If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon (22 page)

I pour another bottle of Drano down the sink. Nothing. I add some baking soda because I think I read in one of those forward-forward-forward e-mails that it might help. Nothing. I add some vinegar and
Holy sulfur dioxide, did I just make a bomb because that is some toxic shit right there.
My eyes are bleeding and I can’t breathe.
I could call a plumber and pay him in cash and just tell Joe the clog worked itself out.
The next time you find yourself wishing your husband were as handy as mine, pause and enjoy the fact that you will never, ever have to hide a plumbing receipt from him or use the money you’ve been squirreling away for Botox to get your sink fixed.

Any time I suggest we buy something for the house, Joe insists he can build it—better, cheaper, and faster to boot. (Maybe cheaper, possibly better, but
no way
faster. I can type seventy-five words a minute, and
potterybarn.com
is only one.)

“Honey, you cannot build a leather couch,” I try to argue.

“How do you know? I haven’t ever tried. I bet you I can,” he insists. “How hard can it be?”

“I know that you are extremely talented and amazing with your hands,” I agree. “But you
cannot build a couch
. Or at the very least, not the couch
I
want, with antique casters for feet and a tufted back and a million hand-hammered brass studs all over it and big, rolled arms. Skilled tradesmen spend entire lifetimes learning how to craft a couch by hand, and half of the time they still turn out looking like thrift-store crap. Google ‘homemade sofa’ if you don’t believe me.”

“Wow,” he’ll say. “I had no idea how little faith you have in me. It would have been a kick-ass couch, just so you know.”

He truly believes this, too.

My husband’s father offered him a “fixer-upper” boat. It didn’t work then, and I knew it never would; that it would sit in our driveway for ten years just as it had at his dad’s. I tried to fight it, but my husband side- stepped me by going straight to the kids. “What do you think of the new boat Daddy (he uses
Daddy
when manipulation of their emotional immaturity is necessary) is going to bring home? Mamma doesn’t think we should. What do you guys think?” Okay, are you
kidding
me? You did NOT just say that to the kids (knowing he did, but trying to stay sane). Oh, and did I mention that shards of the boat are all around it—part of the interior, a vinyl-covered torn-up seat, the cover—on the ground? Every single day I have to look at this old, nasty, mold-ridden boat, sitting on top of a trailer that is propped up on cement blocks.
One time
he tried to get it to work . . . and of course it didn’t. It’s been there for a year and a half. We’ve officially stepped into white trash territory.

LEAH

 

 

The funny thing is—and by
funny
I mean “annoyingly ironic”—as handy as my husband is, there’s one singular task he loathes, loudly complains about, and tries to put off indefinitely, every single blessed, blustery year: putting up the godforsaken Christmas lights.

“We don’t need to do the outside lights again this year, do we?” he’ll try.

“Yes, we do,” I tell him.

“But we did them last year,” he reminds me.

“And we’re doing them this year, too,” I insist.

“But don’t you think they sort of detract from all of your beautiful
inside
decorations?” he says, trying a new and admittedly clever tack. I have to think about that one for a second.

“Nope, they’re totally separate. If anything, they
enhance
my beautiful inside decorations, which by the way, thank you for noticing. Plus I love the lights, so we’re doing them.” I am firm. It’s a tradition—the arguing about it as well as having them there on the house. I witnessed my own parents having this debate every yuletide, too, and have vivid memories of my mom high atop the roof, sweltering in her reindeer sweater (it’s typically around eighty-five degrees in Florida in December),
doing it her goddamned self
while Dad drowned out her thunderous, angry footsteps by twisting the volume on the TV as high as it would go. We could all still hear her, but we pretended not to.

“We could totally distinguish ourselves by
not
doing outside lights.” Joe is grasping now. “Hey, we’re not even religious! Why do we even do Christmas decorations at all? Isn’t putting up Christmas lights when you don’t celebrate Jesus’ birthday sort of hypocritical?”

