by Karen Gilbert

Created on: March 06, 2009

Love and Marriage "50's" Style

Dar wanted to redo her kitchen but spend little to no money to do so. That was my decorating specialty, big changes on little budgets.

I was enlisted and so was Russ, her next door neighbor. She called Russ to come and dismantle her sink so we could install the new counter we had crafted. Russ arrived in his grungy cut off jeans. Almost as soon as he got there, Dar maneuvered for us to be alone; she sent Russ and me off on an errand to Home Depot.

It was an awkward afternoon. I felt strange. For the first time since I had met my ex-husband, Patrick, thirty-three years earlier, I felt that twinge in my stomach and tingling in the nether regions. I wasn't sure if it was interest or lust having been without a man for so long. But I was sure he felt nothing for me. Why would he? Patrick didn't (I had caught him with another woman). Why would any man find me desirable? I was fifty-one years old; grey-haired. I may be living in the north, but everything on my body had moved south.

We compared divorce notes and then calendars. We arranged to use my season tickets to Hartford Theaterworks and go together to the next show in the series. He asked me to dinner for the week before the show. A date? The first in over thirty years. How does this work? Do we split the check? Does he pay? Do we kiss hello or goodnight? Is he expecting to go to bed? Sex?

I surfed the net for all the books I could find on sex. There was no way I was going to go to Borders and stand there for all to see. Did Borders even carry the kinds of books in which I was interested? Did "it" change in the last thirty years? I prayed the books would arrive in brown wrappers. I lived in a small town. The postal workers and I were on a first name basis.

Russ picked me up in his little red sports car. I don't remember the title of the play, but the cast was naked. Great! I kept wondering what he would think of my body naked. Was I too fat? Too flat? He joked about how the women on his street were referred to as the Bentwood Babes. All of them were well endowed. I was bankrupt.

By the third week, third date I knew we were going to have sex. My young friends had assured me that having sex on the third date did not make me a whore. They assured me that three was a good number. Dare I tell them I was ready on the first date? I was in those reproductive tween years. I went to Dr. Mary to ask what does a woman of fifty do regarding sex and birth control.

After she papered me with pamphlets

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