If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon Read online

  A typical morning in our house looked like this:

  5:47 (which was really 5:39 but he liked his alarm clock set exactly eight minutes fast, because this—he insisted—was how he “tricked” himself into getting up earlier. I’d have laughed at the absurdity of this but I was too busy crying.): Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp!

  Fiddle, rustle, blurp! Snap, crackle, blurp! Jesus effing blurp!

  Finally he’d find the snooze button and the godforsaken blurping would stop. Literally within seconds, he would be sound asleep again. Naturally at this point I would be wide awake, so I would busy myself with the freakishly OCD task of making sure the colon between the clock’s hour and minutes flashed exactly sixty times. (It did! Every time!) I would do this for nine hellish sixty-flash cycles in a row, my eyes burning from not blinking, before the inevitable repeat performance.

  5:56 (technically, 5:48): Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp! Blurp!

  Although I purposely bought him an alarm clock that offered the kinder, gentler wake-to-music option, he couldn’t use it, you see, because he was apt to “incorporate the song into his dream” and sleep right through it. (I promised to punch him in the esophagus every nine minutes, but he couldn’t get over this crippling dream-song fear.) And also, what if the radio station was experiencing technical difficulties at exactly 5:47, 5:56, 6:05, 6:14, 6:23, 6:32, 6:41, 6:50, 6:59, and 7:08 (which was actually 7:00, his intended wake-up time)? You really can’t blame the guy for not wanting to risk it.

  When I ended things with Jake, we agreed that he would stay in the house, so I packed my things and moved out. Even though we parted amicably, when I made my final sweep of the bedroom I couldn’t resist resetting his alarm clock to the correct time. It was a tiny, vindictive little victory, and in hindsight, it’s almost appalling how satisfying it was.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  He falls asleep on the sofa and when I try to rouse him to come to bed, he says okay and then won’t get up to walk upstairs. I try to wake him and then he gets grouchy about me bothering him. After twenty years of being married and knowing his routine, I have stopped trying and now I just let him sleep on the couch. Usually, he wakes around one A.M. and comes to bed, where he wakes me up and says, get this, “Why didn’t you wake me up to come to bed!?”

  CINDY

  The man I married thankfully (although not accidentally) is significantly more considerate than old Jake was. If Joe has to get up at some ridiculously unholy hour, he sleeps in the guest bedroom. If he merely needs to be sure he’s awake by a particular but reasonable time, he’ll program his phone to emit a single, subtle reminder tone. For this display of consideration alone, plus maybe the fact that he tells me constantly that he adores my body, I will never leave him.

  If he’s going to leave me, it might be because of the cats.

  In my defense, it’s not like I falsely advertised myself as a dog lover and waited to reveal my true cat-lady self until we got married. When Joe and I met, I had just moved from New York to Los Angeles. With my three cats. On Joe’s very first visit to my apartment, my clowder of four-legged roommates took turns climbing into his lap, nuzzling his pant legs, and burrowing deep into his backpack.

  “How many cats do you have?” he tried to ask nonchalantly.

  “Just the three,” I chirped.

  “Oh,” he replied. “I mean, that’s great! I love cats. Really, you know, I just think they’re great. [pause] So how old are they?”

  “They’re all about six,” I told him.

  Again: “Oh.” And then: “How long do cats live, anyway?”

  Eventually he must have decided that the cats weren’t a deal breaker and asked me to marry him. I think he even grew to love them in his own way, and I am pretty sure I spotted a tear in his eye at each of their little kitty funerals. Two years ago, he didn’t even gripe (much) when I suggested it was time to get our daughters a pair of kittens.

  Although cats by nature are typically crepuscular (which sounds like it means “covered with festering, oozing sores” but really means “most active in the predawn, twilight hours”), Frick and Frack don’t seem to have gotten the memo. They’ll often decide to launch a rousing game of “Can’t catch me, sucker!” right around midnight, and their preferred track runs, roughshod, directly over our bed. After four or five laps they tire of the chase and switch to swarming and circling in a repetitively concentric fashion about the bed, tamping down imaginary grass and looking for the perfect pair of resting spots. Joe finds this portion of the feline festivities utterly enchanting.

  “Fucking cat,” he’ll growl, launching whichever one has dared to alight on one of his feet several yards into the air.

  Thrilled that he’s finally taken an interest in the game, Frick (followed in short order by Frack) will resume the sprint course with renewed vigor, tearing across our bodies and our heads indiscriminately and occasionally leaving a flesh wound in their mutual wake. Their process of settling down to snooze rarely takes them more than an hour or two, so I don’t know why Joe gets so damned cranky about it. I mean, the love and affection those cats give him on a daily basis more than—oh, crap. Never mind.

  I think it comes down to the fact that much like dogs and cats—or as we have recently established, people and cats—men and women just weren’t meant to share a bed. It’s not natural. But somehow it’s gone mainstream.

