Surrender

Back from her usual morning jaunt around the neighbourhood, she wiped perspiration from her forehead. Hating how it stung, running into her eyes. She lifted her long hair at the nape of her neck, to find some relief from the oppressive heat. Should have remembered to tie it back before setting off.

She wasn’t sure what proportion of blame to apportion to her physical state; the high humidity, even at this time of the morning, or her incessant bouts with those bloody damn hot flashes. She eats and drinks soy-derived products, she takes evening primrose, and she’s susceptible to all kind of advice from other women who’ve gone through the cycle of menopause. Preferring to ignore the opinion of her next-door neighbour, that none of what she’s doing will be actually helpful; it’s only the placebo effect she feels, convincing herself that they help. Some people just know it all.

“Lose twenty pounds”, Edouard said, looking at her critically. Instinctively she took a deep breath, drew in her stomach. No use, there was no drawing in her stomach at this stage. The pounds had just crept up. She never thought of herself as fat, just more than a little overweight. It was clear he thought otherwise.

“You’ve got too much fat on your body”, he continued. “That’s your real problem. Lose some of that and you’ll feel a lot better.”

She’d feel a whole lot better, she thought bitterly, if he would just keep that kind of advice to himself. She didn’t, after all, tell him to straighten his back and walk properly. He was only in his mid-fifties, and already he looked much older. Drawn to his full height he would look much better, his physique even notable. As it was, with his grey, balding head sunk into his turtle-neck, his back arched, his gait shuffling, he looked pitiable.

“You’re not the girl I married”, he would say mournfully. No response from her. Though she repeated it to her best friend, Helen, who despised him. You’d think, she often mused to herself, that she would resent Helen for her attitude toward Edouard. Who was, after all, her husband. But she didn’t. It gave her an oddly vicarious sense of satisfaction to know Edouard was loathed by Helen.

That happened from the very first time she had met him. She had described to Helen this new guy she was dating. Whom she’d met at the dental office where she worked at the time. She knew little about him, other than noting his carriage, his sense of awkward formality. He was anything but cordial, but he did present as respectful of her. And he was her age, and attractively masculine, she thought.

And when, after a few appointments to have his teeth cleaned and cavities filled, he gleaned she was single (she did have a tendency to talk a lot, couldn’t help it, it was her gregarious personality, she knew that) he had asked her out for a date.

It was after they’d been going out sporadically for a few months that she had introduced him to Helen, when they’d gone out, despite his initial reluctance, on a double-date. Helen had called him ‘Eddie’, in a misguided attempt at chumminess. Edouard had frozen, a frown swept his handsome face, and he stiffly corrected her. That had set the tone of their relationship.

Good, she said to herself, poking her head around her son’s bedroom door. Still asleep, his long legs wound about the top sheet, head still buried beneath his pillow. She had ample time to get his breakfast ready. At least she didn’t have to think about Morgan, long left for her summer job as an arts-and-craft instructor at the community centre. It wasn’t Morgan, in any event, who was demanding. Her brother had always emulated his father; demanding, curt, dismissive. Something else she had always mentally shrugged off.

That same neighbour always lingered on that, her personal feeling that the boy was never disciplined for anything, allowed to go about doing whatever he wanted, unaware of common social courtesies, oblivious to the need to curtail his nasty, base instincts. None of her damn business anyway, she was only a neighbour. Even his aloof father hardly took notice of what his only son was doing, how he was behaving. Still, they had him well in hand, now he was fifteen. He had agreed to take piano lessons, like his sister, if they would agree to signing him up for a soccer league.

To their general surprise, he did well at both. As for his sister, she had finally given up her obsession with horses. For years she had been emotionally invested in horse-back riding. There were stables operated not far from where they lived, in the city suburbs. At one of those stables where riding lessons were offered, Morgan had become a familiar presence. After awhile, as she had gained confidence, Morgan had traded her work on week-ends mucking out the stalls and dressing the horses in exchange for riding lessons. She prided herself on her daughter’s initiative and accomplishments.

She had been kept busy - still was - driving them both everywhere, although Morgan now had her own driver’s license and made use of the van from time to time. Jeffrey now consumed most of her driving time. Driving him back and forth to soccer practise, soccer games, in town and out. When it was out of town, Edouard would accompany them. She always worried about driving on highways, and Edouard had encouraged her, instructed, that she stay off them. Safer, he told her. He said she should concentrate her driving in the closer general area, and she felt comfortable herself, with that restriction. Most women, he loved telling her, didn’t know how to drive properly on a highway anyway.

Now that Morgan’s interest in horses and horse-back riding had abated, she had become involved in theatre arts in her third year of high school. That was more than a little interesting. The transition from horses with all the psychological connotations of young girls’ hormonal maturity substituting an overt attraction to boys to a subliminal one for the symbolism of muscular horses.

