Iced Tea

My wife sunbathes on her chaise lounge in our lush backyard: a private dinosaur garden full of gigantic primitive-looking plants with fronds, fuzzy bark, and palmate leaves. Her long bare legs shine with suntan oil all the way up to her caramel-colored monokini cut very high above her hipbones. A gold chain between her breasts connects the V of fabric to cover them while leaving her bellybutton exposed below.

She lies very still, absorbing her vitamins. I imagine her eyes are closed behind her big brown sunglasses. Days like this are her due. She worked for it.

So did I, but not as hard. Not as elegantly. I did not pass through the years of work and come through on this side with defined abs, the way she has.

Even from where I stand watching her through the screened door of my writing bungalow, I think I can smell her Hawaiian Tropic. Sure, we can afford fancier skincare, but this stuff smells like forbidden fruit we remember from the seventies and eighties: Bo Derek. The topless surfer girl poster my oldest stepbrother was allowed to tape to the ceiling above his bed. My neighbor with her Aqua Net-ted hair and skin that never burned who was too close and taboo to ever EVER consider thinking of that way.

Papaya and coconuts and banana candy on display inside a hot glass box. Popcorn machines and toys piled under a claw. Funtime fair rides that only sometimes showed up for Fourth of July weekends.

I think my wife is sleeping until I see her move just her arm, reaching towards the table under our tallest Figleaf Palm. When her hand touches the dewy glass, a tight little crease forms across her middle as she elevates her torso to take a drink: iced tea. The charms on her bracelet combine with the tinkling of ice in her glass to make a shimmering wind chime sound.

I want a glass too, but I wait until my wife is done refreshing herself. When she settles back into basking I quietly cross the garden behind her to go into the kitchen where our housekeeper always has a big fresh pitcher of iced tea full of floating lemon slices sitting out on the bar. The bar has no alcohol, but the mirrored shelves showcase our collection of colorful glass vases that our housekeeper keeps selectively filled with flowers: gladiolas. Birds of Paradise. An improbably shiny aqua-colored flower I do not know the name of. She wears a crisp white pinafore over a light-weight cornflower blue coat-dress. She has her own bungalow and smells like air conditioning.

*****

In real life our refrigerator is broken and all our jewelry is cheap. My wife keeps defrosting it and fixing it, holding everything together with duct tape. In our real current life we can’t always pay the rent on time and we call our beverage of choice “refrigerated tea water”.

Refrigerated tea water is made out of decaf Lipton bags in a big cheap clear plastic pitcher with a big round bottom. The pitcher has fissures in the molded handle where it slipped out of my soapy hands when I was washing it. It bounced all over the floor — dozens of comical bounces — yet stayed in one piece. But it looks like the kind of ice people warn you isn’t solid enough to step on, and could crack open under too much weight.

Sometimes we buy a bag of ice for a special treat, but I still can’t call our drink “iced tea”. I put saran wrap over the spout to keep the stale dead refrigerator food smell out of it.

My wife does have a chaise lounge, though. I bought it for her two years ago. It has a vivid orange cushion with a velcro strap to hold it in place at the foot, and pocket corners to keep it hooked over the backrest. Amazon gave me a payment plan for it. The color reminds me of a stylish orange halter-top jumpsuit I saw in one of the designer shops at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle. The kind of color and outfit only a tall slender woman with warm coloring like my wife could pull off. I wanted to buy it for her so bad I can still taste the yacht she should be wearing it on. Sun and teak and white leather. Blue sky as big as the ocean.

*****

We don’t drink. We don’t go out with friends. All that is behind us now that we know how much we are introverts and built the rest of our lives accordingly. We don’t even fool around with anyone else. Not much, anyway. But even if she does and I don’t know about it … I don’t mind. My wife is very health-conscious. Yoga and squats and meditation. All of her vaccines and prophylactics on schedule.

She said she had no interest in playing golf. Boring. For snobs. But of course it turns out she's good at it. And looks good playing it, too. I love buying her new outfits to golf in.

I always dreamed of living in Palm Springs, but we didn't even have to move there. The edge of the desert is here now where we used to have temperate rainforest. They've developed a new kind of grass that doesn't require water. Well, not as much anyway. We're old and vibrant and we look on the bright side. The world is very very VERY bright now. And hot.

We drink our iced tea without any sweeteners: black diluted to amber by clear frozen bricks of water. But healthy tea can turn on you with its oxalic acid; by the time I’m 73 there’s a small clear glass jar displayed on the bookshelf next to my dad’s copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and Cooking with Love and Paprika. The jar is 91% empty under its cork stopper with … are those a few nasturtium seeds in the bottom of it? The little chunks of sediment look like fossils or artifacts from an archeological dig, sand-colored and sunbleached on display in a tiny museum demonstrating the types of crops that were sown hundreds or thousands of years ago.

I seize every opportunity to fetch the bottle off the shelf and give you my proud explanation, holding the bottle out so you can see they look more like textured mineral clots. “My kidney stones!” I’m proud to share how well I tolerated the bouts of pain, moaning and sweating all night long. “Wasn’t near as bad as I’d heard people tell it though.”

When I brag about how tough I am, my wife brings her tall glass of iced tea to her mouth and sips it to hide the truth of how much sleep we both lost until I passed the stones and switched to Arnold Palmers: heavy on the lemonade. It is kind of my wife not to roll her eyes, but the clinking cubes cheerfully contest my stoic version.