A gun: That was the manly thing, right? Whatever that meant.
In our modern age, a man can be almost anything. He needn’t be a hunter or a farmer or a bush pilot. He needn’t even really be a man. There are many men walking around today who are actually orangutans, according to their wives.
In the South of my childhood, men worked, sweated, ate fried chicken, and had heart attacks. Women worked, too, and sweated, and brought things to the men, such as their chicken, and their defibrillators, because of the heart attacks, because of the chicken.
If I had to describe what, exactly, men did, according to my father, it would be: Outside Things. I don’t think I ever saw him clean a dish. He didn’t even know where the sink was. If you had thrown his keys in it, he would not have been able to find them. He would think you had made them invisible, that you were a witch. I grew up believing men could not do housework, that if you did, something bad might happen. One might grow an ovary.
About the only thing that could make my father do housework was a reliable tornado warning, which forced him inside and often led him to vacuum, although what he did wasn’t so much vacuuming as attempting to hurt the carpet’s feelings. Eventually, the weather would clear and Pop ordered us outside, to do our Manly Outside Things, burning and hammering and such. It was like Separate But Equal, except Pop did not really have a place in his head for things that sounded like math.
It wasn’t just Pop. It was the whole family.
Every Sunday, we would gather at the farm in Coldwater. These Sunday dinners are one of the load-bearing pillars of the first decade of my life, and I didn’t think anything odd about them until I left home and told others.
It wasn’t the food that was odd, having been grown on land one could see from the table, every sort of bean and tuber and leafy thing and many delicious meats, always fried, boiled, burned, but never microwaved. I once had a two-hour conversation with my grandmother about what a microwave was and spent most of the time failing to explain how the device was not a bomb.
No, the food was normal, but the service was not, because the men ate first.
“You did what?” people would say, when I told them this story.
“The men,” I’d repeat, “ate first.”
“How did that happen?”
Mostly with forks, I’d explain.
It’s ready,” Grandmother Key would say.
And there we’d go, Grandfather Key, Pop, uncles, boy cousins, nephews, Bird, me. We’d eat with great pleasure, while the women sat in the living room, waiting, starving, planning our deaths, except for the one or two who stayed near the table, to serve us.
“To do what?” people would say.
“To serve the men,” I would say.
Pop’s glass would be empty, and he would shake it, and the sound of the ice would bring one of the women running, usually his mother, sometimes his wife.
Occasionally, I’d look past the table and see a girl cousin staring at us from behind a piece of furniture, licking her lips while I ate my third pork chop. It was hard to know what she was thinking. Did she want some of this pork chop? Did she want to hurt me with it?
But there was never any complaint, nothing to suggest that this was not the habit of every American family in every home at that very moment.
There was a part of me that felt, yes, maybe it was weird.
And there was another part of me that felt, yes, maybe I would like some cake.
When I left home, this story about Sunday dinners was one of my favorites to tell to my progressive friends. It upset them greatly, but they also loved it, for it confirmed what most of them already believed about certain parts of America. They always wondered how I could come from such a simian world and yet be so egalitarian and kind, which made me wonder how I’d ever given them that impression. After all, it was me, not my father, who’d met a coquettish redhead in my first semester of college and, within thirty minutes of knowing her, asked her to do my laundry.
She actually said yes. We even made a date for the weekend.
“And I need some things ironed, too,” I said, as she pushed her bicycle home, my laundry in a sack on her handlebars.
Two days later, she called.
“I’m not going to do your laundry,” she said, outraged.
What had happened to the sweet girl? Had she been studying Marxism? She explained that it was presumptuous of me to expect her to put a crease in my khakis. How dare you, was her tone. I could hear a woman in the background, feeding her lines.
She explained that my whites would be in the lobby of my dormitory, unwashed, and hung up the phone. Wow. I’d learned my lesson. From now on, I vowed, I would only ask female relatives to do my laundry.
Two months later, I met the woman I’d marry.
She was fifteen, and I was eighteen, and she was visiting my school, a placed called Belhaven, where since the nineteenth century, Presbyterian youth have gone to feel bad about lusting for other Presbyterian youth. I had a few classes with her older sister, who was about as warm to me as Vladimir Putin to a wounded elk, but I liked the looks of the younger one.
So, we met, and nothing happened for ten years.
She did not speak to me because, according to her, I was “weird.”
I did not speak to her because, according to bystanders, she kept “running away.”
Word on the street was, she liked soccer players, which I felt was a cry for help. She also cried for help when I would try to speak to her, which was another cry for help.
