Happily Ali After (8 page)

J
erry Seinfeld was on to something when he proposed the notion of a marriage ref. Unfortunately, I can’t find one; although there are ads for marriage refs on craigslist, they mostly only want to treat the wives. And so instead, when I have an argument with my husband, neither of us is declared the winner and I end up calling my girlfriends and saying, “I’m right! Right?”

It’s very rarely black and white. You catch him in bed with your sister—black; you catch him in bed with your brother—white. Everything else is murky gray. And in
those rare moments (little jewels) when it is clear that you are the winner, it’s almost impossible not to crow at your spouse, “You’re my bitch now . . .”

I have had arguments with my husband that have lasted until sunrise. They become more complicated and heated than a Princeton debate. But without a silver trophy or a Fulbright scholarship. By 4
A.M.
, like a tortured Guantanamo prisoner, I succumb and apologize for an act I can barely remember. The need for sleep far exceeds receiving the gold for being correct in assuming the giant toenail clippings on the couch were his. And I will beg forgiveness and even relinquish sex if we can just close the shades and turn on the sound machine.

And yet, hours later when he’s at the office and I’m ruminating with my tea, I still call my girlfriends and say, “I’m right! Right?”

I analyze my friends’ marriages like primatologist Jane Goodall does the social interactions of chimps. How do they work? How do they communicate? Why is he always beating his chest? And I speak for both humans and monkeys when I say, everyone has a complex social system and primitive communication methods, but we all strive for long-term familial bonds. Nonetheless, it is a jungle out there.

I have one friend whose husband confessed to me that during her endless verbally venomous assaults he fantasizes about pushing her down the stairs, dousing
her with whiskey, and confiding in the coroner that she was a closeted drunk. Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem the healthiest choice.

Another friend argues like a gangster in prison. She throws insults and character assassinations around like a toddler with spaghetti. It’s hard to get back to being simpatico after you bellowed, “I hate everything you stand for, you fucking asshole! I could cut you!” Those words build up like plaque and eventually it all leads to decay.

My cousin Lucy is a walk-awayer. If there is any sign of marital discord, she will just roll out of the moving car. She will submerge her head in a sink full of water to escape any form of altercation. Lucy could be gorging on a three-pound lobster when her husband, Pete, decides to confront her with some issues on their sexless marriage and she will, claw still in her mouth, dart out the back door of the seafood restaurant. The problem with this tactic is that you never resolve. I call it a fugitive marriage: someone is always on the run and the other is always chasing. Plus, you never get to finish a meal.

I do think it’s healthy to fight. Not
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
fight, but a heated meeting of the minds. My mother always says, “Shake it out and lay it down.” If not, resentment festers and you start flirting with the kids’ math tutor. But it has to be specific. A positive and
conclusive face-off must stick to one topic. And when it veers into “and another thing . . .” and suddenly you’re yelling about the time, fifteen years ago, when he gave you a Barnes & Noble gift card for your first anniversary, then it’s just emotional, histrionic laser tag. (For the record he did give me a Barnes & Noble gift card for our first anniversary.)

I have also found that even in the rare cases when I am proven unequivocally right, the payoff is most often unsatisfying in the extreme. For example, let’s say that, hypothetically, I tell my husband that our friend Fanny is having an affair with her brother-in-law. The two sneak off into the basement every Thanksgiving for a little slap and tickle.

My husband will immediately shake his head. “No, that’s not true.”

I will then put my hands on my hips and glare. “Um, yes it is! I know for a fact! Fanny’s friend Amanda told me at lunch!”

And when he dismisses my “made-up story,” naturally I have to go get proof, which is impossible unless I duct-tape a nanny cam in the heating vent of Fanny’s in-laws’ basement in Ronkonkoma, Long Island.

A couple of years ago, Fanny and her husband filed for divorce and the secret leaked that she had, in fact, been bumping fuzzies with her brother-in-law (who is now her husband). I don’t get confetti nor does my
husband hoist me on his shoulders while he sings, “For she’s a jolly good truth teller, for she’s a jolly good truth teller.” My husband shrugs and says, “Huh. Shocking.”

