Marie's Notes
I was flattered when David contacted me and asked me to review this, well, this "project" I guess you'd call it. I live in an "assisted living facility" now, never mind where. At 85 my mind hasn't left me, but my body has started to give up. I had a stroke a couple of years ago and while the physical and speech therapy have worked reasonably well, I'm articulate and mobile again anyway, I still need assistance. But my days with the Vets Corps are, I'm afraid, behind me.
What David has written here is accurate, as far as it goes. But he wasn't in my head, as we used to say. So I welcome this chance to, well, fill in the blanks.
I was the prototypical country girl, born and reared on a farm outside of a tiny town in eastern Colorado. It wasn't quite the "Butcher Holler" of the Loretta Lynn song, but it wasn't far off.
When I first heard the song,
Ode to Billy Joe
, with its line, "that nice young preacher brother Taylor stopped by today, said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday..." I laughed. That was pretty much how Chester and I were brought together.
What I had wasn't exactly an arranged marriage, but it wasn't far from it. Chester's dad and mine started, well, "putting us together" is a good way to put it. Things like Sunday dinner after church involved our two families and we were of similar ages. When Chester asked me to marry him it was almost as simple as agreeing to borrow a bull or a stallion.
I said "Yes" of course, and went to my 17-year-old marriage bed a virgin.
It was a different time. There was no such thing as sex education in school and between my parents heaping shame on the one girl who wasn't coming to church anymore because she was
in trouble
, and the preaching about abstinence I was ignorant about what was expected.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I was a farm girl and knew how the next generation of cattle or horses or pigs came to be. I understood the mechanics. But I had no idea what the, well, what making love was.
And, it turned out, neither did Chester. My marriage night consisted of me undressing and waiting for him in bed, him arriving half drunk, taking my virginity, and falling asleep. The whole encounter was about five minutes. And that set the stage for my pre-David sex life. For some reason, he never said and I never asked, Chester had decided Thursday was sex night. It was like he filled up and needed to drain or something. It was mechanical. It was, again, me waiting in bed, naked, him mounting me, the fucking, the gasp of his release, and his snoring.
Chester bought the little dry goods store in town and to my surprise, I think his too for that matter, turned out to be a very good businessman. Much better at business than farming anyway. He was good with customers, always willing to extend credit and since he didn't get pushy, I don't think over his 30 years running the store he had more than a dozen accounts go bad. He was popular, spent eight years on the Town Council, and we were prosperous. We had the big house built and were considered, well, to be immodest, the "upper crust," although I think we both knew very well that we were big fish in a very small pond.
It was a good life and, as they say, you never miss what you never had, so I didn't mind our sex life. We did manage seven children, so something was working.
We were even talking about retiring and traveling.
And then he dropped dead.
It was nothing dramatic. No car wreck or catastrophic collapse of the store building or anything like that.
Like almost every one of our generation, he smoked too much and I fed him the fried food he liked.
Then, one day, climbing the roll-around ladder to get a hat for Margie McDaniel, he had the widowmaker and I was a widow.
I was okay, financially. He had good insurance, the house was paid for, and we had money in the bank. Mostly, though, the store was a going concern so I sold it to a bright young couple. I made them a good deal and invested, well, hired a man from two towns over where they had such things as financial planners, and he invested well.
But it got lonely in that big old house and, well, I had passed the Medicare card threshold and thought it would be nice to have some young people around. So I went to the local campus of the state college and posted a little note card -
Room to let
.
The first, well, I guess you'd say "applicant," was a young girl who looked like she would have boys over every night so I told her "no."
The second was a young man who looked me up and down in a way that made me blush. I told him "no" too.
David was the third. He was nice and polite, a bit older than the previous two. I think the thing that made me say "yes" to him was the way he seemed almost old-fashioned. He held the door for me when we went into the house and answered with simple, "Yes ma'am," or "No ma'am" when I asked questions.
It turned out he was a veteran, just home from almost three years in Japan. He was very studious, almost ridiculously studious, and when I asked him about it he said he had just decided to be a "good student" after an, as he put it, "performance in junior college that was not stellar."
