You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up
Page 19
She Says
We tested the therapeutic waters together with a matronly and taciturn therapist named Diane. These were expensive exercises in futility during which Diane would nod, I would vent, and Jeff would stew. I would feel much better following Diane’s sessions, but Jeff wanted to throw himself from a window. So we broke up with Diane and rebounded with Glen, who may or may not have been wearing an ill-fitting wig. Jeff and I argued so vehemently about the status of his piece that we couldn’t focus on ourselves, so we dumped Glen. Next, we hooked up with New Age Donna; traditional Charlene; Bonnie, the very Waspy lady whom Jeff scared every time he raised his voice (which was often); a cadre of intensely serious middle-aged men with receding hairlines and soothing voices; my rabbi and spiritual adviser Mel, whom Jeff respects but had vetoed for our wedding and in whose company he could never resist ranting against organized religion even when the subject was division of household chores.
In one of our sessions—I believe it was with Diane, but it could have been Charlene or the very Waspy lady Jeff scared—we were asked to do a marital therapy exercise. I was eager to try it. Jeff considered it a waste of time but agreed because leaving the session early would have meant getting stuck in rush hour traffic. The assignment was titled “The Fondness and Admiration Catalog.” We were told to list the things about our partner that bother and annoy us. Then we were to explain why we justify putting up with them. I believe the object is perspective, assuming that each participant will examine their list and realize how small and petty their concerns are in the face of the deep love and respect they have for their partner, and thus build on the fondness and admiration.
Here is the actual transcript from that session:
JEFF
You’re asking me what bothers me about Annabelle. Seriously? Christ, where do I even start? [He takes a moment to think about it.] OK, it never ceases to boggle my mind how Annabelle opens up boxes of cereal, cookies, bottles of medicine, packages of smoked salmon, and containers of cheese as if she were a feral, starving animal with large claws, huge fangs, no sense of reason, and lacking the ability to use logic or opposable thumbs. I’m pretty positive that most chimps, a majority of orangutans, and even bottle-nosed dolphins would do a much better job of opening things than Annabelle. I am forever having to find new ways of salvaging these shredded boxes and containers with Scotch tape, safety pins, or just abandoning the destroyed packages altogether and emptying the contents into plastic bags, which, by this time, I have to buy in bulk. And then she has the nerve to yell at me because plastic bags are bad for the environment. If they are so bad, maybe she should learn how to open up cardboard!
I am also constantly amazed at Annabelle’s bed-making technique. Annabelle leaves the blankets in the same crumpled jumbled mess from the night before and then casually drapes the bedcover over them. The pillows are then pushed and squeezed under the lumpy covers. It’s not so much making a bed as it is stuffing it like a cannoli.
And how is it okay for her to take all the cups and glasses from the kitchen and leave them in her upstairs office? I’ll be at a loss about where they’ve all disappeared to when I remember how she hoards them, and then I have to go upstairs to retrieve all the coffee-and wine-encrusted cups and glasses.
Even more aggravating is that although she’s completely addicted to coffee and uses the espresso machine sometimes up to five times a day, Annabelle refuses to clean, add water to, or care for it in any way. She treats the machine as if it were her personal little coffee bitch, exploiting and mistreating it until it dies an ugly, dirty, dehydrated death from neglect and abuse. I spend almost half of my morning cleaning the espresso maker of excess grimy coffee grounds, removing the caked-on soy milk, and adding the life-sustaining water until the next time Annabelle tries to kill it. And you should see how she keeps the inside of her car! It’s as if everyone in the city of Los Angeles opened her car doors and emptied everything out of their pockets and threw it in. Riding shotgun in Annabelle’s car is equivalent to sitting in the back of a garbage truck on pickup day. I’m no clean freak by any means, but after driving with Annabelle, I not only need a shower, I also need to be deloused. It’s really very nasty.
ANNABELLE
Jeff doesn’t like my housekeeping habits very much, which is interesting considering that Jeff engages in a mortal struggle with kitchen appliances on a daily basis. Recently, Jeff squared off with our toaster. Ezra and I were happily reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when the tirade began. Was the battle between Lord Voldemort and Harry raging in our very own house? No, it was just Jeff. “Ugh, ow! Shit, fuck! Annabelle, why did you buy this piece-of-crap toaster?” Scuffling and metal-on-metal clanging sounds ensued. In the morning, I inquired, “Who won?” but I needn’t have. When I went downstairs, all traces of that toaster were, as they say, toast. Jeff’s ire is not limited to appliances; it also stretches to answering machines, shoelaces, traffic lights, phone solicitations, and (especially) organized religion.
True, no one will ever bounce a quarter off a bed I’ve made, but Jeff leaves traces of his presence everywhere. Every morning the same sight greets me. Wadded-up damp towels gather in a wet heap that looks as though an old man has curled up by the side of the tub and expired there. In addition, Jeff refuses to adhere to the new regulations of our recycling program. He’s a one-man superfund site. He reacts to my reminders as if I have personally set out to regulate him, not that these are instructions from the City of Los Angeles. Consequently, I spend a great deal of time keeping our reusable resources from sitting in a landfill for the next millennium.
