A Cup of Comfort for Couples (24 page)

During their second phone conversation, he proposed and she accepted. The ring arrived in the mail later that week.

Months went by, and just like teenagers, Mom and Marty talked on the phone every night for hours. We all started to notice that this “new normal” could, and did, involve smiles and happiness. The willow tree was no longer weeping. The only problem: he was in Des Moines and she was in St. Louis.

Fall arrived, and it was time for Mom to take me to college at the University of Iowa — coincidentally, only two hours east of Des Moines. After checking into the hotel, Mom and I had just sat down to relax when the front desk called to say there was something wrong with the credit card Mom had used to make the reservation. She let the desk clerk know she was on her way down to straighten things out.

When the elevator doors opened to the lobby, there stood Marty with two dozen red roses. He quickly explained that there was nothing wrong with her credit card; it had all been a ploy to get her to the lobby. I will never forget the image of my mom, happier than I had ever seen her, in the arms of her true love. It was kismet; meant to be.

Many years have passed since my Mom and Dad finally got married. (Although not my biological father, Marty has been “Dad” to me in every sense of the word.) Like all marriages, they have gone through some rough spots, but nothing could have prepared them for what was to come.

In December 2009, Dad was involved in an incident that left him a quadriplegic. He was on a ventilator in an intensive care unit for six weeks. Mom rarely left his side. She became his advocate, his voice, his calming presence, his angel. They have since left the hospital and for the last three months (and counting) have been at a remarkable rehabilitation facility.

When Mom feels angry, hopeless, exhausted, helpless, frustrated, or any negative emotion, I simply ask her, “Do you still love him?”

She answers me without hesitating. “I did not think I could love him more than I have my entire life, but I do.”

In Hebrew, the letters of the alphabet also have a numerical value. The Hebrew word for life,
chai
, has the numerical value of eighteen. In February, at the remarkable rehabilitation facility, my parents celebrated their eighteenth anniversary. For them, life has started again.

Although my mother's self-portrait is now hanging in my living room, I know the willow is not weeping. It is a constant reminder to me that the power of love can go beyond the past as well as the present to create a beautiful future — such as this “new normal” that has returned my mom to the arms of her true love, her first true husband.

—
Suzanne Yoder

Love Shack

I
'm quiet. That's what people who don't know me say, anyway. I spend hours plotting my next verbal expression. I write conversation starters in my journal. I record funny things I should have said in a situation in which all I could think to do at the time was smile and nod. When I'm in a group of people, I observe, I contemplate.

Joe likes to talk. He's the life of the party, the guy with the jokes, the guy who says what everyone else is thinking but is too afraid to say. He has no inner monologue. Before he has a chance to think about what he's going to say, it just blurts right out of his mouth. “Diarrhea of the mouth,” I call it.

I'm sweet. Even people who know me say that.

He's whatever it is that's the opposite of sweet. Well, except with me, but no one is supposed to know that. Don't tell anyone I let his secret out.

The day we met was an unusual one for me. I was talkative. It was a typical day for him; he was interruptive. I walked into Radio Shack to buy a prepaid phone card for a weekend out of town with my friends. I told Scott, my friend behind the counter, all about the concert we were planning to see. I told him how excited I was. Then I told him that one of the friends I was headed out of town with just happened to have broken my heart the day before. I had found out that he wasn't interested in me in “that way” and that he had gone out with both of my girlfriends from work on different nights the same weekend he'd taken me out.

I told Scott that I hated men — except him, of course. He didn't count because he was my friend. I told him I was done with the stupid pursuit of Mr. Right. I told him about my plan to be the crazy lady with fifty-seven cats and a porch swing where I could sit and yell at whippersnappers who strayed onto my lawn.

Scott shook his head and laughed. “You've already got the crazy part,” he said.

“I'm not crazy,” I told him. “Men are crazy. And stupid. They pretend they like you when they really don't just so they can take your heart and break it into fifty million tiny pieces. Then they apologize, and you melt. Your heart gets glued back together for half a minute — just long enough for them to break it apart again.”

The new guy at The Shack — the one with the intentional baldness, the surfer dude necklace, the strong cologne, and the runny mouth — interrupted my hateful spiel. “That's because you're dating boys,” he said.

I shot him a glare and continued my tirade. “And then the ones who aren't out to break your heart act like they just can't live if you aren't by their side 24/7. They act like — ”

“Okay, here's what you want in a man,” the new guy interrupted. “You want a guy who is nice but not too nice. If you wanted one of those sweet and sensitive ones, you'd want to date girls. Right?”

He didn't wait for my response before he continued. “You want a guy who will open doors for you but will also let you do things for yourself . . . ”

I glared at him as he proceeded to tell me everything I had ever wanted in a man.

“And you're glaring at me like that because I'm right and you know I'm right, but you don't want to let on that I'm right. Right?”

“No!” I protested.

He smiled victoriously and slid a piece of paper across the counter. “Here. Write down your name and I'll freak you out even more.”

I looked at him questioningly and then wrote my first name only on the paper.

He picked it up and studied my penmanship as he ran his hand over his goatee and hummed. “Hmm . . .”

