If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon

by Jenna McCarthy

  The second package was roughly the same size as the first and wrapped just as meticulously. I wondered if it was a novel or memoir or some other thoughtful tome, my favorite kind of gift (besides cash, which would have been slightly creepy at that particular juncture in our relationship). I opened the box and was shocked to find what could only be a kinky, wearable sex toy. I gingerly lifted the elastic contraption from the box, turning it around to inspect it more closely. It basically looked like an industrial and not at all comfortable pair of thong underwear with a small metal box affixed to what I assumed was the crotch. Were these those vibrating panties that were making the bachelorette party rounds? I wondered, purposely avoiding Joe’s gaze and hoping that the look on my face didn’t reveal the depth of my horror and disappointment.

  “What do you think?” Joe asked, not even the slightest bit self-consciously.

  I dared to look up at him and was surprised to see he hadn’t donned a leather S&M mask.

  “What is it?” I finally asked, defeated.

  “It’s a head lamp!” he replied.

  “A what?” I stammered.

  “A head lamp,” he repeated. “You know, a flashlight you wear on your head when you go kayaking into caves or spelunking.”

  Oh, right. When I go kayaking into caves or spelunking. Who was this man? And more important, who the hell did he think I was?

  I considered the gifts I’d given him—the embroidered wallpaper-print shirt, the Euro-styled whip-stitched sandals, the massage gift certificate to my favorite day spa—and realized that a lot of the time, we subconsciously give our significant other gifts that will benefit us in some way. I clearly wanted Joe to be slightly edgy and the tiniest bit metrosexual; he wanted me to have an outdoorsy, adventurous spirit and an urge to get dirty. We were both screwed.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband is an absolutely horrible gift giver, to the point that I’ve

  come to dread any holiday where the exchange of presents is involved.

  I’ve received gas station stuffed animals, perfume roses, knickknacks

  that play music, and myriad other treasures you probably wouldn’t

  even attempt to regift. We’ve talked about it, I’ve begged him to take

  one of my friends shopping with him, and one year I went so far as to

  print out a list with links to websites and visual aids. It didn’t help. This

  Christmas, the highlight was matching elf costumes: Supercenter

  sweat suits (two sizes too big) in Santa red and Christmas tree green.

  (“But I just wanted you to be comfortable,” he said.) My friends literally

  wait for the report now every birthday and Christmas.

  ALLISON

  Over the years Joe has become somewhat famous for heading out in the afternoon on Christmas Eve to “start his shopping,” and sneaking out of the house as I’m making breakfast on my birthday to procure my gift. This is not passive-aggressive behavior meant to torture me. In Joe’s mind, it’s not rocket science; that’s just when you shop. No sense dragging the whole affair out for days or even weeks, right? Plus, by its very urgent nature, a last-minute shopping trip is guaranteed to end with a purchase. Not necessarily a mind-blowing or even marginal purchase, but a purchase nonetheless. Mission accomplished.

  When you have a million friends and a couple of kids and a dozen or more nieces and nephews and gigantic blended families, gift giving can get out of control. Therefore, Joe and I long ago agreed that holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day were really nothing more than artificial Hallmark holidays and therefore not something we would recognize with physical tokens of our affection. Because our anniversary falls in the busiest gift-giving season of our lives—we have both kids’ birthdays, my birthday, Mother’s Day, and the annual celebration of the one and only time we’ll ever host an open bar for two hundred people all in a five-week span—more often than not, we use the occasion as an excuse to purchase something large that we were going to buy anyway but otherwise would have felt guilty about. Which means that one year I got a flat-screen TV for our anniversary (and you may recall that I don’t watch TV), and another year Joe got a giant antique mirror that he wasn’t particularly fond of even before he discovered how outrageously overpriced it was. Happy anniversary of that other year we gave ourselves something I didn’t want, dear! When we do exchange gifts, I have to admit that his are

  When we do exchange gifts, I have to admit that his are always both thoughtful and generous—if not necessarily things I might ever buy for myself. He’s not the type to go for the Tiffany-box, ten-karat display of fondness, nor is he the homemade-card sort of sap. He tends toward practical items that would nonetheless be considered splurges because nobody in their right mind could ever claim to “need” any of them. There was the coffeepot with the built-in timer (note: we had a perfectly good model at the time, minus the clock) because he knew I hated waiting for my caffeine fix in the morning; the microwaveable Brookstone slippers and matching buttery robe that together cost a small fortune; the ATM-size high-tech towel warmer because “who doesn’t like getting out of the tub and wrapping up in a nice, toasty towel?” He stuffs my Christmas stocking with not one tube of body lotion but seven, a symbol that he loves me despite my finicky nose, and also tangible proof of his relentless desire to find at least one scent that might please it. The year I mentioned I wanted a sewing machine, Joe spent countless hours researching various machines and their features, and ultimately forked over a sum that could get you a decent used car for a digital model nicer than the one the seamstress that I go to uses. It took me a week to figure out how to turn it on, and several months of lessons before I could load the thread and wind a bobbin. I made some curtains that year, and pretty they were not. It turns out that sewing in a relatively straight line is a lot harder than it looks. Sadly this was before we had children (which is probably why he was buying me pricey machinery), so I couldn’t even pawn my lopsided, ill-fitting window coverings off as one of the kids’ handiwork. My overly generous husband is still bitter about how much dust my electric stitcher collects, but in my defense I didn’t ask for the bloody Lamborghini of sewing machines. If he’d gotten me the Fisher Price model I’d had in mind, its disuse wouldn’t be an issue.

