If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (17 page)

“That really works for you?” I asked Jenny earnestly.

“Totally,” she replied. “You know what the best part is? When we buy each other gifts, they’re really meaningful. I mean, if you get Joe some sweater he doesn’t like, he doesn’t just have to wear it, he has to wear it knowing that he paid for half of it.”

Jenny had a point—and it would sure make things simpler if they ever got divorced, knock on wood—but I still had concerns. What if one of them broke an arm or got cancer and couldn’t work? What if the house needed a major repair and one of them couldn’t afford their half? What if Rob had some massive midlife crisis and went out and bought a dozen fat gold chains or decided to get hair plugs?

Jenny just laughed. “We’re still a team,” she insisted. “Neither of us would do anything the other was really opposed to with our money. But if I want to get a massage a week or send my mom a plane ticket for her birthday, I just do it. I can’t imagine living any other way.”

I still thought it was weird, probably for the same reason purple hair and those gross earring holes the size of quarters still strike me as weird: I am a creature of habit and I don’t really embrace change. In my mind, marriage is when you throw all of your respective shit—your cats, dogs, pots, pans, furniture, quirks, neuroses, and checkbooks—into one house, where the whole mess magically morphs into a home. Call me crazy, but I like the perks of commingled currency. You know, the familiarity and consistency, knowing someone’s got my back, not having to write a dozen checks a month, oh, and having unrestricted access to half of someone else’s money.

After seven years of marriage, I am sure of two things:
First, never wallpaper together,
and second, you’ll need two bathrooms.
Both for her. The rest is a mystery.

• DENNIS MILLER •

 

 

Though I have found that my husband can insult and infuriate me in just about any room in the house, the injustices that I suffer in the bathroom are uniquely revolting. I say this while fully acknowledging the fact that Joe never
ever
leaves the toilet seat up means that relative to many women, I am married to a living saint. (I had one boyfriend who never
ever
put the damned thing down. You’d think that after a year or so of plunging assfirst into the frigid bowl in the darkest hours of the night, I’d have learned to check the seat status before sitting down, but that’s where you’d be giving my half-asleep self way too much credit. His recurring response was, “At least I’m not peeing on the seat.” Gee, dear. Thanks for the surplus of courtesy!)

It was actually a restroom incident that almost thwarted my relationship with Joe before it ever really even started. It was our very first date, and Joe came to my apartment to pick me up. We may have enjoyed a glass of wine on the patio or a quick chat on the living room couch, I can’t recall. What I do remember is Joe asking if he could use the bathroom before we left for dinner. Naturally I’d spit-shined every inch of my apartment in anticipation of his visit, so I led the way to the tidy little jewel in my apartment’s admittedly dinky but nevertheless spotless crown.

He was in and out in a flash, and off we went to dinner. The food was lovely and the conversation flowed easily; Joe steered me through the crowded restaurant with his hand placed gently on the small of my back. I felt like royalty. When we finished dinner we made our way back to the car and shared our very first, very memorable kiss in the corner of the parking garage. Afterward Joe drove me home, kissed me again (even more memorably, for the record), and left. I bolted to the bathroom to make sure I didn’t look like Courtney Love after our little liplock, and there it was, a neon sign heralding my utter incompatibility with this otherwise staggeringly perfect man: The soiled hand towel, scrunched up and wadded down behind the towel bar like an oversized terrycloth spit bomb.

Oh bloody hell, he’s a slob!
was my first thought. Why would I think anything else? I hadn’t seen his apartment yet (not that that information would have helped in his defense), so all I had to base my judgment on were two meetings where he’d managed to project an orderly appearance and seemingly meticulous grooming practices. But anyone could pretend to be neat and conscientious
twice
. I wasn’t sure if I should see him again.

