The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack

  During her first six months she had gradually made her way at bedtime from downstairs, to the hallway outside of our bedroom, to the floor of our bedroom. When I beckoned her up to join us on the bed, she leapt so quickly it was as if she’d been waiting for the invitation her whole life. In one swift move, she jumped six feet into the air and landed directly between us.

  And the longer our baby quest took, the more I grew to love and appreciate Tink. I can’t imagine waiting so many years for a baby and not having Tink to hold on to, her big head on my shoulder (which, incidentally, is what I feared would happen once she was allowed on the bed, but I always imagined her on Ian’s shoulder, not mine).

  Now it was the three of us in the house—our house—and, as Tink seemed to think of it, our bed. Someday a baby might sleep between us, but for the moment, we held a small St. Bernard.

  A Fine Mess

  In any marriage, even the best marriage, there will come a day when you will wonder why you married this person.

  At your wedding it’s hard to fathom such a thing ever happening. This handsome, tuxedoed man is publicly binding his life to yours, looking into your eyes, and declaring his eternal devotion, and you think, Never! It would have to snow inside my house before I would ever feel anything but love and gratitude for this man!

  Well, it snowed inside my house.

  I am not saying that metaphorically. I am telling you it literally snowed inside my house, because one year, to kick off the holiday season, Ian had somehow decided—even though we still didn’t have kids, even though I never said I missed snow—that I would enjoy a snow machine.

  I don’t know where to even begin or end this story.

  Let’s just start by saying that this wasn’t flakey snow, not that I would have enjoyed flakey snow, but Ian did admit later he thought it would be flakey. This is the problem with ordering things like a snow machine online. You can never be sure if the snow will be just mildly annoying or marriage-ending annoying.

  Instead the snow was sudsy. Sudsy like a washing machine was overflowing and spewing suds off my second-floor balcony and into my living room, where I was flipping through a magazine in front of the fire, having been instructed not to peek while Ian set up the Big Surprise.

  Perhaps, in retrospect, the fact that Ian was playing “Let It Snow” on the stereo should have tipped me off, but I thought he was just setting a festive mood, and frankly, who would have guessed that any sane person (let alone a spouse who supposedly knew and loved me) would let it snow, let it snow, let it snow inside my house?

  Maybe you’ve noticed that I am back to calling it my house, my second-floor balcony, my living room. Of course it was our house . . . unless you unleashed a snow machine inside of it, and then it reverted back to my house, the house I bought myself before I met you, the house I decorated, the house that contains my favorite leather chair that suddenly has a wet stain where your sudsy snow has just landed.

  I have to admit, I had a bad feeling about the Big Surprise. It came in a big box, and there wasn’t much I could think of that any woman would want that comes in a big box. Chocolate and jewelry come in small boxes. Clothes come in relatively small boxes. They say good things come in small packages; I say bad things come in big boxes.

  Thus I was well prepared for something I might have to fake being excited about. And I am on the fence about whether it is gracious or self-sabotaging to fake excitement over a gift that you don’t love from your spouse. On the one hand, you want to reward his efforts and encourage future gift giving. On the other hand, that’s the kind of flawed, codependent thinking that leads women to fake orgasms with men who still have no idea where the clitoris is. And those men have no idea they have no idea. That is the danger of faking.

  So I was sitting there, debating whether to fake excitement about the new drum set for Rock Band or whatever it was that Ian got me that we couldn’t really afford and didn’t really need, when, as it happened, I didn’t have time to fake a response. I had a genuine response in a voice I barely recognized, because, just as you don’t know what your scream sounds like until you’re actually screaming, you don’t know what your Mommie Dearest voice sounds like until you/she/it shrieks: “What the hell is happening?!”

  Now, let me tell you what the hell was happening. From above me large blobs of “snow” were falling and accumulating on the floor while also landing in clumps on the area rug, the coffee table, and (as I mentioned) my favorite leather chair. One clump stuck to the wall, which is not something snow does, by the way. Real snow does not land on a vertical surface and stick there, but this sudsy snow did stick until it slowly started to slide down, leaving a thin, wet trail in its wake, like a snail. I think it was this thin, wet trail—combined with the wet stain on the leather chair—that caused me to stand and yell, “Stop, stop, stop, turn it off!”

  Amazingly, that was the first moment Ian realized the expression on my face was not joy but horror.

  He turned the machine off and explained that the snow was nonstaining and nontoxic and could simply be “vacuumed up,” which would have been nice to know before it began showering down on our sofa, but I guess that would have ruined the Big Surprise. Speaking of which, I was beginning to think the Big Surprise was that the man I married had no clue about me whatsoever.

  Surely he’d noticed I was a neat freak. My parents had noticed, because I wasn’t always a neat freak, but just as my tolerance for alcohol had weakened since college, so had my tolerance for messes. And that does make me feel like a freak. I don’t like a house that looks too perfect. Actually, I do, but I don’t like being the kind of person who needs her house to look perfect. In fact, once, back in my single days, when I had a date coming over, I intentionally put some dishes and a glass in the sink to avoid that perception. Some women fake orgasms; I faked a mess.