Then, a decade later, I came home from graduate school one weekend to find her sharing an apartment with a good friend. There we were, my friend and me, sitting on the porch, and this young woman just walks up, bums a cigarette, gives me a little grin, and goes inside.
“I’m going to marry her,” I said to my friend. I could not explain why I’d said that.
A few days later, I saw her at a wedding.
At the reception, we talked.
At the party after the reception, we talked more.
My plan was to talk to her until her brain stopped working properly and then ask her to marry me. We did a lot of laughing. Nobody had told me how funny she was. How could somebody that gorgeous be so funny? She had clearly been exposed to gamma rays in her youth. It wasn’t fair.
I told her about all my failures in writing, and she told me about all her failures with soccer players, and by the time I took her home, I was in love. I’d always thought I’d fall for a tortured poetess, but she was my opposite in every way. Unlike me, she had no interest in books or canoes or live music or talking about her every psychological state until those around her fell asleep or attempted to escape through a window. On paper, this was not going to work.
When fall came, I knew it was time to do something I’d never done with a girlfriend: take her to Coldwater for Thanksgiving. On the way there, our first real road trip, she taught me a great way to pass the time in the car called the Penis Game, where you replace any word in a traffic sign or billboard with penis.
“Do Not Block Penis!” she said, pointing to a traffic sign.
“Are you okay?”
“Penis Parking Only!” she said.
We spent the next two hours this way, laughing, dying.
“Penis Five Miles Ahead!”
“Number One Penis in Mississippi!”
Soon we laughed ourselves out. I could live forever with a woman who understood the value of a word like penis. As we got closer to Coldwater, I decided it was time to explain how we did things at Thanksgiving.
“The thing is,” I said, “the men eat first.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know, we’ll say a blessing, and then you go to the living room and wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“To eat.”
“And what are you doing while I’m waiting?” she said.
“Eating,” I said.
I tried to explain that it had something to do with farming, the men needing to eat quickly so as to excuse themselves to see to the few chores, the Outside Things, but this explanation had no legs.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “It is so stupid.”
Silence. Quiet.
“Penis for Senate!” I said, pointing, but she didn’t laugh.
A few minutes after we arrived, all the men took their places around the table, and so did I. And my girlfriend followed me to the table.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Sitting down.”
She pulled out a chair.
“Maybe you’d like to sit in the living room?” I said.
She gave me a little grin and sat down.
My grandfather and my father looked at her, and then looked at me, while I looked into the mashed potatoes, to see if Jesus was in there.
A clearing of the throat.
“Let’s pray,” Grandfather Key said.
And we ate. That’s when I knew I would marry her. And of course, I did. You know that already.
The first time I remember our discussing who should do what, the cooking and the cleaning and the housework, we were in the kitchen of our first apartment.
“Why haven’t you taken the garbage out?” she asked.
She pointed to an unfamiliar canlike object in the corner. It was in a part of the kitchen where I had often seen my wife, but I paid no attention to what she did there. She had all sorts of hobbies that I felt were not my business, such as collecting empty milk jugs, which I made sure to save for her.
“Stop it!” she said, as I put an empty jug into the fridge. “Why do you do that?”
“Is this a trick question?” I said.
She just stood there.
It was a game! The name of this game was “Where Does My Wife Want the Empty Milk Jug to Be?”
“What about the sink?” I said. “So you can clean it.”
“Why would I want to clean that?”
“You could fill it with rocks and make a shaker.”
I made a shaking motion with the empty jug, and she made a motion that seemed like she was going to kick my face through my brain.
She explained that what you do is, you throw it away.
“But the can is full,” I said.
And she explained what you do is, you empty the garbage.
She held up the bag with one hand and told me to take it out, which is what I did, hurrying back to the kitchen, eager to see her pull more fun things out of the can.
“Where’d you put it?” she said, of the garbage bag.
“The porch.”
“No.”
The bag of garbage, she explained, had to be transported to a larger can.
The beautiful woman with the shoulders and almond eyes, my own Sophia Loren, had become a garbage Nero. How had this happened? I felt the sting of a moral conviction deep in my young and ignorant heart, some friction between the way I thought of the world and how it actually worked. The sting was minor, almost forgettable, the kind of pain you can drown out with a beer and a good eight hours of sleep. It was nothing, I hoped.
That night, I thought about all the world’s garbage being moved from smaller cans, to larger cans, to ever larger cans, until it got to the biggest can of all. Where was this can? Who emptied it? God? Does God have a wife? Or a husband? Or at least a maid?
