Margery
Margery stared at Douglas over her glasses, but he didn’t pay her any attention. In fact, Douglas never payed attention to Margery anymore and she knew it. All he now a days was sit in front of that damned flat screen TV and watch shows on the discovery channel. Except Margery knew he wasn’t really watching them. He was just sitting, facing forward, eyes glued on a screen while his mind screamed inside his immobile body. Margery wanted to scream too, but she knew that was impossible. No, her job was to remain calm, positive, loving to her bedridden husband.
Nearly five years had past since Douglas had left her; the old Douglas, the real one. Five years ago, hospice brought in the hospital bed and set it up in front of the living room TV, transforming her thoughtfully crafted home into a shabby excuse for a room. She resented Douglas, irrationally. It wasn’t his fault, she knew that. How was he to know that when they arrived at the thirty year mark in their marriage that he would hit the worst spot in his battle with Parkinson’s. Margery knew she could not blame Douglas for leaving her alone, forced to live out the rest of her days with a ghost of a husband. She could not leave him, a good southern christian like herself. What would her mother think? Yes her mother was ninety two and had numbered days as well, but even so, things like this just did not happen in rural Georgia.
No, Margery had accepted her fate. She would live the rest of her days watching “Alaskan Bush People” with Douglas, talking to a man that could not talk back, alone but without a moment of peace.
Perhaps this was punishment for jumping into marriage without her father’s blessing. Her father never did approve of Douglas. Douglas was a good young man when they had met. He had things going for him; he came from a good family, old money, and had a stable career in banking. But for some reason Margery’s father did not like this well rounded country boy, calling him too weak for his prized daughter.
Margery married Douglas anyway. And now her father was right. She was forced to live her days with a weak man who could not take care of her. Instead, she took care of him everyday as if he were the child they were unable to have. She almost felt like she should hate him.
But she didn’t. No, Margery loved Douglas, the man he was and this sad ghost of a man he had recently become. She did, truly and deeply, for reasons she did not quite know, but chose to trust. Maybe it was God’s doing. Or maybe she just did have a heart under the layer of cold and callousness she built up to survive her years of solitude.
So Margery looked at Douglas, over her glasses, even though she knew he would never pay attention to her. And she loved him, and would love him, for as much time as they had left.
***
Writing from the perspective of an older, married woman was difficult for me. I did not quite know how to express her inner thoughts with a voice that could be read as someone with much life experience. Also, adding in extra challenges of making her southern and the caretaker to her husband made the experience even more daunting. However, it was a thrilling task as well. Writing about a character so different from me forced me to get to know her better and try and complete her personality, as I was figuring it out as I was writing it. The more I wrote, the more I learned about Margery, and so developing her voice became easier over time.