“Your letters curve to the left. This tells me that you are somewhat introverted. The loops in your letters tell me that you are happy and bubbly . . .”

He was right on. And yes, it did freak me out. I told him so, too. Before I walked out the door I looked over my shoulder and said, “You're weird. Stay away from me.”

But I couldn't stay away from him.

The next week I was back in the store for another phone card. I did need one, but what I really wanted was to see that new guy. This time I examined his empty left ring finger and noted the name printed on the pin on his shirt.

“How was the concert?” Joe asked.

“Awesome,” I said as I tried to keep my cool.

“How were things with that guy all weekend?”

I laughed. “Fun for us. Miserable for him. We didn't talk to him, and he kept asking if we were mad at him.”

“That's pretty cold,” he said.

“Maybe. But so was what he did to us.”

“You know, you need a guy who — ”

“I know,” I interrupted. “You told me what I needed last week, remember?”

The speaker was speechless. I grabbed my phone card and left.

Every time I went into the store, we talked a little bit more. One day he ripped off a piece of receipt paper and jotted down his number. “Here,” he said as he slid it across the counter. “You can call me sometime if you want. If you ever need to talk to someone about how stupid men are. Or whatever.”

I kept his number in my wallet for weeks. Throughout those weeks, I studied The List. You know what I'm talking about: The List of What I Want in a Man. Every woman has one. And if they don't — well, they should.

There were a few things on The List that didn't quite fit him. I drew a small X for “nope” next to “must have a cat,” “must be in a rock band,” and “must have blue eyes.” However, a lot of the things on the list fit him perfectly. I made giant check marks next to the good qualities he possessed: charm, sense of humor, smarts, a job . . .

But there was one item on the list I didn't know about, so I finally called him. After the preliminary “How ya doin's,” I asked the question: “What's your last name?”

“Hozey,” he said.

I threw up in my mouth. “Hozey? Seriously?”

“Yep,” he said. “Why?”

I looked at The List in my lap and drew a great big red X next to “must not have a stupid last name.”

“Oh. No reason,” I said.

I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the confidence and charisma. Maybe it was the cologne and surfer dude necklace. Maybe it was the way he made me want to punch him every time he opened his mouth. Or maybe it was the fact that he always seemed to know what I was thinking and blurted it out before I even had a chance to spend an hour contemplating how I was going to say it. I don't know what exactly it was, but a little over a year later I walked into the Social Security office and officially changed my last name to something stupid.

—
Michelle Hozey

A Room of His Own

M
y husband's room is at the back of our apartment, next to the kitchen. How many times have I walked by and wanted to haul out his clutter and hurl it into the trash? Sometimes, I've kicked a box out of my way en route to his desk or thrown a stack of papers on the bed because I couldn't find the latest PTA notice. But I controlled the impulse to clean up. If he wanted to spend the better part of his days in clutter, so be it.

Back in Harry's bachelor place, it took many arguments to convince him that a coat rack did not belong in front of a bay window. Now, cardboard boxes are stacked higher than the windowsill. The guest bed and Harry's desk occupy most of the nine square feet; what's left is a three-foot-wide corridor where he swivels around on his office chair. He spends hours in front of the computer, his back to the door, slumped from bad posture. When he talks to friends on the phone, he rests his calves on the desk. Then his laughter rings over into the kitchen. For more serious conversations, he slams his door shut, especially when our toddler decides that Daddy's threshold is the best place to toot his fire engine.

The walls are unadorned; there's not even a bulle-tin board. Whatever artwork the kids bestow on Daddy is scattered on the desk, curling from the humidity that seeps in from the kitchen or yellowing from sunlight. The kids' paper frogs with glued-on buttons share desk space with unopened charity solicitations, the Paul Fredrick shirt catalog, pink car-repair receipts, doctors' business cards, and Post-it notes from me. A Plexiglas bin overflows with coins. Cardboard cartons, a shredder, and filing boxes crowd the space under the desk.

Once in a while, Harry surveys the scene, leans back in his chair, hands crossed behind his head, looks at me, and moans: “What am I supposed to do with this mess?”

“Clean it up,” I'll say, leaning in the doorway, hand on hip.

“Yes, but how?”

“You take a pile, go through it piece by piece, throw out what you don't need, and file the rest.”

“Yes, but I can't do that without you. I need you to help me.”

So far we have left it at that, both of us unwilling to commit what little time we have as a twosome to cleaning up his room. We'd rather hang out and talk.

I tease him that, here in our Chicago apartment, he has recreated the disarray of his father's wholesale shop, where out-of-fashion sweaters, skirts, and scarves were never weeded out but wandered up another level on the shelves that reached to the fifteen-foot-high ceiling.

Harry grew up in the back room of that store in Munich, Germany. A cardboard box was his playpen. The room smelled of dust that had absorbed years of cigarette smoke, textile dye, and polyurethane bag odor. Of the secretaire desk, only the hutch door with its stained glass tulip window was visible under heaps of order forms, customs declarations, and shipping documents. Oil-heater grime had blackened the walls.