365 Nights Page 17
We moved to our fab new house in our fab new hood and made some fab new friends—but it took some time. I had to work every day to exorcise Little D abit more. Oooh, I hated her. I told a few friends about Little D, but not many. Who really wants to know that kind of thing, and quite frankly, up to that point, I thought myself to be made of different stuff. So it was a shock all the way around. Even my best friend, Rita, didn’t believe me, and wanted the name and number of my therapist. “You’re not the kind of person to get this,” she said. “Who did you talk to? I want a second opinion.” “Not now,” I said. “I’m late for my massage therapy.”
So there I was in all my pitiful, depressed glory. Charla— for better or for worse. And there was Brad picking up after me—literally and emotionally. That’s when I noticed that, in marriage, you have the little stuff that you think will drive you screaming crazy (like leaving green toothpaste spit sliding down the corner of the sink every morning ). And then there’s the real stuff—like depression, illness, accidents, infertility, unemployment. Once I hit that big-time stuff, it made me realize how small and petty I used to be. Marriage is sometimes about all those crazy left-hand turns during rush-hour traffic on the way to the house—horns blaring, hearts beating, cars swerving . . . and then, finally, peace and safety at home.
APRIL
Spring Training
“This is going to be a huge weekend, honey!” Brad announced on a Friday afternoon.
Great! I’m thinking. What fabulousness has my husband planned for us? What family bonding experience has he thoughtfully conceived and considered? What sweet, quiet romantic moment has he coordinated for the love of his life? I closed my eyes, smiled sweetly, and waited for the inspiring news.
“Well, the Final Four is this weekend and baseball’s Opening Day is Monday. The Buckeyes could be playing for a National Championship and the Tribe could be good this year. Whaddya think?”
Well, not much, really.
My husband is a huge sports fan. NBA, NFL, NCAA—you name it. If it’s on, he’ll watch it. But his true love, besides me? Baseball. Like most baseball purists, he had the game passed down to him. His grandfather played for the Yale Nine. His father was a high school shortstop. His mother cut her baseball teeth on her father’s beloved New York Giants and Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” The Staten Island Scot’s “shot” seared the beauty and legacy of baseball in her mind, which she dutifully passed along to her youngest son. To quote Field of Dreams (Brad’s all-time favorite movie), “The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. This field, this game, it’s a part of our past; it reminds us of all that once was good and could be again.”
As a young boy, Brad’s love of the game would be forged by his mother shouting and waving her arms in unison with Carlton Fisk as he willed his walk-off home run out of Fenway in the twelfth to send the ’75 World Series to Game 7. Reggie Jackson hitting three home runs in Game 6 to seal the Dodgers’ fate—and his place in history. Bill Buckner’s fateful misplay in Game 6 of the ’86 Series. And memories that hit closer to home. David Justice’s home run off Jim Poole in Game 6 of the ’95 Series to beat his hometown Indians in their first World Series since 1954. And of course, José Mesa’s heart-crushing blown save in Game 7 of the ’97 Series. To Brad, this is what spring is about. It’s about baseball.
I’m up against this in the spring, too, friends. That feeling of renewal. That excitement of Opening Day. That “army of steamrollers.” That and, of course, the Final Four.
The problem is I am not a huge sports fan, and can’t really relate to the mythologizing of sports. On a good day, you could call me a fair-weather supporter of my college football team. I am a tad more passionate about my college basketball team, particularly when they are winning NCAA National Championships, which they do often. But to me, it’s just entertainment, it’s not life, and it’s certainly not obsession.
In fact, when my dad called me in 1995 and suggested that I look into buying some PSLs for the NFL franchise coming to town, I barely blinked.
