A Cup of Comfort for Couples (7 page)

John has never done anything that even vaguely resembles the philandering behavior of my father. He doesn't flirt; if he winks or whistles at a woman, it's at me. He refers to me as his girl, calls me “my love,” serenades me with Eric Clapton's “Wonderful Tonight.” John has never hung out in bars after work; he comes home to me as fast as he can. The only other girl he's really been with is a girl named Cindy. He went with her in high school, not for long, and
he
broke it off. I pried that out of him. I probably shouldn't have, because even after all these years, I think of her whenever I meet somebody named Cindy.

But Cindy is not the only girl I've been jealous of over the years. Heck, girls; I even became jealous of John's guitar. “You touch that guitar more than me,” I cried early on in our marriage. Then there were the secretaries. I imagined one had kissed him after I'd matched her kamikaze for kamikaze, me a stay-at-home mom and totally out of practice. John and I were attending his going-away party; he'd been transferred to another department at AiResearch. That was 1981; I may finally be convinced it didn't happen. Another, John hired when he started his moving and storage business. I talked to her on the phone for months before I met her. When I finally saw her in person — oh, my gosh! — she was beautiful.

“But, honey,” John explained, “when I hired her she was fat.”

My insecurities continue to haunt us. I continue to question John and to size up the women he works with. I wonder if I would have worried less if John had worked at fewer jobs over the years and met fewer women. I doubt it.

Our family, like many others, has been hit by the recession. John has been out of work for much of the past two years. We recently moved from Portland, Oregon, back to Bend, where we feel at home. But I am working, and John is lonely. His music and his guitar (which I now love almost as much as he does) are not enough to fill the empty spots. I have fiddled a bit on Facebook for a year or so, during which John has shown no interest. Whenever I've tried to coax him to join he's always declined.

“But baby — ”

“No.”

“But your old friends, who you still tell me stories about like it was yesterday — ”

“No!”

“Okay,” I'd finally give up.

One evening I came home from work, and seeing the slump in his step I decided to pop onto my Facebook account. There, I saw the faces of extended family and friends, many of whom are in California, where we lived till we were in our thirties, and of our children, who are three hours away in Portland. I smiled that rascally smile I attribute to my mother.

“Baby!” I called across our little apartment. I was at the computer in our office; he had stepped into our bedroom. “We're signing you up on Facebook.”

“No,” he said, as always, but walked into the room. A few minutes later, he was in the chair, looking up friends, and smiling too.

By the next day, he was back in touch with Harold and Jeff, whom he hadn't talked with in fifteen to twenty years, and he was posting back and forth with our family in California and reaching out to our kids and friends in Portland and even friends here in Bend. From then on, I often came home from work to find him on the computer, sometimes laughing out loud. I felt pleased with myself . . . until one night when I walked into the house and saw John standing in the kitchen with a nervous look on his face.

“Honey, I have to tell you something,” he said. “I went onto Facebook . . .” And my loving husband proceeded to rattle off his story about how he was looking at a friend's “friends” page and came across a girl named Pauline who had been a friend of his in high school. He wrote her a little note saying, “Hi, it's fun to see your face. You don't have to write me back, just wanted to say hello,” something like that; sent it off; decided to look at her “friends” page and saw . . . and here he paused.

“Cindy!” I threw in.

“Yes,” he said. “And I didn't feel like I could ignore her without hurting her feelings. So I wrote her the same sort of note, with the ‘you don't have to friend me back.' And well, Pauline didn't, but Cindy did.”

I kind of laughed, thinking John was pretty cute.

“Let's go look at her!” I said, excited to see what this Cindy looked like.

John and I giggled our way into the office. He pulled up his Facebook account and sat me in the chair. Cindy's picture was off to the left, among John's cluster of friends. I clicked on it and then clicked on it again to make it bigger.

“Shit! She's hot. And skinny,” I said. But I continued to giggle, now because I was a little nervous. “Honey, how fun,” I said, trying to be a big girl.

I am fifty-three. John is fifty-five (which means I only have five years to get over this jealousy thing).

John pulled out a blue sticky-note, wrote his Facebook log-in and password on it, and shoved it at me. “You can go on anytime,” he insisted.

“Oh, honey, I'm not — ” I crushed it in my palm and tossed it into the trashcan without even finishing my sentence.

My cell phone rang. It was our twenty-nine-year-old daughter.

“Hey, go onto Facebook,” I told her. “You can see Daddy's old girlfriend. She's hot. And she's skinny.”

As you've probably figured out, I am not skinny, for sure. I weigh forty pounds more than when John and I got married. But he thinks I'm hot and tells me often.

Over the next few days, I continued to tell close friends and family to take a peek at Cindy on John's Facebook page. And then I let it go, truly . . . until I walked into the apartment after a very rough day at work and John quickly turned off the computer.
Cindy
! is where my mind went. Embarrassed, I kept my mouth shut.

John stood, greeted me with a hug, and then while pouring me a glass of chardonnay said he had chicken and broccoli ready for me. John has been doing most of the cooking since he's been out of work. Sometimes it's breakfast while I'm getting ready for work; sometimes a sack lunch; and often dinner, which he keeps warm if I work late. This was a late night, so he had already eaten. He sat and visited with me while I ate my warmed dinner at the kitchen table, patient with me as I shared my day.

I decided to finish my wine while checking my e-mail. John went into the living room to catch up on what was happening with the NCAA's “March Madness” on TV. E-mail-schmemail; I went straight to Facebook, to John's wall, and stared at Cindy. I turned off the computer, fast. Went in and sat right next to my husband on our big ol' couch.

