Monday, February 22, 2010

Another Chore

Her first marriage to the father of her two sons was filled with testing, testing, testing. What would she fix for dinner: beans and fried potatoes (her family’s staple diet) or cabbage and halushki and other odd sounding, foul smelling dishes, recipes handed down from his Czechoslovakian mother and grandmother. 

It didn’t help that she got pregnant right away, squeezing a crib into their tiny trailer house out on Airline Road. Georgia from next door tried to help soothe the teenager’s anxiety with humor and practical advice. “Ya know there’s only about this much difference between one man and the next,” she’d say, measuring with her thumb and forefinger, then letting out a big, deep laugh that lifted the spirits.

Even when Georgia cracked two ribs moving her refrigerator from one side of the kitchen to the other, she just taped herself up and kept on going. And when the baby got the colic and cried and screamed for 24 hours straight, if was Georgia who brought over the paregoric. “Now only a couple of drops,” she cautioned. “It’ll let him get some sleep and you too.” And, of course, she was right.

The worst part of that time was the sex. At first it had been ok and sometimes even fun. But after the baby was born it was so painful she had to bite her hand to keep from crying. Finally, she went to see the doctor out at the airbase and he immediately put her on penicillin. After a couple of weeks, the pain was gone, but the pleasure never returned. Sex became part of her job, like cooking, and washing dishes, and taking stuff to the laundromat.                                            

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