My spouse also doesn’t take into account that I spend much of my day in the car, making it, in effect, my secondary residence, but Jeff has turned our house into the equivalent of my car’s interior. Either Jeff is turning into his dad or his history major’s interest in ancient civilizations seems to have degenerated into a compulsion to create piles. These mounds of detritus act as a Rosetta stone to the life of Jeff Kahn. Receipts, phone numbers, tax-filing information, price tags from new clothes, movie theater stubs can be found in interesting configurations scattered onto every flat surface in the house. This makes living with Jeff both a fire hazard and fantastically entertaining for someone whose hobby is scrapbooking. Sadly, not being crafty in any way at all, I have been reduced to placing smoke detectors all over the house in case any of Jeff’s structures should ignite and reduce our home to a pile of ashes.
JEFF
First of all, 98.9 percent of the time I throw the right trash into the right recycle bin, so why does my accidentally putting one recyclable item into the wrong wastebasket make me, according to Annabelle, the captain of the Exxon Valdez? Let’s talk about how well all of her initiatives have worked out. One year she insisted on fruit-sweetened whole wheat cupcakes for Ezra’s birthday party. Some of the boys threw them on the ground in disgust while others used them as baseballs and batted them against the side of our house. They were so dense, they’re still decomposing in the backyard three years later.
ANNABELLE
I’m glad Jeff mentioned that birthday because Jeff always makes fun of my attempts at organizing structured activities. That particular year, for Ezra’s birthday celebration sleepover, I hired a cousin and her friends to come and set up play stations where they supervised cookie baking, arts and crafts, and soccer. Jeff made fun of this and said that I had overscheduled the boys. So the next year I let Jeff have his way, and we made no plans at all for the annual event. The boys all went outside to play in the backyard. In less than ten minutes, these parochial school boys had transformed into a marauding gang. One boy was tied to a tree, with two or three others taunting him with a big stick, while another band was in the center of the yard jousting with chairs. The only way we were able to reestablish order was to get pizzas and permit the entire bunch of hooligans to throw slices at one another until they exhausted themselves. It was a nightmare. I’m still tired.
JEFF
ANNABELLE
It amuses me that Jeff takes my occupational hazard of talking on the phone as a personal indictment against him, when it sometimes appears as though our entire family schedule revolves around Jeff’s obsession with a particular bodily function. Basically, his day is a continuum of bathroom runs, which makes it impossible to calculate the timing of everyone else’s use of that room. Inevitably, I might amble into said room at the same time that Jeff has headed in armed with the entire newspaper, the new Philip Roth novel, and the Mahabharata. Jeff is convinced that somehow I am conspiring to keep him out just because I also use the bathroom to shower and put on my makeup; however, it would be impossible to plan my visits because he seems to need to go all day long, after which we stage a daily reenactment of the scene from Marathon Man: “Is it safe?”
JEFF
Here’s another thing that drives me nuts: she cannot master any technology invented after 1989. Now, admittedly, I am no techno-wizard at any level, but compared to Annabelle, I’m Steve Fucking Jobs. Annabelle has never figured out how to work the DirecTV, the DVD player, or, of course, the TiVo, all of which our son had mastered by the age of three. This means that after I’ve finished saving the espresso machine from certain death, I segue into my other identity as Annabelle’s techno-slave. I’m up and down the stairs all day long trying to solve the many technical mysteries that never cease to bewilder Annabelle and grind her life to a complete halt. She’ll call me to her office to see what’s wrong with her computer or printer, and a majority of the time I’ll take one look and tell her that because the printer and computer run on electricity, it might work better if she remembered to plug them in. Later at night I have to turn on the TV set for her, remind her how to use the DirecTV remote, and also work the TiVo, a task that Annabelle finds as perplexing and unimaginably complicated as the string theory. If it was left up to her and I didn’t push to upgrade our technology into the twenty-first century, Annabelle would be listening to cassettes on a Sony Walkman, watching VHS tapes, and working on her nine-inch black-and-white laptop with a rolling trackball by gaslight.
ANNABELLE
Jeff is right. I can’t figure out the remotes. They annoy me and I can’t help it; I just don’t feel like learning how to do it because, let’s face it, all of this type of information becomes obsolete the minute you learn it. The small space I have left in my brain is currently occupied by user names, passwords, membership numbers, credit card expiration dates, and e-mail addresses, all of which will have to be updated constantly, leaving no more room for any new information and instructions. I know that once I conquer the TiVo, the new downloadable chip will be ready, and by the time I can figure out how to add music to my iPod, I’ll be downloading songs straight into my all-in-one phone, and if I ever bother to learn how to do that, you can bet that the very next week Apple will invent a way to upload tunes right into my brain.
JEFF
Annabelle will not let me listen to music in my car when I’m driving if it’s any louder than a Jennifer Lopez movie dialogue whisper. I love to listen to music when I drive, but straining to hear lyrics by the Strokes at a volume only a dog can discern is absolutely maddening. This prohibition doesn’t just apply to music loudness, it also goes for controlling car temperature, speed, and when I can or can’t honk the horn. Annabelle is not just my navigation-ally challenged copilot, she’s my passenger-side Mussolini.