I think whenever I am right I should get a Twix bar and a twenty-dollar bill.

M
y husband and I had a recent situation wherein I was, hands down, the winner! The champion! The Roger Federer of wedlock. I need to start by explaining (fully recognizing that my husband and I will ultimately get in a squabble about why I have to delete this chapter) that my spouse is a dreadful driver. He can grill a fish, but he can’t come to a full stop. He can tell you the date of every presidential inauguration, but not why it’s illegal to cross the double yellow line on the freeway—we have a battered Chevy Tahoe with one headlight to prove it. And the matrimonial rub is that even though he’s demonstrated the driving skills of a ninety-year-old blind man, I can’t tell him what to do EVER when he’s behind the wheel. If I say softly, “Watch out for the baby carriage,” or “Don’t hit the litter of puppies,” he will stew in resentment.

Why can’t men be told anything? Where is that receptive chip? Even when we all had lice, my husband refused to believe he had it too. “You have lice!” I would repeat over and over as I combed through my daughters’
waist-length hair. “I do not have lice,” he would retort over and over. (He had lice.)

It was a luscious summer day. We were driving (he was behind the wheel, I was white-knuckling it on the passenger side) with our kids to the beach for our daughters’ first surfing lesson. The car was jam-packed with wet suits, towels, pink zinc, and excitement. My husband drove down a sandy path that turned into a dune leading right for the beach. “I don’t think we should drive right onto the beach. We don’t have a permit for that,” I said.

My youngest shouted from the backseat, “Mommy, you go crabbing and you don’t have a fishing license for that.”

I shot her a look. “That’s different, that’s survival.”

My husband, realizing the tires couldn’t handle the load, started reversing back on the sandy trail. Now keep in mind, there are no signs of life, not one person, one car, or a seagull in sight. The idea, I assume, was to about-face and park on the empty street. The street had a clear vista of the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. And so my husband, with a speed that generated a sand-and-pebble storm, reversed with gusto. And . . . slam! Our heads bounced back and forth like bobble-head dolls and there was a moment of silence. I turned around to check the girls; their heads were still jiggling. Was it a gigantic boulder that fell from the sky? No, he had
hit a black pickup truck loaded with surfboards. We all got out of the car. Ever the peacemaker, I ran to the truck to ensure that no one was hurt. The driver was a tan, freckled shirtless twenty-year-old who seemed somewhat shell-shocked.

“Are you okay?” I said, poking my head in his window.

“Yeah, I’m cool,” he said, holding up the peace sign.

“This was completely our fault. I am so, so sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m cool,” he repeated, holding up the peace sign.

“Let’s get all your information.” He got out of the truck. “I’m Ali, by the way.”

“Cool. I’m Liam.”

I froze. “Are you Liam the surfing instructor?”

He looked bewildered; I couldn’t tell if it was marijuana, the accident, or just his natural state. “Yeah!”

Well, that was rich. There was not a soul in sight, but my husband managed to hit and destroy the children’s surfing instructor, who was about to give them their introduction to the great wave-riding sport.

My husband exchanged license numbers with Liam as I surveyed the damage. I mean, how many cars must he destroy before I give him a bicycle? Honestly, a newborn could have driven better.

My conundrum was this: how to punish him without being a bitch? It needed to be announced loudly and
on the record that I was right: he is a terrible driver. But I didn’t want to berate my husband in front of a man who looked like an extra from
Pretty Little Liars
.

And then it came to me.

I rushed back to the Tahoe, where my daughters were listening to mind-numbing pop music sung by Ariana Grande. I pulled off their headphones. “Can you believe your dad got into an accident?” They shared a blank look. “I mean, I don’t want to point any fingers, but now you’re going to be late for your surfing lesson.” I could see the little wires in their brains sparking. “It’s going to be REALLY embarrassing for you now that Daddy totaled his car.” They threw the headphones on the floor and whipped around to investigate what had transpired. “I’m just glad it’s not me going out there in that rough surf with him because I would worry that the instructor would be so mad he would take it out on me. You know, make me go too far out and stuff?” I gently stirred the pot until it boiled into a frothy frenzy. “Yeesh, those waves look big.” When my husband got back in the car, the girls laid in to him like a school of piranhas on pork. And what was he going to do? Yell back at his kids? They were not being disobedient or bratty; they had a legitimate reason to be angry with him. My younger daughter refused to speak to him for a couple of hours and my elder expressed existential disappointment (a ploy her dad uses with great success
on her). My husband apologized profusely. He spent the rest of the day overcompensating, folding towels, opening water bottles, and acting like a cabana boy in some 1950s beach movie.

