The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  In Andy and Mary’s family room there were frames and shadowboxes almost everywhere the eye landed. Inside each one was a picture of them being a super couple: relaxing on the beach in Hawaii; smiling at each other on their wedding day; laughing with their heads comically and gender-swappingly misplaced into the circular facial cutouts of a male bodybuilder and a platinum-blond calendar girl painted on a sheet of plywood.

  Kristen and I didn’t do shadowboxes, and for years there were no pictures displayed of us or even the kids. Our bare walls said a lot about who we were as a couple and as a family, just as Andy and Mary’s prominently displayed family portraits spoke volumes about them. That’s not to say that we didn’t have any photos of good times. We had a couple of candid shots taken at arm’s length in a Salt Lake City parking garage, stashed in a drawer. I sometimes found them when I was looking for a coaster. We also had wedding pictures, but I had never gotten around to picking them up from the photographer’s studio.

  Mary returned, handing me a Tupperware container. “I made some more of that salsa that Kristen likes,” she said. “This batch isn’t as tomato-y as the other one, just so she knows. But Andy tried some last night and he loved it.” For a moment I felt envy rising, and I noticed a pattern emerging. Things are fine at home, then I come here and get a soul-crushing glimpse of perfection. We may have to move.

  I thanked her, and she said with all the sincerity in the world, “It’s no problem. Hope she likes it.” I returned home with the salsa and texted Kristen:

  Mary made u salsa. I’ll put it in the fridge.

  She didn’t respond, so I sent another one:

  Didn’t give us chips to go with it tho—guess she’s not perfect.

  That got a response:

  She’s probably making the chips by hand.

  I spent the following week trying not to think too much about the disparity in Kristen’s and Mary’s priorities. But comparison is a compulsively playable game, and a dangerous one. The more I compared Kristen’s résumé as a homemaker to Mary’s, the more I started to compare my overall relationship with Kristen to that of Andy and Mary—an exercise that was sure to sow disappointment.

  It’s worth mentioning that I sometimes get stuck on strange and unfamiliar words—or rather, strange and unfamiliar words get stuck on me. In passing, I’ll hear someone in my office say the word fiduciary, and before I have a chance to look it up in a dictionary, I’ll have heard it six or seven more times throughout the day. In the elevator, on the radio, in line at the deli: Fiduciary! There it is again! I’m always left wondering, Have people been saying this word all along? How have I not noticed this before? Then, as swiftly as it came into my life, the word will vanish—sometimes for years. When it rains, it pours, I guess. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s raining unfamiliar words or unpleasant reminders of personal circumstances.

  The following Saturday, Kristen was trying to get caught up on work. When she told me she had been craving a peanut-butter-cup milk shake all day, I offered to run out and get one for her. She thanked me by setting her files aside and pulling me close for a long, cozy hug. Rubbing my hand in circles across her back, I smiled, thinking this was a small but certain indication that we were back on track. Look at me fulfilling her needs. Look at us being sweet and romantic together.

  But then I made the mistake of calling Andy to see if he wanted to come with me.

  “I can’t right now, buddy,” he said cheerfully. “Mary and I are reading the new Harry Potter to each other.”

  “Pardon me?”

  He clarified that the book wasn’t brand-new, it was just new to them. They hadn’t read that one yet. But that was hardly the point.

  “You read to each other?”

  “Sure. That way, neither of us gets left out when we get a new book. And we just like to do this once in a while.”

  Oh, fuck me.

  I got off the phone as quickly as possible, and Kristen asked me what was wrong. Apparently, the fact that I had rolled my eyes when I hung up had given me away. At first, I offered Kristen ten million guesses as to what was going on next door, but when she wouldn’t play along, I simply gave her the answer:

  “Harry fucking Potter, Kristen. They are sitting on their fucking couch, under a fucking blanket, reading Harry fucking Potter to each other.”

  Kristen did her best to stifle a laugh and asked why this posed such a problem for me. The problem, of course, was who were they to be in such a happy marriage that they would actually sit and read books to each other?

  “Yeah, that’s pretty unconscionable,” she said. “How dare they?”

