Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  While I wrapped the pirate Legos in paper that urged me to CELEBRATE! CELEBRATE!, Danny shoved all his toys and clothes into one corner. Because I was sick of nagging, I let Danny get away with this botched cleanup job and ushered him downstairs. When I opened the hall door that led to the cold garage, I noted—with enough disgust to dream of divorce—that Ebb had failed to take the garbage cans out to the curb.

  Danny wrinkled his nose. “It smells like doody out here.”

  “Daddy keeps forgetting to take out the trash,” I said.

  “Why don’t you just do it?”

  “Because he promised.” My words echoed hollowly in the garage, and Danny—sensing I was not to be further tangled with—squeezed the birthday present too tightly against his chest.

  “Put that present in my car,” I ordered him. Danny actually obeyed, then followed me back into the kitchen, where I tossed my car keys onto the counter, grabbed a piece of scrap paper by the phone, and wrote Ebb a curt reminder: Cynthia before 2. Garbage by 2 too.

  I shoved the note behind a refrigerator magnet I’d bought Ebb for his fortieth birthday, which read, I’D FORGET MY HEAD IF IT WASN’T ATTACHED TO MY BODY.

  Danny pointed to the refrigerator. “That’s rude,” he said.

  “The note or the magnet?”

  “Both.” He looked at me sorrowfully. “Daddy will think you don’t like him.”

  “I can love Daddy,” I told Danny, “without always liking what he does. Now let’s hit the road.”

  The garage door groaned open and I backed my Toyota down the snow-encrusted driveway. The car took forever to warm up, and while big bellows of exhaust steamed out of the back, I gazed into the rearview mirror at Snow Man and Snow Lady and the dented photo of Mrs. Order that graced our for-sale sign. I was disappointed that Law and Order hadn’t called us last night to set up some weekend viewings—but relieved that no one would be trooping through to inspect our mess.

  As I drove down our street, I noticed that all the other husbands on our street—or, more than likely, their sick-of-nagging-’em wives—had pulled their trash cans to the end of the driveway for pickup. I turned on the radio. The oldies station was playing “Yesterday,” a song I had considered highly profound when I was thirteen years old and had the leisure to lie—in premenstrual depression—for hours, facedown, on the bed. I could use that time now, I thought, to do more-constructive things, like whine to a marriage counselor, If he truly loved me, then surely my husband would remember to take out the garbage.

  I pulled out onto the main road. The birthday boy lived miles away in one of those new gated subdivisions where the too-groomed streets were lined with five-thousand-square-foot minimansions. Although we were running late, I wasn’t in any hurry to get there. The birthday boy’s parents rubbed me the wrong way. June and Stewart Fox were a pair of personal-injury lawyers who ran a full-page color ad on the back of the Yellow Pages that asked:

  INJURED?

  HURT?

  CALL FOX AND FOX

  WE’RE ON YOUR SIDE!

  NO FEES UNLESS WE WIN!

  PHYSICIAN ON STAFF

  ¡SE HABLA ESPAÑOL!

  That ad, plus the fact that Attorney Fox and Attorney Fox had criticized my only child at the Montessori school holiday party, had won them a high ranking on my shit list.

  Granted, I hadn’t been in a very social frame of mind the evening of that school party. I’d been pissed at Ebb because he had some mandatory SB function to attend, which meant I had to go to Danny’s school party solo (unless you counted our RCA video camera as my not-so-blind date). As I perched in my festive velvet pantsuit on a plastic schoolroom chair meant to accommodate the tiny bottom of a four-year-old, I felt like some bereft single parent who’d been ordered to tape the event for the benefit of the nonattending ex.

  Danny’s Montessori directress (a too-upbeat woman I privately referred to as Glorious Gloria) had stood up in front of the crowd of parents swathed in some kinte cloth that looked garish against her Swedish-blond hair. I set the camera rolling just as she gaily announced, “Moms and Dads, the theme of our holiday celebration is cultural diversity!”

  Slowly, I panned the camera to the red EXIT sign that hung above the door.

