How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  “Why do you always have to be right?”

  “Sometimes you’re such a fucking snob.”

  “Why do all your female friends hate me?”

  We’d recently had one of Nick’s friends over for dinner. She sat next to me, pecking away at her phone for an hour and a half. When I looked over at her screen, wondering if she had a work emergency, I saw she was playing Words with Friends. She was the least hygge dinner guest I’ve ever had.

  “And speaking of your female friends, why’d you have coffee with your ex-girlfriend and not tell me?” I broke the rules Bobby Klein had taught us in Mexico, bringing up long-resolved issues, the kind that rot a marriage if you keep mentioning them after they’ve been put to rest.

  “Oh my God, I don’t have to tell you everything. I forgot! Why do you get weird and jealous when you’re mad about other things? Also, did you stick your fingers in the Brie cheese and eat it again?”

  “Yes, you do have to tell me! That’s what marriage is about—telling me everything! Maybe I did. So what? It’s Brie. That’s how you’re supposed to eat it. And yeah I have a bee in my bonnet about your ex-girlfriend. I’m sorry,” I said. “Even though she’s awful.”

  “When you apologize like that you sound like Donald Trump. Maybe it’s your fault you have no friends here. Look at how you’re acting.”

  Nick’s words trampled me. Exhausted me. Enraged me. He couldn’t unsay them.

  “Fuck it. Leave me alone.”

  Nick called me a spoiled brat. I called him a word I’d prefer not to repeat.

  We retreated to separate rooms, the silence heavy with defeat. Lady Piazza paced up and down the long hallway, refusing to take sides. “I rescued you from a trash bin,” I reminded her. “He’s brand-new and he doesn’t even let you sleep in the bed!”

  I seethed in the living room and distracted myself by eating a brownie and watching the scene from Casablanca where Rick puts Ilsa on the plane. I thought, for the hundredth time, about whether she was better off with Victor Laszlo. Victor Laszlo would never have coffee with his ex-girlfriend. He knew something about loyalty. I opened Skype. The little green dot blinked next to Nick’s Skype photo, the one I keep trying to get him to change because he looks like a twenty-year-old German exchange student in it. So he was online. Why is he on Skype? I thought. Who is he talking to? Is he talking about me? Should I Skype him? No, I decided. I was not going to Skype my husband from the same house.

  I grabbed my purse, left the house, and headed to the yoga studio down the street. An hour of stretching and breathing with strangers who neglected deodorant would do me good. As I bent over to touch the floor in the crowded vinyasa class, I noticed my toes looked gross, gnarly, and ragged with only the tiniest chips of red polish still clinging to the cuticles.

  “Ewww,” I said out loud.

  “Are you okay?” The teacher rubbed my tailbone and moved her own perfectly pedicured turquoise toenails next to mine.

  “Ahhhh,” I said. “Just relaxing into this pose. Ahhh Namaste!” My answer satisfied her, and her perfect little blue toes moved on to help the woman next to me correct her downward dog.

  I hadn’t gotten a manicure or pedicure since we’d moved to San Francisco. I blamed this on not having any friends to go with me. Nail care back in New York had been a communal activity on Sundays with my girlfriends, a time to catch up and gossip and bitch about our significant others. Going alone to the nail salon felt stranger than eating out by myself. Yoga has taught me a lot about myself over the years, and in that moment it taught me I needed a pedicure.

  I chose one of the many nail salons on Divisadero Street and indulged in shiny pink fingers and toes. The stress melted out of me and into the green tea–scented porcelain toe tub. Why had I stopped doing this? Taking the time to take care of myself had been such a priority when I was single and living in New York. Since I’d been married my time had been increasingly filled with “us” time or “having awkward dinners with other couples” time. In an attempt to feel less lonely I began texting with my friend Sarah, who was going through a nasty divorce. Before filing for divorce, Sarah and her ex were one of those couples who constantly posted goofy selfies of themselves in exotic locations with perfect hair with invented hashtags like #BestHusbandEver and #ArentWeCute. Sarah was one of those people who made me feel like every other married person had already been let in on the secret of having a perfect marriage. Those goofy selfies were hiding the truth. Now they only talked to each other through their lawyers.

