Domestic Affairs (36 page)

“Well, if all the muffler shops here are closed,” said my husband, “let’s call California. It’s three hours earlier there.”

The manager looked stunned. Was Steve kidding? Did he know what it would cost to call a dealer in L.A.?

About two dollars for three minutes, said Steve levelly, even cheerfully. “I’ll pay.”

“How am I supposed to get the number? What am I supposed to say?” This fellow had never made a long-distance phone call, from the sound of things.

“I’ll make the call. I’ll get the tail-pipe specifications.”

Well, I’m going to skip over what happened after that, which was an endless debate involving telephones, mufflers, Valiants, reminders of the slogan from this muffler company’s television ads—punctuated with occasional, increasingly strained use of the word
buddy
on the part of my husband. I paced the office, scribbling notes, ostentatiously copying the manager’s first name off his personalized shirt. He was just reaching for the telephone—gingerly, as if the receiver were a grenade—and he had the number for the muffler shop in Los Angeles, when he made one last grumble about how much time all of this was taking, and I lost control.

What about our time, I yelled. What about the sixty miles we drove? I don’t even remember what I said, but somewhere in there a
Car & Driver
magazine ended up flung halfway across the floor, and a telephone receiver got slammed down. And a phone call wasn’t made. And though we caught the second half of the movie, I have no recollection of what finally happened to Indiana Jones at the Temple of Doom—because all I could think about was our unrepaired car, our totaled evening. “That was a good idea about calling California,” I said quietly as we made our way home in silence, except for the sound of our tail pipe rattling. Steve paid the babysitter seven dollars and drove her home.

It isn’t that I learned, that night, that women should defer to their husbands in car repair shops. It isn’t that I learned to suffer fools gladly. There were some lessons in there about counting to ten before leveling the first threat of a call to the Better Business Bureau. But what I really learned had to do with my precious freedom of self-expression that I guard so zealously, and that I certainly preserved, that night. Except the cost was too great.

One of the hardest things to learn in a marriage—and I’m still a long way from getting this right—has to do with sometimes putting aside one’s self-interest for the good of this mysterious new unit,
the couple.
Who have a tendency to get all tangled up in details that never seem so important when they’re going well, and then suddenly become vital when they’re not.

Steve and I have known our friends Tim and Margaret for close to ten years—about as long as we’ve lived in this town. They’re a bright, articulate couple, wonderful parents of two boys around the ages of our two older children, living just a couple of miles down the road from us; their paths and ours cross often. When they do, we always smile, wave, exchange news of kids and gardens, comment on how good it would be to get together. They have always seemed to me extraordinarily kind and generous, with the kind of conscience that extends not only to friends but also to strangers around the globe. I don’t know many parents who spend more time with their children or display more tenderness. They have what has always looked to me like a really good and strong marriage. And one that’s nothing like my own.

Tim is a long-distance runner who gets to work every morning by foot, not car, so we pass his tall, lean figure in a Day-Glo beanie on the road into town, no matter what the season. Margaret is a tiny, soft-spoken, very pretty woman with a lively sense of humor and one of the best gardens in town. I see her outside, tending it, when I drive by. Our children know each other less well, because while Audrey has been attending the big red-brick school in town, Tim and Margaret have chosen to school their two at home—partly because they would just as soon avoid conveying certain worldly lessons to their boys. They have no TV set, no He-Man figures in the playroom. On the Frisbee lying in their front yard are the words “He is the Lord.”

Tim is a minister of the fundamentalist church in our town; Margaret carries her well-thumbed Bible wherever she goes, in a home-sewn case with handles like a pocketbook. It is their faith that shapes every aspect of their lives. Steve and I (who belong to the Congregational church, but don’t always make it there on Sunday mornings) are less absolute in our convictions. We try to maintain, in our family, a strong sense of moral behavior (though, as a half Jew, I can never go quite so far even to identify what I am as strictly Christian). But you won’t hear us talking about having taken the Lord into our hearts. The grace we sing before dinner—a Shaker tune called “’Tis a Gift to Be Simple”—never mentions Christ.

