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

by Jenna McCarthy

  I started to seethe.

  “Well, why don’t you just tell me where I can have it,” I snapped.

  “Pretty much right here,” he said, indicating a seemingly arbitrary, centered-on-nothing point on the geometric plane that was the wall, in precisely the spot where I had planned to hang the robe hooks.

  “Perfect,” I said sarcastically.

  “Where do you want your outlets?” he asked in all sincerity.

  “Is that a trick question?” I demanded. “Because ideally I would like them centered over the backsplash.”

  “Yeah well, that’s not to code,” he replied.

  “Then put them wherever the hell you want and thanks for asking,” I muttered, throwing my pencil into a pile of sawdust and flouncing from the room. (I flounce from rooms a lot; it drives Joe crazy.)

  “So we’re done here?” he bellowed after me. I ignored him.

  Pretty soon the weeks of individual, nightly FUFs started to blend into one giant festival of angry obscenities. The finished, fuzzy result was an eleven-month “discussion” about where I wanted the faucet handles and how I wanted the tile laid out and how high I wanted the top of the pony wall next to the toilet to be, all of these “discussions” were moot because there weren’t actually any options. Nevertheless, Joe would ask and I would answer and he would proceed to tell me why what I wanted wasn’t going to be possible at all and I’d fly off in a murderous rage, because that’s what I do.

  After a lengthy debate about which sort of light I couldn’t have over the bathtub, I found and bought a darling petite crystal chandelier. It was absolutely perfect, practically made for the space.

  “You can’t have that over the tub,” Joe said when I showed it to him.

  “Why not?” I demanded, crushed.

  “Because if you grab it when you’re in the tub, you’ll get electrocuted and die,” he replied wryly.

  “How could I grab it when I’m in the tub?” I asked. “I’ll be sitting down!”

  “Not when you’re getting in and out,” he insisted.

  “You never said I couldn’t have a chandelier there,” I reminded him with a pout.

  “Well, I’m saying it now,” he answered.

  Cue the exit music.

  Eventually, every single detail had been hammered out and we could cross master bathroom off our endless remodel list. Remarkably enough, the finished product turned out quite beautifully, and I’ve gotten used to reaching behind a wall of damp towels and fluffy bathrobes to flip the light switches on and off. Most important, we’re still married. I guess that’s all that really matters. That and I got my lovely little crystal chandelier centered over the bathtub, and I’m still alive to tell about it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Are You In

  or Are You Out?

  Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.

  Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

  • GROUCHO MARX •

  Joe and I are similar in that we both like carefully constructed systems and elaborately detailed plans. Go-with-the-flow, we are not. When I got pregnant the first time, I wondered how we would ever be able to agree on a name for our unborn future child. We had endless lists of possible monikers but nothing close to a consensus. He refused to consider Sebastian or Olive, and I put the kibosh on Jordan and Joe Jr. He scoffed when I added Hunter to the girl-name list, even after I agreed to consider Mokelumne for a boy (I’d just call him Mack). Finally I offered a suggestion, the best I could come up with besides drawing straws or paper-scissors-rock: If it was a girl, I got final say from a field of mutually acceptable choices, and if it was a boy, he’d get to make the ultimate call. It seemed fair enough and Joe agreed to it, but still I prayed for a girl. (I like to think that my two daughters are proof that God likes me and He listens.)

  When we bought our first house together, I got a tiny taste of what the rest of my life was going to look like. Joe and I requested duplicate copies of every single piece of paper associated with the purchase and spent ridiculous amounts of money at Staples in order to painstakingly organize our individual forests of forms. It was an exhausting waste of time and resources, but we hadn’t figured out a single record-keeping method we could co-manage without killing each other yet.

  “Do you have a copy of the physical inspection report?” our real estate agent would ask us, and Joe and I would frantically tear through our respective color-coded binders, desperate to be the one who could locate the document first. We laughed together at our shared compulsiveness, but it was obvious that once we were in the house, there would have to be a mutually agreed-upon division of authority.

  “How about I get inside and you get outside?” I suggested.

