If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (8 page)

I am sure it is because he is so deprived of bedroom entertainment (and I’m mostly talking about the televised kind here) at home that Joe acts like an inmate who’s just discovered his cell has a free cigarette machine whenever we walk into a hotel room.

Before I’ve even had a chance to scope out the honor bar or check to see if the last guests left anything good in the safe, he is sprawled spread-eagle on top of the comforter (he obviously doesn’t read the studies where they report the sorts of things they find on there), looking a bit like a hairy, mannish Angel with his remote control “gun” pointed at the TV. It matters not if the room’s set is smaller and older and has far fewer bells and whistles than any of the models we have at home. To Joe, the ability to indulge in this beloved pastime from the unparalleled comfort of a bed ranks up there with winning the Heisman Trophy, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the super lottery all in one day.

My husband, an astute guy who knows how to play any situation to his advantage, has picked up on the fact that “vacation rules” are quite different from “home rules.” They must be, if the wife who is a veggie-pushing nutrition Nazi at home will give in to her family’s pit stop pleas for Doritos and Yoo-Hoo and then actually be cool enough to call it dinner.

“Wow,” he’ll say, sucking the powdery processed cheese from his fingers. “I’m proud of you.”
For relaxing your ridiculously rigid standards for the first time in possibly ever
, is the part he is wise enough not to say out loud.

“Whatever,” I reply breezily. “We’re on vacation!”

Totally abusing my laid-back holiday attitude, he will try to squeeze as much TV time into any given getaway as I’ll allow. Every time we return to our hotel room, he molests the set like it’s his long-lost, war-torn lover. He begs me to order room service, thinking I’ll be impressed with his big-spender façade, when really the fantastical idea of watching TV and eating in bed—at the same time—is almost more than he can bear. If I protest, he flings my words back at me like poo in a monkey cage.

“Come on, honey,” he pleads. “We’re on vacation.”

Lots of wives complain about husbands whose nonstop channel surfing makes them dizzy and nauseated. I once read an article—and it was pure speculation, mind you, not a scientific exposé—that suggested that a man’s inability to settle on one channel could be merely an extension of his evolutionary need to expose himself to as many women as possible in the (subconscious) hope of maximizing reproductive success. In other words, more channels equal more chicks. Another theory suggests that channel surfing is just another of the many ways a man—the aggressive hunter to our more laid-back gatherer—is built to explore. Perhaps Joe is more evolved than most, because when it comes to television he’s not much of a surfer. In fact, I’d say if anything he’s a loiterer. Something on a random channel will catch his eye—a stock market ticker, a black-and-white movie with cowboy hats, anything to do with sports or nature, a big voluptuous pair of knockers—and he’ll be spellbound for hours.

One day he appeared to be watching a screen saver of a forest. It piqued my interest only in the is-that-TV-broken-or-is-hereally-watching-a-screen-saver? sort of way.

“Whatcha watching?” I asked.

“It’s a documentary about birds,” he replied.

“Is it interesting?” I prodded.

“Not really,” he admitted.

“Oh,” I said. “So why are you watching it?”

“I want to find out what happens,” he answered. “Besides, I’ve got an hour invested in it already.”

What I wanted to say is,
Dude, we have at least 899 other channels! Cut your losses! That’s already an entire hour of your life you’ll never get back!
But that combination of hopefulness and loyalty is rare and sweet, when you think about it. So instead, I did what I always do: I said good night and crawled into bed with Sheldon, the cats, and my book and prayed for sleep to come quickly.

What’s Cooking?
(I’ m Gonna Go Out on
a Limb and Say Me)

Anybody who believes that the way to a man’s heart
is through his stomach flunked geography.

• ROBERT BYRNE •

 

 

Heart disease may be the number one
actual
killer of women in this country, but the whole orchestrating-of-the-meals thing has to be the number one killer of their little spirits. I mean, honestly. Unless you’re Rachael Freaking Ray and somebody is paying you to come up with a crowd-pleasing spread under a certain price point night after identical night, what is there to love about the gig? To be fair, I am sure there is at least one woman out there who wakes up each day eager to show her family how much she cares for them through a new and innovative display of culinary wizardry. I would genuinely love to meet her and shake her flour-dusted hand. Then I’d like to shove a flaming lamb chop into her annoyingly chipper pie hole.

