Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know we didn’t have the door closed.”

  In the silence that followed, I feared Danny would ask, Why do you always close it? I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain the facts of life to him before I had my first cup of coffee. In fact, I couldn’t fathom having such a discussion before Danny lost every single one of his baby teeth. Yet Danny almost forced me into The Conversation by saying, “I know your secret, Daddy.”

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me what you know. And then I’ll fill in . . . at least some of the gaps.”

  He poked me in the arm. “You’re the fairy!”

  I smiled. “How’d you guess?”

  Danny crawled out from under his blankets and sat in my lap. I held him tight against my bathrobe as he told me, “I saw you sneak into my room last night. And Mommy is Santa Claus, because I saw my Lego deep-sea-diver kit in her closet on Christmas Eve.”

  “Excellent sleuthing,” said I. “But don’t tell anyone at school.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people like to believe.”

  “But why do they like to believe in things that aren’t true?”

  “Because they like stories,” I said.

  Danny considered this for a moment. “How much of a collie dog can I buy for ten dollars?”

  “A tail,” I said. “Or maybe a bark.” I gave him a kiss on the top of his head and scooted him off my lap. “Get dressed now. I’m going to take a shower.”

  The minute I stood up, I heard the plumbing groan.

  Danny jumped up and down. “Mommy beat you to it!”

  Our sluggish water heater needed to be replaced, but neither Lisa nor I had the time—or the desire—to research our options. So it had turned into a weekend family game—not always executed with good sportsmanship—to see who could make the mad morning dash into the bathroom and nab the hottest first shower. Lisa, who usually lost the race, now broke into celebratory song.

  “Why does Mommy have to sing so loud?” Danny asked.

  “Because loud,” I said, “is what Mommy is all about.”

  I sent Danny downstairs to play, then crossed the hall and sat down on Lisa’s side of the bed. I took her ovulation graph off the nightstand and saw that she probably wouldn’t surge this weekend. That would create problems for me next week. I’d have to rearrange some afternoon appointments, and Victoria would think I was scooting out to some hot assignation. I couldn’t blame her for having a prurient imagination. There certainly were a lot of extramarital affairs going on at SB; some of the guys I worked with seemed to trade in their wives as often as they upgraded their personal computers. How they got away with these flings—never mind why they wanted to—eluded me. Sometimes I felt like the only man at SB who lived his life by the calendar and the clock, the only man whose wife—and secretary—knew where he was at every minute of every day, so that even if he wanted to conduct some steamy affair, he wouldn’t be able to wedge in a quickie at the local Motel 6.

  Lisa came back into the bedroom, wrapped in a white towel slung suggestively low on her breasts. “Don’t forget to put that mirror back in Danny’s room,” she said.

  “Later,” I promised.

  “I just don’t want it there forever.”

  “It will not be there forever,” I said.

  “May I quote you on that? A month from now?”

  “A month from now,” I said, “we’ll be living somewhere else.”

  “Optimist.”

  The bathroom, ordinarily suffused with steam after Lisa showered, felt ominously chilly. I shut the door, hung my bathrobe on the hook, and eyed the toilet with longing. Maybe after a couple of cups of coffee . . . or a particularly fibrous breakfast . . . How much longer, after all, could I go without going?

  I took a stone-cold shower—uselessly turning the dial all the way to H—then toweled off, shivering in the frigid air. As I squirted a dollop of shaving gel into the palm of my hand, I felt a promising nagging in my stomach. But then the gnawing passed and returned, passed and returned—a good indication it was more psychological than physical.

  Halfway through my shave, I identified the source of my stomach discomfort. That morning, when Danny had so rudely woken me up, I’d been lying with a woman in my dreams. But it hadn’t been Lisa—nor some succubus come down to haunt me. It had been Cynthia Farquhar. Again!

  Razor in midair, I paused and examined my half-shaven face. So I’d slept with Cynthia in my dreams. Twice. Big deal. How could I control it? The entire human race, I told myself, would be in jail if people were held accountable for taking on inappropriate nocturnal lovers. Besides, Lisa had erotic dreams too. What had she muttered yesterday morning in her sleep?

