Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  Apologies weren’t my forte, but I thought I knew a way to weasel myself back into Victoria’s good graces. I closed my Filofax and opened my bottom desk drawer, where I pulled from a manila folder an Acquisition Request form.

  I took the form into the outer office and looked at her stiff, flat back. “I know you don’t want me to touch your machine,” I said—and then, because that statement seemed to border on the pornographic, I quickly added, “so I wonder if you could make a copy of this form?”

  “If my machine is working this morning.” Without looking directly at me, Victoria turned, plucked the form from my hand, rose from her desk, and slipped the form into the copier. “It jammed twice yesterday.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How? You had your door closed.”

  “I heard you say ‘fiddlesticks.’ ”

  Victoria lowered her head. “I’m only human.”

  “We all have that problem,” I stupidly said. “Well. What I really came out here to say is maybe it’s time we got a new machine.”

  Victoria gave me a tight smile, then triumphantly pressed her thumb down on the green COPY button.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LISA

  School got canceled, so after Danny and I trooped through Toys “

  R

  ” Us to pick out some pirate Legos for his Saturday birthday party, we went back home and spent the rest of the morning rolling the white powder in the front yard into two cold, silent characters: Snow Man (whom I gleefully dressed in Ebb’s turd-colored tie) and Snow Lady (whom I posed holding both a broom and a squeegee mop).

  Then I suggested to Danny that we give Snow Lady a few more hands.

  “How many?” he asked.

  I undulated my arms up and down. “As many as a Hindu goddess!”

  “What for?”

  “So she can multitask—with a vacuum cleaner! And a sponge! And a toilet brush!”

  Danny put his hands on his hips and regarded me solemnly. “Mommy, Daddy is right. You’re not a normal woman.”

  My jaw dropped open—and big white furry breaths came out of my mouth. I balled my fist inside my mittens and almost knocked Snow Man’s head right off his block.

  “Daddy said that? To you? About me?”

  “He said that to you last night—don’t you remember? After he came home and asked ‘How did your day go?’ and you said, ‘You really want to know?’ and went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet?”

  I laughed. Then I walked over to Snow Man and affectionately straightened his turdish tie before I knotted it tighter around his neck.

  “Hey,” I called to Danny, “what happened to the for-sale sign? It’s dented.” I tried to look appropriately stern. “Did you throw a snowball at that picture of Mrs. Order?”

  “I didn’t, Mommy. Really.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it. And Daddy didn’t do it. And now her face looks like a crumpet.”

  “Crumpet!” Danny said. “What’s a crumpet?”

  I didn’t answer. Because I was busy packing another snowball. After I made sure that none of the neighbors was watching, I winged the iceball at the sign and yelled, “Gotcha!” when I caught Law and Order right in the puss.

  “You’re dead meat,” I told Danny, “if you tell Daddy I did that. Now let’s go pig out on some lunch.”

  I fixed us tomato soup and four grilled-cheese sandwiches. Danny ate one-half of a single sandwich. I did the rest of the math and calculated that tomorrow I’d have to start a starvation diet.

  Then I piled the dirty dishes in the sink and told Danny, “Now Mommy needs some time to herself.”

  Danny immediately started to mope. “What is there for me to do? There’s nothing to—”

  “Play with your toys,” I said. “Color your coloring book. Read a book or two.”

  “But I’m bored with my toys and I don’t want to color and I like when you read to me better than when I read to myself.”

  I ended up shoving National Geographic: Life and Death on the Veldt into the VCR. As the narrator calmly stated, “Violence during mating is not unusual in the animal kingdom,” I trudged upstairs and sat down at my desk. I was hard at work trying to block out a new novel (main character: me; minor characters: also, regrettably, me) when the phone rang. I threw down my pen. Ordinarily I never answered the phone while in the throes of artistic vision, but even I could see that my plot was a pile of shit.

  “Is this the great Elizabeth Diodetto?” a voice asked.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed with the cordless phone in my hand. “Aye-Aye?”