  Glorious Gloria may have had her heart in the right place. But out of the thirty children enrolled in the school, only one was “a person of color” (Zachary #3) and only Noah Fox and Danny were “of Hebraic descent” (or in Danny’s case, half). So all this “How many As are in Kwanzaa?” (“Three!”) and “How many candles on the menorah?” (“Eight? No, nine!”) struck me as less inclusive than divisive, as it served to point out those who were different. I became aware that my kid numbered among the odd ones when Gloria lined up a group of children to make a “Living Menorah.” Danny (who had been chosen to play the shammes candle over the Foxes’ precious little pig of a son) stood in the middle, wearing a flame-yellow paper yarmulke. After Gloria read aloud an abbreviated version of the Hanukkah story and every candle got “lit” by Danny (who scooted around shining an Eveready flashlight over his classmates’ heads), Gloria then announced, “And that is why Jews everywhere on Hanukkah say—” She nodded encouragingly at Danny. “They say—”

  I held the video camera steady and zoomed in on Danny, so close his face looked broad as a pumpkin. He smiled and announced too loudly, “A GREAT MIRACLE HAPPENED HERE!”

  I panned across the audience, duly recording all the Protestant parents’ polite smiles and applause. Two seconds into the next number—a rousing version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—a man seated behind me leaned into my airspace and mouthed (in a Boston accent that made me cringe), “Happened tha-yuh.”

  While keeping the video camera focused on the chirping children, I whipped my head around and confronted a stocky bearded guy wearing a name tag that read STEWIE FOX.

  “A great miracle happened tha-yuh,” Stewie said. “Not he-yuh.”

  I must have looked confused, because Stewie’s well-coiffed wife explained, “Your son said the last word wrong.”

  “Well, your husband’s pronunciation isn’t so hot either,” I said.

  I had forgotten to press the mute button during this heated exchange. So later—knowing that Ebb would disapprove of the way I had squabbled with the Foxes—I fixed the videotape so forty-five seconds of silence reigned between “had a very shiny nose” and “used to laugh and call him names.” The Fox partnership probably would have called this tampering with the evidence. I called it the kind of editing that would save my buttinski.

  The Foxes must have made a bundle chasing ambulances. When I spotted half a dozen helium balloons bobbing on the corner mailbox of Regency Drive, I turned in to the winding driveway of a Tudor mansion that could have belonged to King Henry VIII. Danny and I crunched up the stairway and rang the bell. June Fox opened the door. I gazed into her elegantly appointed foyer and felt first envy, then revulsion. The black-and-white marble on the floor sparkled, but I was sure it felt freezing cold beneath bare feet.

  “Hey, Noah!” Danny called out to the birthday boy. He pushed past the ultrathin Mrs. Fox and rushed inside without wiping his Reeboks on the mat. June Fox gazed down at her marble floor in dismay, as if some savage species had invaded her home and left behind its smudgy tracks.

  “Come back here right now!” I ordered Danny. “And remove your shoes in the hallway. And tell Mrs. Fox you’re sorry for the mess you just made on her floor.”

  Danny handed the birthday present to Noah Fox, then plopped down on the marble and yanked off his sneakers without untying them. “Sorry!” he told June Fox.

  She turned to me with a chilly smile. “The party ends at four.”

  “His dad is going to pick him up,” I said, realizing a second later that his dad gave her the mistaken impression that Ebb and I were divorced.

  As Danny, clad only in socks, slid on the marble floor into the back part of the house, I called after him, “Be good!” But my heart wasn’t reall
y in it. I knew when Danny was going to be good and when he wasn’t. I just got these motherly feelings.

  I drove carefully. The snow that had looked so fresh and clean yesterday now was tinged with browns and grays, and judging from the stiff wind that continued to shake my car, the slush that coated the road probably would turn to ice by tonight. In spite of the crummy weather, I still felt hopeful. I loved house-hunting. Real estate made me feel as feverish as a young girl longing to fall in love. Every property was a blind date. Every house could be The One.

  Cynthia had faxed me very precise directions to the house, which wasn’t all that far from where we lived. After I drove the ten miles toward home, I turned onto a hilly, bumpy country road called Darling Lane. Rough-hewn wooden fences—like the kind found at Girl Scout camps—separated the road from the forest. The trees—pines and bare maples and slender white-barked birch—made me feel like I was going back in time to Robert Frost country, or at least to an era earlier in my own life when I knew every line of the poem that ended and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

  The houses all were hidden behind the trees. I almost missed the number on the country mailbox: 27 Darling Lane. The paved driveway sloped downward for about one hundred yards. At the bottom, surrounded by pine trees, stood a weathered white saltbox that looked exactly like the kind of house that Danny would draw with his crayons: a solid rectangle on the bottom and a sloping noncongruent quadrilateral on top.