Morgan, she acknowledged to herself, hadn’t been rewarded handsomely by her genetic inheritance, the intermingling of her father’s sperm with her mother’s ovum. Where she herself was a good-looking woman with generous features, and so was Edouard - when he was young - their daughter was fairly close to homely.

But theatre arts it was, and she encouraged her daughter, and was enthusiastic about turning up for school plays, and took huge pleasure in viewing her daughter’s easy camaraderie in exchanges between the other students with whom she shared a passion for the floorboards. She could recall taking part in a high school play herself, in her younger years, some unnoticeable tertiary role she could barely recall, in a Shakespearean play; but dredging her memory she could not even identify which of the Bard’s plays she’d been recruited for in her then-dramatic- arts class.

She hoped Morgan would be a ‘normal’ kid, wouldn’t turn out to have friends who got themselves involved with street drugs. Unpopular girls, girls who weren’t beauty queens often went out of their way to ingratiate themselves with boys, hoping to be noticed, to be invited to become part of the crowd. She hoped that the values she had ingrained in her daughter would create enough self-respect and self-confidence to insulate her from committing errors she would regret later.

Which stirred within her memories she had long ago shelved in areas of her consciousness so remote from easy access that when they surfaced, she almost went into a state of existential panic. Older than her daughter, much older, she had been certain she was destined for spinsterhood. They didn’t even use that word any more. Women took pride now, so many of them, in being free from intimate encumbrances; they lived a kind of life traditionally secretly prescribed for men. They were self-absorbed predators, using men as men had used women.

She wasn’t certain what she thought about that. It was all right, she supposed, just wasn’t for her. Her generation hadn’t even remotely thought of any kind of social upturning so radical in nature, where women would think themselves entitled to the same kind of non-committal relationships that men did. Easy, casual sex, no strings attached, no expectations, just one-night stands. Men had become as expendable to a woman’s satisfaction in life as some men always claimed women were to theirs. If men could always brag why buy a cow when you could get milk at the corner store, women were now proving that they could lasso the bull to their personal convenience.

Even if she’d been born to a later social era, even if she had been involved in the women’s liberation movement from its early days and taken its messages seriously, she’d never have been able to subscribe to them. She couldn’t, for herself, imagine life without a male companion. Although she often thought wryly to herself that she was delusional, there was little in the way of companionship between herself and Edouard. And then, to reassure herself that she had done the right thing, she thought of their children - her children. Her life now revolved around them, but then it always had, from the moment they were born.

She had been bemused and a little upset when Edouard had distanced himself from his own children. He would never think of picking up a crying infant, of soothing the child, walking a dark bedroom late at night with a feverish child. For that matter, even simple things like feeding a child. Changing a diaper was out of the question. He would call out to her, “The baby stinks to high heaven!” But change a diaper, never. It offended his sense of personal propriety that he, a male, would descend to such a menial, trivial task.

Well, he was a good wage-earner. They had a lovely home. They had two vehicles. He gave her a more than adequate household allowance to pay their expenses, do the food shopping. She had an acceptable allowance as well as pocket money for herself.

There were some strictures placed upon her. She was allowed to use the Internet now, and she could prowl around on it to find products that piqued her interest, and she could order them, but only through one of her friends who would use her credit card. And then she would reimburse her friend. Her friend.

Her friends. She saw them often enough, and when she did, she relaxed, she was herself, her gregarious, fun-happy self. Not the subdued middle-aged woman she was with Edouard. Her friends had agreed among them, she knew, to keeping their comments to themselves. None of them, the married, the divorced, the single, would ever, she knew, commit to continuing a marriage like hers. Let alone leaping into a marriage-compact with someone like Edouard.

But she did love him when they were married. She loved how he looked, how he looked at her. He wasn’t non-committal then, he wasn’t about to degrade her self-regard then by observing unpleasant things about her. Of course, she wasn’t overweight then, she was, as they used to say back then, nicely stacked. And then some. And she was easy to get along with, still is, since that’s her personality.

Odd how opposites attract sometimes, she often thought to herself, trying to make some sense out of the trajectory of her life, so unlike what she had imagined. But then, not so odd in the sense that sometimes when someone is desperate, as she had been for someone to cherish and to love and to hold her and to want to live his life with her, she saw in him the answer to her dreams of achieving wife-hood.

That was funny. She was the last one of her group of girlfriends to marry. When most of them already had babies she was still single. They’d gone out of their way trying to introduce her to prospective boyfriends. She’d gone out on all kinds of blind dates, and nothing had ever clicked. Until, out of the blue - at least out of the dentist’s office - along came Edouard.

After they married they decided to see a bit of the world. They were both fairly mature, in their mid--to-late-thirties, (she and he respectively), had both good-paying professional occupations, and had both saved assiduously. Which was about all they really had in common, she thought sourly, much later.

