The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life (2 page)

Introduction: Erring on the Side of Love

D
R.
S
EUSS ONCE SAID,
“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” And that’s nice and all. But then you get married and reality isn’t always that great because maybe somebody snores or is kind of weird about “staying within our household budget,” and your dreams start to look pretty good by comparison. Because marriage can be the biggest blessing and the most significant challenge two people ever take on. It’s the joy of knowing there is someone to share in your sorrows and triumphs and the challenge of living with someone who thinks it’s a good idea to hang a giant antelope on your living room wall.

The days are filled with laughter and compromise. And then there are days filled with silence and anger. But at the end of it all, you’re two people God has joined to journey through life together. For better or for worse. In hunting season and in health.

A few weeks ago, I spent most of the day at my best friend Gulley’s house. It was one of those rare, gorgeous Saturdays in Texas when the weather is absolutely perfect. We’d spent our time catching up on life while the kids ran around the yard and did
their best to see if there was a way one of them could end up in the ER before nightfall. It’s like their hobby to see which of them can make us yell first, “WHY DID YOU DO THAT? YOU’RE GOING TO KILL YOURSELF!”

As day turned to evening, Gulley invited us to stay for dinner. So I called Perry to let him know that was the plan, and he said he’d meet us at Gulley’s in the next hour or so to help with the grilling of the meat. Because nothing really brings men together like building a fire and cooking on it. I’m pretty sure that’s in the book of Proverbs.

And since it was after five o’clock by that point, and since nothing wears you out quite like watching your children try to push each other off a trampoline, Gulley and I sat out on the swing in her backyard and began to reflect on life in that way you do with your best friend.

The past week had been full of various political rants in the news, and seeing as we’d already covered our latest thoughts on
The Bachelor
and how we felt about colored skinny jeans, our conversation turned to these controversial topics. I was feeling pretty good about life and began a whole discourse on how all we need is love. Just like the Beatles told us in 1967.

I said I felt like maybe I’d been too harsh in the past. Too black and white. Too quick to judge someone before thinking about how they might feel or what they’ve been through. I’m sure by this time I was waving my hands wildly in that way I do when I feel strongly about something, and I concluded this whole diatribe by saying, “I want my next forty years to be about love. If I err, then let me err on the side of love. May it be said of me that I always erred on the side of love.”

Gulley nodded and we toasted to erring on the side of love,
feeling pretty good about ourselves and our new magnanimous take on life. Then I looked up and saw that Perry had arrived. So we made our way back into the house to figure out what we needed to do to get dinner started.

I kissed him on the cheek as I walked into the living room, and he asked, “What were y’all talking about out there on the swing?” Feeling good about my new resolution, I replied, “I was telling Gulley that I’ve decided maybe I’ve been too hard on people in the past. From now on, I’m going to err on the side of love.”

(Please picture me saying that like I’m Gandhi. I felt like I’d never been more profound.)

Perry looked right at me and without missing a beat said, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Well, I bet no one ever talked like that to Gandhi.

But that’s marriage. You are two very different people who aren’t going to agree on everything. There are times you might feel like the person you married is dead inside because they want to quote the apostle Paul after you’ve just declared that you want to err on the side of love. And sometimes those moments will lead to a fight in the middle of your best friend’s living room that causes her and her husband to find an excuse to leave the room.

Hypothetically speaking.

Marriage is a constant push and pull of thoughts and ideas and values and arguing over whether $100 is too much to pay for a pair of jeans. (It’s not.) But it’s also the most literal example of how iron sharpens iron.

When I look back on the sixteen years Perry and I have been married, I can see the places where we’ve made each other better. There are parts of us etched into each other like the rings in the trunk of a tree. We’ve grown, we’ve changed, we’ve been forever
marked. And ultimately, we are so much better together than either of us would be on our own.

Sometimes we err on the side of love, and sometimes we think that’s a dumb idea. But we are in this thing together for the rest of our lives
 
—not just for better or for worse, but for better AND worse. No one else drives me crazier, makes me laugh louder, or causes me to fall in love all over again when I least expect it.

And that’s what this book is about. The times that brought us together and the times we were falling apart. The days that we wouldn’t trade for anything in the world, and the days that he hung an antelope on my wall.

Welcome to the story of a real marriage. Dead animals and all.

CHAPTER 1

E
VERY YEAR
on our wedding anniversary, smack-dab in the middle of the hottest month of the year, I know with all certainty that I was out-of-my-mind in love with Perry to marry him at noon in August. In Texas. And not just anywhere in Texas, but in South Texas, where the devil has been known to remark, “Man, it is really hot. Can someone find me a double-wide with a window unit and an extension cord so I can plug in my oscillating fan?”

