A Cup of Comfort for Couples

by Colleen Sell

  He nodded. “It was the same with me and Louie. I had no intention of getting a cat. Of course, he had other ideas. Fixed me with those big eyes of his, and I was lost.”

  I shifted my gaze from the sleeping cats to his concerned face. It was a good face, I decided.

  “You know,” he continued in a matter-of-fact voice, we should get them together for play dates. That way, they won’t forget each other, and we can get to know one another.”

  When I stiffened in response, he added hastily, “As friends. I mean, you’re new to town, and I’ve lived here forever. I could show you around.”

  At the expectant look on his face, I nodded and the knot around my heart began to loosen.

  Michael and I began spending time together, and our relationship grew so gradually, it’s difficult to know when we crossed the line from friendship to love. We had a simple wedding ceremony on the summit of a mountain overlooking the harbor town I’d come to think of as home. Michael moved into my house, and the comforting routine of our marriage helped wear smooth the jagged memories of my life before. When we were blessed with a child, I searched the solemn eyes of our infant girl and found nothing of Lucy. A part of me died that day, but another part began to heal.

  Our daughter, Sara, is now fifteen and has grand plans: she wants to be a veterinarian like her father. Michael is thrilled at the thought of sharing with Sara his practice and stewardship of the shelter we now run.

  Our cat, Louie, still makes an effort to run around the house, but most evenings he lounges before the fire waiting for us to rub his belly. The years have been less kind to Snowball. Arthritic and nearly blind, she rarely ventures beyond the quilts I scatter about the floor in a pattern meant to catch the sun as it moves throughout the day. Although my heart aches at the thought of losing her, I know that when she passes, Lucy will be waiting for her.

  When Snowball hears my voice, she purrs in greeting and waits to be picked up. I hold her close and whisper her name, one that anchors me to the life I had before and reminds me of how blessed I am to have found Michael. Snowball, my little matchmaker.

  — Ariella Golani

  My Other Husband

  I have been happily married for twenty-nine years . . . to two men. Fortunately, they both occupy the same body, so I’m not in danger of being carted off to prison anytime soon.

  Husband number one’s name is Fred — a hard-working mechanical engineer, quiet, reserved, an honorable man. Intelligent and analytical, he’s a no-nonsense kind of guy on whom I can depend no matter what kind of crisis comes along. I am a free spirit, usually led by emotions, not logic; my response to most serious problems is to laugh and let God worry about them. Fred’s is to weigh out the circumstances and calculate an appropriate course of action.

  We are two very different personalities. So when people I know meet Fred for the first time, they are usually surprised. “He’s so . . . serious,” they say.

  I just smile because they don’t know my “other” husband, Freddie.

  I’ll give you a for instance. You know how boring grocery shopping is? Not with Freddie. When he comes with me, this is usually how it goes:

  We walk into the market and Freddie says, “I wanna push the cart!”

  “Why?”

  “I’m the man; I push the cart.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  And the adventure begins. I’m standing there trying to figure out which soup is the best buy, and when I go to put the chosen one into the cart, Freddie runs about six steps ahead. So I run to catch up, and he sprints about eight to ten steps farther on. Before long, I’m chasing him up and down the aisles, and we’re laughing like fools, and people are beginning to stare.

  Finally, stifling a giggle, I grab the vehicle away from him. “Okay, mister, you’ve lost your cart-pushing privileges! I’m pushing the cart from now on.”

  “Hmmph.”

  The minute I set my purse in the basket, Freddie jumps on the front — effectively stalling it where it stands.

  “Get off the cart, Freddie.”

  “I wanna ride!”

  “You’re heavy. Get off!”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud. All right, but behave yourself.”

  I’m checking out the prices on the paper towels, and when I turn around, Freddie, now off the cart and about fifteen feet away, is in his Michael Jordan mode — making basket after basket with assorted brands of toilet paper. There are now approximately twenty packages of tissue in my basket.

  Trying not to laugh, and thus to encourage him, I yell, “Stop that!”

  People are gathering to watch.

  Freddie, all innocence, asks, “What?”

  I put all the toilet tissue back on the shelf and continue down the aisle. Freddie has disappeared, thank goodness. For the next five minutes, I finish my shopping in peace.

  At the checkout counter, the clerk is ringing up my groceries when I stop her. “Hey, those aren’t my ice cream bars.”

  “Uh, they were in your basket, ma’am.”

  “How did those four packages of Cheetos get in there?”

  “Hmmm,” she says with a lifted eyebrow. “You might want to ask him.” She points at Freddie, who has suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, grinning like a hyperactive four-year-old.

  I look at him suspiciously. “Where have you been?”

  “Just messin’ around.”

  The clerk waves for my attention. “So will you be wanting this package of chicken feet?”

  “Freddie!”

  At this point, Freddie gives me his most lovable grin and in his best Bart Simpson voice says, “Ha ha! You love me!”

  “No, I don’t. You’re a pain in the butt.”

  “Yes, you do!”

  I sigh. “Okay. I do. But I don’t have to like it.”

  By now, the clerk and the three people behind us in line are laughing out loud.