“What’s a PSL?” I asked with the phone wedged on my shoulder as I flipped through files while sitting in my window office on the eighteenth floor of the tallest building in the city. “It’s a permanent seat license,” my dad said. “It means that you will forever have the rights to buy the tickets for those seats.” “Why would I want to do that?” I asked as I spun around and sorted through some other files on the floor in my office. “Well, it’s a great investment,” my dad patiently answered. “It’s a neat way to support your city. You might even enjoy it. And I’ll bet there are some guys who would love a gal who has really great seats for the toughest ticket in town.” Picture a dangling phone swinging back and forth after being tossed across my desk in a mad rush to get thee to the stadium and pick out those wonderful guy magnets—I mean PSLs. Okay, I wasn’t that spastic. But very nearly.
My dad, in a very sweet and appropriate way, has been my wingman over the years. While girls don’t traditionally have a wingman, I did—at least in spirit. And while it didn’t really help sort through all my dating dilemmas, you’ve got to admire my dad for trying. For instance, he used to arm my housemate Dana and me with interesting sports stats to offer up when out and about town mixing and mingling with other young singles.
At the time, Dana and I lived together in a small duplex in the heart of Myers Park in Charlotte, within walking distance of our favorite bar. We had three tiny bedrooms and we used the third as a dressing room/closet (it wasn’t nearly as glam as it sounds). We would sit on opposite sides of a small table in front of our giant Revlon makeup mirrors plucking, chatting, spraying, and grooming before we finally headed out around 10 P.M. (I know, can you believe we ever went out that late?) Every once in a while we would call my dad and ask for some relevant sports trivia, and we would rehearse in a giggly girly way while sorting through Lancôme lipstick from our free gift with purchase.
Thus prepped, we would head out to the Pub, feeling good, looking cute, and rather bursting with Pertinent Sporting Information. The Pub was in a converted house in a historic neighborhood. It was dark and smoky and intimate, with a fireplace in one corner, a bar in the other, and oddly mismatched tables and chairs. There were several televisions posted around the bar (tuned to the sports event du jour), and in warm weather, they opened a giant brick patio. The Pub served the requisite bar food and lots of ice-cold buckets of beer. It was homey and local and one of our hangouts at which to mingle and pretend to watch sports.
One evening, we were one beer into masquerading as Scintillating Sports Enthusiasts, and before I could even wipe the froth off my lip, bam—it was over. That’s right, just like that: Dana had fired off all our collective sports ammunition before she was done with her first Miller Lite. There was not one bullet left in our arsenal about college hoops, the NBA, or how any decent second baseman has to hit better than .315. Nada. I was stunned! I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. And Dana just stood there beaming in all her Scintillating Sports Enthusiast glory.
I couldn’t possibly be mad; I was too busy being surprised. My sweet little roomie, Dana, who was so soft-spoken and kind and not remotely competitive. Well, well, still waters run deep, don’t they? I am not suggesting that she was not soft-spoken, kind, or even competitive, but rather my girl knew to seize the moment and so she did. The things you can do when you have a wingman. It’s a powerful feeling, as Dana will tell you.
Dana eventually did meet her future husband at a “My Dad as Wingman” expedition, but it was not at a bar. Thanks to Dad, we had enviable seats at a great three-day college basketball tournament crawling with cute eligible postgrads. Chris sat behind us throwing popcorn in Dana’s hair (is that guy smooth, or what?) and the rest is history. Now Dr. Phil advises single women to meet guys in a content-rich environment (i.e., sporting venues), and gets highly compensated for it. But my dad knew that years ago, and i
t did prove out for Dana and Chris. I should really pay my dad for all this great advice.
I know that my friend Julia is cringing right now as she reads this. She comes by all her sports gravitas the good old-fashioned way—she earns it. She is a huge sports fan, fanatically tracks sports stats, and would be so disappointed by our sports plagiarism. But hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Because in the midst of finding someone else, don’t we sometimes pretend we’re something we’re not? It inevitably doesn’t work, mind you, in the short run or long term, but we’re all just scouting, whether it be innocent, or not so innocent. So Dana and I, while we do love a good Super Bowl party or a Sunday tailgate, are not sports fans at heart.
