Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  The Times, swathed in its blue plastic bag, sat in a mound of snow on the front porch. I picked up the bag by the wrong end and the paper slipped out. AT LEAST 19 KILLED IN CRASH AT SNOWY LAGUARDIA, read the headline. Then the subtitle: Plane En Route to Cleveland Burns and Careers into Bay.

  I drew in a quick, coffee-tinged breath. But that was my plane, I thought. Wasn’t it? The one Victoria had put me on, and took me off again, after I lied to Rudy and told him that I couldn’t possibly go to Cleveland, because Lisa and I had to make an offer on a house? With the newspaper in my hand, I stepped back into the hallway and turned on the light. Leaning against the closed front door, I examined the photo of the 747, broken in two, with the fuselage smashed. Then I read the article all the way through, and each breath of air I drew into my lungs felt like a gift. I hadn’t died. I’d been spared—all because Lisa had drawn on my calendar a smiley, ovulatory face.

  I exhaled. And inhaled. Like Ebenezer Scrooge flinging open the shutters on Christmas morning, hardly able to believe he was still alive, I felt like I should open the front door and shout my existence to the world. But I simply whispered within myself—I could be dead now, now I could be dead!—as I abandoned the newspaper in the front hall, picked up my briefcase, and trudged in my boots down to the bottom of the snowpacked driveway where I had parked my car the night before. Lisa had left her car next to mine.

  Last night I’d told Lisa—who had been insufferably edgy all day—“You may as well leave your car in the garage. I’m sure Danny won’t have school tomorrow.”

  “He’ll have school,” Lisa said. “Or he’ll have a baby-sitter.”

  “Make sure you call me tomorrow—or, better yet, page me—if your temperature surges.”

  “I don’t need a million reminders.”

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Meaning—it’s the end of the weekend, right? And you promised to spray that front lock, but have you made any romantic overtures toward that can of WD-40?”

  “There are only so many minutes in the day, Lisa.”

  “Well, during one of those minutes I went into your car to get out the lock you bought at the True Value. And guess what I smelled coming out of your trunk?”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m going to toss all that trash into the Dumpster at work tomorrow.”

  Lisa gave me an exasperated sigh. “And tomorrow, I guess, you’re going to put that mirror back in Danny’s room.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, adding to myself: Then again, maybe I won’t.

  In the crisp, cool air of morning, this petty tiff I’d had with Lisa seemed pointless. Life was too short to bicker about WD-40 and trash and mirrors. I opened the door of my Audi and resolved to put a stop to this sort of squabbling in the future. We’re going to move into a new house, I thought. And we’re going to have a new baby and—goddammit—we are going to be happy!

  But it was hard to think of making a fresh start when I found that the inside of my car bore the cloying odor of old coffee grinds and eggshells and orange rinds. I turned the key in the ignition, and while the car gruffly warmed up, I brushed the last inch of powder off my windshield. Then, to surprise Lisa and show her how much I cared for her, I brushed off her Camry. After I finished, I regretted I hadn’t thought of an even more noble gesture: writing, with the finger of my glove, something gallant in the powder that had coated the windshield. I LOVE YOU might have warmed Lisa’s heart. But by the time Lisa woke up, the wind would have blown the words away.

  Snowplows still were cutting through the SB parking lot, yet the space in front of the monstrous green Dumpsters was cleared. I pulled up beside the first Dumpster and tossed inside the garbage bags. I left my windows cracked to rid the car of the lingering garbage odor. As I entered the back hallway of SB and shook off my boots, the security guard said, “Mr. Strauss—you’re whistling. Man, I’ve never heard you whistling before.” I smiled, signed in, and told the guard, “Have a good one.” Then I puckered up my lips and continued to chirp through the empty halls of SB. I smiled as I strolled by the motivational poster that showed the match on fire. Good attitude? Yes. Contagious? You betcha! Even Victoria’s Postum-odorous office smelled better on this fine morning. I hung up—and buttoned—my coat on my blue hanger and sat down at my desk. I piled all the papers I had brought home over the weekend (but had failed to work on) onto my desk. No matter. I had all day to deal with this paperwork. First I wanted to log on to my electronic mail and post Victoria a very grateful thank-you for taking me off that plane to Cleveland.

