Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  “Mommy?” Danny’s tiny voice came from across the hall.

  I was a rotten mother. I didn’t answer.

  The voice grew closer. “Mommy? Mommy?” Danny’s tiny shadow appeared in the dark doorway. “Mommmmmmmmy!” he hollered, as he kamikazed himself onto the mattress and took over Ebb’s side of the bed. Danny placed his hot, smooth face next to mine on the pillow. Adorable as he was—with his dark brown cowlick, his big cheeks and snub nose and loose front tooth that was threatening to fall out at any minute—Danny had one tragic flaw: he was a mouth breather. I turned my head away from his foul morning breath as he announced, “It snowed outside.”

  I took the thermometer out from between my lips. “I know. Daddy woke me up early so I could thoroughly enjoy the experience.” I gestured at the window. “Open the blinds so I can see.”

  Danny kneed me in the bladder as he climbed over me, then rolled off the mattress and yanked open the blinds. The bedroom instantly was flooded with the silvery color I associated more with Christmas morning than the first day of spring. The dark branches of the maple tree just outside our window hung heavy with snow, and a few flakes still were falling beneath the streetlight.

  “Gorgeous,” I said, before I thought, Damn, now I have to spend the rest of the morning shoveling.

  Danny continued staring out the window. “I hope I don’t have school.”

  And I hoped he did. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Danny. But just being in the same room with him was work—which, of course, kept me away from my real work. If I didn’t have you, I sometimes sourly thought when he bothered me, I could have written six killingly good novels by now. Then I looked into his cutie-pie face and thought: Well, maybe one and a half.

  “Come here, sweetiekins,” I said, throwing back the blankets.

  Danny snuggled up next to me. I gave him a wild, impulsive kiss on his plump cheek before I stuck the thermometer back in my mouth.

  Like all new parents, Ebb and I had sworn we’d never let a baby rule our sleeping patterns. Except when he was nursing, Danny hadn’t been allowed into our bed. But then Danny grew into a toddler, Ebb was still traveling three or four nights out of seven, and I’d been too lazy—and maybe too lonely—to bar anyone from lying by my side. By letting Danny clamber in beside me every weekday morning (and warning him, “Don’t tell Daddy I let you do this!”), I had created a weekend problem. “I don’t understand why,” Ebb told me, “every Saturday—like clockwork—Danny has to get between us in bed.”

  I definitely was asking for trouble by cuddling with Danny every morning. But I figured he wasn’t going to be this cute forever—and if I couldn’t have another baby, then I wanted to make the most out of the one I already had. So I squeezed Danny in my arms. “Mmm!” I said. My tongue buzzed against the glass of the thermometer, which distorted my words. “I love you so much, I can’t say how much!”

  Then I pushed Danny’s head off my chest, sat up, and held the BBT thermometer beneath the lamplight. I squinted at the tiny black lines that marked the higher nineties. I never had mastered the knack of tilting the thermometer so I could read the mercury right (and I had even more trouble comparing the two purple lines on those pee-on ovulation-predictor sticks). My temperature this morning seemed level with yesterday’s—but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.

  Danny stared at me as I marked my temperature on the graph I kept on the nightstand. “Why do you keep taking your temperature?”

  “I told you,” I said. “Daddy and I are trying to—but why can’t you remember what I told you?”

  Danny rolled over and punched Ebb’s pillow. “Why do you have to have another baby?”

  “Because we want one.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing. You’re perfect. But—stop punching Daddy’s pillow!”

  Danny instantly stopped. “Why are you and Daddy so mean to me lately?”

  Instantly I felt ashamed of my peevishness. “I’m sorry. I just have a lot of things on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  Like selling my novel, I wanted to say. But then Danny might say, Oh, who cares about your crummy novel? and I’d be forced to sob, Nobody, apparently, beyond me, myself, and crummy I!

  “Like,” I said, “like . . . well, finding us a new house to live in.”

  “Why do we have to move?”

  “Because Daddy got promoted and now we have to”—my stomach turned, just thinking about it—“entertain.”