  Aye-aye.

  I. I.

  Ifor “I. I.” Iforson.

  Asshole, I thought. My razor scraped like sandpaper against my chin.

  At the breakfast table, as I dabbed a tissue against my still-bleeding skin, Danny stirred his soggy Wheaties with a spoon. “What’s fuck?” he asked.

  I cleared my throat and reached for a box of Grape-Nuts. “A verb,” I said.

  “Also a noun,” Lisa added.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “A good fuck,” Lisa said. “A bad fuck. A mediocre—”

  “But what does it mean?” Danny asked.

  I stared into my Grape-Nuts and told Danny it was a private word—an adult word—not to be used in front of either of Danny’s grandmas or the other children at school. This word had various connotations, both positive and negative—

  “Get to the point,” Lisa said. “It’s what people do to make a baby.”

  “Oh,” Danny said. “Why can’t I have Frosted Flakes? At Zachary’s house, they get to eat Frosted Flakes.”

  “Zachary’s parents are divorced,” I reminded him.

  “Not that Zachary,” Danny said.

  “Which one of the famous half-dozen Zacharies is turning five today?” I asked.

  Danny pushed back his chair. “Gotta poop now, Daddy!” he said as he raced for the stairs.

  I pushed my bowl of Grape-Nuts toward the center of the table.

  Lisa clucked her tongue sympathetically. “Want some—”

  “I do not need prunes, Lisa.” I stood up from the table. “Now, let’s get this mess cleaned up.”

  We cleared the table of bowls pooled with warm milk and disintegrating cereal. As we piled the dishes by the side of the sink, I asked, “Why did you tell Danny that fucking makes babies?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  I swatted her lightly on the arm. “He’ll think it’s instant cause and effect.”

  Lisa put on her yellow household gloves. “He knows better than that.”

  “He does?”

  “Stop looking at me that way, like you’re about to lay an egg.” Lisa squirted an inordinate amount of Joy onto a yellow sponge, then tipped on the faucet. “After that night he came into our room and caught us at it—well, he asked and so I told. The mechanics, at least. Of what goes where.”

  “You think he understood?”

  “He asked me if it felt cold,” Lisa said as she rinsed the first cereal bowl. “But otherwise he seemed totally confused about how the two parts go together.”

  “That’s not surprising, considering how much trouble he still has tying his shoes.”

  “Well, practice tying with him.”

  “When do I have time to practice?” I asked.

  Lisa put the cereal bowl down into the left side of the sink. “Could you empty the dishwasher for me?”

  “I don’t have time. I told Josh I’d be there by ten.”

  “Don’t forget True Value.”

  I don’t have time for True Value, I might have replied, had my eyes not fixed on the digital clock on the stove that contradicted my lie. It was only 9:20.

  “And don’t forget it’s garbage day,” Lisa said.

  “I don’t need to be reminded.”

  A bigger
lie had never been told. Because of course I had forgotten. And I didn’t remember again until I passed, in my car, two other trash cans that some other, more responsible husband in our neighborhood already had pulled to the curb. I glanced at my dashboard clock, considered going back to put out the cans, then remembered the sanitation workers usually came between one and two.

  Chance it, my inner voice said.

  The moment I squeezed the old-fashioned latch on the True Value front door—and heard that blasted cowbell ring—I felt as if all eyes were upon me. Surely every salesman here recognized me as the kind of hardware-retarded guy who did not know his ratchet from his key wrench. I pulled back my shoulders, passed by the paint-chip display, and headed down an aisle catering to the toilet-troubled. I had no idea plungers came so small—and so big. I could only imagine the sort of sick, desperate sound they emitted before the desperate homeowners flung them to their flooded floors and called a plumber.

  In aisle five, a large pegboard displayed Master padlocks, Yale doorknobs, double bolts, and safety chains.

  “Help you?”

  I turned. The white-haired salesman wore a red apron and a name tag that read ROY. “I’m looking for a lock,” I told Roy. “But I guess that’s apparent.”

