“We’ll just get a head start on things,” you tell each other.
Five hours later every single picture, pillow, and piece of furniture you own, plus the leftover packing supplies and a smattering of potted plants, is neatly crammed into the truck’s spacious cargo hold.
“All that’s left is the garage,” he’ll say proudly. “Do you think the movers are going to be mad?”
“Who cares?” you’ll say. “We just saved ourselves at least a thousand bucks. Plus there’s plenty of stuff in the garage, isn’t there?”
Um, yeah. There’s plenty of stuff in the garage, all right. You’ve got containers, shelves, and boxes teeming with flat-head and Phillips screwdrivers, a dozen nearly identical regular hammers, and several of the ball-peen, claw, club, and sledge variety. You’ve got crates stuffed with clamps, crowbars, chisels, and caulk guns; vises and wrenches and pliers (oh my!). Every size and shape of screw, nut, bolt, brad, hook, anchor, latch, and tack is generously represented and sorted into neatly labeled drawers. There is one entire wall studded with enough cutlery to fillet an ocean of fish, an impressive collection that includes drywall knives, putty knives, pocketknives, taping knives, finishing knives, and whittling knives (oh yes, he can whittle; go ahead and cue the dueling banjos from Deliverance). The garden section rivals Home Depot’s, with mowers, blowers, hoses, hoes, shovels, sprayers, rakes, edgers, pruners, trimmers, and a smattering of spades and shears. A tangle of wire cutters, wire strippers, earmuffs, and goggles hangs next to several pairs of work gloves attached by carabiners to warped, worn old tool belts. Over there you’ve got your trowels and torches (because you never know when setting something on fire might sound like a good idea), brushes and rollers, tapes and staplers, levels and ladders—and all of that mess looks like a kid’s plastic play set next to the power tool section, home to the loud, lethal gear that requires protective eyewear and prayers to operate: the drills, drivers, saws, sanders, planers, routers, crushers, and grinders that are absolutely, without question, going to claim one of your husband’s limbs—or at least a digit—sooner rather than later.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
I adore my husband. He loves to do fix-it tasks and building projects all around the house. Unfortunately he is the most disorganized human on the planet and cannot remember where he puts his tools. He is constantly asking me if I have seen his measuring tape/hammer/head/ whatever, and I do my level best not to say, “Well, if you think of the last place you used it, walk there and look down, and you’ll see it!” I do refrain, because I adore him, and I greatly benefit from all of his work, once he finally finds his tools.
JULIE
As it happens, the movers had more than enough to do. It took a team of four burly men twice as long to load up the garage as it took Joe and me to pack the entire contents of our threebedroom home. We congratulated ourselves on our obsessive collective initiative and bantered about some ideas for how we might spend the money we had saved by doing so much of the work ourselves.
“What would you do with my tools if I died?” Joe asked in earnest one day as we surveyed his thousands of dollar’s worth of construction paraphernalia tidily arrayed in the new garage.
“It’s my dowry,” I said jokingly. I was still marveling at the fact that he didn’t say his “business” or “truck” or even “cremated remains”; that his biggest posthumous concern would be his garage full of mystifying gizmos.
“That’s one lucky son of a bitch,” he replied, shaking his head wistfully.
“Can we not talk about this?” I asked. I was already feeling a little maudlin—moving does that to me, plus being pregnant added a whole new layer of hormonal sentimentality—and the hypothetical bereavement and remarriage discussion wasn’t helping.
The thing is, Joe loves his tools. And he uses them not only often and eagerly, but with great skill. He doesn’t like it when I touch or move them, and lending them out is not even an option. (It’s not that he’s not generous, but ever since I let a girlfriend borrow one of his nine staple guns to hang some stupid curtains and neglected to get it back, he’s gotten a little guarded.) Even when I use my own tools—yes, I have a few and I know how to use them—he hovers annoyingly behind me, asking exasperating questions like “Are you sure that’s level?” and “You’re not hanging that on a paint chip again, are you?”
