Читать книгу Not Tonight, Honey: Wait 'til I'm A Size 6 - Susan Reinhardt - Страница 13

Not long ago I ran into a man who took great exception with women who are trying to find decent men, even husbands, and the newspaper column I’d written on the subject. He fired off an e-mail that spread flames when I opened it.

Essentially, he said that all a woman really wants is a husband to buy her things, namely a washer and dryer. A washer and dryer? Come on. Where is he meeting his women? Fleece Night at the flea market?

I called him up, which I tend to do when people send blistering e-mails thinking that’s going to be the extent of the contact. No way he was getting off so easy, believing he could sputter his evil and simply hit the Send key with no repercussions. No, sir. I like to hunt them down in the phone directory and call their sorry good-for-nothing arses.

He picked up on the fourth ring, sounding as if I’d awakened him from a Percocet doze. There is an entire subculture of people I’ve discovered through my work as a journalist, who stay home all day with “ailments” and exist in a state of narcotic somnolence. Occasionally, they call and babble all sorts of indecencies and indignities.

“What is it?” the sleepy man grumbled.

“I’m calling about your e-mail, Mr. Hicks. It smacked of misogyny.”

“Say what? Did you say I was a pygmy?”

“No, I said miso—”

“Who is this a-callin’ me at this ungodly hour?”

“This is Susan, with the paper. You sent an e-mail and—”

“Woman, it ain’t even noon! All’s I said was you womenfolk is out to get men for all they got. In particular, a washer and dryer, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s true,” I said, “that some men—and I have to say in all honesty you sound like one of them—would rather be neutered than commit their love and lives to a woman, but the point of my story was how to meet great men in this small city.”

“You ain’t in touch with reality,” he barked. “All the women are out for one thing. To grab hold of a man and get married, then snatch all his money and everything else they can milk off him.”

Excuse me, el Anusaurus, I wanted to say. “Women work, too. Some of us even get paid better than these men.”

“Wake up and smell the wallet, woman,” he screamed. “You need a reality check. You are like all the rest of them just looking for a house and a washer and dryer.”

“What’s with this washer and dryer business? I don’t know a single woman who married a man for his Maytags.”

“Well, they do. Pure and simple.”

I decided to ask my husband, Tidy Stu, about this. He’d know. He once had to fight off a bevy of frumps chasing him for his authentic log cabin with the possum skeletons under the covered front and side porches. But come to think of it, he did own a stackable unit, and I imagine this intrigued a lot of his dates who were tired of changing dollar bills and sitting in the soapy humidity at Suds’n’Duds.

“Hon,” I ventured, “do you think women are only after men for their appliances and such?”

“That’s right,” he said. “That and our hardware.” He started laughing, thinking he was the wittiest person on the planet. “You saw my ’76 Buick wagon and then you had to sink your claws into me.”

“I saw that car and nearly ran for my life. It was a motorized mess, a horror on bald Goodyears. I married you because you’re neat and clean and can work a sponge better than Monet could work a paintbrush.”

A few days later the evil Anusaurus sent another scorching e-mail, all about how women are only after what a man can give them materially, so I dialed his number, this time at nine o’clock in the morning.

“I’ll have you know,” I said in my calmest but firmest voice, “that I’ve loved many a poor man in my day and so have my friends. One of my best friends, in fact, once dated a man who took her to a fast food restaurant and used a coupon for the corn dogs. She didn’t ditch him. They even got engaged and he didn’t own a single credit card—couldn’t qualify. As for a ring, he gave her an eighty-nine-dollar amethyst. She would have kept him, too, had he not gone to prison for robbing the Texaco. So there!”

He mumbled incoherently into the receiver, losing some momentum. “You women use your bodies as weapons.”

Yes, I’ll give him partial credit for that. Weapons of male destruction is what I like to call it. I’ve got a set of hips that could compact garbage and I’m considering buying a pair of enhancements that could double as flotation devices.

“Weapons, huh? Listen here. As for your comments about marriage being legalized prostitution, you are way wrong. We’re not all a bunch of hookers wanting washers and dryers. You need the spin cycle, you…you…ogre.”

He gurgled and tried to find his voice.

“Bye now. You have a lovely day and please refrain from e-mailing me again. I’ve put a hex on your address.”

As for the whole notion of husband catching, why, it’s something we’ve done since the dawn of man and womankind. Of course we want husbands—that is, if we’ve never had one. Those of us who’ve had one, if we are still half sane when the divorce ink is dry, would never have another. At least not for a while.

With men it’s different. They are really hard to marry off until they do it the first time. After the maiden voyage down the aisle, they can’t seem to want anything else. When the first wife leaves, they champ at the bit to get the second marriage rolling so the dinners don’t stop and the sex is fairly regular. They need a woman like a bed needs a blanket. Women, on the other hand, can live half a century single and call those the best years of their lives. I’ve seen it happen over and over.

With men a succession of wives is like a lifeboat, offering in the form of domestic skills such pleasantries as missionary trips to the bedroom, a roach-proof house, toilets without the rings of Saturn crusting the bowl, fried chicken and limas, rice and gravy with flaky buttermilk biscuits every Sunday.

