Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  “You didn’t say a comma!” I blurted out.

  “A comma?” Ebb asked. “A comma! What are you talking about, Lisar?”

  I was about to garble out Everything! And nothing! when Danny pushed past Ebb into the bathroom and positioned himself between us, his eyes darting back and forth.

  “Mommy,” he said. “Daddy. Remember: When you . . . I feel . . .” Then he burst into tears. “Stop fighting! Stop fighting or I’ll put you both in time-out!”

  Okay. So now Ebb and I knew for certain we were rotten parents—because our own kid had to put us into two separate corners for misbehaving. And now we also knew we never deserved to be parents in the first place—because we had driven our only child to burst into tears and ask us in a pitifully small voice, “Are you guys getting a divorce?”

  I leaned back against the bathtub. Ebb leaned in the doorway, put his hands in his pockets, and did the very thing that drove me crazy whenever he grew embarrassed or ashamed or uncomfortable: He jingled his keys just like a nervous jailer. I looked at him and he looked at me. And maybe you know how that goes—when you sense the emotional equivalent of a runaway truck coming at you, and see not the life that you’ve actually lived flash before you, but the one you might have to suffer through if only you don’t slam down fast enough on the brakes?

  I saw how easily Ebb—who had become an expert packer during his road-warrior days—could put together a suitcase full of clothes and snap the locks. I also saw how tempted I would be to screech, “Unpack that suitcase, my fine friend, because I am the one who is doing the walking!” Then I would storm downstairs (without taking even a single pair of sweat pants or a stitch of underwear, secretly thrilled to shred all my Fat Clothes forever). As I slammed the front door behind me and backed my car out of the driveway—sticking out my tongue at the McGruff dog in the dining-room window—I would say, “Ha! Ebb’ll be sorry he criticized me for leaving the cordless phone off the hook now! Ha! Ebb’ll be sorry he got pissed when I ran out of time and didn’t bring his car into Midas. Just wait until he comes home and finds this house all dark tomorrow. That’ll run his batteries down. That’ll fix his muffler.” Then I drove all the way down to the main road before I thought, Hey, wait a second—I forgot to take my sole hard copy of I’m Sorry This Is My Life. Better turn around now, before Ebb sets the manuscript on fire and then takes an ax to my computer.

  In this fruitcake fantasy of separation and divorce, Danny was nowhere in sight. He wasn’t sitting on the living-room carpet humming “Home on the Range” while he put together a Lincoln Log cabin, he wasn’t in the kitchen asking me for the fourth time in an hour, “Isn’t dinner ready yet? I’m really hungry,” and he wasn’t buttoning his pajama tops (crookedly) while telling me, “But I don’t want to go to sleep now. Daddy isn’t even home yet.” In the dark of night, he wasn’t standing in our bedroom doorway demanding to know exactly what we were doing; in the light of morning, he wasn’t squirming like some goofy, giggly worm between us in bed.

  Oh, that Danny! I’d always known that he would function as a very sticky piece of double-sided tape between Ebb and me (but also, sometimes, as a wedge). And as I watched him put his hands up to his face and cry, I realized there was a reason why I’d had trouble just an hour before, distinguishing the two boys who sat despondently on the bench at Montessori House, and it had nothing to do with their identical ski jackets. I’d known since day one how little it would take for me and Ebb to do something stupid and turn our kid into yet another Broken-Home Zachary. I remembered how low I had felt when I had attended Danny’s Montessori holiday party with just the video camera by my side and how pissed I had gotten at Ebb because he hadn’t accompanied me. I also remembered how strongly I had berated myself for all my bad marital behavior as I had settled my too-wide butt on the tiny Montessori House chair. Lisa, I had lectured myself, you and Ebb need to stop this senseless quarreling, otherwise Danny is going to sulk onto the stage for his junior high school band concert and not know which side of the auditorium to look out upon—because his father is sitting solo to the right and his mother is sitting solo to the left.

  I had promised myself that night—and many subsequent nights—that I would clean up my act and become a good wife and mother. But my intentions, once again, had gone for naught. Danny sobbed and kept on sobbing, and neither Ebb nor I made a move to comfort him, as if we both needed a strong reminder of just how bad things had gotten in our dear little family—and how much worse they could get.