  My logic was clearly lost on her, so I resorted to acting even more childishly. “Whatever, Kristen. Hey, tonight let’s turn the clock back to the eighteen hundreds like Andy and Mary do, so we can read books to each other like shithead pioneers. Maybe if we did that then we’d actually look like a couple in love, like they do, and then we could stuff it down everyone’s throats.”

  “Dave, knock it off. They’re just doing what works for them. They’re not stuffing anything down anyone’s throats. My God, you’re so jealous.” She shook her head.

  I didn’t want to admit that Kristen was right. I knew that acknowledging my jealousy would mean acknowledging that I had a number of unfulfilled expectations. I didn’t want to have to deal with more unfulfilled expectations; I just wanted to buy a milk shake. But I was jealous. Insanely jealous. By some fluke, Andy and Mary had been enjoying the marriage I had always wanted and expected. Mary taking care of the household. Andy reading to her under a blanket. The two of them finding time between balancing their checkbooks, maintaining their landscaping, and ironing their curtains to fall more and more in love with each other every day. Their marriage appeared to be blissful, stable, romantic. Not chaotic, not painful or confusing like ours had been, but perfect. To me, theirs was what a successful marriage looked like, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked a lot like the marriage my parents had.

  My mom and dad didn’t argue with each other. They were comfortable in their roles, just as Andy and Mary were. They ate and slept and shopped at regular hours, just like Andy and Mary. And they were constantly showering each other with affection, just like Andy and Mary. Every evening growing up, my brother and I would come downstairs on a homework break or in search of ice cream, and we’d find my parents giggling and hugging and carrying on like honeymooners. We’d observe this, watching their private moment, and then we’d squeeze in between them, absorbing all of their love like little freckled sponges.

  My marriage was supposed to look like that. It wasn’t supposed to involve cereal for lunch and other letdowns. It was supposed to be constant affection, not once-in-a-while, thanks-for-buying-me-a-shake affection. Andy and Mary had no business being so functional. They had no business being so matchy-matchy. They had no business being so happy.

  “That’s the problem,” I told Kristen. “We don’t read to each other. We don’t hug or hold hands or swat each other with dish towels. We don’t hang family pictures, because we don’t have any. We spent five years arguing and totally disconnected. Five years! Andy and Mary are living in a perfect marriage, and we aren’t.”

  “Dave, our marriage is perfect,” she said. “If you could stop looking at what it was supposed to be and start looking at what it actually is, then you might see that.” She waited a moment for my brain to catch up to her words, and then she smiled the way she smiles when she’s done talking about something and wants to move on. “Now, go get my shake.”

  Two weeks later, I was standing on our front porch with a ladder and two boxes of Christmas decorations. The late autumn wind was more or less steady, with some gusts every now and then to remind me that it was below freezing outside. “Can you hurry? How long is this going to take you?” Kristen asked from the warmth of our foyer. I had about ninety minutes until nightfall.

  “Not long.”

  Rather than opening my eyes to our version of perfe
ct, as Kristen suggested, for the past two weeks I had been trying a different tack: seeking opportunities to lead us directly into what I considered to be a utopian marriage. We are going to be happy and functional, damn it. I’ll see to that personally.

  Something about hanging Christmas decorations had always given me a sense that I was the head of a functional family. I think that’s because a nicely decorated house is no accident. The decorations must be purchased in advance and stored year-round. Ladders are involved, as are special plastic clips and extension cords. All of which denote a certain degree of having one’s shit together. It’s easy to find satisfaction in the job, too. The sun goes down, the lights come on, and suddenly it’s the holidays. Add a quiet snowfall, and you’ve got something resembling a Norman Rockwell portrait.

  I schlepped my ladder over behind the bushes in front of our living room window and propped it up against the brick facade of our house. From the boxes on the porch, I removed two long strands of garland and Christmas lights, stretched them out across the yard, and plugged them in to check if the bulbs worked. Which they didn’t. Oh, for Christ’s sake. I looked next door. Andy and Mary were standing in their driveway, keeping warm in matching knitted caps, which I assumed Mary had picked out for the two of them. Their porch and garage were lit up with hundreds of tiny lights, and the fat spruce in the corner of their yard had been decorated to look like a Christmas tree. Mary was cheerfully helping Andy put up their decorations and laughing at something he had said.

