If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (12 page)

I am sure I don’t need to bring this up, but I will: When the woman of any given house comes down with a cold, somehow the world continues to turn. Beds get made, lunches get packed, permission slips get signed, laundry gets washed, pets get fed, work gets finished, bills get paid. No one is mopping your brow as you accomplish these tasks because—and you can’t really put too fine a point on this—
nobody realizes that you are sick
. It’s not that you don’t feel lousy, because you do. Of course you do! But what good does it do you to belabor that? Or to announce it every five minutes? Or even to acknowledge it yourself? You’re not being a martyr, and most of the time your clueless life partner isn’t intentionally being an insensitive cad. It’s just that because of your aforementioned experience with bras and waxing and high heels and childbirth, you can take it. You can’t afford
not
to, because last time you checked they weren’t giving away five extra hours of daylight with every box of Kleenex. So you pop some pill or another and you power through, and somehow, magically, you get it all done.

In marked contrast to your stoicism, when your husband develops a raging ninety-nine-degree fever, he will likely be rendered immediately immobile and expect you to morph into Florence fucking Nightingale. Even though we live in the third millennium (and we know that we do because we all have vague memories of all that unwarranted Y2K hoopla) and you’ve never
once
met him at the door with his slippers and a highball, one of the side effects of MIOI is a sort of hallucinatory state in which the patient believes he has time-traveled back to the 1950s and has himself a nice little housewife to attend to his every irritating need.

This is where you must tread very, very carefully. Because if you act like the bitch you want to be and accuse him of—
gasp
—exaggerating his symptoms, it will cause the “illness” to linger for several weeks or longer. No one knows the precise pathology behind this phenomenon, but trust me, it’s a timetested fact. You see, guys have figured out that there are certain distinct benefits of being sick. Consider these quotes from some legendary men:

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

—Samuel Butler

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.

—George Bernard Shaw

’Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

—Henry David Thoreau

 

Where are the nudge-nudge-wink-wink quotes from Erma Bombeck, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem, or Jane Austen extolling the benefits of being unwell? Where are the inspirational posters emblazoned with quotes like this: “If you want to test a woman’s capacity to really get shit done, get her sick. You’d be amazed at what a coughing, hacking, feelinglike-hell female can accomplish.” What? They don’t exist? Exactly my point.

I had always assumed the whole poor-poor-pitiful-me routine must have its roots in some sordid sexy-nurse fantasy. Even though most of us were raised with terrifying images of female caregivers like Louise Fletcher’s callous Nurse Ratched in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and Kathy Bates’s psycho Annie Wilkes from
Misery
, the stereotype persists. (I blame it on the Halloween costume people, who in recent years have managed to make even pirate and inmate outfits slutty.) But maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe men walk around shouldering a burden I can’t fathom. Maybe they all go through life feeling like they need to be big and brave and productive and protective every waking minute of every single day, so when their noses seem to have sprung a tiny leak, they see it as a sanctioned break from the rigors of their self-imposed power prisons. If that’s the case, we women need to band together to show them that is it much, much worse on the outside and that their little “vacation from life” won’t be the all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise they’re envisioning.

Consider the child who is allowed to stay home from school because she has a tummy ache. If
you
stay home from work to cuddle with her on the couch and eat ice cream and watch movies together all day, what do you suppose are the odds that she’ll feel better tomorrow? Or the next day? I can’t be the first to point out to you that
your husband is not very different from a child
—yours or anyone else’s. So looking at it that way, the trick is to ever so subtly make being “sick” a living hell for him. You know, so that he will realize there’s no benefit to remaining unwell and recover quickly so that you can all get on with your perfectly busy lives.

Here are a few things you can do to help him get back on his feet with head-turning speed:

 

Call his mother (or your mother; whichever one he likes less).
If she lives nearby, explain that you’re worried about leaving him alone—which you have been forced to do, since you’re doing double duty and all—and were wondering if she could sit with him for a few hours a day. If she lives out of town, tell her she can help by checking in frequently via phone and e-mail.

 

Refuse to have sex with him until he has been symptom-free for a week.
It’s amazing how a man who is too weak to fetch his own aspirin can muster enough energy to grope/proposition /fling himself on top of his partner, but somehow they seem to manage it. “Sorry, pal, but look how miserable
you
are,” you might chastise gently. “I’d be crazy to expose myself to whatever nasty bug you’ve got!” Once he realizes that coughing preempts coitus, he’ll be tripping over himself to embark on the road to recovery. In the interim, unless he is robustly ill (or his “symptoms” are keeping you up all night), try to resist the urge to decamp to the guest bed or couch. Having the bed to himself could fall into the reward category and effectively negate the no-sex threat.

 

Send the kids in to entertain him.
Nothing says “get well soon” like a couple of rugrats jumping on you, right? Pump them up on lots of sugar and send them in with very full mugs of steaming beverages. Make sure they tell him, “Mom says we need to be in here as much as possible to cheer you up!” After a few days of this, he should come to realize that being vertical and productive is the far less painful option.

 

Hide the remote control.
I know, this one is cruel and really will require herculean effort on your part not to give in, because the whining and complaining will actually worsen in the short term. Also, it’s best to initiate this plan when the kids aren’t home, as he will spew obscenities like the lead thug in the dirtiest Quentin Tarantino flick you ever saw and make an upsetting mess tearing up the house looking for his beloved clicker. He’ll accuse you of hiding it (the nerve!), and he may even bribe you with offers of spa vacations and shopping sprees if you’ll just give it back—or at least help him find it. Be strong! Remember, you’re doing this for his own good. Desperate times call for desperate measures. If televised delights are taken away from him, the only other perk to being sick is a license to eat all of the junk food he can possibly shovel into his mouth. Which brings us to:

 

Clear the house of all junk food and refuse to buy any more until he is 100 percent well.
This is easy to pull off, as you will use the “you need to eat healthy,
healing
foods” line of reasoning that’s impossible to argue with. Strip the pantry and refrigerator of his tasty favorites such as salami, Doritos, and those disgusting frosted circus animal cookies he insists on having in the house, and replace them with a hearty assortment of nutrient-dense goodies like liver, wheatgrass, radishes, boiled cabbage, low-sodium chicken broth, and canned, unsweetened goat’s milk. Continue to drink wine, eat steak, and enjoy dessert as you normally would, insisting that you need to keep up your precious strength. This isn’t being unkind; it’s helping to motivate him toward wellness. Bottoms up!

