The following is a brief summary of my ordinary day after thirteen years of marriage. Get up at six-thirty a.m., which is really nine-thirty a.m. my time because I was in New York last month, so I’m already running three hours behind. Down a double espresso so I can appear sentient and not frighten our child as I attempt to drag him out of bed. I lovingly make him pancakes, but “Mom, these pancakes taste too eggy” is my reward, and because I feel guilty that I am traveling so much, I remake pancakes from scratch all the while reminding kid that children are starving down the street in East Los Angeles. Then I drive the carpool, depositing the children at school, and then head across town to have night guard adjusted. Doctor tells me my jaw clenching at night is causing my neck pain, and I should “relax more.” I pencil in “relax more” in my “pending” list and note that I’d better get another job soon or I won’t even be able to afford a new night guard to grind through as I hit the road for two auditions while applying makeup and shoving food in my mouth at the same time.
At the first interview, the director mistakenly thinks I am Annabeth Gish, a perfectly lovely actress who is just not me. He insists on talking about “we”—she and he worked together—and he simply will not accept that I’m not Annabeth Gish and becomes irate when I decline to discuss it. I leave feeling vaguely confused—am I her? I might be. At the second audition I see every actress who has ever, and I mean ever, starred in a sitcom, including people as varied as Bonnie Franklin, from One Day at a Time; Katey Sagal, from Married with Children; and Mel Harris, from Thirtysomething, a show about a kind of ennui that at the time it was on I didn’t recognize as my life. Because forty is the new thirty, I suppose it makes sense that at fortysomething I would now understand Thirtysomething. Of course, actress years are like dog years, only shorter, so at fortysomething in show business I’m like eighty-something and virtually unemployable. I wait for an hour to read, miss my yoga class, add “do yoga” to my “pending” list for next week, then swing over to get a Brazilian, because it’s date night and I want to make an effort for Jeff.
As I undress at Faces, which is an ironic name for a salon that mostly attends to crotches, my Eastern European waxer, Mischa, is admonishing me for missing appointments, and I’m too embarrassed to explain that since my original waxer, Sasha, died of breast cancer last year, it’s been too depressing to come in for a wax. But I know they need the business so I buy a series of treatments that I’m sure I’ll never have time to come in for, and while she’s buried in my now hairless nether region, I’m on the phone with other moms coordinating summer camp schedules when a call comes in. It’s Jeff, wondering if he was supposed to pick up Ezra or if I was on my way? I remind him that I have my legs over my head right now, and he tells me not to worry, he’ll be happy to pick up the kid because he’s so looking forward to going down on me tonight. But that call is interrupted by a message from the contractor confirming that the tiles have come in for the upstairs bathroom renovation. I feel strangely turned on by the idea of new shower tiles. Meanwhile, a text message appears on my BlackBerry from the babysitter, whose car has broken down and she can’t make it tonight. I call and cancel plans with Jeff, who’s so mad I promise him we’ll grab some time later tonight. While I drive home, our stockbroker calls to explain that although our pension plans are worth less than when we initially invested with him, they were actually worth more for a two-year period six years ago and we’ve only lost money that was profit anyway and so even though I am a moron at all things financial, even I can deduce that by the time Jeff and I will be cashing in these accounts, we’ll be lucky to have enough to afford our membership dues in AARP with the proceeds. The fact that I thought of myself and AARP together sends me into an instant spiral of anxiety. How did I get so fucking old! There must be some mistake! The years 1985–88 were such a waste—I want those years back! I want back all the hours I got sucked into watching Rock of Love! The time I’ve spent deleting e-mailed invitations to join Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter? I want that back too! I want every minute I’ve spent on hold with customer service centers returned to me. I’m so old I need every available minute to make money for when I’m even older! By now I have a big fat TMJ headache as I inch my way home through the Los Angeles traffic.
Get home, feed kid, struggle through fifth-grade math, beg him to commence bedtime routine. We read, he wants Dad, he wants me, Dad, me, Dad, then says he wants some Mom time; and I know that he knows that I know that the Mom years will soon be coming to an end, so I can’t refuse and I stay with him until he falls asleep, grab a quick shower, and then head to my office to pay our medical bills. Call downstairs to tell Jeff to turn off ESPN and meet me upstairs soon because I’ll be ready for some “action” right after I figure out our health plan’s newly required co-payment policy. I’m halfway through the pile when Jeff races upstairs to check on my progress and gives me the once-over. “Aren’t you going to put a cute outfit on?” Jeff says with a groan. “I’m sorry. I meant to,” is all I can manage to say, and the truth is I really did intend to wear thigh-high stockings, heels, and a skirt for Jeff, but after I showered I didn’t have the energy to get dressed up for him. So I end up right back in my ratty sweat pants and T-shirt just like every other night since our kid was born. He sees me covered in insurance claim statements and hisses, “Aren’t you ready yet?” By now it’s almost eleven p.m., which is really two a.m. my time, so I can barely hold my head up as I reply that we had better start to make more money or one day we’ll be forced to figure out the new Medicare drug benefit and then we’ll really be screwed! He takes this as an opportunity to remind me that talking about money before sex is a turnoff. I remind him that talking about money is only a turnoff if you’re talking about not having money; talking about money before sex when you have money is actually a turn-on.
