Does your husband do that? My husband does too! Drives me crazy. We ask each other constantly, What’s wrong with men? Why can’t they clean up after themselves? Why do they leave dirty socks on the floor and damp towels on the bed? What’s the deal with their thermostat control issues and remote control fetishes? Why do they forget our anniversaries but remember to turn on the game when we’re trying to have sex in bed? The rhythm and predictability of these conversations is comforting in a discomforting way. You feel better while you’re doing it but worse afterward. Hollow, like a tunnel.
All this complaining inspires another list for Emily.
Top Ten Mistakes New Brides Make
1. Cooking too often. If you cook seven fabulous dinners the first week of marriage . . . you have now set the tone. Anything less than cooking a fabulous meal every night will be regarded as your “slipping.” Do everyone a favor and cook nothing until about three months in. Then make it something simple and burn it.
2. Cleaning too much. See above. Picking up socks on day 1 leads to picking them up on day 1,001. Set the standard early and buy four shop vacs with wide-mouth hoses, one each for the bedroom, bathroom, den, living room, etc. When you see a pair of socks on the floor, vacuum them up. Your husband will think elves took them. The vacuum is an excellent hiding space for almost anything. Your hubs will never look in the vacuum. He will not think to change a filter, no matter how many years you own it.
3. Enjoying sex like a man. Just like cooking, the more often you slap it down on the table, the more often your man will expect to see it slapped there. While everyone feels romantic in the beginning, it’s better to pace yourself. Keep the shenanigans down to once a week at most. Less is more. There’s nowhere to go but up!
4. Encouraging his “friendships.” Your husband’s friends are now officially your foes. Even if you liked them before, they are now your adversaries. They will work actively to lead your husband astray. They will be there for every dumb idea and weak moment he has, egging him on. Don’t make more work for yourself later by initially encouraging these wolves in pleated khakis. Best bet is to get them all married off. Fast.
5. Encouraging hobbies. Hobbies cost money and take time. The last thing you need is your husband spending all his hard-earned income on some dinky little trains or shiny golf clubs. God forbid he starts a band. Should one of these nasty hobbies take hold, consider breaking his habit for him by staging a robbery. Should he replace the items lost, stick to your guns and steal it all again. Eventually his willful spirit will become too exhausted to fill out another insurance claim.
6. Allowing him to spend too much time alone. Don’t let that little squirrel of yours go storing up his nuts without you! Lord knows what they get into when nobody is watching. You’ll never have to find out if you always know what he does. Pay off secretaries and gym valets for intel. It’s worth it.
7. Letting up on him. Not insisting the hubster do his chores is tantamount to electing for a divorce. Consider the Stanford Prison Experiment, which proved prisoners will act exactly like you expect them to. If you expect hubs to be lazy from time to time, he will be. And more so and more so until it’s you living with a chimp who complains bitterly, does nothing, and has his own car keys.
8. Not severely punishing him. You must punish your husband for any infraction, no matter how small. Sled dogs are trained when they’re puppies. At their first mistake, their owner violently shakes them . . . and they never make that mistake again in their noble lives. Now, your hubby’s no puppy. Imagine how hard you’re going to have to shake him.
9. Conceding defeat. Never give up. Never surrender. This will take time and no path is easy. Consider your husband the biggest and most unending renovation project of your life. It will take time and resources, and lives may be lost.
10. Fighting over every little thing. Everyone argues, but bickering left unchecked becomes a way of life, a native tongue you must speak when you enter the door. Put aside these childish ways and settle your differences the way tycoons do: trade them away. Offer to give up clipping your toenails in bed if he’ll start taking the trash out when he’s supposed to. Get everything in writing, just like lawyers. If marriage is an institution, then you’re cochairs of the organization and you should communicate properly, through certified letters and not goofy little Post-it notes with hearts on them.
