Traveling while Married

by Mary-Lou Weisman

  Traveling While Married

  Also by Mary-Lou Weisman

  My (Middle-Aged) Baby Book: A Record of Milestones, Millstones and Gallstones

  Intensive Care: A Family Love Story

  Traveling While Married

  BY

  Mary-Lou Weisman

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  Edward Koren

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  © 2003 by Mary-Lou Weisman. Illustrations © 2003 by Edward Koren.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Portions of this book have appeared in slightly different versions in the

  following publications: “Traveling While Married,” The New York Times

  Travel Section (July 21, 1999); “The Modified Marital Plan,” The New York

  Times Travel Section (Feb. 20, 2000); “Packing,” The New York Times Travel

  Section (Nov. 8, 1998); “Shopping,” European Travel & Life (Sept./Oct. 1983);

  “His Vacation,” The New York Times Travel Section (June 11, 1989); “Her

  Vacation,” New Woman (Nov. 1991); “Fantasy Real Estate,” The New York

  Times Travel Section (July 9, 2000); “Reality Real Estate,” The New York

  Times Travel Section (Jan. 16, 1994); “The Summer House Guest,”

  The New Republic (Sept. 19 and 26, 1983); “A Walk on the Wild Side,”

  The New York Times (March 1, 1998).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weisman, Mary-Lou.

  Traveling while married / by Mary-Lou Weisman;

  illustrated by Edward Koren.—1st. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-319-0

  1. Married people—Travel. I. Title.

  G151.W428 2003

  910.4′086′55—dc21 2003040402

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To the women in my life, for their

  friendship, encouragement, and advice.

  I, Mary-Lou, take thee, Larry,

  to be my constant traveling companion,

  to Hong and to Kong, in Cyclades

  and in Delft, for deck class or deluxe,

  so long as we both can move.

  Contents

  Traveling While Married

  Why We Travel

  Traveling Poor

  Doing Nothing

  The Modified Marital Plan

  Packing

  Shopping

  His Vacation

  Her Vacation

  Fantasy Real Estate

  Reality Real Estate

  The Summer Houseguest

  Having a Terrible Time

  Telling

  A Walk on the Wild Side

  Coming of Age in Elderhostel

  Epilogue

  I am grateful to my agent Rosalie Siegel for

  her enthusiasm and hard work, and to my editor

  Elisabeth Scharlatt, whose vision helped to

  shape this book and whose good humor

  made work seem like play.

  Traveling While Married

  Travel can put extra strain on a marriage. Being the same old couple in a new and different place is a disorienting experience. All too often, when people don’t know where they are, have jet lag, don’t speak the language, and can’t figure out the money or maintain intestinal regularity, they get hostile. And since they don’t know anybody else in Kyoto to take it out on, they take it out on each other. Because couples therapy is rarely available on vacation, it’s important to be aware in advance of the special challenges associated with traveling while married.

  Some marriages are saved by going on vacation. While the marriage is at home, the partners may be contemplating divorce, but send that marriage on vacation and they’re on a second honeymoon. On the other hand, a marriage that gets along swimmingly at home can be a fish out of water on vacation.

  The very concept of vacationing can mean different things to each partner. My husband, Larry, likes to move around a lot, preferably from place setting to place setting. Food’s not that important to me. I like renting other people’s homes in Tuscany or London and then pretending I’m living their life. Unfortunately, I have a talent for choosing people with disastrous lives.

  Does a vacation have to have palm trees? Does it have to be far away? (It should be if it’s a summer beach house and there’s the slightest chance that you will be unable to restrain yourselves from inviting friends to visit.) Should it be in the city or the countryside? Does it involve mostly standing up or lying down? Does it mean getting to throw your clothes all over the room? Does it mean setting the alarm clock for 7:00 A.M. and seeing every museum and monument whether you want to or not? Or does vacation mean sleeping until you wake up, dressing slowly to CNN, lingering over a buffet breakfast and an American newspaper, and spending the three remaining daylight hours meandering and otherwise soaking up the atmosphere, usually by mouth? Does it mean calling the office?

  Just deciding where to go on vacation can often test the marriage’s flexibility. One partner wants to do something physical and adventurous, like trying to outrun molten lava down a volcano; the other prefers something more restful, even spiritual, like raking gravel in a Buddhist monastery. Taking turns is only fair—this vacation, run down the volcano; next year, rake.

  Negotiating what time to leave for the airport can be even trickier. I think we need to leave enough time to get lost at least once, run out of gas, and get stuck in traffic. I also emphasize the distinct possibility that my dental work might set off the security alarm and they’ll have to do a strip search, for which we need to add on at least another ten minutes. Larry prefers the excitement of the photo finish. Dashing down the gangway as they’re rolling it away from the fuselage is his idea of “right on time.” The inevitable, mutual rage with which we begin each trip only helps us to appreciate better the good times that lie ahead.

