Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married (16 page)

“It's out of my hands,” Greta says snippily. “It's none of your business anyway.”

Anger boils up inside me and I reach for my wallet. “It's my business now,” I tell her, and I slap down Brad's gold card and pay for Scout's entire surgery, thinking that'll wipe the smug look off her big face. The couple is so shocked they don't know what to say. A week later I get a handmade card in the mail from their six-year-old son.

 

 

Dear Nice Lady,

Thank you for saving Scout. He is our dog.

You saved his life. He is my friend.

 

I Love you,

Daniel (age 6)

 

That's when I decide to help as many animals as I can. Imagine bringing in your dog and not being able to save it because you don't have enough cash or room on a credit card. It's inhumane. People love their pets as much as they love their human children, sometimes more. Imagine bringing your child to the emergency room and the nurse telling you they can't sew his arm back on until the bill is paid. Disgusting.

I call Greta and set up the Ace Award, a fund for pet owners who can't afford emergency treatment for their animals. In the very first month the fund saves six dogs, fourteen cats, and a mallard, which was attacked by one of the fourteen cats. Believe it or not, the mallard was clearly the winner. The animal hospital texts me whenever there's a need, and I okay it. I've said yes to every request so far except the snake, because people who own snakes are weird, and the hamster with internal bleeding, because I suspected it was being used for nefarious purposes.

I throw my first fund-raiser at the country club and Greta gives a PowerPoint presentation featuring some of the wounded animals they've saved at the hospital. She's a superstar, choosing to show my genteel audience only cutely wounded animals: kittens with bandaged paws, bunnies with bandaged ears, a puppy with a cast on one leg, and a turtle with one tiny eye sewn shut and a small bandage on his head—he looks like a little pirate turtle saying, “Arrrrghhh!” I even got Scout, the bulldog who inspired the Ace Award in the first place, to make an appearance. The couple who owned him agreed to bring him, along with six-year-old Daniel, who slayed every heart in the audience when he climbed up on a chair in order to reach the microphone and then said, “Pweeze, everybody, pweeze help dee animals. Dey need you!”

Not a dry eye in the house.

We raise sixteen thousand dollars that night, which Addi says is the best haul for a new charity that she's ever heard of. Soon I've raised so much money I have to hire a tax accountant and Brad complains about the cost. He complains about money all the time now; I have no idea why. He's the front-runner to become the president, but he says that doesn't put any money in the bank right now.

I ask the Kellers if they'd like to help and Ed's all for it but then he says, “My cousin Ada used to work at the animal shelter. She's one special person, that Ada!” and Mother Keller looks furious. She glances over at me sternly, twisting her ornate diamond rings around her fingers, and says if I'm so interested in volunteering, why don't I start showing up at the church youth group subcommittee meetings? “You're a committee head,” she says, “but I've never seen you at a meeting once.”

 

The girls and I attend a charity event at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, a fund-raiser for their permanent collection, which mostly features dead artists from other centuries. The theme of the event is a funeral wake, a festive dirge; patrons wear black veils and sip evergreen absinthe as sad cellos play throughout the galleries. Everyone who pledges a thousand dollars or more gets a small headstone carved right there for them, in their honor. The girls think it's a hoot. Addi buys us all headstones and tells us to pick our epitaphs.

 

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

ADDI RATHBONE

Left everything in a children's trust.

 

Here lie the remains of

ELLIE RATHBONE

I might be GONE—but I'll be watching!

 

R.I.P.

JENNIFER KELLER

She thought life would be more . . .

something.

 

I can't finish.

Something makes me too sad. The cello music presses uncomfortably in my head, reminding me of the calypso music from my honeymoon, and suddenly everything seems doomed, decaying, made of dirty water and bitterness and blue ruin. I feel like I'm a bumblebee trapped inside a cello. Maybe it's the absinthe. Maybe it's the diet pills or the prescription painkillers I always seem to be popping. I don't know. I don't care anymore.