“Are you out of your demented, irrational mind?” my sane friend Andrew asked kindly. Andrew had enjoyed the privilege of listening to me gush about Joe since the day I had met him, and even though Andrew wasn’t gay (he had a very nice girlfriend himself), he had been almost more excited about this date than I was. Which was saying a lot. “Jenna, you’ve had the hots for this guy for months!” my friend went on. “Maybe Joe’s
not
a pig. Maybe he was just so excited to get back out of there and be with you that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he really
is
a filthy, disgusting slob. Who cares? You’re neat enough for fourteen people anyway. You can’t seriously be considering writing him off because of a scrunched-up towel!”

Because Andrew had effectively made me feel like a threearmed circus freak, I promised him I’d give Joe another chance. (I should probably mention here that Joe emphatically denies any recollection of or involvement in Towelgate. But why on earth would I have dreamed this up? I’m telling you, I was smitten.)

Every single time my husband uses the bathroom, he stays in there for twenty to thirty minutes. No one really knows what he’s doing (okay, we actually do), but we know better than to disturb “the king” on his throne.

CHERYL

 

 

My reservations reared their ugly multiple heads once again when Joe invited me to his place. I was impressed to find that he lived in a storybook Spanish-style house in a great part of town, even if he did share it with a roommate. Then I saw the inside.

His bedroom furnishings consisted of a single mattress on the floor wrapped in a faded plaid flannel sheet, a tiny nondescript desk, and a couple of dusty plastic milk crates doubling as a dresser. A giant beach towel was tacked to the wall above the single window, where someone with a different decorating sensibility might have hung a rod with curtains on it. The living room was home to the smoked-glass coffee table and armoire he’d built in high school. (I admit I was deeply impressed by the meticulous craftsmanship, even if the style wasn’t exactly mine . . . or of the particular decade we were living in at the time.) The seating consisted of a pair of itchy brown couches draped in even itchier Mexican blankets. I think there may have been a beanbag or Papasan chair, too. And then there was his bathroom.

“I didn’t even know they
made
blue grout!” I said obtusely, studying the charming Spanish tile chamber closely. “Oh my God, that’s not grout, is it?” But I was young and in love and Joe was like a supercharged human magnet to me. I wanted to be near him at all costs, even if it meant rubbing elbows—literally—with a room full of filthy fungi and their kabillions of tiny airborne spore-spawn. I went through gallons of mildew remover and shredded several towels in the process, but all of the elbow grease in the world plus a chemical cocktail that could kill a horse couldn’t restore that grout to its former chalkiness. It was too far gone. A four-dollar pair of shower shoes was a quick and easy temporary fix; insisting on showering at
my
apartment was the long-term solution.

The most annoying thing about my husband is that he has a very slight
touch of OCD, which means, among other things, that I am not allowed
to get the bath mat wet. Ever. I am supposed make sure my feet are
dry when I step onto the mat. Isn’t the purpose of the mat to
dry your
feet
?

JANET

 

 

Eventually Joe and I bought a house together, and in retrospect I wonder if I was smoking crack in my sleep at the time because the 1,100-square foot cottage we traded our combined lives’ savings to mortgage had but one tiny bathroom. We talked of adding another one down the road, but we didn’t have the money to do it right away. (Hell, we could barely afford to put toilet paper in the one we had.) For a while we managed just fine, mostly because we were giddy new homeowners and the house was our baby and
nobody says anything bad about the baby
, even if it’s got three extra nipples and a horn growing out of its forehead. The baby is perfect, and the horn just makes it more “charming.” (We used the word
charming
a lot in those days; that and
quaint
. As in, “Isn’t it quaint the way only one person can stand in the kitchen at a time?” And “Look at these charming old-fashioned rope-and-pulley windows! Too bad they don’t open!”) But as I said, Joe and I both loved our perfect little house-baby with all of our combined might, at least until the fateful day when our digestive systems decided to operate in perfect harmony. Since my husband is far bigger and faster than me, naturally he beat me to the bowl.

“Joe!” I shouted into the door that he had just slammed in my face. “I need to get in there!”

“Well, obviously you can’t right now,” he said calmly, his voice muffled but still sounding suspiciously smug.

“Joe! Come on! You know I can’t hold it! What am I supposed to do?” I was hopping up and down on crossed legs.