  “I went out on a limb this time,” he’ll tell me, handing over another expertly wrapped box. “If you don’t like it or you won’t use it, you have to promise me you’ll take it back.”

  “I promise,” I vow solemnly.

  Oh dear mother of the infant baby Jesus, what is that?

  “I don’t like it and I won’t use it,” I admit. Well, I promised.

  “Really? You won’t? You don’t even want to try it? Why don’t you just try it?” He looks hurt and I feel awful. But I truly don’t like it and I definitely won’t use it and if you didn’t want the brutal honesty you asked for, you should have married someone else.

  I know that many husbands shower their wives with precious metals and semiprecious gemstones at every gifting occasion. Mine is not one of them. Other than my wedding and engagement rings—purchases about which it’s not like he had much choice—Joe has bought me jewelry exactly once: a pair of diamond earrings when I gave birth to our first child. (And I am pretty sure that if creating, carrying, incubating, and then delivering another life into the world doesn’t earn you something sparkly, nothing ever will.) It took me less than two weeks to lose one of them—I was very busy not losing our new baby, thank you very much—and I have never heard the end of it. I would bet my last dollar I never will. Whoever came up with that catchy “Diamonds are forever” line clearly wasn’t married to me.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband is a terrible shopper. In fact, he never shops unless he knows exactly what he needs to get. He never browses, and when he does it just to be accommodating, I feel so stressed because he always asks, “Are you done?
Are you ready to go?” Because of this he also is a terrible gift giver. He has gone so far as to give his mother money to buy things for me. When our daughter was small, he had her pick out my gifts so everything I got was exactly what a six-year-old girl wanted (horse-head pendant, mini-hoop gold earrings). Now, every year I get the same thing: a Yankee candle and new slippers, plus anything else that I very specifically ask for.

  ROSEMARIE

  I love buying gifts, probably because to me shopping is a fun activity, an inherently pleasant way to pass the time that sometimes even ends with a purchase. I like products and packaging, and I am a sucker for any sort of marketing claim. I’ll see a tube of Blackest Black mascara and feel a rush of hopeful joy, because I have only True Black, Dark Black, and Very Black. But Blackest Black? How could I have lived my entire life without enjoying this extreme of blackness? Thank God I found it! Similarly, it matters not that I already own two dozen bottles of hair conditioner; when I see that Extra Super Thick and Glossy Conditioner on the shelf, I am helpless to resist it. I like drugstores and hardware stores, sock shops and supercenters. Joe will mention that he’s going to pick up some paint and I will beg him to let me tag along.

  “I’m just getting paint,” he’ll say.

  “That’s okay, I just want to keep you company. Plus I like looking,” I tell him.

  “At what?” he genuinely wants to know.

  “All of the stuff !” I explain vaguely.

  At the paint store, he waits mostly patiently by the counter while I bustle about the place, accumulating must-have gadgets that we didn’t even know were out there waiting to make our lives easier and that we therefore must purchase immediately.

  “What the hell is that?” Joe asks, inspecting a little rubber nub I’ve placed on the counter.

  “It’s a tool for cleaning the rim of the paint can!” I explain excitedly.

  “Did you ever hear of a rag?” he asks, shaking his head.

  But to me, if they make a product specifically for one task, it must be one of those wonderful things you could live without, but you probably wouldn’t want to. Like a cheese slicer. Before the cheese slicer came along, sure you could always use a knife to saw off a nice hunk of Jarlsberg. But once you’ve experienced the bliss of identical, uniform slices of your favorite curdled milk product, there’s no going back. You know it and I know it and if your cheese slicer broke tomorrow you’d haul your ass right over to Target and buy another one.

  “What’s that?” he asks, pointing to another item in the pile.

  “It’s an edging tool,” I inform him.

  “Does tape ring a bell?” He is starting to get a little pissy with me, which isn’t very nice seeing as I came along to keep him company and all.

  “But this is made just for edging,” I argue. “Tape can be used for anything.”

  “You really will buy anything, won’t you?” he says sadly, handing over his credit card to the cashier. “Next time, you’re staying at home.”

  He’s right. I will buy anything. Our drawers are clogged with Chip Clips and egg separators, wine aerators and dryer balls. We have a pasta maker, a bread maker, and a yogurt maker (into which you must put yogurt plus whatever fruit you want in it and the machine then conveniently mixes it for you; you know, like a spoon might), plus a spatula for every dish and cooking surface ever invented, including a pan-size one for omelets and a dozen pointy ones for pie. In an effort to clear up some kitchen cabinet space, I finally sold the $100 George Foreman Grill in our garage sale. I got a whopping ten bucks, but I honestly never used the thing so I was relieved to see it go. Within months, I’d purchased a shiny new panini press, which fit perfectly in the spot left vacant by the George Foreman—because, it turns out, they are the same fucking appliance.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband—a prominent architect—keeps buying these ugly printed

  jackets with tigers and such on them at the swap meet. He insists on

  wearing them in public because he thinks they are cool. I’ll sneak into

  his closet and throw them away, but he just keeps buying more. Is this

  male menopause?