I enjoyed talking to him. Often it was more an "interview" than a "conversation." He was studying to be a teacher and liked my reminiscences about things that he only read about in his books. We laughed about "duck and cover" drills in the 1950s and he seemed fascinated as I told him of the olive-drab colored barrels of emergency supplies stowed in the hallway of the basement of my grade school or the little triangles that used to be on the dials of our AM radios for something called "Conelrad."
Forgive an old woman's wandering. What you care about is how he, well, how he "awakened" something in me. I laugh, these days, when I hear all of the bitching about "woke" this and "woke" that. What he "woke" in me was special and wonderful.
I was up at night. As I got older I found I ate little at meals, even when I cooked for both of us, but would wake at night, hungry, and needed to get a little snack.
I do wander, don't I? Forgive me.
I was up at night, standing in front of the refrigerator door, looking for something to snack on. I was contemplating the meatloaf that was left over from dinner and, if I'm completely honest, lingering in front of the refrigerator (he always laughed when I called it an ice box), enjoying the way the cold air against my skin, my robe was open, made my nipples so hard they ached. When something touched my hips I screamed.
I turned suddenly and he was standing there, hands held up kind of defensively.
"Sorry," he said with a laugh, "but I couldn't resist."
I was gasping for breath, my heart was hammering so hard I could feel it.
"God, David," I started but then realized where his eyes were looking and quickly closed my robe.
He was smiling that smile that always made me smile back.
I smiled, but I felt a blush spreading.
"Looking good, Marie," he said.
Even as I said it I knew how much, how perfectly, I sounded like my grandmother when I said something that can only be written as, "Oh, pshaw."
He laughed and mimicked me. "Pshaw?" he said and that made me giggle.
"Okay," I said, getting myself together, "you got me. Would you like a sandwich?"
He smiled, not the grin he often flashed or the smile that was so infectious, but an easy smile.
"Would you like to know what I'd really like?" he asked, and without thinking I said, "Sure."
He took a step, startling me, and put his hands on my shoulders.
I was surprised. Hell, I was shocked. Oh, I knew he was a toucher and I enjoyed the shoulder rubs he was free with, but this was, well, different. It was intimate. He was well inside of what we used to call my "personal space." And his face was serious, no smile now, no grin.
"I would like what I just saw," he said, his eyes holding mine.
My, "Pshaw," made both of us giggle a little.
"David," I said, "I'm flattered but," and he cut me off by touching my lips with his fingertip.
"Marie," he said, and when he brushed his fingertips across my cheeks I felt a tingle in my belly, something I had only felt when I masturbated, "we're good together, we have fun together and, honestly, you are so much more interesting than any of the girls in school I can't wait to get home and be with you."
I was too surprised to speak.
"And we're both adults and," he kissed me then as his hands moved down, getting under the material of my robe and making my skin tighten in goosebumps where he touched.
"David," I said, but he cut me off with a kiss.
"I'm not a rapist," he said, his mouth so close to my ear that each word was a warm moist little puff, "and I'll stop if you say to."
I didn't say "Stop."
Instead, I said, "David, I'm three times your age."
His hands moved farther under the material of my robe. He started at my shoulders, his nails very lightly tickling slowly down my back, around the depression at the small of my back, and ending by covering my ass, his palms flat and gently pressing.
"I didn't hear 'stop,'" he said.
"David, stop," I said and he looked almost childlike the way his face fell.
I stood, taking deep breaths for several seconds and I was pleased at some deep, instinctual level to see that his breathing wasn't any too steady either.
"David," I said, this time it was
my
hand moving to lay gently on his cheeks, "I'm not saying 'no,' but I AM still hungry and I think we need to talk before this goes any farther."
And again, it was the childlike look on his face that got to me.
"Wellllll, a meatloaf sandwich WOULD be good," he said.
I made two sandwiches then, aware every second that I was naked under the light robe, aware every INSTANT that this man was watching me.
He said nothing while I prepared the sandwiches, cutting thick pieces of the meatloaf and adding a liberal coating of mayonnaise to the bread. I put the sandwiches on paper plates, added a handful of potato chips, poured two glasses of milk, set it all on the little kitchen table, and sat across from him.
After a couple of bites, the worst of my hunger assuaged, I could talk.
"What is it you think you want, David?" I asked.
He grinned around his own mouthful and said, "A woman who can make a sentence that does not include the words 'like,' 'totally,' or 'awesome,' and can talk about something other than how drunk she got."
