The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack

  But I doubt it.

  Self-Storage

  One dilemma I remember wrestling with as a single woman was whether or not to buy a house. I know that’s a luxury problem (like faux fur or no fur), but it was still a very fraught decision, made more fraught by all of the unsolicited and conflicting opinions I got on the topic. And those were just the ones in my head.

  Half of me was certain I was better off as a modular unit that could be picked up and moved easily into someone else’s life, and in that scenario, real estate would only complicate my whirlwind romance.

  The other half of me asked, What whirlwind romance?

  The truth is, there was nobody in the picture when I was thinking of looking at houses, and there hadn’t been anyone for some time who hadn’t had either a fear of commitment or a prior commitment (an old girlfriend, a wife), so the only whirlwind I was experiencing was that, while I was debating the pros and cons of home ownership as a single woman, married women were snatching up all the hot properties.

  Yes, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills–adjacent were at every open house the minute it opened, calling their husbands, describing the place room by room while I was still racing to get to the listing before my lunch hour ended. I resented these ladies at first, these hoarders of the good men and the good houses, until I realized that I was in an enviable position. I didn’t need a handsome man in an expensive suit with an adorable son on his shoulders to saunter in and kiss me and sign the paperwork.

  I wanted one, but I didn’t need one. At least, not to buy a house.

  So I did it. On my own. Because I could. And maybe partially because my mom had never had that chance. My mom lived with her mother until she was married. She never got to turn a sunroom into an art studio, or design her dream kitchen. She’s still rarely allowed to buy a piece of furniture on a whim. She defers to my dad on these matters, not because he has the taste, but because he makes the money. If my dad wanted a green leather couch, they got a green leather couch. Sadly, that’s not my way of explaining that he got what he wanted; that’s my way of telling you that my parents have a green leather couch.

  But, thankfully, I do not. I found a gorgeous, modern condo at the beach, and by some miracle it was the perfect time to buy, and it’s beautifully decorated to my specifications, and it was a great bachelorette pad, and I had amazing parties there, and when people complimented my home (which was deemed “the Fabulous Beach House”), I would say brightly: “All that’s missing is the guy.”

  What I didn’t realize was that the guy, when he finally did come, would come with things.

  And the Fabulous Beach House wasn’t lacking things. Especially things like a remote-control helicopter and a samurai sword and a large wooden chess set that Ian’s brother had made, let alone art that I didn’t particularly like, and stereo equipment that needed fixing, and a pinball machine that was all Ian had left of a father who had died when Ian was ten.

  Okay, the pinball machine we’d find space for, but certainly not everything qualified as sentimental. For example, the remote-control helicopter, I knew for a fact, was brand new. Ian got it to celebrate the high ceilings in my house, which was now “our house,” which is why Ian needed space for his clothes and pinball machine and whatever the hell else was coming in box after box after box.

  This is how I found myself looking at storage units. I know that Suze Orman and pretty much every other smart person on the planet agrees that storage units are a huge waste of money. Why pay rent for things you aren’t using, things you will one day forget you have?

  Here’s why: there is a man in my house—our house—and I married him.

  This is probably why couples should buy a house together, although maybe men who own their own homes enjoy having a woman move in. It probably makes a man feel as if he is providing for his spouse. I thought about why it was different for me. Was it sexist? Did I secretly wish Ian had brought a house to the table?

  No. I wished Ian had brought nothing to the table, including the table.

  I loved Ian. I just didn’t love his things.

  Now, before you deem me a snob, I would like to explain that I did live with Ian in his very small Lower East Side apartment for a few months while we were dating.

  I’d been working in New York and living in a furnished apartment, but my lease was up, and my job was ending, and it seemed encouraging and astounding that my bad-boy boyfriend wanted me to stay and live with him. So I decided to ignore his scary bathroom and tiny bedroom and complete lack of closet space. We could do this. We were in love.

  Ian built shelves above the bed for my shoes. He cooked me delicious meals in the hallway he called a kitchen. We went to the farmers’ market together every Sunday. We were the New York couple I always wanted to be. And at night as his radiator rattled and clanged, I would lie in his arms and look up at my shoes and think/sing: We gotta get out of this place.

  According to Wikipedia, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals was immensely popular among United States armed forces during the Vietnam War. I’m not likening my situation on the Lower East Side to Vietnam, but I will say the lack of an exit strategy was starting to worry me.

  The final straw was the NYU students. Ian’s lease was almost up, and the apartment was being shown, and while I was home making the bed by standing on top of it (which is how you had to do it, since it took up half of the room), two young Asian students came in, took a quick look around, and announced, “This isn’t big enough for two people.” They were eighteen-year-old girls. And not to stereotype, but Asian girls are by and large not large people.

  I decided—much as I had about the backpacking I was willing to do early in our relationship because I was so excited Ian wanted to travel with me—that I was too old for this crap.

