If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (11 page)

Wrong. For approximately ten years, I would watch this ritual, waiting until the precisely perfect moment to say casually, “Don’t forget to rinse out the sink, please!”

“Does it really matter?” he’d ask.

“Yes, it
does
,” I’d reply. “If you do it right away, it takes three seconds. If you don’t do it right away, the crumbs harden and stick like little globs of glue and then I have to use a Brillo pad to get them off.” Those stuck-on crumbs had become symbolic, an emblem of all of my unheard pleas and unmet needs.

“Big deal,” he’d mutter.

“Exactly!” I’d shout, because when you have the exact same fight 6,392 times, you tend to pick up right where you left off the last time. “It shouldn’t be a big deal and it
wouldn’t
be a big deal if you’d just rinse the fucking sink when you were done! We’ve got the little sprayer and everything! How hard would that be, honestly?”

But time after infuriating time he’d forget, and I’d march into the kitchen in a huff and resentfully scour away the evidence of his passive-aggressive hatred for me.

“You do it on purpose, don’t you, just to piss me off?” I accused him one day.

“Do what?” he asked, a shoo-in for Best Actor in a Clueless Role.

“Leave your crumbs in the sink!” I bellowed.

“You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, shaking his head and sounding genuinely hurt. “You actually think that I go through my day trying to think of hundreds of tiny little ways to irritate you. You give me way too much credit, Jenna. I’m not that conniving. Having a spotless sink just isn’t important to me, so I forget. I know it
should
be important to me because it’s important to you, but you have a lot of little ‘things,’ you know? It’s hard to keep track of them all.”

Can you imagine? Playing the wise-and-rational card on me? The nerve! But I had to admit, I did sort of sound like a paranoid, insecure, and impossibly demanding nut-job when he put it that way. And I felt bad that I’d accused him of malice where there was none, but the important thing was that after that perfectly compelling little speech of his,
he stopped leaving crumbs in the sink
. I am not even making this up just to make him look good. Even though he was right that I did have “a lot of little things” that bugged me, and even though he had convinced me that he wasn’t borrowing extra crumbs from the neighbors so he could sprinkle them in the sink as part of an ongoing, evil plot to annoy me to death, and
even though I essentially admitted that I was being difficult and the crumbs weren’t that big a deal in the grand, overall scheme of the eternity that was our life together
, in the end I got what I wanted: a stupid clean sink. I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly how, but I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and my head down and appreciate it while it lasts.

For ten years my husband has not picked up a wet towel, washed
ketchup off of a dish, changed a lightbulb, or remembered trash day
without a friendly “How many times do I have to tell you?”

JENNY

 

 

I have a male friend who told me—in confidence and under threat of a lawsuit if I identified him by name or distinguishing characteristics, so for these purposes I’ll call him Sally—that men have figured out a foolproof way to get out of doing any dreaded housework:

“We suck on purpose,” Sal told me, speaking without permission for his entire gender. “We know that if we do a really bad job at something, you won’t ask us to do it again. Once I actually pretended that I couldn’t fold a simple hand towel in quarters. I just sort of scrunched it up in a wad and set it on the towel pile with a flourish and a triumphant ‘There!’ My wife hasn’t asked me to fold the laundry once since then.”

Joe is no Sally (and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d need to write). He is an adept towel folder and knows the secret to streak-free windows (newspaper, not paper towels). He doesn’t “suck on purpose” just to get out of doing the job. He doesn’t have to, because he tells me to my face that since there’s no way he could ever do any task to my unreasonable standards, he’s just not going to do it at all. And since he’s more or less right, it’s really hard to argue the point.

When I was in college, I preferred male roommates to female ones for several reasons: They had sex with strangers more often, which meant they were more likely to stay out all night and therefore not be at home eating my food. (And when they
were
home, they’d never touch my fat-free cottage cheese or homemade negative-calorie cabbage soup anyhow.) They didn’t care about décor, so I could hang whatever I wanted on the walls. They rarely borrowed, ruined, or lost my favorite skinny skirt. I am not sure if I was just a lot more blasé back then or it’s simply because I was drunk for the majority of that four-year stretch, but I don’t recall constantly being bothered by my guy roommates’ little domestic insults. You know, the never-made beds, the pile of dishes in the sink, the stinky socks on top of the washing machine (because lifting the lid or locating and then actually using a hamper would require herculean effort), the offhand admissions of oh-yeah-actually-I-
did
-drink-your-last-can-of-Diet-Coke-sorry. Now that I think about it, it must have been the booze, because that shit makes me mental on a daily basis.

