The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life (7 page)

(Doesn’t this make you wish you were married to me? Hello, neurotic and insecure.)

(Also, you know what isn’t as fun at twenty-six years old as it was at ten? Climbing a ladder to get into bed at night.)

So that’s how we ended up at Discount Mattress making our first major purchase together in the form of a king-size bed with firm support. It was shortly thereafter that we also realized the key to a good night’s sleep was that we never share covers. Because Perry said I sleep under enough blankets to suffocate a normal person, and to that I said he was welcome to find his own solution. Which he did. In the form of the twin floral comforter I used all through college. He still sleeps with it to this day.

For those of you doing the math at home, that means he sleeps with a bed covering that’s well over twenty years old. So much for that plaid Ralph Lauren number I’d so painstakingly chosen when we registered.

Anyway, we’d been sharing a room for a few months when I discovered that Perry talks in his sleep. And he doesn’t just mumble. He makes loud declarations about things. There were nights he woke me up to ask if I could see the blue iguana coming out of our wall, or if I knew that there was a clown outside our window. You know, things that might send a person into an adrenaline-fueled reaction that leads to insomnia for the rest of the night.

And that’s why I didn’t really pay any attention to him the night he woke me up to ask if I’d just seen something small and furry run across our bedroom floor. I figured it was just another one of his sleep-talking ravings, and frankly, I was tired of getting all worked up about false iguana sightings and clowns wielding knives.

But a few mornings later, Perry woke up at the crack of dawn, which he unfortunately likes to do, and went into our kitchen to
discover a family of possums huddled in the corner like the Little Match Girl, except they were possums. You didn’t read that wrong. Possums. In our kitchen.

To make it worse, that’s when he told me he hadn’t been asleep when he saw something small and furry run across our bedroom floor a few nights earlier. Which meant there might have been possums. In our bedroom. And let’s be honest, possums in the kitchen are tragic enough, but in the bedroom? That’s enough to cause a full psychotic episode. I know this to be true because that’s what I had.

At times like this, it comes in handy that living with Perry is akin to living with Bear Grylls. He knows how to handle odd situations that most people never encounter. So he herded the possums out into the great outdoors and repaired a small opening under our kitchen cabinets that appeared to be their portal into our home.

The possum invasion was still fresh in my mind a couple of days later. Naturally, I’d scoured the entire kitchen with bleach, but there’s just a sense of discomfort that lingers when you know you’ve shared your food preparation space with an animal that belongs to the phylum Rodentia.

(I really don’t know if possums or the more formal, opossums, fall into the rodent phylum. But if they don’t, they should, with their beady little eyes and tails that I can’t even think about without wanting to dry heave. I can abide many things, but a hairless tail isn’t one of them.)

So I became concerned a few nights later when I heard a noise coming from the kitchen. Perry was out late playing basketball with the guys, because that was back when he was young and could do that kind of thing without tearing his meniscus or throwing out his back. I was home alone, and that meant I had to deal with the
noise differently than I normally handle these types of situations. By which I mean I couldn’t yell for Perry to come handle it.

I tiptoed over to the entrance of the kitchen and flipped on the lights, hoping to scare away whatever it was. And that’s when it happened.

Something threw a half-eaten piece of toast at me. A half-eaten piece of burned toast. I can still see the toast when I close my eyes. I can still hear the screaming that happened inside my head. It was like
Friday the 13
th
and
A Nightmare on Elm Street
all rolled into one, except with toast instead of a murderer wearing a bad sweater.

Right at that moment, Perry walked through the front door and I went into total FREAK-OUT mode about the noise and being assaulted by a piece of half-eaten toast. To which he replied, “That’s weird. We don’t even eat toast.”

Yes. That’s the weird part.

Not the fact that something THREW, nay HURLED, a piece of toast at me. And I may not know if possums belong to the phylum Rodentia, but I knew there was no way they were capable of throwing toast. For starters, they’re basically blind.

So Perry set a trap that night and caught a rat. Not a mouse. Not a cousin of Stuart Little. A rat. A rat with a penchant for burned toast. Or maybe he hated the burned toast, and that’s why he threw it at me. And, oh, it was an angry rat. It hissed at Perry and jumped on the side of the cage like it wanted to attack.

Needless to say, we started looking for a new place to live the very next day. Because possums are one thing, but when a rat shows up, it’s time to move. Or burn the place to the ground. It’s your call.

But as for me and my house, we began searching the real estate listings the next day. Because there are some things that even Young Love can’t handle.

