Over the next few weeks, I see very little of my husband. He leaves the house early and comes home late. Often after I’m already asleep. He doesn’t talk to me, gives me only monosyllabic answers to any questions I ask. It’s like we’re roommates who aren’t even friends. Like some awkward twist of circumstance has thrown us together here temporarily, and we just have to make the best of it until we both go our separate ways. Only I’m still here, right where he left me. I watch him when he sleeps, so sweet curled on his side, one hand tucked under his chin. I study his face. So gentle when he’s asleep, so stern and unforgiving when he’s awake.
On long, lonely nights, I try to occupy my hours with healthier pursuits. Yoga, meditation, journaling, reading self-help books like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Esteem. My shelves used to be filled with self-help books for single girls, but now they’re filled with self-help books for married women. The advice is actually quite similar. I purchased a wagonload of them at Barnes & Noble. I asked a smiling bookseller named Kelley for popular titles concerning marriage. She was the one who helped me buy all my self-help books about being single. She pointed me down a self-help aisle. I wound up with a bookshelf filled with books like:
Keep That Man!
Get Him Back NOW!
How to Seduce Anyone in Five Dates or Less!
What Men Want
Why Men Leave
What Women Do Wrong
Marriage Isn’t Supposed to Be Easy
Save Your Marriage, Save Yourself
Ten Ways You’re Driving Your Husband to Drink
I write down the upshot of all my studies for myself, and possibly for Emily. I admit my current sour mood forces me to put a somewhat negative spin on things . . .
Top Five Traits of Good Wives
1. They cook, clean, and shop. (Translation: Become a gourmet chef and economical wizard and keep a ready-for-surgery-clean home.)
2. They’re not high-maintenance, and they’re proficient at organizing and making budgets for the home. (Translation: Shop like a frugal Depression-era war widow for yourself, but gleefully purchase any item your husband requests, like Brad’s new electric shoe buffer.)
3. They speak positively about their husbands in public. Always. (Translation: Glow about hubby. When he’s accused of scandal, weep and deny.)
4. They keep their minds and bodies in shape. (Translation: Go easy on the gravy boat, lady! And the independent thinking.)
5. They enjoy having a healthy, monogamous sex life. (Translation: Enjoy whatever sexual positions/acts/routines your husband does. Whatever he likes is to be considered “normal.”)
Top Five Traits of Bad Wives
1. They neglect household duties. (Translation: Don’t leave scum rings in bathtubs or forget to buy toilet paper.)
2. They’re unwise with money and make secret purchases. (Translation: Don’t buy anything you don’t have permission to and don’t hide your expensive purchases in the garage.)
3. They tease and speak negatively about their husbands in public. (Translation: Don’t say anything bad about your husband ever. Even if he throws you down a flight of stairs, smile and say he’s wonderful!)
4. They dress in a slovenly manner and are careless about their appearance. (Translation: He can wear sweatpants to bed but you can’t.)
5. They trick their husbands and pretend to enjoy sexual relations. (Translation: Don’t agree to oral sex and then use a sock slimed with hand lotion to do the job.)
I can never show these lists to Emily. She’ll think I’m insane.
There’s so much that’s hard to talk about. Like loneliness and how that seems to be a large part of being together. Sometimes I walk through the empty house and I turn on every light, until each room glows and the house is ablaze. From bay windows I watch warm light from our windows dappling the dark water. People ask how I’m doing and I say great. I can’t bring myself to tell them the truth. I have no close friends I see anymore, no close family. My husband ignores me and his family dislikes me. I don’t fit in at all and yet I can go anywhere I like, buy anything I want. I’ve never had so much, and somehow I’ve never felt like I had so little. I never had much at my little apartment, but everything I had was mine. My retro toy collection, my squidgy bath mat . . . and Mrs. Biggles, my beloved cat. Here . . . what do I have? What can I say is mine? Other people chose everything. I’ve never been this safe and this close to starving at the same time.