“You are so lucky,” everyone who has witnessed the fruits of his handiwork is fond of telling me. And for the most part, they are right. Joe can wire an entire house, install plumbing, outfit a walk-in closet with professional-looking shelves, and build a door frame—that’s square, even—from scratch. He can put up crown molding, switch out light fixtures, and cut and lay tile. He knows how to frame a room, throw up a wall, and hang, tape, sand, and patch drywall. Friends and family alike marvel at his proficiency, and I don’t begrudge him the praise. He absolutely deserves every bit of it. But every once in a while, I’d like to be able to simply call a fucking plumber, just like everyone else.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My husband is the handiest person I know. He will fix anything and does a great job at it. But when he says he needs to put something together, the kids and I run the other way. He has this habit of getting really mad at the person who is helping and no matter what you do, IT IS WRONG! You can do everything right and if one thing goes wrong—such as a screw that won’t go in right—it is your fault for not holding something right or for not handing him the screwdriver right.
KRIS
On any given Saturday, I might suggest one of a million possible fun family activities: a trip to the zoo, a day at the beach, a drive up to wine country, some margaritas in the backyard.
“Sure, sounds fun,” Joe will reply absentmindedly. “Only I was going to build you that bookcase you wanted . . .”
Oh, how I want that bookcase. I crave it with every atom in my being. I’ve mentally outfitted it with just the right ratio of knickknacks to books and chosen the photos I’ll display on top of it. It’ll be beautiful and functional, a workhorse and an heirloom all wrapped up in one spectacular maple package. That bookcase is the answer to my organizational prayers. Having it will change my life! So I load up the car and the kids and head off on another single-parent adventure—and I can’t even complain about it, because when I get home, the tools are put away, the sawdust is a memory, and my new, expertly crafted display of woodworking is bolted securely to the wall I had chosen as its home. It’s a beauty, too. The edges are meticulously mitered, the top and sides are sanded smooth, and the entire piece is perfectly plumb in every way possible. Ethan Allen, kiss my ass.
It’s not just my decorative whims that demand my husband’s every spare hour. The bigger culprit is the parade of home repairs of which our charming little vintage farmhouse is in perpetual need. Rarely does a week go by when a toilet doesn’t plug, a pipe doesn’t spring a leak, or some aging appliance or other doesn’t stage a mutiny.
“Sink won’t drain again!” I’ll shout to anyone or no one, cursing softly under my breath at the pool of stagnant, soapy water before me.
“I’ll fix it later,” Joe’s voice reverberates back to me from somewhere in the silently decaying bowels of our home.
I survey the piles of syrupy breakfast dishes and sticky utensils and coffee-stained mugs, and let loose another string of whispered profanities.
“Later when?” I bellow. The deafening silence in reply is all I need. Later when I get around to it because it’s not like I’m sitting around watching Glee and popping bonbons over here, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s not that I don’t believe that Joe can fix the sink; I’ve seen him do it enough times to be utterly confident in his abilities. It’s just that like a lot of husbands, he has this annoying thing called a job, and most days he’s expected to show up at it. So off he trots to work, closing the door on his troubles for the next nine hours as he goes. I’m the one stuck looking at the mess, and it makes me want
to tear all of my hair out.
I pour another bottle of Drano down the sink. Nothing. I add some baking soda because I think I read in one of those forward-forward-forward e-mails that it might help. Nothing. I add some vinegar and Holy sulfur dioxide, did I just make a bomb because that is some toxic shit right there. My eyes are bleeding and I can’t breathe. I could call a plumber and pay him in cash and just tell Joe the clog worked itself out. The next time you find yourself wishing your husband were as handy as mine, pause and enjoy the fact that you will never, ever have to hide a plumbing receipt from him or use the money you’ve been squirreling away for Botox to get your sink fixed.
Any time I suggest we buy something for the house, Joe insists he can build it—better, cheaper, and faster to boot. (Maybe cheaper, possibly better, but no way faster. I can type seventy-five words a minute, and potterybarn.com is only one.)
“Honey, you cannot build a leather couch,” I try to argue.