CHAPTER 6

A
T SOME POINT
during my teenage years, I decided it would be a dream of mine to buy a house with my future husband that would be the home we would live in forever. The house where we’d raise our family and mark doorways with kids’ heights and open presents on Christmas morning and create a whole host of magical memories.

Maybe it was because my parents divorced when I was nine, and by the time I left for college, the only places that really felt like home were my grandparents’ homes. Or maybe it was because I became slightly obsessed with the movie
Father of the Bride
and wanted a hypothetical daughter to have her wedding reception in the backyard of the house where she grew up.

Of course, now that I have an actual daughter, she’s repeatedly
told me that ALL HER FRIENDS have gotten to move to new houses and she’s the ONLY ONE who has to stay in the same old house. So in my desire to fulfill my lifelong dream, I may be inadvertently raising a child who will become a wandering gypsy.

The rat incident was the perfect opportunity to begin the hunt for the perfect house since the only other option at that point was to live in a tent outside. The only problem was that we were poor. And houses tend to cost money and require things like insurance and property taxes and down payments because GAH, being a grown-up is hard.

But the six months of living virtually rent-free had given us a chance to save some money, so I began to search the Sunday newspaper for open houses and promptly fell in love with several homes way out of our price range, because frankly, our price range was depressing. I wasn’t completely sure our price range was going to be able to afford us the luxury of indoor plumbing.

And after several tearful weeks where Perry would keep having to reel me back into reality, we decided it might be best to find a Realtor to help us in our house search. We ended up with the kindest, most patient Realtor ever. He didn’t even laugh when we told him our budget, even though he agreed it might be tough to find everything we were looking for at that price point.

Over the next month or so, we looked at a series of houses that were each more depressing than the last. Some of which might have been located next door to a crack house. We discovered that people like to call a large closet a “third bedroom” and that “updated kitchen” just means it was updated sometime after 1953. And every time we found something remotely promising, it already had a contract on it.

But finally the day came when our Realtor, Robert, called me
and whispered furiously, “I’m listening to a deal falling through in the next cubicle on a great house. We need to get over there RIGHT NOW.” He gave me the address, and I grabbed Perry and forced him into the car, yelling, “STEP ON IT! I’LL EXPLAIN ON THE WAY!” like we were the Duke brothers, and we screeched out of the parking lot of our rat’s nest.

We pulled up in front of the little cottage house, and I knew in my heart it was the one. It was yellow with mint green trim and hideous landscaping, but I could see the potential. And it was in a neighborhood where I’d dreamed of living but didn’t think we could ever afford.

I don’t know if we’d even seen the third bedroom before I was asking Robert how you put a contract on a house. I knew we wanted it, and we’d seen enough “diamonds in the rough” with blue shag carpeting circa 1973 to know it was going to go fast. Robert advised us to offer an extra $100 in addition to the asking price because it would be a nice gesture. Hey there, Big Spender. We would like to offer you tens of thousands of dollars and this crisp $100 bill.

Apparently it worked because the owners received three offers within the hour and they chose ours, even though it wasn’t the highest. They just thought we seemed like a sweet young couple and wanted us to have the house. I could cry right now thinking about it.

It was as if God had handpicked that house for us, and it became ours beyond reason and logic and financial limitations. Of course, given the fact that they had “Save the Whales” stickers on every window, they might be horrified to know that their former walls are now host to several mounts of dead animals. But Perry had on his Birkenstocks the day we looked at the house, and you can’t tell
me that didn’t work in our favor. The only thing better would have been if I were wearing some sort of patchouli oil and a “Meat Is Murder” T-shirt.

A month later we signed all the papers and officially became adults saddled with a thirty-year mortgage. God bless America.

We moved into our new little house, overcome with gratitude that it was ours. Sure, you couldn’t run the microwave unless you turned out all the lights in the house first, and the kitchen countertops that were some kind of glittered laminate pattern circa 1972 didn’t match, and the washer and dryer were right next to the stove in the tiniest kitchen ever, but that was all part of its charm. We knew we could make it ours in time.

And so we spent the next several months hanging crown molding and painting walls and trying to make those glittered countertops seem a little less like something out of
Saturday Night Fever
. It was a lot of work but totally worth it, because I knew it was the house I’d been waiting for since I was seventeen years old. It was going to be our safe haven from the storms of the world. A place where we would love and laugh and fight and dream and seek God’s will for our lives.

And repaint the kitchen at least thirteen different times.

