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Now, normally, I don’t balk at being the decision maker in our marriage. But, normally, strange men don’t request a saw to disfigure our furniture.
I tried to reach Mike at work to see what he wanted me to do—in other words, to ask his permission for the couch amputation—but he wasn’t there.
So the movers sawed off a leg; the couch fit through the door; they moved it to our new house up in Westchester.
When Mike arrived that night, fresh—not!—from his first train commute and ready to collapse, he immediately noticed that the surface he was about to collapse onto was tilting dangerously.
I explained what happened.
He was incredulous.
Okay, not just incredulous. He was other things, too. Including royally pissed off. Now that I’ve had almost a decade of enlightenment regarding Mike’s daily commute to the city, I can attribute his fury that night, at least in part, to an hour spent on an un-air-conditioned railroad car sandwiched in a middle seat between two large businessmen who carried on a conversation across his lap. But at the time, in my seminewlywed overanalytical self-absorption, I concluded that everything was all my fault.
Him: “How the hell could you let them cut the fucking leg off the goddamn fucking couch?”
Me: “I had no choice.”
Him: “We got the fucking couch in. They’re goddamn professionals and they couldn’t get it out? And what kind of movers carry a goddamn fucking saw around to cut the legs off people’s furniture?”
Me: “They don’t. I ran out and bought one.”
Him: “You bought the saw?”
Me: “The goddamn fucking saw. They told me to.”
Him: storms off, spends sleepless night trying to keep balance on the aforementioned—and seriously listing—goddamn fucking couch.
Me: spends sleepless night sobbing into pillow over first significant married fight.
When I say significant, I refer to the fights that stand out in a couple’s mutual memory. Not the arguments that happen along the way: arguments about the thermostat or what color to paint the bedroom or who should buy the Mother’s Day cards for his side of the family. I’m talking Fight, fights. Lying-awake-at-dawn-crying fights. Who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-the-man-I-married fights.
Actually, I can count on one hand the number of fights and sleepless nights we’ve had in our marriage.
After the moving ordeal, our next sleepless night—and, incidentally, our next significant married fight—was a year or so later, when I was ten centimeters dilated and pushing. Does that fight count? I mean, I truly wasn’t myself at the time.
Who was I? you might ask.
I was Lizzie Grubman meets Shannon Dougherty meets Valdemort—a temporary state brought on by the sheer physical agony of childbirth.
And Mike—who was supposed to be coaching me—was just plain stupid at the time, a temporary state I’ll chalk up to low blood sugar. I’ll admit that it was due in part to the fact that I wouldn’t let him visit the hospital cafeteria—or even the vending machines—for the twenty-four-hours-plus that I was in excruciating labor, lest he miss the big event. That’s how stupid I was. I kept thinking that any minute now, there would be a baby. I kept thinking that for, oh, sixteen thousand minutes or so before it actually happened.
Anyway, here’s how stupid Mike was: He brought up the couch story in the midst of my agony.
“You can do it, hon,” he crooned. “You can get this baby out. Unless you want me to run out and buy a saw so that we can cut off one of its legs?”
Har de har har, right? Funny guy, that Mike.
Of course, he then found it necessary to make like Jay Leno and regale the nurses, the doctor and a passing orderly with the Couch Monologue. They all had a good laugh at my expense while I writhed and moaned and cursed the epidural that didn’t work and swore that if the baby ever came out I would be a single mother because I was getting a divorce.
As it turned out, I didn’t.
As it turned out, neither did my parents, although they’re such opposites that most people say it’s a miracle they’ve stayed together all these years.
Anyway, as I was saying before I went into my longer than anticipated digression, my father—who is good at many things, including, fortuitously for us, fixing freshly sawn-off couch legs—has never been good at spelling. He likes to tell people that’s because he’s an accountant—as though an accountant requires prowess only with numbers and not with that pesky alphabet.
So when he filled out the paperwork after I was born, he left out the second “a,” and by the time anybody figured it out, it was too late. My mother woke up and I was Barbra and that was that.
My three older brothers used to tease her—and me—that it was a good thing he had left off the second “a” instead of the third one along with the first “r,” in which case, I’d have been named after the large gray elephant in the French children’s story.
My mother wasn’t amused. It isn’t that she has anything against children’s literature; she is, after all, a middle-school English teacher. She is also a fanatic about all things spelling-and grammar-related. From what I hear, she didn’t speak to my father for a few days after she discovered the spelling mistake in my name. But, like I said, they managed to stay married.
