Eve Marx

Word Count 856

I’m a house riddled with termites, is what my aunt Adele used to say. She was a tiny thing, not even 5’ tall, although endowed with a prodigious bosom. She had skinny, bird-like legs and favored cotton batik shifts she wore loose, without a belt. She prided herself on rarely being sick and bragged she’d never missed a day of work, but now, at 65, her eyesight was failing, and she’d developed gout and diabetes, along with a heart murmur. She was never the same after being mugged on the street in NYC a couple of blocks from her home. Her assailant struck her on the back of the head with a brick or rock stuffed inside a sock. He took his swing, and down she went, at which time he grabbed her handbag and ran off. The thief was never apprehended, and Adele was somehow diminished. Her heart went out on her not six months after moving into a fancy assisted living community her financial consultant found. She died, leaving me a little money. Enough money to buy a horse.

Don’t ever buy a horse, she cautioned me time and time again. The hit to the head compounded with the heart condition and diabetes, and the gout made her a little verklempt her last five years. I tried to stay in closer contact. She was my only aunt, after all. She’d never married and had no children and for two decades lived in a first-floor studio apartment in a doorman building east of Union Square. Before I got married and left the city, I lived in the West Village. Sunday mornings, I’d walk my dogs across town to Adele’s, and we’d sit at her pretty table, and she’d make coffee. She favored a Chemex pot. She was healthy as a horse, she’d say in those days before she started referring to termites. Her speech was peppered with references to horses, which amused me. She was healthy as a horse. She despised anyone who ate like a horse. She liked men who were strong as horses. Still, she cautioned me never to get a horse because horses were dangerous.

As soon as she sickened and died and left me a little money, the first thing I did was buy a horse. Adele wasn’t wrong. Horses are dangerous. They’re large, and they will step on you, crowd you, push you into walls. They will buck you off, toss you, rear up, take a bite out of you. Horses will rub you against fences and trees. Some horses live to get their riders off. None of this deterred me.

For the next dozen years or so, I was covered in black and blue marks. My fever for horses was a kind of sickness. I broke fingers; I cracked my elbow. I suffered not one, not two, but three concussions. Only once did I ever seek medical treatment, and that was only after I blacked out in my car behind the wheel and afterward couldn’t remember where I’d been going.

I don’t ride anymore, but that’s only because my horse died. I’m edging in on 70 years old now; like Adele, I’m a house riddled with termites. Thanks to so much time spent in the woods riding horses, I’ve had Lyme Disease four times. Even though I was well dosed with doxycycline, my immune system was permanently compromised. I currently suffer from IBS, diverticulosis, psoriatic arthritis, and a pre-glaucoma condition. A detective with the New York City police department I used to date had a favorite expression about subjects he arrested. “He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind,” he liked to say. Well, on the bad days when I can barely move, and it’s an effort just to get out of bed, I feel like this could be me. Will the day come when I might not be able to shit? Could I go blind? Both are a real possibility.

For years I’ve had my eye on an elderly woman in my community who walks miles every day. She is spry and covers a lot of ground. She moves very quickly. Like my aunt Adele, she’s a tiny thing. She walks in every weather. Sleet, hail, sideways rain do not discourage her. I have to say they discourage me. To my great surprise, her obituary appeared in the local newspaper last week. It said she was 78 years old and recalled she weighed two pounds at birth. I called a friend who knew her and asked what had happened.

She said she wasn’t feeling well and went to the doctor, our mutual friend said. She got a terminal diagnosis three weeks ago and was in the hospital for a few days. The family was just making arrangements for her hospice care when suddenly she didn’t need it and died swiftly with little fanfare. I thanked my friend for the information and thought, well, that was brilliant. That lady probably walked around for a decade or so feeling like a house riddled with termites.

To be sure, there are worse fates.

You could say I’m a bit envious.

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.