The Suburban You (20 page)

The other mom puts her fifth quarter in the meter, avoids further eye contact with your wife, and walks with her twenty-five-year-old diabetic “child” into the gym. Your wife gets back in the Land Rover and slams the door. She continues driving and secures the first available spot she sees, three blocks away, which no one would describe as rock-star parking. On the long, cold walk to the gym, she tries to come up with an answer to your daughter's two questions: “What happened to our rock-star parking, Mommy?” and “Why did you get so mad at that lady?” Your wife has ten minutes to answer these questions before your daughter gets dropped off at Fun Club.

Try to Make a Phone Call

You come home from work and you are at the front door struggling to find the key, which you have probably misplaced, and you see your wife through the window. She is talking on the phone. You try to get her attention by waving, but she is engrossed in her conversation. You ring the bell and you can tell by her expression that she is distracted and annoyed by the doorbell ringing. She opens the door without interrupting her phone conversation. She does not have the time to acknowledge you, except for the fact that she is annoyed because you disturbed her train of thought during her important phone conversation.

You put your briefcase down and hug your kids. You head upstairs to change your clothes and you tell them that you will be right down. You want to change out of your tailor-reinforced wholesale suit. This is the first thing you like to do each and every night when you get home, after greeting everyone, because it somehow transitions you from being a corporate executive to being a dad and husband and regular guy, a guy who is ready to hang out with his family.

You come downstairs and your wife whispers to you, while still on the phone, “I am just wrapping up, honey.” You notice the pasta in the large pot of boiling water and it is all floating on the top. A bad sign. A sign of overcooked, limp noodles. You race to the rescue, because your wife is too busy with her important conversation to be bothered with matters as small as the pasta noodles that you are about to eat for supper. Your son and daughter both see you take control of the cooking pasta and ask if they can test the noodles, a skill that you have trained them well at, a skill that they can rely on for their entire lives because they, unlike your wife, can discern a perfectly cooked noodle. The only downside is that, when a noodle is not boiled to perfection, they know and it bothers them.

You lift a limp noodle out of the pot of water, and at that moment you know what each of their reactions will be. As you move the noodle away from the pot of water, you mentally craft the strategy that you will use this evening to try to deceive your children into believing that the noodles will taste good once they are smothered in red sauce. You have a difficult time convincing them of this because you cannot convince yourself of it, and, like you, they know a perfectly cooked noodle. The only person in your family these overcooked noodles will not matter to is your wife. She has prepared some low-carb dish for herself.

You empty the pasta pot into the colander, drain the water, and empty the pasta into a bowl that your wife placed on the counter before you arrived home. You smother it with red sauce.

You serve the pasta on the plates on the table and have the kids sit down. You look at your wife with an annoyed expression and she looks at you with an expression that says, “I am on an important call, one that cannot be disturbed for something as trivial as sitting down together to eat dinner.” Sometime you would like your wife to pay attention to you like she does to whoever is on the other end of this call. You and the kids start eating and your wife hangs up. She joins you.

“Who was that?” you ask. “Oh, it was Jessica. We are arranging swim class for the girls.” You are amazed by this call and others like it for two reasons. First of all, in the fifteen minutes or so of your wife's phone conversation that you partially overheard you did not hear any discussion whatsoever about swimming. Second, you know that if it were you arranging swim lessons for your daughter and her friend the call would go something like this: “Hey, Bill, what's up? Hey, I was thinking we should get the kids in swim class. What do you think?” “I know a really good swim teacher. Her name is Annika. I'll set it up for Saturday.” “See ya.”

In that hypothetical conversation, you have arrived at a conclusion every bit as good as your wife's, only she has taken twenty-two minutes to do it and you took twenty-one seconds.

You are just finishing dinner and it is time to begin clearing the table and washing the dishes. The phone rings. You look at caller ID, knowing that there is no chance that this call is for you. You are right. It is Findley, Susan. Perfect timing. You hand your wife the phone, and while you, your son, and daughter clear the table, rinse the dishes, stack the dishwasher, clean the countertops and kitchen table, and sweep the floor, your wife is working through the details of having Max over tomorrow after school for a playdate, details that must be discussed immediately after dinner during cleanup rather than, say, during the day, when both your wife and Susan are home without kids.

Your wife has another two calls to make about the school benefit, which she is organizing. These are not brief calls, because there is no such thing as a brief call with your wife. There are many, many very important details to discuss. Everything must be perfect.

You hang out with the kids and play with them. You try not to make too much noise with them, because this will get your wife upset while she is on the phone. Rather than her moving to another room to continue her conversation, she will point her finger at a forty-five-degree angle upward, indicating that she wants you to take the kids upstairs so that you don't distract her while she's on her call.

The phone rings again and the caller ID says Jaynor, Richard, a name that you do not recognize. While the phone is ringing, you hand it to your wife and she says that it is Sue from book club. Another twenty-five-minute discussion. “Sue needed to know what book we were reading this month,” your wife says after hanging up.

Again, the phone rings and you try something that you rarely attempt. You answer the phone without looking at the caller ID. It is Beth. “Hang on a minute, Beth,” you say politely. “Let me get Diane for you.” After climbing two flights of stairs to find your wife, you indicate to her that Beth is on the phone, and she looks at you with an annoyed expression. She does not feel like talking on the phone and implies, with her annoyed facial expression, that you were somehow supposed to know that. You can tell by your wife's expression that you must tell Beth that your wife is busy putting your daughter to bed and that she will give her a call back. How can you be so stupid as to assume that your wife wanted to talk on the phone with Beth?