  “Entertain who?”

  “The big cheeses Daddy works with.”

  “Do you like those cheeses?”

  “I have to be nice to them. But just between you and me? I think most of them are doody-heads.”

  Danny giggled, then repeated, “Doody-heads! Doody-heads!” nine times before I told him to can it.

  “Why do you hate parties?” Danny asked. “I love parties. I can’t wait until my party tomorrow.”

  I lay back on my pillow and groaned. I had completely forgotten that Danny was invited to yet another birthday party—which meant I had to crawl through Toys “

  R

  “ Us this afternoon to buy yet another overpriced present.

  “And I can’t wait until Daddy’s birthday,” Danny said. “What’d you get Daddy this year?”

  “Nothing. Yet.” I plumped up my pillows and flopped back down upon them, staring at the ceiling. Lovers were supposed to know—and deliver—exactly what their loved ones wanted and needed. And yet I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to get for Ebb. “I guess the best present I can get for him is to find a new house.”

  “Why does Daddy care so much about the house?” Danny asked. “He’s hardly ever home.”

  “That’s not true. He’s home more now than when he was traveling.”

  Danny shrugged. “I used to like it when Daddy wasn’t here.”

  “Danny,” I scolded him. “That’s not very nice.”

  “But it’s true! You thought so too. After Daddy left for the airport, you used to make popcorn and say, ‘Let’s have a party!’ ”

  I heaved a lonesome sigh. True, when Ebb left town on business, I had turned to Orville Redenbacher for consolation. Free from Ebb’s sometimes-ponderous presence, Danny and I had refrained from eating our cruciferous vegetables and scavenged in the refrigerator for slumber-party meals (cold pizza, salami sandwiches, vinegar chips and sour-cream-and-onion dip). We had put on our pjs at six P.M. and spent the night sitting on the couch, giggling at Bugs Bunny cartoons and sucking on the salty old maids left at the bottom of the popcorn bowl. But surely we missed Ebb more than we let on, because after I tucked Danny into bed, he always begged me, “Tell me a funny story about Daddy!” Oh, it was all Danny’s fault—wasn’t it?—that more than one of those stories had worked its way into I’m Sorry This Is My Life.

  “I think that on Daddy’s birthday,” I told Danny, “I’ll show him this novel I’ve been writing.”

  “Why didnja show him before?” Danny asked.

  “Because he made fun of my first novel and it really hurt my feelings.”

  “That wasn’t nice,” Danny said.

  “I totally agree.”

  “He should have said what my teachers always say: ‘This is good, but it can be better.’ ”

  “He did—sort of—say that.”

  “Well, why didn’t you listen?”

  Because I didn’t want to! I felt like blurting out. Because it was more convenient to turn a deaf ear. Because I had felt—at least at the time—that if what Ebb said about my writing was true (that it was too glib, too on the surface, too unwilling to go down deep into the characters’ hearts), then I may as well just give up my dream of being a novelist altogether and take up some other ridiculous hobby, like carving decoy ducks or joining a fife-and-drum corps.

  “I did listen,” I told Danny. “He said I wrote it too quickly, without thinking of how it could be more meaningful. So now I’ve spent three whole years on this oth
er book—”

  “Three years,” Danny said. “Why did it take you so long?”

  I wrinkled my brow, tempted to say: Because I had your heavy diapers to change, your bananas to mash, your lunches to pack, and your birthday cupcakes to make. But that was only one side of the story. The other was this:

  “Because,” I said. “I was so busy. Loving you. To pieces!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  EBEN

  Have a good one, Lisa. I hung up the phone, knowing Lisa would have a thrilling day whipping up wacky problems for her even wackier characters. Meanwhile, I was stuck dealing with the real thing. I pulled my in-box toward me. As I riffled through the stack of memos, letters, reports, and spreadsheets, I couldn’t find a single document I wanted to read. My secretary’s ranking of each manuscript—URGENT! HIGH PRIORITY! ASAP!—made me want to dump the entire contents into File 13. Victoria never rated any task WHENEVER.

