I Can't Complain (11 page)

Bob’s meticulousness ratcheted up a notch in 2003 after
Publishers Weekly
ran an interview with me. Before the reporter came to the house, I hid the junk, vacuumed, made coffee, even made the beds. When the interview ran, it described me in my “cheerfully cluttered kitchen,” which I found adorable. Bob did not. Suddenly countertop essentials—vases filled with wooden utensils, pepper mills, the bagel guillotine, the ibuprofen, a cutting board or two, the spoon rests—looked ominously to him like the un-put-away.

Are you asking, “If he cares so much, why doesn’t
he
clean up?” Well, he does. Weekend mornings he’s at his tidiest and therefore most annoying. When I’m in a good mood, I find the hum of the carpet sweeper, a tic while he’s watching TV, mildly amusing. But other days, the whir of that mechanical brush lapping up the sunroom’s crumbs sounds like a rebuke. He looks up and sees me frowning. “I’m cleaning,” he says. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s your body language,” I grumble. “I know you: You’re saying, ‘I work all week and I shouldn’t have to be cleaning up after you.’” I have resorted to name-calling: Mr. Clean. Hazel. Sue Ann Nivens.

I am neat in ways that don’t count on the Bob scale: I disinfect my sponges regularly in the microwave or dishwasher. I maintain an accordion file of clipped recipes that are divided into categories and graded. My spices are alphabetized, and my closet is arranged by color. I have my strengths, just as Bob has his weaknesses. I accuse him of being, in the words of Holden Caulfield, a secret slob, the out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of housekeeper. Whereas I can put my hands on an RSVP card as its deadline approaches and never pass through a stationery department without augmenting my supply of file folders, he shoves everything into drawers. I recycle. He keeps radiology journals that date back to Madame Curie.

If it were sexism, I’d complain louder, but it’s DNA: Grandma Hinka’s values visited, late in life, upon the grandson. He’d want any roommate, wife or no wife, to be crazy clean. I do try, because I understand that immaculate quarters are more gratifying than a pigsty. He is capable on some nights of hiding his dismay at the mess that I call cooking because dinner is on the table and cumin’s in the air.

We’ll work it out. I have called for a morning grace period: Allow me to eat my toast before I must refrigerate the butter and wash the cup I’m drinking from. I appeal to his scientific side: One shouldn’t swab the decks with the bacteria-laden sponge at the same time one is prepping food, should one?

I’ve heard that some women grab a comb and lipstick when their husband pulls into the driveway.
What’s so difficult?
I ask myself.
After all these years, don’t I know how to put a smile on his face?
The back door opens. I shove the potato peels down the disposal, and, with rubber-gloved hands, I wave.

M
Y HUSBAND HAS EXCELLENT
taste, inherited from his late father, a sharp dresser with an impeccable eye, whose favorite cultural institution when visiting Boston was Filene’s Basement. Though not a slave to fashion, my husband likes his wife to dress in what he views as elegant yet tasteful attire. And the best way to achieve this, he once believed, was to accompany me on shopping trips.

In my less confident youth, I complied. I even solicited his vote on a dress that was my first choice for a rather special occasion—our wedding. He didn’t like it. I still remember it longingly: two-piece, a bit Edwardian, ivory silk crepe yet affordable. “Are you sure?” I asked, as if a fiancé belonged in a bride’s dressing room. He was sure. I retreated.

Might you have expected more fashion backbone from a woman who graduated from college the year
Ms.
magazine was launched? Yes. I didn’t have then what I’ve developed over many decades of marriage: the ability to overrule him and find a cure for, at least in this context, that wifely condition, the disease to please.

Our son helped. Somewhere in his teenage years, after his dad criticized something or other—haircut, sneakers, item of clothing—Ben said, “Ego boundaries, Dad.” It seemed so simple and good-natured, yet so profound. I can’t report that my husband’s feedback mechanism is so finely tuned that he answered with, “You’re right. You are not me and vice versa.” We still have to invoke this phrase on a regular basis to remind Mr. Arbiter of Taste that my ruffled chili-red scarf from the local arts festival is wrapped around my neck and not his. I hasten to add that I don’t have oddball taste in clothes. I am not one of those women who calls attention to herself by sewing sequins on her bodices or gluing feathers to her eyeglasses. My taste, I insist, is separate but equal, just a touch more . . . idiosyncratic.