  Neatness counts when you’re traveling married. Often husband and wife have different comfort levels with regard to orderliness. We’ve resolved ours. The minute I enter a hotel room, I mentally divide it into “his” and “her” sides. I stake out my side of the room, my side of the bed, and my night table, where I put my book and my watch and my key to the room and anything else I want to be able to find.

  I carefully unpack, hang up my clothing in my half of the closet, and put the foldable items in my allotment of large and small bureau drawers. Then I go into the bathroom and line up my pharmaceuticals on my half of the glass shelf, most of which, it may come as no surprise, are prescription drugs meant to relieve anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

  Meanwhile, while helping himself lavishly from the minibar, Larry is tossing belts over the back of his chair, emptying the contents of his pockets on his night table, abandoning shirts on his lampshades, and dropping wet towels on his side of the bed.

  Travel, for all its spontaneous joys, can disrupt a couple’s lifelong routines. Waiting until 11:00 P.M. to have dinner in Madrid is one thing; waiting to use the bathroom in your own hotel room when you’re supposed to be on vacation is quite another. A four-bedroom, two-and-one-half bath colonial marriage can crack under the pressure. What kind of lower intestinal droit du seigneur makes him feel entitled to go first and bring a book?

  Issues of responsibility are
especially exacerbated when couples stray far from home. We know who pays the bills and does the dishes at our house, but who’s in charge of coming up with the right amount of euros for the bellhop? Who remembers, or forgets, to buy a battery for the camera? Who remembers film? Who takes the pictures? Who fills out the customs card, including flight number? Who has to retrieve the tickets from her backpack in the overhead bin to tell him the flight number? Who gets the film developed? Who, if anyone, ever puts the photos in the album?

  Vacationing couples should recognize their individual strengths and weaknesses and make the best of them. I, for instance, have a difficult enough time finding my way around my own hometown, never mind somebody else’s arrondissement. I’m also no good at figuring out money. I can barely deal with the coins in my own realm, although the introduction of the euro has at least standardized my confusion. This is a congenital problem—a matter of being born with a left brain the size of a chickpea—and has nothing whatsoever to do with some Gilliganesque theory about how girls grow stupid at puberty in order to make men feel superior.

  When it comes to making his way in foreign lands, Larry is superior. He always knows where he is and how to get where he’s going, even if he’s never been there before. Anyone in her right mind would relax and enjoy it instead of insisting upon taking the metro in exactly the wrong direction just because she’s a feminist.

  Sociologists have observed that men tend to stop talking when they get married. They take this penchant for muteness with them when they travel. A woman’s efforts to bring her husband out of his shell with “How was your day?” might jump-start him at the dinner table at home, but it won’t work on vacation because you’ve both had the same day.

  In anticipation of such a circumstance, many couples choose to travel with another couple; others hope for a chance encounter with a couple they know from home, or a couple they don’t know from home, or a couple they know but don’t particularly like from home. It doesn’t matter. Embrace them enthusiastically. Invite them to join you for dinner.

  The introduction of a new female and another alpha male into the dinner-table society causes the men to revert to their talkative, flirty, funny pre-marital selves. What a delightful evening! What a nice couple they are! What a nice couple we are! You decide to get together when you both get home.

  You can either arrange to meet this couple again the next day, or you can say good-bye and part. It doesn’t matter. Either you’ll talk to them at dinner, or you’ll have them to talk about at dinner.

  Perhaps for totemic reasons, people like to possess a piece of the country they are visiting. Women like to wear it. Men like to eat it. This atavistic urge tends to turn husbands into suffering cartoon characters, sitting on benches outside of foreign dress shops. The wives, for their part, morph into the international food police—“Do you have any idea how many grams of fat are in that cassoulet?”

  A successful vacation often depends upon a couple’s willingness to commit mutual enabling. “You look gorgeous! Buy it,” is Larry’s line. Mine is, “Let’s have dessert.”

  The vacation’s over. You’re in the terminal; the bags are checked. If the marriage can make it through the airport shops, you’re home duty-free. Traveling while married has given you the opportunity to share moments of rare intimacy that you might never have enjoyed had you stayed at home—like sex. Buckle up, settle back, and relax. A marriage is at its best at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet on its way home from vacation.

  Why We Travel

  The sole cause of man’s unhappiness,” Pascal wrote in his Pensées, “is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” If we were not tempted to venture out, we would never have to experience the disappointments inherent in travel: that arch is not so triumphant; that tower’s not so leaning; that Mona’s not so Lisa.

  The fault is not in the three-star sights but in ourselves, that we are the same underlings we were when we were at home–just as prone to boredom, anxiety, and petty thoughts, in spite of the radical change of scene. I can be just as unhappy in front of the rose window at Chartres as I am at my kitchen sink. In fact, I can be more unhappy because I believe I should be happier.

  The fact that we bring ourselves wherever we go does not keep us from going. The urge to “get away” may be bred in the bone. Perhaps someday researchers will discover a gene for it. My guess is that they’ll find it somewhere between the ones for manic depression and attention deficit disorder.

