If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (18 page)

BOOK: If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon
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Sadly, the second shower upstairs was even worse. The shower nozzle was set at the same little-person height as the “master” shower, only the box itself was about as big as a coffin. If you dropped the soap you were screwed, because bending literally wasn’t an option. You also had to remember to close the room’s lone window before stepping inside the shower, as the slightest breeze would plaster the shower curtain to your body and you’d never be able to get it off again.
So mornings became a race for the better of the two showers, and the shower of choice became like the TV. If you thought you were going to want it at any point in the next several hours, you’ d race to turn it on.
“Oh, shit! I was just about to get in there,” the other person would say.
“I’ll be quick,” the first would lie.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
When our young son began to get mobile, my husband started baby- proofing the house. I came home from work one day and was about to die because I had to go to the bathroom really badly. To my dismay, the toilet was locked down with some big plastic contraption and I couldn’t figure out how to unlock it. Since no one was home I was left with the choice of not being able to figure it out or peeing in the sink. I decided that force might be the best thing to use and started pushing and pulling every little piece and part I could. Magically it opened just in the nick of time without me having to rip the lid off its hinges. For the next few days I fumbled with these things like you can’t believe, cursing every time and hearing my husband laughing at me and asking if he should get our son to come show me how to do it.
Not
funny.
DEILIA
 
 
The other thing about the not-so-masterful bath was the storage space. Essentially, there wasn’t any. The single cabinet under the sink was home to an eyesore of ancient, rusty plumbing, and there was no medicine cabinet—just a mirror—so all of our crap had to fit into two wobbly drawers. Fortunately Joe didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a lot of personal necessities, just a brush, razor, shaving cream, deodorant, and toothbrush. That’s it, his entire grooming arsenal. I, on the other hand, had more creams, bottles, lotions, potions, serums, and sprays than an embalmer. Those poor drawers were packed to the gills with perfume and peroxide, sunblock and self-tanner, all of it stuffed in alongside a tangled nest of hair accessories and appliances—because God forbid I walk out into the world with the tresses He gave me.
“You don’t use half of this crap!” Joe was fond of accusing.
“I use all of it and more,” I insisted. “Have you seen the overflow in my office closet?”
This continued to be a futile and frustrating argument, because I am married to a man who insists I am beautiful just as I am—which is plucked, dyed, faux-bronzed, and tattooed within an inch of my life. (I was unfortunately born with approximately eleven eyebrow hairs so I went ahead and had some nice brows permanently inked on, in addition to two small and tasteful decorative tattoos.) It’s not like I’m some Lady Gaga when it comes to makeup. I like neutral shades, stick mainly to tinted lip gloss, and wear mascara a handful of times a year at the most. But Joe doesn’t seem to understand that it takes time, effort, and a munitions store of beauty products to achieve the “natural” look he adores.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
When my husband gets out of the shower, he insists on blow-drying
his butt. Apparently he likes it
very
dry. I don’t mind this in theory, but
it’s not exactly a turn-on to watch him do it. Plus, this isn’t why I forked
over a fortune for an ionic dryer. The worst part is, I think our teenage
son is now doing it, too. I’m afraid to ask.
LORI
 