“How do you know? I haven’t ever tried. I bet you I can,” he insists. “How hard can it be?”
“I know that you are extremely talented and amazing with your hands,” I agree. “But you cannot build a couch. Or at the very least, not the couch I want, with antique casters for feet and a tufted back and a million hand-hammered brass studs all over it and big, rolled arms. Skilled tradesmen spend entire lifetimes learning how to craft a couch by hand, and half of the time they still turn out looking like thrift-store crap. Google ‘homemade sofa’ if you don’t believe me.”
“Wow,” he’ll say. “I had no idea how little faith you have in me. It would have been a kick-ass couch, just so you know.”
He truly believes this, too.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My husband’s father offered him a “fixer-upper” boat. It didn’t work then, and I knew it never would; that it would sit in our driveway for ten years just as it had at his dad’s. I tried to fight it, but my husband side- stepped me by going straight to the kids. “What do you think of the new boat Daddy (he uses Daddy when manipulation of their emotional immaturity is necessary) is going to bring home? Mamma doesn’t think we should. What do you guys think?” Okay, are you kidding me? You did NOT just say that to the kids (knowing he did, but trying to stay sane). Oh, and did I mention that shards of the boat are all around it—part of the interior, a vinyl-covered torn-up seat, the cover—on the ground? Every single day I have to look at this old, nasty, mold-ridden boat, sitting on top of a trailer that is propped up on cement blocks. One time he tried to get it to work . . . and of course it didn’t. It’s been there for a year and a half. We’ve officially stepped into white trash territory.
LEAH
The funny thing is—and by funny I mean “annoyingly ironic”—as handy as my husband is, there’s one singular task he loathes, loudly complains about, and tries to put off indefinitely, every single blessed, blustery year: putting up the godforsaken Christmas lights.
“We don’t need to do the outside lights again this year, do we?” he’ll try.
“Yes, we do,” I tell him.
“But we did them last year,” he reminds me.
“And we’re doing them this year, too,” I insist.
“But don’t you think they sort of detract from all of your beautiful inside decorations?” he says, trying a new and admittedly clever tack. I have to think about that one for a second.
“Nope, they’re totally separate. If anything, they enhance my beautiful inside decorations, which by the way, thank you for noticing. Plus I love the lights, so we’re doing them.” I am firm. It’s a tradition—the arguing about it as well as having them there on the house. I witnessed my own parents having this debate every yuletide, too, and have vivid memories of my mom high atop the roof, sweltering in her reindeer sweater (it’s typically around eighty-five degrees in Florida in December), doing it her goddamned self while Dad drowned out her thunderous, angry footsteps by twisting the volume on the TV as high as it would go. We could all still hear her, but we pretended not to.
“We could totally distinguish ourselves by not doing outside lights.” Joe is grasping now. “Hey, we’re not even religious! Why do we even do Christmas decorations at all? Isn’t putting up Christmas lights when you don’t celebrate Jesus’ birthday sort of hypocritical?”
“Christmas lights have nothing to do with Jesus,” I say calmly, ignoring his blasphemous suggestion that we eschew decking the halls entirely as a statement-making act of agnosticism. “It’s not like I’m asking you to build a life-size, working manger on the front lawn and borrow a baby and some livestock to put in it. They’re lights. And in case I haven’t been clear about this, we are going to put them on the house, this year and every year after it, for the rest of our lives. The only way it will ever be up for discussion is if your next wife wants to get into a debate about it with you. Are we good?”
A sad shell of the confident, cocky man I married stares back at me, shoulders slumped. Man, this guy really doesn’t want to put up those lights. I decide to throw him a dry, admittedly unappetizing bone. “You know, I’m happy to call the Christmas Light Guys if it’s really that big of a deal.”