  “Loved your novel.”

  “Oh, I’m so happy,” I said. “I was worried about the ending—”

  “I confess I haven’t quite finished it yet—but listen, can’t talk long, I have this editor in mind—a forty-something guy smack-dab in the middle of his own midlife crisis—to whom this manuscript will really speak. But I want to suggest a few changes—”

  “Sure. Totally. Anything you want.”

  “—so my assistant—” Aye-Aye put down the phone. “Bruce! Bruce!” He picked up the phone again. “Bruce just told me that my Monday lunch has canceled, so let’s you and I meet face-to-face.”

  Other authors might have leapt at the chance to gaze upon Aye-Aye’s handsome visage. I, however, thought, Uh-oh. Aye-Aye wants to gauge if he can pass me off to New York—or Hollywood—or failing that, Sioux City, Iowa—as this year’s hot young novelist.

  It was far too late to schedule plastic surgery. “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Bruce!” Aye-Aye called out. “Tell me where I was supposed to be for lunch on Monday. Ms. Diodetto? Are you there? I hope you like Japanese.”

  “Love it,” I lied—and immediately wanted to belch on the brackish taste of seaweed, miso, and rice vinegar that filled my mouth.

  “Ichikawa, then,” Aye-Aye said (as if I was supposed to know where this restaurant was located and how many stars it rated in Zagat’s).

  “Itchy what?” I asked.

  “Kawa. At one. See you there and then.”

  I put the phone back onto the nightstand. Right next to my ovulation chart. And saw, with dismay, that my temperature probably was due to spike within the next three days.

  I bit my lip and considered calling Aye-Aye back to cancel lunch—then decided to chance it. I could end up ovulating on Sunday or Tuesday just as easily as on Monday, I told myself. Besides, half the time I couldn’t tell if I was dropping an egg or not, since I couldn’t read that blasted thermometer right anyway. And I couldn’t very well tell Aye-Aye, Oh, so sorry, can’t make it that day, as I must stay home to achieve sexual congress with my husband! Besides, what was more important to me in the long run, anyway—having a kid or having a novel? As Mommy, I had spent the entire morning packing together two snow people who would melt as soon as the sun came out. As Elizabeth Diodetto, I would spend the afternoon fashioning stupid characters that deserved just as cruel a fate.

  Motherhood sometimes stunk, I thought. But then, too, so did authordom. I gazed down at my wrinkly hands. I was sick of being home all by myself, talking to no one but people who didn’t even exist, tired of having nothing on my calendar but dates with my fertility doctor (whose too-smooth bald head and face—like that of a garden grub—I had grown to hate because he reminded me of my repeated failures). The way Aye-Aye had commanded “one” had made this lunch date sound so important—so glamorous—so utterly cosmopolitan!—that I just couldn’t say no (even if I didn’t know how to eat with chopsticks).

  I stood up, went into the bathroom, and gazed at myself in the mirror. God in heaven, I thought. I look like a mother! I couldn’t decide what was duller—my skin or my hair. And that line on my forehead—marked deep with the worry and aggravation that came with keeping a house—seemed more like a gulch than the proverbial furrow. My lips were shrinking back into my face. Even my ears looked old! And wouldn’t it be a better world if I could just take all those wiry hairs I had
to pluck from my chin and replant them on Ebb’s thinning head?

  If only I didn’t look like myself, I thought. If only I looked like: Cynthia Farquhar.

  I went back into the bedroom, threw myself onto the unmade bed, and speed-dialed Cynthia at her real-estate office. Amazingly, Cynthia—who spent the better part of her day schlepping clients around in her black Lexus—was sitting at her desk.

  “Cynthia,” I said. “I absolutely have to get my hair cut—with your hair man—this weekend.”

  Cynthia gasped. “Lisa, an appointment with Ricardo takes weeks.”

  “But I have a very important engagement,” I said. “This coming Monday.”

  Cynthia made soft, clucking sounds of sympathy. She probably thought I had yet another cocktail party to attend with Ebb. “I’m scheduled with Ricardo at four tomorrow,” she said. “Take my appointment.”

