A nasty cold makes its way through the house. Aaron brings scary dreck, like a kid going to daycare only bigger and worse. The kids get it, I get it, and then Aaron gets it again. We spend a lot of time simply caring for each other. Comfort foods and hot toddies. Vicks vapor rub.

And we buy a hot tub. A Jacuzzi. The strangest purchase I have ever made by far. I could no more imagine myself doing that than I could imagine myself having a jet boat or a pony dog. But achy and hopeful and tender and embracing the goofy factor (a t-shirt from the gap, “Cougar Bait”, cz he knows that if all else fails and a fear of mine cannot be mastered any other way, humor will probably get the job done as I have no resistance to a good laugh), we go comparison shopping and listen to schpeels about LED lighting and numbers of jets and oxidation. The showrooms smell like chlorine. The smell is the same as the Schaumburg public pool I grew up in until my life exploded forever into a shit splatter pattern of my parents’ manias and economic catastrophes – until it exploded into the person I became. Smelling chlorine again, I walked around the showrooms and watched the cascading LED lights and stuck my hand in the warm water. I can remember the hot sidewalk under my little feet as I ran the 8 blocks or so over to the pool, the pool pass a giant baby pin with my number on it attached to my bathing suit, right hip. My sister’s adorable boingboing curly hair, her polka dot butt bikini bottoms and the halter top forever coming untied and flapping loose around her neck. My best friend Mickey and I would go to the pool every single day, sometimes we’d pick up Sherry, sometimes we’d duck out the north door and go to the strip mall for candy, giant chewy sweet tarts were my favorite. Pixie sticks. Sherry’s cat had kittens on the chair in her living room, and we paused to see the squirmy wet pile of them. Mickey took dares to pull her bathing suit bottoms down in the pool, then dive to up-end her bare ass at the life guard, a maneuver she repeated often and which I found stimulating to contemplate at the safe distance of being me not her. Slightly older boys egging her to flash them her vagina in the stairwell tubes of the giant jungle gyms of the parks with no trees in our squat flat poor new subdivision. She cleaned my room for me and worshiped her older sister. Her mom and dad hated each other and kept the drapes drawn always, her house always dark and over air conditioned. Not mine. My house was awash in sunlight, nothing but flowered valances my mom would sew herself, like fabric bangs across the foreheads of the windows. She liked yellow, and shades of it were everywhere, as on the giant round area rug with long gold tassel fringe at the edge. My father had a component stereo system, box speakers near the real-wood fireplace that had a brass curtain I’d open and close endlessly. Led Zeppelin loud on the weekends. My parents nzling each other next to the sink in the little kitchen while she made the nightly salad, vinegar and olive oil and too much oregano always. They kept bells on the doorknob to the bedroom in case one of us got up in the night and might disturb their fucking. The end tables by their bed and next to the couch were all giant empty wooden wire rolls that my dad hauled home from work and my mom made gingham tablecloths for. My favorite gingham was (is) blue, the same material my grandma used for curtains; everyone was always sewing something, nesting nesting my mom would paint walls colors like “chartreuse”. My dad built me a playhouse on the patio and blasted music out of his van while he tended tomato plants and a little grape arbor. I can see the line of orange day lilies along the garage, happy hippie color splash against the shit brown siding color that my mom said was “earthy”. She took yoga classes at the Slim n’ Trim, which ironically was the storefront between the candy depot and a Baskin Robbins in that strip mall. Before his dissatisfaction with his work and the stress of sole providership broke my father’s will into deadly shards hurting anything close enough to catch their random flying trajectories, before my mother’s fragile mind and strong spirit collided and she disappeared into herself to watch the sparks fly, before I memorized the Book of Ruth to win a stack of white bibles and looked for a Larger Meaning to Suffering, life was good. And now it is good again.

Aaron looks at me worried about my worrying, “You really think I’m going to disappear or something don’t you?” Or something is about right; I worry about what I can’t imagine not so much about anything that I can. I rub his head, press my palm to his mind through his skull, promise to care for it, make bargains like a giraffe caught in quicksand only different, “I’ll do anything, take on anything, just don’t take leave of yourself my man, please be happy….” He has a stuffy nose and snores a little; I like it, that’s how I know he’s still there even if I close my eyes. Then I dream of John who shows me a healing scar on the back of his head where his cranium was pried open like a walnut down the middle. He tells me there was really something wrong with it, his brain, a connection capacity was blocked by something like a recurring tumor. I think it was me, the Recurring Tumor Girlfriend. He tells me no, it wasn’t. “It wasn’t you.” I ask him if he is going to die. He doesn’t answer me. I wake up and listen to the quiet house, breathe in the smell of apple sauce I have slow-cooking overnight in the kitchen.

smells like everything will be okay feist - mushaboom