Around the same time I came along, Barbra Streisand became a household name and validated the unorthodox spelling of mine. I can barely remember anybody ever calling me Barbra anyway. I was dubbed Beau early on, and I have never since been anything but.
My parents gave me the nickname because it’s short for Beaulieu, as in Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Elvis’s wife. They thought I looked a lot like her. Which I do. In fact, complete strangers have come up to me and said that over the years.
I never mind when people do that. I mean, it’s not like they’re telling me I look just like Cyndi Lauper or something.
Priscilla was, and still is, beautiful.
Three pregnancies and a lifetime ago, I was also beautiful. Now I’ve got a seven-year-old, a preschooler and a baby. I’ve also got flab, stretch marks, varicose veins, dark circles under my eyes, sagging breasts that have nursed three children, with nipples that hit my belly button, and a childbirth-traumatized crotch that leaks pee if I laugh.
Which I don’t, lately.
That, I suppose, is a blessing. But it doesn’t feel like one.
Damn, it used to feel good to laugh until tears streamed from my eyes instead of my bladder.
Things that used to make me laugh that hard: being tickled by my dad. The scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin and John Candy are in the car that catches fire. Seinfeld—even the reruns I’ve seen a dozen times.
Oh, and my husband, Mike.
He really cracked me up back when we were dating. When we were first married, too, even after we moved up here to the suburbs.
He used to do this dead-on imitation of our crotchety old neighbor, Mrs. Rosenkrantz, that was hilarious—and, I suppose, cruel, if anybody but me had ever seen it. But nobody ever did. It was our special thing.
We’d be doing some mundane task—folding laundry or grocery shopping—and I’d say, “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz for me, please,” and he would. He’d be Mrs. Rosenkrantz folding laundry or Mrs. Rosenkrantz grocery shopping, and I swear I’d be on the floor gasping for air.
Mrs. Rosenkrantz died right before I gave birth to our second son. I was in labor for the wake and in the hospital for the funeral, so we didn’t go. We came home with our tiny blue bundle to find a rented wooden stork on our lawn and a For Sale sign on hers.
Once or twice after that, I asked Mike to “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz,” and he obliged, but it wasn’t the same.
A lot of things haven’t been the same since then. Some are better, some are worse—but nothing is the same. Lately, I find myself missing the way things used to be.
I don’t miss Mrs. Rosenkrantz, though—I just miss laughing at her. Or, rather, laughing at my husband’s impression of her.
A young family from the city bought her house. Where we live, in the leafy northern suburbs of New York, young families from the city always buy dead old people’s houses. This was a nice family, the Carsons. They have a daughter my older son’s age and a son my second son’s age and twins on the way any second now. The mom, Laura, is a lot of fun when she isn’t eight months pregnant with multiples in the blazing dead of July, and the dad, Kirk, coaches Little League with Mike.
On hot summer days we grill and drink beers on their deck or ours while the kids play in the sprinkler, and on cold winter days we shovel while the kids build snowmen. The Carsons pick up our mail and Journal News when we’re on vacation and we pick up their mail and Journal News when they’re on vacation, and we keep saying that one of these years we should vacation together.
It sounds good, doesn’t it?
Yeah. Suburban bliss.
Three kids, a raised ranch, an SUV and a 401K. We have everything but a dog, but the boys have been begging for one, and sooner or later I know I’m going to give in and we’ll have the dog, too.
They, like I, will have everything they always wanted.
I was born under a lucky star. That’s what my mother always said, shaking her head and laughing. Things came easily to me from day one. Friends…contest prizes…school elections…boyfriends.
If I wanted something, I got it.
This life is what I’ve always wanted. Isn’t it?
Well, isn’t it?
Back when I was young and single and dating my husband—along with the other Mike, the one I didn’t marry—I dreamed of the life I have now. I figured it would be mine for the taking, because most things were.
Be careful what you wish for—or so they say.
They being the same they my grandmother is always quoting; the they who say beauty is only skin deep, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play, and love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
Or was that Frank Sinatra?
Not that it matters. Grandma Alice quotes him, too.
The thing is, there’s truth in all clichés—that’s why they’re clichés.
So here I am, a living cliché, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, reminding myself that I have everything I ever wanted—and trying desperately to remember why the hell I wanted it in the first place.
two
The past
“If I were you,” Valerie told me, lounging on her unmade bed and polishing her toenails that stifling July night, “I’d wear the red. Mike likes you in red, right?”
