“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My husband is lazy, plain and simple. He is a travel writer and gets a ton of free things from his trips. He brings them home and leaves them lying around. These free things are not items that he wishes to keep; he is just too lazy to throw or give them away. I have offered to discard some of them, but he is particular and says that he would like to do it himself. But he has never hit me or cheated on me, and in spite of his annoying habit of being lazy, he sometimes carries my heavy bags up the stairs of our apartment after long trips.
LAURA
At the risk of stating the blaringly obvious, taking a trip requires a colossal amount of work, and I’m not even including the years you have to toil away at a soul-numbing job to make enough money to afford one. I’m talking about everything that leads up to that moment when your bags are packed and waiting by the front door, the mail has been put on hold, the gas has been properly shut off, and you are out of there! Just as soon as you find your fucking keys.
I have a pre-vacation to-do checklist that spans several days and includes admittedly ridiculous things like “pack clothes.” It’s not as if I’ve ever found myself checking into a hotel room and had the porter ask if he could help me with my bags only to discover that I had forgotten to pack any. Having this task on my list, however, provides another handy item I can cross off when it’s finished, resulting in a false sense of accomplishment that I rather enjoy.
If you’re anything like me, here’s how the pre-trip preparations look. Let’s start by assuming that the destination is a given, for example the annual trip to see the in-laws in Florida. (Because if you’re going away purely for sport, you can factor in an additional 357 glitches, issues, and arguments such as a debate over the merits of really experiencing the rain forest versus not having wireless Internet access from your room.) Picking a date is fun, if you enjoy spending days on end trying to juggle work and school and soccer and gymnastics schedules. Just when you think you’ve got the ideal itinerary, you remember your husband’s weekly, nonnegotiable basketball game, which means you can never be anywhere but home on a Thursday night. Ever. You settle for the backup itinerary, the one that has you traveling at unholy hours with a total of four five-hour layovers and two plane changes—which you loathe because you hate flying, especially the taking off and landing parts—but what can you do? You add Get Xanax prescription refilled to your list.
The actual packing takes you several days, because (a) you are packing not just for yourself but for everyone in the entire house (although at some point you will either boycott packing for your husband for obvious reasons, or quit inviting him on your trips), and (b) everyone in the entire house is a highmaintenance pain in the ass. This one can’t crap without her daily dose of Miralax and that one has allergies that require different daytime and nighttime medications. They both need hair ties and Band-Aids and water shoes and sunblock and a noise machine to sleep to and do you think they can actually agree on a single toothpaste flavor? You should be so lucky.
And you haven’t even cracked your own suitcase yet. Oh sweet Jesus, it’s overwhelming, isn’t it? First you have to try on every single outfit you own, because even if you wore something just yesterday, there’s no guaranteeing that it will fit you today, and besides you need to be wearing it in order to assemble the proper accessories and undergarments. You will pack all of your staple, uniform, go-to pieces, and then you will continue to stuff random items of clothing into the suitcase, including several that have been hanging in your closet for decades and still have the tags on them because hey, you never know, they might be perfect in Florida! When your suitcase is bursting at the seams, you will realize that you forgot to pack your panties. Or did you? Shit, you can’t remember so it all has to come out again anyhow. It turns out that you did pack the unmentionables after all, but now that the whole lot is spread out across your bed, it all seems out of style and seasonally inappropriate and wrong, wrong, wrong. You used to have cute, trendy clothes, didn’t you? You would almost swear on your life that you did. But you don’t have the time or money to shop for a new wardrobe before you leave, so you angrily shove it all back in. This time you do forget the panties.
The clothing part taken care of (sort of), you will start amassing the rest of the stuff that you can’t live without for two or twelve days. You always start with tampons, especially if you are going anywhere near a beach or a pool, as you will absolutely get your period just as soon as you are officially en route to your destination, even if you are nowhere near due and have an ovulatory cycle you can otherwise set your watch by. However many tampons you think you need, double it and you’ll probably only have to make one emergency drugstore run on your trip. The must-haves are staggering. You pack three books (that you’ll never crack), five magazines (that you’ll have finished skimming before you board your plane), and an eighteen-pack of condoms (if you’re lucky you’ll use one). You can’t sleep without earplugs, you can’t figure out how to go anywhere with fewer than four pairs of shoes—sneakers, flipflops, heels, and casual walking shoes are the rock-bottom bare minimum—and your humidity-control plan for your hair (two different types of gel, one ionic blow dryer, paddle brush, round brush, the as-seen-on-TV ceramic tourmaline straightening iron that has changed your life and you wouldn’t think twice about trying to rip from an armed robber’s grip, a bottle of silicone serum, and an assortment of holding sprays ought to do the trick) takes up an entire carry-on bag all on its own.