  Sarah began detailing the demise of her marriage through clipped sentences and descriptive emojis over text message while I waited for my nails to dry.

  It turned out that there wasn’t a single bombshell that ended their marriage. They began fighting over the little things. He wanted to get Yankee season tickets. She thought they were a waste of money. She put the toilet paper roll on wrong. He wouldn’t stop eating cereal in bed. She thought Silicon Valley sucked and he thought it was a masterpiece. He wanted a Hamptons share house. She thought he just wanted to fuck teenagers.

  “He can’t stand my friends,” she texted. “Including you. Sorry. We fought once a month, then once a week, twice a week, every day. The resentments got bigger and bigger. I had a dream I set him on fire. Then we stopped having sex…which was good because his balls smell. Seriously.”

  A divorce in your circle shakes your own foundation and makes you reconsider the things you can and can’t live with. Maybe I didn’t need a car so I could drive to Costco to get thirty toilet paper rolls to store in the closet.

  I stared down at my rosy toes and felt a sense of happiness and accomplishment that was clearly not in proportion to either the expense or the amount of effort I’d put in.

  I’m getting a blowout, I decided.

  I texted Glynnis about the fight, my pedicure, and whether I should ask the hairstylist for beach waves.

  “You know you’re dealing with a lot,” she texted back. “It’s OK to take a breath and take care of yourself, you know. Your toes look perfect! Yes on beach waves.”

  I felt better. This was what it felt like to reset. All the marriage advice I’d gleaned so far had been about us. But keeping us strong was also about keeping myself strong and healthy and happy. I thought about an interview I’d seen recently between Oprah and Michelle Obama. Former FLOTUS + Oprah was like the “Be your best self” equivalent of crossing the streams in Ghostbusters. Michelle described moving into the White House and realizing that in order to be a good wife and mom she had to make sure she took care of herself. “If you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up,” the First Lady said. “If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list.”

  I’d stopped making myself a priority. For years I’d been disgusted with my mother for losing herself in her marriage and her role as constant caretaker, and yet here I was, married for less than a year, completely losing myself.

  My calm was short-lived. The moment I walked back into the house, my anger returned, triggering a physical change in my body, like when a hyena smells a kill, a celebrity senses a paparazzo, or Lady Piazza gets a whiff of pizza. All the lights were out.

  Did that fucker leave?

  If anyone was going to leave, it was going to be me, but he up and did it first.

  He’d left.

  I’d made him leave.

  Shit.

  Every married friend I have (even the happily married ones) has their own unique marriage escape fantasy. When her marriage was still about taking goofy selfies, Sarah told me she’d go back to school to be a large animal vet if she ever broke up with her husband. Erin always told me that if she left her husband she’d go to Taos, New Mexico, with her two daughters and live in an adobe house and make jewelry out of feathers. Eliza would become a bartender in Bali. Annie would join me in San Francisco and become a lesbian. I didn’t have an escape fantasy yet. Nick and I were still so shiny
and new. I wondered, where would I go? The image formed almost instantly: I could go to Paris, sublet a flat in the Marais, get bangs, start smoking again, and buy a pink cashmere coat.

  But the fantasy made me sad. Paris would be really lonely without Nick. Who would spout off obscure facts about the construction of the Eiffel Tower or tell me which side of the plane to sit on when we landed at Charles de Gaulle?