  In the car as we drive home, Freddie goes into his bet-I-can-drive-you-crazy mode, grabbing my knee, tickling the back of my neck, rolling my window up and down.

  “Quit it, Freddie!”

  The response is, of course, an escalation of the behavior — until I give him The Look, and he settles down.

  All is quiet for the next quarter mile, then suddenly he says, “Ha ha!”

  I groan. “Ha ha, what?”

  “Ha ha!” he repeats, tickled with himself. “You’re married to me!”

  So, you see, I have the best of what marriage can be. I have a husband who is a rock in every storm and a steadfast partner in a serious marriage. A husband who shows me he loves me with his hard work around the house and in his job, by handling our finances brilliantly, and displaying his affection frequently with a warm hug and a light kiss.

  But I also get to live with a bona fide character, a best friend who constantly surprises me, who makes me laugh like nobody’s business, and who honestly believes that affection is best shown by a well-timed, heartfelt wedgie.

  Do I know what it means to be loved and in love? You betcha.

  — Tina Wagner Mattern

  Heart and Sole

  When, at age twenty-five, I was about to marry my college sweetheart, there was no shortage of advice from my well-meaning Italian family on how to achieve and maintain marital bliss. Unfortunately, much of it was a bit too 1950ish for my taste and did not really fit marriage in the waning years of the twentieth century.

  Have a warm supper on the table each night.

  Yeah, right. My husband and I needed to pay for our expensive college degrees; we were up to our ears in student loans. Both of us would be working for years to come, and so we’d be fortunate to find the take-out food still warm by the time our plastic forks dug into it.

  Bathe the kids and put them in clean clothes before he gets home.

  When we finally did have kids, I was quite certain we’d be challenged enough trying to coordinate who would pick them up from daycare or baseball practice
. The kids would be bathed no more than three times a week — if they were lucky.

  Show him you appreciate him and are interested in him by redoing your hair and makeup at the end of the day.

  Really? I’m barely up in time to do it right before I go to work.

  Keep a tidy house, vacuum and dust frequently, and keep his closet and drawers filled with freshly laundered clothes.

  Vacuum the house? Do his laundry? Pffftthhh! My vacuum would be buried under loads of laundry I had yet to fold — my laundry; surely Dan would do his own.

  Don’t go to bed angry.

  This, I was sure, would be the most difficult bit of advice to follow. I don’t easily let go of things I’m upset about. Neither does Dan, for that matter. And with all of the demands on our time, it was unlikely we would have much time to work things out before the lights were turned off for the night.

  Frustrated with the seemingly impractical advice I had received, I turned to the two people who knew me best and who, coincidentally, had been married nearly fifty years: my grandparents. I figured they must have some good advice they would be willing to share — an advance on my inheritance perhaps, something I could pass on to my future children. So one day while sitting at their kitchen table as my grandmother cooked and my grandfather sat in “his” chair sipping a glass of wine, I asked the million-dollar question.

  “Nonnie,” I began.

  “Yes, honey,” she replied, opening the oven to baste the chicken.

  “I’m looking for some advice.”

  “Advice about what, honey?”

  The smells were tantalizing, and I inhaled deeply. “Everyone is telling me that for my marriage to work I need to do Dan’s laundry, and keep the house clean, and bathe the kids, and get dolled up for him. That will be impossible. I’ll have a job outside the home, too, and won’t have the time to do all that. Besides, I expect Dan to do his share of the house-work and childcare, too. So what can I do to help our marriage last like yours and Grandpa’s?”

  Nonnie looked lovingly at Grandpa and said, “Touch him with your toes.” Then she turned back to the oven to baste the chicken.

  Touch him with my toes? That’s as useless as all the other advice I’ve received, I thought. Or was I missing something?

  “What do you mean, ‘Touch him with my toes’?” I asked.

  “Touch him with your toes. It’s as simple as that.”

  “But, Nonnie, how is that supposed to help me have a long and happy marriage?”

  She closed the oven door and turned to me. “Sweetie, you and Dan will have many arguments about the littlest things. And after some of those silly disagreements, you won’t feel like sharing your bed with him. Be thankful that you have someone who loves you to share a bed with. Be thankful that you can touch him with your toes.”

  I had my doubts. How could touching toes ensure a lasting, happy marriage? Then again, who was I to question the validity of something that obviously worked for them? All I could do was ponder the possibility as I waited for Nonnie’s delicious chicken and for my own marriage to begin.

  A few months before their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, Grandpa passed away. Since then, Nonnie has not spent one night in the bed they used to share. I’m quite certain that each night she imagines the feel of Grandpa’s skin against the bottoms of her feet and the warmth that always radiated from his legs.

  In the nearly two decades that my husband, Dan, and I have been married, more often than not I’ve used my toes in a not-so-gentle effort to encourage him to roll over and stop snoring. But there have been many times when, because pride and a stubborn Italian streak make it too difficult to apologize out loud, I gently touch his leg with my toes to say, “I’m sorry. Let’s break down the barriers between us. Let’s connect.” And some nights, I place my feet mere inches from his leg just to feel his presence, grateful that I have someone — that I have Dan — to go through life with.