“Christmas lights have nothing to do with Jesus,” I say calmly, ignoring his blasphemous suggestion that we eschew decking the halls entirely as a statement-making act of agnosticism. “It’s not like I’m asking you to build a life-size, working manger on the front lawn and borrow a baby and some livestock to put in it. They’re
lights
. And in case I haven’t been clear about this, we are going to put them on the house, this year and every year after it, for the rest of our lives. The only way it will ever be up for discussion is if your
next
wife wants to get into a debate about it with you. Are we good?”

A sad shell of the confident, cocky man I married stares back at me, shoulders slumped. Man, this guy
really
doesn’t want to put up those lights. I decide to throw him a dry, admittedly unappetizing bone. “You know, I’m happy to call the Christmas Light Guys if it’s really that big of a deal.”

That’s their real name, the Christmas Light Guys. We’ve never actually seen the Guys in person, but I picture a rogue band of seasonal, skill-specific handymen with ginormous beer bellies sporting dollar-store Santa hats. “Sorry ma’am, we only do lights,” a portly Guy tells the bent-over little widow when she asks if he might be able to fix her creaky screen door while he’s there. The Guys’ little lawn signs and flyers pop up all over town right around Thanksgiving, and every year I am tempted to give them a call. Like I said, we don’t know any Guys personally, but Joe does not like them, not one little bit. (Maybe it’s just me, but the Guys seem to demand a Seussical sort of syntax for some reason.)

“I just don’t like getting up on that twenty-foot ladder,” Joe finally admits to me.
He would not, could not, on a ladder. Tell me, tell me, what is sadder?

“Seriously?” I scoff. “You prance around on the forty-fivedegree roof like a nimble old billy goat without a moment’s pause, you rock climb and mountain bike for fun, and you once jumped out of an airplane—on purpose—but you’re scared to climb up a silly ladder?”

He huffs and he puffs and eventually, after I’ve dragged two hundred feet of string lights onto the front lawn so that he can’t turn on the sprinklers until they’ve been moved, he climbs up onto the big, scary ladder.

“If I start screaming or you see sparks coming off me, grab that wooden broom and push me off the ladder with the handle end,” he says somberly. “And make sure that you don’t touch my body.”

“Yeah, okay, got it, get the broom, no touching the body,” I indulge him, bracing the ladder against the house with both hands. “Now up you go!”

Sometimes Joe takes the lights back down as soon as I start undressing the tree, but I can almost always count on him taking care of the removal by my birthday in May. One year we were sprucing up the place for a Fourth of July party and realized they were still up. Seeing as we were past the year’s halfway mark—albeit barely—I told him they could stay up. I thought he’d leap at the chance to get out of putting them up the following holiday, but Joe has tremendous pride and he was suddenly mortified about those stupid lights, so he climbed up the dreaded ladder in the heat of summer and ripped them down and I didn’t even need to save his life with a nearby broomstick. Christmas sure seemed to come early that year.

When one of my boys was a baby and we were on a tight budget—some things never change—I saw a really cute highchair in the shape of a lifeguard stand. It was $350. My husband decided he could make it for me. I call him Tool-Time Tim because he thinks he is handy but he is not. The next thing you know I am rushing him to the emergency room after he ran the circular saw over his hand. By the time we paid his medical bills and for physical therapy, I could have bought that chair ten times over. It took my husband several other incidents before he finally accepted the fact that he is not a do-it-yourself guy.

MIA

 

 

I have many a friend who likes to lament the fortune her husband has assembled in fancy, dust-covered tools and plenty who complain about half-finished paint jobs and faucets that have been dripping for seven years. (Can you say Chineseeffing-water-torture?) Pals bemoan the countless hours their significantly delusional others spend in their “workshops,” from which concrete evidence of any sort of “work” transpiring there does not exist. Comparatively, I won the handy-husband lottery and I know it. I just miss hanging out with him. It’s not easy being a home-project widow, either.

