But in time, the water around my feet turned first murky, then brown, and then began to congeal until the tub looked like the most unappetizing Jell-O mold imaginable. The goop was so thick that pulling my bare feet out was like extracting myself from swamp mud. And the stuff stank!
“That’s the bad juju coming out of you,” Anna said as she flushed the slop down the toilet.
“Out of my feet?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s proven. The bad food you eat, the body poisons and fats. They leach out of your feet.”
“Can I go back to bed now?”
“Just until your steam shower.”
“I don’t have a steam shower.”
“You will.”
Anna installed a series of plastic curtains in my shower with a portable steam maker set on high. I sat in it on a footstool, sweating, until I was able to polish off three big bottles of weak tea of some kind. This took some time, as the tea tasted like gutter water and a man’s bladder can only hold so much gutter water.
An exercise bicycle was delivered. Anna had me ride it every hour and a half for exactly twelve minutes, until I had worked up a sweat to prove I had raised my body temperature.
“This is to cook out the mucus and such,” she said.
For three meals in a row she fed me bowls of watery stew with chunks of beets and celery.
She had me do one-hour, slow-stretch sessions from her iPad, but I had to move exactly as did the instructor on the video.
She plugged in this thing the size of an electric bar of soap that made a humming sound and vibration, a bit of homemade medicine with Russian lettering on the box. She had me lie naked on the floor and rubbed my entire body, both sides, with whatever that thing was. The Commie machine made different sounds over different parts of my body.
“Atta baby!” Anna said. “We’re getting to it now!”
Without telling her, I chugged some NyQuil and chewed up a few Sudafeds just before I crawled back into my bed to disappear into the Land of Nod.
I felt better in the morning. My sheets were so damp with my night sweats I could have wrung them out like a chamois.
Anna had left a note taped to my percolator.
Left you sleeping deep and silent. I like you like that. You will no longer be ill if you finish the soup in the refrigerator. Drink it cold in the morning, hot at lunch. Do the exer-bike twice before noon and take an hour for the stretch routine on the link I emailed you. And RE-STEAM, until you’ve downed three bottles of distilled water! Leach that sodium! A.
I was alone in my house on my own terms, so I immediately ignored Anna’s instructions. I had coffee with hot milk. I read an actual print copy of the Times—not the online version, which Anna preferred because newsprint paper was a sin against the earth, regardless of my recycling. I treated myself to a nutritious breakfast of eggs with fried slices of linguica (a Portuguese sausage), a banana, a strawberry Pop-Tart, papaya juice from a carton, and a large bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
I did not do any stretching. I did not get on the stationary bike nor did I go into the plastic steam stall. I did not open her email link, thus stretched not a whit. Instead, I spent the morning doing laundry—four loads, including the bedsheets. I played my mixtape CDs and sang along. I reveled in obeying not a single one of Anna’s commands. I lived the best life imaginable.
Which meant I had answered the question Anna had put to me two weeks earlier: No. I did not think I was the man for her.
When she called to ask how I was, I confessed to ignoring her instructions. I also said that I felt healthy, rested, and like myself and despite how wonderful I thought she was and what a dope I am and blahditty blah-blah dittity-blah.
Before I could muster the vocabulary to actually break up with her, Anna did it for me.
“You are not the man for me, baby.”
There was not a smidgen of rancor in her voice, neither judgment nor disappointment. She said it straight out of her face in a way I couldn’t. “I’ve known for a while,” Anna said, chuckling. “I was wearing you down. Would have destroyed you over time.”
“When were you going to let me off your hook?” I asked.
“If you hadn’t backed out by Friday morning, we’d have had the Talk then.”
“Why Friday morning?”
“Because Friday night I’m going back to Fort Worth. Ricardo is taking me hot-air ballooning.”
A bit of my man-pride had me instantly hoping that this Ricardo fellow would not be the man for Anna, either.
He wasn’t. Anna never told me why.
For the record, I did get my scuba certificate. Anna and I joined Vin and a dozen other divers, offshore in the kelp beds. We breathed underwater, swimming through what looked like a tall forest of sea trees. There’s a great picture of Anna and me, on board afterward, our wet-suited arms around each other and big smiles on our cold, wet faces.
We leave for Antarctica next week. Anna arranged a big shopping spree, seeing to it that we have all the necessary gear. She spent extra time with MDash, making sure he was going to have enough layers to stay warm. He’s never been to a place cold enough for chinstraps and crabeaters.
“Antarctic Circle, make way,” I hollered, modeling my green parka and shell. Anna laughed.
We’ll fly to Lima, Peru, then change planes for Punta Arenas, Chile, where we’ll board a boat to make the crossing from South America to the old science station at Port Lockroy, our first stop. The seas in the Drake Passage can get pretty rough and tumble, they say. But with a strong sail, a firm wheel, a true compass, and a reliable clock, our ship will journey south, bound for the Antarctic Circle and adventure galore.
Oh, yeah. For B15K, as well.
Christmas Eve 1953
Virgil Beuell didn’t close the shop until nearly dinnertime, when a light snow began falling. The road back home was slick and getting slicker so he drove slowly, wonderfully easy to do in the Plymouth with the PowerFlite automatic transmission. No clutch, no shifting, an engineering marvel. Skidding off the icy road and getting stuck in the snow would be a disaster tonight; in the Plymouth’s trunk were all the treasures due in the morning from Santa, kept hidden and undiscovered there since the kids had declared their wishes weeks ago. Those presents had to be under the tree in a few hours, and transferring them from the trunk of a snowbound car to the cab of a tow truck would alter Christmas Eve horribly.
The drive home took longer than usual, sure, but the length of the trip did not bother Virgil. The cold was what he hated. PowerFlite or not, he often cursed the folks at Plymouth, who were unable to build a car with a heater worth a damn. By the time he slowly pulled up to the house and the yellow spread of the headlamps played on the screen of the back porch and there was the hush of tires coming to a stop on the gravel drive, he was aching slightly from the cold. Virgil had to be extra careful not to slip on the front walkway, as he had done too many times before, but he still got inside the house as fast as a working man could.
As he stamped the snow off his overshoes and hung up his layers of warm clothing, Virgil’s body softened in the warmth pumping up from the cellar through the grates. After buying the house, he self-installed a furnace that was far oversized for the modest home. He put in, too, a beast of a hot-water heater, a commercial unit that never, ever ran out of the liquid heaven that allowed for the kids’ baths and his own long showers. The winter fuel bills were worth the comfort, as was the price of two cords of firewood every winter.