DIED 1999
A TRULY HAPPY MARRIAGE is much rarer than anyone admits. In fifty years, I’ve seen no more than four or five. I think the secret is this: you are connoisseurs of each other’s faults. The quirks, the glitches, the annoying habits, the obvious complaints that would drive anyone out of their mind in a couple of months only become more precious to you over the years. The in-laws of my first marriage, The Skater’s mother and stepfather, were the real McCoy.
She, a little Italian-Catholic ballbuster, and he, the original geek who never said a word. His idea of a good time was to come home from work in the IT department, fix a pitcher of martinis, and crack open the new Tom Clancy. Her idea of a good time was sitting right there beside him. She had a PhD in his likes and dislikes and her greatest pleasure was to display this knowledge. He never drinks more than one cup of coffee in the morning. Or better yet, in first-person plural. We love the Joan Baez Christmas album. We go to Disney in the spring.
They had it all figured out—early retirement, the long-awaited, hard-earned twenty years side by side in their A-frame in the Poconos, on the deck of their Marriott timeshare in Hilton Head, in the cocktail lounge of a ship cruising Alaska. And time with their grandsons: right around then, I moved up to Pennsylvania with the boys. But on a golden October evening during a little bus trip down South, he collapsed at a TGI Fridays. They brought his dessert, he asked for the check, and he put his head down. Not the worst way to die, but a cruel way to leave. She paid the bill and took the bus home.
Tell me, where does the doting go? And the bossing? And the right way to cook the steak? How can a house be so much quieter without the quiet? She will never get over it, in fact she wouldn’t if she could. Which might be considered something of a consolation by the less perfectly wed.