How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  A few weeks before we left for Africa we’d had a high school friend of mine and her husband over for brunch. They lived an hour outside of San Francisco and it was the first time I’d seen them since I moved to the West Coast.

  “So, do you have friends here?” Karen asked me casually.

  “Nope. None,” I replied with a force and a touch of bitterness I hadn’t expected.

  “Yes, you do, Squeaky,” Nick interjected. I looked at him and thought about the argument we had when I returned from Israel, the one where he told me maybe it was my fault I didn’t have any friends.

  “I have Nick’s friends,” I said. For good measure I added, “And they’re great.”

  But it wasn’t the same. When Nick went out of town for work, I was on my own with Lady Piazza, wishing I had someone to go to dinner with, someone who wasn’t brand-new but comfortable and already broken in. As I looked around at the Maasai women, joking and laughing and fixing one another’s beaded necklaces to place them in a pretty pattern around their long slender necks, picking up one another’s babies with no mind for who belonged to whom, I mourned the friendships I’d left behind. I missed my girlfriends from New York and Philadelphia every day, and not having them around made me lean on my husband more than I wanted to. I felt needy and vulnerable. I hadn’t realized how desperate I was for a strong community until right then.

  This is the part where you tell me to cue the violins. I’m complaining about being lonely just months after meeting and marrying the man of my dreams. But despite the vow I’d made in Bobby Klein’s office to build my own life and network of friends in San Francisco, I hadn’t gotten very far. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. Making new friends in your thirties is harder than making it to work on time in your twenties. I frequently loitered after yoga class to chat with the instructors, but so far only movie-soundtrack enthusiast Roy remembered my name, and sometimes he called me Jill. I’d gone to a women-only empowerment retreat down the coast in Big Sur filled with karmic chanting, talking sticks, and intentional breathing. I’d enrolled in all kinds of other classes, including but not limited to knitting, ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging), pizza making, and even pickling (even though I worried Nick’s ex-girlfriend would be the instructor). I struck up conversations with strangers in my Uber Pool. I’d gotten recommendations for a dentist, a landscaper, and a psychic, but no one who wanted to have wine with me on a Friday night.

  I was set up on friend dates with friends of friends, one of whom got blind drunk, texted her ex-husband the entire night, and then tried to kiss me. I met people all the time who said, “Let’s get dinner” or “Let’s grab a drink.” I promptly e-mailed or texted them with available times and possible locations.

  Then, silence.

  Why do people say they want to get dinner or drinks if they don’t really mean it?

  Things looked promising after a couple of girl dates with women I met through work. One of them was cool and shared my love of travel, food, and red wine. We had a good rapport. This was exactly what I’d been waiting for. But I got too eager. I hugged her too hard at the end of dinner. “Call me,” I said in a desperate tone. She never called.

  I didn’t want to leave Naropil’s house. I wanted to stay with these women a little bit longer to remember what it felt like to have a community of women around me, a lady squad. I could hear the others outside singing and laughing. Naropil squeezed my arm in a motherly way, as if she could tell what I was thinking. I realized that she might be younger than I was, even though it seemed like she’d lived a dozen lifetimes more. I wanted to tell her everything that was happening to me. I’m scared. I’m sick. I’m lonely. I hadn’t told any of my friends these things, not even my news about my muscular dystrophy. It’s a strange thing to say over text message, and no one gets on the phone anymore without exchanging at least a dozen text messages about when might be a good time to talk.

  I could hardly make out Naropil’s face in the dark room, but I could see her lips move into a smile as she prepared to say good-bye.

  “You can always come back.”

  Four days later we left the Maasai Mara by a rickety four-seater plane for Samburuland in northern Kenya, arriving on an airstrip that was nothing more than a thin clearing of the shrubbery where a herd of zebra, unconcerned by the plane’s engines, whinnied a welcome as we landed. I choked on the hot red dirt that spun like a top into the air when we stepped onto the runway. We were staying at a family-owned and -operated ranch called Ol Malo, where our hosts were a newly married couple named Andrew and Chyulu, white Africans who had both grown up in the bush. The couple lived with Piper, their ginger-haired toddler with a predilection for camel milk, and their five-hundred-pound pet pig named Sausage.

  Nick and I slept in a tree house perched on a ridge looking down into a rocky valley that could have been Arizona if it hadn’t been for the white-bellied zebras running below and the elephants that crashed into the vegetable garden. The equator ran right below us, and during the day the maroon-tinted earth was as hot as the surface of the sun.

  Northern Kenya has been home to the Samburu people, who like the Maasai are nomadic cattle herders, for thousands of years. They are also polygamous, and men can have as many wives as they can financially support. Samburu marriage is also arranged based on factors that do not include love. The Samburu often maintain sexual relationships with their boyfriends and girlfriends after their marriage to another person. This is socially acceptable as long as no one gets pregnant. They ensure this using various techniques from the rhythm method to condoms to discreet forms of oral contraceptives.

  And while the Samburu are technically patriarchal, the women are silent leaders. “They [the women] are the elephants. A herd of elephants is ruled by the women, and the Samburu women are matriarchs in their own way,” Julia Francombe, the founder of the Samburu Trust, told me. “They are so strong. Their husbands beat them and they shake it off. They will do whatever it takes for their families and for their children. They help one another. They really help one another.”