The main complaint we yokemates have, ironically, is absenteeism. Ellie says she sees her husband, Rick, for about a half hour a day, and that’s hardly enough time to tell him everything he’s screwed up and has to fix and/or needs to leave alone. I feel sorry for Ellie. Everyone thinks her life’s so perfect, but I wouldn’t want to live even one day of it. She and Rick never touch each other. Ever. They never kiss, never hold hands, never have sex. They apparently don’t talk much outside the most necessary exchanges; intimacy on any level is nonexistent. Ellie says back when they were dating, they had a passionate sex life, but as Rick’s hedge fund began to take off, he worked longer and longer hours, often coming home too tired to take off his shoes, let alone to make love to his wife. Ellie felt rejected and angry.
Whenever Rick did have time for her, she enjoyed turning the tables on him and rejecting his advances. Ellie says she learned to use sex as a weapon, withheld it whenever she was angry or upset or even mildly irked. By the time she finally cooled off, it was then Rick’s turn to give her the cold shoulder. So the game went on until they both just shut down. Rick started to pull even longer hours at work. Ellie’s convinced he’s cheating on her. Now they live together as hostile roommates who never speak to each other. They only communicate through their precocious, robust, and ruthlessly intelligent eight-year-old son, Cody. So there they are, like silent planets of stone, orbiting each other, each unable to get closer to the other or break away.
I guess I shouldn’t be so judgmental. It’s not like my marriage is going to win any awards. Addi says she’ll never get married again. She says any woman who decides to get married is crazy. Right now, I’d have to agree. Brad’s never home anymore and when he is, we fight like crazy. Over dumb things. Stupid things. Like the toothpaste war. It started with my “inability” to replace the cap after using our toothpaste. I researched it online, and toothpaste caps are one of the top ten reasons couples fight.
Top Ten Reasons Couples Fight
1. Money. Spending it, saving it, who has it, who doesn’t, and why your credit card bill is now larger than the national debt.
2. Assuming a fleet of maids will clean up all the toothpaste/beard stubble/soap gunk left on the sink.
3. Assuming a jaunty elf named T.P. replaces the toilet paper when it’s empty.
4. Using an excessive amount of glassware/dishware and leaving it strewn about so the house continually looks like a party just ended.
5. Depositing damp towels on the bed and making the comforter damp, so sleeping becomes like a survival story in the rain forest.
6. Leaving the dishwasher door open and nearly killing people.
7. Leaving dirty socks and skid-marked underwear on the closet floor for your spouse to see, like a special art exhibition.
8. Leaving the toilet seat up and causing your spouse to have Startling Drop and Shockingly Cold Ass syndrome.
9. Leaving the lights on or leaving the lights off. Flicking the remote control. Opening the garage door or not opening the garage door. Basically any switch or device that can be toggled causes marital woe.
10. Heat. To turn up or not to turn up? That is the eternal question. Someone is constantly trying to freeze or bake the other one to death. That much we know.
Any of these complaints and many, many, many others are sanctioned reasons to seek out marriage counseling and/or start a blog called Things He/She Does to Make Me Crazy!!! Statistically it’s husbands who more often commit these offenses, but in our house I am the main perpetrator. I’m always losing the toothpaste cap and it drives Brad nuts. Naturally I switched to toothpaste with an attached flip
top, but that did little good. I just wrench the damn thing off, usually in the morning after a night of drinking too much wine. I can’t help it. I have superhuman strength sometimes. Usually when I’m holding the toothpaste. The fact is, everybody on earth falls into one of two camps.
Those who cap the bitch . . . and those who don’t.
Personally, I’m not sure why toothpaste caps are so important. Probably because I’m a non-capper, and non-cappers don’t understand why anybody worries about a missing toothpaste cap. More important, we fundamentally don’t care. Why get so bent out of shape about a dinky bit of plastic? When Brad asks, “Where’s the toothpaste cap?” I usually shrug and say something like, “I have no idea, maybe it rolled away. Maybe it fell down the drain. Maybe a ladybug wanted a hat. How should I know? Get over it already. Move on. You can worry about dinky bits of plastic after cancer is cured and they figure out where the Mayans went, okay? Solve those mysteries first.”