  I know I have a little Rain Man in me: That’s not where that pillow goes, definitely, definitely not where it goes. But when you’re single and living alone, if you like things just so, you can have them just so. And when you come home at night, unless you’ve been robbed, things will still be just so. And then you get married, and nothing is ever just so again.

  Mess tolerance was something I had been struggling with even before the snow machine incident. It’s a topic all couples face at some point. All straight couples, at least. I can’t help but notice that most of my gay male friends, whether single or cohabitating, have gorgeous Zen homes that look and smell like boutique hotels. I dream of their clutter-free counters and perfectly organized closets. I think cleaning should be called “gaying things up” instead of “straightening things up.”

  Still, I was happy, when I married Ian, to finally have a straight spouse in the house.

  The same could not be said of my housekeeper.

  My housekeeper came with my house when I bought it in 1997. The people who lived there before me kept things much neater, she managed to communicate, despite her sometimes spotty English. At first I was offended, but once I got used to enjoying an immaculate home every Tuesday, I found it easier to maintain Wednesday through Monday, and eventually we settled into a rhythm of mutual appreciation and respect, except for one square-shaped antique Chinese wooden rice bucket, which I always liked at an angle in the corner and she liked pushed directly into the corner.

  We agreed to disagree (aka I put it back at an angle every Tuesday night), but I didn’t mind, because given that I was learning to keep things pretty clean myself, that rice bucket was the only sure sign my housekeeper had been there. In fact, sometimes it was unclear who was keeping the house clean for whom.

  But while it was just the two of us (me and her), if something was out of place or missing, we noticed. That’s why it should not have surprised me one day, almost a decade ago, when she asked: “What happened to Steve?”

  Steve had been my boyfriend of three years, and when we broke up, I forgot to tell
my housekeeper. Actually, I didn’t forget: it had never entered my mind that I needed to. But there she was, folding laundry, asking me about Steve. And he’d been out of my life for months, so clearly she was waiting to ask, waiting to see if he was just busy, or out of town. And in that moment I realized that either she is secretly glad she no longer has to do Steve’s laundry on occasion, or she is worried I might die alone. And those two things might not be mutually exclusive.

  I think it was the latter, because she proceeded to tell me, even though I hadn’t asked, that she had been married to her own husband for thirty-two years. “Thirty-two years,” she repeated.

  That conversation haunts me still. I had had no idea that anyone—other than my parents—had been concerned. So I thought she would be relieved when I finally came home to Los Angeles with Ian. But she wasn’t relieved once she saw how Ian lived, which is to say he left evidence of life around the house.

  She was used to dealing with much less life. She had taken care of my house for a long stretch when nobody lived there, while I was working on Sex and the City in New York. Sure, she had to deal with me when I was home between seasons, but by then, I liked the house the way she liked the house, so it was a wash, literally.

  But then I brought Ian into the house, and Ian brought Tink into the house, and Tink brought sand into the house—something I had managed to avoid in ten years of living at the beach. So believe it or not, I had been feeling badly for my housekeeper until this particular evening I’m describing when a snow machine had appeared in the house.

  It was a Tuesday evening, so the housekeeper had just left. Let me repeat: Our housekeeper had just left. This was the one day a week when the house was spotless, when everything was returned to order, when she would work her magic and drive away. Certainly Ian knew that about me, how much I loved cleaning day.

  Maybe he thought the house would be superclean after this veritable indoor car wash, but instead it looked as if a rave was happening in our living room. And I said as much. In fact, I probably said more.

  And that was the moment I realized the expression on Ian’s face was not remorse but disappointment. And he was not disappointed in the snow machine, as I felt he should be as a consumer. He was disappointed in me.

  He had had ideas about how this night would go, and never mind that he had snowed on my living room; I had rained on his parade.

  He had imagined us dancing in the snow. (He was still looking down at me from the balcony when he confessed this, so we were kind of a reverse Romeo and Juliet, in more ways than one.)

  And Ian does not abandon a plan easily, so he smiled and said, “C’mon, one dance.” And then he turned on the snow again and hurried downstairs to join me, still hopeful the evening could be salvaged, possibly even made romantic.

  And I thought, What if this is one of those moments, like the night we officially moved in together in New York? Ian had wanted to eat Chinese food while sitting on boxes, and I had wanted to unpack the boxes and get our lives in order. And he finally said he was going to a bar if I was not going to be “fun,” and I worried he would go to a bar anytime I wasn’t fun, and furthermore, I might not always be fun, and what then? Of course, the next morning, I regretted everything. Why had I been so concerned with unpacking that I couldn’t enjoy our first night in our first joint apartment? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing! It still makes me sad thinking about it. So that morning, our first Monday morning waking up together in our new place, I said I thought we should have a certain number of do-over days in our relationship. We should each get, say, three days that didn’t count against you, no matter what you did. And Ian said, “Great, see you on Thursday.”

  Okay, that was funny. But the truth is you don’t get do-overs. Certain moments in life never come back.

  And it occurred to me now, with the snow falling wetly around me, that maybe this was one of those moments I might forever regret not enjoying. So I tried. And it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I am telling you honestly, I tried to smile and dance with Ian in the snow.