  I had tried. I had showered in a shower that seemed impervious to cleaning products. Its best bet was that it might end up in the public garden next door with the other discarded bathroom fixtures that were trying to pass as art. We had to get out of that place.

  And we did. We rented a West Village apartment together for a year, and then Ian proposed, and now he was leaving everything behind (well, he was leaving New York behind—the rest he had apparently brought with him) to join me in Los Angeles, because I had a career and house there.

  And that house was perfect as is! That’s what I was thinking as I took the large metal elevator to my potential storage unit. That house was once featured in InStyle Home, and, aside from some slight restaging—apparently I needed aqua ceramic vases, an orange cashmere blanket, and a breakfast tray with books on it—it was clearly considered a lovely space by people who specialized in lovely spaces, so why mess with it?

  Because I was now married. That’s why.

  That’s what I kept coming back to.

  Ian wasn’t just visiting. He wasn’t a booty call (anymore). He was my husband, and I needed to make room for him, emotionally and physically.

  So I put some of my things in storage, including my beloved art deco bedroom and vanity set with Bakelite handles that I had bought when my first marriage was ending. I remember my soon-to-be-ex-husband saying “You don’t have room for that furniture,” while I was thinking I will when you leave. Now that art deco declaration of independence was leaning against a wall in unit R3176, along with my grandmother’s bentwood rocking chair and a bunch of expensive throw pillows.

  I had no idea I had so many throw pillows. Why doesn’t Suze Orman warn people about those? They cost a small fortune, they have to be literally thrown aside so you can enjoy the furniture they adorn, and eventually they adorn your storage unit.

  As I was about to lock the unit up, I thought: It’s not bad in here. If you set it up right, you could sit quietly among your things. You could use it as an office. It could be like a home away from home. Maybe this is where I will go when I need space.

  T
hen it hit me: why was I looking for a space to be alone in, when I had waited so long to find someone to share my space with so I wouldn’t be alone?

  And then everything went black.

  The lights, it turned out, were on a timer in these storage units. That would definitely be a problem as far as using mine for an office. Apparently I would have to find space for Ian, Ian’s things, and me in our house. And in the years to come, I thought, if we’re lucky enough to expand our family, we’ll pack up our things and, together, we will look for a bigger storage unit.

  The First No No Noel

  I blame the Pottery Barn holiday catalog for the fact that Ian and I, both Jews, kicked off one of our first holiday seasons as a married couple at Home Depot, picking out a Christmas tree. I cannot blame our kids, who begged us mercilessly for a Christmas tree, because we did not yet have kids. I cannot blame my parents, because although my dad initially supported Bush (one and two), he never supported the Hanukkah bush. In fact, I recall that he was extremely judgmental of one Jewish family in our predominantly non-Jewish hometown of Tulsa who did have a Christmas tree every year. Even though it was decorated exclusively with blue ornaments and silver bows, my dad made it clear to my sister and me that he thought the whole “Jews with Trees” movement was in very poor taste.

  Then again, my dad was a man who, in his wood-paneled wet bar, had highball glasses featuring busty women whose clothes disappeared when the glass was full. So I learned early on that taste was subjective.

  Fast-forward to November 2006. Ian and I had been married a year and a half, and I was flipping through the Pottery Barn holiday catalog, with page after page featuring something beautiful but not for us, because we were Jews. In my opinion, Jews have yet to make Hanukkah decor beautiful, unless you consider a blue and white paper dreidel beautiful, but what can you expect from a holiday whose spelling is annually up for debate?

  So as I browsed past monogrammed velvet stockings and quilted tree skirts and pinecone wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to Ian, “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated Christmas. Everything looks so cozy and inviting.” And much to my surprise, he replied, “We can celebrate Christmas, if you want.” And, like a twelve-year-old, I said, “We can?” And he said, “Sure.”

  It seemed so subversive. Christmas? Really? I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, I thought about what my parents would think. But my parents were 1,200 miles away. They weren’t visiting that season. They wouldn’t even need to know. (Until now. Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad!) Still, even just considering the possibility felt wrong and dirty and . . . totally exhilarating, like your first night away at college, when you realize you can stay out until dawn because nobody is waiting up for you. Ian and I were consenting adults. We were married. This was our home. Why couldn’t we celebrate whatever the hell we wanted?

  We decided we could, and proceeded to embrace the holiday in all of its commercial glory. For example, while I know it can be annoying to Christmas veterans, I discovered there is nothing I love more than hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while shopping for stocking stuffers. I love stocking stuffers. I love having stockings to stuff. I love that whole sections of stores, from CVS to Neiman Marcus, suddenly opened up to me. I love tinsel. It’s so simple, yet so elegant! I love that as soon as I told a Catholic friend what I was up to, she invited me to a gingerbread-house decorating party. How fun is that? And why hadn’t I been invited before? What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?

