It’s our belief that it’s ultimately more cost-effective to complete the fondness and admiration exercise over tiramisu with candlelight instead of sitting on a sofa in front of a stranger trying not to make eye contact. The latest data tells us that there are more than fifty thousand couples therapists practicing in the United States today, so clearly, many other couples are spending as much as, if not more than, us on counseling and the latest innovation: conjugal boot camps. Statistically speaking, after four years, upward of 38 percent of couples who seek out help end up divorced anyway, so we have a suggestion for couples who are thinking of sinking all of their hard-earned money on therapy: Go to Paris instead. Get drunk and eat great food. You might eventually get divorced, but at least you’ll have the memory of harping at each other in front of Notre Dame instead of in some cramped, windowless therapist’s office.
field guide to the vacation trajectory of a married couple
prewedding weekender: the fuck fest
Two sex-filled days and nights at a picturesque Santa Barbara hilltop hotel
year one: napa valley bacchanalian bliss
Drinking wine, eating great food, more wine, more food, wine, food, wine, food, sex, sleep, food, wine, a little biking and tennis, food, wine, sex, sleep, sex, spoon the rest of the night
year two: romantically rustic
A cozy cabin in the woods of Big Sur. We soak in a hot tub, make a wood-burning fire, screw. Jeff is so happy he’s inspired to gobble at a flock of wild turkeys that live on a farm next door to the cabin. Turkeys mistake Jeff for female bird in heat and attempt to ravish him. Turkeys chase him back into cabin, perch overhead, and peer through skylight while we try to have sex. Nothing can deter us; we’re passionately aflame! Gobble gobble!
year three: we always had paris
This was the high point of our marital vacations. We drop off kid at Grandma’s in Albany. We saunter guiltily but very happily down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées eating seven meals a day. Luckily, we had no idea that this was our last gasp of vacation grandeur or we might not ever have left France. As it was, it took several garçons to pry Jeff’s hands from that last bowl of steamed mussels or we would have missed our flight home. Au revoir, joie de vivre.
year four: intervention convention
Four years into our union, it was a hostage-style, no-one-gets-out-of-here-alive journey to the center of our relationship. Annabelle spent the entire weekend weeping and wondering if we should have a second child. Somehow, in the middle of this emotional meltdown, Jeff discovers there’s an all-girl anal porno in the room’s DVD player. Imagine that—all-girl, all-anal, conveniently left in our room. He spends two days trying to convince Annabelle that he didn’t put the movie in there and proceeds to memorize each scene for later reenactment. Meanwhile, Annabelle breaks her indoor crying record.
year five: reality bites
We stop in at the relatively inexpensive Harris Cattle Ranch for a one-night vacation en route to the annual Gurwitch family Thanksgiving dinner in San Francisco. Ezra takes a few bites of Annabelle’s tri tip, a delicious yet sinewy cut of cow, when that old persnickety esophageal stricture makes an untimely appearance. It forms a net across his esophagus. We spend most of the night trying to coax it down, and a large part of the next day debating whether to take him to a hospital in LA or to a hospital in SF. Just as we decide to head back to LA, Ezra raises his fists in the air and announces, “It’s down!” We drag ourselves to San Francisco, but when we arrive back home, we are greeted by an overflowing toilet. Spend much of the night and next few days washing down floors with bleach. All in all, an utterly unrelaxing holiday.
year six: the frugal family freebie
A lovely two-plane jaunt with hours of layovers to picturesque Albany, New York. It may sound like a good idea to take up Jeff’s parents on their annual offer to babysit while we take it easy in our hotel. Can any couple manufacture romance at the Capital District’s Viewcrest Suites, which has neither a view nor a location on a crest, but occupies an uninspired spot on an industrial stretch of highway where each prefab room smells more like spoiled fish and old socks than a youth hostel on a fisherman’s wharf? Come on, we dare you!
year seven: asian con-fusion
Jeff surprises Annabelle by making reservations at a hotel near home, cleverly eliminating costly travel expenses. We eat a delicious Asian-fusion dinner and arrangements have been made for Annabelle to have an hour-and-a-half shiatsu massage. Jeff neglected to factor in that Annabelle had just returned from New York and is still on East Coast time. The effect of the three-hour difference and the relaxing massage is to put her in a state of deep sleep that she awakens from only a half hour before checkout time. Number of times we had sex: zilch. Number of cold showers for Jeff: four.
