A Cup of Comfort for Couples (29 page)

After my husband's swimsuit comment, I hoist the baby into his arms so I can go to the bathroom. I make my way past the wet swirling slides, over a faux bridge with a rope railing spanning the “lazy river,” to the women's locker room. There, I peek in the mirror.

My swimsuit is white, and I am afraid what my husband meant is that you can see the color of my flesh and the bulges of my post-partum belly through it. But the swimsuit is lined and my fears are not realized. Though wet, the swimsuit still appears white, not transparent. Its dress-like shape floats away from my belly and does not cling. I found it featured in a magazine article about swimsuits designed to hide the flaws of a “mom” figure.

The water park is filled with teenage and twenty-something girls in micro bikinis and with round breasts and taut bellies. In the presence of these girls, the idea that my mom swimsuit is erotic to anyone strikes me as amusing. That it is erotic to my husband is reassuring.

While the swimsuit is not clinging and not transparent, I see the outline of my nipples. This probably inspired my husband's “naked” comment. It does not bother me, though it once may have made me self-conscious. I am still nursing the baby and my breasts feel about as erotic to me as my arms. In the bevy of half-naked younger girls, I feel inconspicuous enough.

When I met my husband in college, he would lope around campus like a bouncing question mark, no taller than I, his posture a curve, skinny inside his baggy clothes. He was always quick to ingratiate himself with others, which I thought of as kindness and gentleness. I never saw him lose his temper. He seemed so nonthreatening, a guy who would not, could not, hurt me. I understand now why harmlessness appealed to me. My dad had spent years drilling the mantra “boys only want one thing” into my head; my mom was afraid for me to walk anywhere outside alone, day or night, lest I get abducted; and college campuses were rife with seminars on date rape and domestic violence. Though I had experienced none of those things, their threats breathed down my neck.

But there was more to my future husband than a mild temperament. The first time I met him, with a girlfriend of mine, he leaned against his dorm-room bunk bed and pronounced to us, “Yeah, I'm a virgin.” (We had not asked.) “I think that's cool,” he added.

He was a freshman then, and I was a slightly more experienced sophomore, so I raised my eyebrows and smirked. Secretly, though, I admired his courage in putting it out there.

His folks pressured him relentlessly to become a doctor, so he started out pre-med. But in art classes he found expression painting cartoon-like characters oozing color, humor, and vulnerability. When he switched his major to art, he received no end of grief from his parents. But he stuck to his guns. So I began to see him as a person willing to be himself — his goofy, creative, vulnerable self — no matter what others thought. And that is what attracted me.

He and I started dating my senior year. After five years we got married in a white-steepled country chapel with artful black and white photos to prove it.

But he and I looked mismatched. Commuting on the train together to our separate jobs with different dress codes, I would be in a blouse and slacks, he in a T-shirt and jeans. I looked like the grownup, he the kid. People often seemed to think we were not a couple. Sometimes they walked right between us. At a fast-food restaurant, I would have to interject, “I'm with him,” even though he had just ordered for both of us.

At home, if the furnace broke, I was the one to call for repairs. I was the one to find the best deal, show the workers what to do, argue when the work was not done right. He was afraid to offend, to make demands.

Before our daughter was born, we were at a party with a girlfriend of mine. My husband sat off to the side as my friend and I chatted. Two guys approached us, drinks in hand, and began to chat. They were bores. It was clear they thought I was single. I threw a “rescue me” look to my husband. I did not expect him to make threats or start a fight. I thought he would come stand beside me, put his arm around my waist, give the nonverbal “back off” cues. He did nothing but smirk, amused at my predicament.

During this time period I got pregnant, accidentally. There was a miscarriage, then a difference of reactions. I was bereft; he was relieved. A year later, he reluctantly agreed to a second pregnancy. I became pregnant with our daughter. But during that year, things changed. He had stopped looking at me. He had stopped ogling me in his trademark adolescent way. He would walk out of a room I was in and turn out the light, forgetting I was there.

It continued this way until our daughter was two years old. One night he and I were lying in bed together. He was facing the wall, and I was stretched out next to him looking at the back of his head. He had talked a lot about a woman at work when I was pregnant, then not at all afterward.

“Don't worry, she's married,” he had said. “She's just a friend.”

I had not wanted to ask about her this night, but I knew I had to.

I was surprised to hear of the woman's divorce and her new boyfriend. I had not known everything then, so I am not sure how I knew to ask, but I did. “Are you jealous of her new boyfriend?”

He whispered to the wall, “I think so.”

I attempt one of the adult water slides while my husband holds the baby. Moving in line step by step up a wet staircase to the top of the slide, the outside landscape slowly reveals itself through the tall windows. A solid rain falls into a pond with ducks, circled by prairie grass. It is calm and scenic. But the higher I move, the more I see. The pond is tucked into the elbow of a highway on-ramp, where cars glide past construction equipment, piles of dirt, and a dump truck.

The water slides protrude outside of the building from the top and curl back inside at the ground level, like plastic noodles dripping rain onto the concrete below. Inside the building, I hurl myself down the dark plastic tube, where I get twirled and twisted and dropped.

One night in the weeks after discovering the affair I was driving home from a far suburb with my daughter. She was two years old. Snow blanketed street signs on the unlit road so I could not tell where I was going. Visions of my husband and the other woman tumbled over and over in my brain.

My daughter began to whimper. Strapped into her car seat behind me, she wanted out. But I could not stop the car. It was too dark, the streets too isolated.