  “We keep no secrets from each other,” a Samburu woman my mother’s age named Mama Bee said to me during a beading workshop Julia took me to in the Laikipia Highlands of northern Kenya.

  Mama Bee sat higher than the other ladies, poised on a table with her long bare legs dangling below her a couple inches shy of the ground. The rest of the women sat on the floor, their bare feet stretched in front of them on cowskins. I was captivated by their feet. They were so different from my own. These feet did work. They walked more than twenty kilometers a day. They could withstand the prick of the sharp acacia needle. Their nails were hard and thick and had never seen a drop of paint. This was where the Samburu mamas gathered away from the Samburu men. Run by the Samburu Trust, the jewelry workshop was the hub of commerce and socialization for these women. This was where they traded beads, where they gossiped, where they borrowed money. They chattered away about their kids and their husbands and who had bought a new motorbike and where did he get the money for that motorbike and whose daughter was about to marry whose son and whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing. When I arrived, the women couldn’t stop talking about the girl who’d married a warrior they referred to as B.

  “She’s terrible,” one woman said.

  “Awful,” another agreed.

  “Mean and hateful.”

  “And ugly. So ugly.”

  “Why did he marry her?” I asked in disbelief.

  I expected them to shake their heads in confusion and tell me they didn’t know why B would marry someone so horrible, but Mama Bee knew the answer.

  “She’s so good at taking care of the goats.”

  The women make jewelry and trinkets and beadwork, really nice stuff, not the junk you find in the Nairobi airport. Children as small as a few weeks were quiet at their mothers’ breasts. Older kids ran in circles, playing at being warriors.

  With cool efficiency Mama Bee used a squat, s
hort knife to cut through a band of leather to make beaded coasters for the tourists. “I share everything with these women.” She swept her arms in a wide arc.

  I stared at Mama Bee’s beads. You can tell a Samburu woman’s life story by reading her jewelry. When a warrior takes a wife, he doesn’t give her a ring. He buys a chain from the local spear maker. She loops this chain through one of her many earrings and around her neck. She will wear it until her husband dies and then remove it forever.

  The Samburu women brought Nick a chain to give to me and fashioned an earring for me out of a stray piece of copper.

  Nick tried to place it in my ear but the women clucked and brushed him away. While the chain symbolized our marriage, these women felt it was their job to make sure I wore it properly.

  “Now you have to slaughter a cow,” one of the women said to my husband.

  Nick was adamant that he did not want to slaughter a cow.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I said to Nick. “You can go to the silly expensive organic grocery store in San Francisco and buy me some hormone-free grass-fed beef when we get home.”

  You can tell a woman is the mother of a warrior if she has two long strands of beads running down from the chain of one of her ears. You can tell she’s the mother of twins if she is wearing cowrie shells in her large beaded collar. Different beads indicate if she has delivered a baby by a breech birth, if she’s had a miscarriage, or if she’s barren. You can even tell if a bull cow was properly slaughtered at her wedding. Other things are more personal. Beneath the decorative beads are strings of blue or green prayer beads, one for each of her children, each one holding a piece of her child’s umbilical cord. On her wedding day the bride wears a necklace, woven by the other women in the village from giraffe tails to symbolize joining her life with the rest of the tribe, particularly with the women.

  “The women all take care of one another,” Mama Bee said. “If I give birth, the other women take care of my children. They do my chores. They cook for me. They are there for me. I love these women.”

  “What about your husband?” I asked. “Do you love your husband?”

  Mama Bee considered it.

  “After you have babies you start to love your husband. You don’t know him before that. Once you have the babies, you say, ‘Okay, now I know you. Now I love you.’ ”

  It made sense that these women would take their time learning to love their husband. I loved Nick now. I really did. But even though we’d chosen to marry each other, that love was still so brand-new that part of it had to be infatuation. It wasn’t the good times that made me love Nick more; it was the hard times. It was the past few months that had turned our love into something different, something more real.

  When a young Samburu wife is brought to her husband’s village for the first time, she is handed a baby to take care of. It’s someone else’s baby, but she treats it like her own for a time and this helps her bond with her new community. “She goes directly from being the child of her mother to being a mother,” Mama Bee said. She lives with that baby and her husband’s mother, sometimes for as long as a year. In the Samburu tribes the mother-in-law decides when a new wife is ready to consummate her marriage.

  Mama Bee grabbed me by the crook of my elbow to introduce me to a group of children playing in the dirt outside.

  “All of them call all of us Mama.” I raised my eyebrows in a question and she went on to explain. Once a Samburu woman gives birth, she takes on the name Mama, joined by the name of her firstborn. Mama Bee gets her name from her firstborn son, Beesus.

  “All the women take care of all the children like their own,” she said. This sounded idyllic in comparison to the $3,000 a month for daycare in San Francisco.

  I told Mama Bee I liked her name. In fact, Bee was the name I wanted to give to a little girl if we ever had one, Bee, short for Beatrix, named after Nick’s grandmother and Beatrice, the older sister in my favorite children’s book, Beezus and Ramona.

