Joe’s gotten to be a creative and almost intuitive cook. No longer does he have to measure out the requisite teaspoon of salt or tablespoon of olive oil. Gift-giving occasions have become a delightful excuse to purchase exotic kitchen tools (who knew you needed different spatulas for fish, burgers, and veggies?) and splurge on frivolous but fun items like a panini press or a bamboo pizza peel. Sure, now that he’s a “pro,” there is some suffering to endure. “Did you put more salt in this than usual?” he’ll ask after dipping a spoon into a pot of something-or-other that I’m simmering, clearly implying a leaden hand. “Want me to flip these?” he’ll offer, inspecting the pancakes I’m making and all but suggesting that I don’t recognize when a bubbling circle of batter is ready to be turned. He’ll stir my sauces, adjust the stove burners, add and remove lids, even suggest additions and substitutions. As annoying as it is to be micromanaged by him, I take great comfort knowing that if anything tragic should happen to me, at least my children won’t be eating Lucky Charms for dinner every night.
CHAPTER FIVE
Domestic Bliss
and Other Big Fat Lies
Marriage is not just spiritual communion;
it is also remembering to take out the trash.
• DR. JOYCE BROTHERS •
My husband has superhuman eyesight. It’s true. We’ll be zipping down the highway at eighty-five miles per hour and he’ll casually remark, without even pulling his eyes from the road in front of him as he drives, “Wow, did you see that baby hawk on the roof of that barn?” Hell, half of the time I didn’t even see the barn. Or we’ll be hiking and he’ll suddenly freeze and put a finger to his lips, his other hand pointing to what turns out to be a tiny lizard sunning itself on a rock a dozen yards up the trail. He can read road signs in their entirety before I can even make out the letters, can spot a familiar face in a crowd of thousands, and as far as I know, has never walked through a spiderweb, even when it’s pitch-dark.
So you can imagine why it is relentlessly frustrating to see him standing before the refrigerator, door swung wide, scratching his head and staring blankly into the Warhol-esque interior.
“Guess we don’t have any milk,” he’ll say with a shrug.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s hiding behind that massive gallon of white liquid on the top shelf right in the front,” I like to respond warmly. “Did you check there?”
The most frustrating aspect of living with a victim of Male Pattern Blindness is the disease’s unpredictable nature. For instance, although my poor husband apparently isn’t able to see the brown, festering lettuce in the main crisper drawer or realize that the lemonade pitcher no longer contains a single molecule of liquid when he puts it back on the shelf, he has no problem finding the last slice of leftover pizza that I wrapped in tinfoil, scrunched into a ball in an effort to camouflage the telltale triangular shape, and hid in the far corner of the bottom shelf on the door, behind the maraschino cherries that may have actually come with the refrigerator.
Sometimes I actually feel bad for him, like when he asks where we keep the vinegar or the vacuum bags, as if he lives inside some funhouse Costco where every night the sadistic manager rearranges every single item so that he can never find what he’s looking for. The other night, it was ear drops. Our daughter woke up complaining that her ear hurt, and for the first time in possibly ever she serendipitously made this announcement while standing slightly closer to Joe’s side of the bed. The unwritten but also unconditional rule in our house is that if one of the children chooses you to do her midnight bidding, you get up and deal without complaint. To Joe’s credit, he did precisely that, murmuring sweetly to her that it would all be okay, Daddy would just get her some of the nice ear medicine, and it would feel better in no time.
Rumble, crash, fumble.
“Medicine drawer,” I mumbled, trying not to fully emerge into consciousness.
Clang, clatter, bang.
“White box with blue lettering, right side, toward the front,” I called, a bit louder this time.
Thump, thud, boom.
“Size of a deck of cards only fatter, next to the Children’s Motrin!” I shouted, totally awake and furious at myself for not having ESP so I could have left the damned ear drops out on the counter before I went to bed. I endured another several minutes of this maddening ruckus before throwing back the covers angrily and marching into the bathroom where Joe stood peering into the open medicine drawer. After hugging my daughter gently and apologizing for the fact that she was in pain, I tenderly shoved my husband out of the way to have a look myself and—lo and behold—the white, card-deck-size box with the blue lettering sat like a snake coiled and ready to strike, right there in the front, right-hand side of the medicine drawer. Next to the Children’s Motrin.
When I ask him to unpack the kids’ backpacks, he’ll stack the respective contents on the nearest counter, because he has absolutely no idea where anything “goes.” (Hint: 90 percent of it “goes” into the trash.) Sometimes I’ll be lying in bed and suddenly I’ll think to myself, “My God, I am the only person in this house who knows where the spare sheets are! What would they do if something happened to me?” I’ve even asked Joe this question, and his response is usually something like “I’d throw away three-quarters of the shit you hoard in this house so I could actually find something when I needed it.” Because obviously, it’s my fault for recklessly putting the medicine in the medicine drawer.
Although my husband may complain about all the “stuff” I “hoard,” when it comes to food, the man I married throws nothing away. Expiration dates are meaningless, mold is but a slightly bothersome topping to be scraped away, and that salad dressing nobody liked? Oh, that will make an excellent marinade.