You scan your list. You’ve lined up a house sitter and arranged for the mail and newspaper to be put on hold. You have left checks for the dog walker and the gardener and doublechecked the timers on the lights and sprinklers. You have created a snappy yet vague “out of the office” e-mail auto-reply, unplugged all of your small appliances, watered your plants inside and out, and hauled your trash and recycling cans to the curb. You checked the car’s fluid levels and tire pressure and have your printed boarding passes in hand. You make one final sweep of the place to make sure you haven’t overlooked anything. You haven’t. Of course you haven’t.
“Ready to go, honey?” you shout, because now that you think of it you have no idea where your husband is.
He materializes out of nowhere. “Yeah, just give me a sec while I throw some stuff in a bag,” he says.
Bon voyage!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He Can’t Help It,
He’s a Guy
See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
• ROBIN WILLIAMS •
My husband, Joe, was raised to be a consummate gentleman, to open doors for women and stand when one enters a room. He has impeccable table manners, shines his shoes when they get a little scuffed, and hardly ever forgets to apply deodorant. With all of this going for him, you can understand why it still shocks me when he delivers this ridiculous-to-me request: “Show me your boobs.”
Really? Show you my boobs? While I’m scrambling eggs or struggling into a pair of jeans or tearing through the house trying to find the cordless phone that’s ringing somewhere, suddenly you would very much like to see my breasts? And you think that I will think this is a fine idea, too, and just whip them out for you? Once he even offered me fifty bucks for a peek, which I probably shouldn’t have taken, but come on, it was fifty bucks. The whole thing is so absurd it’s almost comical, especially when I occasionally give in (trust me, when you live with it every bloody day, eventually it wears you down, even when there’s not cash involved) and he actually looks as giddy as Charlie when he won that ticket to the wonderful, whimsical Wonka factory. My boobs do that to him. Like I said, comical.
“Aren’t you glad that I’m still so attracted to you?” he’ll ask when I express my disdain for the frequent peep-show demands.
“Well, sure, yeah, of course,” I tell him. “It’s just that I honestly don’t get why you need to look at my sad, deflated, postbreastfeeding b
reasts all of the time.”
“I can’t help it,” he replies. “I’m a guy.”
Indeed, a recent study (because we needed a study for this) out of New Zealand’s University of Wellington found that when men are shown photos of a woman, nearly a solid half of them will check out her breasts first. One third of the fellows will home in immediately on her waist and hips, while less than one in five gentlemen is even remotely concerned whether she has a face that looks like Rocky’s after Apollo Creed beat up on that shit. Some speculate that boob gazing is evolution at work, a manifestation of a man’s innate attraction to these twin symbols of fertility and youth, which clearly is a bunch of bullshit because like I said, Joe really likes looking at my breasts. (Or maybe it’s just that they’re the only ones he has any likelihood of seeing without an embarrassing pay-per-view charge showing up on the cable bill.) So because most of the time I rather like being married to him even though he can be a juvenile pain in my ass, I try to let him have this small thrill every once in a while.
The problem is that looking at them is rarely enough. No sooner have I dropped top than the next request rolls in.
“Can I touch them?” he pleads.
I have tried innumerable times to explain to him that the sudden copping of a feel does nothing for me. In fact, it does worse than nothing; it makes me want to recoil and run screaming in the opposite direction. It’s essentially antiforeplay. He knows this, but he insists that he can’t help himself.
“So you can still thoroughly enjoy feeling me up, knowing that I can’t stand it in this context?” I ask.
“Totally,” he insists.
Day in and day out, Joe finds any and every opportunity to brush his hands across my baby feeders. He sneaks up behind me as I’m brushing my teeth or surveying the refrigerator contents for an acceptable snack option and cups them from beneath. Even a nice morning hug by the coffeepot habitually ends with a double hand-slide up the sides of my torso, fingers lingering just a little too long around the bosom region. The funny part is he actually thinks he’s being sly when he does this. I always see it coming and have mastered some pretty clever—and effective—deflective moves of my own. To watch us you’ d think we were a pair of dancing octopuses with all of the skim-block-slide-stop business. When subtlety doesn’t work, I usually resort to a calm, rational request.
“Would you get your fucking hands off of my boobs?” I command.
“I can’t help it,” the refrain goes. “I’m a guy.”
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
The worst, most ridiculous, annoying, frustrating, brazen, pompous, chauvinistic, childish, and idiotic thing that my husband does to me—so often that it has become habit—is flick my boobs. Actually it is usually just one boob. The “flick” is a little upward stroke of his index finger delivered right under my somewhat sagging postbaby breast. Of course he thinks this is hysterical and endearing at the same time. Needless to say, I enjoy it about as much as he would enjoy a flick of his testicles. Telling him to stop at this point only fuels the fire. Plus I refuse to give him the satisfaction of even acknowledging the flick; it’s the Pavlovian response that seems to keep him going. We’ve been married eleven years and have two daughters. I expect to endure about 7,382 more flicks from this otherwise very loving and handsome man.