CHAPTER 7

I
MADE A
D
IN
P
ERSONAL
F
INANCE
301
in college. And I passed Business Math 201 only because I guilted my poor professor into passing me after I told him a sob story about how I needed to know my final grade before Christmas break so I could go ahead and inform my parents that I wouldn’t graduate on time due to failing an essential course.

(What I neglected to tell him was that I already knew I wasn’t going to graduate on time due to the aforementioned D in Personal Finance and my desire to spend one more football season at Texas A&M.)

(I’m also going to admit to you that I graduated while on scholastic probation. And honestly, I’m good with that. I’ve had to show my college transcript shockingly few times throughout my adult life.)

(Which is good since the university currently has my transcript on lockdown due to outstanding parking tickets from 1992.)

Based on this information, it’s safe to assume that I have never known what people mean when they talk about their checkbook being balanced. And I spent most of my early twenties with the security of knowing the bank just took money out of my dad’s account whenever my personal account ran out of money.

(Listen, I’m not proud. But I was in my early twenties, and nobody ever talks about how smart people in their twenties are.)

But once Perry and I got married and took on this mortgage for our cute cottage house, a new financial day dawned. We no longer had disposable income to spend on things like cute tops from Banana Republic. And Perry has always loved himself a new shirt from Banana. Or maybe that’s me. Either way.

On a related note, I got my first bonus from my new job in pharmaceutical sales after Perry and I had been married about three months, and I promptly drove to Ann Taylor and blew the whole thing on this red wool suit because WE WERE RICH. Except we absolutely were not. I had no business spending that money on a suit, but I felt like I deserved it. And it was red! And the jacket was a peacoat! And it looked just like something Rachel would wear on
Friend
s
!

Justification is a delicate art form.

I still own that suit, by the way. Not that I will ever wear it again, because the skirt is short enough to offend Kim Kardashian, but I felt so grown up when I bought it. It was like I had arrived, with my wool suit with shoulder pads. And also like we’d have to eat ramen noodles for several weeks until we both got paid again.

Anyway, it appeared that, based on our premarital counseling, responsible married couples are supposed to sit down with their
checkbook and have meetings wherein they create a budget using a pie chart. And we tried to do that, but it just made us both hungry for pie.

The truth is, we are not now, nor have we ever been, good budgeters. Perry and I both tend to have a little bit of an impulsive personality: act first, think later. This makes us fun at parties but not the people you want in charge of anything you actually care about. The difference between us is that I will later toss and turn all night worrying that we might end up living on the street, whereas Perry always believes everything is going to be just fine.

I’d always heard that the two biggest issues in marriage tend to be finances and in-laws, but it wasn’t until we bought our house and really had to watch how we spent our money that I realized how true that was. And the problem was, whenever we had a little money left over to spend on something frivolous, you could guarantee we’d never agree on how to spend it.

What? We could put it in savings?

How is that fun?

Perry was happy with the entertainment center we’d inherited from his grandfather. Why on earth did we need to buy an armoire for our TV? And I didn’t feel like a game feeder on the back of Perry’s truck was a necessary expense. Why do you need a contraption to throw corn out on the road while you hunt? Isn’t that why God gave us hands?

Gulley and her husband, who were much more financially responsible than we were, had devised a system where they each got a certain amount of “mad money” every month that they could spend on whatever they wanted. Perry and I agreed that seemed like a good idea, so we attempted to emulate the mad-money idea
 
—with little to no success. Mainly because neither of us really
agreed on what were necessary expenses versus frivolous expenses. My makeup was necessary. As were new jeans. And he maintained that hunting gear was essential to our survival since it put food on our table. Which, technically, is true. What I questioned was whether buying six flashlights from a company called Cheaper Than Dirt! constituted hunting gear.

(I told Perry I wrote this, and he said I need to quit telling people he shops at Cheaper Than Dirt! He said that’s like if he told people I buy all my jewelry off QVC.)

(It’s fascinating that he didn’t want to get into a debate over whether or not he bought six flashlights at one time because . . . GUILTY. He just wants to clarify he bought them from Cabela’s.)

(As if any of you reading this book will care.)

This seems like a good time to tell you that Gulley and her husband also went through a Dave Ramsey stage a few years ago, where she carried cash in different envelopes designated for various expenditures. It worked beautifully for about three weeks, until she had a complete mental breakdown in the aisle at Target because she couldn’t figure out if favors for her son’s birthday party counted as “miscellaneous” or “household expenses.”

But at least they made an effort. And I’m sure Dave Ramsey knows what he’s doing, but some other friends of ours also opted to try out the cash-in-envelopes system, and someone stole all their money out of the wife’s purse while she was at work. I’m no financial genius, but having all your money stolen seems counterproductive to the entire concept of financial management. Although I’m sure the criminal appreciated that it was going to be easy to manage his ill-gotten gains, thanks to those handy labeled envelopes.