  “But I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “It’ll be a swap. I’ll give you Ricardo, but you have to give me Eben. At two o’clock tomorrow. I just got wind of a magnificent house that both of you need to see.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said. “But how can I ever repay you?”

  “I’m really not making much of a sacrifice.” Cynthia’s soft voice turned breathless. “I’ve been wanting to tell you—but you know how it is, when you’re not sure that everything is going to work out all right?”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re about to close on another million-dollar property.”

  “No, much better. I’ve met a man. I’ve been seeing him now for three weeks. We’re driving up to Bear Mountain after he gets off work tomorrow, and I’d just as soon get an early start.”

  My good news about I’m Sorry suddenly paled in comparison. I leaned my head over the edge of the mattress and stared at a peapod-shaped stain on the carpet. “You must really be in love,” I said, “if you’re willing to put this guy before your hairdresser.”

  Cynthia laughed.

  I didn’t. “Isn’t Sunday one of your busiest working days?”

  “Lisa, I can’t live for work forever. So I’m going to do something very naughty. When we leave for Bear Mountain, I’m leaving my pager behind.”

  Out of my mouth came a squawk that I hoped Cynthia took as an expression of happiness instead of peevish jealousy. Imagine, I thought, making love without a pager or phone in the room, without a fax machine beeping at the bottom of the bed, without Danny snoring like a warthog across the hall, without trying to conceive . . . well, whatever it was that Ebb and I were trying to conceive—another shot at waking up every hour on the hour with a feverish, teething infant, another chance at standing outside the barrier of an amusement-park kiddie ride and hollering at the crying child inside, “Pull the bar toward you and the plane will fly!”

  “So who’s the lucky guy?” I asked.

  “His name is Rob Amore.”

  “You’re dating an Italian?”

  “Lisa,” Cynthia chided. “You’re Italian.”

  “Yes, but I don’t have a hairy back.”

  “But I told you before.” Cynthia lowered her voice, so she wouldn’t be overheard by others in her office. “My ex-husband was the one with the hairy shoulder blades.”

  Cynthia didn’t need to remind me—since I planned on slipping Angus Farquhar’s hairy shoulder blades into my final revision of I’m Sorry This Is My Life.

  “Where’d you meet this Rob?” I asked.

  “At a Rotary luncheon.”

  “What does he do for a living?” I asked.

  “Well. Promise you won’t laugh. His company is called Have A Heart Critter Control. They capture and relocate wildlife that has invaded homes.” Cynthia hesitated. “I know it sounds rather beastly—”

  Actually, I thought it sounded most manly.

  “—but Rob does very well for himself.”

  You do pretty well too, I felt like saying. But there was no need for me to point this out. Cynthia did fantastic—she made money beyond my wildest dreams, and that she looked so beautiful while doing it only added to my feelings of non-success.

  I poked at a ragged cuticle on my dry, dishwater hands. “Listen,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something. But don’t tell anyone else—least of all Ebb—just yet.” My throat clotted with a wad of conflicting emotions. “I’m meeting with my agent on Monday. He says he thinks he has just the right editor for my book.”

  “Lisa, this is so exciting!”

  “Isn’t it?” I said—even though I suddenly felt like I was about to throw up.

  “But you don’t sound excited.”

  “I guess I’m just nervous that the editor won’t like it.”

  “The editor will love it. And then your book will get published and get great reviews—”

  “Reviews,” I said queasily. “Don’t mention reviews.”

  “—and then the media will call you up to do interviews—”

  “Interviews,” I said. “Oy-yoi-yoi! What’ll I tell the interviewers when they ask me where I get my ideas?”

  “Tell them the truth.”

  “The truth!” I said. I couldn’t tell the truth. I couldn’t tell the whole world that I drew inspiration from Ebb, and Cynthia, and even inanimate objects, like a Sara Lee pound cake. People would think I was a kook if I admitted that even rocks and trees and stop signs seemed to sing to me. And they would find me pathetic if I said, Sometimes I feel so lonely at night that when I stand over the sink to wash dishes, I make the fork talk to the spoon, who then turns around and gives hell to the knife, and before I know it, my eardrums hurt from the conversation.