“We've got a problem,” I said.

John paused his recorded basketball game.

“Honey, I'm jealous of Cindy. It wouldn't be so hard if she wasn't so pretty,” I said . . . okay, whined.

“I'll just block her,” he said.

“No, you can't do that.”

“I knew this could be a problem. I'll close my Facebook account.”

“No. You're having so much fun with it,” I said. “I'm sorry. But you being friends with Cindy feels dangerous to me.”

John stiffened, feeling like I'd questioned his trustworthiness. “I'm going to take her off there,” he repeated.

“Let me sleep on it,” I said. After all, I'd had a really tiring day. And I'd just talked to a married girlfriend who has been looking at an old (also married) boyfriend's Facebook wall wondering if he is intending to send her secret messages through his posts, a conversation I'd neglected to share with John.

He reluctantly agreed to wait.

In the morning, after waking to several bad dreams during the night, I got up and walked straight into the office. I turned on the computer, then picked through the trashcan, unfolding every little blue note I could find without making too much noise. With no password found and horrified that John would hear me if I dumped the entire contents onto the floor, I went back to the bedroom. The sun was coming up, and John was stirring.

“Honey.”

“Uh-huh,” he answered.

“I'm still having a hard time with this Cindy thing.”

“I will get her off there today.”

“Thanks, baby,” I said, climbing into bed with him. “I'm really sorry.”

John held me, hugged me, and kissed me on the forehead.

That day while I was at work, John wrote to Cindy and explained to her, honestly, like I encouraged him to do, that his wife is a jealous lunatic (in so many words). When I got home, he relayed to me that she understood, that her husband works with a lot of “hot, young babes” and it bothers her, but she's never told him.

“Give your wife a hug for me,” she'd said.

“Damn,” I said, “she's even nice.”

So is my husband, especially to me. And he loves me, only me, for eternity. I have five more years to
get
that . . . and to get over this jealousy thing. He may have to extend that deadline.

—
Ande Cardwell

Three Little Words

I
n the beginning, three little words followed us everywhere we went. To the movies. Restaurants. That silly beach bar where the guitar player strummed Jimmy Buffett songs. Even down by the river, where we walked each night, jeans rolled up to our knees, hands lightly touching. Three little words.

I love you.

They were there on our wedding day with fifty people drinking mimosas at 11:00 a.m. as the river-boat sauntered down the coast. Paddlewheel churning. Wedding guests laughing. A singer crooning “Unforgettable.” We danced so close I could feel your warm breath like fingers on the back of my neck.

I love you.

They were even there when you carried me over the threshold into our new cookie-cutter house. Magnolia trees dotted the lawns, and everyone had matching black mailboxes with little red flags. Perfect, we thought.

I love you.

The children came soon after that. A boy first, quiet and cuddly. Then a girl, colicky, screaming even as you swaddled her. The words still came back then. But they didn't show up as often anymore. When they did, they sounded weary and spent and muttered into a pillow case.

I . . . love . . . you.

I don't know when it happened really. There wasn't a particular moment in time. But one day I noticed the words were gone. Not completely. But gone like old friends who'd moved away, promising to come back and visit. Just as soon as soccer season ended. Or a work deadline passed. Or someone got over the flu. It's amazing how life can hum along even without old friends. Without those three little words.

We moved into a bigger house, a two-story with ivy that scaled the red brick. You liked the game room upstairs and talked about adding a pool table and shooting eight-ball on Friday nights. But that was before the kids filled the room with their roller blades and bicycle helmets and video play stations. Soon the pool table became just another one of those things that parents dream about, like uninterrupted sleep or car seats without Cheerios stuffed in the cracks.

You started to spend a lot of time working outside, baking in the Florida heat, edging the corners of our lawn into perfect 90-degree angles. That's when the new words started to come around. Curious, at first. A little too friendly. Like uninvited neighbors. They'd watch while you power-washed the driveway and sheared the ivy from the brick. Three new words.

He's
a keeper.

I'd nod in agreement. They were right, after all. I'd let those new words sit for a while, sipping lemonade, talking about the weather. I'd try to get comfortable with them, to make them feel at home. Then something would interrupt the lazy afternoon. A child's splinter. A phone ringing. Our dog busting out the front door. I'd have to excuse myself and bolt down the block, because Mrs. Reilly had taken out her broom already and was getting dangerously close to the terrier squatting on her front lawn. I'd run in circles trying to catch that crazy dog. Just when I was almost ready to let Mrs. Reilly take a whack at him, you'd come running up behind me. Leash in hand. Pieces of ivy still stuck to your arms.

He's
a keeper.

So I let the new words in. I got comfortable with them. Over time, I came to appreciate their steadiness. Their predictability. The way they never let me down. Even though they didn't sparkle or take my breath away.

Years passed. Jobs came and went. We dished out money for prepaid college plans and two sets of braces, for horseback riding lessons and broken arms, and for 2,041 teenage text messages. And long after we'd accepted that these comfortable words were enough, that it was okay that the “I love yous” only wanted to come around for birthdays and anniversaries . . . we got the call.

Nobody is prepared for that call. Nobody can imagine what it's like to lay on that cold, metal table day after day. To wait for the buzzer to sound and for beams of radiation to pass through tight red skin. Nobody is prepared for the surgery, either. To lose a piece of herself. To feel that sharp twinge in those last fleeting moments just before unconsciousness, when every fiber pulses with the same three words.