Neither is my friend Allison, who managed to camouflage for a long while that she did not share her husband’s fanatical and all-consuming passion for Auburn football. In fact, she was not interested in football, period. She and her husband were at the Auburn/Georgia football game. It was the fourth overtime, 30 flipping degrees, and the crowd was going wild. This game was going down in the history books of football as the stuff of legend, and Allison’s husband looked over at her, the woman with whom he’d chosen to share his love and his interests, and she was checking her watch. “Up until that time, I had kept hidden my sheer disinterest in football, except as it might pertain to tailgating, what one might wear to the game, or who one might see at the game. But I was totally outed.”
Standing in freezing temperatures as my team went into overtime became a new pastime; I did end up securing those four lower-level, end-zone PSLs (which did turn me from a Pathetic Sports Loser into a Popular Sports Lover for at least eight weekends a year). And I became a very popular girl. It also proved to be a major bonus when Brad and I started dating.
In fact, Brad claims those four little PSLs were a deal maker for him. “I mean, you came to the table with a dowry, for Pete’s sake!” he once claimed. “It was awesome.”
“Are you telling me you married me for my lifetime tickets to the NFL?” I screamed. I was incredulous.
“Of course not,” he said. “But it was a nice perk. Kind of like watching the Final Four when your favorite team is in it! You’re going to watch anyway—but now it’s a lot more exciting!” Alrighty then.
But I guess that’s appropriate since most men eat, live, and breathe sports. If they’re not watching sports—they’re watching sports movies. Men who do not weep at the miracle of their first child being brought into the world will cry like babies when Ray Kinsella “has a catch” with his dad in Field of Dreams. My husband becomes a blubbering fool every time it’s on. There are movies he could watch over and over no matter when and where he’s tuning in. There’s Hoosiers—what guy, he claims, doesn’t get choked up when they run “the picket fence” and Jimmy Chit-wood hits the game winner? Football? Look no further than Brian’s Song. If you’re a man and you don’t come unglued during the final scene when Billy Dee Williams’s Gale Sayers comes to the hospital as James Caan’s Brad Piccolo is taking his last breath, then, according to Brad, you don’t have a soul.
Now that Brad is no longer pretending to be interested in taking ballroom dance with me, he is either watching sports—or a movie about sports—or tracking sports online. In the old days before we got married, Brad was so wrapped up in the success of his three favorite teams that the core of his very happiness was deeply invested in wins and losses. He would be moody, quiet, and cranky if his teams lost. He would skulk around the house, muttering under his breath or calling his best friend to vent and scream. Before we met there were days where a particularly painful loss could keep him at home all day, unshaven and in a funk. Brad’s old roommate claims he used to root for the Browns even though he was a Bears fan because Brad would “be insufferable at least through Wednesday.”
If his teams won, Brad would be ebullient, happy, and carefree. The world just seemed brighter to him. He would want to celebrate, to study every sportscast as they fawned over his team’s victories, and to cruise the Internet to find glowing updates and to memorize stats. I mean, the energy and emotion Brad expended to follow not one, but three or even five, sports teams could fuel a small third-world country. Just imagine if he spent all that energy and emotion on me, it would be . . . well, it would probably be incredibly claustrophobic and cloying, so never mind that point.
My real point is before he had a wife and kids and a mortgage, Brad held sports in the center of what most women would consider a small, unhappy, and slightly pathetic life. A life for which most men probably pine and reminisce. Today, Brad works hard to keep his sports mania in check—he probably does a lot of his obsessing when I’m not around. But either way, today there is a discernible difference in the grip that sports has on his life. What’s the diff? Well, not to beat a dead horse, but we do have that DVR, and a couple of growing kids who need his attention, and a wife who is trying to connect with him. All this encourages a good deal of personal growth, don’t you think?