I leave early and go home, only to discover I'm brutally, inexplicably, unforgivably
out
of any pills that could aid or assist me here in my time of melancholy need. No Vicodin, no Ativan, no freaking aspirin?
How can this be?
Even Bi'ch and company are sound asleep. There's no begging for exotic cures or medicinal herbs. I settle for unhappily soaking in a hot tub. Unhappy, I am. It's true, but I love my porcelain sanctuary, and there amidst the fragrant splendor of blooming gardenia oil and pink rose petals I sink my brittle frame into the warm eggshell-shaped embrace of my astronomically expensive bathtub, steeping myself in warm pearly-white water. Drawing a thick cowl of bubbles up around my collarbone, I think they seem so happy. Shiny green, oystery blue, pearly pink little bubbles, and so social, as though they've come from great distances to be together there at that moment.

I close my eyes.

Perhaps this bath, a mere moment in time for me, is also a grand event. An opulent, effervescent All-Bubble Ball, a magnificent occasion, demanding that each small transparent guest wear their finest, most glimmering-shimmering frippery. I sit up and study them. The bubbles dance together. I get lost watching them crowd each other in graceful interconnected and randomly clumping orbits, merrily joining one another in jolly groups or pairing off in romantic seclusion. My favorites are the wee singles, the lone bubbles that drift off on their own and seem even happier once away, as if escape allowed them to look back and see the mesmerizing beauty floating serenely behind them in peaked clouds on a silky white sea.

It must be the absinthe. I must remember to get some absinthe.

I study the lone singles, and they seem to become intoxicated by some invisible, vibrating, percolating velocity as they go along their travels, most usually near their death. They seem to know the dance is almost over. Sailing about, they become bigger and brighter every moment with a sharp iridescent green; they hurry, tacking hard across the harbor, gathering up all the most beautiful sights. Then, as though they cannot withstand their own sheer happiness, or perhaps the orchestral frequency of their brothers, they pause, quivering with incandescence and washed with pearly faces, all luminous, shiny, and bright. Then they . . .

Pop!

A tiny shout. A cry of joy and the bubbles burst apart at their iridescent seams. Not a shout of warning or weakness or worry . . . not that. They give a shout of unstoppable, incandescent glee. Then they're gone. This is the way bubbles die. I watch legion after legion of them die, until the milky bathwater is all but spent. No bubbles remain.

When the water becomes less warm, I draw myself up and wrap a large terry-cloth towel around my pale body. I step out of the tub gingerly, onto the cool porcelain floor, and climb into bed. There I write deep thoughts in my journal, using neat handwriting, until I fall asleep with all the lights on. My journal is still open, the pen rolling off the page, staining the white sheet a darkly blooming permanent blue, as my last thought hovers, abandoned on the page. It's this. There can be nothing happier or better on earth than to be a little bubble, a bubble that lives an entire life in just one day. Especially if that very short day is actually a long, magnificent dance.

Brad comes home with an apple-green Lamborghini, to celebrate his rising star at Keller's, a Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera, to be exact. I shake my head. “How much did that thing cost?” I ask him.

“Isn't it insane!” he shouts at me over the roaring engine.

“Yes, Brad, it is. Especially since it's winter . . . in Minnesota.”

“It's sick! She goes two hundred and sixty miles an hour!”

I cross my arms. “I see. And is there an autobahn somewhere nearby that I'm not aware of? Indoors, perhaps? Or with heated roads?”

At Brad's insistence I climb into the ridiculous green car, my head bumping the ceiling. You could slide this car under a school bus if you weren't careful. Brad puts the beast in gear and guns the engine, which roars so loudly I cover my ears. We take off, my stomach lurching, and with each turn I think I might vomit inside his new car. The whole ten-minute drive he's laughing like a maniac while I scream, “
Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!
” We veer around the lake so fast, we actually hit a bird
in flight.
Not one on the road, one that's actually flying through the air. A crow smacks right off the windshield and Brad curses it, the vehicle screeching to a halt. “My God!” he says. “Did it crack the windshield?”

Soon after we get back home, a car honks outside. “That's the Brock!” Brad shouts. “He's gonna shit his pants when he sees the new Lambo! Wanna go for another test ride with us?”

“No, thanks. I think I've killed enough birds in flight for one day.”

