The Journal of Best Practices (19 page)

The next morning, I awoke to Kristen kissing me on the forehead, telling me she had to go to work. “The kids are ready to go to Mary’s. Can you take them?”

I nodded into my pillow, blinded by the sunlight streaming in through our bedroom windows.

“Thanks,” she said. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.”
Okay—last night was a setback. That’s all. Time to get back on track.

I navigated through the usual morning chaos with the kids—more cereal please; not that kind of cereal; more water please; I meant juice; look, my pants are on my head; my shoes were in Mommy’s purse so can I wear my rain boots—and at eight thirty, we headed next door.

“Is Kristen working early this morning?” Mary asked as she helped me to remove the kids’ shoes and jackets.

“Yeah, and I did not sleep well last night.”

“How come?”

I hugged the kids and they ran off into Mary’s toy room, which was clean and organized and filled wall-to-wall with books and games and crafts. The house already smelled like pot roast, and Mary—who looks so much like Kristen that they’re sometimes mistaken for sisters—looked as fresh and relaxed as ever.

“Who knows,” I said.

Mary laughed and asked if it was because I’d eaten so much cake the night before, and then she abruptly marched into the kitchen, saying: “Wait here a second. I have something for you guys.”

I stood in the foyer while she continued talking to me from the kitchen, and I noticed how few decorations they had in their entryway compared with the rest of their house. There were pictures and mementos scattered throughout the other rooms, and the one that stood out was a hand-painted rendition of a poem that Andy’s sister had written for them as a wedding gift. The words escape me, but the gist was that their love shades the path of their life, like trees growing over a road. Something like that. It was heartfelt and affecting, and when Kristen and I weren’t getting along, any thought of that poem aggravated me. There were some trees painted in the background and the entire work was framed and displayed above their formal living room love seat.

The closest thing we had to a handmade emblem of our love was a torn sticker on Kristen’s rearview mirror. It read
PRINCESS, KRISTEN
. When we were dating I had printed this on a label maker at work. The original sticker read
THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT PRINCESS, KRISTEN
. I’d created it in response to a label she had given to me after I’d gotten emotional talking about how happy I was to be with her.
YOU ARE SUCH A GIRL,
it read. My first response read
YOU ARE SUCH A BITCH
. I tossed that in the trash. Too risky. Then I made the princess label. When I gave it to her, she tore off the part she liked best and stuck it on her mirror. No frame. No trees. Just pure label-maker romance.

In Andy and Mary’s family room there were frames and shadowboxes almost everywhere the eye landed. Inside each one was a picture of them being a super couple: relaxing on the beach in Hawaii; smiling at each other on their wedding day; laughing with their heads comically and gender-swappingly misplaced into the circular facial cutouts of a male bodybuilder and a platinum-blond calendar girl painted on a sheet of plywood.

Kristen and I didn’t do shadowboxes, and for years there were no pictures displayed of us or even the kids. Our bare walls said a lot about who we were as a couple and as a family, just as Andy and Mary’s prominently displayed family portraits spoke volumes about them. That’s not to say that we didn’t have any photos of good times. We had a couple of candid shots taken at arm’s length in a Salt Lake City parking garage, stashed in a drawer. I sometimes found them when I was looking for a coaster. We also had wedding pictures, but I had never gotten around to picking them up from the photographer’s studio.

Mary returned, handing me a Tupperware container. “I made some more of that salsa that Kristen likes,” she said. “This batch isn’t as tomato-y as the other one, just so she knows. But Andy tried some last night and he loved it.” For a moment I felt envy rising, and I noticed a pattern emerging.
Things are fine at home, then I come here and get a soul-crushing glimpse of perfection. We may have to move.

I thanked her, and she said with all the sincerity in the world, “It’s no problem. Hope she likes it.” I returned home with the salsa and texted Kristen:

She didn’t respond, so I sent another one:

That got a response:

I spent the following week trying not to think too much about the disparity in Kristen’s and Mary’s priorities. But comparison is a compulsively playable game, and a dangerous one. The more I compared Kristen’s résumé as a homemaker to Mary’s, the more I started to compare my overall relationship with Kristen to that of Andy and Mary—an exercise that was sure to sow disappointment.

It’s worth mentioning that I sometimes get stuck on strange and unfamiliar words—or rather, strange and unfamiliar words get stuck on me. In passing, I’ll hear someone in my office say the word
fiduciary,
and before I have a chance to look it up in a dictionary, I’ll have heard it six or seven more times throughout the day. In the elevator, on the radio, in line at the deli:
Fiduciary! There it is again!
I’m always left wondering,
Have people been saying this word all along? How have I not noticed this before?
Then, as swiftly as it came into my life, the word will vanish—sometimes for years. When it rains, it pours, I guess. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s raining unfamiliar words or unpleasant reminders of personal circumstances.

The following Saturday, Kristen was trying to get caught up on work. When she told me she had been craving a peanut-butter-cup milk shake all day, I offered to run out and get one for her. She thanked me by setting her files aside and pulling me close for a long, cozy hug. Rubbing my hand in circles across her back, I smiled, thinking this was a small but certain indication that we were back on track.
Look at me fulfilling her needs. Look at us being sweet and romantic together.

But then I made the mistake of calling Andy to see if he wanted to come with me.

“I can’t right now, buddy,” he said cheerfully. “Mary and I are reading the new Harry Potter to each other.”

“Pardon me?”

He clarified that the book wasn’t brand-new, it was just new to them. They hadn’t read that one yet. But that was hardly the point.

“You
read
to each other?”

“Sure. That way, neither of us gets left out when we get a new book. And we just like to do this once in a while.”

Oh, fuck me.