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked, sounding appropriately suspicious.

  “Well, we are going to have to make a million decisions about paint colors and furniture placement and fixture choices and landscaping and stuff,” I explained. “I think we might avoid a lot of fights if each of us has a domain.” I was waiting for him to point out that there would be a lot more decisions to be made inside, where we’d also be spending the majority of our time, but surprisingly he agreed. It was official: I would never have to even pretend to consider hanging a framed basketball-legend poster on my living room wall, or argue over a stupid wagon-wheel Roy Rogers garage-sale coffee table. I could hardly believe my good fortune.

  “Please don’t take down that tree in the back that I love,” I added sweetly, referring to an adorable gumdrop-shape bit of greenery that was one of the first things I’d noticed when we looked at the house.

  “That’s not a tree, it’s an overgrown shrub,” he countered. “And it’s going.”

  “Fine,” I spat. “I hope you like your new pink bedroom.”

  Despite the rocky start to the inside/outside agenda, it has served us well over the years—with a few noteworthy exceptions.

  One day after we’d been in our first home for a few months, I was strolling through an antiques store when I saw it: an architecturally stunning recycled garden station crafted entirely from vintage pieces. The top was a repurposed door into which a large hole had been lovingly cut to hold a weathered porcelain bowl. The back had decorative wrought iron corbels holding up a former drawer front enjoying a new life as a shelf. Best of all, the front of the reincarnated shelf was dotted with antique glass knobs—aged to the perfect shade of purple—where I could hang all of the garden tools I didn’t have because technically I can’t stand gardening, but I could always buy some tools, and besides, having this beautiful piece of furniture on the property might even inspire me to cultivate a green thumb after all. My lack of agricultural interest or inclination didn’t diminish the appeal of this wonderfully lovely bit of recycled history in any way. The thing oozed more charm than any season’s Bachelor ever has, and I wanted it desperately.

  I have a husband now, I reminded myself. I was still in that giddy newlywed phase where I nearly wrecked my car a hundred times a day because I was busy staring at the way the sunlight glinted off of the princess-cut diamond on my left hand instead of looking at the road. I should call Joe and ask him if I can buy it. It was more of a formality than an actual request for permission; it was a sign of marital solidarity, my blossoming maturity, and a commitment to our new little team of two. Plus I’d need him to come down with his truck to pick it up and haul it home.

  “No way,” Joe said when I rang him from my cell phone and told him in painstaking detail about our new and utterly incomparable garden table.

  “What?” I stammered. Maybe he hadn’t heard me right, or perhaps he was answering another question I had asked earlier that day. I made my own money and I could buy whatever I wanted! Surely he understood this.

  “I said, no, you are not buying that garden table,” he repeated.

  “But you haven’t even seen it yet!” I argued, my head filled with a running tickertape of You are not the boss of me. “It’s really amazing and it
will look great on the back wall by the garage. I promise, you’ll love it. Here, I’ll take a picture with my phone and send it to you. Hang on.”

  “I don’t need to see it,” he interrupted, “because I don’t want it and you’re not buying it.”

  “You cannot tell me what I can and can’t buy!” I shouted. Not the boss, not the boss, so totally not the boss! Other shoppers were staring at me like I was a petulant seven-year-old, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation at all.

  “Oh yes, I can,” he said calmly. “It’s outside.”

  I was furious. How dare he lord his domain over me like that! It was obvious that he was just saying no to be spiteful. He was a power-hungry SOB and I had married him. The finality of that decision hit me like a wrecking ball to the gut. For the first of what would be many, many fleeting moments over the next several years, I wholeheartedly hated him. The next time I wanted something I certainly wasn’t going to ask, even if it meant I would have to carry the thing home on my back. I began crafting a detailed mental list of all the crap I was going to buy without requesting my husband’s precious authorization first.

  I stomped around the house for a few days and eventually the spat blew over. We didn’t talk about the infamous garden table again for months, and then one day it just came up. I was still bitter—about losing out on it and that boss-of-me business—and I let him know it.

