I Can't Complain (10 page)

I was fixed up with my husband on the basis of not much more than our being in the social viewfinder of his cousin Jill. If we had hobbies to discuss on that first blind date, they didn’t come up. Our joint extracurricular activities—aside from the son that trumps them all—have waxed and waned over the years. We lost interest in the running, the tennis, the cross-country skiing. He hasn’t urged me to do anything I consider dangerous since I cried on the back of a Jet Ski in 1994. I prefer going solo to the driving range so I can hit in peace, without the unsolicited coaching. Every few years we stack the half cord of wood that a truck dumps on our driveway. And sometimes, when the right song comes on in our living room, we dance.

W
E AGREED IN OUR YOUTH
, easily and companionably, that we weren’t going to have children. It was 1975 when we married, and our no-child avowal needed little defending in our circle. The one couple with a toddler seemed the odd pair out. “We had her during the baby bust,” they liked to say, smiling in what I now recognize as insider knowledge, i.e., parental bliss. Bob and I did nothing rash—no tubes tied or vas deferens cauterized—but when we bought a house, our purchase and sale agreement stipulated that the backyard monkey bars would go with the seller.

In 1978, Bob’s brother and his wife had Erica, our first baby relative. We spent vacations in California at her side, and photos of her—a miracle of recessive genes, her blond curls and blue eyes—appeared in every room of our house. Like grandparents, we had the best of all worlds: a baby to dote on whose shrieks of hunger were someone else’s job to quell.

In 1980, one of my best friends had an unplanned baby girl. She was single and a lawyer working long hours, so none of it should have been easy. At thirty, I found myself visiting often after work, with a fascination masquerading as moral support. Motherhood began looking less tiresome and more enviable. During one visit, baby Julia was slumped sideways in her highchair, her mother laughing at nothing more than her adorableness, when I blurted out, “I’ve been thinking a lot about doing this.” My friend turned sharply toward me, the baby spoon and cereal on its way to the little mouth, and she who was usually ironic and self-deprecating said solemnly, “It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Not a week later, Bob and I were driving up Woodcliff Road toward Centre Street in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, a moment and place frozen in memory, when he said quietly, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about having a baby.”

“Me too,” I breathed.

And besides that simultaneous reproductive lightning bolt, here’s where more luck came in: we didn’t know if we had the physiological goods. We said, sitting on the edge of the bed, “Okay. We’ll try. We’ll give it a year. If it doesn’t happen, we won’t go crazy.” Cyclically speaking, the first opportunity came in two weeks, so we did what was medically required, then did it again the next night for good measure. I took my temperature as a follow-up, which might have told the tale if I’d known what I was looking for. Two weeks passed, then a significant third. I was late. This was before the days of home pregnancy tests, which now seems prehistoric—a visit to a lab, a blood test, the wait. At the appointed hour, I dialed the doctor’s number and stated my name. The nurse paused, then, in a buoyant singsong I remember to this day, whispered, “Congratulations.”

A few hours officially pregnant, we made phone calls: to our parents, to siblings, to Aunt Hattie in West Palm Beach. My father reportedly slid to the floor in ecstasy. That phone bill, with the pertinent calls of May 20, 1981, circled in felt-tip pen, is the opening souvenir in what became Benjamin’s first photo album. Below it: me in a pink sundress, not showing but grinning, and the Polaroid of my first ultrasound.

I’ll stop there, because every parent has a birth story and everybody loves their children. Until now, I haven’t proselytized in print out of respect for those who can’t and those who don’t want Pollyanna promoting parenthood. But yesterday was Ben’s birthday, and because I’m convinced he’s the best idea we ever had, such sentiments move a mother to write about what she might have missed.

What if we’d been the husband and wife in my cautionary tale, a true one, about a childless couple who stuck to their guns? They spearheaded a support group called Nonparents Anonymous and were quoted in the
Boston Globe
decades ago describing the freedom, the spontaneity, the money saved, the creativity nurtured, blah blah blah. Today I know through mutual friends that they are divorced. But not just divorced; divorced and furious. The ex-wife claims he ruined her life with his nonparent nonsense. He says it’s her own damn fault. She left town, postmenopausal, never to be heard from again. He’s single, eligible, and searching for a wife of childbearing age.