I’d always envisioned a December wedding complete with twinkle lights, poinsettias, and Christmas trees decorating the church sanctuary. My bridesmaids would be dressed in dark-green taffeta dresses with huge bows on the backs, because this was a late ’80s/early ’90s daydream, which meant they’d also have enormous hair and bushy eyebrows. In a perfect world, they’d have
delicate wreaths of baby’s breath encircling some type of elaborate updo and green satin shoes dyed to match their dresses. For years I’d kept a picture torn from an issue of
Bride
magazine that featured a December bride with her hands tucked in a white fur muff with red roses cascading from it like a waterfall. Never mind the fact that in Texas it rarely gets cold enough for a pair of mittens; I wanted to look like Anna Karenina on my wedding day.

However, when Perry finally proposed on April 24, 1997, after two (long) years of dating, I said, “YES!” before he could even get the words out of his mouth. A woman with a stash of contraband bridal magazines hidden underneath her couch is a woman quick to abandon the dream of a wedding with a winter-wonderland theme.

Prior to our relationship, Perry hadn’t had many serious girlfriends because he believed his time was better spent hunting deer and making homemade ammunition. Contrary to popular belief, a deer blind with no indoor plumbing isn’t really the best place to meet a nice single girl
 
—or even a trashy single girl, for that matter
 
—and thus he went through his late teens and early twenties with a Ford truck and a .257 Roberts as his primary companions.

This may explain why he felt a hunting blind was a perfectly acceptable gift to give me for my twenty-fourth birthday. Fortunately for him, we’d been dating for only about three months, so I accepted the gift with great enthusiasm instead of making him leave on the spot. Looking back, I should have set the gift bar a little higher from the beginning, because he had no way of knowing the small tin of popcorn he got me the following Valentine’s Day was going to send me into tears and hysteria. It
wasn’t so much that I didn’t enjoy the festive, cinnamon-flavored popcorn as that I reached the bottom of the tin only to discover there was no velvet ring box.

It’s not his fault. All those John Hughes movies I watched throughout my formative teen years would have set up any guy for failure. Who can compete with Jake Ryan, the Porsche, and the final birthday cake scene? It’s not possible.

(That movie may or may not also have been responsible for my slight obsession with hair adorned with baby’s breath. So classy.)

One night, early in our relationship, we were at my apartment after attending a wedding shower for some of Perry’s friends. There is nothing that makes a single girl start to dream about new linens and china patterns like a wedding shower. Because everyone knows that’s what marriage is all about
 
—the new household items. It didn’t matter that I had no idea how to prepare an actual meal; a new set of Calphalon cookware would change all of that. Perry stood at the door, wrapped his arms around me, and whispered words he would live to regret for the next two years: “For what it’s worth, I know you’re the girl I’m going to marry.”

With that statement I began to mentally plan a wedding. A wedding that wouldn’t take place for another two years because Perry left a crucial word off the end of his statement. What he should have said to the crazy lady with starry-eyed visions of ivory silk shantung in her head was, “For what it’s worth, I know you’re the girl I’m going to marry SOMEDAY,” but he didn’t know that because it’s not a lesson you learn when you spend a large majority of your young adult years with a bunch of guys competing to see who can get their truck stuck in the mud.

When the day finally arrived that an actual proposal of marriage came and the follow-up question from Perry was “How
soon can we get married?” I whipped out the wedding planner I’d secretly purchased months before (okay, years before) and said, “Let me call the church.” The answer, according to church availability, was August 16, and the rest is history. Instead of looking like a Russian ice princess on my wedding day, I spent my reception with the glow of a woman wearing fifteen layers of petticoats in 120-degree weather.

Love is not only blind but also indifferent to extreme temperatures.

Organizing a wedding in three and a half months isn’t the easiest task, so it totally paid off that I’d been planning it in my head for twenty-five years prior to the actual day. All I had to do was substitute a bouquet of lilies for the white fur muff covered in roses, which I was willing to do, because did you read the part about getting new cookware?

At some point in the midst of the wedding-planning festivities, I dragged Perry to several department stores and local boutiques to register for gorgeous place settings of fine china and sterling-silver utensils that, to this day, we’ve used all of three times
 
—one of which was when I made dinner and discovered that all our regular forks were dirty and we were out of plastic ones. So I pulled out the sterling, and honestly, it did give the Cheesy Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper a certain sophistication that had previously been missing.

These days, whenever we attend a wedding, we sit back with our three plates of cake and four glasses of house wine and watch the bride and groom take to the dance floor for their first dance. We get all sentimental, look deeply into each other’s eyes, and say, “Those two fools have no idea what they’re getting into. They don’t deserve those new dishes. You know who deserves some new
towels? We do. We’ve survived over a DECADE of marriage, and we’ve earned those towels.”

When you’re a young, bright-eyed fiancée, you have no idea what color towels you want for your bathroom because chances are you’re moving into his apartment, and anything will be a step up from the thirty-year-old towels he stole from his parents’ house before he moved out, the concrete blocks that serve as an entertainment center, and the neon Bud Light sign that he and his fraternity brothers swiped during what has become a legendary night in college.