I just know if I had to figure out all those envelopes, I’d get into some sort of Peter-robs-Paul-to-pay-Mary scenario where I would
take money out of “grocery” to buy shoes and tell myself I’d just cut back on “entertainment” to make up the difference. But then I’d forget and never make up the difference, and there would be a shortage or an overage or whatever it is the bank calls it when you don’t have money where you are supposed to have money. Essentially, I’d become a one-woman Enron corporation.

But we weren’t completely irresponsible. We didn’t spend more than we had, and we were careful not to get into debt, because that had been a painful lesson I’d learned in my early twenties. Those credit card companies aren’t playing when they say 22 percent interest, which doesn’t make up for the free blanket they give you when you sign up for a Visa. And we were certainly more sensible than a couple I know who decided during their first year of marriage that they were sad they couldn’t afford to go on vacation, so they sold their car, bought ski clothes, and flew to Colorado with the proceeds.

I bet their parents were so proud.

I do think I have at least a tad of financial sense, thanks to my dad. Charles Marino has never met a dollar he didn’t immediately invest into some type of sensible, high-yield mutual fund. When I was a child, there were nights you could barely sleep from the sound of pennies yelling from being pinched. The man still owns a rust-colored velour jogging suit he bought in 1976. AND WEARS IT. Even though, in all fairness, he did buy me a pair of Guess overalls in 1984 that cost $80. And $80 in 1984 is the equivalent of like $400 in today’s economy. Which is a lot to pay for your thirteen-year-old to look like a jaunty farmer.

My point is that finances in marriage can be a dicey proposition. It’s hard for two people from two different backgrounds to reconcile
how to manage a joint checking account. To this day, Perry still doesn’t see how a new living room rug is something we need, and I don’t believe anyone should buy Williams-Sonoma peppermint bark in bulk quantities just because it’s on sale.

So, like everything in life that isn’t fun, dealing with finances requires some compromise. And a little bit of understanding. And occasionally sneaking in packages from the car when Perry isn’t home, and when he asks if something I have on is new, replying, “What? This? I’ve had it FOREVER. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

(I’m not advocating deception. I prefer to call it creative consumerism.)

I also tend to round things down to fifteen dollars. Any time Perry asks me how much anything costs, I just say, “Fifteen dollars.” He knows this isn’t the case since we aren’t living in 1975, but he goes with it because it makes us both feel better. A girl I used to work with did the same thing with her husband, and I was at her house one time when a new couch got delivered. “Well, great,” he groaned. “Another hundred dollars out the door.”

Sure.

Because couches cost $100.

If you buy them from someone’s garage.

The thing is that in all the checking accounts and retirement accounts and grown-up responsible financial things, Perry and I have made a commitment to honor God first. We try our best to remember that all things come from him and belong to him. And he has never failed to provide for us even when conventional Mr. Drysdale wisdom would say it doesn’t make sense.

I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face several years ago when I announced that Perry and I decided I should resign from my job and pursue writing full time. It was like we’d just declared
that we believed fairies would henceforth be delivering bags of money to our doorstep, and I just knew my dad was envisioning a future where he would have to let us live on his front lawn in tents that he purchased. But Perry and I knew it was a step of faith that God was calling us to take, so we
 
—very prayerfully and soberly and freaking-outerly
 
—walked out on a precarious financial ledge.

It was one of the hardest years of our marriage. Perry had to have surgery, and we had bad insurance, my car got broken into, and a band of gypsies depleted our savings account. (Not really, but that sounds more fun than telling you how we had to get our roof fixed.) It wasn’t fun times.

But we saw God provide what we needed time and time again. It was Proverbs 30:8 in action: he gave us neither poverty nor riches. And the upside of only getting your daily bread is it eliminates a lot of arguments about whether or not you need to get new kitchen countertops, because you don’t think much about those things when you’re busy buying five boxes of Hamburger Helper because they’re on sale for fifty-nine cents each and you’ve forgotten that you think Hamburger Helper is gross.

And ultimately it’s these times that can make or break a marriage. You can let it tear you down and make you bitter over other people who appear to have more, or you can band together and realize it’s just money. It comes and goes, but never once has it bought anyone real, lasting happiness.

A fact that Perry and I have reminded each other of repeatedly over the years during lean times as we toast each other with a glass of wine poured from a $2 bottle right before we dig into our Hamburger Helper stroganoff.