When Brad finally comes home there are strange calls late at night. He runs vaguely worded errands that sometimes last for hours. I’m starting to really believe he’s having an affair. How would I know? It’s not like I can ask him. Instead, I ask the online community, read articles on how to tell if your husband’s cheating. The culmination of reading hundreds of such articles is:
Top Ten Signs Your Husband Is Cheating
1. You get recurring yeast infections.
2. Your husband’s laptop and cell phone have a password.
3. You find strange receipts in his coat pockets for bars and nightclubs that have names like Liaisons, the Beaver Club, and Paroxysm.
4. Arguments ensue when you ask your husband where the fuck he goes at night.
5. He gets repeated late-night phone calls from secretaries, paralegal assistants, dental hygienists, pregnant porn stars, or any other female strangers.
6. You smell perfume on your husband’s trousers that isn’t yours.
7. Missing cash.
8. Missing jewelry.
9. Blondes named Candi, Melodi, or any name ending with an “i” keep stopping by your house and sitting on the doorstep crying.
10. Oozing sores of any kind on your husband’s body, especially on the tip of his penis, which he says are just an allergy to something, like linen.
I obsessively take online quizzes like “The Cheater Test,” “Big Cheater Quiz,” “Find Out If He’s Cheating on You,” and “Did He Ever Even Love You? Find Out in Five Questions or Less.” They all ask questions like:
Has your husband seemed distant lately?
Not at all. Brad maintains the distance of most rogue cosmonauts drifting through deep space and orbiting far-off planets like Oh Baby Yes Baby and the exotic Escort Service 9. He’s fearlessly explored countless moons and I know he frequents his favorite galaxies: the Big Fat Liar’s Way and Jesus, That’s My Wife Again.
Does your husband check in with you regularly?
Brad checks in very regularly. He sticks to a strict schedule and calls me every single never. He started to never call me back when we first met and he’s so cute about it, he’s kept it up even to this day. He still never calls me. Never. Didn’t call yesterday, won’t call tomorrow, and any minute now . . . he won’t call today.
Have you and your husband stopped having fun together?
Stopped having fun? Of course not. That implies we even started. Brad and I have always made it a priority to bicker, argue, and sulk whenever possible. We try to put petty things aside. We never let a sunny day or our anniversary get in the way of what’s important to us, which is finding out who’s right, crucifying the one who’s wrong, and of course, assigning blame.
Does your husband check out other girls?
Brad only checks out one kind of woman: women with eyeballs. He’s so specific, it’s weird. He will not ogle a woman if she’s missing even a single eyeball, no matter how gorgeous she is. It’s his thing. Once we saw a woman at the mall wearing a patch over her eye, like a lady pirate. I thought she looked mysterious but Brad was almost grossed out. Luckily we ran into some teenage girls trying on bikinis and whew. They had eyeballs and my sweetie was right back in the old leering saddle, mentally doing each underage girl there. Relief. I feel silly getting upset about it. How can I deny him something as small as an eyeball?
Does your husband get phone calls or text messages late at night?
Does he ever. That’s like peak texting time. I’m not sure about phone calls; he usually jumps in the car and takes off when the phone
rings. I asked him where he was going one time, and he said to the corner of Nacho and Beeswax.
As the weeks drag by and the weather gets colder I read self-help books and watch helpful YouTube videos about the signs of an unfaithful spouse. Also about developing a reasonable action plan to make sure the son of a bitch stops getting his icky sticky. It’s all information written primarily by women for women, and horror stories abound. Each one is more awful than the next. There’s the woman who caught her husband having sex with both her best friends, the woman who walked in on her husband four-to-the-floor going at it piston-style with her gay brother, the woman who watched her husband ker-floomping a Swedish exchange student live in their hot tub while his buddies watched, and of course the woman who caught her husband playing Pink Lipstick with their beloved Great Dane, Alphonso. She sued him for divorce on the grounds he had an extramarital affair.
I try everything I can think of to get Brad’s attention. I go to Jeremy’s spa and rebleach my hair, and I buy more expensive clothing, better makeup, sexier lingerie, but he takes no notice of all my improvements. He’s always working, and when he’s home, he seems busy and annoyed. Nothing is quite good enough.