That’s their real name, the Christmas Light Guys. We’ve never actually seen the Guys in person, but I picture a rogue band of seasonal, skill-specific handymen with ginormous beer bellies sporting dollar-store Santa hats. “Sorry ma’am, we only do lights,” a portly Guy tells the bent-over little widow when she asks if he might be able to fix her creaky screen door while he’s there. The Guys’ little lawn signs and flyers pop up all over town right around Thanksgiving, and every year I am tempted to give them a call. Like I said, we don’t know any Guys personally, but Joe does not like them, not one little bit. (Maybe it’s just me, but the Guys seem to demand a Seussical sort of syntax for some reason.)
“I just don’t like getting up on that twenty-foot ladder,” Joe finally admits to me. He would not, could not, on a ladder. Tell me, tell me, what is sadder?
“Seriously?” I scoff. “You prance around on the forty-fivedegree roof like a nimble old billy goat without a moment’s pause, you rock climb and mountain bike for fun, and you once jumped out of an airplane—on purpose—but you’re scared to climb up a silly ladder?”
He huffs and he puffs and eventually, after I’ve dragged two hundred feet of string lights onto the front lawn so that he can’t turn on the sprinklers until they’ve been moved, he climbs up onto the big, scary ladder.
“If I start screaming or you see sparks coming off me, grab that wooden broom and push me off the ladder with the handle end,” he says somberly. “And make sure that you don’t touch my body.”
“Yeah, okay, got it, get the broom, no touching the body,” I indulge him, bracing the ladder against the house with both hands. “Now up you go!”
Sometimes Joe takes the lights back down as soon as I start undressing the tree, but I can almost always count on him taking care of the removal by my birthday in May. One year we were sprucing up the place for a Fourth of July party and realized they were still up. Seeing as we were past the year’s halfway mark—albeit barely—I told him they could stay up. I thought he’d leap at the chance to get out of putting them up the following holiday, but Joe has tremendous pride and he was suddenly mortified about those stupid lights, so he climbed up the dreaded ladder in the heat of summer and ripped them down and I didn’t even need to save his life with a nearby broomstick. Christmas sure seemed to come early that year.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
When one of my boys was a baby and we were on a tight budget—some things never change—I saw a really cute highchair in the shape of a lifeguard stand. It was $350. My husband decided he could make it for me. I call him Tool-Time Tim because he thinks he is handy but he is not. The next thing you know I am rushing him to the emergency room after he ran the circular saw over his hand. By the time we paid his medical bills and for physical therapy, I could have bought that c
hair ten times over. It took my husband several other incidents before he finally accepted the fact that he is not a do-it-yourself guy.
MIA
I have many a friend who likes to lament the fortune her husband has assembled in fancy, dust-covered tools and plenty who complain about half-finished paint jobs and faucets that have been dripping for seven years. (Can you say Chineseeffing-water-torture?) Pals bemoan the countless hours their significantly delusional others spend in their “workshops,” from which concrete evidence of any sort of “work” transpiring there does not exist. Comparatively, I won the handy-husband lottery and I know it. I just miss hanging out with him. It’s not easy being a home-project widow, either.
Five years ago, my brother bought a house in foreclosure. He got a rock-bottom deal and was giddy with his new pad’s upside potential, which was pretty limitless seeing as the place was totally trashed when he bought it. When the broke and bitter former owners begrudgingly moved out, in an effort to salvage as much of their investment as they could, they took every light-switch plate, towel bar, and toilet-tissue holder with them. They stripped the windows of their coverings and even took the knobs off the stove, which seemed unnecessarily vindictive to me. They didn’t just leave with the bulbs that were in the light fixtures; they left gaping holes and dangling wires where the fixtures and ceiling fans once hung. Apparently, before they went belly up they had toyed with the idea of fixing up the joint, as witnessed by the way they had taped off the window trim in several rooms with thick blue painter’s tape. The holes, the wires, the knobless stove, the open electrical sockets, the tape: It’s all still there. For one thousand, eight hundred twenty-five days, my brother has been living in this house without making a single change. “I don’t really even notice it anymore,” he says when I ask casually how the repairs are going. He’s a great guy and one of the funniest men I know and he has a heart the size of Texas and I love him fiercely and unconditionally. And at least I’m not married to him.
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Page 17