My friend Jill owns a restaurant that makes the best chicken you have ever tasted in your life. Somehow the wonder chefs over there can take a boneless, skinless slab of poultry and turn it into a mind-blowing series of multiple orgasms for your taste buds. Lunch or dinner, on a sandwich or à la carte, served alongside an award-winning bottle of wine or a glass of tap water, this stuff is the best of the breast, bar none. When Jill’s Place began selling its signature spice blend, I bought it and I even used it, but my chicken still tasted like, well, chicken.

“You’re holding out on me,” I accused Jill over yet another plate of perfect poultry one evening.

“What are you talking about?” my friend demanded, the picture of innocence.

“There obviously is some ingredient or technique you use to make your chicken taste like this,” I charged, shoveling in another impossibly delicious bite.

“We just season it and grill it,” Jill insisted.

“Liar,” I replied.

I begged and pleaded, and Jill continued to deny employing any steroid abuse, so I dared her to come over to my house and prepare it right in front of me. I bought the organic, free-range chicken myself, so that she wouldn’t be able to inject it with some sort of tenderizing flavor booster on the sly. When Jill arrived, she prepared the chicken just as she’d instructed me and cooked it precisely the same way I had. As usual, it was orgasmic.

“I don’t get it!” I cried. “I did every single thing you did! I used your damned spice rub and I even got the kind of pan you have at the restaurant. Do I need to be wearing checkered pants and nurse shoes? Is it the hair net, because I’ll get one. Just tell me, what am I doing wrong? What’s the secret?”

“You have to cook it with love,” Jill said, shaking her head sadly. Honest to God, that’s what she said.

Well, fuck me, then.

I don’t love cooking. I used to, back in another lifetime when I was doing it for other appreciative adults and had untold hours to scan cookbooks for ideas and peruse gourmet markets for inspiration and exotic ingredients. Once I had kids, putting a meal on the table became a chore that ranked up there with getting my annual mammogram or cleaning the oven on the intrinsic-joy scale. Like most working moms, I had managed to assemble a meager arsenal of five or six familyfriendly meals—meaning the kids would eat them without threatening to puke or actually puking—that I cooked and served on a continual loop. It got to the point where the kids knew what day of the week it was by what was on the table.

“It’s taco Tuesday
again
?” they’d moan. The only day that was a universal crowd pleaser was Saturday, also known as “breakfast-for-dinner day.” On BDD they could have any breakfast item of their choice—cottage cheese, fruit, French toast, pancakes, waffles, hash browns, bacon, omelets, or green eggs and ham if it meant quiet acquiescence. I bought an appalling selection of cereals, hoping to entice my family to the uncooked side. Occasionally it worked, which did slightly mitigate the pain of having to fire up the oven the other six days.

When I go grocery shopping I’ll typically buy myself a couple of special treats, something I like to nibble on from time to time. At the same time, I’ll buy my husband a few treats I know
he
likes, so that he’ll keep his hands off mine. I’ve even been vocal about it. “Please don’t eat my stuff. I bought you your own.” Does it help? Absolutely not. He even knows I’ll get mad about it, so now he tells me that he ate my stuff and he’ll pick me up some more on his way home. If you think I tell him not to bother, you’re wrong. Making him go into a grocery store is his punishment.

SUSAN

 

 

When we were first married, Joe didn’t cook and I didn’t expect him to. Once the kids came along, however, I began to plead for his help. Not with the actual adding-heat-to-ingredients part, or even the shopping, slicing, dicing, battering, breading, puréeing, pulverizing, or cleaning up. What I wanted more than anything else was for someone else to plan an occasional menu, to say, “Tonight we are having
this
.” What a dream that would be, to have an assignment I could carry out on autopilot. No more torturous self-doubting parade of “Will everyone like this?” or “Has it been a week since we had it last?” or “What should I serve with it?”
Not my problem,
I could say.
I just work here. But I’ll be sure to pass your complaint along to management.

