Welcome to Cougarville
By: Terrye Turpin
Tags: Relationships, Aging, Humor, Love, Menopause

“Which one of you is buying the home?” The sales agent greeted us and stuck out her hand. Her fingernails were painted white. Solid white, like she’d dipped them in latex.

“That would be both of us,” I answered. “Me and my husband. This man, the one I married.” I clutched Andrew’s arm and pulled him close. He chuckled nervously.

I glared. The sales agent was barely five feet two, and I figured I had at least 80 pounds and 30 years on the woman. In a pinch I could take her.

“Oh, okay.” Her smile dropped, as though she’d just calculated the commission loss from selling just one town home instead of two, to a son and his mom.

I stopped coloring my hair two years ago. The trade off for dropping the inconvenience of dousing my scalp in toxic chemicals every three weeks is the embarrassment of being mistaken for my husband’s mother about as often. Andrew refuses to age. I’m convinced he’s got a secret closet in our apartment where he’s stashed a magic portrait with wrinkles and gray hair ringing a bald head.

“How nice of you to take your mom shopping.” The cashier at Target, a boy hardly older than the jeans I was wearing, complimented Andrew.

“Uh, she’s my wife,” Andrew pitched his voice lower as he answered. He wrapped me in his arms in a hug that would appear romantic to onlookers, but was actually restraint.

I’m eleven years older than my husband. We were clear on this from the start, when we met online on the dating site OK Cupid. The age difference wanders into our conversation, when I mention music or television shows I watched in the 1970s. We’ve been watching the first season of Saturday Night Live, and I remarked that I saw the show on live television when it premiered.

“Oh,” Andrew said, “my parents didn’t let me stay up that late.”

“Of course not,” I answered. “You were only four years old.”

Part of the problem is Andrew and I resemble each other. We both have dimples when we smile, and we both wear glasses. The longer we are together, the more alike we become. Sort of how certain folks look like their pets.

“Women live longer than men,” Andrew tells me. “We’ll probably kick off at the same time.”

The prospect of dying together does not soothe my vanity.

In a conversation with my gynecologist, we discussed my concerns over the topical estrogen she’d prescribed. I worried over links to cancer or heart problems, and she reassured me. “It’s not like pills, this is a very low dose.”

“But how long can I continue to use the cream?” I asked.

“You can stop when you’re no longer sexually active,” she said. My gynecologist is a nice woman in her thirties. She just had her first child a year ago.

“But how many years?” I wanted an exact number.

“How many years will you be having sex?” she asked.

“All of them?” I countered.

It is a sad myth that women of a certain age no longer desire sex, love, romance. That we’ve settled, like the fat around our middle, into our dotage. That “the change” we’ve undergone has somehow changed us into something less than what we were in our youth. I am not my husband’s mother and we’ll be buying just one home together.

Unless we decide we need the extra space.