Dear Answer Lady: Before he slammed the door and moved out last month, my husband spent a year looking at me darkly and saying things like “What have you done with the spoons?” Do you think he has a girlfriend?
I do.
Why?
Well, I’d have a girlfriend too if my wife hid the spoons.
They were in the dishwasher!
Answer Lady was only kidding. Seriously, I do think he has a girlfriend. This is the way they get when they are looking to leave.
I think I should google her, don’t you, Answer Lady?
You don’t even know her name.
Oh, that’s right.
Just look at this year’s canceled checks from the bank, the checks they xerox so tinily now you need a magnifying glass to read them. See that one he wrote for several hundred dollars to Sherry Waxman, with “research” on the memo line?
He’s not researching anything.
Just Sherry!
I don’t think it’s that funny. This whole thing isn’t funny. His patients keep calling me at the house looking for him. He always gives them our home phone so they can reach him in a crisis, and now no one can find him. His office voice-mail box has been full for two weeks, and he doesn’t answer anyone’s e-mails or cell phone calls. He’s a psychoanalyst.
Of course he is. Has he contacted you at all?
He called right after he left, to say that I’d ruined his life for nineteen years. Then he called three hours later to ask for the phone number of our periodontist.
Tell Answer Lady you didn’t give it to him.
I almost did, but then I said, “I think you can look that up yourself.” And he said, “Oh, I get your game!” and hung up. He did e-mail me once, after I’d e-mailed him the membership dues from his gym. I sent the bill as an attachment. And he e-mailed back, “Please send this to me the regular way. I don’t do attachments.”
“I don’t do attachments”! That’s priceless. What did you say?
I think I deleted it.
Very restrained! How good of you not to say, “Why don’t you get your girlfriend to do it for you?”
I didn’t know about the girlfriend then. The girlfriend! I forgot about her for a minute. Should I google her now?
No, not yet. How’s your money situation?
It’s awful. It’s scary. I have to sell the house, which is freaking me out, just on a practical level. There’s so much stuff here I don’t know where to start. And I raised my children here! This is our home!
Take some deep breaths. It helps, really. They’re teaching kindergartners to do it now. Okay. You’re not going to be that sad about moving, you’ll see. You don’t really need that big house anymore. Two of the rooms in it are just places where you pile old tax returns and things you couldn’t even get rid of at a yard sale, like your broken waffle iron and that old Easy-Bake Oven. Also, your neighborhood has filled up with young couples with toddlers, and the mothers keep bending your ear about their children’s lactose intolerance and preschool applications and you’re just too old to care that much.
I still like Halloween, though. I like the trick-or-treaters. They’re so sweet.
They will have Halloween in your new place, Answer Lady promises. Halloween is the biggest holiday on the planet. Even if you moved to the North Pole, trick-or-treaters would knock on your igloo to take all the Kit Kats and not want the little boxes of Good & Plenty. As far as your own children are concerned, they’ll adapt. In any event, they’ll be off at college soon and you will be alone in your big house most of the time, racking up those huge heating bills and having to shovel out your driveway when it snows. Move to a nice condo, where they take care of those things.
Oh, my God. College. How am I going to pay for it? And now I keep getting these enormous American Express bills for expensive restaurants, which I now realize are for dinners my husband is taking Sherry Waxman to. I think I should google her now.
Just hold your horses. About college: Forgive my bluntness, but you two probably couldn’t really afford it before this recent turn of events. You’ll just have to find a way, like everyone else. I’m sorry about the AmEx bills, though, I really am.
The subject of restaurants reminds me of something. Now that I think about it, my husband may have taken my kids out to lunch with his girlfriend a few weeks ago. He called them on his cell phone to say he was in town and wanted to have lunch. They were so excited because they miss him a lot, but when they came back from the restaurant, they said he brought a former patient he ran into. They didn’t like her that much. Apparently she said, “You’d think they’d have a plain old ham sandwich on the menu.” Then she took all their leftovers home to feed her parrot. I didn’t think about any of this until just now.
Really?
I’m so mad! I can’t believe he took my kids out to lunch with her.
You’d be surprised how often this happens, but it’s shocking when it happens to you, Answer Lady knows. So now it’s time. Let’s just go to Google and type in Sherry Waxman, Idon’tlikeyouville, USA. Answer Lady is joking about the town.
Don’t worry that there will be three million Sherry Waxmans. Most of them are for a child actress also named Sherry Waxman, whose mother is her manager and seems to get Sherry, who has done a national Doritos commercial and is ten years old but Can Play Younger, into the papers every five minutes. Here’s the Sherry we want: the Sherry Waxman with a website called madformacaws.com. Are you sitting down?
Yes.
It seems that Sherry has quite a few macaws, as pets, and madformacaws.com is her forum for giving advice to other macaw lovers.
You mean the birds? The big ones with scary beaks?
Yes. Sherry writes that their beaks are often called “can openers” and says they can bite off a finger. But Sherry uses behavioral therapy to teach them how not to bite. She can also stop them from screaming, which apparently they’re prone to do for hours on end, and teach them to “do their business” on the toilet.
Good Lord.
She says they are wonderful companions. Her newest macaws are Alexander the Great and Festus. She named Festus after her favorite character in Gunsmoke.
So she’s older than I am.
She looks that way. She’s chunky too. And she has very high poufy purple hair.
I’m surprised my kids didn’t mention the hair.
Me too, a little. And she tweets. Most of her tweets are about the cute things Festus and Alexander are doing, but Sherry has other interests as well. Here’s one: “YOU GOTTA READ Siddhartha—AWESOME! Just read it for the first time!”
My husband would never be with someone who thinks Hermann Hesse is awesome. I liked Siddhartha, but he thought it was a silly book. I think you have the wrong Sherry Waxman.
Here’s another: “Sarah Palin BLOWS!”
Well, my husband also thinks Sarah Palin blows, but he would never put it that way, that teenage-y way, and he wouldn’t spend time with anyone who does. I’m sure we have the wrong—
And another: “After seven years alone, happily curled up with my honey and watching Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday RULES!”
Judy Holliday is my husband’s favorite. He loves Judy Holliday.
Maybe this googling wasn’t such a good idea.
You said it was okay. You’re supposed to know these things.
Everyone makes mistakes. Answer Lady is very sorry.
Do you think he loves her? She sounds like a nut. How could he love her? What did I do to deserve this?
Do you still believe in cause and effect? Don’t you know by now that the world is often a crazy and cockamamy thing, a shoddy old fair ride whose drunk operator passed out at the controls long ago with an unfiltered Camel dangling out of his mouth? You didn’t know that sometimes the cars come loose and just fly off into space?
I guess I forgot.
And let’s be honest. Didn’t you kind of feel something coming? Were you two really having a lot of fun before Sherry?
Okay, no.
And about loving Sherry. Maybe he does love Sherry, Sherry and her shrieking birds, and her blog. This is unknowable by you. But you know what? One day you will think, “Well, even Sherry deserves to be loved.”
You’re kidding.
Not at all. You’ll see. For now, try not to think about it. Say goodbye to him, and to Sherry.
Just like that?
Just like that.
Goodbye.
That’s my girl.