Which has to mean that in Tim and Margaret’s terms, we remain lost souls. I asked Tim about this once. “As far as you’re concerned,” I said to him sadly, “I guess you see me headed straight to hell.” He looked at me kindly, and said he was praying for me.

We all like each other a lot. But the issue of religion keeps us from getting too close. What am I to do with the fact that one of the great achievements of Tim’s career in town has been the creation of a crisis pregnancy center that denounces abortion as murder? What is he to do with the casual, eclectic background we provide our children? (A bible story here, a piece of Greek mythology there. A little Jesus, a little Santa, a little rock and roll.)

I read to our children, from our book of Bible stories, about Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “This man was wise and good and great, and we should live by his teachings,” I tell them. (But so was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Gandhi.) “Maybe God didn’t literally create Adam exactly the way the Bible says, or Eve from his rib,” I say (in a discussion of dinosaurs, cavemen, evolution). “The idea is simply that God made the world.” If they heard me at a moment like that, Tim and Margaret would have to view us as the most lost-seeming of fence sitters—the watered-down form of Christianity we serve our children bearing about as much connection to the kind that governs their lives as Kool-Aid bears to nectar.

When our children were much younger, we invited Tim and Margaret’s oldest boy, Ben, to come play with Audrey for the afternoon. When Tim came to pick him up, and the two fathers were animatedly discussing a ball game, Steve—who almost never swears—let slip a couple of words I’d almost never heard him utter, then turned bright red. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said afterward. “I was so focused on not saying the wrong thing that I said it.” I think episodes like that one—combined with our mutual affection, and our desire not to jeopardize it—have made us keep a certain distance in the relationship between our two families.

Tim and Margaret invited our family over for Sunday dinner the other day, and all the things that had made us like each other were present. Their boys proved to be the kind of children I would have guessed they’d have—friendly, curious, lively, compassionate. Margaret had home-baked rolls and a salad from her garden on the table. Their refrigerator door was covered with kids’ drawings, like ours at home, only they also had a Bible lesson for the day printed in big letters for the boys to read. When we sat down, we bowed our heads together for grace, and I felt truly happy to see our families together. Many of our values are so much the same.

The conversation came around to the counseling sessions Tim and Margaret offer to couples about to be married. And partly because Steve and I had celebrated our ninth anniversary just the day before, and because, even when it’s not my anniversary, I am always thinking about marriage and how to make ours better, I asked them what sorts of issues they cover in their counseling sessions. Child raising, finances, in-laws—Tim offered a list of issues anyone who’s been married a while would recognize as ones worth considering—and ones Steve and I would have done well talking about, more than we did, before our own wedding.

Then Margaret named another subject they deal with in their premarital sessions, and I felt my teeth clench. “Headship,” she said. “The principle laid out in the scriptures, that the woman serves her husband, just as her husband serves Christ.”

Well, if I had liked this couple less, if I respected their intelligence less, or knew less of Tim’s respect for and devotion to Margaret, I would simply have sat there in stony silence and beat a hasty retreat home as fast as I could. But I had to ask: How could they accept a notion like that?

Of course, this wasn’t the first time someone had challenged them on the headship question; it’s an idea that goes so totally against current thinking about men and women and their roles. And they both had some reasonable-sounding things to say: That nearly every decision they made was in fact made together, a product of both of them. And that, on the rare occasions when they were at an impasse, and his word overruled hers, nothing so humbled him, or earned her greater respect in his eyes, than to see the strength she possessed that allowed her to yield. Margaret added that Tim’s position, as ultimate head of the household, protected her, made her feel safe. “I wouldn’t want all the responsibility Tim has,” she said.