Not even when Mother Keller nominates us for this year’s annual Heck of a Home Designer Home Showcase. We’re selected as a featured house, which means thousands of people will troop through our home and admire our lifestyle. A woman from the showcase calls and says she’s putting together the official catalog. Can she schedule time for a photograph? I tell Brad the exciting news and he says, “Well, you better make sure you get the house cleaned up. You don’t want them to see it this way.”
Everything seems hard. My life seems like a low-budget community play. All the scenes are awkward, every line is inauthentic, and every movement is skeptically scrutinized by a surly audience and deemed inferior. A trip to the grocery store, a quick run to the club, a quiet dinner for two at home, and I’m so nervous, unsteady, and panicked I’m ready for a double hit of Benadryl and a glass of wine as big as my head . . . even if it’s noon.
I wake up sweating, in panic. Maybe our marriage was doomed before it ever began. I’m working on this awful theory that some people are just not designed for happiness. They lack certain wiring or are unable to make enough of the right chemical compounds to feel happy. If our eye color and hair texture and taste buds are so specific as to be completely unique in the universe for all time in all directions . . . then why wouldn’t our brains be that unusual too?
I thought things would get easier in time, but they’ve only become more complicated than I ever could have imagined. My low-grade anxiety’s become outright ugly panic. I don’t know, I’m looking around this place and I have everything I ever wanted. Maybe I just didn’t want them in the first place . . . but—and the thought makes me queasy—what if I’m programmed to be unhappy no matter what I have or where I am or who I’m with?
Maybe some of us are just broken.
Maybe this sadness is an inseparable element of my bones and blood.
9
Onward, Christian Shoppers
Snow.
Lots of it. The whole lawn looks like one enormous Sara Lee pound cake. I fight the urge to run through it zigzagging like we used to do when we were kids. There’s something so refreshing about tromping on un-tromped-upon banks of freshly fallen snow. Brad’s out of town, and I don’t know that we already have a snow removal service, so I shovel the whole front walkway by hand, panting and feeling near death when I’m done . . . which is about twenty-two seconds before the guy in the little Bobcat shows up and plows the whole driveway in under five minutes.
Tonight is Supper Club. Supper Club is a dinner that Hailey and Lenny throw at their house every month or so; it’s like a potluck dinner party for friends and family and people who keep showing up. They’ve been throwing these strangely themed dinner parties for years, even though by now they’re fairly tame. They used to be somewhat dangerous.
The infamous Hotdish ’n’ Heavy Metal Supper Club had many poorly aimed and very illegal fireworks, which were set off to deafeningly loud heavy metal music. The night ended with a citation from the police, many crying children, and two dead pigeons that had unfortunately been flying overhead.
Twisty Chili Supper Club got messy quick when guests had to play Twister in high winds while eating piping-hot bowls of chili. We stopped after Lenny accidentally dumped a Crock-Pot of molten-hot cheeseburger chili on somebody. Lenny kicked it up a notch for his final activity-themed Supper Club, Gumbo ’n’ Guns, which basically ended before it began, when Lenny accidentally shot Chucker in the leg with a BB gun. Chucker still has the BB in his leg.
Tonight’s Supper Club theme is Fucked-up Pancake Night. There are rum pancake shakes, a deep-dish steak pancake bake, pancake chowder, pancake bacon, sugared pancake balls, pancake Jell-O, and pancake pudding cups. Mom has left already by the time I get there—I guess Dad’s not feeling well—but she left me a note that says she’s cleaning out the attic and I should stop by to sort through some of my old junk. Lenny comes up and hands me a beer.
“Lookin’ pretty fancy-pantsy there, Jen.”
“Am I?” I’m wearing chocolate jeans, a buttery-soft nutmeg-colored cashmere turtleneck, and a long green leather Marc Jacobs jacket. Accent pieces are tall leather riding boots and yellow topaz chandelier earrings. I thought I was dressing down. The truth is, I’m starting to have the opposite problem of the one I used to have, which was being constantly underdressed. I wore sweatshirts outside, something I’d never do now, unless it was a designer sweatshirt. Now I’m overdressed for things.
“Where’s Pee Boy?” Lenny asks. I tell him Brad’s been really busy. He had to work.
