The Timbre of Her Fears
Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, fiction, kids, marriage, parenting, writings | 11 Comments
Faith Shepherd is a born again worrier. Without small children to fret about and follow after, issuing reprimands and warnings, she has, in her old age, turned her anxiety up a notch. Like a stereo that has been moved to the next room or to the house across the street, she feels she must increase the volume of her thoughts in order to be heard from her retirement community in Florida. She has truly found her stride and projects her fretting from the Southernmost state up towards her three grown children who she believes have flown the nest without major incident, with relative health and middling success, all because of her constant vigilance against such things as falls down flights of rickety basement stairs and an uncompromising insistence on cleaning the lint filter in the dryer and turning the water off on the back of the washer after each use.
"There but for the grace of God go all with major appliances," her children joke now that she is not near enough to hear them. She doesn't even sense their disdain as she speaks loudly enough into the phone to traverse the space that is her eldest son's mental illness and substance abuse, her only daughter's faltering marriage. She offers up a constant stream of commentary as to the benefits of Vitamin C and Mammograms and yearly trips to the dermatologist. There is no end to list of things she worries about and, often, maybe once a week, one of these horrible, 'preventable' accidents happens to someone, somewhere. When she learns about the condo fire or the alligator attack on the evening news, she feels something like validation and resumes worrying anew.
Yesterday she called her daughter who was busy making dinner for her own children, caught in the five thirty eddy of meal and bath and homework, to tell her all about the friend of a woman in her golf group's sister-in-law who has just been diagnosed with Ovarian cancer. She called it the 'advanced kind'. "It's incredibly rapid, debilitating, she's only thirty-two years old," she said. "Not expected to live a year." And her daughter chimed in, because she knew it was coming, she'd heard it so many times before, "It's like Gilda Radner. Ovarian Cancer. The silent killer." They said it together, a concert of fear.
Faith has near perfect memory for the timing and circumstances of other people's demise. The way some women store Christmas gift wrap and Easter chocolates bought on sale just after the holidays, Faith squirrels away ghastly stories of tragedy and suffering, waiting for the best time to trot out a specific morbid treasure, usually to underscore someone's perceived recklessness. She tells the one about the man who blew himself up along with his entire neighborhood block while digging the footer for a new front walk as warning to her son who has just bought a lawn aerator. "It is the perfect example of what happens when people use power tools without first mapping out the under ground gas lines in the yard," she says and cannot understand why he has hung up on her.
Her middle child, the doctor with the lovely wife and perfect fair-haired daughters, has not spoken to her in weeks. The way he tells it, when he called to tell her the family dog had jumped to its death from the back of his pick-up truck speeding down the highway, she was gleeful and proud of her clairvoyance, practically celebrating the loss. "That's the last I-told-you-so that I'm going to listen to, Ma," he said. The second hang up in so many days.
Her husband, the father of her children, is a patient man grown accustomed to the timbre of her fears. He spends long days on the golf course as recess from her domestic foreboding. But even he will say, every once in awhile when not in a conciliatory mood, "You make me want to drink and drive, to run barefoot on the fairway with an umbrella in a lightening storm, to drive blindfolded in a school zone." He believes that accidents happen sometimes, but, mostly they don't happen at all, and everyone muddles through somehow.
Faith Shepherd thinks that just knowing these cautionary tales and repeating them will keep her safe, will prevent her ever becoming a victim. Surely I will never drown or die of electrocution, she thinks. Death will be swift and unpredictable, from stroke or antibiotic resistant staph because she was certainly not going to be felled by the preventable stuff, that which can be prepared for and warded off with a healthy dose of calcium and daily water aerobics.
And that is why she is so shaken, so terribly startled and insecure about the incident with the reindeer in the night. It seems that someone has slipped into the gated confines of the Del Boca Vista retirement community and staged a little hanky panky. All the statues of light-up reindeer, their little bulbs shining from the green lawns of retired couples just trying for a little holiday spirit, have been arranged so that one mounts the other, their robotic necks slowly moving up and down, simulating the thrust and strain of the sexual act. The prankster has strewn empty condom wrappers at the scene and completed the staged event by propping up half finished bottles of wine and discarded plastic champagne flutes in the coarse St. Augustine grass of the quiet neighborhood.
It's not the lewdness of the scene that bothers Faith, but the fact that the joke was executed without anyone's noticing a strange person, an unfamiliar car, an alien noise. The security guards, having checked the video tape recording for the comings and goings of all non-residents between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., find nothing that suggests anything but the ordinary departure and return of tanned and wealthy senior citizens.
Which, to Faith, indicates it must be an inside job. Some one familiar and among them, given to wandering the streets at night thinking about sex. Sexual thoughts, even of the wildlife variety, disturb her. She is reminded of the article she read in Newsweek some years back. A perfectly normal seeming guy, married, employed, the father of children, would strip naked, throw on a long coat and walk the sidewalks of their neighborhood exposing himself to mothers pushing infants in strollers and children playing at the park that was properly fenced and gated. It took months for the citizens of the community to identify him as the family man who lived in the adorable house on the corner of Elm and Grove even though he never wore a mask or a hat or anything type of disguise. It was just so hard for everyone to make the connection, so difficult to believe that one of their own, was capable of such sexual deviancy. Their brains refused to see his likeness until he had flashed each and every one of them at least twice.
She vows that this same dumb disbelief will not color her suspicions and she sees everyone at the rec center that morning as a potential perpetrator. She tells her husband after she returns from yoga, "It's probably a widower. Like Lowell MacDonald or Phelps Edwards. It could have been either one of them, they've been alone so long. Solitude makes a person strange after awhile."
And her husband chuckles and feels glad. He loves a joke of the harmless variety. He offers to do a load of laundry and, when the spin cycle is over, he gathers the clothes and dumps them into the dryer without checking the lint filter. He leaves the lever on the back of the washer in the 'On' position and grabs his golf shoes from the cubby with his name on it in the garage. He rides his bike to club house with no hands and plays through the seventh hole even though thunder rumbles ominously in the distance.
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