  So there we were: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) with no excuse other than the fact that I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and Ian wanted—it turned out—the train set that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.

  That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas might not be all peace on earth, goodwill toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas Ian’s, I fear, was SkyMall.

  He bought colored blinking lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments—a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo—instead of the understated jewel-colored balls that I had in mind. Plus he kept talking about the fake snow (“Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?”) when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely hadn’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. Ian was like a Christmas crackhead . . . one taste, and he couldn’t stop.

  But despite our differences, we both loved the little winter wonderland we finally settled on. Some nights when I got home before Ian, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD and lit a fire and turned on the tree lights and played with the different settings (disco fast, then twinkly slow) and put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turned on the choo-choo sound effects and then sat back and enjoyed my first Christmas in all its kitschy splendor. I felt a little guilty when I looked at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how could this much pleasure be wrong?

  Before you answer that, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that Ian and I were fairly certain that once we had kids, we would raise them with the same rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights are better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids went off to college, if not forever. It seemed easy enough to hide the evidence. I accidentally dropped an old-timey basket-of-cherries ornament, and it shattered into a powder so fine there was no trace it ever existed.

  On the other hand, I started to wonder if it might be nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture, has so many beautiful rituals and traditions. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. Maybe our family would ring in Hanukkwanzaa.

  Or maybe I was rationalizing because I had become so intoxicated by the scent of pine needles and poinsettias that I couldn’t imagine life without them! Just as once you fly first class, it’s hard to go back to coach—once you have Christmas, it’s hard to go back to no Christmas.

  That’s why we have the ornaments, the lights, the train, the stockings, and the giant inflatable lawn penguin (Ian’s idea, in case there was any question) in storage unit R3176. No No Noel has become a tradition for us, not instead of Hanukkah, but in addition. It’s no longer a novelty, but . . . we like it, okay?

  And marriage, for better or worse, means you have a full-time, live-in enabler. That’s one of my favorite aspects of marriage, actually—the fact that your partner in life can be your partner in crime. Together, you can create new traditions, make your own rules, and break your own rules.

  Christmas isn’t the only holiday Ian and I bent to our will. We started out, as most couples do, trying to alternate Thanksgivings between our families. One year we’d go to Dallas (where my sister and parents now live), the next we’d go to Pittsburgh (where Ian’s brother was doing his medical residency), and so on and so on—our plan until we had kids of our own, at which point people might finally come to us so we could not travel on the busiest travel day of the year.

  But one year, still kidless, we were both on a strict diet, and we were trying to figure out how we would stay on that diet during Thanksgiving, and we finally broke with tradition like two crazy rebels and announced that we were staying in Los Angeles and cooking our own low-cal but delicious Thanksgiving dinner, for just the two of us.

  Our families were disappointed, but they understood, because we were making a life together. People seem to respect that, especially people who have been waiting a long time for you to make a life with someone (and waiting even longer for you and that someone to make another life: a grandchild).

  Ian cooked a pheasant instead of a turkey, and we made healthy side dishes that w
ere steamed instead of mashed and marshmallowed, and I put mini-gourds in a bowl and tea lights on the table, and we enjoyed this small bird for two, this small feast for two, this small step toward creating independence as a couple.

  And the next morning, when we opened the fridge, there were no leftovers to tempt us—no cold turkey, stuffing, yams, and cranberry sauce with which to make a 12,000-calorie sandwich . . . no leftover pumpkin pie to eat directly out of the tin until it was reduced to crumbs.

  It was bleak.

  What were we thinking? Thanksgiving happens once a year, and we had traded our corn bread for Wasa crackers? I wanted to cry. Ian wanted to eat.

  We immediately fled to a nearby diner—this being Los Angeles, it was a restaurant in a strip mall made to look like a diner—and each had a turkey sandwich (dry) and slice of pumpkin pie (subpar) and vowed never to miss Thanksgiving again.

  In fact, the following year we went to my sister’s house and enjoyed the highest-calorie, most delicious Thanksgiving meal ever. And Ian and I cooked, not only for ourselves, but for everyone, which was a surprise to my family because they didn’t know I could cook.

  Frankly, I didn’t know I could cook until I met Ian (see next chapter), but for that transformation I blame the Williams-Sonoma catalog. Those individual soufflé ramekins, the pink mixer/pasta-maker combo, the meat slicer Ian insisted we have on our registry. Yes, we now own a meat slicer, so when I buy something like prosciutto at the deli, I have to say, “I don’t need it sliced, thank you; we have a meat slicer at home.” I might as well be saying “Just give me the whole cow please, the whole live cow; we want to make our own milk.”

  I never thought I’d have a meat slicer.

  I never thought I’d cook.

  I never thought I’d be asked by a young midwestern birth mother, years later, if we’d be willing to celebrate Christmas, but since we had the decorations already . . .