  Finally I swallowed back my own urge to bawl like a baby and said, “Oh, honey, please stop crying.”

  I tore off some toilet paper and held it out to Danny at the same time Ebb dug into his pocket and offered Danny his handkerchief.

  Danny looked from the toilet paper to the handkerchief. “Which one should I take?”

  “Both,” Ebb said. Then since Danny hadn’t quite mastered the art of blowing his own nose, Ebb sighed, leaned forward, plucked the toilet paper from my hand, and gently clamped both the paper and the handkerchief over Danny’s nostrils. “Blow,” he told him. “Come on. Harder. All the way out. That’s a boy. Okay. You okay now?”

  Danny nodded.

  Ebb tossed both the toilet paper and the handkerchief onto the counter. “You’ve got to stop crying like this, Danny.”

  “Why?” Danny asked.

  “Because you are breaking Mommy and Daddy’s hearts,” I said.

  “And because I’ve already told you,” Ebb added, “that Mommy and Daddy would never get a divorce.”

  “But you never told me why,” Danny said.

  “I very clearly told you why,” Ebb said with this pained look on his face that seemed to ask, Why doesn’t anyone around here ever listen to me when I use the word love?

  “ ’Cuz why?” Danny demanded.

  “ ’Cuz—“ Ebb and I said at the same time. But there we parted ways. Ebb said, “ ’Cuz we’re getting a new house” while I said, “ ’Cuz we’re getting you a collie.”

  Danny grabbed on to the counter and immediately began to do exactly what I had told him not to do a thousand times before—jump up and down and put so much pressure on the lip of the sink that I was afraid the whole basin would crash into the vanity.

  As Danny joyfully sang, “A collie, a collie—a collie collie collie!” I looked up at Ebb. “A house!” I said. “What were you up to today?”

  “Oh,” Ebb said. “I was feeling so full of myself that I hadn’t crashed on that plane—”

  I gasped. “That plane on the news was your plane?”

  “—that I got into a little mischief. With Cynthia. Behind your back.”

  I reached out and yanked on Danny’s shirt. “Stop jumping on that sink! Oh, thank God you’re not dead, Ebb—”

  “My feelings exactly.”

  “—because who could stand being a single parent for even one minute with a kid like this? Stop that jumping, Danny! Make him stop, please, Ebb—and then tell me all about the plane later—but first tell me everything that happened with Cynthia. Did you make an offer?”

  Ebb—his hands full of a very squirmy Danny—nodded.

  “Was it accepted?”

  Ebb set Danny down away from the sink and nodded again.

  “How much?”

  Ebb had made too high of an offer. I could tell, because he said, “Let’s just say that your friend Cynthia stands to make a very tidy profit.”

  “But, Ebb,” I said, “now you’ll never be able to retire early.”

  “So I’ll retire later.”

  “And now I’ll really have to change the ending of my novel,” I said. “Because we have to buy serious furniture.”

  “Cheer up,” Ebb said. “We’ll probably kill each other in the process of picking it out.”

  Danny tugged on Ebb’s belt—yet another thing he had been told not to do a thousand times. “When are we moving? When can I get my collie dog?”

  I nudged his leg with my foot. “First you have to
get your adenoids out.”

  “But I’m scared to go into the hospital,” Danny said.

  “You heard Mommy,” Ebb said. “No adenoidectomy, no collie.”

  Danny hung his head. Then he wiped his nose with the back of his hand and said, “Okay.”

  “Now, remember,” I told Danny. “You have to really care for a dog.”

  “I will, Mommy. I’ll really love it!”

  “Mommy didn’t say love,” Ebb said. “She said feed.”

  “I will,” Danny said.

  “And brush,” Ebb said.

  “I will.”

  “And pick up its business from the backyard,” Ebb said.

  “Zachary trained his cat,” Danny said, “to do his business in the toilet.”

  “I have no intention of sharing the bathroom with Lassie,” I said.

  “I sort of want a laddie dog,” Danny said. “But I don’t know—which should I get, Daddy, a lassie or a laddie?”