They’d gone to Italy, to Spain, to France, toured around Mexico. And then got tired of it all. And still had plenty of savings to burn. So they decided to do the practical thing and they bought a house. For first-time buyers they had enough cash to amaze the realtor with whom they dealt. And they chose their house carefully, with an eye to the future, since they had agreed they would have children, at least two. It took them no time at all to pay down the mortgage completely.

She could hardly believe how much time had gone by. They’d been married for over twenty years. Edouard still embarrassed her socially. He was as curmudgeonly as ever. He was as different from her as it was possible for two human beings to present. To her cheerfulness, generosity and outgoing charm, he presented as socially hostile, would go out of his way to avoid having to acknowledge the presence of a neighbour he’d known for decades.

Other neighbours would speak routinely to one another, through a passage of cordial relations, but not Edouard; he kept himself sequestered in the house, rarely to be seen publicly. She coped with that by suppressing resentment. By reminding herself that she had everything material she would ever need. And she had a companion.

He worked hard. He had a bad back. That bad back was in evidence on occasion when something had to be done around the house. The routine things like disposing of household waste, mowing the lawn, gardening, painting windowsills, fell to her. Otherwise they wouldn’t get done. If anyone ever made mention of her doing things that most husband would make it their choice to perform, she would just respond that everything would change when he retired. Then all the plumbing would be fixed, and they’d get the house interior painted, and the driveway would be refreshed, and the exterior windows washed. All in good time.

They had early agreed that once the children came, she would remain at home, a full-time mother for them. She was happy about that. As her mother still said, he was a good provider. They managed very well indeed as far as their finances were concerned. Another thing they agreed upon. She always had her little ‘efficiencies’, looking for approval from him, because he was abstemious in his spending proclivities. Where they could ‘save’ money, they would, and she became accustomed, and proudly so, to hanging all their laundry out on a revolving clothes line, the only one in the neighbourhood to do so.

“It’s so much extra work!” her girlfriends shrieked, when she told them of her resolve. And she smiled, because they had no idea how smug it made her feel. They worked out of the house, after all, while she did not, and she had ample time…

“But you’ve got all that work looking after the children!”, her mother objected, and she smiled again, so pleased with herself and her life. She was a positive thinker, and prided herself on that. All the things that would bother other people, just did not faze her. Not worth the effort. His sullen, withdrawn, morose and socially awkward persona was for others, not her. He was relaxed with her, open and pleasant. Most of the time.

She liked to tell people he was her best friend. And she had plenty of friends. He was furtively secretive, had no friends, not even workplace acquaintances to warm up to. He eschewed them all, declining to admit anyone into his inner life. But her. And, she sighed, all things are relative.

She recalled with wistful pleasure their early sex lives, and a warm, moist glow crept over her. This time, the deep, penetrating, pleasurable heat she felt invade her body had nothing whatever to do with Menopause.

That time she recalled represented episodes, whenever they could plan them, when they bedded down together. Those hot, frantic nights transformed them both, made their relationship solid, memorable, swollen with expectation. The first time, she instinctively knew it was his first time, and said nothing to abuse him of the notion that it was hers, as well.

It became a little game of theirs, to wind up somewhere interesting where they could end the evening with sex. And then she began to think he was taking her for granted. Enjoying her, but making no commitment. She most certainly enjoyed him, even his awkwardness. His hands cherished her body, and she loved every bit of it.

She was so assured at one point that he would never be able to face a future without her. She was certain on so many occasions that he was on the cusp of telling her that. She thought she could dimly recall, but wasn’t at all certain, that at one time he had gasped that phrase she waited to hear, that he loved her. Once, never again. Finally, he had her on tenterhooks, waiting for commitment. Her parents kept asking her. It was awkward.

Worse, the uncertainty upset her dreadfully. She imagined at one point that he would tire of her, amble off, never to repeat his experiment with another woman, content, once he had experienced what sex was like, to forego it thereafter.

And when he finally, gravely, explained to her that he thought it was time they stopped these furtive encounters and made a life together she could hardly believe her ears. She had flung herself at him, flushed and ecstatic, and it was one of the very few times she had ever seen him taken so utterly by surprise, a wide grin crossing his normally taciturn face. She loved him at that moment with a passion that was never repeated. She thought her heart would never stop clattering against her chest.

Well, time was a-fleeting, as her grandmother used to say. Edouard planned on an early retirement. He had determined that by age 58 he would retire. He had all the requisite numbers to enable him to do that on a full, generous government pension, nicely indexed to match inflation. He had everything figured out down to fewer expenses and great flexibility in their finances.

What, she thought helplessly, would she do, with him home all day? Her time would no longer be her own, he’d be looking over her shoulder endlessly. Complaining, directing, recommending and sternly insisting.

Where would she find her equilibrium. Retrieve herself?