“He does, but…” I surveyed my image in the full-length mirror we had bought at Woolworth’s and tacked to the back of our closet door only a few days ago. God only knew how we had managed to live in that apartment for almost a year without a full-length mirror.
But Valerie claimed that when she couldn’t see the thirty pounds she had to lose, she didn’t worry about them.
The day after we bought the mirror—my idea—she went back on her diet. It was the same diet she had been on—and off—for the past year or two.
You would think something as drastic as eliminating all fat grams from one’s diet would work. At least, Valerie would think that. It seemed a little extreme to me. But then, I was blessed with a normal weight and a high metabolism. I couldn’t imagine giving up ice cream, chicken chimichangas with cheese, or Popeye’s fried chicken with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy.
Whenever Valerie was on her low-fat diet, I had to sneak my indulgences so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stray from her oat-bran-strewn path. Of course, sooner or later, she always did, but at least I knew it wasn’t my fault.
“This is new. Don’t you like it?” I asked Valerie, gesturing at the black spandex minidress I was wearing.
I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead as she contemplated my appearance. Damn, it was hot, despite the open window and the rotating floor fan in front of it. This was my second summer in Manhattan. Last year, I was so thrilled to actually be living here that I guess I didn’t notice the heat in our fourth floor, un-air-conditioned one-bedroom walk-up.
I do remember noticing the street noise—the round-the-clock horn-honking, sirens, construction-site jackhammers, the throbbing bass from passing car radios and neighborhood bars. It took me a while to get used to the incessant din that accompanied daily life on the Upper West Side. After I did get used to it, whenever I went upstate to visit my family, the nights seemed preternaturally quiet.
Valerie shrugged, set aside the bottle of pale frosted pink polish and said, re: my outfit, “I don’t know, Beau. Don’t you think it’s kind of…”
“Short?”
“Yeah, that. And…”
“Dark?”
“That, too. But also kind of…”
I opened my mouth again, but this time Valerie finished her own sentence.
She finished it with “slutty,” and I grinned.
“I haven’t seen Mike since April, Val. After three months apart, maybe I want to look slutty.”
“No, you want to look sexy. The red one is sexy. This one is slutty. There’s a big difference. Hey, I love this song!” She reached toward the stacked plastic milk crates serving as a nightstand between our two beds and turned up the volume on the boom box.
“I hate this song,” I grumbled, recognizing the all-too-familiar opening strains of Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.”
“I thought you loved it.”
“I didn’t ‘love’ it, I liked it. And that was last month, before they played it every five minutes on every radio station in New York.”
As Valerie sang the opening, “Hey, baby,” in an off-key falsetto, I couldn’t resist adding, “Anyway, I like new-wave stuff much better than pop. Pop is so over.”
“That’s what you said about Madonna last year, and now look. She’s everywhere again.”
“I give her five minutes,” I said darkly. “And Paula Abdul gets ten. Nobody will ever have heard of either of them in a few years. But INXS and The Cure will be around forever, like the Beatles. Mark my words.”
She was too busy singing along with flash-in-the-pan Paula to mark my words, so I picked up the hanger draped with the red dress. It was a month old and I had worn it at least three times already, but of course Mike had never seen me in it. Holding the hanger against my shoulders, I surveyed my reflection.
The short skirt had a ruffled flare, reflecting the lambada craze that had overtaken everyone’s wardrobe that summer. My light brown hair was pretty much bigger than the skirt: long, kinky-permed and teased on top, with the bangs sprayed fashionably stiff and curving out from my forehead like a tusk.
“I don’t know,” I told Valerie. “I think I like the way the black clings better.”
Lying on her back and waving her legs around in the air to dry her toenail polish, Valerie interrupted her singing to say, “I’d kill to like the way something clings on me.”
I never knew how to respond when she made comments like that. It wasn’t easy being five foot seven and a hundred and twenty pounds when your best friend was six inches shorter and a good thirty pounds heavier.
I know, I know…it was probably much harder to be the shorter, heavier one. But I couldn’t help feeling awkward whenever Valerie looked at me with blatant envy…like she was right now.
I tried to think of something nice to say about the neon-blue spandex bicycle shorts she was wearing with an oversize neon-orange T-shirt, but I was at a loss. Spandex wasn’t the most flattering trend if you weren’t built like a pencil. Which, fortunately, I was. And which, unfortunately, Valerie wasn’t.
“My toes are never going to dry with this humidity. Wouldn’t you kill for a window air conditioner?” Valerie asked, still waving her legs around in the air.
“Maybe we can scrape up enough money to buy one.”