  In a way co-sleeping is actually a lot like the much maligned suntan. A long time ago, a “tan” was considered undesirable because having one was a sign that you made your living doing backbreaking labor in a field or some other blue-collar, al fresco venue. (Bear with me; this is relevant, I swear.) But with the advent of air travel, a new reality emerged. If you lived in Chicago and were showing off bronzed limbs in January, it could only mean one thing: You’d obviously just been on holiday in St. Bart’s, you rich, lucky dog. Flash forward to the present, where the tan is once again out of vogue, because sporting one means you must be either too ignorant to read the thousands of consumer magazines telling you how sun exposure causes cancer, or too poor to fork over for one of the kabillions of broad-spectrum sunblocks on the market that those magazines informed you would be best suited to your skin type.

  Sleeping with your spouse is sort of like that. Before the Industrial Revolution, when families tended to work the land they owned, it wasn’t uncommon for a husband and wife to sleep in separate rooms. When you see this in movies depicting this era, you assume it’s so that the husband could fool around with the nubile young chambermaid, but truly it often was simply a matter of having the space, a result of the hard-toargue-with “Why not?” argument. The marital bed became a tradition only when couples moved from rural to urban areas and found themselves with limited real estate to work with. “Guess we’ll have to bunk in here together,” they probably said with a shrug when they eyed their new brownstone’s “master” bedroom for the first time. (I’m guessing that this is when the anti-snore device industry took off as well.)

  I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but you may want to know that depression, heart disease, stroke, and respiratory failure are all associated with insufficient sleep. Not logging enough shut-eye also puts people at a greater risk for divorce and suicide (no data seems to be available for flying off in murderous rages, but I’m going to venture there’s a link). The bottom line is, being tired sucks. It makes you grumpy, impairs your motor coordination, and leaves big, dark, unsightly rings around your eyes. Oh yeah, and it can kill you.

  In the hilariously dead-serious HuffPo piece, the Sleep Doctor goes on to point out that according to surveys, 23 percent of married Americans sleep alone, and that double master bedrooms will soon, once again, be the norm in new-home construction. Although the author obviously intends to appall the reader with these details, I find them strangely comforting. In fact, the next time I can still hear Joe sawing imaginary logs with his fifteen-amp nasal chainsaw through my earplug
s or the temperature in the room drops into the single digits, I will close my eyes and envision the brand-new, all-mine master suite of my dreams, which by the way will be painted Laura Ashley 110 Apple Blossom (the perfect pale pink), will be filled with two dozen flickering verbena-scented candles, and will be a continuous, climate-controlled seventy-six degrees day and night, all year round. In case you were curious, my dream master suite also has forty-eight throw pillows heaped atop a luxurious Tempur-Pedic mattress that comes with a self-heating feather bed and is wrapped in ten-thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. The room itself boasts gigantic windows, a fireplace you can control remotely, and a walk-in closet that is the size of a 7-Eleven with a rotating shoe rack right smack in the middle of it.

  Not that I’ve given this much thought.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I Was Watching That!”:

  Life with the Cable Guy

  Today, watching television often means fighting,

  violence, and foul language—

  and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.

  • DONNA GEPHART •

  He can do it alone or with his friends, drunk or sober, indoors or out. He’ll indulge through his laptop, in the car, on a plane, and—in the most idyllic of instances—in a strange and faraway hotel room. He can (and frequently does) fall asleep doing it. Lying or sitting, with or without a snack and his hand tucked into the front of his pants, it’s quite possibly the singular most versatile and enjoyable activity known to man.

  And I do not mean man in the gender-neutral, all-encompassing, politically incorrect sense.

  The inimitable Ann Landers once said, “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.” In a way I guess that’s a blessing in disguise, because it would totally freak me out if Joe spent even a quarter of the time he squanders watching TV just sitting there staring at me.

  From what I know about addiction, I can confidently say that my husband does not have a TV-abuse problem. At least, not if my father is the yardstick by which he’s being measured. When I was a kid, if my dad was home, the TV was on. “His” seat at the dinner table was the one that afforded the straightest, least neck-crooking view of the tube—which was always tuned to the news during dinner. The volume had but one setting: All the Way Up. The nonstop droning didn’t bother us kids much, as not only did it preclude us from having to regale the table with daily tales of Catholic school soap eating and knuckle cracking, but it was also a great opportunity to point out birthday and Christmas wish-list items as they flashed across the screen. God love those clever marketers and their prime-time displays of beloved favorites like the Barbie Dream House and Baby Alive—because every girl should have a gamut of toys that represent what she probably will never have (a hot-pink convertible parked in front of her Swiss chalet), and also what she more than likely will (a small person in her care who makes indecipherable noises and is impossibly hard to keep clean).

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  He simply cannot resist Tom Selleck. Long before TiVo and Hulu, my

  husband’s sick days were filled with tomato soup and Magnum, P.I.

  on VHS. He taped over the one and only copy of my college graduation

  to get his own copy of “Tropical Madness” from season two; it must

  have been riveting because my sweet hubby learned nothing from

  that not-so-minor faux pas and later taped “Dead Man’s Channel” over

  our wedding! Luckily, we had a duplicate wedding video, so the man

  I married is not the dead man in question. I think my feminist husband

  is drawn to Magnum’s machismo—that overt swagger and unapologetic

  womanizing that is so far from his chosen reality. Despite being

  a poster child for evolution, those pre-PC episodes give my otherwise

  loving and respectful man a twisted lineage to his caveman roots.

