“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
For ten years my husband has not picked up a wet towel, washed
ketchup off of a dish, changed a lightbulb, or remembered trash day
without a friendly “How many times do I have to tell you?”
JENNY
I have a male friend who told me—in confidence and under threat of a lawsuit if I identified him by name or distinguishing characteristics, so for these purposes I’ll call him Sally—that men have figured out a foolproof way to get out of doing any dreaded housework:
“We suck on purpose,” Sal told me, speaking without permission for his entire gender. “We know that if we do a really bad job at something, you won’t ask us to do it again. Once I actually pretended that I couldn’t fold a simple hand towel in quarters. I just sort of scrunched it up in a wad and set it on the towel pile with a flourish and a triumphant ‘There!’ My wife hasn’t asked me to fold the laundry once since then.”
Joe is no Sally (and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d need to write). He is an adept towel folder and knows the secret to streak-free windows (newspaper, not paper towels). He doesn’t “suck on purpose” just to get out of doing the job. He doesn’t have to, because he tells me to my face that since there’s no way he could ever do any task to my unreasonable standards, he’s just not going to do it at all. And since he’s more or less right, it’s really hard to argue the point.
When I was in college, I preferred male roommates to female ones for several reasons: They had sex with strangers more often, which meant they were more likely to stay out all night and therefore not be at home eating my food. (And when they were home, they’d never touch my fat-free cottage cheese or homemade negative-calorie cabbage soup anyhow.) They didn’t care about décor, so I could hang whatever I wanted on the walls. They rarely borrowed, ruined, or lost my favorite skinny skirt. I am not sure if I was just a lot more blasé back then or it’s simply because I was drunk for the majority of that four-year stretch, but I don’t recall constantly being bothered by my guy roommates’ little domestic insults. You know, the never-made beds, the pile of dishes in the sink, the stinky socks on top of the washing machine (because lifting the lid or locating and then actually using a hamper would require herculean effort), the offhand admissions of oh-yeah-actually-I-did-drink-your-last-can-of-Diet-Coke-sorry. Now that I think about it, it must have been the booze, because that shit makes me mental on a daily basis.
Apparently I have a thing that drives Joe crazy, too: I like to use the lights in the house. I know, it’s selfish and indulgent, but it’s a little luxury I sometimes like to afford myself. Because of this, my husband has nicknamed me the “light leaver-onner” and has made it his personal mission in life to circle the house whenever he is home, turning off every light in his path. The criteria he uses to determine whether a certain light should be switched off is simple: If it’s on, it should be off. Regardless of the time of day, whether the light in question is serving any sort of purpose, or who might be using it at the time.
“I’m in here!” I shout from my perch on the throne, fumbling for the toilet paper I can almost make out in the shadows.
“I’m in here!” I yell, head in the dryer, my voice echoing in my ears like I’m trapped in a cartoon cave with a yodeler.
“I’m in here!” I roar from the bathtub, searching for somewhere to place my razor before I sever a critical artery in the now pitch-darkness.
I should probably thank him for reducing our electric bill and being concerned about the environment and helping to preserve our natural resources so that our daughters will have lights someday. He’s probably thinking that without those lights, their husbands will have nothing to go around turning off. It’s sweet the way he wants to preserve the tradition, don’t you think?
CHAPTER SIX
Gee, Honey.
Are You Sick?
I Never Would
Have Guessed.
I love being married.
It’s so great to find that one special person
you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
• RITA RUDNER •
I was lucky enough to betroth myself to a man who is as healthy as a horse and has the immune system of a garlic-loving superhero to prove it. Thank God. Because when a runny nose is attached to a body that doesn’t also have a uterus, I think it’s safe to say the world is going to hear about it.
I’m not stereotyping here, am I? I have to believe I’m not, as pretty much every guy I’ve ever known—including the one who sired me, several I’ve lived with, and the one I eventually married—seems to follow the exact same script when he’s under the weather. He never has a “little cold” or a “touch of the flu.” He is never just sick; he is urgently, unreservedly, violently, pitifully, painfully sick. He could be dying, in fact. Nobody has ever felt as bad as he is feeling right this minute. Ever. He pretty much invented sick, or at the very least has single-handedly elevated it to a new extreme. At the first sign of excess nasal moisture or the faintest rattle in his chest, you might as well prepare yourself for the full-on shuffle-moanwoe-is-me routine, because if this were a wedding, the organist would have just hit the first unmistakable notes of “Here Comes the Bride.” (I realize that there is a chance that your spouse is among the handful of men who make up the exception to this rule. If that is the case, put down this book immediately and go scour YouTube for the BBC3’s “Man Cold” episode of the hilariously snarky and wonderfully inappropriate Man Stroke Woman show, featuring what I only wish were an exaggerated account of a man suffering from an acute viral upper respiratory tract infection. You know: a cold. It’s a sidesplitting little skit that has more than four million views as of this writing because at least that many women can relate to it. Watch the episode, then shut the hell up and count your blessings.)