The exception is if you marry a man whose mother served as his interior decorator and helped him purchase all new dishes and linens when he initially moved into his bachelor pad. If this is the case, you may want to reevaluate whether or not you want to spend the rest of your life with a man who let his mother pick out his sheets. It’s like the old saying goes: “The hand that picks the sheets rules the world.”

Of course, maybe I’m just a little bitter because we’re down to a mere three dinner forks in our Country French flatware pattern. It’s the price you pay when you eat on paper plates most nights and throw them in the trash, forgetting not everything is disposable.

But all those years ago, I was one of those fools who agonized over choosing all the right items to celebrate our new life together, especially the bedding. I walked around the department store exclaiming, “It needs to be pretty, but not too feminine! It should have a masculine influence because, Honey, I want our bedroom to reflect both our personalities!” How could I have known our bedroom would have plenty of his personality, thanks to all the boxer shorts and socks left lying around on the floor as part of his decorating style
 
—Early American Frat House?

There was no need to choose that over-the-top-masculine navy-plaid Ralph Lauren comforter to convey that a man lived on the premises because the stack of
Texas Trophy Hunters
magazines next to the toilet broadcast that message to any visitor who had the misfortune of using our downstairs half bath, which was the size of a phone booth but without the charm and intimacy.

(If you were born after 1992, I want to explain that a phone booth is something from ye olden days. It was a small glass enclosure with a phone inside that you could use to call someone if you had a quarter or a friend willing to accept a collect call.)

(The phone booth was necessary because there was no other way to make a call if you weren’t at home. At the time, iPhones were just a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye. We couldn’t have imagined a world where we would have a device we could carry in our pockets that would give us access to unlimited information and lots of funny videos about cats.)

Perry knew the registering process wasn’t about him, because otherwise we’d be at Home Depot or Academy instead of Scrivener’s picking out delicate crystal welcome bowls and eating lunch in a tearoom that served chicken salad on a leaf of lettuce with a side of consommé. He just went along for the ride because he instinctively knew his role in this whole affair was to smile and nod at everything I selected, even when everything in him wanted to scream, “We don’t even eat shrimp, so why do we need sterling shrimp forks at $75 apiece?”

The great irony of selecting expensive merchandise for your parents’ friends to purchase for you in exchange for some free champagne and carved beef tenderloin is you’re selecting things for the life you think you are going to live, when in reality there is no way to know what that life will really entail. Based on my
registry selections, I had big dreams of a future filled with formal dinner parties requiring twelve full place settings of china and linen napkins. The reality is the last time we had people over for dinner, I served salad from a bag on paper plates and handed them some Viva paper towels to wipe their mouths. Formal dining for us means we put the dogs outside.

Perry and I were two different people coming from two totally different backgrounds. I’d spent the majority of my formative years believing there was no finer meal than a Big Mac spread out on the paper wrapper it came in. He grew up with grandparents with a staff they referred to as “the help” long after it was politically incorrect, and a mother known to make him eat Arby’s roast beef sandwiches on fine china at her dining room table because “only stray dogs eat out of bags.”

It’s no wonder we were a little confused about what our life together would be. He wanted to break free from the formality of his childhood, while I envisioned a life reminiscent of the Ewing family, where we would walk in at the end of a long day, pour ourselves a drink from a crystal decanter, and toast to another day of swindling Cliff Barnes out of his share of the business.

The only problem with this scenario was we didn’t own an oil company. Or a ranch. And neither of us really enjoys the taste of whiskey or bourbon or whatever it was Sue Ellen used to inhale straight from those crystal decanters.

(At the time of this writing it had only been a few months since the death of Larry Hagman [aka J. R. Ewing]. I’m not kidding when I say it felt like a piece of my childhood had died. A piece with very large eyebrows.)

During our engagement, I lived in a delightful little apartment complex for the bargain price of $395 a month, all utilities
included. I was essentially paying a dollar per square foot. It was a tiny apartment, but did I mention the part about all utilities included? For a single girl living barely above the poverty line, it was a little piece of heaven. I could set the air-conditioning at sixty-five degrees and leave it there all day. I wrapped myself in a down comforter all year long, drank hot chocolate, and pretended it was winter while I watched with the rest of the world to see if Ross and Rachel were ever going to get together.

I quickly noticed within a few days of moving into my little apartment that I was the only resident under the age of eighty-two. I’d inadvertently stumbled onto some sort of semi-assisted-living arrangement reminiscent of
Melrose Place
for the elderly. All the apartments were situated around a common courtyard area with a pool and a landlord who constantly tended to the plants while wearing a surgical mask and toting around her oxygen tank. From time to time she’d pull the mask away from her face long enough to take a hit of her cigarette or yell at one of the residents for parking their Cadillac too close to her hedge of red-tip photinias.