  “The truth,” I told Cynthia, “is that my life is so damn dull I have to live three quarters of it in my imagination. So whenever I go anywhere—especially parties—I’m there, but I’m not really there. I’m outside of myself, watching myself . . . and watching other people . . . listening to them . . . and then I duck into the bathroom so I can write down the memorable things that people say on little bits of toilet paper.” I hesitated, afraid I had weirded Cynthia out. Now she would never tell me anything interesting about her—or Angus Farquhar—or this Rob Amore—ever again!

  “Of course,” I assured her, “you’re my friend—so I never write down anything that comes out of your mouth.”

  “You definitely could steal some of my life and put it in your novel.”

  “Well,” I said, “now that you mention it, some of the Angus material did interest me—”

  “Angus! Am I in there?”

  “Oh God, no. Not at all.”

  “How disappointing,” Cynthia said. “I think it would be the greatest compliment to find myself in the pages of a novel.”

  I laughed nervously. “Maybe you could suggest that to Ebb.”

  “Oh! Lisa!” Cynthia’s voice turned mischievous. “Is your book really about Eben? But how could it be? From what you’ve told me, Eben just seems too good to be true. I mean, he sounds like the kind of man a woman could actually stand to live with.”

  I stared, in horror, at the moldy mound of laundry Ebb had been compiling—for weeks!—on the armchair. Then I told Cynthia, “That’s right. Ebb is so perfect that sometimes women ask me to clone him.”

  Cynthia laughed—but she didn’t say, I’ll take two!

  “You know, Lisa,” she said, “you and Eben make such a cute couple.”

  “We do?”

  “I’ve always thought that. It’s just so darling the way you’re complete opposites, and yet so happy—”

  “We are? I mean, I am. He is. Both of us together are . . .” I repressed the urge to make a big fart noise with my lips and said, “Well, words defy me. But you’re confusing me, Cynthia. I didn’t think you were interested in getting married again. I thought your job made you really happy.”

  “Of course. I love my job. But how can I say it? Something’s missing here.” She lowered her voice again. “Sometimes I think I’d just like to stay home and, you know, really keep a hom
e—”

  I clucked my tongue. “What did you eat for lunch?”

  “Nothing. You know I’m trying to watch my weight.”

  “That’s your problem, then,” I said. “You’re light-headed.”

  “No, I think I’m in love.”

  “Well, in either case,” I said, “I recommend that you eat three-and-a-half grilled-cheese sandwiches.”

  “Three-and-a-half sandwiches! I’d have to sign up with Weight Watchers.”

  I pinched a slab of fat on my belly and watched, in horror, as it hung there—without snapping back!—for half a second. In the background, I heard voices, and then Cynthia called out in a breathless voice, “Tell him to hold! I’ll be off in a minute.”

  “Is that the Man Himself on the other line?” I asked.

  “It is. So—should I pick up you and Eben just before two tomorrow?”

  “Sure. No—wait—I have to drive Danny to a birthday party, so fax me directions to this house.”

  “I just know you’ll love this house, Lisa. But I’m a little less sure about Eben. So—if you don’t mind—would you let me pick him up tomorrow, so I can sweet-talk him a little?”

  “He’s all yours,” I told Cynthia, then thought, Whether you want two of him or not.

  Making dinner always depressed me. Somebody, of course, had to do it—but why did it have to be me, the only Italiana in the Western hemisphere who couldn’t even fix a decent bowl of spaghetti? I grimaced as I brushed too much butter—and way too much garlic—onto six slabs of staleish bread. The dollop of red wine I poured into the Classico sauce to give it flavor slopped on the stove. I cut my finger chopping tomatoes and made the mistake of dragging my hand across my eyes after I cut the onions, which only increased my inevitable tears.