  My heart sank. Surely I had the wrong address. Why in the world had Cynthia thought that Ebb and I—who had been looking mostly at modern homes—would be interested in a house that seemed built for Paul Revere? Maybe Ebb would be willing to constitute his way toward a more imperfect union in this uptight saltbox (I could just see him marching around in a tricorn hat, pontificating about the rights of man while dropping his coat and boots and briefcase anywhere he damned please, which proved he did not give two straws about the rights of women). But how could I live in such a straitjacket of a house? There wasn’t anything playful or creative about it!

  I sat in my car and stared—and stared—at this moral manse. Within a minute, I saw some of its appeal. Although it looked like it had been hammered together by a bunch of dour, sexless Pilgrims, it had one decidedly seductive feminine touch: a sea-green front door that called out to me like a siren.

  Cynthia had told me the owners wouldn’t be at home. I cut the engine and got out of the car. The wind was so stiff, my teeth felt cold. I crunched across the snowy driveway to the front walk and stared at the sea-green door as if I were looking into my future. I saw myself standing in the front hall—the model corporate wife—shaking the hands of a long line of look-alike executives (and their dull-as-dishwater wives), repeating like some talking doll, Hello, I’m Lisa Strauss and I’ll be your hostess for the evening. I saw myself sitting, pen and paper in hand, in front of one of the upstairs windows, staring out at the winter landscape for the perfect word I could not find inside myself. I saw myself leaning over the bathroom counter—not so Ebb could give me a good fuck from behind, but so he could sink a hypodermic needle full of ineffective hormones into my flabby, dimpled butt.

  Maybe it was just the wind, or the exhaustion I always felt when I overused my imagination. But tears suddenly stung my eyes, and as I blinked, the sea-green door seemed to shift. Behind that door lay too many SB parties, too many days of sweating over the fifty-sixth draft, and probably vial upon vial of fertility drugs that cost eighty disappointing dollars a pop.

  Why should I let this be my life? I thought. I don’t want to be your hostess for the evening. I don’t want to spend hours every day searching for the right word. I don’t want to live in a house big enough to accommodate half a dozen kids when I can’t even conceive another or even take good care of the one I already have.

  “I don’t want to be me!” I said aloud. “And I don’t want to be a mother and sometimes I don’t even want to be married!”

  When nothing but the wind answered—and a swirl of leaves blew across the white lawn—I puckered up my lips and made a most immature but highly gratifying fart sound. Phfft to your whining! I told myself. You’re hardly ever “you” anyway, since most of the time you’re pretending you’re someone else. So why does it even matter where you live, since you’re so busy mucking around in that muddy place you call your imagination?

  As I stood before that solid white house (which looked as unforgiving as the stone-cold tablets that held the Ten Commandments), I felt the sea-green door pulling me forward. I took a step toward the porch, then another. The shoveled walk was lined with snow-covered goose-egg-shaped stones. I reached down and brushed the snow off one of the goose eggs. After feeling the smooth, taupe stone—taut as a pregnant woman’s belly—I remembered some advice my mother and aunts used to dole out to new brides embarking on their honeymoons: “If you want a boy, put a knife beneath the mattress; if you want a girl, then put an egg beneath the bed.”

  After looking behind to make sure Cynthia and Ebb weren’t coming down the driveway, I put the goose egg in the pocket of my coat. Normally I wasn’t very superstitious. But normally I wasn’t desperate. I told myself it couldn’t hurt to place the stone beneath our mattress.

  The sun—which was pretty dim to begin with—disappeared behind a cloud. I shivered, then went back to my Toyota, turned on the engine, and flipped the heat to its highest setting. The car vibrated in the cold. I looked over at the house.

  “My house,” I whispered aloud, just to see if it sounded okay. It didn’t have a bad ring to it, so I said it again.

  My house. Welcome to my house. My house has a gorgeous sea-green door (that needs to be repainted every spring). My house has a wide, welcoming stone hearth (that blows ashes all over the place). My house has walk-in closets so deep (that I can’t find whatever I’m looking for). My house has four top-of-the-line Toto toilets (that overflow on a regular basis). My house has eight twenty-four-paned windows on the first floor, ten on the second, and four dormers winking up out of the roof (as if to pose the unfinished question: How many gallons of Windex would it take . . . ?).