What I’ve learned over the years is that I can wear him down, sartorially speaking, as if administering a series of allergy shots. I expose him to the offensive element—say, a tweed swing jacket, circa 1940, that I paid $50 for. “The white gloves,” he notes, gazing forlornly at the complete ensemble. “Now it’s a costume.” I remove the gloves for another day, for dinners with friends who will leave their husbands and loden coats at home. Compromise, I’ve heard, is helpful within the institution of marriage.

My late-in-life confidence was born of practicality: I was leaving to catch a plane, heading for the West Coast, donning swing jacket number two, pale yellow wool, mint condition. “Please,” Bob begged again. “Please don’t.” Did I mention that this was a solo trip? That he was fretting about what I’d be seen in three thousand miles away? Not only did I leave wearing the hated coat, but I was able to report from Seattle and San Francisco, “Thank goodness I overruled you. It’s blustery out here.”

I’d estimate that ninety percent of the time, I wear what I want to wear. One still needs those mutually agreed upon outfits for events like the office holiday party, his camp, where ego boundaries are a little fuzzier. And, okay, I still don’t wear in his presence the darling nylon blouses, circa 1950, or the beaded sweater he doesn’t realize is very much back in style. That’s me being peaceable. I have plenty of other options, so why make him squirm? Again, marital longevity loves compromise.

My most recent victory involved a silk flower pin, an orange tiger lily. How great it looked on my black turtleneck, and how perfect to wear to lunch at my mother-in-law’s retirement village. “Not that,” Mr. Arbiter begged. “I hate it.” I smiled and explained: Ladies of a certain age would love it. It was both old and new, a little Edna St. Vincent Millay and a little
Sex and the City.
He didn’t care. He hated that show. I didn’t budge. When I entered the dining hall, first Rita gasped, then Thelma, then Sylvia, then Essie, in admiration of my boutonniere. Essie herself was sporting a fabric red rose. She told me that I should go to the millinery district in New York, where I could buy many such adornments for a song.

Bob smiled the smile of the vanquished. “He loves to come shopping with me,” I explained.

W
HEN I MET BOB
, he was twenty-two and renting a basement apartment under a funeral home in Boston’s Kenmore Square. His meal plan was boyish and homely: steak, stewed tomatoes, creamed corn, and frozen bagels. He told me he didn’t like chicken or fish, which put two check marks in the minus column, boyfriend-wise. A taste for fish was important in my family; my maternal grandparents had immigrated from Riga, Latvia, and my grandmother was famous for the depth and breadth of her haddock repertoire.

It wasn’t long before I realized that Bob
did
like fish and poultry, but that his mother had baked hers until the internal temperature no longer registered on a thermometer. His taste buds had been desiccated and led astray; they needed a guide, a helpmeet, a girl who had the Baltic in her DNA.

Because he was in graduate school and I earned $8,500 a year, our restaurant dates meant hot turkey sandwiches, Dutch, at the Linwood Bar and Grill ($2). Occasionally we’d splurge and order the roast turkey dinner ($3). Recognizing us as regulars, a kind waitress slipped us saucers of extra meat with a wink. Shrimp in lobster sauce on Queensberry Street seemed haute enough, as did advancing from pepperoni to anchovy pizzas. Bob started paying attention to wine, and I stopped putting ice cubes in my Chianti.

Food got fashionable around the time our jobs paid more. We bought our first Cuisinart in 1977; a wok in ’79, a fish poacher in ’80, a coffee grinder in ’85. Things escalated: pasta went fresh, rice became basmati, mushrooms were dried, fish was raw. Bob discovered the Food Channel and many things his wife was doing wrong. Did I skin my tomatoes before making a sauce? Were my bay leaves from Turkey or California?

This is how far we’ve traveled, gastronomically: I am known to murmur over dinner, after Bob confides that my osso buco isn’t quite as good as last time, “It’s tough living with a restaurant critic.” I grouse a little. I tell him it took three hours, and maybe he’d like to send it back. Maybe he’d prefer a nice can of Progresso after a hard day’s work.

“Do you want me to lie and say I love it?” he asks. He points out that which is true, and what makes me pay attention to the feedback: When he likes something, he’s rapturous. If our company holds back, Bob doesn’t wait for guests to say, “This is delicious.” He speaks right up. Last time we had company, I made roasted pears. The guests were having an animated discussion that wasn’t about dessert. Bob dug in. I heard a moan, a private ecstatic whimper. Then another.

“Good?” I asked.

“This,” Bob said with great conviction, as if he hadn’t said it a hundred times before, “is the best thing I ever ate.”