year eight: the florida bathroom keys
Annabelle takes a road trip with her parents and Ezra down the Florida coast to the Keys. Ever taken a road trip with two people in their seventies? The foursome toured exhaustively every bathroom from Miami Beach to Key West. It takes almost nine hours to make the five-hour drive.
year nine: eat and run
Jeff surprises Annabelle on their anniversary by taking her to a special dinner one hundred miles up the coast at the Hitching Post Restaurant, made famous in the movie Sideways. Annabelle packs away half a cow, while Jeff downs an entire family of roasted quails. We skip dessert and rush back to Los Angeles. Lots of indigestion and gas, but the food was delicious and we saved a good seventy-five bucks in sitter sleepover charges.
year ten: anniversary spa somnambulist splurge
Jeff surprises Annabelle on their anniversary with a weekend getaway to a spa in the Santa Ynez Valley. Kid is farmed out to friends so more cash could be funneled into a bank-breaking (but desperately needed) getaway. Spa splurge saw Annabelle sleeping through the first day and most of the second as Jeff retreated deep into some local Pinot Noirs for some trying-to-forget-I’m-married time. Total amount of time spent together: an hour! But oh, what an hour it was!
year eleven: evacuation vacation
No cash for a vacation due to Writers Guild strike, but luckily the national park that borders our neighborhood catches on fire. Our mandatory evacuation order gives us a chance for a spur-of-the-moment getaway to a friend’s guesthouse, recently vacated by the teenage son. Teenage son never actually cleaned said guesthouse nor changed sheets or bath towels. Ever spend the night inside a high school boys’ locker room? With ants?
year twelve: our $22,065 staycation
This year we go for broke with an overnight visit to Beverly Hills’s most expensive chalet: Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Ezra develops intestinal blockage due to scar tissue from earlier surgeries, causing him excruciating discomfort and requiring emergency care. Our little trouper dodges a surgical bullet when his intestines right themselves without the aid of anything more than one night of a hydrating IV drip. Throw in an extra $65 for Annabelle to get an emergency Thai massage the next day. Anything is worth it for the health of our son, but with that bill of $22,000, we’ll be vacationing in the backyard in a makeshift tent for the foreseeable future! Take our advice: if you want to treat yourself to something special, they charge only $8,725 for one of those super-duper new high-resolution MRIs. Food and parking not included.
year thirteen: the $14.98 fakation
As the economy completely collapses, we can’t afford to leave our bedroom, much less travel anywhere overnight. We let kid have free rein over downstairs TV for the night while we retreat to our bedroom. We sip twelve-dollar California wine and watch a marathon of our favorite HBO shows on our nineteen-inch flat-screen TV. Laugh about how improbable it is that all those supernatural freaks have ended up in one backwater Louisiana town until we fall asleep in our clothes. Loved every moment of it.
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• • • •
Anything Goes
“Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs
are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.”
—KIERKEGAARD
What do those red-string Kabbalah bracelets, books such as The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and the countless mass e-mails about miraculous stories of healing and personal salvation that you absolutely must forward to another ten friends or you won’t have good luck for the next decade have in common? They confirm a recently published study by the Pew Research Center that large numbers of Americans are desperately looking for forms of “transcendence from everyday life” without any cumbersome dogma and irksome hard-to-follow doctrine. But what does this mean in practice? If you’re not actively fearing retribution from one vengeful God or another, it can be difficult to get motivated enough to keep up any kind of observances. Complicating matters is our hectic schedule, which means that our family’s daily rituals include the sacred search for the misplaced house keys, crossing our fingers that we still have enough coffee and soy milk left to make our morning lattes, and the mystical hope that our son will remember to bring home that night’s homework assignment. Over the years we’ve cobbled together a set of old-fashioned, new-fangled, and just plain absurd customs into our set of Gurkahn traditions. Here are some of our favorites:
He Says
The Three Nights of Hanukkah
Here’s a holiday that commemorates a short and victorious war that Israel won over the Syrians more than two thousand years ago. Wow, have times changed! Can you imagine Israel and Syria fighting a war now? True, the kids like Hanukkah because they love any festival that celebrates military victories and miraculous oil that burned for eight days more than it had any realistic right to burn, God be praised. Yeah, right. Kids like presents and that’s exactly what Hanukkah, in its calendar proximity to Christmas, is all about. You all remember Christmas, the celebration that honors the baby Jesus’ first shopping spree at an indoor mall?