Brad is rarely amused by this. This is not the way cappers view the world. They see a missing toothpaste cap as a rift in the universe. Nothing can move forward until (1) the toothpaste cap is located, (2) it’s screwed back onto the tube, and (3) an adequate explanation for the cap’s disappearance is provided. The problem with this last requirement is that no acceptable explanation exists on earth. No matter what happened, no matter how compelling the story (e.g., a vicious crow flew through the open window and attacked you, flying off with the toothpaste cap and leaving you with bloody stumps for fingers), it doesn’t matter. It’s inadequate. Why? Because replacing a toothpaste cap takes “all of three seconds.” Even in the event of an emergency, like vicious crow behavior, it would be simple to do.
At least this is what Brad tells me.
So fine. No big deal, but even the tiniest smear of toothpaste on the sink sends him into paroxysms of rage. He says my careless toothpaste droppings are ruining all his suits. He hunts for toothpaste infractions like a toothpaste forensics specialist. No matter how angry he gets, I can’t take it seriously. It’s toothpaste. Judging by Brad’s complete disgust for the tingly paste, however, you’d think it wasn’t toothpaste smeared around the sink but the fecal remnants of some wintergreen elves living in the medicine cabinet. So that’s who I start blaming. The naughty little elves that live in the medicine cabinet and poop minty-white diarrhea paste. I even made a Christmas centerpiece based on them. A large potted poinsettia encircled at the base by pinecone candle holders set the stage for my merry little wintergreen elves, who were carefully posed in miniature scenes among the leaves enjoying various wintergreen-elf activities, like boinking.
Brad remained unamused.
Eventually I flee downstairs, defecting to the guest bathroom, and I brush my teeth there. In all honesty, I’d gladly keep the ball-sack cap on the cumwad toothpaste tube, and I’d do so religiously, if only the praise I received for capping the toothpaste was even remotely close to the punishment I received for not capping it. Uncapped toothpaste = utter disgust/ensuing insults/probable fight. Capped toothpaste = no reward or reaction whatsoever.
Ellie and Addi tell me to ignore Brad and his constant complaining. Ellie says her husband goes ballistic if she leaves shopping bags in the front hall. He hates anything not put away and snaps at her about clothing on the floor, newspapers on the table, and coffee cups on the counter. I tell her he sounds a little irrational and she says that’s nothing. Her pet peeves include forks loaded into the dishwasher with their prongs down, food in the refrigerator that’s facing “backward,” and when the toilet paper is on the roll the wrong way. “Yikes,” I say. “Remind me not to marry either of you guys.”
“It’s just that couples who live together for a long time slowly become unhinged by even the smallest things,” Ellie says. “I never used to care which way the toilet paper roll was, but over the years I started to notice he put it on a different way, and I took it as a sign of disrespect.”
“Does he still put it on the wrong way?”
“The maid puts all the toilet paper on the rolls these days,” she says. “I just pay her extra to put it on the right way.”
Addi says her ex-husband clipped his nails for hours on end in bed and ate cereal like a “jackass.” I tell them I keep thinking if I could just stop annoying Brad he might look at me like he used to. Like he wants me. I’d give anything if he’d look at me that way. “Oh, please!” Addi rolls her eyes. “Men always complain about something. There’s no point in trying to please them. Trust me, I know.”
“You’re divorced,” Ellie says.
“Exactly. I know everything about being a wife. I have three ex-husbands to prove it.”
The truth is none of us is exactly happy with her domestic life. We soothe ourselves by hunting down things that please us and are perfect. We search tirelessly for the perfect massage, the perfect handbag, the perfect carpaccio. It’s a particular thorn in our side when we think we have the best of something, only to discover there’s something better. I bought a new Prada handbag and was about to show it off to the girls when Addi walked in with an Hermès. I just shoved my handbag under the chair and didn’t say anything.
People tease me about how “picky” I’ve become, but the truth is I’m a lot more educated about quality. I can tell cow leather from calfskin ten yards away. And I now know the difference between a skilled facial technician and an ape flinging crap at my face. Still, people frown upon pickiness around here. Christopher commented on my “increased sensitivity” last week, when we went to Hillcrest for lunch. I ordered a seafood salad with no scallops, extra lemon wedges, and dressing on the side. An order that would’ve seemed monastic to the club girls seemed “fussy” to him.
