Allergy

She's lying down after a night of reverie, a fabulous evening of unexpected delights. In the hours before, all she knew about was a 6:30 dinner and reservations at a comedy club. She bloomed with the night's shade, funnier and more beautiful with every passing hour. Words flowed mingled with red wine and mixed company. At reverie's end, at 5 am, she laid down and sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed.

In a couple hours kids six small feet were pounding up and down the halls like gazelles on the Serengeti. I arose, hung over and undercaffeinated, looking across the bed to my wife. Her porcelain skin glows against burgundy sheets, her curved form the desire of every sculptor since the discovery of clay. But the pillow crammed under her eye means migraine, and she's going to feel it when she's awake.

I wonder what it is that caused the sneezing, and pad slowly down the stairs, careful not to upset my fragile thought. The first visible child is running through the living room on all fours with a long string tailing behind him. He stops and looks at his butt, shaking it to see the tail wag. I smile, kiss him, and shuffle to the aspirin and coffee pot. The drawer is broken. Someone's hung on it and bent the track rollers. I wiggle, shimmy, then grip and rip it from the slot, admiring the bent metal and cursing my lack of coffee.

In the last fifteen years, I've known her and not known her. She was mysterious and beautiful then, and still is, but in a way I find difficult to grasp. She makes love seem easy to feel and hard to accept, like I couldn't possibly deserve the gift so freely given and fear having nothing to offer in return. A terminal fear. Lonliness waiting to detonate. And it was a question like this I asked her that night, between sipped wine and rare food, her merlot hair waving gently to her shoulders. Her eyes sparkled, and with a smirk told she's not changed.

But she has. She was a beat poet and a flapper girl, a nymph and free spirit in those long ago college days. The love we felt produced binding and formative changes: work, home, kids, stay-at-home motherhood. So maybe she still is a beat poet, and nymph, but reality is harsh. Did Kerouac have to yell at his kids for not flushing the toilet? Did Peter Pan ever change a diaper? If she has been the same, somber suburban life has settled in around her. My reaction has been high blood pressure medication and antidepressants. She, dressed in black beaded flapper shirt, is a Brownie mom; surreal and unchanged. Maybe she hasn't changed, life did.

So as I make coffee and wait for the sound of her groggy feet, I think about her and our anniversary today. Twelve years. How could I go to some store and buy some other guys words about a generic wife and give this to her? Does he know her? The way her subarctic toes creep across the bed to my warm legs at night? The way she's still afraid of me kissing her collarbone, suspecting after all this time I still may be a vampire. Its the widow's peak, I think. So instead I'm writing her this note, an extended thought on a trip we're still walking together. Happy anniversary.

And the sneezing from upstairs means its almost time. She'll be down soon. Kids are watching cartoon superheroes from underneath the sleeper sofa, a cotton and steel fortress. She's allergic to something around here. The meds don't help much. We've tested her. Nothing unusual, and nothing insightful. Maybe she's allergic to domesticity. That I could see. Somehow I can't see Kate Chopin scrubbing the kitchen floor and doing laundry. And this is the moment of epiphany for me, that after all this time, she's not changed, our circumstances have. I've made a life of throwing myself into those circumstances, she's been herself. Those moments I was mad at her for not becoming Betty Rubble when we had a home, I was wrong. I fell in love with Betty Boop. Its who she is. And its beautiful.

(originally written October 2005)