  Until two seconds later, when my shoes started to slip and slide in the suds, and I was getting faux snow in my hair, and I yelped, “I can’t do it!” And I ran outside and buried my head in my hands, and although to the casual observer it might seem that, once again, I was the not-fun one, all I could think was, Why the hell did I marry this person?

  And I imagined that Ian was standing inside, in the snow, thinking the same thing.

  And it wasn’t like in the movies. We never looked at each other and started laughing hysterically. The whole night was kind of terrible, especially during the cleanup process (which was, in fact, a process).

  First of all, I was surprised that I was expected to help, but I decided to pick my battles. I did not, for example, point out that the bubbles did not simply “vacuum up.” The vacuum mostly just pushed the bubbles around.

  To be honest, I still don’t fully understand what the bubbles were made of, because they did not lose mass or melt, even once vacuumed. In fact, we used a see-through vacuum (we actually used all of our vacuums, and a few mops), and once it was clearly full of bubbles, that was it—there was no more room. Does that seem like standard bubble behavior to you? I’m pretty sure NASA has something to do with these bubbles.

  Then Ian and I got into another disagreement about whether something could be designated for “indoor use only.” This happened because I suggested that perhaps snow outside of our house might have been the way to go. I could have come home to the one house in Los Angeles surrounded by a lovely blanket of snow. Or he could have put the snow machine on our roof, and we could have been sitting by the fire, and he could have pointed out, “Look! It’s snowing outside!” That might have been romantic.

  “It’s for indoor use only,” he maintained. And I maintained, “Nothing is for indoor use only. If you can use it indoors, you can use it outdoors, unless it’s so poisonous it would kill animals outdoors, and then it shouldn’t be indoors either.” We went round and round with this, and we still haven’t resolved it. I did have to admit that the stains on the chair and wall did miraculously disappear, to which Ian replied dryly, “It wasn’t miraculous. It’s nontoxic and nonstaining.”

  Finally, as if readying it for burial, Ian placed the snow machine back into the big box between two plastic containers of bubble refills, which, to my surprise, he pulled out from under the bathroom sink where he had already stashed them for, I guess, the next time we wanted snow in the house? And then he said he would give the snow machine to someone at work “who would appreciate it.”

  I had to bite my tongue to avoid further insulting of the snow machine, not to mention the person “who would appreciate it.” (Who might that be? Someone who hated her house? Someone who was having one of those parties where everyone paints graffiti on the walls because he was moving—that kind of person?)

  As we carried several Hefty bags of bubbles outside and put them into the trash, Ian reminded me that sometimes I loved his grand gestures. I couldn’t remember one that I loved until he said, “When I proposed, on the beach, on a horse?” I admitted that that had been a good one (maybe because the horse hadn’t been in our living room?), but that’s the thing about romantics—you can’t romanticize them. They can be hit or miss.

  As it turned out, there was a lovely woman in Ian’s office who had two toddlers and a linoleum kitchen, and apparently she made snow in the kitchen, and her husband loved it and laughed, and the kids loved it and laughed and played, and they all had so much fun they invited more kids to come back and enjoy more snow on Christmas Day.

  So maybe the gift had just been too early—several years and one linoleum kitchen too early. And it was not lost on me that this gift ended a year during which Ian and I had gotten further from, not closer to, having kids of our own (more about that in a moment). But this was also a year (other than when it snowed ins
ide my house) during which Ian and I had gotten closer to, not further from, each other.

  We did not get closer with the housekeeper, though. She never learned about the snow machine—I made sure of that for Ian’s sake, fearful it might put her over the edge and lead to some kind of homicide/suicide by toxic cleaning products. But as her workload got heavier, so did her sighs, and eventually, her sighs were all I could hear.

  I knew she was upset about the dishes in the sink, Ian’s clothes on the floor, the unmade bed, the bathroom sink sprawl . . . because so was I.

  But Ian was trying. He was making an effort—the dishes in the sink were unstaged now, but Ian used the kitchen nightly, so . . . dishes happen. The clothes on the floor had dwindled down to only that day’s clothes. The unmade bed was better than Ian’s attempt to make the bed, which had the effect of a badly wrapped present: sometimes, it’s better not to bother. Ian even agreed to get Tink groomed every other week to cut down on the dog hair.

  We were all trying to adjust to life together, so why was it feeling most trying to our housekeeper? She was supposed to make it better, to put things back in order, at least once a week. Her frustration and intolerance only highlighted my own.

  So I had to end the relationship. Not with Ian. With her. And she had been my longest relationship ever.

  I really tried to make it work. I gave her space (I basically invented reasons to leave the house when she was cleaning), and several raises (even though my friends were paying less for their nannies), but nothing seemed to make her happy. We both knew it would never be like it had been, and the baby Ian and I had been waiting for all these years (apparently she’d been waiting, too, quietly, just like she’d been waiting for Steve to come back) would not make things better, mess-wise.

  So we said our good-byes, and she tearfully gave me back my key despite my insistence that I had other copies, please, let’s not make this worse. . . .