  My stomach churned. I could see it now. We would take Danny to the dog breeder and he would get so enamored of the puppies that we would end up bringing home not one but two of those bad-breathed creatures—who would yip and yap and pee and poop and shed allergy-inducing fur all over our new house. Our house. We had a home! The kind of home I actually would be eager to keep clean and tidy. But how would I ever keep the schmutz under control with two dogs and a boy and a man trooping through?

  As Ebb continued to lecture Danny on the responsibilities of dog ownership—I swear he made caring for a dog sound even more daunting than the marriage vows from the Book of Common Prayer—I groaned. I held out my hand in such a way that seemed to beg, Get me off this filthy bathroom floor right now.

  “One of you two,” I said, “please help me to bed.”

  Ebb and Danny rushed forward to help me off the floor. I pressed my lips closed so neither one of them could get a whiff of my malodorous breath. Escorted on both sides—Ebb with his arm around me, Danny clutching my elbow—I hobbled back into the bedroom. It wasn’t every day of the week that two such handsome guys tucked me into bed. And covered me with blankets. And brought me a cold washcloth to place on my burning forehead. And served me a much-needed peppermint Altoid and a Dixie cup full of tepid tap water.

  “Hey,” I said weakly, “this attention isn’t half bad. Maybe I should get sick more often.”

  “Don’t,” Danny said. “Daddy can’t ever find the Nestlé Quik.” He climbed on the bed and started to crawl beneath the covers. Then he stopped. “Can I stay here, Daddy?”

  Ebb sighed. “The more, the merrier.”

  “I get lonely all by myself sometimes,” Danny said as he cuddled up next to me. “Eew. Mommy. That Altoid stinks. And what’s with that brown stuff between your teeth?”

  I hastily slipped a fingernail between my canine and incisor and scraped out the last of the sushi. Then I opened my mouth wide and deliberately breathed straight at Danny’s nose (prompting more eews) before I gave his cowlick a big Altoid-ridden kiss.

  Ebb took off his jacket and started to drape it over the enormous mound of dirty laundry piled on his chair, then changed his mind and reached into the closet for a hanger.

  “Lisar,” he said. “I really don’t ask for much. Do I?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “So in our next house,” he said, “we are hiring a cleaning lady. I—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” I said. “You insist.”

  Ebb sighed. He took off his tie, stepped out of his shoes, and exchanged his wool trousers for his most wrinkled pair of chinos. Dressed in his starched shirt from the waist up and his sloppy Dockers from the waist down, he pulled back the blankets, letting in a blast of cold air, before he climbed next to us in bed.

  “Brrr!” I said.

  “Chilly!” Danny said.

  Ebb turned off the lamp so we lay in the almost-dark, our arms around each other with Danny (breathing his audible, adenoidal breaths) firmly locked in the middle.

  After a while, Ebb said, “Mommy and I used to hug you just like this when you were a baby, Danny.”

  “Mommy and me used to hug like this,” Danny said, “when you went out of town, Daddy. On your business trips.”

  I nudged Danny. But the kid just couldn’t take a hint.

  “Mommy used to make popcorn,” Danny said. “And say ‘Let’s have a party!’ and then she would let me cuddle in here and tell me stories until I fell asleep.”

  “We missed you,” I assured Ebb.

  “Obviously,” Ebb said.

  “The stories were all about you,” Danny said.

  “I’m flattered,” Ebb said. “That I was the object of so much attention.”

  “My favorite story about you was—ow, stop pinching me, Mommy!”

  “I’m not pinching,” I lied.

  “—the one about the mattress.”

  “Mattress?” Ebb asked. “I don’t remember being involved in any story about a mattress.”

  “Tell it, Mommy.”

  Oh, how I longed to excuse myself from this storytelling session. But since I knew Ebb soon would encounter this tale—or rather, a truncated version of it—in I’m Sorry This Is My Life, I said, “Once upon a time—right before Danny was born—you and I went shopping for a mattress, Ebb.”

  “Ah,” Ebb said. “Yes. This is coming back to me now.”

  “I was the size of a sperm whale,” I said. “And you were jet-lagged. And so we both had trouble getting up and down off all those beds. Finally we found one we both liked and I went off to find the salesman. But when I came back from across the showroom and said, ‘I’ll take this one’—”

  “The salesman pointed to you snoring on the bed,” Danny interrupted, “and asked Mommy, ‘The man or the mattress?’ And Mommy said, ‘The mattress. I’ve never seen this character before in my life.’ ” Danny giggled. “Isn’t that funny, Daddy?”