  ILEANA

  Joe doesn’t like accumulating stuff, so it makes sense that he doesn’t much care for trolling for it in the first place. To my husband, braving any sort of retail establishment is a task to be endured when you absolutely, critically need something, like sour cream or a raccoon trap or underpants without holes in them. If my husband determines it is time to buy, for example, new basketball shoes, he drives straight to the nearest sporting goods store, tries on three or four pairs of sportspecific sneakers, purchases the most comfortable one, and goes home. That’s it! He never gets sidetracked in the pool-toy aisle or sucked into trying on a dozen or more pairs of sunglasses or considers how his ratty old socks are going to look with his shiny new shoes. He doesn’t stop to wonder if there might be anything else in the store worth checking out; once he’s made his predetermined purchase, the goal is accomplished and he can head back home to putter in the garage. Honestly, it must be nice.

  Although he’s not a born shopper, Joe has made great strides in the area during our marital tenure. For instance, when we’re on vacation, not only will he occasionally suggest a stroll through the local shopping district to check out the native wares, but he has even learned to feign interest in the items I show him, and he hardly ever hovers anxiously in my shadow, checking his watch every thirty seconds and sighing dramatically. Definitive proof of how far he has evolved in this area came on the morning of our ten-year anniversary, when he presented me with a thick envelope. Inside the envelope was a lovely card, and inside the card was an even lovelier surprise: Ten crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. Now, a Benjamin a year for all of the compromise and sacrifice and that forsaking-allothers business—plus doubling the size of our little family at the expense of ever being able to bare my abdomen in public again—may not seem like all that much, but my husband knows that I rarely spend money guiltlessly (although I admit I somehow still manage to squander an unseemly ton of it on God only knows what), so I was a pleasant combination of stunned and delighted.

  “The deal is,” he said, immediately putting the brakes on my growing giddiness, because I just knew he was going to say we had to do something awful with it like put it in the bank or use it to stock up on unstained Tupperware with matching lids and a new water heater, “you have to spend it before we get home tomorrow.” We were going away for a whopping thirty-six hours to a romantic little town an hour away. In order to spend that kind of dough, the next day and a half would have to feature a lot of shopping. That, gentle readers, was the real gift.

  We bought two cast iron urns for the front porch first—something I’d wanted since we bought the house, but there was always something on the endless home-improvement list that seemed more urgent. Or maybe I’d just not happened across the right pots, but there they were and conveniently I had a fat wad of cash in my pocket. Then we found a quaint little garden shop and chose flowers to plant in them. Up and down the main drag we traipsed, passing up only the stores that sold taxidermy or old-lady clothes. I splurged on an impractical floor-length skirt, three pairs of nearly identical earrings (without even a single eye-roll from Joe), and a gold Buddha wall plaque for the garden (again, not even a sarcastic smirk); while I wasn’t looking, a pair of ceramic lovebirds flew into my shopping cart. “How much do you have left?” he’d ask excitedly after each purchase. I know what you’re thinking—that he just wanted the whole thing to be over and done with so we could go back to the hotel and have sex. But it wasn’t like that, I swear. He was noticeably enjoying watching me enjoy myself, and he even insisted on paying for all of our meals out of “his” money (which was technically “ours” but not, you know, mine to do with as I pleased without asking for his input or permission), because the grand was specifically earmarked for extravagance. He even made a game out of it, saying things like �
�You got that, moneybags?” when it was time to pay, and shrugging as I handed over one crisp bill after another as if to say, “My lady likes to blow the dough. What can I say?” I have never loved my husband more than I loved him that day and a half. Like I said, I know that money can’t buy happiness, but it turns out it can rent it for a while.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If It’ s Broken . . . Please

  God, Don’t Fix It

  For fixing things around the house,

  nothing is handier than a man with a checkbook.

  • ANONYMOUS • (BUT IF NOBODY CLAIMS IT SOON, I AM TOTALLY CALLING IT )

  When Joe and I moved from our last house to the one we’re in now, we decided to do all of the packing and boxing ourselves and then hire a moving company to take care of the transport. But when you have two Type As living and working together, here’s what happens: Three days before the movers are scheduled to arrive, you have padded, packed, and labeled every single household item you own, including the pots and pans, phones, plates, trash cans, TV, towels, litter box, and bed linens. The only article in the house that’s not nailed to something you’re leaving behind is a single, rapidly disappearing roll of toilet paper. So you walk around in the empty-butfor-stacks-of-boxes space aimlessly until one of you grabs your cell phone and calls U-Haul and rents a truck. You know it’s probably overkill, but you have to do something.