There was no satisfaction in having my children do the dirty work. (I could never be in the Mafia.) My feeling of empowerment dissipated quickly. I knew he was a horrible driver, he knew he was a horrible driver, my kids knew, Liam knew, anyone who’s driven on the Long Island Expressway knew . . . so he had an accident, big deal. Why was it imperative that I win the argument of is he or is he not the worst driver in the United States?

And then I felt embarrassed. Maybe there was no winning in the ring of marriage. Maybe the winning is in the ability to accept our shortcomings. We should treat marriage like Quaker schools and have no grades. If my husband’s only fault is bad driving, then I’m surely one of the lucky ones. After all, you should see the list he has on me!

EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW TO RAISE CHILDREN,
EXCEPT THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE THEM.

—P. J. O’ROURKE

L
et’s take the kids on an adventure trip?” my husband cheerfully asked, looking up from the
New York Times
travel section.

“Yes!” I said too quickly.

Would I have preferred to lie on a beach with a stack of self-help books and a club sandwich? Yes, but I suffered through so many educational family trips in my childhood that it was time to subject my own children to them. Fair is fair. My older brother still reminds me of our adolescent trip through Switzerland. I was asleep the
entire time even with the deafening noise of the muffler from the Volkswagen we rented. My mother rigorously traversed dangerously braided roads of the Swiss Alps with me curled up on the floor in the back. But how can you ask a girl in the throes of puberty to absorb the trans-splendidness of the Alpine region? My focus was the growing mountains on my chest, not the snowy caps of Mont Blanc. There is a solitary Polaroid from the trip of me tucked next to a picnic basket of gooey cheese and chocolate like I was being smuggled across the border.

When it came time to pick a destination for our cultural trek, we spun the globe and chose Iceland. What a blessing to detach the kids from video games, Instagram, and
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
. Now, where the hell was Iceland?

The children’s first clue that vacation wouldn’t be filled with virgin piña coladas and snorkels came during the packing ceremony. I have a ritual before leaving on vacations of forcing my kids to put out everything they want to bring in a pile on the bed. I then edit (sometimes secretly throwing away a questionable crop top), and what finally makes it into the duffel is at my discretion. (Extra underwear, a cardigan, and a dress that was given to them by their grandparents. It’s funny how grandparents like their grandchildren to dress like the little Parisian orphan Madeline. Especially when my daughters consider Nicki Minaj their fashion idol.)

The girls produced a pile of bikinis, tie-dyed T-shirts, headphones, and a bag of sour gummy watermelons. “You won’t need any of this,” I said as I dropped two down coats, some hand-knit Swedish ski hats, and hiking boots on the floor. They looked at me with expressions reserved for the death of a pet.

They overheard my husband booking the fly-fishing guide and took survival measures into their own hands by downloading as many Emma Roberts movies as their iPod touches would allow before bursting into flames.

The morning before we departed, I shoehorned some PowerBars and melatonin into our already engorged bags. I was in the middle of shooting a film and called my agent to triple-check that production knew I was out of the country for the week and there wouldn’t be any schedule changes. When I was younger (sigh), every time I would leave the state of California, I would get a call about an important meeting or audition that I was resigned to missing. And ultimately went to Lisa Kudrow anyway.

And then we were off to the airport to experience the delicious meal of rubbery meat and rhubarb vomit that Icelandic Air prepared for us. But, hey, you never hear of people going to Iceland for the food!