For New Year's Eve Brad flies to Tokyo and Addi takes me and Ellie to some artist's party in the warehouse district, where guests pour back champagne and gnaw on lobster claws. The semifamous artist throwing the event takes plaster casts of willing participants' genitalia behind a tasteful Japanese silk screen. Addi is first in line to sit on a bucket and have her hoo-hah planted in a tub of cold wet plaster. Then we all line up, drunk on the extraordinarily strong mojitos. After he's done, the artist's assistants set out plaster pussies and penises on a long table under flickering candles and guests guess which organ belongs to whom. One thing is certain: There are some really weird-looking vaginas walking around in the world, with orchid-like stamens and ham-steak-size labia.

“Wow, Jen,” Addi says. “You have the cutest one of all.” She's joking. My vagina looks like a smashed bat stuck on the grille of a car. Of course, Ellie's isn't pretty either. Her vulva looks like a meat-eating orchid. Addi's looks like Edvard Munch's
The Scream
.

13

Yokemate

I
n January the weather gets weird-ugly. It warms up and thaws, warms up and thaws, creating a week of weird warm sloshy slush, followed by a frigid week of brutal black ice.

Everyone on earth has the flu, including me. Two weeks of fever, headaches, body aches, and painfully coughing up butter weasels. By the tenth day I hold my arms aloft and say out loud, “Death, I welcome thee.”

Even when I get better, something is off. The world around me looks the same but feels different. Like the wrong music is playing. The club feels stuffy, the cocktail parties get boring. I've heard every conversation before, eaten every appetizer already. Brad is always away on business trips these days. I go to almost every social event without him, and I notice lots of wives of wealthy men do. I spend more and more time with the girls at the club lunching and talking. Addi regales us with horror stories from the unhappy housewives field. Souring marriages, acrimonious separations, and sticky divorces fester in every corner of the club. We talk about the trouble with marriage, everyone gladly joining in.

Does your husband do that? My husband does too! Drives me crazy.
We ask each other constantly,
What's wrong with men? Why can't they clean up after themselves? Why do they leave dirty socks on the floor and damp towels on the bed? What's the deal with their thermostat control issues and remote control fetishes? Why do they forget our anniversaries but remember to turn on the game when we're trying to have sex in bed?
The rhythm and predictability of these conversations is comforting in a discomforting way. You feel better while you're doing it but worse afterward. Hollow, like a tunnel.

All this complaining inspires another list for Emily.

Top Ten Mistakes New Brides Make

  1. 
Cooking too often.
If you cook seven fabulous dinners the first week of marriage . . . you have now set the tone. Anything less than cooking a fabulous meal every night will be regarded as your “slipping.” Do everyone a favor and cook nothing until about three months in. Then make it something simple and burn it.

  2. 
Cleaning too much.
See above. Picking up socks on day 1 leads to picking them up on day 1,001. Set the standard early and buy four shop vacs with wide-mouth hoses, one each for the bedroom, bathroom, den, living room, etc. When you see a pair of socks on the floor, vacuum them up. Your husband will think elves took them. The vacuum is an excellent hiding space for almost anything. Your hubs will never look in the vacuum. He will not think to change a filter, no matter how many years you own it.

  3. 
Enjoying sex like a man.
Just like cooking, the more often you slap it down on the table, the more often your man will expect to see it slapped there. While everyone feels romantic in the beginning, it's better to pace yourself. Keep the shenanigans down to once a week at most. Less is more. There's nowhere to go but up!

  4. 
Encouraging his “friendships.”
Your husband's friends are now officially your foes. Even if you liked them before, they are now your adversaries. They will work actively to lead your husband astray. They will be there for every dumb idea and weak moment he has, egging him on. Don't make more work for yourself later by initially encouraging these wolves in pleated khakis. Best bet is to get them all married off. Fast.

  5. 
Encouraging hobbies
. Hobbies cost money and take time. The last thing you need is your husband spending all his hard-earned income on some dinky little trains or shiny golf clubs. God forbid he starts a band. Should one of these nasty hobbies take hold, consider breaking his habit for him by staging a robbery. Should he replace the items lost, stick to your guns and steal it all again. Eventually his willful spirit will become too exhausted to fill out another insurance claim.

  6. 
Allowing him to spend too much time alone
. Don't let that little squirrel of yours go storing up his nuts without you! Lord knows what they get into when nobody is watching. You'll never have to find out if you always know what he does. Pay off secretaries and gym valets for intel. It's worth it.