I’
VE LONG BEEN GRATEFUL
to the nice woman who left the buffet table at a West Springfield, Massachusetts, restaurant to alert me to the mortifying fact that my skirt was tucked into the waistband of my pantyhose as I exited the ladies’ room.

Doesn’t everyone appreciate this brand of human mirrordom? Don’t we all want a friend or partner who, in public, can pantomime
lipstick on teeth
or
fly unzipped
? I remember with great fondness the boss who asked me with a wry smile, “New dress?” the day I came to work with a price tag still hanging from my armpit.

My enthusiasm for grooming frankness leads me to overfascination with couples who exercise none. Most memorably: a happy pair, or so it seemed, one child of each gender at home, who sat next to me at a dinner party, circa 1990. I don’t recall the food or the guest list, only the undisturbed nor’easter of dandruff resting on the husband’s collar, evidently unnoticed, unbrushed, unscolded by his wife all night.

I asked two professionals about this. Was it delicacy? Embarrassment? Cluelessness? How does one account for toupees? The first explained, “It could be habituation. You get used to something and don’t see it anymore. Also, there are dynamics within couples. If you’re together, and you tell someone, for example, that his T-shirt is ripped and he smells, and he gets mad, you don’t tell him anymore. It’s probably the iceberg dynamic: You the outsider are seeing a moment, and you ask yourself, ‘How could she let him come to dinner like that?’ But you may be seeing the tip of a twenty-year struggle. She’s reached the point where she says, ‘If he wants to embarrass himself, it’s not my problem.’”

The other professional I consulted didn’t get psychoanalytic. He launched into a diatribe about a clueless wife in his social circle. “She’s dressed to kill! All she cares about is her own appearance. And even though her husband wears five-thousand-dollar custom-made suits, the hair growing out of his nose is so thick that I wonder how he can breathe. Why doesn’t she say something?”

I brought up the subject of my mother, a dainty and impeccable woman, happily married to my father, a slob. They’d arrive at my house and I’d say, “Dad? Your tie. It’s covered with spots.” My mother would whirl around and snap—she who’d just driven two hours in the company of that soiled outfit—“Lou! Your tie! What’s wrong with you?”

Nothing, I’m sure. In retrospect I view my father’s stains as evidence of his good character. He wore them with pride, judging fastidious men to be vain peacocks and phonies. And my mother: When she looked in the mirror, she concentrated on the immediate self. Habituation didn’t refract or reflect my father in the background, holes in his sweaters, eyeglasses askew.

Just as often, it’s the man who embodies
Love is blind.
I will see a woman—around sixty, miniskirted, wearing plastic earrings wired with colored lights, her hair high and black, better suited to a flamenco troupe—and next to her the button-down husband in gray pinstripes, looking unmindful of the spectacle that is his wife.

A friend helped explain this phenomenon. She said her husband of forty-plus years doesn’t notice anything. “If I gained a hundred pounds, he wouldn’t notice. If I’ve had a drastic haircut and I ask, ‘Notice anything new?’ I see a look of panic on his face. ‘New dress?’ he might say. Since that time, he automatically answers, ‘Got your hair cut?’ I don’t know if he’s locked into some version of me from long ago, something ideal that never was. It’s really annoying.”

Perhaps I live in an overly frank family. My husband has an expression that I call “evaluative.” His features rearrange themselves into something that is part squint, part frown, a look I’ve seen on the faces of judges at the Westminster Dog Show. Occasionally he undergoes a moment of delicacy before blurting out what the offense is, but most often he diagnoses and prescribes without much soul-searching. My son will say, “Ma? You’re not planning to wear those pants outside the house, are you?”

Not now, I won’t.

Michael Rustigan, a California criminologist, said he wonders how Rader, if he is the BTK killer, could hide a sinister life from his wife. “You can fake ‘nice guy’ at work,” he said. “But how do you fake ‘nice guy’ when you’re married?”

—ASSOCIATED PRESS

A
T FIRST I WAS PUZZLED
by the purported wedded bliss of Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rader of Park City, Kansas. Mr. Rader has been charged with ten murders and has confessed to six, leading onlookers to conclude that Mr. Compartmentalize had found his perfect mate in Ms. Clueless. Not that I’m toasting any newlyweds with references to that paradigm, but still I think their marital success lies in the widely quoted forensic fact that this husband “had gone 27 years without communication.”