By now my neck really hurts, so when we finally make it into the bedroom, Jeff starts to massage the place that most directly connects to my vagina, which these days, is my head. It’s so relaxing that I start to fall asleep so I ask Jeff if a hand job is OK, but no, he wants it all. To liven things up, Jeff suggests I talk to him. I begin a rapturous description of how nice the new bathroom cabinets are going to be, but he says that’s not the kind of talk he meant. I know it’s not, and I can’t believe I’m the kind of person who wants to talk about a bathroom renovation—when did I become so bourgeois? It’s just that I’m so tired … So I ask, “Do you mind if lie down while we do it?” Yes, here comes the lie-backer: as I lie there it occurs to me that this will be the only time we’ll have a chance to talk about the camp Ezra should attend this summer because the forms are due tomorrow. Jeff would like to switch the topic and get back to the pussy, but when did it become “the pussy”? I say, “I know California is a community property state, but it’s still my pussy!” But Jeff has made the lie-backer, for its horrible nomenclature, a veritable orgasmatron. He has special talents—it works every time, and I achieve orgasm as we are in the middle of discussing the registration process. I’ve got just enough energy to fit in forty-five seconds of snuggling before we each assume our sleeping positions on our designated sides of the bed and then hear the pitter-patter of little footsteps: Ezra slides in bed between us, Stinky jumps on top of me, and we all fall asleep. Hot!
Psychologists predict gay spouses will experience happier unions. Gay and lesbian couples tend to assign household labor more fairly and resolve conflict more constructively.
less is more
People spend more time with their kids now than they used to. Even though both are working more hours, moms spent 20 percent more time in 2000 than they did in 1965; for married dads the number has doubled. Parents are more kidcentric now. But is that a good thing? The Family and Work Institute, which studies problems in contemporary working families, has found that most children don’t want to spend as much time with their parents as parents assume; they just want their parents to be more relaxed during the time they spend together.
family v
alues, Washington style
Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on the sanctity of marriage and family values, then divorced his second wife after acknowledging his relationship with his current wife, a former congressional aide more than twenty years younger than he is and with whom he was having a clandestine relationship during the Monica Lewinsky hearings. Newt “Family Values” Gingrich announced his plans to divorce his first wife while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.
the worst is yet to come
Participants in a University of Michigan study were asked how strongly they responded to questions such as “My spouse gets on my nerves.” In every age group, people were more annoyed with spouses than with friends and family and the annoyance only increased the longer they were married.
9
• • • •
Slouching Toward Cooperstown
“Even his griefs are a joy long after to one who remembers all that he wrought and endured.”
—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
There is a pervasive cliché that men are gonzo over sports and the women they are married to can’t understand it.
But clichés are often true for a lot of people a lot of the time. That’s how they became clichés in the first place. For instance, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, or between a rock and a hard place. When it comes to sports, our son is the apple, and Jeff’s fanaticism for sports continually puts our marriage between the rock and the hard place.
She Says
I hate to make it sound like our house resembles those ubiquitous commercials where a husband and his pals are camped out in the living room and the pastel-hued twinsetted wife is doing one of two things: shaking her head with a mixture of irritation and love as she places bowls of starchy foodstuff in front of their large bellies or shaking her head with a mixture of irritation and love as she’s shoving her coat on so she can make her escape to the mall. It doesn’t. Except for the Super Bowl or the World Series, rarely do my husband’s buddies come over to sit through ESPN News, ESPN Highlights, ESPN Lowlights, ESPN Minutiae, or the myriad other ways the all-sports network has contrived to fill air space twenty-four hours a day. No, most days, it’s just Jeff camped out with his hummus and avocado wrap, yelling at our television while I walk by seething in genuine disgust at what appears to be a huge time suck and is setting a bad example for our kid, when I would prefer to see him sitting in front of his computer Googling old girlfriends so at least he’d have the appearance of doing something productive. I thought I was marrying a comedy writer; I had no idea that Jeff had ever harbored hoop dreams, Heisman delusions, or boys-of-summer fantasies. While we were dating, I had observed him watching games on TV, but somehow the extent of his devotion just didn’t register. When I offhandedly mentioned it to him, he allowed that he tried not to miss the play-offs. I had no idea he meant the play-offs of every single sport. I had no idea that every single sport even had a play-off. If the javelin throw had play-offs, he’d watch them. I suspect that from the moment our son was conceived, Jeff was hatching a plan. Like the husband in Rosemary’s Baby who just couldn’t wait to deliver their child to the neighboring Satanists, my spouse, unbeknownst to me, was plotting to pimp our kid to the neighborhood athletic associations.