“Sorry, honey, but there’s nothing I can do. The party’s already started. You could go outside?” He wisely said this last bit as a question.

“I am not going to take a crap in my own backyard!” I yelped stupidly, as if I might consider taking a crap in someone
else’s
backyard.

“Then I guess you’re just going to have to wait,” he replied.

Sixteen years passed.

“Jesus, Joe! Are you reading
Atlas Shrugged
in there?” I bellowed, banging on the door. “My insides are about to implode! I am serious, I think I might be dying!”

I did manage to hold it together (so to speak), even though it appeared that my significant other was in no great hurry to come to my aid. After I finally got my turn, I began rifling through my office drawers, desperate to find a mechanical pencil and a pad of graph paper. There was no longer any doubt in my mind: We were going to have to add that second bathroom.

One morning (the morning poops are always eventful in our home—why
is that?) while I was making breakfast for our ten-year-old son, my
husband walked into the kitchen and announced, “You’re not going to
believe this! I just pooped a perfect porpoise!” It’s important to note the
look of absolute amazement on his face. As I stood there, mouth agape,
he continued, “I’m not kidding! It even had the little fin on top and was
arched and everything!” Needless to say, I was even more speechless
when my son asked to see it. Because only a son would ask to see “it,”
right? I can’t imagine a daughter asking to see “it.” Thankfully it had
been flushed out to the ocean where it could swim happily ever after.

SYLVIA

 

 

Fortunately for my bladder and bowels, I got pregnant shortly after the urgency incident, so we started shopping for a bigger house. Joe had a laundry list of must-have criteria his dream dwelling would have. This list included but was in no way limited to a decent-sized yard, a large garage, an office for him, and space for a vegetable garden. As long as the home we bought was relatively cute and in a good neighborhood and
had at least two bathrooms
, I was on board.

We wound up buying a nearly hundred-year-old farmhouse that had a majestic two-and-a-half bathrooms. Half, shmalf! This translated into
three toilets
and I felt like I’d won the lavatory lottery. Sure, every one of these rooms dramatically needed updating, and one of the toilets was actually perched precariously atop a slab of rickety plywood, and the plumbing was sketchy at best so you had to master the art of the multiple flush, and if you were foolish enough to turn on your blow dryer while anything else in the house was plugged in, you’d better know how to change a fuse. Still, I was delighted by the knowledge that I would never have to consider dropping trou in my own yard again.

Even with three distinct and far-apart rooms in which to do our respective business, there were land mines to navigate. One of our new home’s bathrooms—unfortunately the one that would have to be deemed the “master bath” because of its adjacency to the “master bedroom,” although there was certainly nothing masterful about either of these rooms—had a second door that opened directly across from the main entrance to the house. You know, the front door.
The front, glass door.
Talk about a design flaw. More than once I found myself sitting there happily perusing the Pottery Barn catalog when the room would flicker with the telltale shadow play that meant someone was walking up the front path. In a panic I’d leap up, ankles bound by Lycra lace and hands crossed fig-leaf style across my lady parts, shuffle sideways toward the door, and give it a hearty slam. The UPS guy loved me. When it was Joe busting me in this indisposed position, he’d be furious. “How hard is it to remember to close a stupid door?” he’d want to know. And I admit, before I had given birth these instances were particularly traumatic. But it turns out that after you have crapped
on a table
in the presence of a dozen or so strangers, lots of formerly degrading activities don’t really bother you so much. Like the book says,
everyone poops
.

Because of its aforementioned proximity to our bedroom, it was that ill-planned little cubicle of a room that Joe and I wound up fighting about the most. Mostly, the arguing was simply about who was in there first, as it really wasn’t big enough for both of us. There was a single sink, which meant if Joe was brushing or flossing or shaving or pondering his enviable brows, I was out of luck. But the worst part was the horrible prefabricated fiberglass shower/tub combo that had a shower head that had been installed at the perfect height—if you happened to be a family of gnomes.