“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “It is so stupid.”
Silence. Quiet.
“Penis for Senate!” I said, pointing, but she didn’t laugh.
A few minutes after we arrived, all the men took their places around the table, and so did I. And my girlfriend followed me to the table.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Sitting down.”
She pulled out a chair.
“Maybe you’d like to sit in the living room?” I said.
She gave me a little grin and sat down.
My grandfather and my father looked at her, and then looked at me, while I looked into the mashed potatoes, to see if Jesus was in there.
A clearing of the throat.
“Let’s pray,” Grandfather Key said.
And we ate. That’s when I knew I would marry her. And of course, I did. You know that already.
The first time I remember our discussing who should do what, the cooking and the cleaning and the housework, we were in the kitchen of our first apartment.
“Why haven’t you taken the garbage out?” she asked.
She pointed to an unfamiliar canlike object in the corner. It was in a part of the kitchen where I had often seen my wife, but I paid no attention to what she did there. She had all sorts of hobbies that I felt were not my business, such as collecting empty milk jugs, which I made sure to save for her.
“Stop it!” she said, as I put an empty jug into the fridge. “Why do you do that?”
“Is this a trick question?” I said.
She just stood there.
It was a game! The name of this game was “Where Does My Wife Want the Empty Milk Jug to Be?”
“What about the sink?” I said. “So you can clean it.”
“Why would I want to clean that?”
“You could fill it with rocks and make a shaker.”
I made a shaking motion with the empty jug, and she made a motion that seemed like she was going to kick my face through my brain.
She explained that what you do is, you throw it away.
“But the can is full,” I said.
And she explained what you do is, you empty the garbage.
She held up the bag with one hand and told me to take it out, which is what I did, hurrying back to the kitchen, eager to see her pull more fun things out of the can.
“Where’d you put it?” she said, of the garbage bag.
“The porch.”
“No.”
The bag of garbage, she explained, had to be transported to a larger can.
The beautiful woman with the shoulders and almond eyes, my own Sophia Loren, had become a garbage Nero. How had this happened? I felt the sting of a moral conviction deep in my young and ignorant heart, some friction between the way I thought of the world and how it actually worked. The sting was minor, almost forgettable, the kind of pain you can drown out with a beer and a good eight hours of sleep. It was nothing, I hoped.
That night, I thought about all the world’s garbage being moved from smaller cans, to larger cans, to ever larger cans, until it got to the biggest can of all. Where was this can? Who emptied it? God? Does God have a wife? Or a husband? Or at least a maid?
The years, they roll on. You grow, you have children, maybe you fight about small things, like bath toys, which apparently are grown in the uterus when you have children. Like all our fights, the bath toy fight was really about the quality of our marriage, but saying, “I want to fight about our marriage!” is a silly way to start. It’s better to begin with something provocative, like, “If you don’t get rid of those bath toys, I am going to start peeing on them in the shower.”
Happy Meal toys, landfill fodder, Popsicle sticks gnawed into barbed lances, the rubber ducks and turtles that retain water for several hundred years, I hated them. They lived on the floor of our only bathroom, where, in olden times, homeowners were expected to stand.
“Do we really need all these toys?” I asked my wife.
“Do we really need you?” she said.
She still wasn’t very good at expressing her feelings in words, but I deduced, through a complicated series of door-and cabinet-slammings, that her position was this: The toys represented the necessary messiness of family life, the fragments of joy that she worked hard to provide for our children, and that my hatred of the toys was really a hatred of our life, and her efforts to make it a happy one.
And again, there came the old sting, rising up from down under, and I pushed it back down. They were just bath toys. I would’ve thrown them away myself, but bath toys are an Inside Thing, and men, as we all know, only do Outside Things. Besides, if I’d thrown them away, she’d only have fished them back out of the garbage, further confusing me about what should and should not be thrown away. The way the fight ended was, a special task force determined that I should insert my head into my rectum and die.
Sometimes, we fought about sex, which we had to stop calling a meeting, because our children had a gift for metaphor, so we started calling it “the budget,” which made it sound so much more fun.
“Do you want to work on the budget?” I’d ask, while the TV hypnotized our children.
“We did the budget already this week,” my wife would say.
“We should review the spreadsheets.”
“I’ve seen the spreadsheets.”
“Some people make new spreadsheets every day.”
“Those people are not doing their budget right,” she said.
And then, if I decided to be hurt by this, we’d have a fight, and our kids would think it was about money, but it was never about money, unless it was about money, because sometimes it was about money. Like any healthy marriage, we both made gently terroristic demands of the other, and sometimes these demands resulted in fights, and sometimes they merely resulted in a quiet, respectful hatred. My wife’s demands included:
Being “helpful”
Closing “drawers”
Reading her “mind”
Never touching her anywhere unless I have written permission
Not chewing or drinking or talking so loudly
Not making sounds ever out of my face
My demands of her included:
Taking a chill pill
Turning that frown upside down
Allowing me to talk during movies and TV shows and also when she is talking
Acknowledging my presence when I am declaring great ideas for novels into the air
Not checking her phone while I explain how great this salad was that I had this one time
When our fights got really good, I’d start bellowing like a bull elk in rut, which frightened the children, but did nothing for my wife.