Every year Annabelle and I are resolute in trying to give Ezra a sprinkling of his religious heritage by lighting the Hanukkah lights and saying the prayers. We also appreciate how the glowing lights seem all the more cheerful set against the early darkness of that time of year. The first day of Hanukkah, I’ve set out the menorah and loaded it with the two candles. It’s rarin’ to go! We all gather around, light the candles, say the prayers, and then give Ezra a present from one of the grandparents or aunts or uncles. The second day of Hanukkah is much like the first, but Ezra is late coming downstairs, while Annabelle forgets she’s got dinner on the stove and when the smoke fills the house, she runs off to turn on the ceiling fan and open all the windows. Before the second candle is lit, Ezra asks for his present. I dig out another grandparent/relative gift. This one is never quite as good as the one from the first night and Ezra cynically returns to his homework far less enthused. Night three, Annabelle is not at home. Ezra is in the middle of homework and doesn’t want to come down unless he gets the present first. The candles don’t seem to stay in the menorah very well and I have to keep putting them back after they fall off. We manage to light the candles, but don’t bother to say the prayer. Night four, Annabelle and Ezra are both not home and I’m off in my office at the computer writing or looking at free Internet porn. Night five, none of us are at home. Night six, Annabelle is thinking Hanukkah is over because she can’t remember when it started and has put the menorah away and none of us bother to do anything about it. Night seven, I feel guilty and look for the menorah, but I have no idea where Annabelle put it. Desperate, I put the candles in a loaf of bread and instead of the traditional blessing, Ezra thinks it’s hysterical to sing “Happy Birthday to Jews.” We laugh, the candles fall over, and I blow them out. The last night of Hanukkah finds all three of us at a good friend’s Christmas party eating a decidedly un-kosher holiday meal of ham and imported cheeses, the three of us downing Lactaid tablets because Ezra is, like us, lactose intolerant. Next year I’m sure we’ll try to do all eight nights, but predictably, we’ll get to night three and that will be that. Who really knows for sure whether that oil lasted for eight days; maybe it lasted for only three and they thought, Hey, that’s not long enough for a winter holiday that will someday have to compete against Christmas; let’s make it eight. So maybe we Gurkahns are not just lazy and religiously apathetic but more historically accurate.
She Says
Groundhog Day the movie meets Halloween 2005
Honestly, three days of any holiday is enough, right? I like things that can get done in a twenty-four-hour time frame. That’s why Halloween seems manageable. Unfortunately, we’re still celebrating Halloween 2005. In 2005, I went all out. I bought pounds of candy to hand out to the neighborhood kids, and I even managed to buy and put up the decorations a week in advance. It was the first time in my life I had gotten the seasonal decor right, so it seemed a shame to take down the ghost faces I had attached to our trees right away. I intended to leave the decorations up for only an extra week, but that week turned into a month and by 2007 the bark had started to grow around the edges of the masks. Now ghoulish foliage is just part of our direction lexicon, “Oh, you can’t miss it; it’s the third house on the left, the one with the perpetual Halloween decorations.”
That year was also when Fraidy Cat wandered out of our house and took up residence inside a hedge outside our front door. We couldn’t see her, but we could hear her horrible garbled meowing from deep inside the bush. We all felt awful about Fraidy, except for Jeff, who took to calling her Freaky. I was so desperate I consulted a pet psychic. It took her all of about two minutes and seventy-five dollars to come to the psychic revelation that our pet didn’t like being called Freaky/Fraidy Cat and we needed to start calling her Esme again. If we did that, pet psychic lady predicted, she’d come back inside the house. Even though Jeff positively loathed this cat, out of love for me or because I yelled at him, or both, he joined me in a daily ritual of begging Esme to rejoin our family. Neither the name change nor the whole cans of tuna with which we tried to entice her lured her back indoors.