  “Hi, Dave,” she called.

  “Hey, buddies. I guess I have to go to the store to get more lights. Do you need anything?”

  “You know you’re almost out of daylight, right?” Andy asked, positioning his wooden reindeer between some bushes.

  “Yeah, but I can finish this in time.” Fuckface. “You know, I think Kristen and I will probably get started on the inside decorations this week.”

  “Just think,” Andy said as his reindeer’s nose lit up. “We’ve already put up our Christmas tree, decorated inside, and we’re almost done with all the outside lights! But we’ll let you know if we need anything from the store.”

  Mary laughed, hard, the way she might have laughed had I just tripped and fallen face-first into the crotch of their snowman. Then she gave Andy a playful hug, cuing him to back off a little bit. “You’ll be fine, Dave, just ignore him.” It was a nice thing for her to say, and it made me furious.

  Fuck this. Maybe they are better than us. Comically better. Painfully, obviously, woefully better than us.

  Then I turned my thoughts to Kristen. Why isn’t she outside helping me? Why can’t she buy us matching hats? My internal grousing was interrupted by one of our kids screaming inside, then a loud thud, and then more screaming. Through the front window I watched Kristen gather Parker up from the floor as she sent Emily, crying, to sit in time-out. I looked back at Andy’s house. As I stared into the bright red nose of that cocksucking, smug little reindeer, it was easy to imagine their children inside, calmly reading books or practicing long division in a fragrant cloud of homemade gingerbread. Or perhaps from behind a frosted windowpane they’d sip eggnog and delight in watching the doofus next door tripping over himself.

  Kristen opened the door and the screams of our children’s tantrums echoed off nearby houses. “How’s it going out here, Dave?” she asked. She didn’t mean for me to give her an update on my progress, she meant, It’s a zoo in here, I need your help, pick up the pace.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s going shitty, isn’t it?” She rolled her eyes and slammed the door.

  Perfect.

  Two months later, at the end of January, our Christmas decorations were still up. Andy and Mary had been the first on the block to take theirs down, on New Year’s Day, and one by one the neighbors followed. Wreaths were removed from doors, illuminated plastic candy canes were plucked from snow-covered lawns, lights were pulled from rooftops and returned carefully to their boxes. But over at the Finch house garland clung to the porch posts, a wooden nutcracker cheerfully greeted visitors at the door with all the relevance of a month-late sympathy card, and sprays of holly hung by large red bows from our garage lanterns. I hadn’t gotten around to taking it all down. Or shaving, for that matter, or visiting my customers. I had finally taken Kristen’s advice and was trying to shift my worldview—not to align precisely with hers, but enough to meet somewhere in the middle. If our perfect was in fact all around me, then I wanted to be able to access it. Since December, all of my mental energy had been invested in understanding how I might accomplish that.

  The challenge lay in overcoming conventional logic: only perfect is perfect, so any other marital circumstances would be—by definition—imperfect. The only solution I could conceive of was to redefine perfection. At first that meant erasing any value I had previously assigned to the word in relation to marriage. Constant bliss—gone. Traditional division of labor—outta there. Easy, painless, matchy-matchy—see ya. This exercise wasn’t exactly easy. The only reason I was able to shed my longstanding definitions of perfection was that I had absolutely no other choice. Reality was going to stick around for a while, whether I liked it or not. I realized that if I was going to appreciate the gifts of my marriage and stop coveting my neighbor’s life, then redefining perfection would be the only path to get me there.