“Oh, I’ll bet he’s busy,” Lenny says, swigging his beer. Lenny’s the foreman of the Keller’s loading dock. They gave him a job after Lenny lost his job at Hormel, though we still sometimes call him the Ham Man. “Got an awful lot of cheap crap showing up at our American warehouse,” Lenny says. “I’ll tell you something else, my union guys ain’t too happy about them Chinesey products comin’ through the store.”
“Shut up, Lenny,” Hailey snaps. “Don’t say ‘Chinesey.’ ”
“Ow! Quit it, woman! What’s wrong with ‘Chinesey’?”
“I told you at our wedding, you don’t say ‘Chinesey’! You’re supposed to say ‘Oriental.’ ”
“No, no you’re not!” I shake my head. “I told you guys that at your wedding, remember?”
“Why? What was Chinesey at the wedding?” Lenny asks her.
“God, Lenny! Only everything. All the lanterns and the kimonos my bridesmaids wore. Well”—her eyes dart over at me—“that some of them wore.”
“Don’t start,” I warn her. “Don’t give me that look.”
I’ve told her a million times that the bottle of Drano fell out of the cabinet on top of me and bleached my dress before I could even stand up. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I grab another beer. I ask Hailey if she wants one and she shakes her head no. Lenny’s still confused. “Man, I thought our wedding had a Mexican theme,” he says. “Or like, chili peppers.”
All of a sudden loud music blares over the speaker and I moan.
“No, not ‘The Pancake Song’! No no no . . .”
“The Pancake Song” is this weird children’s song Lenny found about a pancake named Flapjack who runs away from home and some sort of Butter Pat people help him escape the Bacon Man and he becomes unlikely friends with Pokey Fork. The plot’s a little hard to follow. Anyway, on the chorus, “Watch him rumble, see him tumble, run-runaway pancake you’re in trouble!” the whole room stops what they’re doing and starts doing the pancake dance, which involves wheeling your arms around like a windmill while twirling. There’s always a lot of spilled beverages afterward. I wind up whirling right into Lenny, and I shout, “Lenny! Just out of curiosity, how hard is it to find a ship’s manifest?”
“A what now?” he shouts back.
“The ship?” he says, knocking the drink out of my hand. “Dunno, we mostly got trucks at the dock!” When “The Pancake Song” is over, I go get a new beer. I hear someone say, “Hey, chief,” and I turn around. There’s Nick, the guy from the vet’s office, wearing an orange hoodie, grinning at me.
“Hey, Nick!” I smile. “Stalk me much?”
“Much as I can!” He nods. “Meet my new pal, here. Pastor Joe.”
“Hi, Pastor Joe.” I shake his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Pastor Joe is creep city. He has dark eyes and a fucked-up crooked haircut and he’s wearing a JCPenney beige turtleneck sweater with patches on the elbows and a white collar sewn on the turtleneck. He says he’s living next door, in the creepy rental house that’s been empty for six months. He got locked out and came over and peered through the windows. Naturally when Lenny saw a freaky-looking peeping-tom “man of the cloth” leering into their windows, he invited him over. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, children,” Pastor Joe says, and wanders away.
“What a weirdo!” I whisper to Nick.
“Weird as hell,” he says. “That’s why I came over here. I was sure he was gonna start shooting people. Thought you might provide protection.”
“You can count on me, Nick. Call me Jennifer.”
“Well, Miss Jennifer, the only thing I think that anyone can count on in this crazy old world . . . is that Pastor Joe will kill all of us. Probably one day very soon.” He smirks. “Saw you do the Pancake Dance.”
“Oh, too good for the Pancake Dance?” I ask him.
“I’m better than the Pancake Dance. You should see my Waffle Trot.”
I snort, despite trying not to. “Sounds very sexy,” I tell him.
“Too sexy.” He sighs. “Got caught up in it. Wound up in a seedy Tijuana bar, showing my puff pastry for bread crumbs. I’ll never let anyone near my waffle again. At least I saved my doughnut hole.” Hailey walks by holding a bottle of lemon spring water and I tell her to start drinking like a man. She ignores me and heads for kitchen. I excuse myself and follow her.
Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married Page 11