I wish Paula Rader and her two adult children well, but I’ll still need to watch Diane Sawyer ask the excruciating questions in prime time:
Nothing? No hint? No unexplained absences, no penchant for long walks, no suspicious midnight loads of laundry? No funny stuff with knots?

“Not really,” Mrs. Rader might say, tissue wadded in her fist, wedding portrait at her elbow.

Is it possible that Mr. Rader didn’t raise her suspicions? I think so. I remember reading about a man who worked for the CIA for decades whose family thought he was a higher-up with the U.S. Postal Service. Novelist Anita Shreve has said that after she wrote
The Pilot’s Wife,
the story of a man with two wives and two families, she received hundreds of letters from people asking, “How is this possible? Who could keep such secrets?” at the same time dozens wrote to say, “You told my story. This is what happened to me.”

I will not grade Mrs. Rader on her lack of inquisitiveness or shabby powers of observation. At dinner I ask my husband of twenty-nine years what happened at work that day and he says, “Nothing.” I rarely press him. He means, “I don’t particularly want to report on the ins and outs of today’s frustrations, which would be just like yesterday’s.” We move on to other topics, other people, especially our son. He likes to hear about my work, my phone calls from what he considers interesting places—editors, agents, friends. I’m not a shrink. I don’t interrogate him because I like to have my thoughts to myself sometimes. How annoying would it be to live with someone who asked constantly what I was thinking and feeling:
What does that faraway look on your face mean? Happy? Sad? In between?

A friend of mine recently turned up with a new beau of the highly sensitive variety. He inquired in therapeutic fashion upon first meeting me:
Who are you? What do you worry about?
It reminded me of a job interview endured by a friend at which the prospective employer asked earnestly, “How would you describe the Who of you and the What of you?” Her first stab at a gossamer answer was rejected as being only the What of her.

I have discovered that the old bromide, “Never go to bed angry” (translation: discuss and make up), is not for everyone. One of my husband’s most endearing qualities is that he wakes up in a good mood, the slate clean. If there’s been what a friend’s polite parents call a “mister and missus,” i.e., a little spat, it tends to fade rather than fester overnight. I suppose some of you will say, “That’s what
you
think. Discuss it. Communicate. Fix it.”

But it’s only a “mister and missus.” Not unrelated, CNN reported last year that men simply have fewer feelings than women. That was enlightening news and applicable science. Why make husbands discuss and analyze and debrief feelings they aren’t endowed with? Besides, the unexamined life has much to recommend it, couple-wise. In my case, 29 years times 365 days would have meant a lot of tedious pulse-takings and conversational detritus. Which brings me back to the Raders, married thirty-four years. If she had asked, “Where were you tonight?” he would have said, “At church with my fellow deacons. At Cub Scouts, hon. Tying knots.” Maybe follow-up questions annoyed him, made him leave the table. Or worse. Maybe Mrs. Dennis Rader found there was a fine line between parallel lives and harmony.

M
Y SISTER-IN-LAW’S
sister-in-law, a mother of three, once told me that when she’s bored, she cleans. I admire that impulse the way I might admire perfect pitch or fluency in a foreign language, which is to say outside myself and constitutionally unattainable in this incarnation.

It used to be that my husband and I had the same threshold for neatness—elastic—but something has shifted. Since he turned fifty, he hates clutter, sees it everywhere, including what I consider to be well-groomed piles of saved mail, notes to self, and unread magazines. In psychoanalyzing this midlife fastidiousness, I blame two things: Our son left for college in the fall of 2000, narrowing the population of non–neat freaks in the home to one: me. And second, my husband’s family of origin.

They are immaculate, none more than his paternal grandmother, who lived with Bob growing up, who would fold the contents of everyone’s drawers, who wrapped her own underwear in tissue paper, who scrubbed the inside of the dishwasher, who moved every year to a new (as in newly built/never sullied) apartment. Within my family, we were neat, but we weren’t frantic. The living room smelled like lemon oil, and that seemed like plenty. We admonished those more compulsive than ourselves, “Don’t be Cousin Sophie,” a tribute to the relative famous for clearing the table while others were still eating.