  I pushed the power button on my computer. The hard drive didn’t chime. Using a more forceful finger, I pressed the button again. Nothing doing. I grimaced at the monitor’s blank screen. It was only 6:00 A.M. The men from Technical Support wouldn’t arrive until 8:30 at best. I would have to remain disconnected for the next two and a half hours—or maybe even more. Probably fifty percent of our staff would use the snow as an excuse to stay home drinking that extra cup of coffee; once they got into the office, they would spend another half hour—over more coffee—trading excuses about why they had arrived at work half an hour late.

  The one person I wished would run late was punctual as ever. At 8:25 A.M., swathed in her pall-black coat and astrakhan hat, Victoria positioned herself in my doorway like a female Grim Reaper.

  “Mr. Strauss,” she said, her face ashen white. “You should be dead.”

  I smiled. “But I’m not.”

  “That plane to Cleveland—”

  “Good thing I wasn’t on it, right?”

  Victoria sounded like a Berlitz language instructor explaining tenses. “But you should have been. You could have been. You might have been.”

  “I guess somebody was watching out for me,” I said.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “I meant you,” I said. “Thank you for taking me off it.”

  “But, Mr. Strauss. I was the one who put you on it.” Victoria’s eyes shone with tears. “You might have passed. Your wife might be a widow, your son might be an orphan—”

  I watched—in discomfort—as Victoria turned away from the door, snatched a tissue from the needlepoint-covered box on her desk, and blew her nose. I cleared my throat. I didn’t know what to say to her. So when she came back into the doorway, dabbing her eyes with a fresh tissue, I tried to make a joke.

  “I had no idea you were so attached to me,” I said.

  “Tusk!” She blew her nose again. “To think we might have lost you. Forever.”

  “Well,” I said, “think of it this way: I also might have electrocuted myself this morning by sticking a fork in the toaster. Or I could have lost my brakes on the way to work and slammed into a salt truck. Instead, I arrived here safely and found my computer has blown a gasket.”

  Victoria stood on tiptoes and peered over my desk. “Did you try plugging it in?”

  I looked under my credenza. Because of the impending snowstorm, Victoria had warned me to unplug on Friday. Yet I could have sworn I’d been the last to leave the office on Friday and that I had forgotten to unplug my computer. However, I could have remembered incorrectly that I had forgotten . . . or forgotten what I once had correctly remembered. . . .

  “Who unplugged this?” I asked Victoria.

  She crumpled the tissue between her fingers. “I suspect Stanley Steemer.”

  “What department is he in?”

  “The carpet cleaners,” she said. “Stanley Steemer came on Saturday and deep-cleaned our carpets—didn’t you smell the difference when you first came in?” As if she stood on the edge of an Alpine meadow, Victoria took a deep, bracing breath. “Mmmm. Intoxicating. Like the first whiff of forsythia in the spring air.”

  I knelt on the carpet and pushed my computer plug back into the surge protector. The machine gave off a healthy hum.

  Victoria now had her emotions completely under wraps. “Mr. Strauss,” she said, in her normal voice, “I hate to tell you this while you’re on your
knees—”

  “Oh, go ahead,” I said. “Hit me while I’m down.”

  “—but on my way in, I noticed a few people had gathered in the back hallway.” Victoria de-astrakhaned herself and fluffed the fur on her hat. “Someone seems to have switched the signs on the cafeteria lavatories. No one dares to use the facilities until LADIES once again are LADIES and MEN once again are MEN.”

  I had the urge to stick my finger into the electrical outlet. “Why do these things always happen when I’m on the pager?” I asked.

  “You’re on the pager? You didn’t tell me. Where is Mr. Furlong this morning?”

  “Out on business.”

  “His secretary said something about him being in the Bahamas.”

  “That’s right. Business in the Bahamas.”