  “So if I have a daughter, then I will be Mama Bee too,” I said.

  “It’s a good name,” Mama Bee assured me as she bade the two of us good-bye.

  I gazed at the toddlers. Five of my friends had given birth in the past six months, and I hadn’t met a single one of the babies.

  “I want to go home for a while,” I said to Nick later that night. “Not home San Francisco. Home to New York. Just for a week or so. I want to be with my family and my friends.”

  If there was one thing our new marriage was lacking it was this—this kind of strong community, a support system to help brace it when things get tough.

  “You know we can live wherever you want. We don’t have to stay in San Francisco,” Nick said.

  I nodded. I knew. But we had bought a house and both our jobs were in San Francisco. Still, it was nice to know that we might not be there forever, that maybe once we did have kids, we’d go back to a place where we had more of a community to help us raise them. Sitting on the plane later that week, ready to make the thirty-six-hour journey home, I wrote an e-mail to my five closest girlfriends.

  Hey you and you and you and you and you.

  I suck. I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch since I left. Planning a wedding, getting married, moving across the country, buying a house…it takes a lot out of you, but those aren’t excuses.

  I miss you. I miss you guys so much.

  And I need you.

  Last month I found out I have the same gene for muscular dystrophy as my dad. Don’t freak out. I’m OK and Nick is being amazing and we’re going to figure this out. We don’t know much, but we know there’s no reason to worry right now.

  Maybe I’m not OK, but I’m no longer curled up on the floor in a ball crying…baby steps.

  I’m coming to terms with it, but it’s scary and no matter what happens I want you to know about it, because I need you.

  Love you,

  Jo

  P.S. I’m excited for all the new babies in our lives. Your kids are all welcome to call me Mama.

  Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  We were flying over the choppy and icy waters of the Arctic when Nick began watching a video clip of the comedian Chris Rock. The most important thing about being a husband, according to Rock, who was married for eighteen years before his 2014 divorce, is waking up every morning and making sure your wife is happy.

  Of course, he said it in a much more elegant way.

  Fellas, when you wake up in the morning, you should look yourself in the mirror and say, “Fuck you! Fuck your hopes, fuck your dreams, fuck your plans….Fuck everything you thought this life was going to bring to you. Now let’s go out there and try to make this bitch happy.”

  Nick laughed loud enough to make the people around us uncomfortable, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “You’re distracting me,” I muttered as I stared out the plane window at a particularly large cluster of icebergs. “I’m trying to spot a polar bear.” If I squinted hard enough I was sure I could see them down there, each one on its own ice floe hunting for fish. I stared intently at white and blue nothingness and then closed the window.

  “Do you feel that way?” I asked Nick after I leaned in for his second viewing of the Chris Rock video. “Do you feel like it’s your job to make me happy?”

  Nick hesitated. “Sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes making you happy feels like it is my full-time job.”

  I didn’t feel much like laughing at Chris Rock. I didn’t feel like laughing at anything. The truth was I was flailing, and nothing Nick did or could do was going to make it better. I’d become a very disagreeable person to live with, the kind of person you’d avoid on the street if given the choice because she was often frowning and muttering things to herself. But poor Nick didn’t have any choice but to continue to wake up in bed next to me every day, and now we were stuck together on an airplane traveling to Holland for a conference. It was
Nick’s conference, not mine, but he’d wanted me there with him—an example, I know, of his efforts to make me happy.

  In what the press described as a “bloodbath of layoffs,” I’d been let go from my job at Yahoo! I first learned I was laid off over text message, which I supposed was better than a Post-it. The higher-ups said things like “I want you all to know this is for the good of the company,” like we were Greenpeace laboring to save the whales from extinction rather than an old-school Internet behemoth laboring to please our shareholders. My only contact with the company postlayoff had been the delivery of a padded box in which I was supposed to mail back my phone and laptop computer.

  Being out of work was daunting for many reasons. We’d just bought our apartment, which completely drained my savings account. Nick and I had both been on my Yahoo! health insurance, and it was damn expensive and I had a weird genetic disease, which meant we should have damn expensive insurance. We’d procured newer and cheaper health insurance that had a $65 copay and a $10,000 deductible, which we soon learned didn’t cover the kinds of specialists I would need going forward.

  But more than that, I was a person who defined herself by her job. It was the thing I talked about when I met new people. Working was how I occupied most of my days. Since I’d met Nick, I’d been working eighty-five hours a week, which had come to seem normal. That’s what the Internet has done to us. It’s made us all feel as though we have to be “on call” all the time. Studies have even shown that more and more women are working themselves to death—literally. According to research from Ohio State and the Mayo Clinic, women who work more than forty hours per week are at much greater risk for things like heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and diabetes.

  I slept clutching my phone and had a panic attack if I found myself somewhere without it, including the bathroom, which is just gross. This was the third company I had worked for that laid people off because it was going under. I couldn’t help but wonder why I kept devoting myself to, killing myself for, companies where both I and the company were disposable. But now I was doing nothing, and I had no idea what to do next.