Read Online Lucky Us by Joan Silber - Free Book Online

younger.
Be healthy,
I thought, but of course he was, without any invocations from me. How solid he looked, the squared shoulders and the muscled angles of his arms. He was wolfing down chow fun with remarkable speed and noise, a sight that made me so glad that I had to slip a noodle down his sock.
    I WALKED AROUND the streets for several days grinning to myself over Gabe’s being fine. Talk about feeling several things at once. At work everyone noticed that I was less testy.
    Gabe bought a shelfful of vitamins and herbal supplements that he fed me every morning. He was constantly trying to get me to eat more, although there was no reason for me to be fatter at present. In the evenings when he didn’t work late, he came home and constructed elaborate meals. Figs with prosciutto, gnocchi with cream sauce, eggplant stuffed with smoked mozzarella. He wanted to tend me. I was going to turn into a tub from humoring him. Some of my short skirts were already getting tighter in the waist.
    I couldn’t have felt more married than I did over those meals, stuffing myself on rosemary chicken and soppingup the sauce with a hunk of bread. I thought that we were like a couple under siege, brave citizens feasting in a cellar while bombs went off overhead. I suppose I thought of our sex life that way too; we had to always be listening for the enemy, and so our interludes were tense and limited, but also tender and comradely.
    Aunt Angie, who had groused a lot about the wedding being postponed, often phoned in the evening and wanted to hear what we’d had for dinner. “He likes the pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe,” she said. “That’s the way to get to him.” Like my mother, she was convinced that the dawdler over marrying was Gabe. She also believed I did all the cooking, no matter what we told her. “Just to offer some free advice,” she said, “get him to eat bitter greens so he’ll piss a lot. A man his age needs that to keep him limber, and I know you know what I mean.”
    For a week Gabe could not take a pee without one of us remarking on the amazing limberness of his dick, which was going to wear us both to a frazzle, down to nubs and shreds of ourselves. Any more pissing and neither of us was going to be ambulatory; we got a lot of mileage out of this one, true or not.
    I N M ARCH MY friend Dawn wore the dress that she’d bought for my wedding to her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday dinner. She said she couldn’t save it up any longer and she would need something different anyway by whatever season we got around to deciding to get married.
    â€œMaybe in another ten years,” I said, just to hear Dawn yelp. In fact, I was thinking that maybe Gabe and I
could
do it, not right this minute but soon. Everything I’d read had assured me of my right to carry on as if I were a regular person.
    Gabe was still quiet around me. Our sex had become the sex of very old, cautious people who were afraid of injuring each other’s vital tissues. Sometimes it reminded me too of some of the sex I had had in high school, which had of course been more wild and strenuous but had had the same sneaky feeling of stolen moments.
    Gabe said a number of things that made a difference during this time (he said I should always remember that I was loved) but mostly he didn’t talk much. He was being vigilant, watching me to see how I was bearing up. It made me nervous but I appreciated it.
    Often we sat in front the TV, letting the sound track talk instead of us. One night we were watching the late-night news in bed; we were drowsy and barely listening.A reporter was blathering on about the stock market, and Gabe said, “I hope my pension fund isn’t run by idiots.”
    â€œWhat fund?”
    â€œFrom the store,” Gabe said. “You know. For retirement. It adds up over the years, even though they don’t put in that much.”
    I said, “When can you