  SHELLY

  Of course, my childhood was before the days of TiVo and remote controls, so many times I’d come home from being at a friend’s house or more likely, the mall, to find my dad half comatose in front of some ridiculous show like Maude or Barney Miller. The watery remains of a Southern Comfort and ginger would be etching a permanent watermark ring on the table beside him.

  “Hey, Jenna, while you’re up could you do me a favor and change the channel?” he’d ask innocently. (Incidentally, Dad rarely meant “while you’re up” literally; he’d use it even if I was asleep in my bedroom upstairs. While I was up, I also was welcome to refresh his cocktail, fix him a nice roast beef sandwich, or give the dog a bath, if the urge to do any of these things happened to strike.)

  Since we had only four channels—the three networks plus a mostly fuzzy version of Fox you might be able to pick up if there was just the right amount of tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears—this wasn’t an overwhelming task. I’d twist the dial six or seven times until he made his decision (“Is that your final answer, Dad?”), adjust the antenna to the sweet spot of maximum clarity, and be on my way.

  What a difference a few decades makes. Now we’ve got nine hundred channels to choose from, and if we are so inclined we never have to watch another commercial as long as we live. No longer do we have to wait in eager anticipation for the occasional instant replay; we can watch any scene we’d like, frame by gloriously detailed frame, any old time we please. (If you haven’t done this while watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, you are absolutely missing out.) This combination of bottomless options and selective viewing has turned what was once an opportunity to relax or even cuddle on the couch into a highly charged competitive sport.

  The key to winning the modern-day television Olympics, of course, is to acquire possession of the remote control and to retain it for the duration of the match. (And although the definition of a “match” is subjective, generally you’re talking about any time period between a thirty-second commercial and a rainy four-day holiday weekend.) If your opponent manages to wrestle the remote away from you—through either bribery, physical threats, manipulation, the promise of sexual favors, or the withholding thereof—the odds of getting it back are infinitesimal. Once you no longer stand any chance of reclaiming the coveted clicker, you might as well go fix yourself a nice sandwich or give the dog a bath, because you lose. Game over.

  I lose a lot, mostly because I don’t care all that much. If I were single and childless, I would cheerfully count myself among the less than 0.01 percent of lucky Americans who do not own a TV. But because I am neither of those things, I have grudgingly joined the mind-boggling 99.9 percent of the people in this country who are the proud owners of nearly three sets each—machines we collectively watch with appalling frequency. According to the A. C. Nielsen Company, the most esteemed media research group in the world, the typical American logs more than five hours in front of the TV every single day. In case you’re not a fan of math, I’ll do the calculating for you: That’s thirty-five hours a week, or seventy-seven days a year of uninterrupted idiot box watching. If Average Andy manages to keep up that prolific couch potato pace until he is eighty, he will have spent more than thirteen years of his life glued to the tube. Where, I ask you, is Michael Moore’s blistering documentary about what that’s doing to our society?

  Call me a big, fat hypocrite, but I’m married and I’m a mom. So in addition to the SUV, the black lab, and the white picket fence, I own precisely the number of TVs I am supposed to own, even though I rarely watch any of them. I might be inclined to tune in more if I knew how to work the remote, or if there weren’t such a disconcertingly large number of options to choose from, or if my husband didn’t care if I also did something else—like balance my checkbook or write thankyou notes or check Twitter from my iPhone—while I was watching. But for some inexplicable reason, Joe not only is desperate for me to be his cable companion, but wants a full 100 percent of my uninterrupted focus to be on the television for
the duration of the programming.

  I do not understand this need at all. I mean, I get the bit about his wanting my company. You know, because we’re married and we love to spend time together and if I’m watching the same show he is, ostensibly I’m not interrupting him every four minutes to ask him to do something around the house. It’s the part where he minds when I multitask that confuses me.

  “Want me to rewind that?” he’ll ask.

  “No, why?” I’ll respond, intently focused on the laundry pile in front of me.

  “Because you were the one who picked this movie and that part was really funny and you were folding that towel so I thought maybe you missed it,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I insist. “I heard it. It was funny!” I say the last part out of courtesy and refrain from adding I wanted to read, but you begged me to watch a movie so quit bitching about the movie I picked or what I’m doing while I’m watching it.

  “You didn’t laugh,” he pouts.

  “I laughed on the inside, dear,” I reply. “I’ll try to be more vocal with my displays of hilarity from now on.”

  “Well, I have to rewind it now anyway, so I’ll just go back to that part,” he says.

  “You ready?” he asks, when the sidesplitting moment in question is all cued up.

  “Yup!” I tell him, continuing with the folding. Three or four minutes later I realize he hasn’t hit the play button yet. If he is waiting for me to gaze meaningfully into the television set’s lifeless electronic eyes, he’s going to be there an awfully long time.