  Victoria sniffed and looked out the window at the snowbanks with disfavor. Evidently the sweet forsythia-like smell of Stanley Steemer no longer was enough to sate her spring fever. She retreated into the outer office and immediately unwrapped a Jolly Rancher candy. As she hung up her coat on the pink hanger, she called out, “How do you want to handle this bathroom situation?”

  “By forgetting it exists.”

  Victoria moved her Jolly from one cheek to another. “I’ll call Maintenance.”

  Our head handyman, Henry Hoyts—who was one month away from retirement and had an attitude to prove it—met me at the rest rooms to inspect the damage. His sourpuss look—and the crust of sugar at the corners of his pinched mouth—made it clear he resented being dragged away from his Monday-morning glazed doughnut for such foolishness.

  “Somebody did a crap job on this, Mr. Strauss,” Hoyts said as he examined the LADIES faceplate hanging on the MEN’s door. “Ruined the screws. Used a flat when it required a Phillips.” He grunted. “Looks like woman’s work.”

  “Of course it’s woman’s work,” I said. “The women are the ones ticked off about the bathroom situation.” I tried to remember which women at Friday’s potty-equity meeting had seemed the most incensed. When one of the lead womanists had risen from her chair to deliver a rousing speech, the very chopsticks in her gray bun had quivered with anger. Yet Victoria’s applause (from the audience) had seemed just as impassioned.

  “Could that damage have been done by a chopstick?” I asked Hoyts.

  “They using chopsticks in the cafeteria now?”

  “How about a knitting needle? Or a crochet hook?”

  “I’m no private detective, sir.”

  I knocked my knuckles against the door. “How long will it take you to fix this?”

  Hoyts massaged the doughnut sugar from his right cheek. “Hour.”

  “One hour! Even I could fix it faster than that.”

  Hoyts looked me up and down—from my two-hundred-dollar loafers to my red tie—and raised his eyebrow in doubt. “I gotta find replacement screws,” he said. “Maybe do some caulking on this here door.” The walkie-talkie that Hoyts wore on his huge leather belt exploded into static. He looked down at my pager (which so far had remained miraculously silent) and said, “Excuse me. I got work to do here, Mr. Strauss.”

  I would have said, Well, see that it gets done, and quickly, if I hadn’t realized how futile my words would have been. I had seen this happen over and over again. Employees on the edge of retirement often behaved like couples on the edge of divorce. Things better left unsaid got said, and all sense of loyalty and decorum got flushed down the toilet.

  When I got back to the office, Victoria was swilling Postum and covetously eyeing new Xerox machines in an office-supply catalog.

  “Will you get me a copy of the sign-in log for the weekend?” I asked her.

  “It’s already on your desk.”

  The smudged duplicate Victoria had laid on my desk seemed to prove that I had held on too long to our copy machine. The sign-in sheet revealed that the usual crowd—half the research team, some of the VPs, the esteemed Stanley Steemer, Victoria, two other secretaries, and the weekend housekeeping staff—had come in on Saturday. Sunday it had snowed heavily, and only a handful of researchers and lab technicians (all men) had signed in and out.

  “Why were you here on Saturday?” I called out to Victoria.

  “Someone had to supervise Stanley Steemer. Men just don’t know the meaning of clean.”

  Surely Victoria—whose actions always were governed by the question “How would Jesus Christ respond to this?”—wouldn’t have dared to change the signs. I stared at the list of possible culprits, then tossed it aside. My management motto was: Whenever possible, lay collective rather than individual blame. I turned to my computer and began to draft the unavoidable memo: This is a reminder to all employees of the need for respect for corporate facilities. Appropriate disciplinary action will be taken against anyone engaging in deliberate destruction of company property.

  I sent the file to Victoria via our electronic-mail system with explicit instructions to send all departments a hard copy on half sheets. While she set about “sprucing up” my memo by fixing the crooked margins and putting it on letterhead, I opened my Filofax to March 23—where the shadow of the word bliss seemed permanently embedded from one-thirty to three-thirty. As I glanced down at the smiley face Lisa had drawn in my Filofax and my scrawled reminder to send flowers to Rudy Furlong’s wife, I reminded myself to feel happy. Lucky. Alive! I placed my palm upon my Filofax as if it were a Bible and swore that from now on—when I gazed outside at the crystalline world and the luscious icicles that hung from the roof, just begging to be plucked and licked—I would appreciate everything I had and embrace all the possibilities for celebrating life that came my way.