  As I fumed in the living room, my shiny pink toes looking a little dimmer in the lamplight, I thought about what to do next. Talk to Nick? Or just go to sleep, because frankly I was exhausted. When you get married, everyone will give you the same advice: Never go to bed angry. That felt like bullshit to me. Sometimes you need to sleep to clear your damn head, right? One of the best pieces of marriage advice I’d gotten during my journey around the world actually came from Hollywood, from the actress and writer Jenny Mollen. I fell a little in love with Jenny when I was interviewing her for a Forbes story on how to succeed in life by failing miserably. The story was fine; talking to Jenny was wonderful. Jenny had been married to the actor Jason Biggs for five years, and her two New York Times best sellers talk a lot about surviving their marriage and having their baby, a little boy named Sid. Jenny’s marriage advice was the refreshing opposite of “Don’t go to bed angry.”

  “You know,” she said, “I think it’s normal to hate each other from time to time. You can’t be afraid of not liking each other. Sometimes you’re going to roll over in bed and wish he was someone else. Girls grow up with this idealized version of what their marriage should look like, and the reality is that it does ebb and flow. As much as I want to murder Jason sometimes, I know we’re not getting divorced and it’s not ending. There are times when you want to fuck them and times when you want to fuck anyone but them.”

  I walked toward our bedroom.

  Lady Piazza jauntily trotted next to me down the dark hallway. If she had any awareness at all that Nick and I had had a fight, the only thing she cared about was whether that fight gave her license to sleep in the bed. I walked past the framed photo we’d blown up from our second date in Joshua Tree, right before the thunderstorm rolled in, the sky bruised purple but the desert calm and still.

  Nick had turned on the reading light on my side of the bed. He hadn’t left after all. I listened to his long, low snores.

  I thought about what Chana said back in Jerusalem. Nick and I had had a fight. It was a brick. We could build a wall or we could keep building our house. We would fix it in the morning. For now, I was angry, and that was okay. My husband was still here, at home, in our bed. I combined the advice of the Hollywood actress and the Israeli Orthodox Jew.

  I sucked in a deep breath, took an Ambien, and went to sleep next to Nick.

  Love is like the wild rose-briar,

  Friendship like the holly-tree—

  The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,

  But which will bloom most constantly?

  —EMILY BRONTË

  “Do you want to have a cowife?” a stunning Maasai woman named Naropil asked me kindly as I sat down next to her in the dirt. “Would you let your husband have another wife? Would you like to have one?”

  I wanted to shake my head. I looked over at Nick, who was sitting off to my left. My husband with other women? No thanks. I already had my hands full with his harem of platonic yet needy ex-girlfriends. But I knew that was the wrong answer, the rude-white-person answer, and I shrugged my shoulders instead.

  “Maybe? Under the right circumstances. If she was cool. It’s a hard thing to say, really. Does she cook?”

  That was right…or closer to right. As soon as my translator communicated my answer to the clutch of women surrounding me, they cheered and thumped their bare feet on the dirt. As a traveler I’m often frustrated by my tendency to make assumptions before I fully understand a situation. Visiting Kenya was one of those times. Polygamy made me uncomfortable before I even came face to face with it. Marriage to multiple spouses is legal in Kenya. In 2014 the country’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, signed a controversial law legalizing the long-held practice, even though in East Africa’s tribal regions polygamy has long been standard without being recognized by the state. Legal or not, the practice didn’t sit well with me.

  “It is hard to take care of all of this,” Naropil said, sweeping her hand around the rural village of Naurori in the Maasai Mara of southern Kenya. Every inch of the family compound was blanketed in children, goats, and sheep. “When you work very hard, you need a cowife to help you take care of the children, the home, the cows, and the goats.”

  In many parts of tribal Kenya men tend to remain in a monogamous relationship with their first wife until they turn thirty-five. But as they acquire more wealth, they also acquire more wives. At age forty-one Nick would have at least two wives if he were a Maasai warrior. He was now making do with just me and not a single cow, goat, or sheep, unless you counted Lady Piazza.

  The women in the village began inspecting Nick the way I look at avocados in Trader Joe’s. They circled him and poked at him, squeezed his biceps.

