Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (5 page)

You know how they tell you to wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident? Well, this story is almost like that.

Until Sunday night, my weekend was terrific. I went to New York for an opera marathon; Friday night was
Madama Butterfly
, Saturday matinee
Le Nozze di Figaro,
and Saturday night,
Lucia di Lammermoor.
Bottom line, for most of my waking hours, people were singing to me.

And if that’s not great enough, chocolate was involved.

Opera candy isn’t as good as movie candy, in that there are no Raisinets, but at least they have vaguely European chocolate bars that taste pretentious. I made do with the dark chocolate for the nighttime shows and switched to milk chocolate for the matinee, but in any event, as you can tell from the opera and the chocolate, I tend to overdo things. Which is why I have four dogs, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I came home and on Sunday night was having a wonderful time poring over my Playbills when a fight broke out between my old golden retriever Lucy and Ruby The Corgi. I leaped into action to break it up, stuck my index finger into the canines of some canine, and got bitten. Not to be a diva about
it, but this was no little baby puncture wound. When I looked down at my finger, it no longer had a top.

And there was blood. Not as much as Lucia di Lammermoor, but enough to send Madame Butterfly running for her car keys and flying to the hospital. I hustled into the emergency room with one hand held high, which was when I remembered something:

I was braless.

Kind reader, my adventures can get personal from time to time. It’s never been quite this personal, but I think it’s important to deal with this subject, to be sure you girls out there learn from my mistake.

Here’s my lesson: you have to wear your bra all the time, even in the house when you’re relaxing by yourself after a busy weekend eating chocolate to music. Because you never know if something untoward is going to happen and you’re going to find yourself in a hospital emergency room in no bra.

At the same time that you’re middle-aged.

The first clue that I had forgotten my underwear was the running part. Yes, that’s it, running into the emergency room with my hand up in the air. The second clue was the look on the face of the hot male nurse when he came into the room to examine my finger. Because, of course, on the night that your dog bites your finger, the nurse will be male and hot. (Lately, I’m thinking that men divide into two groups: Married or Learner’s Permit. The nurse was the latter, which is more entertaining, if equally off limits.)

Anyway, I could tell from his look that I’d crossed the line.

You know which line I mean. The Point of No Return, Bralessness-wise.

When I was younger, going braless was fun and sexy. I wasn’t above resorting to bralessness, as needed. It was one of
my female bag of tricks. The other was whining. Men love that.

The point is that bralessness used to work. But that was then, and this is now.

Now, I wouldn’t be caught in public without a bra. Now, I buy costly bras that not only lift and separate, but also hoist, buttress, cantilever, and generally defy gravity and other natural laws. Isaac Newton had nothing on my underwear.

Einstein’s Theory is no match for Victoria’s Secret.

In my younger days, I scorned padded bras. Now I demand them. Although now they’re called “formed,” which costs twenty dollars more than padded, but we both know what we’re talking about:

Extra credit.

A little help.

False advertising.

Except that here I was sitting in front of a hot male nurse, and I was wearing crappy jeans and a sweater that wasn’t slouchy enough. Truth to tell, no sweater is slouchy enough for my breasts, unimproved. The nurse gallantly averted his eyes, or maybe he was just nauseated. To his credit, he tried to stop the blood flowing from my finger and made small talk to distract me from the horror of the situation and also the fact that my finger was bloody.

He asked me, “Why do you have four dogs?”

“That’s just how I roll. And don’t get me started on opera and chocolate.” Silence followed, so I asked, “What do you think happened to the top of my finger? I didn’t see it on the floor.”

“Your dog probably ate it. They’re carnivores, you know.”

Yuck. I couldn’t speak for a moment. That my dog bit my finger is one thing. That my dog ate my finger is quite another. Not only was I grossed out, I wondered how I would be able to
write. I type with two index fingers, and only one was open for business. Then I considered the bright side. If I missed my deadline, I wouldn’t have to say to my editor, My dog ate my homework. I had a much better excuse: My dog ate
me
.

But the nurse was shaking his head. “Looks like you need a skin graft. Tomorrow, you’ll have to see a hand surgeon.”

“Thanks,” I said, but this is what I thought:

Now
that
calls for an underwire.

I understand that there’s a religion that allows polygamy, so that a man can have as many wives as he pleases. To be fair, I’m not sure this is exactly the religion, but it’s the religion on the TV show, so it may only be an HBO-sanctioned religion.

But that’s not my point.

My point is, where is the religion that allows a woman to have as many husbands as she pleases?

I could get very religious about a religion like that, but there isn’t one. It’s like
The Stepford Wives
, where the wives are robots who do everything to please their husbands. What I want to know is, where are the Stepford Husbands?

You know why it’s set up this way. The book that started the religion was written by a man, and the book that started the Stepford Wives was written by a man.

Well, I write books, too. Can I start a religion?

In my religion, wives could have as many husbands as they wanted. So far, I’ve had as many ex-husbands as I wanted, but that’s not the same thing.

You can see how my new religion would open up a world of possibilities. For example, in my life, neither Thing One nor Thing Two was very handy around the house. So my first new
husband would have to be handy. I’ll call him Fix-it Hubby. I really like a guy who can fix the doorbell. Or that rubber thing inside the toilet tank that’s supposed to flop up and down. Things have gotten so bad around my house that, last week, a friend of mine sent her husband over to fix that rubber thing.

That was when I turned to religion to solve my problems.

My second new husband would have to be sexy, and if you need me to tell you what he’s for, you’re new around here. I’ll call him Sexy Hubby. Every woman has her own idea about what constitutes sexy, but mine involves chest hair.

My third new husband would do chores, like take out the trash and unload the groceries. Chores are all I’d ever ask of this very lucky man. I hate to do chores, and who doesn’t? I’ll call him Chore Hubby. And my fourth new husband would have to be a great cook. It would be fun to have a husband who cooks, especially if he looks like Chef Tom Colicchio on
Top Chef.

I’ll call him Tom Colicchio.

How great is this religion, so far?

I think women would love this religion, and so would men. The advantages for women are obvious, but there are plenty of advantages for men, too. After all, it means that your husbands could avoid the more tiresome of your marital duties. For example, you could be Sexy Hubby and leave fixing the toilet to Toilet Hubby.

Or vice versa, if it’s playoff season. You only have to fix a toilet once and it stays fixed, if you follow.

My new religion is also good for men, because, frankly, I know a lot of women who are a Handful. Actually, I’ve figured out that I’m a Handful. So of course, any woman worth having is a Handful. But in my religion, all the hubbies could band together to keep the Handful happy, and that creates certain
efficiencies and economies of scale, which is the kind of thing men love.

Because it leaves more time for the playoffs.

The other great thing about my new religion is that there would never be divorce. If you got sick of Toilet Hubby, you wouldn’t have to divorce him, you could just marry Car Inspection Hubby. It’s really annoying to have to get the car inspected all the time, and you can never find your registration card. In fact, you could marry Registration Hubby, too. And Proof-of-Insurance Hubby.

Why not?

Then you wouldn’t ever have to leave the bedroom.

If you follow.

Finally, the best thing about my religion would be who got worshipped. In the religion where you have tons of wives, they all worship the husband. And if you have lots of robot wives, they worship the husbands, too.

So you see where this is going.

Wanna join?