  Reluctantly, I pulled out the final draft of SB’s annual report and read: These forward-looking statements—not historical facts but only our plans and assumptions about future performance—shall be identified by words such as may, will, could, should, expects, and believes. . . .

  Long ago, I could find sense in such a sentence. Long ago, I could do my job without thinking, I need to spend more time with my wife and less with my secretary. I need a break from all this paperwork. God, I need to go to the bathroom. God, I need a new life!

  As my clock chimed half-past eight, the first stirrings—like the rustling of a rodent—came from the outer office. I looked up from the annual report and blinked. The long, dour body of Victoria Wright, hearselike in her black winter coat, was parked in my doorway. On top of her head sat a gray fur hat more suited to the Siberian tundra than to the fertile soils of the Hudson Valley. Suddenly I felt as if I were on the set of Doctor Zhivago. Any moment now, Victoria would announce, “Comrade Doctor: We are taking you to the front.”

  The hat begged to be acknowledged. I cleared my throat. “That’s a marvelous . . . chapeau . . . you’re wearing this morning.”

  Victoria took the thick gray nest off her head. “This is an astrakhan cap, Mr. Strauss. Commonly worn in Russia.”

  “I was going to say, it seemed suggestive of . . . colder climes.”

  Victoria fluffed the fur with her gloved fingers. “It was a gift,” she said. “From a man.”

  I maintained a heroic silence.

  “Well!” said Victoria, and the rosy blush that spread across her thin, pelicanlike face momentarily made her look coy and fresh—someone, I thought, with whom a man might conceivably fall in love, or at least address as Vicki. “It’s not what you’re thinking. You know I’m on my church’s interfaith council.”

  I nodded. “I think you’ve mentioned that before.”

  “Did I tell you we were sponsoring a family of Russian refugees? The father gave me this astrakhan hat after I sewed some outfits for his children.” She lowered her voice. “Five children—and another on the way.”

  I tried not to say anything Lisa-like (such as, la-dee-fucking-dah for them). For some reason, Victoria—who had never been married nor had children of her own—always commented (with copious references to the Good Book) upon other people’s fertility. “Well,” she once murmured to me as she sat at her desk during lunch hour, knitting up yet another pair of gender-nonspecific white booties for the next SB baby shower, “the Bible does tell us to go forth and multiply!” Then she gave a loving glance at that too-precious family she had sewn up for herself: a sextuplet of floppy-eared bunnies in frilled gingham skirts who sat huddled, like young unable to leave their nest, in a braided-rug basket next to her Rolodex.

  “Your refugees are probably Orthodox,” I said. “They tend to have a lot of children.”

  Victoria plucked at a fuzzball on the point of her hat. “Our pastor refers to them as refuseniks. He said that if we asked our refuseniks for dinner—which I plan on doing very soon—we shouldn’t serve them meat and milk products together.”

  “I’d lay off the vodka too,” I said.

  Whenever I made a joke (however lame), Victoria chided me with a single syllable that called blubbery arctic mammals into my mind. “Tusk! You’re joking. I’m a Baptist. Our pastor recommends fish.”

  “A sensible choice,” I said.

  “My first thought was: halibut. But now I’m leaning toward flounder.” She gave me a level look. “How are you with a hammer, Mr. Strauss?”

  “Worse than with a golf club. Why?”

  “We’re building our refuseniks a home through Habitat for Humanity. If you were more skilled, I’d ask for your hand.”

  I took a deep breath, counted to ten, then tapped my pencil on my Filofax. “I’m ready to go over our calendar.”

  Victoria pointed a thin, bony finger at me. “I see you already forgot the day, Mr. Strauss.”

  “The date is March twentieth,” I said.

  “The day. What’s different about today?”

  “First day of spring?”

  She nodded. “And?”

  I plunged the depths of my memory, all too shallow these days. When I continued to draw a blank, Victoria said, “I don’t mean to get fresh, but—” She blushed. “Stand up and take a good hard look at yourself.”

