For Better or Worse

You know, it’s funny the things that go through a guy’s head when he’s leaving a gal. When your boots hit the sidewalk and your on home-free toward your old white Toyota and greener pastures, times have never seemed so good; but when you’re crashing in a ratty bachelor’s hotel with fluid stains for bedmates and a rabbit-ears television for human company, you begin to feel sort of like a loser.
         After you leave, it never seems clear why you left in the first place. Sure, the first few hours of it are bliss rediscovered: no cleaning up, no working, no bathing . . . Nothing at all left in your life to remind you of the reason folks believe in the devil. But when it gets quiet, and things get lonely, and there’s nobody there to tell you it’s okay when you whack your elbow on the coffee table or give you satisfaction when you’re frisky or make your dinner just like you like it . . .
         You begin to realize what made you want a woman in the first place.
         I know why I wanted a woman in the first place, let me tell you. I didn’t go to Joe’s Beer and Burgers on a hot Thursday summer evening wearing a wife-beater and tight cowpoke jeans looking to pick up a soul-mate, but it’s funny the way things fall into place, isn’t it? Everything happens for a reason, and all that shit? Turns out, I walked in Joe’s Beer and Burgers through the back entrance that evening, and there was definitely a reason for that . . . Because had I come in the front entrance, my eyes never would have caught that cute little heart-shaped rear sitting on the bar stool, dressed in bright green, so prominent that it practically waved an enthusiastic hello. When you see something like that, it’s hard not to break stride for a little chit-chat.
         Unfortunately, instead of it ending in a motel bed, our little chit-chat ended at the Southern Sweethearts wedding chapel three months later.
         It was a wonderful occasion.
         But it was followed by many storms.
         We picked out a house, all that mess. A little house on a hill, it was, pleasant and airy, but mostly, pricey. I tried to talk her out of it, but Sheri insisted, saying that ‘It looked like one of those cottages out of those Thomas Kinkade paintings’. A dumb reason, or so I thought. After all, I’d always been more of an apartment guy, anyways.
         But when she insisted, and insisted, and insisted, I let her win. I had no idea the pitches that voice could rise to, like I was hearing a civil defense siren instead of a woman. Best to let her win that one. Letting her win once wouldn’t take an effect on my manhood, now would it? Besides, it looked so much like a picture, it could end up being the host for a picture-perfect life.
         Ha. Ha Ha Ha.
         With the house argument over, life seemed perfect again. She was beautiful, had a rocking be-donky-donk and cooked like a dad-gum chef. Yeah, it bit the big one that I couldn’t do the normal manly practices-- gawk at total strangers, give ‘em the big whistle-- but being married to such a woman, such a fine, lovely, cooking woman, It didn’t seem to matter. She satisfied every need.
         Until the nagging started.
         So I’d come home from a hard day slaving my buns off on the construction site, just sitting aside and letting my workers do the work and all (and making thirteen-fifty an hour, thank you very much), when Sheri barges up on me complaining about mud clods I left on the carpet. Okay, so I say, it’s just carpet, not like it’s worth anything. Not like its worth the hard work I put in to buy her Harlequins every week, and certainly not worth the energy she’s spending caterwauling on the precious thing. But, oh, no, like every woman in God’s creation, she always has an answer. It’s not just any carpet, it’s beige carpet, she says, and everything gets rubbed into it stays. And, when I tell her she’s being stupid, you know what happens? When I tell her there’s bigger things in our lives to worry about besides a small stain in an old carpet, you know what she does?
         Slaps me, wails like a banshee, and dashes for the bathroom. And, as I’m trying to apologize, trying to tell her that she didn’t have to hit so hard, she locks the door.
         It takes me five hours to get her out.
         And I’d had six beers. Count ‘em, six. I had so much urine in me it was comin’ up the back of my dad-gum throat. Half the time I was banging on the door, begging and pleading for her to let me in, it wasn’t because I wanted her out so we could kiss and make up. It was because I didn’t want to piss on her sweet, beloved carpet and hear hell’s bells about it later.
         Eventually, the whole thing clears up. She comes out the bathroom, we kiss, say our sorries, I take the longest, most satisfying whiz I’ve ever taken. The end. Paradise once again, in the Thomas Kinkade house.
         Or so I thought.
         The next time, it’s my smell. You smell like oil, she says, and you’re making my house smell like it, too. Not much argument over this, considering how I know that I stink and just don’t care. I only grind my teeth down to the point of pain, praying to God for the first time in my life that I’ll become deaf and spare myself the agony of listening to her nags. The next time, it’s my beard. Too prickly, she says, you’re rubbin’ my skin off every time we make whoopee. No problem with that. I get to sit in a chair with a burrito in one hand and a beer in the other while she takes a razor to my face.
