The Other Retirement

The first time Dan said he wanted to live for himself, I was wiping crumbs off the kitchen table with a damp paper towel. He was seventy-three. I was seventy-two. We'd been married forty-nine years and retired six months. I had plans for this stretch of life: a bus trip to the flower show in Philadelphia, maybe a long weekend at a bed-and-breakfast in the Poconos, afternoons on the front porch with an iced tea and the crossword. Dan had a different plan.

He'd been a shift supervisor at the paper mill down by the Lackawanna River for thirty-eight years. When the wind blew from the south, the whole neighborhood got that sour, wet-cardboard smell. On humid days it hung over the street like a fog. Dan came home from his last shift with a gold watch in a box and a plastic plant from the union hall. Six months later he was busier than he'd ever been. He joined a senior golf league at Pine Hills, started meeting up with the old crew from the mill for breakfast at Kelly's Diner, booked himself a ten-day trip to Myrtle Beach with two guys from the league without once asking me if I'd like to go.

At first I told myself he just needed to burn off thirty-eight years of shift whistles. But then he stopped telling me things. One Tuesday he announced he was going up to Cooperstown for a baseball museum bus trip. The next month he was going ice fishing on Lake Wallenpaupack. Then a week golfing in the Poconos with three other couples. I asked when we'd do something together. He put his coffee mug down — the one with the mill's logo on it, a faded red bird over the word "Lackawanna" — and said, "Carol, I worked my whole life. Now I want to enjoy myself without having to answer to anybody."

I stood there with the paper towel still in my hand. I'd worked my whole life too. Most of it never showed up on a single pay stub.

When Dan and I got married, I was one semester away from finishing my nursing degree at a community college outside Harrisburg. I'd been on the dean's list two semesters in a row. Dan got offered a shift supervisor job at a paper mill near Scranton, and he asked me to come with him. He said I could finish school later. We moved twice more in our first eight years — once for a foreman's post in Wilkes-Barre, once for a plant transfer to Binghamton — before the company brought him back to run the Scranton mill floor for good. Each move meant new pediatricians, new church, new grocery store, a new place to learn where the good produce was. By the time we settled in Scranton for good, Mark was five, Julie was three, and Keith was on the way. I never went back to school. I did home health aide work for years — driving out to people's houses to check blood pressure, change sheets, make sure old men took their pills. Later I watched the neighbor kids before and after school for $40 a week. The money helped. But Dan's job always made the decisions.

When Dan's mother had a stroke, I took care of her in our spare room for seven years, in that same Scranton house. I changed her sheets, heated up her soup, sat with her during the programs she liked on WNEP. Dan kept working because, as he said, somebody had to keep the mill running. Our kids didn't know any of this. To them, their father was the hard worker who brought home golf shirts from his trips and paid for their weddings. I was just the mom who was always around, always had a casserole in the fridge.

That morning I asked him if "living for himself" meant living like I didn't exist. He told me not to make a thing out of it. "You've always liked staying home." That wasn't true. I'd learned to stay home because somebody always needed me there. I'd learned it so well I forgot there was anything else.

Then came a Sunday dinner at our house. All three kids, their spouses, five grandkids. The kitchen smelled like pot roast and the good gravy with the onions. Dan started talking about his next golf trip and made a joke about me being too much of a homebody to go along. I put my fork down next to a scoop of mashed potatoes that had gone cold. I told our kids I'd wanted to be a nurse. I told them I quit my nursing program to move for their father's first job. That for years I'd wanted to travel, take a class, have a job where I wore real scrubs and a name badge. Keith just sat there with his mouth half open. "You never told us that, Mom." I hadn't, because I was afraid it would sound like I blamed them. I didn't. But a lot of choices had been made for me, not by me.

Dan shifted in his chair. The springs creaked. He said nobody forced me. I asked him what would've happened with the kids if I'd stayed in school. He didn't answer. The room got so still I could hear the neighbor's beagle barking at the mail truck. Julie reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

We fought about it for a week. He said I was trying to make him feel guilty for working. I told him I wasn't blaming him for his career — I was blaming him for acting like he was the only one who'd made sacrifices. We sat at the kitchen table with a stack of bank statements from Fidelity Bank. Our pension and our savings came from his paycheck, sure. But also from every home health shift I took, every kid I watched before school, every time I stayed home so he could work a double. The numbers didn't tell the whole story, but they told enough.

I decided to do something I'd been putting off since I was twenty-two. I signed up for a watercolor class at the Scranton Cultural Center, every Tuesday night for eight weeks. $85, paid for with my own checking account. And I booked a week in Cape May, New Jersey with my sister Peggy. When I told Dan, he asked who would make his meals while I was gone. I laughed. Not at him — it was just that the question explained our whole marriage in one sentence. "For one week," I said, "you'll really live for yourself."

My trip lined up with one of his golf weekends. We left the house on a Thursday morning with different suitcases and separate plans. Peggy picked me up in her Buick LeSabre, honking twice in the driveway like she was clearing a lane in a parking lot. Cape May didn't change my life like in a movie. I got sunburned on the beach near the lighthouse, Peggy snored loud enough to rattle the motel window at the Beachcomber, and I missed my own pillow. But I came home knowing I could still pick something for myself. The watercolor class started the next week. I painted a picture of the Cape May lighthouse that looked more like a crooked pencil, but I painted it.

Dan and I didn't split up. We learned to take some trips together and some apart. He's still got a hard personality, and sometimes he talks like his time matters more than mine. Now I stop him mid-sentence. Our kids started asking me what I wanted to do, not just if I could help out with the grandkids.

Keith called last week to ask if I wanted to go with him to the model train show at the mall downtown, just the two of us, no casserole to get home for. I said yes, and I was already looking up what time the doors opened before I hung up the phone.