  Her command so astounded me, I actually followed it. When I was three quarters of the way off my chair, I realized my dilemma. On the first Casual Friday in Scheer–Boorman’s history, I was wearing my very best suit—or as Victoria cheekily told me, “Exactly the wrong dress for the party, Mr. Strauss.”

  I felt like telling Victoria, The clothes we wear at the office should differ from the clothes we wear at home. But why reiterate arguments I’d already made? Our CEO, Rudolf Furlong, had told me to “get with the times” when I claimed Casual Fridays led to a lax working environment, and now every well-pressed chambray shirt I’d see that day—every pair of chinos ordered from Freeport, Maine, and Dodgeville, Wisconsin—would remind me that I was a cultural dinosaur (or at least a man who preferred to see the human race dressed in accordance with SB’s outdated rest-room signs, which showed a male form in trousers and a female form in a skirt).

  When the new Dress-Down-Friday policy was put in place, Victoria had made it clear that she would remain a skirt-only secretary; she considered herself too high up on the ladder to get away with wearing pants. Now, as I watched her strip off her gloves in the outer office, I found myself wondering what she wore beneath her thick black coat. There were no surprises. She wore a nubby gray cardigan sweater over a gray tweed skirt.

  I felt my molars lock together as Victoria placed her funereal coat on her pink hanger, then straightened the shoulders of my trench coat as she hung it on the blue hanger. She turned and tended to her basketful of cotton bunnies—bending an ear down, fluffing a skirt—before she fetched her shorthand pad and a sharp number-two from her needlepoint pencil holder. As she marched into my office wielding her Day-Timer, I counterattacked by placing my Filofax on my desk. Since day one of becoming an uneasy team, Victoria and I had power-struggled over my calendar (where next to SB meetings I penciled in private information such as my appointments with the fertility clinic and that narrow, forty-eight-hour window in which Lisa and I were forced to fornicate like there was no tomorrow). My refusal to give Victoria access to my Filofax led her to believe I was living a double (and immoral) life. Worse, it had resulted in scheduling chaos: conflicting (and even duplicate) meetings, until Victoria snippily announced, “I can’t work for a man who needs to be in two places at once.”

  Thus was born this morning ritual: a comparison of her Day-Timer to my Filofax. Victoria took the padded leather chair on the other side of my desk. The way she primly pressed her knees together annoyed me. We know all about you, said those knees. We have been apprised, Mr. Strauss, of certain negative aspects of your work history—i.e., your prior relationship with a female subordinate! Although I had long since legitimized my relationship with Lisa, Victoria see
med to regard our marriage as the equivalent of a sustained Satanic rite. Only after Lisa had purchased a piece of Victoria’s fancywork at the silent auction—a crewel sign that read SO IT’S NOT HOME SWEET HOME—ADJUST!—did Victoria admit to me, “Why, I like your wife very much. When she explained to me why she bought that sign, she had me in stitches.”

  Victoria perched her silver reading glasses—which she wore around her neck on a mother-of-pearl chain—on her nose. She spread her Day-Timer on her lap. “Before we begin,” she said, “I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “Good first, please,” I said.

  Victoria modestly lowered her head. “My good relationship with the men in Information Systems has paid off. I’ve been voted secretary of our new Virus-Free Environment Task Force.”

  “Congratulations,” I told Victoria. “That’s a real honor. And the bad news?”

  Victoria poked her pencil into the wire coil of her shorthand pad. “The task force has weekly meetings. One-thirty to three-thirty every Monday.”

  I tried—hard—to keep a straight face. But the thought of two hours of freedom from Victoria caused my heart to swell to the size of Oklahoma.

  From the outer office, the phone began to peal, then the automatic messaging system picked it up. “I can do without you,” I said. “I mean, manage for myself.”

  “I’ll ask Marjorie or Sharon or one of the other girls to cover for me.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Then I’ll mark that as prime time to arrange your meetings.”

  But I already had my pen poised above Monday; I scribbled in from 1:30 to 3:30 P.M.: bliss. “Keep it clear, please. I need time to catch up on paperwork.”