 
For my fortieth birthday—and also because it would dramatically increase the value of the home we’d been painstakingly renovating for the previous eight years—Joe built me a glorious new master bathroom. It is spa-like and serene and ridiculously big, and we each have our very own sink and several drawers and cabinets to do with as we please. (His are practically empty so you’d think he might offer me some of this coveted real estate, but he doesn’t and I don’t complain. Much.) Then he transformed the old, hideous, cracked-linoleum blot on our home’s landscape—the former “master bath”—into a lavish walk-in closet.
Just for me.
It’s got plush chocolate-brown carpeting, a floor-to-ceiling shoe rack, wraparound shelves, and a smattering of valet hooks. There’s even a lock on the door, so I can hide in there and talk on the phone, and it sometimes takes the kids ten full minutes to find me. When I die, I want to be buried in there.
“Dude, where’s
your
stuff?” his friends will ask Joe when he proudly shows off the result of his carpentry (and husbandry) skills.
“Happy wife, happy life,” he says with a shrug.
This is actually one of his favorite sayings, and—for obvious reasons—it’s one of mine, too. (Sure, it’s typically something grumbled under his breath as he’s doing something he would much rather
not
be doing, such as trying to figure out how he’s going to strap the chipping, rickety armoire—the one that we don’t need but I insist on buying anyway at the yard sale he doesn’t want to stop at in the first place—to the roof of the SUV without killing anyone. At that moment in time, does he
want
to be risking a herniated disk for a piece of superfluous, secondhand crap? Of course not! He’s simply choosing possible debilitating pain over the sort of emotional torture—and let’s face it, the withholding of sexual favors—that only a wife can inflict.)
Fortunately, the infamous towel incident from our first date turned out to be a fluke. In the thirteen years we’ve shared this sacred space since that day, Joe hasn’t left a single scrunched towel in his wake. He still sometimes turns the light off when I’m in the middle of shaving my legs, but he doesn’t leave floss splatters on the mirror or whisker shrapnel in the sink. When he has the audacity to use the room for one of its primary intended purposes, not only has he mastered the art of the “courtesy flush,” he even installed a fan
on a timer
right next to the toilet. Occasionally he even lights a candle. He uses the shower squeegee I bought, and sometimes even complains when I leave a little speck of toothpaste on the neck of the tube. I have permanent teeth marks on my tongue from biting it when he nags me about my slovenly toothpaste ways—
as if!
—but all things considered, I think I can live with that.
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
My number one pet peeve occurs when I am indisposed. My husband
suddenly needs to know where I am. He will come into the bathroom
(no knocking), stand directly in front of me, literally within an eighteen-inch
circumference, and say “What are you doing?” Honestly! You’re
probably thinking he’s stupid or something, but he isn’t! He would
otherwise be thought of as a wonderful, caring, intelligent, hard-working
man, and I do adore him. But what on God’s green earth does he
think
I am doing?! This happens
all the time
. Does he think I have a secret
life in there? There’s not even a window where I could escape if I wanted
to. I don’t think I spend an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom,
although it does have the potential to be a nice little respite with some
privacy and some quiet time away from the kids. Oh well.
DONNA
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Should We Just Skip
the $200 Dinner
and Duke It Out
at Home?
My wife and I have the secret to making a marriage last.
Two times a week, we go to a nice restaurant,
a little wine, good food.... She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
• HENNY YOUNGMAN •
 