“Oh, you’re such a big man,” she would say, when I got loud. “SOOOO big! SOOOO important!”
I found this unfair, for two reasons: First, I had always attempted to be more progressive than my father, a man who indeed would have agreed that he was a very big man and should be obeyed, and second, because secretly, I believed myself to be a very big man who should be obeyed. That was the sting of it.
Is this what marriage was supposed to be?
You hear a lot about marriage in church. The Bible was full of many exemplary unions, such as Adam and Eve’s, who created original sin and gave birth to children who murdered one another and soiled creation with the blood of all humanity. Then there was Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was quite old, so God told Abraham to make a baby with the maid, Hagar, which he did, because when God tells you to make sex with the maid, you don’t ask questions, even if she is named after a Viking.
There are more marriages in the Bible, but these two are the most normal.
Then there’s the Book of Ephesians, which suggests that men ought “to love their wives as their own bodies,” which perhaps meant the Lord wanted us to get our wives drunk and take them to the gym?
Most important, it is recommende
d that husbands are to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church,” which, if the simile was to be believed, meant that at some point my wife might demand I be tortured and then killed by the government, which, during some of our fights, did not seem unlikely. It’s funny now, but at the time, it was not funny. At the time, it was a terrifying thought to think that much of our fighting was fated because my wife and I might have married the wrong person.
We passed the milestones: Year One, Five, Ten. We had babies. We bought a house. It got robbed. It was a life.
I took on new responsibilities at work, and she took on more at home, mostly with the children, who, according to a book she read, needed to be fed at least weekly, which required more groceries, which required regular trips to Walmart, which made her violent.
We did things happy families do. Cookouts, vacations, birthdays with ponies. When we fought about things like bath toys, I brought flowers home, which she appreciated. Sure, we had problems. Maybe she didn’t dance with me at bars, and maybe I didn’t get excited about going to Disney World, and maybe I could feel the tremors of my conscience telling me I was doing this all wrong, and that if I kept it up, Something Bad might happen, but still, we laughed, we cried, we lived, we put the children down at a reasonable hour, so we could eat dinner in peace, just sitting there, watching television from different pieces of furniture, not saying a word.
Men over here, women over there.
Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, not wanting her to see me seeing her, I’d look at my wife on the couch, and something sort of sickening would make itself known in my intestines, the shadow of some terrible monster circling under the water of our home.
Is she happy, I wondered?
Would she ever have an affair?
What would it be like to be divorced?
None of the insidious hurricanes that destroy marriages battered the roof: no addictions, no adultery, save what I’m sure was the mutual daydreaming of what life might be like with other people, as her body bore the marks of three children and I went from looking decent shirtless to being required by most city ordinances to be carried in a horse trailer. But on the worst days, I’d find myself wondering: Is this marriage dead? There was no hatred, no anger, just a blank space where love should be.
So you push the terror down with the heel of a boot and tell yourself you’re happy, because you’ve got a career and a family and a life that you love and sometimes don’t, and you find yourself standing in church and hearing a chord change in a hymn that hits you like a memory and the place inside you where the feelings live splits wide open and you get a little weepy.
It’s a beautiful life, you tell yourself.
And later that day, standing in the kitchen with a beer, surrounded by your wife and children, you find yourself thinking that these are the salad days.
And then you finish that beer, and your wife puts the kids to bed, and you have a discussion about a few things, work, money, the future, and something comes out of your wife’s mouth that ends the salad days forever.
Before I tell you what my wife said, it’s important to know that all week, we’d been having an ongoing discussion about money and time. We had a big decision to make, which was: Should I work more, and make more money, which seemed impossible, since I was already working too much? Or should I work about the same, and make the same money, which had turned out to seem like not enough money, having three daughters who were required by oppressive governments to wear clothes and shoes to school?
My wife said, Yes, I should make more money.
And I said, Maybe we just think we need the money.
And she said, Do you know how much milk costs?
And I said, Time is more precious than stuff.
And she said, You’re never here anyway.
And I said, That’s not true.
And that’s when she said the thing:
“If you’re not going to be a part of our lives, at least we can have some money.”
It hit me square in the tender part of my aorta, a dagger of a razor-tipped sentence. The room turned like the Gravitron, that ride at the fair that pins you to the wall until your organs slide out your earholes, and that’s what happened. My organs slid out my earholes.
My wife did not usually talk about her feelings like that, and was as surprised as me that this thing she’d kept secret was out.