I got off the phone as quickly as possible, and Kristen asked me what was wrong. Apparently, the fact that I had rolled my eyes when I hung up had given me away. At first, I offered Kristen ten million guesses as to what was going on next door, but when she wouldn’t play along, I simply gave her the answer:

“Harry fucking Potter, Kristen. They are sitting on their fucking couch, under a fucking blanket, reading Harry fucking Potter to each other.”

Kristen did her best to stifle a laugh and asked why this posed such a problem for me. The problem, of course, was
who were they to be in such a happy marriage that they would actually sit and read books to each other?

“Yeah, that’s pretty unconscionable,” she said. “How dare they?”

My logic was clearly lost on her, so I resorted to acting even more childishly. “Whatever, Kristen. Hey, tonight let’s turn the clock back to the eighteen hundreds like Andy and Mary do, so we can read books to each other like shithead pioneers. Maybe if we did that then we’d actually look like a couple in love, like they do, and then we could stuff it down everyone’s throats.”

“Dave, knock it off. They’re just doing what works
for them
. They’re not stuffing anything down anyone’s throats. My God, you’re so jealous.” She shook her head.

I didn’t want to admit that Kristen was right. I knew that acknowledging my jealousy would mean acknowledging that I had a number of unfulfilled expectations. I didn’t want to have to deal with more unfulfilled expectations; I just wanted to buy a milk shake. But I was jealous. Insanely jealous. By some fluke, Andy and Mary had been enjoying the marriage I had always wanted and expected. Mary taking care of the household. Andy reading to her under a blanket. The two of them finding time between balancing their checkbooks, maintaining their landscaping, and ironing their curtains to fall more and more in love with each other every day. Their marriage appeared to be blissful, stable, romantic. Not chaotic, not painful or confusing like ours had been, but perfect. To me, theirs was what a successful marriage looked like, and I couldn’t help but notice that it looked a lot like the marriage my parents had.

My mom and dad didn’t argue with each other. They were comfortable in their roles, just as Andy and Mary were. They ate and slept and shopped at regular hours, just like Andy and Mary. And they were constantly showering each other with affection, just like Andy and Mary. Every evening growing up, my brother and I would come downstairs on a homework break or in search of ice cream, and we’d find my parents giggling and hugging and carrying on like honeymooners. We’d observe this, watching their private moment, and then we’d squeeze in between them, absorbing all of their love like little freckled sponges.

My
marriage was supposed to look like that. It wasn’t supposed to involve cereal for lunch and other letdowns. It was supposed to be constant affection, not once-in-a-while, thanks-for-buying-me-a-shake affection. Andy and Mary had no business being so functional. They had no business being so matchy-matchy. They had no business being so happy.

“That’s the problem,” I told Kristen. “We don’t read to each other. We don’t hug or hold hands or swat each other with dish towels. We don’t hang family pictures, because we don’t have any. We spent five years arguing and totally disconnected. Five years! Andy and Mary are living in a perfect marriage, and we aren’t.”

“Dave, our marriage is perfect,” she said. “If you could stop looking at what it was supposed to be and start looking at what it actually is, then you might see that.” She waited a moment for my brain to catch up to her words, and then she smiled the way she smiles when she’s done talking about something and wants to move on. “Now, go get my shake.”

Two weeks later, I was standing on our front porch with a ladder and two boxes of Christmas decorations. The late autumn wind was more or less steady, with some gusts every now and then to remind me that it was below freezing outside. “Can you hurry? How long is this going to take you?” Kristen asked from the warmth of our foyer. I had about ninety minutes until nightfall.

“Not long.”

Rather than opening my eyes to our version of perfect, as Kristen suggested, for the past two weeks I had been trying a different tack: seeking opportunities to lead us directly into what I considered to be a utopian marriage.
We are going to be happy and functional, damn it. I’ll see to that personally.

Something about hanging Christmas decorations had always given me a sense that I was the head of a functional family. I think that’s because a nicely decorated house is no accident. The decorations must be purchased in advance and stored year-round. Ladders are involved, as are special plastic clips and extension cords. All of which denote a certain degree of having one’s shit together. It’s easy to find satisfaction in the job, too. The sun goes down, the lights come on, and suddenly it’s the holidays. Add a quiet snowfall, and you’ve got something resembling a Norman Rockwell portrait.

I schlepped my ladder over behind the bushes in front of our living room window and propped it up against the brick facade of our house. From the boxes on the porch, I removed two long strands of garland and Christmas lights, stretched them out across the yard, and plugged them in to check if the bulbs worked. Which they didn’t.
Oh, for Christ’s sake
. I looked next door. Andy and Mary were standing in their driveway, keeping warm in matching knitted caps, which I assumed Mary had picked out for the two of them. Their porch and garage were lit up with hundreds of tiny lights, and the fat spruce in the corner of their yard had been decorated to look like a Christmas tree. Mary was cheerfully helping Andy put up their decorations and laughing at something he had said.

“Hi, Dave,” she called.

“Hey, buddies. I guess I have to go to the store to get more lights. Do you need anything?”

“You know you’re almost out of daylight, right?” Andy asked, positioning his wooden reindeer between some bushes.

“Yeah, but I can finish this in time.”
Fuckface
. “You know, I think Kristen and I will probably get started on the inside decorations this week.”

“Just think,” Andy said as his reindeer’s nose lit up. “We’ve already put up our Christmas tree, decorated inside, and we’re almost done with all the outside lights! But we’ll let you know if we need anything from the store.”

Mary laughed, hard, the way she might have laughed had I just tripped and fallen face-first into the crotch of their snowman. Then she gave Andy a playful hug, cuing him to back off a little bit. “You’ll be fine, Dave, just ignore him.” It was a nice thing for her to say, and it made me furious.