CARRIE
Would that it were only my breasts that had such magnetic qualities, but apparently my ass is also utterly irresistible. (I know, I should be flattered. If you’ve seen my flat, shapeless, pancake-like ass, you know this to be true. And on an intellectual level I guess I am flattered. But unfortunately that doesn’t make the pawing any more pleasant.) He’ll swat at it, cup it, slap it, snap his towel at it, play air drums on it, jiggle it, and pat-pat it (oh my precious, heavenly God, the worst) whenever the opportunity presents itself, which is often, seeing as we live together and everything. And then there’s the morning poke.
An inveterate early bird, most days I leap from our cozy marital bed at some unholy hour and launch into what Joe has dubbed my whirling-dervish routine. I plump pillows, pack lunches, check e-mail, peruse Facebook, shuffle papers, dispose of the many cheese wrappers that are undoubtedly still scattered about the house from Joe’s midnight snack attack the night before, and of course Tweet about the whole exciting affair. Eventually I whirl back into our bedroom, coffee cup in hand, ready to scoop up laundry and eager to make the damned bed already.
“Come cuddle with me,” Joe says sleepily, every single time.
“Can’t,” I tell him. “I’m on a roll.”
“You’re always on a roll,” he replies. “Come on, come cuddle with me.”
Occasionally I oblige, setting my coffee cup on my nightstand and reluctantly tucking back into bed. I try not to squirm too much.
Fifteen seconds later: “You feel great,” Joe tells me, his pair of hot paws heading on autopilot up my top.
“Thanks,” I reply, getting wiggly.
“Wanna get naked?” he asks.
“Can I take a rain check on that?” I ask him, eyeing the laundry basket in the corner.
“Come on, it’ll be quick,” he pleads.
“Hard to turn down such a compelling offer, but I have stuff to do,” I say, trying to roll away from him, an impossible task seeing as he has my entire lower body in a scissors grip.
“Why are you always so agro in the morning?” he asks, hurt, clamping down even harder.
“I am agro because I was in the middle of doing something productive, and also after thirteen years of having you stick your boner in my ass-crack under the guise of ‘cuddling’ it’s starting to get a little old,” I say into my pillow.
“I can’t help it,” he says, hungry octopus hands all over my body, desperate for one final brush against my boobs. “I’m a guy.”
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
If my husband is walking behind me or I am bending over gardening, in the fridge, whatever, he has to brush up against my butt. I guess I am glad he still likes it, but it is irritating.
L.H.
You know what’s funny to me? That the ass-grabbing, gaspassing, breast-fondling man I married gets absolutely bent out of shape when I talk on the phone. Of all the potentially annoying wifely sins I could commit, personally I think this one is pretty benign. To hear Joe bitch about it though, you’d think I walked around banging a gong and singing “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” in a bad British accent all of my waking hours.
“Who are you talking to?” he’ll ask in an excruciatingly loud voice that my friend Kim, with whom I am trying to have a nice chat, could probably hear from Colorado without the phone.
“Kim,” I reply, covering the mouth part of the receiver with my hand and foolishly trying to hide the fact that I’m having two conversations at once.
“What’s new with Kim?” he’ll ask, ignoring one small detail, which is that I am still on the phone with Kim.
“I’m trying to find that out,” I inform him, marching out of the room. Of course he follows me. If I throw myself down on the bed, suddenly he gets the urge to organize his sock drawer. If I go out to the back patio, he abruptly remembers that he has some straightening up to do outside. The only place that is safe and sacred is my walk-in closet, which is dark and windowless but otherwise delightful and nearly soundproof. You’d think that the fact that when I’m on the phone at least I am blabbering to someone else would be a great relief to my husband, but still it bugs him, and trying to figure out why has proven pointless.
ME: “Why do you hate it so much when I talk on the phone?”
JOE: “When you talk on the phone? You’re always talking on the phone. And you are right, I totally hate it.”
ME: “I’m not talking on the phone right now, am I?”
JOE: “Well, practically always.”
ME: “I don’t talk on the phone at dinner, and I don’t talk on the phone in bed, and I don’t talk on the phone in the shower or bath, a
nd I don’t talk on the phone at work—except for work stuff—and I don’t talk on the phone while we’re having sex—”
JOE: “Hey, can we have sex right now?”
ME: “Sorry, I have to make a phone call.”
It’s really not as if the phone is glued to my ear 24/7. I talk on the phone when I’m doing other, mindless things, like unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry or putting away yet another load of groceries or doing my tedious portion of the meal preparations. Invariably as I am doing one of these things, Joe enters the room and sees me cradling the cordless receiver with my shoulder.
JOE: [dramatic, disappointed sigh]
ME [into phone]: “Hang on a sec—”
ME AGAIN [covering the mouthpiece with my hand and giving Joe the horse-look I have perfected where I pull my ears back until they are practically touching behind my head; it’s a talent]: “What? Do you urgently need something from me or can you wait until I am finished with my call?”
If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Page 22