Well, I am not buying it, and I am not buying it even though I know my pride, my willfullness, my headstrong need for control and equal responsibility in our marriage is the reason for at least seventy-five percent of the fights that take place in our household. Even though I know there would be a lot more peace and happiness in our house if we could accept a method of relating to each other like the one Tim and Margaret subscribe to. I can even see the reasoning behind a scriptural law that gives one sex ultimate power to overrule the other; the alternative (that exists in our household, for instance) makes for a lot of fights, a lot of impasses. Listening to Tim and Margaret describe their own system of living by the scripture, and the scripture only, I felt a kind of envy and sorrow. Because all around me—in their neat, bright, welcoming home, on their bountiful table, their blooming garden, and in the faces of their two fine boys—was evidence of how well it worked. And still, theirs is not the path for me. Steve and I will take the rocky road, with no one book offering all the answers, and I know from past experience that road will be filled with brambles and potholes, and even dead ends. I don’t feel either of these two couples is wiser or better than the other (though I have a guess at who has the greater shot at pure happiness). We are simply different. Passing each other on the road, I know we’ll always smile and wave, and wish the other well. And then, go our own, our separate ways.

There was a winter, a few years back, when I spent my days looking at real estate. As things turned out, we never bought any of those houses I tromped through, opening closets, inspecting basements. But every now and then Steve and I will be in some nearby town and we’ll drive by a familiar-looking place, and it comes to me: I went there with a realtor. “$75,000,” I tell him. “But it could probably have been gotten for less.” “$160,000. There’s a dumbwaiter in the kitchen.” “$225,000. The walls were paneled in mahogany. And there’s a bowling alley in the carriage house.”

“You got a realtor to take you through a house that cost $225,000?” Steve says, not really surprised (we have been married for nine years), but faintly curious.

“I drove our good car to the appointment that day,” I explain. Meaning our two-year-old Ford, and not our eighteen-year-old Plymouth.

“And what did you tell the salesman, after he’d taken you through this mansion?” he asks me.

“I was concerned about how we’d heat that third-floor tower room. Also, there wasn’t enough land.”

I remember well the winter when I went shopping for houses. Not just the prices of the houses I looked at, and which sellers would consider owner financing, and where interest rates stood. Charlie was not quite one year old then. Audrey was four. I wasn’t working. Money was tight. One week our water heater gave out, and two weeks later it was the furnace. We were using our front hall as a closet, and even so, I had clothes boxed up in corners all over the house. The paint was peeling. Melting snow had leaked through the roof and onto the walls of the one room I’d papered. Every day a new layer of dust seemed to rise up through the cracks between our floorboards. The woodstove made my skin dry, and there were ashes everywhere. Our house is five miles out of town, at the end of a dead-end road. Looking out the window, all I could see was snow. Steve worked long days, and sometimes he was gone for a week at a time, house painting in the city. Days would go by that the only conversations I had were with children and real-estate agents.

So that winter I sat in their offices and told them about my dream house. It should have at least four bedrooms, I explained (there would be more babies. I knew that.) And bathrooms, lots of bathrooms (our own house having only one).

The house I was looking for was sunny. Had a big kitchen, with lots of counter space, everything built in, and room for a little desk in one corner and a comfortable chair to sit in and read to a child. I figured room for a refrigerator went without saying. In our house we have to keep the refrigerator in the pantry. And since the doorway to the pantry crosses paths with the front door and the doorway to upstairs, it’s a frequent occurrence for a cook (me) to find herself clutching five eggs and half gallon of milk while she stands poised on the threshold, waiting for a couple of children and a dog to take off their boots, shake off a pile of snow, and finish arguing over whether they want miniature marshmallows or whipped cream in their hot chocolate.

Of course, when these real-estate agents heard that I also wanted land, and privacy, and a screened-in porch and plenty of closet space and a barn (for the horse we would someday own) and water nearby (if not on the property) and a first-rate public school district—they all told me you have to expect to pay a good price for such a place. Naturally, I concurred. And I didn’t even blink when the realtor quoted me a price of two and a quarter (I, who had been putting off a trip to the dentist because I didn’t know how we’d pay for my root canal).