It’s not like I’m anti-sports; everyone in Miami Beach played tennis when I was growing up. I’ve watched my share of Super Bowls and I’ve got a fairly reliable outside shot in H-O-R-S-E, but I didn’t grow up playing team sports so I was entirely unprepared for Jeff’s machinations. It started innocently enough: I had been genuinely enjoying myself, having a great if not exhausting time indulging our munchkin in his desire to toss or kick a ball from sunrise to sunset, which had the added bonus of serving as my personal fitness regimen. In a town where people regularly throw fistfuls of cash at strangers to nag them into shape, I had my own trainer, who employed one of the most sophisticated motivational techniques known to our species: working-mother guilt.* So imagine my surprise when Ezra and I were playing in the backyard and Jeff barked out this pronouncement: “If our son wants to be a professional baseball player, you’re not stopping him.” Huh? The kid was two years old. But that was the moment my spouse chose to inform me, in an excited, almost anguished tone of voice, that he himself might have had a career in professional sports had his family been more encouraging, and now I might be denying his son the same opportunity and he was not going to stand for it. I was stunned.
Some kind of early childhood imprinting has left my husband with the impression that nothing could be better than a career in sports. Jeff has formed this opinion despite the fact that aside from a few brief encounters at parties with that human phenomenon known as Lance Armstrong, we don’t actually know any professional athletes who could give us a realistic depiction of the profession. That’s like having an audience with the pope and concluding that joining the clergy affords one a glamorous lifestyle. Try telling that to Coach Kahn.
There’s my husband, Jeff, and then there’s his alter ego, Coach Kahn. Jeff has a self-deprecating sense of humor and can experience complete (if fleeting) happiness in the enjoyment of a delicious meal. Coach Kahn, on the other hand, takes things superseriously and the only thing that will satisfy him will be to see the fruit of his loins take his place among the pantheon of greats in Cooperstown. They are exact opposites. Okay, I might be exaggerating a little—Coach Kahn would probably like to get into my pants too.
Mighty Mite Rebels, Orangemen, the Giants, the Orioles, the Yankees, the Rangers, the Red Sox, the White Sox, the Orioles again, the Yankees again, the Titans, the White Sox again, the Purple Yankees, and the Toluca Lake All Stars. In chronological order, those are the teams our child has played on.* The kid is eleven. You don’t join teams until you’re four. You do the math.
I can’t remember the justifications for all the moves; all I know is that like our Russian ancestors who trudged from shtetl to shtetl, Coach Kahn schleps our kid from league to league as if they are escaping a pogrom.
To this day it’s a complete mystery to me how he finds these teams and how many leagues there are in each and every neighborhood. I am loath to make the distinction, but it does seem to be the dads who pass this information around. Do they actually speak of it, or is there something in the male DNA code by which this information is shared? Each organization has its own code of conduct and commissioners, and you have to know the secret handshake or someone who has an in in order to penetrate the labyrinthine system. It’s no secret to anyone with athletically inclined kids that each and every one of these youth teams is something of a personal fiefdom ruled over by a coach whose child, coincidentally, happens to be the star player of the team. Each team has its own hierarchical structure that must never be challenged or your kid will find himself warming the bench all season. Think feudalism meets the Moose Lodge. Coach Kahn quickly adapted to the system and began ingratiating himself with the coaches, offering to run practices and doling out batting tips, because he just loves to pass on his passion for sports to children, and more important, he was determined to secure a good spot for our future Hall of Famer.
The thing was, Ez really seemed to love the game and exhibited remarkable hand-eye coordination, so my husband decided he needed to become the coach of a team too. It was adorable to see the kids on Jeff’s team all suited up at this young age. The only problem was that at seven years old, not all of them had developed the long attention span required for baseball. I don’t always have the attention span required for the game. As an employee of Ted Turner’s, I was once given the honor of being the captain of the Atlanta Braves for a day. After I jokingly suggested that the team play only five innings because I found nine to be a tad repetitive, I think I escaped bodily harm only because earlier that week the Braves’ pitcher John Rocker had made racist remarks* and manager Bobby Cox didn’t want to draw any more negative attention to the team.
Meanwhile, on our field of delusions for men who are living out their childhood drea
ms through their sons, one kid was drawing circles in the dirt, another was counting the clouds overhead, and another was in tears. Often the crying child was our very own offspring. Why? The way Coach K singled him out, you might imagine our tyke was being scouted for the majors right then and there. “Ezra, ready position,” “Ezra, don’t look down,” “Ezra, don’t look up!” “Run hard, Kahn, run hard,” “Head in the game,” “Head in the game!” Head in the game? The kids were hitting a ball off a tee, for God’s sake. It was not an uncommon occurrence for me to show up and inquire how the game was going only to be told, “I don’t know about the team, but your husband’s on fire!” Coach Kahn’s reputation for toughness was sealed when he threatened to bench a player because said cutie had forgotten his team cap. When did “Thou shall not forget your hat” become a commandment! It’s kind of funny when you realize my husband is as passionate about baseball as he is about seeing the end of all organized religion, and yet his adherence to following the rules of the sport has exactly the same kind of rigidity that you see in only one other group in the world: religious fanatics. Fearing that we would have to relocate to a new community and live under assumed names in some sort of Little League protection program, I gently suggested that perhaps he should retire from coaching temporarily as the kids headed to coach pitch.* He agreed to hang up his official coaching hat, but felt they needed to change leagues—again.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 15