Late one night, about three weeks after receiving the useless pet psychic’s advice, Jeff and I heard some scuffling in the bushes, accompanied by loud hissing and a short high-pitched meep. Jeff opened the front door of the house and saw Esme/Freaky/Fraidy Cat’s limp, matted fur ball of a corpse in the mouth of a coyote. Acting on instinct and perhaps too much Pinot Noir, Jeff grabbed one of Ezra’s dinky Star Wars light sabers—really nothing more than a flashlight outfitted with a flimsy plastic cone—and gave chase. The coyote sauntered brazenly up the street, leaving Jeff out of breath as he brandished his plastic weaponry. Esme/Fraidy/Freaky was gone forever.
So for Halloween 2005, Jeff marked the spot where Fraidy Cat was taken from us by scrawling “RIP Fraidy” on a stone leading up to our house. Each year we turn over the marker, while other folks decorate their yards with faux gravestones. Since that year, our descansos is the real deal.
And 2005 also marked Ezra’s refusal to wear a one-stop-shopping costume. It had been so easy when he couldn’t speak, just stuffing him into a little soft suit and voilà, instant cow or pumpkin. Once he could voice his own opinions, he was Spider-Man each Halloween (and many other days of the year) until 2005, when he announced that he wanted us to make a costume together. Clever and crafty parents turn their kids into pieces of sushi, iPhones, or wind turbines, but due to our combined negative organizational skills, by 5:30 p.m. we were tearing through our closets to hunt down old clothes and applying makeup for beard stubble to achieve that costume favored by harried parents everywhere: the hobo. I’ve tried to help him keep his hobo au courant by making timely signs that vary from BROTHER CAN you SPARE A MILLION to WILL WORK FOR HEALTH CARE BENEFITS (which would be both a trick and a treat). Last year, deep in the grip of the Twilight book series, Ezra added fangs and became the first hobo vampire in our neighborhood.
Because we don’t really get a lot of trick-or-treaters, since 2005 we’ve been sheepishly doling out that same Halloween candy. We’ve barely made a dent in the s
tash, so we’ll be hauling it out every year for the foreseeable future. Maybe that’s the one trick we’re actually pulling off. We’ve made time stop and it’s always 2005 at our house, at least for one night every year.
He Says
Father’s Day, Fight Club
Another great nouveau Gurkahn tradition is to take Father’s Day and drain every last drop of joy out of it. Perhaps this stems from Annabelle’s habitual indifference and perpetual disregard for sentimentality, or from my inheriting from my mother more of a weakness for contrived holiday sappiness than I had originally thought. It’s true; I actually don’t mind these minor manufactured celebrations. It’s one day on which you can grant the other person appreciation and acknowledgment, however brief or even artificial. I know it’s not like winning an Academy Award or Pulitzer Prize, but sometimes it just feels good to be recognized.
A few years ago Annabelle was in a showcase of short plays written by teenagers. Why she chose to be in those plays, I don’t know. For my Father’s Day present she got tickets for Ezra and me to see her in the teenagers’ plays. I don’t think she did this with any malice, but if there is one thing worse than going to see mediocre theater in Los Angeles, it’s going to see mediocre theater in LA that’s written by teenagers. I don’t know who liked it less, Ezra or me.
Afterward, there was a supremely vague plan to go out to a Father’s Day lunch and an even vaguer idea as to where we were to go. As we headed out to find a restaurant, I was about to turn off the narrow side street near the theater when a megalodon-sized Hummer limo came out of nowhere and turned into the street at the same time. He saw that I was turning and could easily have stopped to let me scoot by, but instead he proceeded to barrel toward my car like a tank running over a bicycle. He rolled down the limo window and barked at me in broken English to back my car down the street and let him through. I rolled down my window and told him to let me through. He got angry, I got angry; he started to curse me, and I cursed him back. Annabelle hit the fan. What was I doing? What if he had a gun? The mention of a gun sent Ezra into hysterics, imagining I was about to be shot. The Father’s Day standoff continued, the limo driver and I screaming and cursing each other, Annabelle reprimanding me in a shrill hate-filled voice, and Ezra bawling his eyes out. Finally, I gave up and let him pass. We didn’t go to a restaurant and instead drove home in a bitter silence interrupted only by Ezra’s postcrying sniffles. I spent the rest of the day in Annabelle’s doghouse—by myself and watching an NBA play-off game. She went to bed without even saying good night as the game segued into SportsCenter and a night spent sleeping on the couch.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 20