Later that night, you listen to the message machine to hear that your father left a message for you earlier that day. You have one call to return, an important one. Your father wants to check up on his stock portfolio, which you manage for him. You reach for your Blackberry, where you have his phone number, and then reach for the phone.

“What are you doing?” your wife asks. “I am calling my father back.” “Now?” she says. “Yes, I need to talk with him for one minute”—the average length of the few calls a week you make from home. “He wants to know if I purchased General Dynamics for him today.” “What about the kids? Are you going to ignore the kids? They haven't seen you all day long,” she says.

You sheepishly put the phone down and know that you will have to make this thirty-second call after the kids are asleep. You hang out with the kids and put your son to bed. Your wife puts your daughter to bed. You emerge from your son's room and reach for the phone. You pick it up to hear your wife on the phone downstairs. You put the phone back in the cradle and accept that you will return your father's call tomorrow from work.

So Tell Me All About Your Thong Underwear

You and your wife attend an evening fund-raiser for an organization that you will call Kids First. Of the many fund-raisers that you attend annually, this one is the most fun because almost everyone who lives in your suburb comes out to support the event. It is a big neighborhood party at the local club.

You show up at the event, and every which way you turn there are ways to spend money. You already dropped a few hundred dollars on the admission tickets. There are raffle tickets for bicycles, opportunities for kids to be Chicago Cubs bat boys for a day, shopping sprees at Nike Town, and hundreds of other items, which for the most part you do not pay attention to because you have been drinking beer and wine and hanging out with all of your friends. Besides, you have “won” enough items at prior fund-raisers to know that tomorrow the items you fight hard to pay outrageously for tonight will seem ridiculous to you, largely due to the two beers and two glasses of red wine that will impair your buying judgment.

Tonight, most of the people whom you hang out with are guys, because tonight they, like you, are trying to avoid any additional cash outlay during this economically challenging time. You all know, however, that your wives are spending their time determining the best items for you to “win” that evening. You will better understand how your wife spent her evening when you stop by the checkout table on your way out.

Every two years, Kids First elects a president, an upstanding volunteer from the community, to do, well, you are not sure exactly what. During the current term, the president is a woman whom you know and enjoy joking around with named Lynne O'Donnell. That evening, Lynne told you that the Kids First presidency was not all that it was cracked up to be and that, going in, she thought that she could have more impact on the organization than she was actually able to. “Kids First does not like change,” she tells you. “They only want to maintain the status quo.”

It is interesting, you think, that Lynne has revealed herself to you in that way, because you know Lynne to be a person who does not like to say negative things, even when she has negative thoughts. You think that Lynne has revealed herself to you in this manner because, like you, she may have had two beers and two glasses of wine.

You break away from your conversation with Lynne and find yourself standing alone in a corridor outside the bidding room, waiting for your wife to place her final “winning” bid on two Cubs baseball game tickets. “Can you believe that I got the tickets for only $410?” she says excitedly, as though she has just won something.

Lynne approaches you while you are standing in the corridor outside the bidding room. She is feeling guilty for expressing a negative thought to you three minutes earlier and apologizes for being a negative person. You think she tells you this because she feels guilty. You did not really take notice of, nor would you probably remember, the conversation tomorrow, but now that you suspect that Lynne feels guilty about revealing a negative thought to you, you can joke with her about this so that she will never forget. She makes you swear that you will not tell anyone.

Lynne, looking for something to do with her nervous energy while feeling overwhelmed with guilt, slips her right hand, so that it almost fully disappears, inside the front of her pants and pulls out a business card–size piece of card stock, which was sandwiched between her skin and her skin-hugging pants, with the number 37 written on it. Your eyes involuntarily follow the movements of her right hand as she does this.

With that, you ask Lynne—the thin, in-shape, skin-tight short shirt and skin-tight pant wearing, flat-and-exposed tummy Kids First president—“What exactly was securing that card with the number 37 written on it between you and your pants?” because you didn't really notice any visible means of support for the card. You then realize that you did notice a thin strap of white fabric, so you continue your inquiry, asking the president of Kids First a question that you know would embarrass her had she not consumed the beer and wine that you suspect she has. “Is that a thong you are wearing?” you ask, expecting her to ignore you. “Yes, it is,” she says with pride, smiling a thong-wearing smile because you have discovered something about her that she tells you not even her husband is aware of.

Well, all of a sudden this fund-raiser has gotten a hell of a lot more interesting for you. “Why bother?” you ask. “Isn't it uncomfortable?”—equating it to a wedgie, something to which you can relate. While wondering who else among you is wearing a thong tonight, you ask, “Doesn't it feel like you are being crept up upon?” trying desperately to think of anything to say to keep this conversation from dying.

As your blond, long-haired, in-shape, skin-tight-outfit-wearing, quick-witted wife walks over to ask you for your credit card, she realizes immediately that you and the Kids First president are discussing the features and benefits of thong underwear, and when she does she reveals to you and the Kids First president that she too is wearing a thong, a fact that you wish you had been previously aware of. This fund-raiser has now just gotten twice as good as it was ten minutes earlier, and ten minutes earlier it was pretty damn good. To you and your wife, Lynne offers that the main benefit of the thong is that there is no VPL, a fact with which your wife concurs. Then, to you, they both demonstrate what they are talking about. It is a demonstration that you enjoy, and one that will make the $410 baseball tickets and whatever else you have “won” that night seem like a good value, even tomorrow. Not taking this conversation quite as far as you would have liked to, you reluctantly break away and head over to the checkout table. “Let's go,” your wife says.

From this evening forward, you have a newfound appreciation for all the responsibility that comes with the position of the Kids First presidency. This school fund-raiser, with this Kids First president, you come to realize, is one that you will never, ever forget for as long as you live.