  Roy squinted. “What kind you apparently need?”

  My face grew warm. “For a door. To keep out a child.”

  “What kind?”

  “A five-year-old boy.”

  “What kind of doorknob?”

  Only then did I notice the doorknobs were labeled Hall/Closet or Bedroom/Bath (with privacy lock). “Bedroom,” I said. “But before I left home, I didn’t measure—”

  Roy reached into his apron pocket. I was afraid he’d whip out some grisly garden tool—like a weed whacker—that he’d use to cut me down to size. But he extracted a well-used handkerchief and honked his nose. “These here come in standard measurements,” he said, stuffing his handkerchief back into his pocket. “What color’s the hardware in your house?”

  I hesitated.

  “You want to call your wife?” Roy asked.

  How long have you lived here? Lisa would say. And still you can’t remember if the doorknobs are gold or silver?

  “Give me the gold,” I told Roy.

  After I left True Value, I walked down the mini-mall sidewalk past a number of come-and-go establishments: a tanning salon called Ray’z, a pet-supply store known as Pooch Patrol, and a bad Italian restaurant, Mia’s Mamma, that was home to meatballs so gritty that Lisa swore they must have originated out of one of Pooch Patrol’s Alpo cans. Mia’s had a new neighbor: On Your Toes dance studio. In spite of the cold wind that caused me to huddle in my coat, I paused to watch through the venetian blinds. About a dozen baby-fat-padded teenagers in black leotards and pink tights were writhing a dance that seemed a cross between the hula and the pony. The teacher, who had the right kind of body for such lissome movement (all skin and bones), kept stopping the cassette tape and forcing the teenagers to repeat the same motions. I moved away from the window only after one of the mothers seated on a bench in the lobby gave me an evil glare. I glared back. What kind of mother was this, I thought, who couldn’t tell the difference between a child molester and a decent man in search of potential baby-sitters?

  The minute Joshua Silber, CPA, buzzed me into his office, I felt clobbered by the music from the dance studio next door: an oldies tune called “Poison Ivy,” about a gal—pretty as a daisy—who drove the men crazy. As Josh came out to greet me, snapping his fingers and shaking his hips, I understood why I had succumbed to the charms of A. A. Milne the night before. Josh was a big, bearlike man whose ears sat too high on his frizzy-haired head and whose snout was turned up so you were constantly aware of his nostrils. He looked like a dancing version of Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Pooh’s bare belly, however, seemed preferable to what Josh wore. Josh was truly color-blind (unlike me, who was unjustly accused of being so), and usually his wife, Deb, matched up his trousers and shirts. Yet Deb, an avid garage-saler, must have left to go junking at the crack of dawn, because Josh’s tie—an odd, mottled yellow-and-brown pattern that looked like a monarch butterfly smashed against his chest—did not even remotely match the hue of his blue windowpane shirt.

  “When did that dance studio move in?” I asked.

  “First of the year,” said Josh. “Most of the time it’s Swan Lake stuff. But Thursdays it’s tap classes. For three-year-olds, no less. Makes the paper clips in my top desk drawer do the cucaracha.”

  “Have you talked to them?” I asked. “About soundproofing?”

  Josh ran his hand over the thinning remains of his wiry hair. “We’re splitting the cost of a cork wall after tax season. In the meantime, they get to listen to my clients moaning and groaning, and Julie gets free lessons.”

  Josh’s daughter Julie was about as heavy as Josh’s wife. I tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked, “Ballet?”

  “Jazz,” said Josh. “I’ve watched her. Through the window. She’s awful. I dread her recital. Because I know when I see her hoofing her fat self across the stage, I’ll get so proud—I’ll cry so hard—that the frigging camcorder will vibrate and shake, and later Deb’ll yell at me for taking such lousy footage.” He ran his hand over his hair again. “Step into my chambers, if you dare.”

  I followed Josh into the back office, which was considerably quieter and smelled of hours-old coffee. Ignoring Deb’s pleas to let her do up his office, Josh had settled for dental-like decor. The antiseptically white walls were plastered with Far Side and Dilbert cartoons, and a plastic ficus tree gathered dust in the corner.