We spent an irritating upright overnight flight to Reykjavik, the girls glued to Emma Roberts, my husband and I redirecting pent-up sexual energy into competitive
Scrabble games. After we landed we sluggishly made our way to the Hertz rental warehouse and received our gleaming white Volvo. I struggled to keep my eyes open and didn’t fret that my husband (have I mentioned that he’s a terrible driver?) was behind the wheel in a foreign country. Although I was slightly concerned when we careened onto the highway and he asked me what side of the road the Icelanders drove on. The girls were passed out in the back under a heap of down coats. If you want to travel to a spot that is the polar (and I emphasize polar) opposite of Manhattan—Iceland is your place. Hopefully you love dried fish.

W
e arrived at the lodge and were upgraded to the Antarctic suite, which was a modern, black-and-white room with leather pillows and ceramic penguins. It felt like a lounge at Island Records. We curled up on the black faux fur bedspread and slept for four hours. Let me add an important side note—it never got dark in Iceland. At 10
P.M.
it was as bright as lunchtime in Miami, which alters your sleep schedule in a way not even a bottle of muscle relaxants can fix. It’s particularly vexing when your children refuse to go to bed until it’s dark outside. It became a parody on “Who’s on First” as we did rounds of “We’re not going to bed until it’s night!” “It is night!” “But it’s not dark out!” “It doesn’t get dark
in Iceland.” “Well, we won’t go to bed until it’s night.” “It is night!” You get the idea. When the girls did wake up at two in the afternoon, their eyes welled up at the realization that Iceland was not a Discovery Channel TV series, but their home for the next six days. And not even Emma Roberts could save them.

“Where are we going?” my little one asked, lips trembling.

“We are going to ride some Icelandic ponies!” I answered with fake excitement.

“I don’t want to ride a pony!” she pressed.

“Oh, but you’ve never ridden an Icelandic pony!” I don’t even know what I meant by that.

We finally found the barn and makeshift ski shed nestled into a moss-covered cliff. There was a tiny, fenced-in rink with about twenty ponies that had long wispy bangs and melancholic eyes. They looked like a brooding Irish rock band. They were caked in mud and horse poop from days of rain. We couldn’t find the manager or anyone in charge. A small girl with white curls wearing an unkempt nightgown and mismatched boots of different sizes pounded through some puddles and disappeared up into the house. It felt like the creepy opening of an avant-garde Danish horror film.

Finally two teenagers (ginger-haired twins) appeared from a secret door in the barn and slowly began to ready the horses. And by “ready,” I mean they threw on the
saddles, barely tightening the belts around the girth. My younger, sensing it was not the safest environment, clutched my hand and begged us to forgo the experience. She was confused as to why we never pushed her to ride horses in the States and yet, in a foreign country with no hospital for miles and the stench of wet cement and death surrounding us, we were forcing her. I kept repeating, “Icelandic ponies?” as if somehow that would trick her into optimism.

Unsafely perched on the ponies, we started our trail ride, surrounded by a panoramic view of hills and valleys. I imagined a row of fiery red-haired Vikings standing atop one of the hills chewing on reindeer limbs and laughing at the ridiculous tourists trudging through the muck. I rode my horse at the rear in case I needed to go all
True Grit
on the situation. My children kept turning around and giving me the “When will this end?” look. When we had done a tortoiselike loop and commenced our clippety clop back to the eerie barn, my pony started to get antsy and rebel. She—her name was Hilda—started bucking and snorting, her eyes fixated on the sloppy corral she called home. And then off she went. A full-on gallop up the hill. Small stones were flying. And behind me I heard the familiar screams of terror. When I turned I saw my family racing behind me. Clearly, my horse was the leader, the Barbara Walters
of the herd. There were no seat belts, so we clutched the tufts of horse hair next to the reins and held on for dear life.

We retreated to our car and began our long drive back to the hotel. We all smelled of horse, manure, and fear. I assumed that was the last pony ride for this family. And that includes carousels.

The next morning we lapped up our grain-filled porridge in anticipation of the day ahead. The girls pleaded to rest in the room and try to FaceTime their friends in New York. They had no idea what cultural ordeal lay ahead of them.

“Are you guys excited to climb a glacier?” my husband asked. It was as if he said, “Are you guys excited to do some math homework?”

Once again, we piled into the Volvo with our down coats, hats, and tears. As a parent I put on a stoic face of wonder as we neared the ragged peaks. “This is going to be amazing,” I faked. I loved the idea of it, I just wasn’t sure my body was prepared for it.