I knew something of that nature was going on when my phone rang about a week after my run-in with the washer/ dryer psycho, and the past roared in like a storm surge. It was spring, which is the open hunting season on love in all its forms. There was definitely something in the air besides pollen when one fine afternoon in late April I had the great pleasure of hearing from an ex-boyfriend, the one with horse teeth and a high-pitched mosquito-whine voice. He was the boyfriend before Thurston Truitt III.

It had been eighteen or more years since I heard that soprano, but the spring heat, a wife who bolted, hormones, and the big yellow sun drove him directly to the phone where he dialed up his past as one would excavate a grave. He was in the mood for resurrecting and possibly getting laid and eventually having his shirts ironed and a hot meal on the table just like most of the other freshly divorced males, God love ’em. I imagined he’d called a fleet of us on his list, the girls from his personal recycling bin.

“What’s up?” squeaked my old flame, who didn’t like me quite enough in the ’80s but somehow thought he might whistle a new tune now.

“Oh, not much,” I said. “Just two kids, a mortgage, a marriage, and a mild case of going to pot.”

“You got some pot?” he asked, and I remembered then how much he loved being stoned twenty-four hours a day.

“No. You know I don’t mess with that. What’s up with you? Why the call after nearly twenty years?”

“I’m divorced,” he chimed as if I’d be deliriously overjoyed.

“I’m so sorry. Hmm. Wasn’t she that sixteen-year-old you met a few years ago? That’s the word on the street and in high school parking lots.”

“She was almost eighteen,” he said. “I see your sharp tongue hasn’t mellowed.”

“I guess you remember now why you dumped me.”

“No, you dumped me.”

“Wrong,” I said. “You traded me in for the California Hemp Queen. Remember?”

“We were just friends. She had good weed.”

“That’s right. Dumb me. I forgot friends sleep together for a year and a half.”

“I don’t want to talk about her. When can I see you?” he had the nerve to ask. “I think about you all the time.”

“It’s been almost twenty years,” I said. “Twenty years!”

He cleared his throat and sniffed a few times. Obviously spring had rendered the guy 100 percent insane or divorce had shoved a Roman candle up his sphincter, certain to send him rocketing for the altar. That’s one more thing I must mention. Divorced men, as I’ve said, are fairly easy targets for one who is really hungry to marry. You don’t even have to pretend to be moving to another area or leading a glorious life to snag a commitment from them. I’m told divorced men make good husbands because they’ve learned a few hard lessons and are beat down enough to know it won’t kill them to say, “Yes, dear,” and keep their mouths shut on other topics first husbands can’t leave alone. The other bonus is the captivating children he’ll bring to the mix, stepchildren sure to love you so much they plot daily the various ways to make your life a living hell.

For a good long while, I sat in shock and silence on the phone, not ready to answer this old flame with the sudden urges to go through his little black book. I wondered how many he’d called before he got to my name.

“I miss you,” he said unconvincingly.

“How did you find me?” My daddy had run this particular fellow off in 1984, a year before I met Mercury Man Truitt. And then I remembered the wonderful new world of Finder’s Keepers—the Internet. Google.com.

“I’ll bet you look exactly the same as ever, don’t you?” he said.

I put a hand across the flesh mountain that used to be my flat stomach. “Oh yes. Unless you figure in the twenty pounds and teats that hang like two old-lady stockings. Not to mention the fact I could very well be a candidate for a future front ass.”

He laughed and it was so high-pitched I heard two dogs barking in the background. It was the same pterodactyl cry that used to cause my eye muscles to twitch and left arm to seize. “I saw your pretty picture online.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the photo was taken seven years ago.

“I’m not getting any younger,” he said.

“Neither are your wives,” I countered, feeling mean saying such.

“Seriously. I’m going to be an old man with liver spots by the time I finally get to see you again. I won’t have any hair and my back will be covered in moles. I guess I’ll be calling you from the old folks home. Maybe then you’ll see me.”

“Maybe in the summer of ’42—2042. You might want to brush up on your shuffleboard and bingo. Keep flossing your teeth. The men with original molars seem to get all the rest home babes.”

“That’s pretty mean, Susan. You used to be the nicest girl I ever dated. That’s what I tell everybody.”

“Oh, right. Your sisters laughed at my shoe selections and your bipolar poodle bit a hole out of my ass while your mother sat there and did nothing but pet the killer dog.”

“Come on. Let’s just get together for old times’ sake.”

“I’m sorry, really. Memory lane isn’t my destination of choice. It’s just that I’m completely married and up to my scalp in debt. My husband has an eBay addiction and we’re paying off the fourteen trumpets he ordered in addition to the Lexus with no bumpers or hubcaps; plus there’re the PTA meetings for the next ten to twelve years. I’m on the covered dish committee, along with my volunteer work with Hospice and the Leukemia Society. There’s no time for fraternizing with old flames, hon.”

He cleared his throat and I swear I could hear the swoosh of pages flipping in his little black book. I felt his defeat in the silence.

“You got any single friends?” he asked, and all I could do was take pity on him. I knew how he felt. This is how women feel when the men we have given our lives and years to won’t budge on the issue of marriage. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking.

“Maybe if you act like you’re moving away,” I kindly tell my ex, “the girls will come rushing back begging for your attentions. Or better yet, go to Sears and get the best front-loader and matching dryer money can buy. I’m told that works like a charm. A girl just can’t resist a man with Maytags.”