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
When he has a cold he stuffs the ends of tissues into his nostrils so
that they hang down like white flags of surrender. He thinks it’s functional
and remembers doing that when he was twelve. Was I dreaming?
How can this be the sexy hunk I lusted over last week?
DEBORRAH
When a man (maybe not your one-in-a-kazillion mate) falls ill, all of the symptoms typically strike at once and with thunderous force. Male Instant-Onset Illness (MIOI) typically features a mild and generic litany of contradictory complaints, including but not limited to agonizing sniffles and congestion, excruciating fatigue and insomnia, piercing constipation and diarrhea, and unbearable sweats and chills. The cumulative effect of these symptoms is a sort of zombielike trance, which he will perfect by pacing around the house in his female partner’s immediate shadow.
“Unnhhhhh,” he moans, shuffling his slippers across the tile dramatically. Even if he is normally the poster boy for perfectly coiffed metrosexuals, his absurdly disheveled hair is standing on end in striking Cosmo Kramer fashion. His wife looks at him, wondering if he actually went to the trouble to locate and employ some sort of styling product to achieve this look. Then she turns away and proceeds to ignore him, because the groaning is annoying as hell and furthermore she is pretty sure five minutes ago he was a normal, symptom-free human being.
“Unnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he repeats, louder and longer this time, perhaps pressing the palm of his hand to his forehead, because guys never seem to understand that (a) you test for fever with your wrist, not your palm, and (b) it is a well-known scientific fact that you cannot be the judge of your own temperature.
If I refuse to acknowledge it, it’ll go away, she says to herself foolishly as she picks up her pace in an attempt to put some distance between herself and the godforsaken moaning.
“Unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhh, sniff, snortle, [hacking, phlegmy, here-comes-a-lung cough].”
“You sick?” she asks, stopping, defeated. S
hadow Boy bumps right into her back.
“I dink so,” he replies, plugging his nose from the inside by pressing his tongue into the back of his throat, in an effort to give his voice an air of crippling, incurable congestion.
“Sorry to hear it,” she says with a kindness she does not feel, stepping slightly away, just in case. “Want me to make you some tea?”
“Ogay,” he sniffles. “Ed baby sub soup?”
“Sure, yeah, tea and soup, coming right up,” she mumbles through gritted teeth.
Shadow Boy somehow manages to separate himself from her. He shuffles into the living room, moaning periodically so that nobody in the house accidentally forgets that he is very, very sick, and plops down onto the couch. The joyful sounds of SportsCenter fill the house.
She brings him his soup and his tea. He thanks her meekly before asking for a bigger spoon, the salt shaker, some crackers, more sugar, the phone, a few magazines, his woolly socks, and a blanket. She finds herself hoping—for a brief moment and while simultaneously wondering about their collective health insurance coverage—that he will require hospitalization sooner rather than later.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My hubby returned from an out-of-town business trip and you would
have thought he had a stage-four end-of-life disease. I brought out
throat lozenges plus the Vicks and told him to put a little dab inside
each nostril to help clear his head. What does he do? He smears a
huge glob of it under his nose. Five minutes later he appears in the
doorway shouting “My EYES, I got it in MY EYES, the fumes, oh my
God!” I told him it was a personal spastic issue and that I couldn’t help
him anymore. I liked him better when he had pneumonia. At least then
he was so sick, he was quiet.
TERI
*or frankly, her
I posted a query on my blog asking women how they deal with a sickly spouse, and though an overwhelming majority offered some version of “I try to stay far, far away,” one lady actually got a little pissy with me. “Who doesn’t like a little pampering when we’re not feeling well?” she demanded, sneering at me with her words. “I offer juice, tissues, cold medicine, a cozy bed, and DVDs,” she added. (If you look closely, you can almost see the words you heartless bitch right there at the end.) Another gal took a decidedly practical stance. “I don’t bend over backward to take care of him, but I do bring him food and drinks. I can’t have him flat-out die on me, can I?” And then there’s my friend Jenny, who has honed her convalescent duties down to a single word: “Porn. In a man’s world, it solves everything. At the very least, it’ll occupy his tiny mind for a little while.”
Whether you ignore him, wait on him hand and foot, head out of town for a few days, or distract him with back-to-back showings of On Golden Blonde, try to keep in mind that it’s not his fault he’s a big fat pansy-ass. He’s inherently not good at managing discomfort because he hasn’t been groomed for it virtually since birth the way you have. Between wrangling your pendulous breasts into a constricting wire-trimmed undergarment on a daily basis, regularly having thousands of tiny hairs ripped off your body with strips of molten wax, repeatedly wedging your mostly flat and plainly rectangular-shaped feet into triangular footwear perched on top of twin four-inch spikes, and let’s not forget occasionally expelling a creature the size and shape of a large watermelon (sorry, a watermelon with shoulders) out of your vagina—or alternately, having the watermelon person or people pulled out through a man-made gash in your abdomen—you know what pain is. And it’s not a little tickle in the back of your throat or a blocked freaking nostril.