Apparently I have a thing that drives Joe crazy, too: I like to use the lights in the house. I know, it’s selfish and indulgent, but it’s a little luxury I sometimes like to afford myself. Because of this, my husband has nicknamed me the “light leaver-onner” and has made it his personal mission in life to circle the house whenever he is home, turning off every light in his path. The criteria he uses to determine whether a certain light should be switched off is simple: If it’s on, it should be off. Regardless of the time of day, whether the light in question is serving any sort of purpose, or who might be using it at the time.

“I’m in here!” I shout from my perch on the throne, fumbling for the toilet paper I can almost make out in the shadows.

“I’m in here!” I yell, head in the dryer, my voice echoing in my ears like I’m trapped in a cartoon cave with a yodeler.

“I’m in here!”
I roar from the bathtub, searching for somewhere to place my razor before I sever a critical artery in the now pitch-darkness.

I should probably thank him for reducing our electric bill and being concerned about the environment and helping to preserve our natural resources so that our daughters will have lights someday. He’s probably thinking that without those lights,
their
husbands will have nothing to go around turning off. It’s sweet the way he wants to preserve the tradition, don’t you think?

Gee, Honey.
Are You Sick?
I Never Would
Have Guessed.

I love being married.
It’s so great to find that one special person
you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

• RITA RUDNER •

 

 

I was lucky enough to betroth myself to a man who is as healthy as a horse and has the immune system of a garlic-loving superhero to prove it.
Thank God.
Because when a runny nose is attached to a body that doesn’t also have a uterus, I think it’s safe to say the world is going to hear about it.

I’m not stereotyping here, am I? I have to believe I’m not, as pretty much every guy I’ve ever known—including the one who sired me, several I’ve lived with, and the one I eventually married—seems to follow the exact same script when he’s under the weather. He never has a “little cold” or a “touch of the flu.” He is never just sick; he is urgently, unreservedly, violently, pitifully, painfully sick. He could be dying, in fact. Nobody has ever felt as bad as he is feeling right this minute. Ever. He pretty much invented sick, or at the very least has single-handedly elevated it to a new extreme. At the first sign of excess nasal moisture or the faintest rattle in his chest, you might as well prepare yourself for the full-on shuffle-moanwoe-is-me routine, because if this were a wedding, the organist would have just hit the first unmistakable notes of “Here Comes the Bride.” (I realize that there is a chance that your spouse is among the handful of men who make up the exception to this rule. If that is the case, put down this book immediately and go scour YouTube for the BBC3’s “Man Cold” episode of the hilariously snarky and wonderfully inappropriate
Man Stroke Woman
show, featuring what I only wish were an exaggerated account of a man suffering from an acute viral upper respiratory tract infection. You know: a cold. It’s a sidesplitting little skit that has more than four million views as of this writing because at least that many women can relate to it. Watch the episode, then shut the hell up and count your blessings.)

When he has a cold he stuffs the ends of tissues into his nostrils so
that they hang down like white flags of surrender. He thinks it’s functional
and remembers doing that when he was twelve. Was I dreaming?
How can this be the sexy hunk I lusted over last week?

DEBORRAH

 

 

When a man (maybe not
your
one-in-a-kazillion mate) falls ill, all of the symptoms typically strike at once and with thunderous force. Male Instant-Onset Illness (MIOI) typically features a mild and generic litany of contradictory complaints, including but not limited to agonizing sniffles and congestion, excruciating fatigue and insomnia, piercing constipation and diarrhea, and unbearable sweats and chills. The cumulative effect of these symptoms is a sort of zombielike trance, which he will perfect by pacing around the house in his female partner’s immediate shadow.