And what was the secret?
That she didn’t really like me much anymore.
I asked her to explain, and it all came pouring out, that I was too focused on work, not there physically, that she felt like she was parenting alone, doing all the housework, all the childrearing, while I tried to remind her how money was made, that it required people being places for long periods of time, and that besides, she was not there emotionally, that the funny woman I’d married had long since been replaced by a deadness in the eyes, a joyless sighing in my presence, the sudden destruction of all general mirth in her vicinity.
The word divorce came up a few times over the next week, not in the form of a threat, but just a grenade, a pin pulled on a word to see what would happen.
I was pretty sure she hated our life, and maybe I did, too, and was it even really our life? It was two halves of a life. A divorce? It sort of seemed like we already were.
And then, a week after she’d said the thing she couldn’t unsay, after all fighting and slugging, exhausted, our best punches thrown, what seemed like the last leg of the pub crawl of our marriage, she mentioned she might take the kids and leave.
“Where?” I said.
“Away.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a promise, or a threat.
That night, I marshaled all evidence against her, and there was no shortage: Her gloom, the way she winced like she’d smelled something rancid when I tried to touch her, how she refused to talk about anything, ever, until it was too late.
I tried to make her coldness the common denominator of our worst moments, her refusal even to try to enjoy what she knew I loved: dancing, jalapeños, videos of interspecies love between cats and dogs, the most hilarious passages of A Confederacy of Dunces.
But then, last I checked, all that stuff didn’t mean I was not also a jackass. When I looked at the leviathan, all I could see was my face, and questions about toilet seats, and leaving them up, and drawers, and leaving them open, and giving the children tortilla chips to eat in the living room after she’d cleaned, and how I tried to hug her after a workout, knowing she would hate it, and how I left the lamp on late into the night, reading books, while she with her translucent eyelids tried and failed to go to sleep next to me, exhausted from the long day of doing all the Inside Things that my rearing told me were her responsibility.
I had inherited my father’s sham dichotomy: men over here, women over there. And maybe that worked in olden times, or maybe not. Maybe that’s not history. Maybe that’s just a bad idea, a story someone told. Maybe everything I knew about women was wrong.
I got up, couldn’t sleep, walked across the hall to my office.
I got so upset at the idea of my wife at some point in the future actually not being my wife that my heart began to beat hard, too fast, so fast I could feel it in my knees, in my ears. My heart dropped three stories into my kidneys, and I could feel it beating there, where it clearly had no business being, and my back began to spasm. I got down on the floor.
Is this what a broken heart felt like? It felt a lot like diabetes.
I saw clearly that there was one thing I needed to stop doing, and that was behaving like my father. He’d had three wives. Just because he could be an idiot about women didn’t mean I got to do it, too. Besides, he’d finally figured it out. He’d been married to my mother for about forty years. He’d clearly learned something.
What a gift, to learn, and change.
I looked around my office, as I lay dying on the floor.
On the wall, two pairs of antlers, formerly attached to the heads of dee
r my grandfather killed many years ago, representative, perhaps, of the Manly Outside Things I didn’t really do anymore. On another wall, books, representative of what I did now, which, let’s be honest, were very much Inside Things.
My father had no interest in reading, or in the art on the wall, the fountain pens on the desk, the music on the shelf. There was a gun, but it was hidden, like a relative with a facial deformity. I was unlike him in every way. Why had I chosen to be precisely like him in the way I treated my wife?
I closed my eyes, tried to sleep on the bare floor. It would be a pitiful sight. I pictured my wife finding me there in the morning, covering me with a blanket. No, she would ignore me. You couldn’t extract pity from the woman if you used an industrial centrifuge. Pity was not the solution.
I tried to remember why I’d married her, how funny and weird she was, how she smelled cups before using them, how lovely it had been, once, to see her at a wedding. And I remembered the Penis Game. A woman who will teach you the Penis Game comes along only once in a lifetime.
I loved that she didn’t want to dance with me, and I loved that she tried anyway. She had something you couldn’t get at, a fire in her that nobody could touch. I loved that. I tried touching it many times, and she always hit me when I tried to touch it, and I loved that, too.
Here was a woman who just sat down at a tableful of men and ate and didn’t care, a woman who held my hand, grabbed my arm, seized my shirtsleeve, wailed to the high heavens when the tiny humanoid screamers we’d made together emerged from history, naked souls wailing. These were ours: We’d made them. She taught me to love these children, showed me how to do it with shit on your hands—and I’d taught her some things, too, like how to talk about her feelings using words and not doors.
That night, I dreamt about the garbage can, and even the larger garbage can, and even the city dump, where, one day, I could take my daughters to show them where I would bury the bodies of their boyfriends if they reminded me too much of the idiot I used to be.
The World's Largest Man Page 26