There’s no masking we’ve been at this a long time

We were in the car recently and I realized I had forgotten my mask.

I had masks, just not there. I had one in my backpack, swim trunks, garage, the Jeep, everywhere except for the car in which I was seated. Masks have become like reading glasses or water holes. It behooves us to have them scattered around in case we find ourselves parched or blind. “Do you have an extra mask?” I asked. To her credit, she didn’t give me the look. Most men are familiar with the look. The look is like a rich cake with many ingredients. It’s a pinch of “How could you,” a dash of “Are you that dumb” and a twist of “When are you going to learn.”

However, this look wasn’t that look. This held mild surprise: “How could you forget an item that has become so much part of our lives?” How could I? I could and I had. It was almost easier when there was a mask shortage and you had to hold on to yours as if it were a rations card during the war. Without it you were going hungry, or in this case, not going anywhere.

Did she have an extra mask? I wasn’t sure because she was being cagey. She looked as if she were considering her options and, given the question, mine too.

I knew she had her mask, the black one, her-go-to, which made her look mysterious, as if she could have been a double agent in a James Bond thriller. I wasn’t asking to use that mask. Mask etiquette dictates you don’t ask to use someone’s go-to mask.

“I mean, don’t you have one of those paper ones?” I asked.

A paper one. One you buy 50 to a box or as single at the checkout counter in most grocery stores at 10 times the price. Those are a dime a dozen. You see them everywhere and lately, scattered on the ground like love letters gone wrong. “I don’t know,” she said and faltered. I suspected she did. She knew and what she was trying to decide was whether she was going to tell me what she knew.

What do you mean you don’t know? You don’t know if you have two masks or you don’t know if you’re going to loan me one of the two masks I know you have.

Mask etiquette is delicate. One has to consider whether one is in one another’s social bubble. I thought I was in, but maybe when it comes to loaning masks there’s no in, only out.

Remember who you’re talking to here. We’re 40 years into this marriage. Forty-one in September but given the challenges of COVID, and in this case your unwillingness to share your second mask should you have one, and I think you do, I’m not sure 41 is a lock and I would advise taking the under on making 42.

It made me feel like Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.” “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

A more contemporary version might be “Do we not sleep in the bed at night? Have we not had moments where our pillows — my three and your two — have intermingled and migrated and by morning, what was once yours had become mine?”

This has happened and although neither of us are looking for it to happen, pillows are like a nomadic tribe that respond to its own clarion call.

How about this? You loan me your second mask and I’ll wear it inside out. Then, if you need it, you can turn it outside in and to help you remember which side is which, I’ll draw a little mask with whiskers on it.

The car was quiet. The car was heading around the block because fortunately we hadn’t gone far, either literally or figuratively. We pulled up in front of the house and I walked to my car to get my mask, a matching black one.

We were a team. A couple of secret agents. Forty-one years and still getting to know each other.