Couplehood (2 page)

“I snore.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, but I snore in odd, little rhythms.”

“Doesn’t bother me.”

“I once snored a medley from
The King and I.
”

“My favorite musical.”

“Alright.… I just thought you should know.”

And you keep raising the ante. Not that you want to scare them off; it’s just that if they’re ever going to leave you, let’s get it out of the way now.

“You may notice that in the bathroom, I tend to flush a few seconds before I’m actually done. I don’t know why,
I just do. And there’s no way I can change. Do you understand this? Can you accept this? Because it has cost me dearly in the past.”

And she
still
hasn’t changed her mind.

S
o you think, “Maybe this’ll work.” And ultimately, they find out everything:

How you chew, how you sip, how you hum, how you dance. How you smell at every point in the day, how you are on the phone with your mother, the fact that many of your friends are shallow, that you always have to sit on the aisle, how you never really listen, how whiny you get when you travel, how you’re not gracious to her friends when they call, how certain game shows make you really really happy, how cranky you get because you’re too stupid to remember to eat, how you manage to get confrontational only when it’s with the absolute wrong person to be yelling at, how you don’t like the way you look in any picture you’ve taken since 1974, how you’re unable to get off the phone when you’re running late because you don’t have the ability to say, “This isn’t a good time; can I call you back?” How you have to lick certain fruits before actually eating them, how you have no ability to save receipts—all these things, and they
still
want to sign on. They still like you.

This feels good. For about a minute.

But the next thought is, “Wait a second, why is she being so understanding? If this stuff doesn’t faze her,
her
stuff must be even
worse.
… Oh God—what don’t I know?”

And every day, bit by bit, you find out.

H
ere’s how I wake up.

The alarm goes off, I slap it as fast as I can. Whatever song was playing is already stuck in my brain, and I sing it for a while until I realize I don’t really know any of the words.

I turn to see my young bride sleeping sweetly, and a series of thoughts comes into my head:

“Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Isn’t it wonderful I get to see this face I love every morning?”

“Aren’t we lucky?”

“Isn’t life good?”

“I wonder if my dentist can move my ten o’clock
cleaning to the afternoon, because I want to bring the car in and get the tires checked before lunch.”

For the life of me, I don’t know how I make this last jump. But I do. Every day. I wake up, it’s good, it’s good, everything is good, and then—“Boy, I just thought of four things that might go wrong today.”

T
here are just too many things to do.

We all have Things To Do. Big things, little things—doesn’t matter. They’re things, and they’re yours to do.

I’m not particularly organized, but I try to make lists. You can have your Master List of what you’re going to do. Or else you have lots of Little Lists, and one Big List, listing all the Little Lists.

“Things to do today.” It’s always stupid things like “Call cable guy,” or “Pick up dry cleaning.” This is why you get out of bed that day—to “pick up blue jacket.”

Some people have stationery that already says, “Things To Do Today.” Why do we need that? The reason you’re writing it down in the first place is because you want to do it. I think that’s fairly obvious. Who writes down things they
don’t
want to do? There are plenty of things I don’t want to do. “Don’t slam your knee against the dresser drawer.” I don’t need to write it down. I remember from last time. “Don’t eat a piece of melon that’s so soft you wouldn’t enjoy it.” I
know
that.

There are, of course, grander things you want to do with your day, larger goals you have for your life that also don’t need to be written down. “Work toward world peace.” I don’t have to jot that down. “Leave the world better than you found it.” I got it, I got it.

S
o I’m lying there, awake no more than two minutes, already running down my list of Things To Do. My bride is up now, too.

She says, “What are you thinking about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I’m still not sure what the rule on that one is. The “tell-me-exactly-what-you’re-thinking” thing. Sometimes it’s helpful, but generally speaking, not-so-much.

She persists. “Tell me.”

“I’m serious, it’s too dumb to tell you.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking, if they don’t have tomato soup at lunch today, I’m not going to get soup at all. Because their other soups are pasty.”

A moment of quiet.

“That’s what you were thinking about?”

“I told you it wasn’t good.”

She says, “That’s alright, ask me what
I
was thinking about.”

“What?”

“The card my sister sent me.”

“Would you forget about that card already?”

“Why would she sign it ‘Fondly’? She’s never used the word ‘fondly.’ Ever.”

“It’s the same as ‘Love,’ only a little … fonder.”

“I just really don’t like that.”

So, we’ve been awake less than eighty seconds, and we’re already lost. Whatever sense of magic and wonder there is to the start of a new, fresh day has long ago been shot to hell.

E
ven if you woke up and
didn’t
do this, even if you woke up and heard nothing but the song of the birds and the love in your heart, there’s still one moment every morning that’s unavoidable and invariably gets your day going wrong.

You know how you get out of bed, drag your feet into the bathroom, flip on the light, and stand in front of the mirror? You know how you squint your eyes and look?
That.
That’s the big mistake. Looking in a mirror that early in the day.

It’s always a disappointment, no matter who you are. You just see your reflection and think, “That’s not what I was hoping for. I could have sworn I was better looking than that. I must be thinking of someone else.”

Nobody looks in the mirror and goes, “That’s
about right.” They always start fixing, moving their hair, tucking their cheeks … “No, that’s not working either.” So you go into the shower, you soap up, clean up, fluff up, dress up, take another look: “Nope, still not working.”