  Taking a closer look at the meaning of perfect provoked a number of questions, such as How did we end up here? and Wasn’t our relationship indeed perfect back when we were dating? It was easy to see that reality and my intentions diverged the moment Kristen and I said “I do.” When we were dating, everything felt perfect, yes, but then again I hadn’t expected Kristen to come over and do my laundry, cook all my meals, and dust underneath my bed. A girlfriend didn’t do those things, per my definition. Kristen never led me to believe that she was Susie Homemaker, yet I had assumed that a wholesale shift in her priorities would come with time, marriage, and kids. Besides, I couldn’t get over how lucky I was to be with her. I was not at all focused on what I thought she should be doing. I was simply focused on making myself better for her.

  More interesting still were the insights about myself that resulted from a month and a half of feverish journaling. For one, I quickly realized that I had no business holding Kristen to any standard of homemaking because I had clearly failed to deliver any sense of normalcy myself. It’s safe to assume that Kristen didn’t spend her childhood dreaming of someday marrying a guy who would tote around a personal instruction manual reminding himself not to melt down when her family reunion goes thirty minutes longer than the invitations indicated. Kristen is no June Cleaver, I wrote. But then, I’m no Ward. So if she’s not June, and I’m not Ward, how can I expect us to be all Ward-and-June-Cleaver like my parents or Andy and Mary? If anything, we’re like a heterosexual adaptation of The Odd Couple. (There you have it, folks—the single most imbecilic personal breakthrough in recorded history.)

  While my neighborhood was busy putting the Christmas season to rest I had finally made some progress. Andy sent me text messages asking me to keep the lights up another three weeks because he had bet money on the middle of February. Whatever. I didn’t mind being judged by the neighborhood. If I was going to be the asshole with the gauche decorated house and the enlightened path to a joyful marriage, so be it. I wasn’t trying to get laid by the neighbors.

  Undefining perfection seemed like a supreme victory in my quest to learn how to go with the flow. But having discarded all troublesome preconceptions about marriage, I found myself eager to redefine it. I mentioned this to Kristen one evening, and as usual, she encouraged me not to try so hard. “You’ll find perfection if you’re not looking for it.”

  Later that night, Kristen suggested that we should treat ourselves to an overnight stay in Chicago without the kids. It would be our first night alone together in over three years, and before she could finish asking if I was interested, I told her to book it. The next day, we made arrangements
for a babysitter; a few days after that, we were checking into our hotel with only one suitcase, which we’d packed with pajamas, a change of clothes, and a couple bottles of wine.

  With the entire glowing and twinkling city at our fingertips, Kristen and I wound up under the covers in our pajamas, watching television. And it felt so . . . perfect. So us.

  I asked Kristen what she thought Andy and Mary would be doing had they been the ones vacationing in the city that evening.

  “Who cares?” she said, handing me her empty wineglass for a refill. A few minutes later, she asked, “Did you figure out what makes me perfect yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I know you are, somehow.”

  “Even though I’m totally not the homemaker you thought I’d be?”

  “Yeah, even though. I’m sorry that I expected that from you, and I’m sorry that it took me so long to get here.” That felt good to say.

  “I don’t blame you,” Kristen said. “Heck, I’d love to have a wife like Mary.”

  Then she asked me if I knew why I was perfect for her, and I drew a blank. “Is it because you have to tell me how to function like a normal person?” I asked. What girl doesn’t love that?

  “No. It’s because I know you’d do anything for me, you get me, and you make me laugh, which makes me happy.”

  She nestled up against me and I looked down at the tip of her cute nose hovering above my chest. I settled back and my mind wandered off to a moment earlier in the evening, when Kristen had instinctively placed her pillow on the window side of the bed because she knows I’m afraid of heights and being close to a twentieth-story window would bother me. Then I thought of all the times she was patient and guided me when I needed help, whether I knew it or not: Just relax and enjoy this with me. Stop looking, and you’ll find our version of perfect. Please come talk to me, whatever’s on your mind. I thought of all the difficult tests we’d survived and how she had never left me, how she remained loyal and supportive and willing to love me. Then I looked to our future and easily imagined us doing whatever love might call us to do for each other, no questions asked, time after time. To be for each other that one person who makes the other’s life the best and brightest it could possibly be. Then Kristen burped and started laughing, and there it was: our perfect was revealing itself to me, moment by imperfect moment.