 

Make sure whatever cold medicine you give him has the words
may cause drowsiness
on it.
This won’t do anything to shorten the duration or severity of his symptoms, but it could buy you a few minutes of silent relief. Administer this medication in the late afternoon so that you can have a few hours to yourself after the kids go to bed and before you turn in.

 

Threaten to call a doctor.
Few things strike fear into the heart of a grown man like the thought of donning a paper gown and having a stranger (in all likelihood another man) palpate his flesh or, heaven forbid, puncture it with a needle. You can lead up to this one gradually, dropping casual comments like, “If you’re not feeling better by Friday, I think you should go to the doctor.” Obviously he’s a big boy and the boss of himself, and you can’t
make
him go, even when Friday rolls around. If he resists, having an arsenal of vague and ambiguous questions such as “Have you read that prolonged fever is associated with erectile dysfunction?” can be enormously helpful in encouraging him to be proactive in his own health care. (By the way, the doctor card works great with sick kids, too—and you can be totally sly about it. “Do you think maybe I should call Dr. Black?” you can ask, looking gravely concerned and slightly perplexed, as if the situation may indeed be out of your hands. Brace yourself for the inevitable, “You know what? I think I’m starting to feel better!” More often than not, it works like a charm.)

 

Get sick yourself.
This move is the trickiest of all of to pull off, because you probably don’t get sick easily, and on the rare occasion that you do, you aren’t adept at broadcasting your misery. Whenever I manage something brutal like projectile vomiting or severe diarrhea, Joe occasionally notices and responds (even if he was praying to the same porcelain god just hours before me) with a steady stream of Gatorade and the luxury of having the whole entire bed to myself. It’s not much, but it’s better than listening to
him
moan and hurl.

As we were driving, we saw a sign that said
“Watch for Rocks.”
Marta said it should read “Watch for Pretty Rocks.”
I told her she should write in her suggestion to
the highway department,
but she started saying it was a joke—
just to get out of writing a simple letter!
And I thought I was lazy!

• JACK HANDEY •

 

 

From the endless train of ridiculous research studies that cross my desk, one of my favorites of late was this one: WOMEN MORE ATTRACTED TO MEN IN EXPENSIVE CARS. That was the actual title of the news release, which I even skimmed—mostly because I thought there must be more to it than the obvious—before promptly filing it in my handy “no shit” folder. Apparently a team of university psychologists showed a group of women photos of a man sitting in a sleek silver Bentley and another guy in a battered Ford Fiesta. The women were then asked to rate each man on a standardized scale of attractiveness. Not surprisingly, the women found the Bentley boy significantly more handsome than the Ford fellow, never mind that they were the
very same person
. None of this was surprising in the least, including the brief mention of a corollary study in which this time the men were asked to rate women in various vehicles. Not at all shockingly, what kind of car the woman drove or what shape it was in or probably even whether it was on wheels or blocks mattered not in the least to the men; they judged each gal on face and figure only, her choice of automobile utterly irrelevant.

Call me shallow and materialistic, but I get this. To Joe, a car is a tool for carrying crap, and because he is both handy and adventurous, a truck is a must. He drove an old, gold, toosmall-for-his-frame Ford Ranger when we met, and he never looked sexier to me than the day he upgraded to the brand-new, gleaming white F-150. It was no Rolls Royce, but it was rugged and manly and had that delicious new-car scent and a CD player. He was
hot
.

That was eight years ago. Today the outside is scratched up, the tailgate is bent, and the inside is coated in dueling layers of dust and dog hair.

“It’s a
truck
,” Joe says when I complain about the filth and the stink. “It’s supposed to be dirty.”

So most of the time we take my car, which isn’t a minivan but close. It’s more of a station wagon–SUV hybrid, but at least it’s got leather seats and a moon roof. It runs great and has never given us a single headache, so I know that I’m stuck with the stupid thing for at least another hundred thousand miles. This used to infuriate me—I like change!—but I’ve come to a place in my marriage and in my life where I have realized that it really doesn’t matter if I’m driving a Pinto or a Lexus; a car is just a vehicle of transport, sort of like a hot dog is to ketchup. It’s an armor designed to protect my family from the dangers of other, bigger cars and keep us dry in a rainstorm. It’s a climate-controlled wagon for hauling groceries and small bodies from one place to another. Oh, and it’s also a great sparring spot.

Many years ago I wrote an article about relationship conflict for a national magazine, and one of the sources I interviewed—probably a Ph.D. or a famous clinical researcher or bestselling author—told me something I have never forgotten: “When you want to bring up a touchy subject with your spouse,” the communication guru told me, “do it in the car.” The reasoning he used to substantiate this advice sounded like something you’d hear from a wilderness guide before taking off on a solo stint through the grizzly-riddled back country: “Men perceive direct eye contact as a challenge,” he went on to explain. “So the same information will be received as significantly less hostile if you’re not looking directly at him when you deliver it.” After years of careful observation, I’ve come up with another equally compelling motivation for always limiting your sex, money, child care, politics, and religion discussions to the car: Chances are, you’re already fighting anyway. At least if you’re me.