  At the very least, going away is how we fix up our lives so they’re worth living when we get back, a procedure not unlike preparing to die. Larry pays bills, stops the mail at the post office, and replaces burned-out lightbulbs. I cancel the newspaper delivery service, recycle the diet soda cans, clean the slime out of the refrigerator drawers, take any items of clothing each of us hasn’t worn for two years to Goodwill, and call our friends and family to say good-bye.

  Larry and I travel in different but complimentary ways. I travel the way I cook. I follow directions like a fascist. I measure precisely. I don’t improvise and I don’t make substitutions. If the recipe calls for a pinch of salt, I’m plunged into panic: how many grains are in a pinch? Before we leave for any trip, I read the travel guides slavishly, like a student studying for an exam. I underline. I clip articles. I talk to people who’ve been there. By the time we leave, I have a file folder full of required sights to see, recommended routes to follow, and places to eat. It’s the travel equivalent of preheating the oven to 350 degrees, taking out all the ingredients, and measuring them into tiny bowls, arranged in sequential order.

  Larry will not be bullied by travel guides. He likes to wander around without any particular destination, allowing his interest to settle wherever it may. He notices chimney pots, doors on unimportant buildings, and children playing in hidden courtyards. When we were in Ireland, he fell so in love with the town of Kinvara and its people that we never got to Dublin.

  We are prompted to travel by different desires. What I look for in a vacation is a place that’s as blatantly different from my real life as possible. I want to get carried away. When I set foot upon foreign soil, I don’t want to see Blockbuster Video, Pizza Hut, Bed, Bath, or even Beyond. I like my countries backward. I want cows in the streets, minor uprisings, and people who think I’m stealing their soul when I take their picture. I like to vacation among people who wear costumes: grass skirts, wooden shoes, lederhosen, lace hats—I don’t care, just as long as they don’t resemble me and they live under circumstances with which I am totally unfamiliar, like poverty, dictatorship, or no dining room.

  I’m also crazy about rubble. If there must be buildings, then at least let the plaster be peeling and the streets unpaved. I wish all of Rome looked like the Colosseum except for my hotel.

  I thrive on cheap thrills. The sight of a woman beating her wash on a rock makes my heart sing. It’s not that I begrudge her a washer-dryer. As far as I’m concerned she can have all the large and small appliances imaginable, break through the corporate glass ceiling, and become the CEO of a Fortune 500 if that’s what she wants. Just not during my vacation.

  I am nostalgic for a world that probably never existed except on the large canvas map that my grammar school teacher would pull down over the blackboard when it was time for geography lessons. Each country on the map was illustrated with a little girl or boy my age, dressed in the native costume, standing next to something emblematically local. As a result, when I go to Alaska, I want to see igloos and Eskimos chewing blubber. When I go to the Congo I expect to see a little African boy in a loincloth shooting poison blow darts from a dugout canoe. In the Netherlands, which used to be Holland, I search for windmills and girls in wooden shoes and white hats that turn up at the ends. I want Hans Brinker skating on a frozen canal. This means that no matter where I go, I carry with me, in addition to an increasingly large bag of pharmaceutical impedimenta, an impossibly nostalgic dream.

  Instant disappointment is the price I
pay for my overblown expectations. The airport in Prague looks like any other airport. The taxis in Italy have meters—just like in New York. What was I thinking? That my luggage and I would be borne by chariot into Rome? Along the road from the airport in London shreds of plastic trash bags cling to clumps of scraggly grass, and a billboard flashes great white teeth surrounded by wet red lips clamping down on a hot dog with everything. I might as well be in Trenton. Fortunately, within minutes I make a quick adjustment, downshifting to reality. Suddenly the most mundane details make me swoon with delight—the unfamiliar typeface on the sign-age in the London tube; the way the Irish build walls by stacking the stones vertically; the impenetrable hedgerows of Cornwall; the wisteria along a ledge in Istanbul.

  Larry is a student of history, which is another one of the reasons he loves to travel. He wants to see the places he’s read about. Most especially, Larry is a devotee of British naval history and in particular of Vice Admiral Lord Nelson. He has read everything he can find about his hero. Recently, having read all the biographies, some more than once, he’s been reduced to reading young-adult fiction on the subject, in addition, of course, to the bulletin published by the Nelson Society, an international organization with headquarters in Yorkshire, of which Larry is card-carrying member number 2379.

  For his sixtieth birthday I surprised him with a visit to Portsmouth, where HMS Victory, the ship that Nelson commanded during the decisive Battle of Trafalgar, lies at permanent anchor. Affixed to the deck is a brass plaque that reads HERE NELSON FELL. We pause for a moment of silence. Then we repair below deck to view another plaque: HERE NELSON DIED. Standing just inches from where his hero expired, Larry’s voice comes close to cracking when he repeats Nelson’s last words: “Thank God, I have done my duty.”

  Then we’re off to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, a place famous for mean time and for the fact that Lord Nelson’s bloody uniform from the Battle of Trafalgar is there on display.