Another vision of my husband and the woman accosted me. A tangle of arms, legs, and . . .
Stop
!
Stop
!
Stop
! I silently admonished myself, repeatedly, futilely. I could not stop my torturous thoughts. My skin crawled. My daughter started screaming. I fought a rising panic.

I made a wrong turn, then another. I could not catch my breath. As I approached a railroad track, I saw the train and had a flash — just a flash — of a vision of me driving the two of us into it.

At the bottom of the waterslide, I slosh around in the catch pool, where it is bright and noisy and exuberant. I see my husband standing on the side, waiting, watching, smiling. The baby is balanced on his hip; our daughter is holding his hand. “There's Mom!” he says to her. He is looking at, not past, me. His stance is wide, his feet anchored, his shoulders broad.

Together, we make our way to a lukewarm hot tub, lit turquoise from below.

We worked to recover our marriage. We went to counseling once a week. We read books about affairs. We looked at the patterns of our behavior and deliberately changed them.

There was no magic moment when I said, “I am so in love with you that I forgive you.” There was no scene where he ran after me in slow motion with a fistful of wildflowers. His affair was like a fulcrum in our lives, a prism where the light comes in imperceptibly and comes out split, defined, divided into its separate parts.

Over the course of several months, he became more like a grownup. And I became less of one.

The next day when we are leaving the hotel, the sky is a steel drizzle. I stand outside with the kids waiting for my husband to get the car. A balding man in a sleeveless shirt is smoking nearby. He is shivering, hugging himself against the chill. My husband pulls our car up to the curb. As I am about to get in, the guy suddenly becomes animated. He makes conversation with me about the model of our car, a battered station wagon. I wonder about the guy's enthusiasm.

Once I am in the car, my husband says, “That guy's a creep. I saw him lurking around the hot tub.”

“Hmmph,” I say as we drive away.

Later that night, at home with the kids asleep, my husband and I sneak into our bedroom to do what we had not been able to do with the kids in the hotel room: make love. With his arms around me and his skin warm, he says again, “You looked naked in that swimsuit,” with a smile.

“What do you mean naked? It wasn't like you could see through the fabric,” I say.

“But I could see the outline of your nipples,” he explains. “And that guy was looking at you in the hot tub.”

“Oh, the ‘creep!'”

I nestle into the normalcy of his jealousy, his irritation, his desire to hold me and make love to me and find me sexy in a mom swimsuit.

—
Stephanie Springsteen

A Gift for Women

I
was about to walk around the side of our house, but stopped when I heard my husband, Eric, talking to our neighbor's sixteen-year-old son.

“Women are not like us,” he said. “And nowhere is that more clear than when you have to buy them a gift. Forget logic and practicality, and think useless and a waste of money.”

“I don't even know why she gave me a present, it's not my birthday!” young Steve pointed out.

“That's the whole point! They only give you things because then you have to buy them something back. They don't limit themselves to rational events, like birthdays and Christmas. They dream up anniversaries, like the day we first kissed and the first time you said you loved me. Most of the time, you won't remember any of these things, but there is nothing you can do to stop them,” Eric said in his “expert” voice.

With my own birthday coming up, I smiled and kept listening.

“My father once gave my mother an electric blanket. They had no central heating, and their bed was always freezing. Did she appreciate a suitable present like that? Of course not! She would have preferred a bunch of roses, a great asset when your feet are freezing all night long!” I could tell Eric was well into his subject now and enjoying himself.

“Well, I was going to get Carrie a book token because she has to pay a fortune for a lot of her study books,” young Steve ventured.

“A book token,” Eric repeated in a voice close to alarm. “Don't even think about it! Any book is a pretty risky thing to buy them. They might love cooking, but if you give them a book on it, they will take it as a criticism of their cooking. They can be into a particular sport, but they don't want to read a book on how to improve at it.”

“So what kind of book can you buy then?” Steven asked.

“Some rubbish on their secret heartthrob, like how George Clooney came to be an actor or David Beckham's views on women's fashion. I would just forget a book; it's too risky,” Eric advised.

“You are still thinking logically,” he went on. “You said Carrie shares a flat with some friends and it costs a fortune for electricity as they study into the early hours. Now, we might think a decent reading light with one of those new ‘eco' bulbs that burns forever would be a good idea. But no! A woman would rather have a multicolored candle that gives off the scent of lotus blossoms and as much light as the moon on a cloudy night!”

I heard Steve laugh. “Her mum gave Carrie one of those for her birthday, and she loved it. You are spot on, Mr. Stark!”

“Perfume never goes wrong. They aren't happy until they have a row of bottles of all shapes and sizes,” Eric offered. “The thing to do is pick something with the name of someone famous in a really fancy bottle. It is not so much the using of it but the showing it off to friends that pleases them. You can always say you chose it because you think it is very seductive; they like that even more.”

“Jewelry is probably the best bet; it's the most useless thing around. Try to see what kind of things she wears. The best thing is to say, ‘I just felt like it was you!' It panders to their egos, and they will love it even though they hate it.”

Eric went on with his sage advice. “Whatever you choose, you have to remember the wrapping. Wrapping is absolutely one of the most important issues when buying gifts for a woman. It is best to find one of those shops that will do the wrapping for you; if not, then get your sister to help. You need whatever new shiny paper they like at the moment and one of those totally useless rosette things that matches. If you can get coils of stuff to stick on as well, you are home and dry before they even open it.”