Our guide was an Icelandic teenager with long hair parted on the side just above his left ear. A look my older brother pioneered in the ’70s with his garage band. Frank (pronounced Frunk) was as excited about taking us up the glacier as my then hysterical little one was to being there. The tears were worse than when she had eight teeth extracted.

And then came the crescendo of indignation as my rail-thin children were handed crampons (boots with metal teeth) and ice picks. Keep in mind: the metal ice picks were the same size they were. “What are these for?” The question was delivered with a mixture of horror and disdain.

“To chip the ice,” my husband rationally answered.

“For cocktail hour,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. It had the opposite effect.

We hiked straight up, stumbled over chipped boulders, and gasped for breath. We finally made it to the peak of the ice-and-snow-covered glacier a couple of hours later. It was not a hike; for me, it was a battle for self-preservation. My children rallied (they had no choice), but if we’d been the von Trapp family, we’d be dead. And I would have ditched that guitar ten minutes in. Frank thought it pertinent to stop every few yards and regale us with some glacier story barely understandable through his accent. One story was about a shepherd leading his sheep through the glacier to reach the grassier knolls on the other side. One of the sheep fell in a crevice and when the shepherd tried to save him, he too fell into the hole. Just as the shepherd was about to eat the sheep, he realized that the sheep had burrowed himself in the ice and built a tunnel, which led them to freedom. The shepherd and the sheep made it to the village, and in celebration of the sheep saving the shepherd’s
life, the shepherd cooked the sheep for the whole village to enjoy. Needless to say, my youngest burst into a fresh bout of tears. A few hours later Frank told us another tale of a father and his baby trapped in an ice cave; the father was able to save his baby by cutting off his own nipple and allowing the blood to nourish the baby. “Zat is why allza min in Iceland haff only one nipple!” I told Frank he should write children’s books.

My children couldn’t peel off their crampons fast enough when we reached the lava-filled parking area. I had never seen them so infuriated. Well, maybe the one time I forgot to DVR
Teen Beach Movie
.

The doors slammed and, in silence, we started the drive back to the hotel. The kids were not interested in the crashing waterfalls or bucolic pastures of goats. They were too filled with rage. “Are you guys excited about salmon fishing tomorrow?” my husband asked at the exact wrong time. At least with hiking the glacier, there was movement. I didn’t quite know how to sell standing in a frigid river in a rubber suit for hours waiting for a fish to take the lure.

And then it came. The phone call from my agent.

I could be on the space shuttle, in a cave held captive by Islamic fundamentalists, or in a fjord in Iceland and my Hollywood agent would be able to intercept any Microsoft cloud and find me.

As always he cut to the chase: “Production had to move dates, they need you on set tomorrow.”

I laughed out loud. “Um, I’m in Iceland on a glacier?”

He replied without missing a beat. “Yeah, I told them that. Can you be on set tomorrow?”

I wanted to do the movie, but more important, I wanted out of Iceland. “Absolutely, I’ll figure out a way.” I had a fleeting vision of myself in the makeup trailer, giggling and sipping tea with Nicole Kidman while my family hunkered down to another plate of poached fish in Reykjavik.

I turned to my husband. “I have to go back. They had to flip days around because of the weather and they want me on set tomorrow.”

And before my husband could even process what I had said, my girls, in unison, screamed, “Take us with you!” I had secretly relished the idea of my husband fumbling to hook flies on their poles. I, of course, would be curled up on Icelandic Air watching
Grown Ups 2
.

But no such luck. When Mommy is taken out of the equation, it causes fragmentation within the ecosystem and the resistance becomes weak.

S
omewhere above Nova Scotia I looked over at my gleeful children in their faux leather airplane seats flipping through
SkyMall
magazine and taking One Direction quizzes. They turned to me and beamed. They will
remember the reckless canter on the pony, struggling not to slip off a glacier, and the gamey taste of venison, but most important, they will remember that when they were teetering perilously on the brink of misery, their mother rescued them.

You can’t say that about the concierge at the Hyatt in Cancun.