  I gulped. But it was too late. Already I had fallen in love with the kind of house any woman with more than a shriveled pea for a brain would call a Wifebreaker.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EBEN

  After Josh threw me a kiss meant for Cynthia’s fair lips, I got back into my car, ran a few errands, and then thought about “He Left His Heart at the Office” all the way home. I did like Lisa’s piece. But. Still. Lisa had such an aggressive imagination. Why couldn’t she write something bland? brief? soothing? like haiku? or Hallmark greeting cards? Why did she think people’s private lives were the only subjects suitable for the printed page?

  I pulled into our driveway and touched the remote control on my visor. The fickle garage door creaked open—revealing the garbage cans I earlier had failed to take down to the curb. I pulled my Audi into the garage. The phone was chirping inside the house. I unlocked the door leading to the hallway, rounded the corner, and lunged for the cordless phone in the kitchen.

  “Heads up!” commanded Mrs. Joan Order. “I’m bringing someone to see your place sometime before dinner.”

  “But our place is a mess.”

  “Tidy up.”

  “My wife’s not here.”

  Mrs. Order crisply clicked her tongue.

  “I mean, I’m short on time,” I said.

  “Well . . .” Mrs. Order said. “You’re lucky. This is a bachelor, on a weekend house-hunting blitz. He probably won’t notice.”

  I looked around the kitchen at the spotted floor, the stained counters, and the fingerprint smudges on the dining-room archway. Even I noticed what an extreme state of chaos our house was in—so there was little hope this bachelor would be oblivious. Nevertheless, I told Mrs. Order to bring the guy over.

  I knew there was something I needed to do besides grab a quick lunch before Cynthia arrived—but I coul
dn’t recall what it was. I pulled out a box of Ritz crackers and a jar of peanut butter from the cabinet. After I ate six crackers slathered with peanut butter, I retired to the half-bathroom. With the extra toothbrush I kept stored in the vanity drawer, I brushed my teeth so hard the bottom gums started bleeding.

  While I was pulling a disturbing number of black—and gray—hairs out of my comb, I heard the long, low squeal of brakes and the clatter of cans and glass carelessly being tossed into a truck. I dashed for the garage and rolled two Roughneck trash cans (one in each desperate hand) down the driveway, but the garbage truck already was rumbling far away down the street.

  Just then Cynthia Farquhar pulled up, chipper and blond and bright, in her gleaming black Lexus. She lowered her power window and her breath came out in angelic white puffs. “Sorry I’m a little early.”

  I gestured at the obviously full trash cans. “I’m sorry I’m late.” I wheeled the trash cans up the driveway and into the garage, trying not to shiver from the cold. “I need to get my coat and gloves,” I called out to her. “Do you want to come in?”

  When Cynthia hesitated, I was reminded of something Lisa once told me: “Every once in a while, Cynthia gets creeped out going into houses all by herself with a man.”

  “If she’s with a man,” I said, “then she’s not by herself.”

  “A dangerous man! You know the kind, Ebb, even if you aren’t that kind yourself.”

  I felt like pointing to the picture of the friendly dog hanging in the window and informing Cynthia: Ours is a McGruff House! Instead, I said, “Give me a moment to lock up and I’ll be right out.”

  It felt odd to sit in the passenger seat. I tried to concentrate on buckling up, but I found myself sneaking—out of the corner of my glasses—brief glimpses at Cynthia. No doubt about it, Cynthia Farquhar put herself together well. In the open collar of her tan trench coat, she wore a red and green scarf that reminded me of a stuffed Spanish olive. She wore rough-hewn ruby earrings that resembled the cherry pits my sister and I used to spit across the picnic table (taunting each other with these moronic insults: “You’re such a boy!” “Well, you’re such a girl!”). I don’t know why I always thought of Cynthia in culinary terms. Lisa had informed me that Cynthia didn’t even know how to boil a hot dog, never mind fix up (with extra brown sugar and bacon) a can of B&M baked beans. Yet ever since Danny had announced, “That lady smells nice—like a bakery,” Cynthia had seemed especially gustatory to me. Like Danny, I didn’t mind a whiff of Cynthia. She gave off the comforting fragrance of vanilla or cloves or gingerbread, as if she would taste delicious if you dared to take a bite.