ANNABELLE
I might be his passenger-side Mussolini, but he’s a veritable Stalin behind the wheel. He acts as if he’s the dictator of the road with his stream-of-consciousness narration of everyone’s mistakes. Other cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, squirrels, potholes, a stop sign—you name it and Jeff honks at it. The only things that enrage Jeff more than other drivers’ habits are his own errors when he’s playing sports. That’s right, Jeff himself is a bad sport. I signed us up for a weekly family tennis lesson, but every time Jeff missed a shot, he’d curse at himself and throw his racket down in disgust. Both of these expressions of bad sportsmanship were accompanied by loud growling through clenched teeth, which was sometimes sprinkled with expletives. When he played, it sounded like he was on the receiving end of a Civil War-era amputation. His claim that “lessons were ruining his game” was a novel one; meanwhile, our child was privy to all of this behavior. What kind of role model was he being by being such a bad sport?
JEFF
Speaking of bad sports, it really irks me that Annabelle refuses to wear lingerie. Not on Valentine’s Day, my birthday, or even our anniversary. She claims to be just antilingerie. She finds garter belts and thigh-high stockings silly, needlessly provocative, and objectifying, three things I hold very dear to my heart. Yet I doth think the lady protests too much because there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. I have personally seen dozens of photos of Annabelle wearing very sexy lingerie all through the 1980s and early 1990s. She insists she never wore it to be sexy for a guy, but as a sort of neo-postmodern-feminist, mini-Madonna fashion statement. “Just for herself.” Well, I am sorry, but I don’t buy it. I mean, even Annabelle will freely admit that the period from the 1980s to the early 1990s was the prime of her sluttiest years. Those fortunate boyfriends and suitors got the emotionally desperate, nearly nympho lingerie-adorned gamine that I somehow completely managed to miss by marrying her.
ANNABELLE
Jeff would like me to wear sexy lingerie. I get it! Let me state for the record that I have never been a lingerie girl. Jeff thinks I am making up the fact that I was wearing these items in public as a political statement. He forgets that I am not of the current generation of postfeminists who feel perfectly comfortable popping out babies in their twenties while simultaneously piercing their labias for a QuickTime video to be posted on YouTube. No, I am age wise, an annoying postfeminist feminist who wore lingerie outside the bedroom to break down stereotypes, but inside, I always preferred to wear the pants and not the panties. OK, sometimes I wore neither, but never did I don a garter belt or push-up bra. Meanwhile, the only thing Jeff says more often than “Would you please put on a pair of thigh-high stockings” is “How’s my hair?” If Jeff were a Hindu, that could be his mantra. Ironically, his hair always looks the same to me.
JEFF
The fact that Annabelle thinks my hair looks the same all the time speaks volumes as to how little she actually looks at me. My hair’s been every which way since we first met. Back then it was big and puffy like a cloud. Then I cut it mid-length, then went short, then very short, then I grew it out long and curly, and then cut it short again and now it’s between looks. I don’t know what it is. I mean, how is it? How’s my hair?
That’s when Susan or Donna, or maybe it was Bonnie or Glen said, “Great work.” They appreciated our honesty and were very much impressed by our attention to detail.
JEFF (INTERRUPTING)
We have more. I can’t stand the way she uses the phras
e “Don’t micromanage me” every time I disagree with the way she’s doing something, for instance, loading the dishwasher without first rinsing out the meat-stained dishes.
ANNABELLE
Jeff has this whole list of words and phrases I can’t say. Jeff thinks the word property is an erection killer. What am I supposed to say, “Jeff, the land our house is sitting on’s tax bill arrived in the mail today”?
At this juncture, the therapist says, “That’s all we have time for today, but you two should definitely come back.” In fact, she/he suggested we come back twice a week for the next six months if not for the rest of our natural lives. Annabelle assured her/him that we’ll consider that, and so we dutifully made our next appointment and slunk out of the office.
As we drove home, the Strokes playing at a barely audible level in the car, we talked about the session. We both acknowledged that we really did need to pick our battles. One of us, noting that the timbre of our exchanges can be a little too heated, suggested that perhaps we should ratchet down the tone. One of us said that ratchet was about to become as overused as micromanage. One of us agreed that we would try not to use the word ratchet quite as much, and the other agreed that although SSRIs had eroded the partner’s once full-throttled libido, it probably was important to function in the world as long as the music could be turned up just a little. Agreed. Then we calculated how much the next six months of counseling would cost. Though mathematically challenged, even we could figure out this one. Once a week at $175 for six months came out to $4,200. We weighed our options. That was enough for three nights plus tax at the surreally luxurious Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur (ocean views, five-zillion-thread-count sheets, Lindt chocolates on the pillow) or four and a half months at a youth hostel in Flagstaff, Arizona (towels and linens included, shared bath). Come to think of it, in total we’ve spent enough money on therapy over the years to make a monthlong barge trip down the Seine ($25,000) or a week’s worth of dinners at one of Napa Valley’s most celebrated restaurants, The French Laundry, without wine, of course.