 
England’s
Daily Mail
recently reported the results of a truly depressing survey I’ll call “The Honeymoon Is So Totally Over.” The researchers polled five thousand couples—each of whom had been hitched at least a decade—about their daily connubial lives. Sadly, 83 percent of the respondents had stopped celebrating their anniversary together after three lousy years, while 60 percent said they hadn’t enjoyed a single romantic evening since the day they tied the knot. The number of couples who held hands even occasionally dropped from 83 percent in the first year of marriage to just 38 percent ten years later. (Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait around for the slow and painful decline. “I’m not really much of a hand-holder,” Joe told me,
the day before we exchanged vows
, information I promptly shoved deep into the Would Have Been Good to Know Yesterday file.) With a sample size as large as this study’s, unfortunately one can expect the results to be fairly representative of the population at large.
The often-recommended solution to marital apathy is the infamous Date Night, which ostensibly offers couples a regular chance to reconnect, unwind, and—at least the guy is hoping—have gnarly, passionate monkey sex.
Here’s the thing. When you go to the great trouble of putting on mascara
and
shaving your legs and you’re shelling out a king’s ransom to some teenager to eat your food and keep your kids alive for a few hours and not burn the house down, you sort of hope it’s going to be worth all the effort and expense. Sadly, the fact that it rarely is doesn’t keep most of us married folks from getting our hopes up and going for it anyway, time and trying time again.
It’s not anyone’s fault, really. Think about what’s involved in getting two very busy, very different people to one restaurant or movie theater or concert. First off, you have to pick a date and a time, and agree on where you’ll be going and what you’ll be doing. That in and of itself could take months. Most couples start with dinner, using some variation of this time-honored, romantic line of reasoning:
We’d both have to eat anyway, and at least we won’t have to do any dishes afterward.
Invariably the fact that you love Thai and he prefers Italian will come up and you’ll have to determine whose turn it is to call heads in the coin toss.
“Last time we went out we went to My Thai and I burned all of the skin off the roof of my mouth on that ridiculous pickled-tofu-curry thing you ordered,” he’ll insist.
“No, we went to Mama Mia and you got marinara sauce on the cuff of your brand-new white shirt, remember?” you’ll counter. Since you’re the one who famously recalls birthdays and library book due dates and where the lint brush lives, he’d be a fool to argue with your innately superior memory.
You’ll try to agree on a neutral third cuisine that has an affordable restaurant in your zip code, but the odds are there is no such thing. Because your preferred-order eatery lists are in direct opposition, it will take you seven years to get to the place where they intersect, at that joint that neither of you really likes nor hates, the model of mediocrity. You’ll consider wearing pants and skipping the whole shaving thing altogether.
Will reservations be needed? If so, who will be responsible for making them? For once, you concur that it should be whoever didn’t do it last time. But neither of you can remember who that was because it was thirteen eons ago, so the stalemate continues.
Screw dinner
, you think; it’s too complicated. You’ll just go to a movie instead. Because
that’s
not fraught with contention, right? Action, adventure, comedy, drama, or horror? Diet or regular Coke? Aisle or center seats? Plain popcorn or a greasy bag of swimming-in-disgusting-has-more-fat-than-thirty-two-Whoppers-fake-butter nuggets?
HIM:
“I’ll see anything but a chick flick.”
HER:
“Define ‘chick flick.’ ”
HIM:
“Anything with kissing or a plotline or Meg Ryan.”
HER:
“I’ll see anything that’s not gory.”
HIM:
“Define ‘not gory.’ ”
HER:
“Anything with kissing or a plot line or Meg Ryan.”
“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
We have this pre-date routine that is as predictable as it is infuriating. We share a tiny, one-sink bathroom that hasn’t been touched since it was built in 19-fucking-51. Usually he shaves while I shower. We bob around each other in our stifling little bathroom, ostensibly trying to primp for each other. (For the record, it is impossible to see one’s hair, much less style it, in a twice-fogged-up mirror.) After his shower, he swiftly puts on the first pair of pants and first shirt he sees, slips into shoes, and leaves the matrimonial bedroom while I have fits about what to wear—as if it really matters. He knows it takes me “a little longer” to get dressed. While he uses my fashion panic time to give dinner, bath, and bedtime instructions to the sitter and maybe have a cocktail, I am in the back of the house throwing clothes on and off, feverishly trying to figure out what to wear. Even though I just showered, I’m sweaty and frustrated and I can’t see through the foggy bathroom mirror to put on my eye makeup. The movie starts in twenty minutes. I finally get it together and rush out of the bedroom to find that my husband is nowhere to be seen. This is because he is
waiting for me
in the driveway IN THE IDLING CAR
. Thanks to him, though, we always make it to the movie on time.
KIM
 
 
Even if you could actually agree on a film, then you’d have to decide which theater to see it at, which would necessitate a debate over the merits of Red Vines versus Twizzlers, because the one of you who is from the East Coast thinks Red Vines taste like those disgusting wax lips you used to pretend to like as a kid, while the West Coaster insists that the discussion is a waste of time because strawberry-flavored straws do not qualify as
licorice
. It is right around this point that you realize that if you go to a movie instead of out to a restaurant you will both
still need to eat dinner
, a reality that probably means you’ll be cooking
and
doing the goddamned dishes—which is no way to spend a date night seeing as you may have already shaved your legs. So you’re back to the restaurant conundrum. Bob’s Underwhelming Bistro, here you come.

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