The Marriage Book (21 page)

Arriving at the shack, I immediately began my preparations. First I sieved the water through the fabric of a flour sack. I kneaded the dough and put it in the oven. I cleaned the mushrooms and steeped them in hot water. I then chopped up the garlic, put butter (we had our cow back) in the pan, and fried everything together. This meal made in large measure with food gathered from the wild prairie was simply delicious.

I should have mentioned that Abe had begun to dig a cellar in the dirt floor of the shack. . . . I was so excited in preparing this special meal that I nearly fell into the pit as I flew about the place, setting the table and making other preparations. We had no tea or coffee, but I ground up some barley, boiled it in water and so had, at least, a substitute coffee.

My husband would soon be coming through the door. I was so happy, truly in seventh heaven, and very proud. I had used my brains and my nerve and as a result my husband would soon sit down to a fine dinner, just the two of us alone.

Soon Abe arrived. It was evident that we liked one another, because when he came inside where I was, it was easy to see that he was glad to see me and we were happy to be together.

Never was there a more delightful dinner than that one. The food was delectable and our shanty was filled with happiness. After we finished our meal, Abe insisted on knowing all the details of my accomplishment. As he listened, his gladness became tinged with a sadness that our
condition was such that I was reduced to searching the prairie for food. But nothing could destroy the magic of that hour. He kissed me and called me his good angel, and my contentment was complete knowing that he appreciated my devotion to him. I served the barley coffee in the cool outdoors and we spent another pleasant hour together before Abe returned to the field. So ended a charming interlude in the harshness of our lives. It was a great moment for us and its memory has been a sustaining treasure to me over the years.

ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

GIFT FROM THE SEA
, 1955

When he made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Charles Lindbergh became one of the most famous men in the world. He married Anne Spencer Morrow two years later, and their marriage survived not only his renown and their many airplane flights but also the kidnapping and murder of their firstborn child. Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) went on to have four more children and to publish several dozen books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Gift from the Sea
was her most famous, staying on the
New York Times
bestseller list for eighty weeks. It remains, more than half a century later, a popular meditation on some of the particular challenges of being a woman.

Husband and wife can and should go off on vacations alone and also on vacations alone
together
. For if it is possible that woman can find herself by having a vacation alone, it is equally possible that the original relationship can sometimes be refound by having a vacation alone
together
. Most married couples have felt the unexpected joy of one of these vacations. How wonderful it was to leave the children, the house, the job, and all the obligations of daily life; to go out together, whether for a month or a weekend or even just a night in an inn by themselves. How surprising it was to find the miracle of the sunrise repeated. There was the sudden pleasure of having breakfast alone with the man one fell in love with. Here at the small table, are only two people facing each other. How the table at home has grown! And how distracting it is, with four or five children, a telephone ringing in the hall, two or three school buses to catch, not to speak of the commuter’s train. How all this separates one from one’s husband and clogs up the pure relationship. But sitting at a table alone opposite each other, what is there to separate one? Nothing but a coffee pot, corn muffins and marmalade. A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

MARY KAY BLAKELY

“HERS,”
THE NEW YORK TIMES
, 1981

Mary Kay Blakely (1948–) was an early contributor to
Ms.
magazine and the
New York Times
’s “Hers” column. The illustration that appeared with the piece below showed a bride walking a tightrope strung over a tub of ice cream. Blakely, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, had two sons, in 1974 and 1975, and divorced in the early eighties, later writing in her book
American Mom
, “divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.”

Brides are so happy they haven’t noticed yet that the institution of marriage is designed to hold only one and a half persons. They don’t immediately comprehend the multiple implications behind Norman Mailer’s suggestion that the whole question of liberation boils down to one: “Who will do the dishes?” The same one who does the dishes also gets to be the half person.

In the case of “nontraditional” marriages, it can take a woman even longer to comprehend that she is the half person. Many intelligent couples like to believe they can balance the equation to an even three-quarters apiece. With a few liberating amendments—she gets to keep her job, maybe even her name, he helps with the dishes—they hope to even things out. So subtle is the shift from “bride” to “wife” that a woman convinced of her independence can miss it altogether.

I would certainly have remained oblivious to the myriad assumptions hidden in the institution of marriage had it not been for a woman named Agnes who rudely interrupted my bliss only six months after I became a bride.

I ran into Agnes at Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, our neighborhood delicatessen in Chicago. We were returning from the bike paths along the lakefront, tennis sweaters draped cavalierly over our shoulders, looking like a couple who had just passed the screen test for an Erich Segal movie. We stopped at Hemingway’s to find a treat to bring home. Newlyweds are fond of treats. After some deliberation, I selected a high-quality brand of butter-pecan ice cream and handed it to the man who was carrying our money in his wallet.

He looked at the price, something that had not occurred to me.