Because I didn’t exactly relish the hours I spent slaving over the proverbial hot stove, I tried to minimize them by cooking in bulk. I’d buy twenty-pound turkeys for our little family of four (only two of whom actually had full sets of teeth), stuff as many meatballs into the Crock-Pot as it would hold, bake a dozen potatoes at once. I wouldn’t just make enchilada pie, I’d make
four
enchilada pies! My theory was that if we could live off leftovers for a few days at a stretch, I could whittle my time in the kitchen down to a reasonable two or three evenings a week.

What I failed to factor into my brilliant plan was the fact that Joe doesn’t like leftovers. Actually, that’s not technically true. He
likes
leftovers, he just prefers to eat them all on the first night you cook them.

“Take this away from me,” he’ll say, pushing the serving bowl toward me.

“Just stop eating,” I reply.

“I can’t,” he says with a shrug, pulling the serving bowl back toward himself.

“Are you still hungry?” I ask him, this time reaching for the bowl myself.

“Actually, I’m stuffed.” He groans, leaning back and rubbing his annoyingly flat abdomen for effect.

“Then
stop eating
,” I growl.

“Wish I could,” he replies sadly, dumping the entirety of tomorrow night’s dinner on his plate.

I have never heard someone chew a sandwich the way my husband
does. I promise that you have heard it from your home and you were
probably thinking to yourself,
Gosh, what is that sound?
It’s my husband
eating a PB&J. Every time he does this, I instantly think of the look on
Nick Lachey’s face in the first season of
Newlyweds
when Jessica Simpson
asks if it’s chicken or tuna. I firmly believe his sandwich sounds are
the reason I have lines on my forehead, because I make that face every
single time.

AMANDA

 

 

Worst of all would be when he would walk in the door at the end of the day with a grocery bag, because invariably—and I am talking roughly 127 percent of the time here—it would contain nothing but beer.

“Would it
ever
occur to you to call me and tell me you were stopping at the store and ask if we needed anything?” I’d rage. At any given time I have no fewer than four different shopping lists going, one each for the farmer’s market, the “regular” grocery store, Costco, and the super expensive mostly organic specialty market. And even when I go to each of these places, I forget stuff all the time, even stuff that was on my stupid list! I don’t care if you saw me unloading $600 worth of consumables just this very morning; the odds are that we still need
something
. And even if we don’t, I’m going to make you pick up something heavy—like the thirty-two-pound tub of kitty litter or a case of water bottles—just to make it worth your while.

It was a long and exceptionally random string of events that finally led to my kitchen salvation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it began when I was pregnant with my first daughter and we bought a new house that happened to have a pool. It was a balmy ninety-nine degrees the day of the open house, and that pool glistened like a cartoon hero’s oversized front tooth. I am fairly certain that if you look up “How to Hook a Sweaty, Hormonal Home Buyer in the Summertime” in any real estate manual, you’ll find a photo of that piece-of-shit, owner-built, godforsaken pool.

The ballooning hose running nonstop into the corner of the thing should have been a tipoff, but it wasn’t until we got our first $500 water bill that we realized if pools were ships, we had the fucking
Titanic
docked right in our backyard. Well, we’d just have to get it fixed, that’s all there was to it.
Immediately.
In a big, fat, pregnant-lady panic I called every pool repair company in a hundred-mile radius and started scheduling estimates. To my horror, after a cursory inspection every single one of them systematically refused to touch the thing.

“We don’t know when it was built or what it’s made out of or if it even has a proper foundation,” was the general consensus. (To their shared credit, for the price of a fleet of Range Rovers, several were willing to have the existing pool removed and replaced with a brand-new model.) In other words,
Good luck with that colossal money-sucking hole in your yard, chubs.

The bulldozers showed up the next week. I stood in the kitchen, sweat pooling in and around my newly massive cleavage, weeping openly for the floating
SkyMall
table tennis set I would never have, the legendary water polo parties I’d never host.