  “Hysterical,” Ebb said. “Especially since a minute later, Mommy poked me in the arm and hissed, ‘Wake up! I need your American Express!’ ”

  “She never told me that,” Danny said. “Hey, stop kicking me, Mommy. Stop tickling me, Mommy—”

  “I’m not kicking,” I lied. “I’m not tickling.”

  “Ouch! Ooh! Tell another story, Mommy. Or you tell one, Daddy. Tell about how I got born.”

  Ebb cleared his throat. I just knew he was going to say something ridiculous, like When a man and a woman love each other, they feel compelled to express that love through a physical action called sexual intercourse. . . .

  So I said, “Start with the crackers.”

  “Crackers?” Ebb asked. “Oh. Right. Okay. You were a bit reluctant to join the world, Danny.”

  “I was?”

  “You didn’t want to come out of Mommy when your time came. So three nights after you were supposed to be born, Mommy sat down at the dining-room table and said, ‘I’m going to sit here and eat every single one of these—’ ” Ebb squeezed my hand. “What kind of crackers were you eating that night, Lisar?”

  “Chicken in a Biskit,” I said.

  “Mommy said, ‘I am going to sit here and eat every single one of these Chicken in a Biskit crackers until I poop this baby right out.’ ”

  “And then I came out,” Danny said.

  I rapped Danny on the elbow. “Not so fast,” I said. “You’re skipping over fourteen hours worth of suffering and pain.”

  “Fourteen hours,” Danny said. “What’d you do for fourteen hours, Daddy?”

  “Cracked his knuckles,” I said.

  “I was nervous,” Ebb said.

  “And chewed on my ice chips. And said gentlemanly things like”—I lowered my voice in imitation of Ebb—” ‘You realize, Lisar, that I would take your place if I could.’ ”

  “What did you say to that, Mommy?” Danny asked.

  “I couldn’t say anything,” I said. “I was too busy screaming.”

  This wasn’t the total truth. I had screamed. A lot
. (Why not? It wasn’t a tea party.) But I also had said to Ebb, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” And Ebb had said, “You can, you can. You have to. You will. Come on, Lisar. One more push. I know you can do it. Get it out. Do whatever it takes.”

  I held my hand against my stomach. “Oooh. It hurts just thinking about it.”

  “I thought women were supposed to forget the pain,” Ebb said.

  “Dream on,” I said. “It felt like someone took a chain saw to my stomach.”

  Ebb crinkled up his face. “You’re exaggerating. You’re exaggerating, right?”

  “I swear,” I said. “I felt like I was . . . a . . . a . . . a rusty lock! and someone was trying to crack me open with the wrong key! So I screamed. And so I pushed. And then”—I nudged Danny—“you finally popped out like a jack-in-the-box, and the doctor said, ‘We have here a very handsome boy!’ ”

  Danny beamed with delight. “And then what happened?”

  “You know what,” I said. “Because Daddy turned on the video camera.”

  Ebb—like me—was no great photographer. But every year on Danny’s birthday we popped this well-worn video into the VCR and watched the whole thing unfold all over again. Even though I hadn’t wanted a camera in the delivery room, Ebb had insisted (“You’ll be thankful later on, Lisar”) and I finally had relented (but only after commanding him, “Absolutely NO crotch shots”).

  I was glad, now, that Ebb had captured the aftermath of Danny’s birth on videotape. Although I had promised myself that I would remember every last detail of this gruesome yet thrilling experience, I knew I would forget a few things, and I thought it might be useful to have a record of how it really, really happened.

  But then just the opposite occurred. Whenever I watched the tape, I could not believe I was looking at myself. I thought: That’s me? But look at me. Look at me there, I look so beside myself. . . . So young, so stupid, so blissfully ignorant that this might be my only shot at ever having a kid.

  The video started solely with sound: the whir of a camera. The picture remained dark. Then Ebb’s voice—happier than I had ever heard him in my life—said, “Wait. Wait. Oh fuck, the camera’s not working.”