  7. 
Letting up on him
. Not insisting the hubster do his chores is tantamount to electing for a divorce. Consider the Stanford Prison Experiment, which proved prisoners will act exactly like you expect them to. If you expect hubs to be lazy from time to time, he will be. And more so and more so until it's you living with a chimp who complains bitterly, does nothing, and has his own car keys.

  8. 
Not severely punishing him
. You must punish your husband for any infraction, no matter how small. Sled dogs are trained when they're puppies. At their first mistake, their owner violently shakes them . . . and they never make that mistake again in their noble lives. Now, your hubby's no puppy. Imagine how hard you're going to have to shake him.

  9. 
Conceding defeat
. Never give up. Never surrender. This will take time and no path is easy. Consider your husband the biggest and most unending renovation project of your life. It will take time and resources, and lives may be lost.

10. 
Fighting over every little thing
. Everyone argues, but bickering left unchecked becomes a way of life, a native tongue you must speak when you enter the door. Put aside these childish ways and settle your differences the way tycoons do: trade them away. Offer to give up clipping your toenails in bed if he'll start taking the trash out when he's supposed to. Get everything in writing, just like lawyers. If marriage is an institution, then you're cochairs of the organization and you should communicate properly, through certified letters and not goofy little Post-it notes with hearts on them.

 

The main complaint we yokemates have, ironically, is absenteeism. Ellie says she sees her husband, Rick, for about a half hour a day, and that's hardly enough time to tell him everything he's screwed up and has to fix and/or needs to leave alone. I feel sorry for Ellie. Everyone thinks her life's so perfect, but I wouldn't want to live even one day of it. She and Rick never touch each other. Ever. They never kiss, never hold hands, never have sex. They apparently don't talk much outside the most necessary exchanges; intimacy on any level is nonexistent. Ellie says back when they were dating, they had a passionate sex life, but as Rick's hedge fund began to take off, he worked longer and longer hours, often coming home too tired to take off his shoes, let alone to make love to his wife. Ellie felt rejected and angry.

Whenever Rick did have time for her, she enjoyed turning the tables on him and rejecting his advances. Ellie says she learned to use sex as a weapon, withheld it whenever she was angry or upset or even mildly irked. By the time she finally cooled off, it was then Rick's turn to give her the cold shoulder. So the game went on until they both just shut down. Rick started to pull even longer hours at work. Ellie's convinced he's cheating on her. Now they live together as hostile roommates who never speak to each other. They only communicate through their precocious, robust, and ruthlessly intelligent eight-year-old son, Cody. So there they are, like silent planets of stone, orbiting each other, each unable to get closer to the other or break away.

I guess I shouldn't be so judgmental. It's not like my marriage is going to win any awards. Addi says she'll never get married again. She says any woman who decides to get married is crazy. Right now, I'd have to agree. Brad's never home anymore and when he is, we fight like crazy. Over dumb things. Stupid things. Like the toothpaste war. It started with my “inability” to replace the cap after using our toothpaste. I researched it online, and toothpaste caps are one of the top ten reasons couples fight.

Top Ten Reasons Couples Fight

  1. Money. Spending it, saving it, who has it, who doesn't, and why your credit card bill is now larger than the national debt.

  2. Assuming a fleet of maids will clean up all the toothpaste/beard stubble/soap gunk left on the sink.

  3. Assuming a jaunty elf named T.P. replaces the toilet paper when it's empty.

  4. Using an excessive amount of glassware/dishware and leaving it strewn about so the house continually looks like a party just ended.

  5. Depositing damp towels on the bed and making the comforter damp, so sleeping becomes like a survival story in the rain forest.

  6. Leaving the dishwasher door open and nearly killing people.

  7. Leaving dirty socks and skid-marked underwear on the closet floor for your spouse to see, like a special art exhibition.

  8. Leaving the toilet seat up and causing your spouse to have Startling Drop and Shockingly Cold Ass syndrome.

  9. Leaving the lights on or leaving the lights off. Flicking the remote control. Opening the garage door or not opening the garage door. Basically any switch or device that can be toggled causes marital woe.

10. Heat. To turn up or not to turn up? That is the eternal question. Someone is constantly trying to freeze or bake the other one to death. That much we know.

