of extra-nice ponytails, I just tear up. Elevated ponytail, are you kidding me, dead lady?）。 I’ve put on a pinkish lip gloss and I still look like a woman from a Munch painting. I see now how the clown-faced old ladies come to be. You look in the mirror, you do what you’ve always done, eyes, cheeks, lips, and still a dead woman looks back at you. What the hell. You darken your eyebrows, you redden your cheeks, you switch out from the neutral lipstick to a brighter one, and you just go out into the world, knowing that at least you don’t look gray. I stay gray.
I’m walking around in my white shirt and underpants because I can’t figure out if the navy pants are the right pants to wear. Maybe it’s like trying to get upgraded in the airport. Maybe there will be a VIP waiting room at the MRI place. I know there won’t be, and sure enough, we’re seated with three people who look tired, ill, and furious. Brian comes back upstairs to see what’s taking me so long. He says I look cute and pats my ass, and that drops me. I pretend to do something downstairs and cry for a minute on the landing.