Five years ago, my brother bought a house in foreclosure. He got a rock-bottom deal and was giddy with his new pad’s upside potential, which was pretty limitless seeing as the place was totally trashed when he bought it. When the broke and bitter former owners begrudgingly moved out, in an effort to salvage as much of their investment as they could, they took every light-switch plate, towel bar, and toilet-tissue holder with them. They stripped the windows of their coverings and even took the knobs off the stove, which seemed unnecessarily vindictive to me. They didn’t just leave with the bulbs that were in the light fixtures; they left gaping holes and dangling wires where the fixtures and ceiling fans once hung. Apparently, before they went belly up they had toyed with the idea of fixing up the joint, as witnessed by the way they had taped off the window trim in several rooms with thick blue painter’s tape. The holes, the wires, the knobless stove, the
open electrical sockets
, the tape: It’s all still there. For one thousand, eight hundred twenty-five days, my brother has been living in this house without making a single change. “I don’t really even notice it anymore,” he says when I ask casually how the repairs are going. He’s a great guy and one of the funniest men I know and he has a heart the size of Texas and I love him fiercely and unconditionally. And at least I’m not married to him.

Friends and Family:
not Just a Phone Plan

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

• GEORGE BURNS •

 

 

As Exhibit Y in the virtual trial of Jenna’s Big Mouth versus Joe’s Inability to Absorb Anything That Comes Out of It or Share Anything in Return, I present to you this classic anecdote: My husband has played basketball for eighteen years, every single Thursday night, with the same group of guys. The only two instances I can recall when we were actually in town and he did not participate in this weekly ritual were the two times I experienced the joy of induced labor. Serendipitously, on each of these occasions the doctors arbitrarily offered Thursday as the first viable opportunity, and both times Joe tried to gently persuade me to hold off “just one more day” so that—and I am not making this up—he could
play basketball as scheduled
, never mind that by the second time we had this conversation I had been pregnant for a cumulative 13,440 hours and was about sixteen miles and thirty pounds past my breaking point. When I insisted that his coming to the hospital with me was not up for discussion, he actually had the gall to try to negotiate a midevening hall pass by reminding me that labor was a long and grueling process (as if I didn’t know this?) so it wasn’t as if the baby would “come right away.” I must not have smacked him hard enough, because he doesn’t even have a scar. But I digress.

“Kent’s getting married in Mexico and we’re invited,” Joe announced out of the blue one day. “Do you want to go?”

I had a brief moment of utter blankness, and then a tiny, low-voltage lightbulb went off. “The Kent you play basketball with that I’ve never met?” I asked, not really caring about this small detail as I was too busy mentally picturing myself on a tropical Baja beach sipping a frosty margarita and wearing a sexy white slip dress (that I didn’t technically own and that I’d have to starve for a week to wear in public, but it was a
great
dress so it was totally going to be worth it.) It briefly crossed my mind that I didn’t know that Kent was even single, but then I also realized that I knew absolutely nothing about
any
of Joe’s Thursday night buddies, one of whom felt close enough to my husband to ask him to fork over several thousand dollars to watch him utter a barefooted “I do” on foreign sand.

I suppose I should have assumed that the entire basketball team and their families—and not just my husband and ours—would be invited to this shindig, but to be honest I really didn’t give the wedding itself a whole lot of thought. The other guests were nameless, faceless people and they had nothing whatsoever to do with my upcoming tropical holiday, which was going to be all about me save for a quick little exchange of vows by a pair of strangers somewhere in the middle.

We arrived at the resort to find that the thoughtful bride-to-be had assembled dozens of sand buckets into darling little welcome kits and left them at the check-in desk. There was sunblock and bottled water, a generous selection of snacks, and even a pair of massage gift certificates. Oh, and a threepage, jam-packed-with-back-to-back-events-and-excursions itinerary spanning the better part of the upcoming week.

As we shuffled behind the valet into the sweeping glass elevator, I was livid. “Why didn’t you
tell
me it was this kind of wedding?” I wailed, already knowing what Joe’s answer would be.

“I had no idea what kind of wedding it was going to be!” he spat back. Well, of
course
he didn’t. Because it never would have occurred to him to ask.