  “Jenna, don’t you understand?” Joe began. “You have great taste and our house always looks amazing. Whenever people come over they assume you are responsible for the way everything looks, and they’re right. The outside is all I’ve got, and if you start putting your cutesy shit out there, too, I won’t get any credit for that, either.”

  You really could have knocked me over with a sneeze. Blocking the garden station had had nothing whatsoever to do with power or money or just being an asshole for the sake of it; it was about pride, and I hadn’t even considered that for a second. Sure, Joe could have told me his reasoning months ago and saved me an ulcerative amount of resentment—but we were both new to the soul-baring, sharing-everything aspect of marriage, and at least he was trying. I was both touched and repentant, and although I can’t recall any specific details, I’m sure we had a nice go at it to celebrate our camaraderie.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  Every single day, my husband leaves his sock drawer open about half an inch. And every single day I close it all the way. I mean, how much extra effort does it take to close it the rest of the way if you’re already closing it most of the way? I’m not exactly obsessive-compulsive; for example, I can tolerate quite a bit of dust, so it’s not “my problem” that’s to blame. It’s just that it looks so messy left open and looks so neat closed. I don’t want to even bring it up because it’s not worth starting an argument over, so I shut my mouth, shake my head, and push that dad-gum drawer closed every single day.

  JEANNE

  As Chief Executive Officer of Exterior Operations, Joe gets to decide things like which plants will go where and whether we’ll have a wild and eclectic English garden (my preference) or a neat, manicured yard (Joe’s inclination) and when he will water the aforementioned jungles. On the latter front, I am convinced he has subconsciously created a watering reminder that coincides perfectly with my grocery shopping schedule. Because the joy of selecting, bagging, and lugging around hundreds of dollars of foodstuffs is compounded only by having to dart through a water park to get them safely to the front door.

  I call his cell phone from mine.

  “Can you please turn off the sprinklers?” I ask.

  “Why?” he wants to know. “Where are you?”

  “I am sitting in my car in front of the house and I have a trunk full of groceries,” I explain.

  “If you parked in the driveway like I always tell you that you should, you wouldn’t have to run through the water,” he says.

  “Can we not have this particular discussion right now?” I demand. “Your truck is in the fucking driveway and I have ice cream melting out here.” Nine hours later he saunters slothlike out front and gingerly flips off the sprinklers.

  “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself rushing out there like that,” I mutter under my breath, struggling up the soggy path under a load of hateful grocery bags.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband will grab items that he doesn’t think are being used enough to justify having real estate inside the house and throw them into a box and label it KITCHEN STUFF despite that fact it has four of my books, a flower vase, a few of the kids’ clothing items, a rubber spatula (the only kitchen item), and an old VHS tape. He then takes said box out to the garage and there it goes into a Garage Location Items/Witness Protection Program—never to be found again. Why, I ask?!

  HEATHER

  Sometimes Joe will try to goad me intentionally (or so it feels) by describing some elaborate yet hypothetical al fresco plan or another that he’s considering. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn to bite my tongue when he does this, but I’ve gotten quite good at not engaging—because I know that whatever it is that he’s threatening to do is likely never going to happen.

  Joe: “I was thinking about moving the hot tub up onto the back deck.”

  Former unenlightened me: “What? That’s insane! It’s utterly ridiculous! We paid a fortune to lay that foundation under where the tub is now, and the deck isn’t even big enough so we’d have to add onto it, and do you remember how expensive that PVC decking was? And even if we did move it, do you really want to walk out the back door of our bedroom and step directly into—or have to step around—a behemoth hot tub? Oh, and once you built the new deck and moved the stupid tub then we’d have a lovely gaping cement hole out here by the patio, and what were you thinking of putting there? A nice tetherball pole, maybe?”

  The discussion would continue to escalate exponentially, with Joe systematically deflecting my arguments with some version of “God, you are so negative,” and me getting angrier and more frustrated because I knew in my heart the discussion was pointless to begin with. It’s never going to happen, I tried to remind myself. It’s not that I ever had some great epiphany or anything that caused a shift; but after a decade or so of having one variation or another of the same futile argument, I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it anymore. The result is that those exchanges now look a whole lot more like this:

  Joe: “I was thinking about moving the hot tub up onto the back deck.”