Food appreciation of this magnitude leads to cooking, which leads to his kitchen rituals: First, he consults eight or nine favorite cookbooks and searches them for virgin territory. He calls out his nominees: The cassoulet! The black cod with the red-miso glaze! To which I say, “Do we have to? The salmon on the grill with the mesquite is so nice.” Step two: indefatigable shopping. If the recipe calls for black mustard seeds and mine are brown, he volunteers to jump in the car and drive to . . . Where might he find black mustard seeds, or mache instead of frisée, or lamb from New Zealand rather than Northampton? I explain: chefs expect owners of their cookbooks to be flexible. Toasted pignoli suggested for a garnish? Sorry; I thought I had some. No one will miss them. Sometimes I have to lie for his peace of mind. I don’t tell him that I padded the
polpette
with a little ground chicken because I didn’t have enough ground veal. Step three: assembly.
Mise en place.
Consult wife as to whereabouts of measuring spoons, measuring cups, garlic, lemon, grater, colander, and tahini.

Step four: sharpen the knife, this way and that, steel against steel, like an infomercial host, a fencer on KP. “What?” he asks me, frowning in the doorway. “Am I
not
supposed to sharpen the knife?”

I retreat at this point, before he asks me what country the olive oil is from.

“Bob made it,” I tell the company when they compliment the soup.

The chef takes a sip and frowns. “Not as good as last time,” he says.

I
AM SOMETHING OF AN EXPERT
in matters of annoying a husband when he’s trying to sleep. There’s the ritual of the emollients, involving hand cream, moisturizer, and lip gloss. There’s the thermostat, set too high, requiring discussion and/or adjustment. There’s my forgotten vitamin pill, two floors away in the kitchen. Or the porch light still burning, the e-mail unreturned, the water glass unrefreshed, the afghan off-kilter, the cable box on. In other words, this is about a twitchy wife and her marital bed, by which I mean the site of sleep, and not that other, more commonly and sensationally referenced thing: sex.

“Please sleep downstairs,” my husband groans, after imploring me to shut off the light and reminding me of his breadwinning 6
A.M.
alarm.

He is not unreasonable. He gets up at dawn, works very hard, and is exhausted most nights. Pillow talk is largely one-sided: I arrange myself, tuck the covers under my arms, flounce around while I choose whether to face east or west. Only seconds have passed when I say, “Good night, hon,” to which he moans, “Huh? Whah? You woke me up.” Despite this talent for nearly narcoleptic nodding off, he requires total blackout conditions in order to fall asleep, which correlate negatively with my need to read. I argue halfheartedly and insincerely, one foot off the mattress, book and glasses in hand, “If you can nap in the middle of the day with the TV on, why is total darkness and silence essential? Isn’t that hypocritical?”

“I have to get up at six,” I hear again.

Why argue? I love my holidays in the guest room. There I find nothingness—no curfew, no rules and regs, no remote control. “Of course,” I cluck on my way out. “You get up so early. And you have such a hard day tomorrow. I’ll go downstairs. I don’t mind.”

I’ve tried compromise. I’ve owned at least two of those miniature reading lights that hook onto your book and forestall marital spats, unless your bedfellow has transparent eyelids the way mine apparently does. Equally unsuccessful was an eye mask
pour l’homme,
the kind that Hollywood stars wore in movie-set boudoirs, but of the masculine variety: maroon silk patterned with golfers wearing knickers. He hated it. A mediator might say that flexibility is missing in our marriage around the subject of irreconcilable bedtimes. If only I
minded
losing to inflexibility; if only I was possessive of my half of the mattress or felt worried about it as a symbolic representation of sexual congress, I’d fight the good fight.

I shouldn’t have made fun of President and Mrs. Nixon in the 1970s for, among other things, sleeping apart. I’m older and wiser now, and I’ve got a little insomnia myself. I’m sure that separate White House bedrooms were a metaphor for nothing conjugal. Was I too young and callow to allow that a thoughtful president who tosses and turns all night might bunk elsewhere for a first lady’s sake?

Closer to home, neither one of us sees my furloughs as a romantic failure. It’s a luxury to have an extra bedroom and a partner who doesn’t miss you while he’s down for the count. It’s also about public health. At the first sign of a scratchy throat, his or mine, I volunteer to withdraw, to commence the quarantine. If it weren’t politically incorrect—the assumption that all Americans had a spare bedroom—the Surgeon General would recommend, along with frequent hand washing, that sick spouses take their germs down the hall.