  “Why is your husband so old with just one wife?” one of them asked me. “Why don’t you have any children?” Having one childless wife, in her eyes, meant we were a very poor couple. There were perhaps a dozen women sitting with us and more children than I could count running rowdy and free. One of them, a curious toddler shaped like a bowling ball, waddled over to pet Nick’s blond head. Yellow hair was funny and strange to them and clearly an invitation to stroke him.

  “I have all the wives I need.” Nick said with confidence, rubbing small circles along the small of my back. “But if we get more goats, I’ll consider it.”

  The Maasai and Samburu tribes of Kenya live in very much the same way their ancestors did a thousand years ago. The major difference is that they now have cell phones and everyone is on Facebook. There are other differences too. Today there are agreements about sharing their land with the government for game reservations, the tribes are much more conciliatory to the wildlife (no more hunting lions), and they’re more apt to send their children to government schools where they learn to read and speak Kiswahili.

  Yet many of the remaining Maasai and Samburu still live in primitive villages without electricity or running water. A man’s worth on the Mara is judged by sheer numbers—number of cows, number of wives, number of kids.

  Even on Nick’s worst days I don’t feel like pawning him off on a cowife—yet.

  But what the hell did I know? I could feel very differently a year from now.

  Understanding polygamy in tribal Africa, really understanding it, requires a certain fluidity of Western moral thinking. There are three things worth mentioning right off the bat: The first is that Maasai and Samburu polygamy isn’t about sex. It’s about division of labor. More wives mean more hands to do the work. The second is that the first wives are usually the ones asking their husband to get another wife. And the third is that the women, for the most part, have made their peace with these arrangements. One researcher in Kenya, Dr. Crystal Courtney, has been living among the tribe for several years, working on conservation and development with them. To better understand the prospects of Maasai youth, she asked around one hundred of them to draw her a picture of what they hoped their lives would look like when they grew up. Nearly all of them drew her a picture of them with at least three other cowives and between five to ten children.

  It wasn’t until I sat down with the women of the Maasai village that I understood how having cowives is less about sharing a husband than about sharing burdens. To many Western women this may seem like the opposite of a feminist choice. When I explained it to a friend of mine in New York, a type-A tiger mom investment banker, she was so angry she nearly spat on the floor.

  “Why don’t they just tell the men to work more?” she erupted with irritation for a culture half a world away. The simple answer is that the men won’t do it. And so the women work with what they have—other women.
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br />   Gaining cowives is also about the creation of a community. Maasai women view their cowives as a blessing because an extra wife means less work, an extra pair of hands when they are sick or recovering from childbirth. This is just good home economics—and a matter of life and death. When I saw how much labor the tribal women did, I felt like crying. The work of caring for the cattle, collecting water (from miles away), searching out firewood (also from miles away), cooking, building houses—it would be all too much for one woman on her own. The men won’t do it. Other women will. The women take care of one another.

  It had taken a day of travel to meet up with Naropil and her cowives. Nick and I stayed in the Maasai Mara’s Rekero Camp, and we’d had a rough night, thanks to its position right next to what the locals call the “hippo highway.” Gangs of the giant beasts surrounded us to graze all night long, grunting and moaning, their giant rumps rubbing against the canvas of our tent. “There’s an animal the size of a Volkswagen out there,” Nick mumbled, half asleep. “I don’t think we should go outside.” Next came the shrieks of the bush babies, a cross between a monkey, a rat, and a gremlin with giant eyes that glow in the dark. They flew through the air and landed on our tent, where they proceeded to tap-dance for hours.

  “You’re not supposed to feed them after midnight,” I moaned, slightly delirious.

  Around three in the morning the hyenas joined in with their cacophonous barking and laughing. Before sunrise a water buffalo had been devoured by a pride of lions in the river outside the tent. There’s never a dull moment in the Mara.