  The True Value bag clanked when I put it down on Josh’s desk.

  “What’s in there?” Josh asked, as he started spreading my tax return across his conference table.

  “A lock.”

  “What for? Danny still climbing in your bed?”

  I frowned. “How’d you know?”

  “Lisa told me.”

  “Why did she tell you that?”

  “Just to be fair,” Josh said, “she didn’t say the kid in the bed was Danny. She mentioned she was getting done with this novel she was writing—hey, listen, I didn’t know she thought of herself as a novelist—why didn’t she tell me?—why didn’t you tell me? Anyway, she mentioned she was writing this book, and when I asked her what the story was about, she said an ordinary guy with ordinary problems. ‘So what kind of problems?’ I asked her, and she said—pretty defensively, I gotta admit—’Like, like, like, he doesn’t understand why his kid keeps climbing into his bed.’ ”

  I didn’t care for the amused look Josh gave me. “Lisa’s novel,” I said, “is based on someone else—”

  “Someone else!” Josh gave a bearlike grunt. “That’s like calling a doctor’s office and saying, ‘I’ve got this friend who thinks he has herpes.’ Everybody knows it’s you who’s got the herpes.”

  “I don’t have herpes,” I said.

  “That’s my point. Tell your writer-wife to write about it and everybody’ll think you do.”

  I hesitated. “Are you done being an asshole?”

  “I’m just warming up. Want some coffee?”

  “Give me my bad news first,” I said.

  Josh gestured me forward. “Come to the table.”

  Across the length of the table lay my 1040 and a long spread of schedules: itemized deductions, interest and dividend income, and capital gains. As if pressure on the form would cause an explosion, I used only the tips of my fingers to turn to the second page of the 1040. I gazed down at Josh’s calculations and blinked.

  “Do I get to keep my firstborn?” I asked.

  “He’s all yours,” Josh said. “At least until he gets his driver’s license.”

  I sat down slowly in front of the 1040. “But I already paid . . . God, just look at all this estimated from last year. I don’t see why I owe this outrageous amount.”

  Josh hemmed and hawed and stroked his tie, then launc
hed into a speech that seemed to mix the wisdom of Socrates (“Man has a duty to the state”) with the mythology of Passover (“Remember we were slaves in Egypt—before we became slaves to the IRS”).

  “I don’t make the rules,” he finally said.

  “But can’t you help me get around them better?”

  “You don’t take my advice,” Josh said. “Remember, just this time last year, I told you and Lisa to buy a bigger house and to have another kid to knock another couple of thousand off your gross—”

  “We’re trying.”

  “I know you’re trying.”

  I bit my lip. “Don’t tell me. This also is part of Lisa’s novel?”

  “Is it?” Josh asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “How come you don’t know?” Josh asked.

  “She won’t let me read it. She says I’m too critical. And too unemotional.”

  “Unemotional? You?” Josh snorted. “Man, if anyone wore his heart on his sleeve—”

  “It wouldn’t be me.”

  “But you’re as easy to read as a book! Come on. Take this trying thing.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Don’t take that.”

  “You can’t blame Lisa for telling me that. You gave it away last year. When I suggested you get yourself another little tax deduction, you got this look on your face.”

  I shrugged.

  “Come on, guy,” Josh said. “It’ll happen.”

  “I guess.”

  Josh hesitated. “Tell me to fuck off if I’m getting too personal.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Fuck off.”

  “But I used to know this guy. And he and his wife couldn’t . . . you know, have kids. So then they went to the doctor and discovered the wife was—get this!—producing antibodies that fought off the poor guy’s sperm.”

  “Lisa doesn’t have antibodies,” I said. “She has a blocked fallopian tube.”

  “No shit,” Josh said. “How’d that happen?”

  I couldn’t believe my own ears. I had just blurted out Lisa’s deepest secret. I should have felt shame. But really what I felt was relief. I wanted to keep on spilling, to say, Well, it all began when . . .