The years, they roll on. You grow, you have children, maybe you fight about small things, like bath toys, which apparently are grown in the uterus when you have children. Like all our fights, the bath toy fight was really about the quality of our marriage, but saying, “I want to fight about our marriage!” is a silly way to start. It’s better to begin with something provocative, like, “If you don’t get rid of those bath toys, I am going to start peeing on them in the shower.”
Happy Meal toys, landfill fodder, Popsicle sticks gnawed into barbed lances, the rubber ducks and turtles that retain water for several hundred years, I hated them. They lived on the floor of our only bathroom, where, in olden times, homeowners were expected to stand.
“Do we really need all these toys?” I asked my wife.
“Do we really need you?” she said.
She still wasn’t very good at expressing her feelings in words, but I deduced, through a complicated series of door-and cabinet-slammings, that her position was this: The toys represented the necessary messiness of family life, the fragments of joy that she worked hard to provide for our children, and that my hatred of the toys was really a hatred of our life, and her efforts to make it a happy one.
And again, there came the old sting, rising up from down under, and I pushed it back down. They were just bath toys. I would’ve thrown them away myself, but bath toys are an Inside Thing, and men, as we all know, only do Outside Things. Besides, if I’d thrown them away, she’d only have fished them back out of the garbage, further confusing me about what should and should not be thrown away. The way the fight ended was, a special task force determined that I should insert my head into my rectum and die.
Sometimes, we fought about sex, which we had to stop calling a meeting, because our children had a gift for metaphor, so we started calling it “the budget,” which made it sound so much more fun.
“Do you want to work on the budget?” I’d ask, while the TV hypnotized our children.
“We did the budget already this week,” my wife would say.
“We should review the spreadsheets.”
“I’ve seen the spreadsheets.”
“Some people make new spreadsheets every day.”
“Those people are not doing their budget right,” she said.
And then, if I decided to be hurt by this, we’d have a fight, and our kids would think it was about money, but it was never about money, unless it was about money, because sometimes it was about money. Like any healthy marriage, we both made gently terroristic demands of the other, and sometimes these demands resulted in fights, and sometimes they merely resulted in a quiet, respectful hatred. My wife’s demands included:
Being “helpful”
Closing “drawers”
Reading her “mind”
Never touching her anywhere unless I have written permission
Not chewing or drinking or talking so loudly
Not making sounds ever out of my face
My demands of her included:
Taking a chill pill
Turning that frown upside down
Allowing me to talk during movies and TV shows and also when she is talking
Acknowledging my presence when I am declaring great ideas for novels into the air
Not checking her phone while I explain how great this salad was that I had this one time
When our fights got really good, I’d start bellowing like a bull elk in rut, which frightened the children, but did nothing for my wife.
“Oh, you’re such a big man,” she would say, when I got loud. “SOOOO big! SOOOO important!”
I found this unfair, for two reasons: First, I had always attempted to be more progressive than my father, a man who indeed would have agreed that he was a very big man and should be obeyed, and second, because secretly, I believed myself to be a very big man who should be obeyed. That was the sting of it.
Is this what marriage was supposed to be?
You hear a lot about marriage in church. The Bible was full of many exemplary unions, such as Adam and Eve’s, who created original sin and gave birth to children who murdered one another and soiled creation with the blood of all humanity. Then there was Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was quite old, so God told Abraham to make a baby with the maid, Hagar, which he did, because when God tells you to make sex with the maid, you don’t ask questions, even if she is named after a Viking.
There are more marriages in the Bible, but these two are the most normal.
Then there’s the Book of Ephesians, which suggests that men ought “to love their wives as their own bodies,” which perhaps meant the Lord wanted us to get our wives drunk and take them to the gym?
Most important, it is recommended that husbands are to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church,” which, if the simile was to be believed, meant that at some point my wife might demand I be tortured and then killed by the government, which, during some of our fights, did not seem unlikely. It’s funny now, but at the time, it was not funny. At the time, it was a terrifying thought to think that much of our fighting was fated because my wife and I might have married the wrong person.
We passed the milestones: Year One, Five, Ten. We had babies. We bought a house. It got robbed. It was a life.
I took on new responsibilities at work, and she took on more at home, mostly with the children, who, according to a book she read, needed to be fed at least weekly, which required more groceries, which required regular trips to Walmart, which made her violent.