 

Any of these complaints and many, many, many others are sanctioned reasons to seek out marriage counseling and/or start a blog called Things He/She Does to Make Me
Crazy
!!! Statistically it's husbands who more often commit these offenses, but in our house I am the main perpetrator. I'm always losing the toothpaste cap and it drives Brad nuts. Naturally I switched to toothpaste with an attached flip top, but that did little good. I just wrench the damn thing off, usually in the morning after a night of drinking too much wine. I can't help it. I have superhuman strength sometimes. Usually when I'm holding the toothpaste. The fact is, everybody on earth falls into one of two camps.

Those who cap the bitch . . . and those who don't.

Personally, I'm not sure why toothpaste caps are so important. Probably because I'm a non-capper, and non-cappers don't understand why anybody worries about a missing toothpaste cap. More important, we fundamentally
don't care
. Why get so bent out of shape about a dinky bit of plastic? When Brad asks, “Where's the toothpaste cap?” I usually shrug and say something like, “I have no idea, maybe it rolled away. Maybe it fell down the drain. Maybe a ladybug wanted a hat.
How should I know?
Get over it already. Move on. You can worry about dinky bits of plastic after cancer is cured and they figure out where the Mayans went, okay? Solve those mysteries first.”

Brad is rarely amused by this. This is not the way cappers view the world. They see a missing toothpaste cap as a rift in the universe. Nothing can move forward until (1) the toothpaste cap is located, (2) it's screwed back onto the tube, and (3) an adequate explanation for the cap's disappearance is provided. The problem with this last requirement is that no acceptable explanation exists on earth. No matter
what
happened, no matter
how
compelling the story (e.g., a vicious crow flew through the open window and attacked you, flying off with the toothpaste cap and leaving you with bloody stumps for fingers), it doesn't matter. It's inadequate.
Why?
Because replacing a toothpaste cap takes “all of three seconds.” Even in the event of an emergency, like vicious crow behavior, it would be simple to do.

At least this is what Brad tells me.

So fine. No big deal, but even the tiniest smear of toothpaste on the sink sends him into paroxysms of rage. He says my careless toothpaste droppings are ruining all his suits. He hunts for toothpaste infractions like a toothpaste forensics specialist. No matter how angry he gets, I can't take it seriously.
It's toothpaste.
Judging by Brad's complete disgust for the tingly paste, however, you'd think it wasn't toothpaste smeared around the sink but the fecal remnants of some wintergreen elves living in the medicine cabinet. So that's who I start blaming. The naughty little elves that live in the medicine cabinet and poop minty-white diarrhea paste. I even made a Christmas centerpiece based on them. A large potted poinsettia encircled at the base by pinecone candle holders set the stage for my merry little wintergreen elves, who were carefully posed in miniature scenes among the leaves enjoying various wintergreen-elf activities, like boinking.

Brad remained unamused.

Eventually I flee downstairs, defecting to the guest bathroom, and I brush my teeth there. In all honesty, I'd gladly keep the ball-sack cap on the cumwad toothpaste tube, and I'd do so religiously, if only the praise I received for capping the toothpaste was even remotely close to the punishment I received for
not
capping it. Uncapped toothpaste = utter disgust/ensuing insults/probable fight. Capped toothpaste
=
no reward or reaction whatsoever.

Ellie and Addi tell me to ignore Brad and his constant complaining. Ellie says her husband goes ballistic if she leaves shopping bags in the front hall. He hates anything not put away and snaps at her about clothing on the floor, newspapers on the table, and coffee cups on the counter. I tell her he sounds a little irrational and she says that's nothing. Her pet peeves include forks loaded into the dishwasher with their prongs down, food in the refrigerator that's facing “backward,” and when the toilet paper is on the roll the wrong way. “Yikes,” I say. “Remind me not to marry either of you guys.”

“It's just that couples who live together for a long time slowly become unhinged by even the smallest things,” Ellie says. “I never used to care which way the toilet paper roll was, but over the years I started to notice he put it on a different way, and I took it as a sign of disrespect.”

“Does he still put it on the wrong way?”

“The maid puts all the toilet paper on the rolls these days,” she says. “I just pay her extra to put it on the right way.”