  Like today. Lisa hadn’t paged me to let me know her body temperature had risen—nor had she called me yet to let me know what she had found out from Cynthia about the house. But I didn’t have to wait until she called, did I? Victoria would be out of the office. I had no meetings scheduled for early afternoon. I could do something loving, something life-affirming. I could take an extended lunch hour. Surprise Lisa. Go home and indulge her fantasies for an hour or so. Go home and . . .

  . . . fuck her like a stranger.

  Victoria was just beginning to copy my memo as I speed-dialed the Teleflorist. After I quietly gave the clerk information on Rudy’s wife, I told her, “I have another order. Going to the following address . . . For a certain—um, Elizabeth Diodetto, yes, that’s spelled D-I-O-D-E-T-T-O. A dozen roses. No, make that spring tulips. Pink, if you have them. And can you get them there before eleven A.M.?”

  “For ten dollars extra,” the clerk answered. “Is there a message?”

  I paused. “I heard you need a plumber.”

  The clerk fell silent for a moment. “No, we don’t,” she said. “And the message is?”

  “That is the message.”

  The clerk hesitated. “Let me repeat that back to you: I heard you need a plumber.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any name attached?”

  “Leave it unsigned, please.”

  “And now your name as it is listed on your credit card?”

  For a second I wished I could assume a false identity. But then I shrugged, gave my name and credit-card number, hung up the phone, and leaned back in my chair. I saw the whole scene unfold as planned. I would come out of the ten-thirty meeting that Victoria had set up with the chief architect, and Victoria would inform me with barely concealed glee, “Mr. Strauss, I don’t want to ruin your morning, but your wife just called to say you have a major plumbing disaster. How fast can you get home?”

  I saw myself standing on my own front porch—sans wrench—but wielding some equally manly accoutrements, like Henry Hoyts’s key ring and walkie-talkie. I stamped my feet to shake off the snow, then . . .

  . . . reached with one gloved finger to push the doorbell. The door cracked open and Lisa’s eyes peered around the safety chain.

  “Hey, lady,” I said. “Your husband told me you had a problem. With your drain.”


  Lisa’s disembodied voice was husky with desire. “I believe I do.”

  “I’m here to address the situation.”

  “I’m not sure I should let you in. You see, I just got out of the shower—“

  “You can trust me.”

  Clutching a scanty towel around her breasts, Lisa released the safety chain. I came in and shut the door. Then I followed her up the stairs, waiting until we reached the master bathroom before I reached out and yanked the towel off Lisa, hoisting her onto the counter in front of the vanity mirror. . . .

  “Oh, fiddlesticks!” Victoria said. The copier stopped thump-thumping. Victoria opened the door that exposed the machine’s inky guts. She gingerly lifted her skirt an inch to kneel before the machine and said, “It figures! Stanley Steemer’s just been here, and now that dirty man will come and mess up my carpet.”

  At the ten-thirty meeting in the boardroom, I reported to the chief architect that SB had complete satisfaction with the plans for the new wing with one minor adjustment: additional stalls were needed in the ladies’ room.

  I expected the architect to greet my news with a can-do attitude. What he offered, however, was a stubborn silence.

  “That’s not a minor adjustment,” he finally said.

  “Half a dozen more stalls in this one lavatory?”

  He stabbed his finger at the blueprints that lay spread out on the table before us. “If you double the number of regular stalls, you’re obligated to double the number of handicapped.”

  “But not a single woman who works here is physically challenged.”

  “We have to follow code, Mr. Strauss. Additional stalls will take up already allocated space. I’d have to cut into this janitor’s closet. Then I’d have to cut into the kitchen. But if I cut into this cleaning station here, you’re going to have OSHA on your tail. And if I move this way into the cafeteria proper, you can kiss your sushi bar good-bye.”