It’s The Face. Something scientific happens to your face when you sleep. You go to bed normal, you wake up —you have no face. The features have gone away while you slept. I think it has to do with the earth’s rotation. As the earth revolves, facial features move with it, so that while you sleep, your face is in Europe. Because there are only a finite number of faces, and if the Europeans go to work with no face, it looks bad for them. So this way everybody gets a shot.

I think it’s all nature’s way of keeping us humble. At night, you’re thinking of your problems, you’re thinking of yourself. “How come this didn’t work out? How come I live the life I do?”

You wake up, you look in the mirror, and you go,
“That’s
why! I have no facial features and a T-shirt with orange juice stains from 1983.” It gives you perspective.

F
irst order of business for every couple is negotiating Shower Rights.

“You want to go first?”

“No,
you
go. I’m sleeping.”

“Okay, but don’t get upset if I use all the hot water.”

“Don’t.”

“I can’t control how much hot water comes out—it just comes.”

“So get out sooner.”

“Alright, I’ll try.”

“And don’t puddle up the floor.”

Hmm. “Maybe
you’d
better go first.”

My problem is, I like long showers. I enjoy everything that goes on in there. And I get distracted.

I’ve discovered that while showering, the areas of our body that we spend the most time scrubbing are not necessarily the areas that
need
the most scrubbing. There’s a gap between Scrubbing Supply and Scrubbing Demand.

For example, the mid-chest gets an awful lot of scrubbing. Right around the chest plate. We love scrubbing that chestal area. Now the fact is, nobody really ever has dirt there. You couldn’t get this part dirty if you wanted to. You’d have to come out of a pool and trip with your arms out. Or eat soup naked and fast.

But we scrub there because it’s
convenient.
It’s nearby, it doesn’t take any effort, you can think about all the Things You Have To Do while you’re scrubbing. So we spend forty minutes scrubbing needlessly.

Your
feet
, however, which really need the attention, get nothing. Admit it. Your feet haven’t been scrubbed since you were in a bassinet. They’re just too far away. No
matter how short you are, it’s not worth the effort. So you forget about them. “Well, they’ll get dripped on. They’ll be fine.”

Other areas you scrub a lot, not because they’re so convenient, but because frankly, it’s pleasurable. Certain private areas—they get tremendous attention. The irony is that these are areas thought of as unhygienic, while in fact, they’re so clean you could entertain there.

A
lot of couples shower together. It’s supposed to be romantic and sensual. Truth? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Because one of you is not getting water. One of you, therefore, is not taking a shower.

Let’s be honest; one of you is having a great time, it’s terrific. The other one is in the back going, “You got a sweater up there? Maybe a windbreaker? Something with a hood would be nice. I would get it, but my ass is frozen to the wall here.”

Then there are people who use the shower to do everything. They shave, they brush their teeth, they do their taxes, everything.

I can’t shave in a shower. It’s too risky. Ever see the guys who shave with an electric razor while they’re
driving?
What is
that
about? You telling me there’s no other opportunity in their day to have a razor at their throat than while doing sixty around a curve? Surely they could
squeeze a moment in before breakfast. Or at least wait for a red light.

Personally, I have to be on dry, non-moving land to shave. And even then, it’s not so easy. The main problem is I have no mirror depth perception. It’s all distorted; left is right, forward is back—I don’t know where I am. Ever try to check the back of your head with another mirror? I can’t find myself. I’ve missed by a good six feet. I go, “Oh, that’s not me at all. That’s a shower cap on a hook.”

The best thing is to find somebody who looks roughly like you and just look at the back of
his
head.

I
’ve actually tried
not
shaving, but it turns out I’m not a Beard Guy. Certain guys look good in beards. I look, at best, like I’m on my way to something that may, ultimately, with a lot of work,
become
a beard.

My beard starts to look promising, and then in four days just gets tired and stops. People see me unshaven and ask, “Oh, what is that—three days, four days?”

And I have to tell them, “Sadly, since last summer. But thank you for caring.”

And they always ask. They see stubble and have to comment.

“What are you—growing a beard?”

What if I wasn’t? What if I simply forgot to shave? Now they’re just criticizing my hygiene. Like if you forgot
to shower they’d say, “Hey, did you
mean
to smell like that? You going for some effect or are you just woefully negligent?”

And that awkward stage of Beard Development is toughest on your partner.

“I can’t kiss you with that face. It hurts.”

“It’s going to be a regular beard any day now.”

“Let’s talk then.”

M
y wife and I start each morning with the genuine intention of exercising. But in a dazzling display of mutual support, we’ve learned to talk ourselves right out of it.

“Look,
I
don’t feel like working out,
you
don’t feel like working out—let’s just skip it.”

“Nobody’s going to know, right?”

“It’ll be our little secret.”

“Right, we’ll just look the way we do.”

“And if anybody asks, we ran.”

The truth is
nobody
wants to work out. We just do it to keep up with people who look better than we do. If we all just agreed to
not
work out—and I mean
everyone
, across the board—we’d be a lot happier. We could eat cupcakes and sleep late. The problem is it would only take
one
guy in good shape to ruin it for the whole group. “Great, now we gotta look like
this
guy.…” And the next morning
we’d all be back running, lifting, and sweating against our will.

S
ome people talk like it’s nothing. “I’ll just lose it after the holidays. It won’t be hard—I mean I’ve only been eating like a pig these last … what is it … 3 … 4 … 20 years. I’ll have some cottage cheese for lunch, I’ll be fine.”