“Pasta doesn’t go bad,” he’ll insist, and, “It’s just the crusty stuff around the mouth of the container that smells funny; the milk inside is fine.”
Of course, I’m the exact opposite. I take that whole “best by” business seriously. I put those dates on my mental calendar and promptly toss the contents on the appointed day. I have learned to do this when Joe isn’t home, because frankly the sight of my husband digging through the trash to salvage some hardened heels of bread could be the nail in my libido’s coffin.
“Where’s the rest of the turkey we had the other night?” he’ll ask. He’s referring, of course, to that “other night” six months ago, also known as Thanksgiving.
“Dunno, honey,” I say absentmindedly. “Maybe I ate it or something.”
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My husband won’t throw anything away, ever. I live with old ripped
sneakers (“I’ll use them for gardening”; we have a lawn guy), socks
with holes (“I can sew them”; he doesn’t know how to sew), ancient
photography equipment (“Digital is a fad”), magazines dating back to
1979, sleeveless frat T-shirts, and a few cables the puppy chewed
through. The worst part is that he works from home and if he sees me
carting anything to the trash, he follows me out and brings it right back
into the house.
LEAH
I am not blaming my husband for his inability to find anything in our house, really. I am sure that a social anthropologist would be able to explain why, evolutionarily, it made no sense whatsoever for a man to be able to locate anything specific within the cave. “Back in the woolly mammoth days,” the wise scholar would tell me in the gravest of tones, “if the hunter went into the den to retrieve his bow and arrow, he would be endangering his family by alerting the enemy as to their whereabouts. Therefore, he learned to stay several protective paces from the entrance to the cave, where he would throw his voice onto a faraway boulder as he bellowed, ‘Hey honey! Where’d you put my goddamned bow and arrow?’”
If gatherer-girl got pissed when this happened—and I’m going to bet that she did—her hulking hunter-husband would launch into his lecture abou
t the dangers of his job and how lucky she had it being able to stroll through the fields, chatting with her bitches and picking berries while he was out risking life and limb and slaying big, burly bison all day. And sadly, without the benefit of Wi-Fi or Wikipedia, she couldn’t even shut him up by informing him that 80 percent of all of their food was gathered, not hunted, thank you very fucking much.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
Although I’ve been happily married for seventeen tears, it drives me
nuts that my wonderful, giving husband continually leaves his skivvies
on the bathroom floor. It is especially gross after he’s come back from
a fifty-mile bike ride during the brutally hot summer. Does he think his
undies will magically walk to the laundry basket themselves? The funny
part is we’ve talked about it and he truly believes most of the time he
puts them in the hamper.
SUE
I should interrupt myself here by saying that although Joe may not have an intimate working knowledge of our home’s interior or a majority of its contents, compared to most men he does do a lot around the place. Especially considering—as he is quick to point out—he really couldn’t care less if the beds ever got made or the laundry got put away. If you died tomorrow, I’d never make the bed or put a single article of clothing away ever again, he tells me. (Well, not with actual words or anything, but believe me—he tells me.) He could live happily ever after pulling clean clothes from a mound on top of the dryer, so the fact that he will go so far as to transfer a stack of folded items into their respective drawers is, in his mind, an act of loving selflessness. Or more specifically, foreplay.
This is not a quantum leap. Just last year, a fascinating study found that the more household chores people do, the more sex they have. (Go ahead, put the book down and go tell your husband that. I’ll wait.) Now, had the study focused exclusively on how housework pays off for otherwise reluctant guys, of course the findings would have made perfect sense. I am pretty sure I’d be willing to give it up on the spot if I saw Joe wielding a Swiffer or emptying the dishwasher of his own accord. But here’s the part that stumped me: The study found that for both men and women, more housework equals more sex.
As a compulsive Type A neat freak who has been known to make the bed around her snoring husband in the morning, I find this hard to believe. According to this theory, considering the staggering number of hours I already log sorting socks and chasing crumbs and plumping pillows each week, I should be having more sex than a billionaire in a brothel. Am I to believe that I’d be getting significantly more action if I just added some more scrubbing, scouring, sweeping, sponging, and straightening to my endless daily to-do list? Would a gleaming toilet bowl or streak-free windows—made that way through my own tireless efforts and an excess of elbow grease—make me feel ever more frisky? Even more discouraging to consider, is my housekeeper swinging from her ceiling fan at night in a pair of crotchless chaps while I am passed out wearing earplugs and flannel Hello Kitty pajamas?
The researchers (a man and a woman; no word on whether they were having sex with one another) admit that they were surprised by their own findings, ultimately chalking them up to something called the “multiple spheres” hypothesis, which suggests that people who “work hard” also “play hard.” Interestingly, the same study also found a positive correlation between time spent at the office and frequency of sex—and reportedly they mean sex with the regular old ball-and-chain at home and not a few quickies in the supply closet with a cute administrative assistant. The way the researchers explain it is that compared to “normal folks,” both workaholics and vacuum addicts are better at prioritizing their time to make room for the things they enjoy.