We did things happy families do. Cookouts, vacations, birthdays with ponies. When we fought about things like bath toys, I brought flowers home, which she appreciated. Sure, we had problems. Maybe she didn’t dance with me at bars, and maybe I didn’t get excited about going to Disney World, and maybe I could feel the tremors of my conscience telling me I was doing this all wrong, and that if I kept it up, Something Bad might happen, but still, we laughed, we cried, we lived, we put the children down at a reasonable hour, so we could eat dinner in peace, just sitting there, watching television from different pieces of furniture, not saying a word.
Men over here, women over there.
Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, not wanting her to see me seeing her, I’d look at my wife on the couch, and something sort of sickening would make itself known in my intestines, the shadow of some terrible monster circling under the water of our home.
Is she happy, I wondered?
Would she ever have an affair?
What would it be like to be divorced?
None of the insidious hurricanes that destroy marriages battered the roof: no addictions, no adultery, save what I’m sure was the mutual daydreaming of what life might be like with other people, as her body bore the marks of three children and I went from looking decent shirtless to being required by most city ordinances to be carried in a horse trailer. But on the worst days, I’d find myself wondering: Is this marriage dead? There was no hatred, no anger, just a blank space where love should be.
So you push the terror down with the heel of a boot and tell yourself you’re happy, because you’ve got a career and a family and a life that you love and sometimes don’t, and you find yourself standing in church and hearing a chord change in a hymn that hits you like a memory and the place inside you where the feelings live splits wide open and you get a little weepy.
It’s a beautiful life, you tell yourself.
And later that day, standing in the kitchen with a beer, surrounded by your wife and children, you find yourself thinking that these are the salad days.
And then you finish that beer, and your wife puts the kids to bed, and you have a discussion about a few things, work, money, the future, and something comes out of your wife’s mouth that ends the salad days forever.
Before I tell you what my wife said, it’s important to know that all week, we’d been having an ongoing discussion about money and time. We had a big decision to make, which was: Should I work more, and make more money, which seemed impossible, since I was already working too much? Or should I work about the same, and make the same money, which had turned out to seem like not enough money, having three daughters who were required by oppressive governments to wear clothes and shoes to school?
My wife said, Yes, I should make more money.
And I said, Maybe we just think we need the money.
And she said, Do you know how much milk costs?
And I said, Time is more precious than stuff.
And she said, You’re never here anyway.
And I said, That’s not true.
And that’s when she said the thing:
“If you’re not going to be a part of our lives, at least we can have some money.”
It hit me square in the tender part of my aorta, a dagger of a razor-tipped sentence. The room turned like the Gravitron, that ride at the fair that pins you to the wall until your organs slide out your earholes, and that’s what happened. My organs slid out my earholes.
My wife did not usually talk about her feelings like that, and was as surprised as me that this thing she’d kept secret was out.
And what was the secret?
That she didn’t really like me much anymore.
I asked her to explain, and it all came pouring out, that I was too focused on work, not there physically, that she felt like she was parenting alone, doing all the housework, all the childrearing, while I tried to remind her how money was made, that it required people being places for long periods of time, and that besides, she was not there emotionally, that the funny woman I’d married had long since been replaced by a deadness in the eyes, a joyless sighing in my presence, the sudden destruction of all general mirth in her vicinity.
The word divorce came up a few times over the next week, not in the form of a threat, but just a grenade, a pin pulled on a word to see what would happen.
I was pretty sure she hated our life, and maybe I did, too, and was it even really our life? It was two halves of a life. A divorce? It sort of seemed like we already were.
And then, a week after she’d said the thing she couldn’t unsay, after all fighting and slugging, exhausted, our best punches thrown, what seemed like the last leg of the pub crawl of our marriage, she mentioned she might take the kids and leave.
“Where?” I said.
“Away.”
I couldn’t tell if it was a promise, or a threat.
That night, I marshaled all evidence against her, and there was no shortage: Her gloom, the way she winced like she’d smelled something rancid when I tried to touch her, how she refused to talk about anything, ever, until it was too late.
I tried to make her coldness the common denominator of our worst moments, her refusal even to try to enjoy what she knew I loved: dancing, jalapeños, videos of interspecies love between cats and dogs, the most hilarious passages of A Confederacy of Dunces.
But then, last I checked, all that stuff didn’t mean I was not also a jackass. When I looked at the leviathan, all I could see was my face, and questions about toilet seats, and leaving them up, and drawers, and leaving them open, and giving the children tortilla chips to eat in the living room after she’d cleaned, and how I tried to hug her after a workout, knowing she would hate it, and how I left the lamp on late into the night, reading books, while she with her translucent eyelids tried and failed to go to sleep next to me, exhausted from the long day of doing all the Inside Things that my rearing told me were her responsibility.
