I found Anna, my wife, working at her computer at her desk.
“From now on, I will be the one cooking”, I said.
“Super.” She continued to work as if I had told her the sun had risen and not that I was going to take on another of her household chores.
“Well then, what can I make you for dinner?”
She stopped typing and looked up.
My vision had deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t see his face closer than an inch or two. Her expressions, from loving to furious—the silent language of our forty years together—were hidden behind patches of gray and distortion caused by an incurable genetic disease. When I was 8 years old, nearly sixty years ago, I was diagnosed with pseudo-xanthoma elasticum (PXE), a rare, inherited disease that causes calcification of the skin, eyes and arteries. .
A long marriage
There are 150,000 of us worldwide who suffer from it and many of us suffer from vision degradation to varying degrees.
I turned my head slightly, trying to interpret Anna’s expression with what was left of my peripheral vision. That’s how I watched movies on my iPad.
“Is that your pissed off face? I asked.
“I’m trying to finish our taxes before my head explodes and you’re bothering me. So yeah, that’s my pissed off face.
– Good. Just tell me what you want for dinner.”
I heard a sigh and saw his hand rise and enter the range of gray. She took off her glasses, which indicated that I was about to receive a lecture, some unsolicited advice, or the order to go for a long walk on a short pier.
“You’re telling me to surprise you, right?
“You are very insightful.
“No, it’s just that I’ve been married a long time.”
I heard the smile in her voice when she answered: “Yeah me too.” I was walking towards the kitchen when I heard “No Harper’s Chicken, please!”
When our kids were still living at home, I didn’t make much more than sandwiches, quesadillas, eggs, grilled meat, and pancakes. Nice food. If pressed, I resorted to dishes I had learned from my mother, spaghetti or chicken a la Harper, a roast chicken covered in Campbell’s mushroom sauce.
Cliché marital conflicts
I would like to attribute the low level of my skills to an inability to read a cookbook but I could see very well at the time, it was just that I hated household chores. Real cooking for me was another one of those married-with-kids chores, like emptying the dishwasher, shopping, making the bed, and vacuuming. This mindset invariably led to cliched marital strife:
Anna : “Why do I have to do everything?!”
Me: “Hey, next to my dad, I do a lot!”
Anna : “Oh yeah ? He is your reference