I am pretty sure my cleaning habits do not lead to more sex. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe considers my meticulous nature (what he calls my anal relentlessness) a serious cock block. Regardless of his take on my tidiness, I do know that I’m not easy to live with. I like everything done a certain way (mine), and I like everything to look a certain way (spotless). I hang clothes according to color, constantly twist cans in the pantry so that the labels are facing outward, and alphabetize things—like appliance manuals and the kids’ books—that have no business being alphabetized. When the Hold Everything catalog comes, I attack it with the lustful eagerness of a teenage boy diving into his dad’s latest forbidden issue of Playboy. I realize that it shouldn’t make me want to claw my husband’s eyeballs out when he loads the dishwasher haphazardly (when everyone knows you always load back to front and never place two glasses side by side) or doesn’t close his sock drawer the last half-inch every single godforsaken time he opens it, but it does. It really, truly does.
“It must suck to be you,” Joe will say, not even meanly. And sometimes I do wish I were one of those easygoing, roll-with-it types, but I’m just not. Occasionally I’ll try to force my square self into a round hole by making a public declaration such as, “Tonight I am going to leave the dishes in the sink until morning!” Most of the time, my resolve lasts less than eight minutes. Remember in the movie The Crying Game when Forest Whitaker recounts the poignant parable of the frog and the scorpion? (It’s the second most memorable scene in the movie, right after the part where the dude finds out his girlfriend has a penis.) In the story, the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across the river because he can’t swim. The frog is afraid that the scorpion will sting him, but the scorpion reminds him that if he did, the frog would sink and they would both die. Finally the frog agrees to serve as the scorpion’s water taxi. Halfway across the river, wouldn’t you know? The goddamned scorpion stings him! Before the frog sinks to his death, he demands to know why the scorpion would do such a foolish thing. “I’m a scorpion,” the predator replies. “It’s in my nature.” It’s an admittedly depressing and obscure analogy, but I totally get what the scorpion is saying. It’s just hard not to be what you are.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
The thing that drives me the most nuts about my husband is that when
he opens up a drawer or cabinet door to either retrieve something or
put something away, he NEVER closes it. I’ll come into the kitchen
after he’s put away dishes and it will look like that scene from The Sixth
Sense.
WELMOED
Joe and I used to have this one recurring fight that was so stupid I almost can’t bring myself to put it in writing, but I will because there’s a good lesson in it somewhere, I think. Joe has a favorite sandwich that he likes to make, and he makes quite a mess doing it. Because he is not actually a Neanderthal, and because I’ve trained him well, he even wipes down the counters and puts all of the ingredients away when he’s finished making it. Then, after he polishes off the sandwich, he brushes the crumbs into the sink and puts his plate in the dishwasher. Hard to complain about that—right?
Wrong. For approximately ten years, I would watch this ritual, waiting until the precisely perfect moment to say casually, “Don’t forget to rinse out the sink, please!”
“Does it really matter?” he’d ask.
“Yes, it does,” I’d reply. “If you do it right away, it takes three seconds. If you don’t do it right away, the crumbs harden and stick like little globs of glue and then I have to use a Brillo pad to get them off.” Those stuck-on crumbs had become symbolic, an emblem of all of my unheard pleas and unmet needs.
“Big deal,” he’d mutter.
“Exactly!” I’d shout, because when you have the exact same fight 6,392 times, you tend to pick up right where you left off the last time. “It shouldn’t be a big deal and it wouldn’t be a big deal if you’d just rinse the fucking sink when you were done! We’ve got the little sprayer and everything! How hard would that be, honestly?”
But time after infuriating time he’d forget, and I’d march into the kitchen in a huff and resentfully scour away the evidenc
e of his passive-aggressive hatred for me.
“You do it on purpose, don’t you, just to piss me off?” I accused him one day.
“Do what?” he asked, a shoo-in for Best Actor in a Clueless Role.
“Leave your crumbs in the sink!” I bellowed.
“You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, shaking his head and sounding genuinely hurt. “You actually think that I go through my day trying to think of hundreds of tiny little ways to irritate you. You give me way too much credit, Jenna. I’m not that conniving. Having a spotless sink just isn’t important to me, so I forget. I know it should be important to me because it’s important to you, but you have a lot of little ‘things,’ you know? It’s hard to keep track of them all.”
Can you imagine? Playing the wise-and-rational card on me? The nerve! But I had to admit, I did sort of sound like a paranoid, insecure, and impossibly demanding nut-job when he put it that way. And I felt bad that I’d accused him of malice where there was none, but the important thing was that after that perfectly compelling little speech of his, he stopped leaving crumbs in the sink. I am not even making this up just to make him look good. Even though he was right that I did have “a lot of little things” that bugged me, and even though he had convinced me that he wasn’t borrowing extra crumbs from the neighbors so he could sprinkle them in the sink as part of an ongoing, evil plot to annoy me to death, and even though I essentially admitted that I was being difficult and the crumbs weren’t that big a deal in the grand, overall scheme of the eternity that was our life together, in the end I got what I wanted: a stupid clean sink. I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly how, but I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and my head down and appreciate it while it lasts.
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Page 8