I had inherited my father’s sham dichotomy: men over here, women over there. And maybe that worked in olden times, or maybe not. Maybe that’s not history. Maybe that’s just a bad idea, a story someone told. Maybe everything I knew about women was wrong.
I got up, couldn’t sleep, walked across the hall to my office.
I got so upset at the idea of my wife at some point in the future actually not being my wife that my heart began to beat hard, too fast, so fast I could feel it in my knees, in my ears. My heart dropped three stories into my kidneys, and I could feel it beating there, where it clearly had no business being, and my back began to spasm. I got down on the floor.
Is this what a broken heart felt like? It felt a lot like diabetes.
I saw clearly that there was one thing I needed to stop doing, and that was behaving like my father. He’d had three wives. Just because he could be an idiot about women didn’t mean I got to do it, too. Besides, he’d finally figured it out. He’d been married to my mother for about forty years. He’d clearly learned something.
What a gift, to learn, and change.
I looked around my office, as I lay dying on the floor.
On the wall, two pairs of antlers, formerly attached to the heads of deer my grandfather killed many years ago, representative, perhaps, of the Manly Outside Things I didn’t really do anymore. On another wall, books, representative of what I did now, which, let’s be honest, were very much Inside Things.
My father had no interest in reading, or in the art on the wall, the fountain pens on the desk, the music on the shelf. There was a gun, but it was hidden, like a relative with a facial deformity. I was unlike him in every way. Why had I chosen to be precisely like him in the way I treated my wife?
I closed my eyes, tried to sleep on the bare floor. It would be a pitiful sight. I pictured my wife finding me there in the morning, covering me with a blanket. No, she would ignore me. You couldn’t extract pity from the woman if you used an industrial centrifuge. Pity was not the solution.
I tried to remember why I’d married her, how funny and weird she was, how she smelled cups before using them, how lovely it had been, once, to see her at a wedding. And I remembered the Penis Game. A woman who will teach you the Penis Game comes along only once in a lifetime.
I loved that she didn’t want to dance with me, and I loved that she tried anyway. She had something you couldn’t get at, a fire in her that nobody could touch. I loved that. I tried touching it many times, and she always hit me when I tried to touch it, and I loved that, too.
Here was a woman who just sat down at a tableful of men and ate and didn’t care, a woman who held my hand, grabbed my arm, seized my shirtsleeve, wailed to the high heavens when the tiny humanoid screamers we’d made together emerged from history, naked souls wailing. These were ours: We’d made them. She taught me to love these children, showed me how to do it with shit on your hands—and I’d taught her some things, too, like how to talk about her feelings using words and not doors.
That night, I dreamt about the garbage can, and even the larger garbage can, and even the city dump, where, one day, I could take my daughters to show them where I would bury the bodies of their boyfriends if they reminded me too much of the idiot I used to be.
Day came, the sun did rise.
I went on a walk. I sweated, I wondered.
What is a marriage?
It’s not an economy, because spreadsheets cannot explain who should take out the garbage, and it’s not a logic problem, because an equation can’t tell you when to come home from the office, and it’s not a zero-sum game, because love only makes more love, and it’s not a hostage negotiation, where you make demands in exchange for what you want, because that’s called terrorism. No, Jesus was right. The only good metaphor for marriage is death, and man, I felt like I’d died.
I finished my walk, sat on the back porch, removing my shoes.
She came out, stood there.
I was supposed to love this woman like my own body, which was starting to make sense, because when I took a bath, I didn’t expect my body to thank me, because that would be weird, because my body had no mouth, except for the one on my face, which I employed, in that moment on the porch when our life together could have been swallowed up by the monster, by saying these words to her.
“I’m sorry for being an idiot,” I said.
And we talked.
“You have to stop working twelve hours a day,” she said.
“Sometimes, I might have to,” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“You have to stop not telling me how you feel,” I said.
“It’s hard for me.”
And we talked some more.
And I knew, as we talked, that I’d have to make my wife want me around again.
And that I’d have to work on the budget, the real one, not the sex one.
And that maybe we could work on the sex one, too, later.
But I didn’t say it out loud, which was an improvement.
It had been a difficult season. The rains came, washed things away, exposed bones. It would take a while for us to laugh together like before, but we could get there. All it took was getting back in the car and holding hands and moving on down that road, trying to pay attention to the signs.
Penis Construction Ahead.
Why had she ever married me? I have no idea. Whatever it was, I was hoping she remembered. I think she did.
I stood up.
“I love you,” I said, all hot, all sweaty, and she closed her eyes, and I touched her, and she didn’t wince.