So today, we don’t fight over the remote, and we don’t keep score of who got to watch what last. And we never argue over what’s more important—some meaningless baseball game or who gets voted off a reality show. This does not mean that we are saints and never argue, but it’s primarily because we have a lot of televisions in our house (including one in the bedroom), and peace is kept simply by going to another room. Also, we’ve both realized that we have to keep our television viewing in check and under control, and to throw some hissy fit about the television would just be one giant step back. In our current house, the television sits at a funny angle in the bedroom and you can’t change channels with the remote without sitting up and leaning out of the bed with your arm stretched out and around like a coat hanger antenna. It’s simply too much work for me to watch television in bed, if you can believe it.
Brad and I have never been marital scorekeepers. This is due to several reasons. The first is that I have a terrible memory and my ability to track what Brad has and has not done required massive brainpower that has slowly oozed from my ears since the birth of my children. The second is that we have those handy job descriptions.
In fact, now that we’re on the same team, so to speak, and aspiring to all things intimate, there is no need. I no longer have to note in the back of my head, “Well, I guess I’ll have to give it up this weekend since it’s been a while.” And Brad no longer has to count back the days or even weeks to locate the fading and distant memory of us rolling in the hay. Yes, the only things I’m counting are the days until this sex every day thing is over. While I am still committed to the overall arrangements, I must admit that the day-to-day mechanics are getting a tad bit old.
But sex should be a team sport, and I am indeed a member of Team Muller. Obviously, having sex alone is not as fun. But the more salient point is that Brad and I now have to work together to make sex work. A concept that, until now, was sadly foreign to me. It turns on its head the adversarial power play between spouses—men gaming on how to get it, and women gaming on how to get out of it. What if, gasp, Brad and I aspired to the same things sexually for the rest of our lives? Without even knowing it, our sex-every-day arrangement made us teammates. Would it stick? I wondered. Because to paraphrase Yogi Berra, from a woman’s perspective, sex is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical. (He also famously said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over”—but that’s a reference for another chapter.) For men, I’d have to deduce that sex is 100 percent physical, and if there is a nice emotional connection, that’s just gravy.
I’ve referenced sportsmanship and this is a good time to address the critical role that it plays in this intimacy-every-day arrangement. And while I’ve done my best to conduct myself in an appropriate manner behind closed doors, I’m amazed that this agreement has forced me to be a stellar player on and off the court. I am finding I must treat my teammate with respect, encourage him with a “good game” even when he didn’t (if you get my drift), conduct myself with integrity, and abid
e by the rules with a good and fair attitude. It’s not been impossible, but it has forced a kind of mindfulness.
For the most part, though, I’ve always considered myself a good sport. Like the time I ran against Roger Brown for Student Council. I voted for him in a terribly misguided gesture of goodwill and sportsmanship and he voted for . . . himself. You know where this is going—Roger Brown won . . . by one vote! “You don’t deserve to win if you’re not willing to vote for yourself. How stupid, ” he commented. Actually, I thought our votes would cancel out each other (like Brad and I often do when we vote on local bond issues), but it really was a stupid gesture of sportsmanship on my part that nearly ended my Student Council career.
Sportsmanship aside, Brad and most men struggle to keep their sports obsessions in check. Brad has to restrain himself from checking on his fantasy baseball team or the odds for the latest Ohio State game. Likewise, women have to keep their ex-man obsessions in check. Too much energy is spent on thinking, “I wonder what [INSERT NAME HERE] is doing right now?”
Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. Which is funny, because he and I share the same hometown and I go home a lot. Arguably, when he wrote that incredibly controversial, thinly veiled memoir that alienated everyone close to him, I would think it was indeed awkward to go home again. For me, I am happy and grateful to go home and always try to be nice to everyone there so that I am welcomed home again and again. But sometimes going home again is still awkward. First off, because you have friends there who never left. Or you have friends there who aren’t really your friends anymore and you feel awkward running into them. Or you decide it’s a good idea to call your ex-boyfriend from high school to see if he’s coming to your twentieth high school reunion.