“Unnhhhhh,” he moans, shuffling his slippers across the tile dramatically. Even if he is normally the poster boy for perfectly coiffed metrosexuals, his absurdly disheveled hair is standing on end in striking Cosmo Kramer fashion. His wife looks at him, wondering if he actually went to the trouble to locate and employ some sort of styling product to achieve this look. Then she turns away and proceeds to ignore him, because the groaning is annoying as hell and furthermore she is pretty sure five minutes ago he was a normal, symptom-free human being.

“Unnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he repeats, louder and longer this time, perhaps pressing the palm of his hand to his forehead, because guys never seem to understand that (a) you test for fever with your wrist, not your palm, and (b) it is a well-known scientific fact that you cannot be the judge of your own temperature.

If I refuse to acknowledge it, it’ll go away,
she says to herself foolishly as she picks up her pace in an attempt to put some distance between herself and the godforsaken moaning.

“Unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhh, sniff, snortle, [
hacking, phlegmy, here-comes-a-lung cough
].”

“You sick?” she asks, stopping, defeated. Shadow Boy bumps right into her back.

“I dink so,” he replies, plugging his nose from the inside by pressing his tongue into the back of his throat, in an effort to give his voice an air of crippling, incurable congestion.

“Sorry to hear it,” she says with a kindness she does not feel, stepping slightly away, just in case. “Want me to make you some tea?”

“Ogay,” he sniffles. “Ed baby sub soup?”

“Sure, yeah, tea and soup, coming right up,” she mumbles through gritted teeth.

Shadow Boy somehow manages to separate himself from her. He shuffles into the living room, moaning periodically so that nobody in the house accidentally forgets that
he is very, very sick
, and plops down onto the couch. The joyful sounds of
SportsCenter
fill the house.

She brings him his soup and his tea. He thanks her meekly before asking for a bigger spoon, the salt shaker, some crackers, more sugar, the phone, a few magazines, his woolly socks, and a blanket. She finds herself hoping—for a brief moment and while simultaneously wondering about their collective health insurance coverage—that he will require hospitalization sooner rather than later.

My hubby returned from an out-of-town business trip and you would
have thought he had a stage-four end-of-life disease. I brought out
throat lozenges plus the Vicks and told him to put a little dab inside
each nostril to help clear his head. What does he do? He smears a
huge glob of it under his nose. Five minutes later he appears in the
doorway shouting “My EYES, I got it in MY EYES, the fumes,
oh my
God
!” I told him it was a personal spastic issue and that I couldn’t help
him anymore. I liked him better when he had pneumonia. At least then
he was so sick, he was quiet.

TERI

*or frankly,
her

 

 

I posted a query on my blog asking women how they deal with a sickly spouse, and though an overwhelming majority offered some version of “I try to stay far,
far
away,” one lady actually got a little pissy with me. “Who doesn’t like a little pampering when we’re not feeling well?” she demanded, sneering at me with her words. “I offer juice, tissues, cold medicine, a cozy bed,
and
DVDs,” she added. (If you look closely, you can almost
see
the words
you heartless bitch
right there at the end.) Another gal took a decidedly practical stance. “I don’t bend over backward to take care of him, but I do bring him food and drinks. I can’t have him flat-out die on me, can I?” And then there’s my friend Jenny, who has honed her convalescent duties down to a single word: “Porn. In a man’s world, it solves everything. At the very least, it’ll occupy his tiny mind for a little while.”

Whether you ignore him, wait on him hand and foot, head out of town for a few days, or distract him with back-to-back showings of
On Golden Blonde
, try to keep in mind that it’s not his fault he’s a big fat pansy-ass. He’s
inherently
not good at managing discomfort because he hasn’t been groomed for it virtually since birth the way you have. Between wrangling your pendulous breasts into a constricting wire-trimmed undergarment on a daily basis, regularly having thousands of tiny hairs ripped off your body with strips of molten wax, repeatedly wedging your mostly flat and plainly rectangular-shaped feet into triangular footwear perched on top of twin four-inch spikes, and let’s not forget occasionally expelling a creature the size and shape of a large watermelon (sorry, a watermelon
with shoulders
) out of your vagina—or alternately, having the watermelon person or people pulled out through a man-made gash in your abdomen—you know what pain is. And it’s not a little tickle in the back of your throat or a blocked freaking nostril.