I am sure I don’t need to bring this up, but I will: When the woman of any given house comes down with a cold, somehow the world continues to turn. Beds get made, lunches get packed, permission slips get signed, laundry gets washed, pets get fed, work gets finished, bills get paid. No one is mopping your brow as you accomplish these tasks because—and you can’t really put too fine a point on this—nobody realizes that you are sick. It’s not that you don’t feel lousy, because you do. Of course you do! But what good does it do you to belabor that? Or to announce it every five minutes? Or even to acknowledge it yourself? You’re not being a martyr, and most of the time your clueless life partner isn’t intentionally being an insensitive cad. It’s just that because of your aforementioned experience with bras and waxing and high heels and childbirth, you can take it. You can’t afford not to, because last time you checked they weren’t giving away five extra hours of daylight with every box of Kleenex. So you pop some pill or another and you power through, and somehow, magically, you get it all done.
In marked contrast to your stoicism, when your husband develops a raging ninety-nine-degree fever, he will likely be rendered immediately immobile and expect you to morph into Florence fucking Nightingale. Even though we live in the third millennium (and we know that we do because we all have vague memories of all that unwarranted Y2K hoopla) and you’ve never once met him at the door with his slippers and a highball, one of the side effects of MIOI is a sort of hallucinatory state in which the patient believes he has time-traveled back to the 1950s and has himself a nice little housewife to attend to his every irritating need.
This is where you must tread very, very carefully. Because if you act like the bitch you want to be and accuse him of— gasp—exaggerating his symptoms, it will cause the “illness” to linger for several weeks or longer. No one knows the precise pathology behind this phenomenon, but trust me, it’s a timetested fact. You see, guys have figured out that there are certain distinct benefits of being sick. Consider these quotes from some legendary men:
I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
—Samuel Butler
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
—George Bernard Shaw
’Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.
—Henry David Thoreau
Where are the nudge-nudge-wink-wink quotes from Erma Bombeck, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem, or Jane Austen extolling the benefits of being unwell? Where are the inspirational posters emblazoned with quotes like this: “If you want to test a woman’s capacity to really get shit done, get her sick. You’d be amazed at what a coughing, hacking, feelinglike-hell female can accomplish.” What? They don’t exist? Exactly my point.
I had always assumed the whole poor-poor-pitiful-me routine must have its roots in some sordid sexy-nurse fantasy. Even though most of us were raised with terrifying images of female caregivers like Louise Fletcher’s callous Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Kathy Bates’s psycho Annie Wilkes from Misery, the stereotype persists. (I blame it on the Halloween costume people, who in recent years have managed to make even pirate and inmate outfits slutty.) But maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe men walk around shouldering a burden I can’t fathom. Maybe they all go through life feeling like they need to be big and brave and productive and protective every waking minute of every single day, so when their noses seem to have sprung a tiny leak, they see it as a sanctioned break from the rigors of their self-imposed power prisons. If that’s the case, we women need to band together to show them that is it much, much worse on the outside and that their little “vacation from life” won’t be the all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise they’re envisioning.
Consider the child who is allowed to stay home from school because she has a tummy ache. If you stay home from work to cuddle with her on the couch and eat ice cream and watch movies together all day, what do you suppose are the odds that she’ll feel better tomorrow? Or the next day? I can’t be the first to point out to you that your husband is not very different from a child—yours or anyone else’s. So looking at it that way, the trick is to ever so subtly make being “sick” a living hell for him. You know, so tha
t he will realize there’s no benefit to remaining unwell and recover quickly so that you can all get on with your perfectly busy lives.
Here are a few things you can do to help him get back on his feet with head-turning speed:
Call his mother (or your mother; whichever one he likes less). If she lives nearby, explain that you’re worried about leaving him alone—which you have been forced to do, since you’re doing double duty and all—and were wondering if she could sit with him for a few hours a day. If she lives out of town, tell her she can help by checking in frequently via phone and e-mail.
Refuse to have sex with him until he has been symptom-free for a week. It’s amazing how a man who is too weak to fetch his own aspirin can muster enough energy to grope/proposition /fling himself on top of his partner, but somehow they seem to manage it. “Sorry, pal, but look how miserable you are,” you might chastise gently. “I’d be crazy to expose myself to whatever nasty bug you’ve got!” Once he realizes that coughing preempts coitus, he’ll be tripping over himself to embark on the road to recovery. In the interim, unless he is robustly ill (or his “symptoms” are keeping you up all night), try to resist the urge to decamp to the guest bed or couch. Having the bed to himself could fall into the reward category and effectively negate the no-sex threat.
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Page 9