  New and improved me: “Great! Good luck with that.”

  During yet another endless remodel (honestly, we never stop; it’s a sickness), we decided to close off a doorway that went from our kitchen to a tiny dining room and move it over a few feet. The existing doorway just wasn’t functional at all, and closing it off would add a few feet of usable wall space to the room, even though we hadn’t exactly earmarked a use for all of the newfound real estate. As Joe began to frame out the former doorway, I had a vision.

  “Wait!” I practically bellowed into his ear.

  “I’m right here, Jenna,” he replied exasperatedly. Joe seems to think I have a volume problem when I speak, and he is therefore constantly reminding me of his proximity. It drives me nuts because can I help it if I’m half Italian?

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to be nice because I was about to ask him to do something for me. “I was just thinking that we should leave the old frame intact and you could drywall the back and then build some little, shallow shelves.”

  “Shelves for what?” he demanded.

  “To put stuff on,” I told him. Wasn’t this obvious?

  “What kind of stuff ?” he asked slowly, suspiciously.

  “I don’t really know yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something,” I assured him.

  “I’m not going to build you an entire wall of shelves just so that you can put a bunch of shit on them,” he informed me.

  “Well, why el
se would you build shelves, then?” I asked, trying to tone down the sarcasm that I know he can’t stand.

  “I just mean if they’re going to be functional in any way, I’ll be happy to build you some shelves,” he insisted.

  “Honey, they’re shelves,” I said patiently. “Shelves are designed for the singular purpose of putting shit on.”

  “Do you mean decorative shit or functional shit?” he asked. He wasn’t even kidding.

  “Does it matter?” I demanded.

  “Absolutely,” he replied.

  “So if I promise I’ll only store a bunch of unsightly, functional crap on there—maybe the blender parts and an assortment of sippy cup lids and that ugly-ass serving platter one of your friends gave us for our wedding—then you’ll build me the shelves?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he said.

  “Deal,” I lied. Once I had those shelves in place, I knew there really would be no further discussion. You know, because they were inside, in my domain.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  My husband has piles of stuff everywhere, and they all have to be at right angles to each other. There are books, CDs, and papers on every available surface in our house, and nothing is in any kind of order, but everything is very neatly piled and exactly perpendicular. If I need to find something, it’s hopeless to please him because there’s no way I can pile things up as neatly as he wants them. Also, he rotates the following items in the cabinets or drawers, as the case may be, so they “wear evenly”: socks, underwear, silverware, and plates. It’s almost funny if you don’t let it get to you.

  JANE

  Joe is better than me at many, many things: snowboarding, working the TiVo, grilling meat, mowing the lawn, carrying cases of soda and tubs of cat litter, playing tennis, parallel parking, and fixing computer glitches instantly leap to mind. But the thing I kick his ass in when it comes to our respective domestic spheres is finesse. See, when Joe decides it’s time to alter something outside, he tends to announce it in a very direct, definitive way. “The ivy’s coming out this weekend,” he’ll say, hands on his hips, the singular raised brow and puffed-up posture together screaming I double-dog-dare you to try to talk me out of it. This of course makes me immediately defensive and argumentative, which is rarely a good starting point. In other areas of his life, Joe has learned the art of subtle diplomacy. Just last night, in fact, he asked, “What would I have to do for you in return if you let me go to the Lakers-Celtics playoff game with Brian this weekend?” Not, “Guess what? I’m going on an expensive boys’ getaway in two days and leaving you alone to deal with the kids,” or even, “Can I go on an expensive boys’ getaway in two days and leave you alone to deal with the kids?” This is because the man I married is smart enough at least in this situation to know that careful wording that includes a promise of future payoff is going to earn him a much more favorable response. But when it comes to his beloved exterior, the same guy can be a bit of a dictator.