He handed it back, explaining that $1.95 was exorbitant for any ice cream, and besides, he didn’t like butter-pecan. I gave it back to him, because what was $1.95 between friends and besides, he didn’t have to eat any. We stood there for some time, passing the pint back and forth, straining for patience, he refusing to indulge an irresponsible purchase, I insisting it was none
of his business. His patience was melting with the ice cream when he delivered his final opinion: There was no way he was going to pay $1.95 for a pint of ice cream just because it said on the bottom of the carton “Hand packed by Agnes.” He was starting to hate Agnes.

We rode home in stony silence. Only six months before I had been the kind of self-actualized woman who could walk into just about any delicatessen and order whatever I wanted. Dimly, I realized that this sudden loss in opportunity had something to do with the vows I had taken. I didn’t remember
ever
saying, “And I defer all ice cream judgments to you.” That’s when I first became aware that love is not only blind, it is also deaf. A woman in love can’t possibly hear the varied assumptions packed between the promises and the vows. The “I do” that took approximately 10 minutes to pronounce will be followed by 10 incredulous years of asking, “I did?”

But I also knew that to challenge a husband’s ice cream authority was to challenge the vast incomprehensible expectations built into the structure of marriage. To question an ice cream decision would lead irrevocably to questions about vacuuming. And children. And sexuality.

We thought we had a “nontraditional” marriage because we were largely unaware that the roles of “head of household” and “subservient spouse” had a pervasive influence on our own relationship. We didn’t fully understand how much a husband’s sense of entitlement and a wife’s sense of duty affected our own decisions about economics and work and power.

The next day, on the way home from work, I stopped at Hemingway’s and bought six pints of butter-pecan ice cream, all hand packed by Agnes. I had to get rid of the status of half wife, and it was the first step to becoming an unwife. My success as an unwife depended largely on the cooperation of an unhusband, and I knew that undoing our unspoken vows could well result in an unmarriage. For better or worse, I packed our small freezer full of butter-pecan ice cream.

KELLY OXFORD

TWEET, 2011

With more than half a million Twitter followers, Canadian author and humorist Kelly Oxford found fame through social media, and in the process earned a book contract that led to her 2013 bestselling
Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar
.

Marriage is having someone to whisper “can you grab me some cereal?” to at 11 pm.

FREEDOM

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

“ON SOME VERSES OF VIRGIL,” 1588

French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) had no shortage of observations about men and women—or about most subjects. His roughly 25,000-word essay, purporting to be about Virgil’s poetry, was also about youth, age, temptation, sex, and marriage.

The fact that we see so few good marriages is a sign of its price and its value. If you form it well and take it rightly, there is no finer relationship in our society. We cannot do without it, and yet we go about debasing it. The result is what is observed about cages: the birds outside despair of getting in, and those inside are equally anxious to get out.

QUEEN VICTORIA

LETTER TO VICKY, THE PRINCESS ROYAL, 1858

Few women—royal or not—were as famously devastated by widowhood as was Great Britain’s Queen Victoria (1819–1901), who dressed in black from the day of Prince Albert’s death in 1861 until her own. Her devotion was legendary, but that did not stop her from writing to her oldest daughter about the lack of freedom that came with marriage—and particularly with pregnancy.

Queen Victoria had nine children, most of whom married into European royalty. Princess Victoria, known as Vicky, was only seventeen when, at her mother’s insistence, she married the future German emperor Friedrich III.

Now to reply to your observation that you find a married woman has much more liberty than an unmarried one; in one sense of the word she has,—but what I meant was—in a physical point of view—and if you have hereafter (as I had constantly for the first 2 years of my marriage)—aches—and sufferings and miseries and plagues—which you must struggle against—and enjoyments etc. to give up—constant precautions to take, you will feel the yoke of a married woman! Without that—certainly it is unbounded happiness—if one has a husband one worships! It is a foretaste of heaven. And you have a husband who adores you, and is, I perceive, ready to meet every wish and desire of your’s. I had 9 times for 8 months to bear with those above-named enemies and real misery (besides many duties) and I own it tried me sorely; one feels so pinned down—one’s wings clipped—in fact, at the best (and
few were or are better than I was) only half oneself—particularly the first and second time. This I call the “shadow side” as much as being torn away from one’s loved home, parents and brothers and sisters. And therefore—I think our sex a most unenviable one.

HENRIK IBSEN

A DOLL’S HOUSE
, 1879

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) offered a critique of modern morality in
A Doll’s House
that was shocking for its portrait of a disillusioning marriage and particularly for the play’s lack of a happy ending. Torvald Helmer is the satisfied, upright lawyer, and Nora his seemingly frivolous wife. The events of the play reveal to Nora a less ethical side of her husband, even as they lead her to find a stronger self. The title echoes her telling him: “Our home’s been nothing but a playpen. I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child.” The dialogue below is from the last scene in the play. In 1905, the critic James Huneker would write: “that slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world.”