  I am saddened by the certainty that someday I will no longer be able to touch Dan with my toes. But I am eternally grateful to my grandparents for their simple wisdom. For I am thankful to have someone who loves me to share a bed with, someone I can lie next to every night and touch with my toes. And when my children and my grandchildren are about to take their own nuptials, I will give them their “inheritance” as casually and as offhandedly as my grandparents gave mine to me: Touch toes.

  — Carolyn Huhn-Sullivan

  A Love Worth Waiting For

  Once upon a time, more than three decades ago, to be precise, an Oregon writer met a Stockholm doctor in a San Francisco restaurant and they ended up touring the city together, talking and walking, walking and talking. The next weekend, he would be in Seattle, so she followed, and again they enjoyed many hours of talking and walking, walking and talking. As the woman drove south to her home in Oregon while he flew home to Sweden, she had the strange feeling of leaving her best friend.

  When the two platonic friends had parted, they’d said they would not write. Yet, their letters crossed in the mail and continued across the continents, sharing careers, families, philosophy, their mutual love of nature. Surely they would never meet again, so the letters were honest and without guile.

  Two years passed, and the Swedish doctor came to work in Seattle for a year. The man and woman met again, and began to fall in love. But he had a family to whom he was committed; she acknowledged that and honored his integrity. Once again, they reluctantly said farewell, and she went on to marry another.

  Over the years, she would wonder about the man and ponder the what-ifs and if-onlys.

  Nearly twenty years later, the woman had a dream. In the dream, the man stood in her kitchen with his wife. The wife — without sadness or anger — was turning over her husband to the woman. With a start, she awakened: What could her dream mean? What on earth was happening in his life?

  At the very same time on the other side of the world, the man typed the woman’s name into the Internet. Nothing. For months, he browsed the web, searching for the woman. Then, on this side of the globe, she typed in his name. Finally, they connected. His wife had died. She had divorced. Neither had forgotten the other.

  Once more the letters and now e-mail crossed. Early one July morning, the woman got a call. She hadn’t heard the man’s voice in two decades. He was at a medical conference in Denver. Within three hours, she was on a plane, risking everything on a spontaneous surprise visit. In a convention room filled with three hundred people, she found him. Twenty years spun back in time, and they were young again; nothing had changed.

  Nothing but circumstances, that is.

  In early November, the man flew the woman to his Sweden home for a two-week visit, which felt like a honeymoon.

  They went shopping together to decorate the new home he had just built. They wound through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan (Old Town Stockholm) and clambered four flights of a centuries-old building to meet his eighty-five-year-old mother, who greeted the woman with a hug. She met his three grown children, who thanked her for making their father so happy and presented her with a gift upon her departure. She met his best friends, and together they laughed like old companions.

  They visited the cemetery on All Soul’s Night, when families light candles and small lanterns on the graves. He spoke of the numbness, the pain, the daily walk through the woods to this green gravestone. At the wife’s grave, the woman burst into tears. “I always wanted you but not at this price, never at this price!” she cried. The man and woman held each other, and came to understand that “for all things, there is a season.”

  Each day he brought her breakfast in bed. Once more, they talked and walked, and walked and talked, and the days were seamless, fluid, without effort. They cleaned, and they cooked, and they entertained. They listened to music and read aloud. They lit candles morning and evening against the cold November darkness. They traipsed the woods, and he showed her favorite places: the meadow the young parents had cleared late each spring for
the children’s Midsommar Festival, the swimming rock, the enchanted hollow tree where the kids once played.

  They threw supplies into a duffel bag and climbed into his boat for the ninety-minute trip through the Stockholm Archipelago of 24,000 islands to his century-old cabin. The Baltic suddenly turned angry and wild, and she clung tightly to keep from being thrown from the banging boat while he steered them safely on. I would trust my life to this man she thought. I already am.

  They hunkered in the one-room cabin while the wind pounded at the red plank door. As the corner fire warmed the room, they stripped off layers of clothing and loneliness. Candlelight reflected in the tiny windowpanes and one another’s eyes in this wilderness on the edge of the world.

  Each day they laughed and loved and learned more about the other. Each day they marveled that life just couldn’t get better. And each day proved them joyously wrong.

  Then, these two people who so savored living alone agreed they would live together. It was only as obvious as eating and breathing. “We have two wonderful places to live in, we love each other, and the rest is just details,” the man said.

  He introduced her to Tanzania, East Africa, where he had worked with HIV/AIDS for years. Unsatisfied to be simply a tourist, she asked the universe to steer her toward something important to do. The very same day she met a local woman busy stirring a pot of ugali in an outdoor kitchen, and the two talked. The woman met her new friend’s sister, who invited her to see her village school.

  Ever the adventurer, the woman climbed onto a crowded, rickety bus and rattled 10 miles south of Dar es Salaam to sprawling Mbagala, where they got out and walked through dusty lanes where tourists never go. “Mzungo! Mzungo!” small African boys shouted at the white woman. Babies looked her way and burst into tears, goats brayed, and eyes followed until they stopped at Fatuma’s tiny home, where thirteen tots danced to the beat of a goatskin drum in a dingy room without toys or books.