I don’t care. I like how I am.
Not really.
Reverend Coy comes for a visit and I ask about the Olya doll. He says she originated from an impoverished village in Russia called Olkhovka. “If you could only see these families,” he says. “They have nothing . . . we dressed Olya up in clothes most children from the swamp dream of seeing.”
“Swamp?” I ask.
“The Olkhovka Swamp was contaminated by radioactive water leakage, from the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant nearby. They’ve cleaned everything up now, of course.”
“Of course,” I say, inching away from the Olya doll sitting on the table.
“So now we must find a way to get the village back on its feet. Let them grow strong again! Praise Jesus!”
“Yep . . .” I nod. “He’s got a heckuva world going on down here.”
I tell Brad about the nuclear-leak dolls and he’s completely unconcerned, if not annoyed I’m bothering him with these unimportant details. “But, Brad,” I say, “how do you know those dolls have no contamination in them? Do we test them?”
He says oh yes, hardy har har, every doll goes to Leningrad for testing and then a special spa in Minsk. “Jesus, Jen.” He sighs. “I know you’re not a business major but even you know commercial products are made with chemicals.”
“This isn’t chemicals, Brad. This is radioactivity.”
He rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he says. “You want to test the dolls? Test away, darling. You do keep things from getting boring.” I take the matter very seriously and send a sample doll away to a lab recommended to me by the animal hospital.
I finally attend Supper Club, my first one in months. I go because finally my family’s not annoyed with me. I’ve been missing in action for some time, but I gave Lenny and Hailey a super baby present: one of every single item sold in Keller’s Peapod Department, which is what they call their infant section. Blankets, bedding, clothing, strollers, appliances, everything. Brad went ballistic but it was worth it, because everyone in my family is smiling at me again.
The other reason I show up is this week’s Supper Club theme is the state fair. Everybody brings their favorite dish from the state fair; it’s sort of a way to bring a little bit of summer into the dead of winter. It’s also a way to get food, any food, on
sticks. Everything is on a stick. Corn dogs on a stick, fried green tomatoes on a stick, barbecued rib fingers on a stick, fried jalapeño peppers on a stick, corncobs on a stick, pizza on a stick, walleye cheeks on a stick, cheesy pretzels on a stick, deep-fried pickles on a stick, frozen bananas on a stick, etc. . . . My favorite is martini on a stick. A frozen alcoholic Popsicle.
We also exchange belated Christmas presents, since everyone was somewhere else for the holidays. Hailey and Lenny went to Brainerd to visit Lenny’s family (scary), and my mom and dad booked a Caribbean cruise like the Kellers, in the hopes that some warm weather would make my dad’s health issues go away. He’s been working too hard and gets worn down easily. I give Mom and Dad a new flatscreen TV. I give Hailey a gift certificate to Keller’s for new clothes and I give Lenny a new box of ice-fishing lures.
They didn’t get me anything. Nobody. Not even my mom and dad. They smile and say I have everything already, don’t I? This makes me mad for some reason, even though it’s completely and totally true. In the midst of the rest of them opening presents I find myself childishly wanting attention and I announce that I’m opening a college fund for each of the twins.
“Opening a what?” Lenny asks.
“A college fund, Lenny. It’s like a coffee can, but bigger.”
At home that night I find Pho has updated the Ice Empress. She appears with a big X of electrical tape over her mouth, a result of my telling Pho to “just shut her up!” Now I wince as she mumbles incoherently. I put a Post-it note on Pho’s Yoo-hoo sitting on the counter:
Pho Fang!
Please degag the Ice Empress. It’s creepy.
Just give her new words or something.
Love, Auntie J
I go exercise with Big D. We have a standing appointment for every Wednesday at three. We usually go jogging, and often through dicey neighborhoods. He says it makes me run faster.
Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married Page 17