         But it’s the next time, almost one year into our happily-ever-after, no stains on the carpet union, that the real problems arise.
         The day that she tells me in an off-handed way, casually, that I need to start eating healthier.
         No burritos. No pork skins.
         No beers.
         Calm, I tell myself. I must stay calm. If I don’t, my fist’ll go flyin’ and her head’ll go with it. I ask her, sort of calm-like, what the hell it is that she thinks she’s doing. What does she mean to accomplish by taking away my apple turnovers and key lime pie?
         Fixing your blood pressure, she says.
         Who on Earth gives a hoot about that?
         But, like all things in the sanctity of married life, The Great Tyrant Sheri gets her way. Even though I whine, protest and complain the whole way, saying I make all the money, I should choose what we eat, Sheri never listens. Only inflects her royal will on my body, forcing my hard-earned beer gut to disappear into a pathetic, wimpy little bulge. While Sheri likes it and compliments me on it, I think I look like a gawky, rail-thin nerd.
         But it’s the kid-talk that drives me off the edge.
         That drives me here, in my Toyota.
         The big talk occurs roughly two years into our marriage. I can’t be entirely sure; according to The Great Tyrant Sheri, I couldn’t be depended on to remember an anniversary if it bit me in the rear. I’m sure it has to be somewhere around two years, even though it felt more like ten.
         So, she’s excited and all, because we’re going out to a nice dinner together, you know? We don’t get to do it much, me slaving at a construction site every day and all. Seems a bit too much to work all the time and treat your wife to a nice dinner every once and a while, but she basically threatened my life if I didn’t agree. And while I’m sitting here with her, shoving some mediocre steak in my mouth when I’d rather be kicked back at home watching the boob tube, she pops the most outrageous, unbelievable question of all.
         I think its time we had kids, babe, and I think we should try it tonight, she says in a jolly voice that rubs me the wrong way.
         Whoa, now. Hold the phone.
         I’ve never been a man to say no to a good romp, but this is a special case. After all, in all my romping over the years, I’ve never wanted or expected a junior to come crawling out the baby machine after me.
         After all, with the nagging of my wife, who wants a whiny kid around, right?
         So Sheri tells me she doesn’t like my hesitation, it isn’t comfortable, and I tell her it shouldn’t be. You gotta give me a break, I say, because between your mouth and those prickly cactus legs laying next to me in bed every night, I got enough on my plate already.
         Okay. So maybe that was a little extreme.
         Sheri seems to think so.
         Her lip trembles like a maraca, and for a moment I find myself restraining the urge not to make fun of her. It’s funny the way a man’s frustration comes out, when it finally does . . . But I’m at the point where I’m dog-tired of backing down, dog-tired of apologizing. It’s a vicious cycle designed for one thing and one thing only--to take a man’s masculinity piece by piece until she’s made just another woman out of you.
         Sheri’s crying by now, and has also managed to call me every curse word in the English language. Her wails only excite me, entice me, and I swing back in for another blow.          
         Golly Lord Jesus, I say, are you content to do that until the end of time or shut up for a while? And then my cheek is on fire and it feels like my skin has been ripped off, because she’s just slapped me with her skinny, ring-infested hand and left one hell of a red mark. I’m still sitting there stupidly with my hand clapped to my face and my eyes watery with pain-darts when she whirls back around and gets in my face, right in front of God and everything holy.
         And she tells me she’s sick of my shit.
         She wants me to leave.
         So here I am.
         The woman sure can be a slave driver, if you really think about it. I’m a man, not exactly muscular but about five inches taller than Sheri the Tyrant. And she still manages to get me out the door. Not by fists, or kicks . . . But by words, the most powerful weapons of all. If we didn’t have them, the only thing we’d have would be fists, and then . . .
         Everyone on Earth would be a gory, bloody pulp.
         And, as I sit here in my battered white Toyota thinking, the idling of my truck becomes sort of therapeutic. What was it about our words that made them so powerful? There had to be something there, or else we wouldn’t have had anything to be so passionate about, you know? Words convey everything.
         Okay, so, if that’s true, what’s with all the endless nagging? What’s with the crying, the slapping, the fits? If she really doesn’t care, why doesn’t she just leave, like I’m doing now?
         Because she does care.
         And so do I.
         I’m sitting here in front of her house, aren’t I?
         It only takes one deep breath and an absence of all thought. Combined with one large, stumbling step out of the cab of a white Toyota, these things add up to create the perfect state-of-mind when saying sorry to a woman whom you love for better or worse.